When you put it that way, I think I see your point. There is a difference in that at the end of inflation, you still have the same number of dollars but they are worth something like half what they were at the start. At the end of the tax, each dollar is worth the same but you have something like half as many dollars.
In theory, you still own the same amount of actual value in both situations and only the units of measurement are different. In practice, they could have vastly psychological impacts and it is actually impossible to tax *every* dollar as many of them are outside US jurisdiction.
Yes, but so does a tax on holding money. By this I do *not* mean a tax on property value or transfers of money (e.g. sales tax, income tax). When you tax money itself instead of property or the transfer of money, people will avoid money. They will transfer there assets into non-monetary goods (e.g. other currencies) and will avoid accruing it. This in turn leads to a surplus of money as everyone tries to sell it and no one buys it. The high supply and low demand then leads to a devaluation of the money and a scramble to not be left "holding the bag" (of money). This leads to the same destruction as you mention. (Though I will grant that in those end stages, the inflation is running on its own independent of government taxes.)
P.S. This is fun. I'm having a sort of backwards Socratic-method moment with this discussion.
Actually, taxes also incur a dead-weight loss. In fact taxes are the standard example of dead-weight loss. I am unfamiliar with the mechanism of dead-weight loss from inflation. Can you elaborate?
Exactly. The inflation becomes a tax on anyone holding currency. Each day, everyone looses some percent of their money's value and the government gains some number of dollars.
On the plus side you don't need to pay the IRS to collect this tax, but that is about the only positive aspect.
If you hate social networking sites, then ignore them!
Easy to say, but now that many clubs and social activities are being organized solely via Facebook, not being in the soc-net club is actually quite difficult. I'm a fairly quiet guy so I don't have much need for things like Facebook and frankly I don't trust Facebook, but clubs that organize via Facebook kind of force me into it.
While I like the idea, I'm not sure how to get the implementation to work. The problem is I don't have to "license" the patent to you, I just have to wave my rights to or contractually promise not to sue you for infringing on my patent. I don't have to put you "under NDA", the contract just has to stipulate that the "license" becomes void if you reveal the contents of the contract.
Now, if we made void all contracts that contain in NDA on their contents, then I could see it working. But short of that, it seems like it would be pretty hard to define what constitutes "NDA licensing" contracts without leaving big loopholes.
Hmm, after more thought, fashion might be a good example for explaining why software patents are a bad idea.
With patents, Amazon has no incentive to make a better one-click because even a basic one-click already distinguishes Amazon from it's competitors (which aren't allowed to have one-click). Without patents, six-months after Amazon introduces one-click everyone else would have it and Amazon would be forced to introduce a better one-click to continue to distinguish themselves. For those six-months Amazon would have a competitive advantage, but in order to maintain that advantage, they would have to keep keep innovating.
But (playing devils advocate) fashion has two major differences from music, books, video, software, etc. First, fashion is not digitally duplicable. The design might be digitally duplicable but it's not like you can torrent a dress. Thus "casual" copying is rare. Second, buying a dress doesn't give one access to the design merely the product of the design. A bit of effort is required to reverse engineer the design from the dress.
(Don't get me wrong. I would love to see good examples of a creative industry without copyright, but without answering these sort of objections, I don't think fashion is an example I could use to convince anyone.)
WebM has a clear advantage when the alternative is not letting your users view video on pages that serve WebM. Other than that, evaluating the advantages of one video format versus another is up to the video producer not the video consumer.
I'm sorry but as a developer myself, my experience completely contradicts your claims. Perhaps this is because when I think of libraries, I'm thinking about things for implementing application internals (e.g. SSL, HTML parsing, B-trees, hashtables, lightweight atomic persistent storage (e.g. Berkly-DB or SQLite)) rather than GUI libraries. While I agree that very few developers would re-implement GTK or Qt, in my experience, developers do often reimplement functionality with things like strings, HTTP or HTML handling or particularly B-trees or hashtables.
It seems you object to a "mishmash" because it leads to an inconsistent user experience. I agree that is a problem, but only for user facing libraries that affect the user experience. In other areas there is no real reason to force all developers into the same libraries. Why should we decide? I'm sorry but the world is a better place because the world didn't stop at Berkley-DB and was ready to welcome competators like SQLite and will be ready to welcome whatever replaces SQLite. To paraphrase you, "Why should we be stuck in 1995? It doesn't have to all be the same. Just use something that works."
(At this point we could digress into "Cathedral vs Bazaar", and how competition has in the long run improved, for example, browsers despite causing developer headaches in the mean time,... but I think we're reaching the limits of the productivity of this discussion.)
To reiterate, I agree that consistency of user experience is a valid concern for standardizing libraries, but it isn't the only concern and it isn't always a concern.
Besides, that greatly favors popular libraries and ignores libraries which may not be pre-installed whereas package management with external libraries are neutral to this.
And I should care... why?
Because if developers choose what libraries to use mainly based on whether the library is likely to be already installed, then new but useful libraries are unlikely to become popular enough to become a standard install. In addition it becomes tempting for the developer to just implement the libraries functionality, but of course that is a drain on application developer time and is likely to have bugs that were already shaken out of the library. In an ideal world, developers would choose what library to use solely based on how well the library does the job. The real world already falls short of that (e.g. API stability and likelihood of the library still being maintained down the road are major concerns), but we should try to avoid making the situation worse than it already is.
However, I'm not sure I agree with the GP that static linking favors popular libraries. Usually I'd only dynamic link against a library if I think it's already popular enough to already be installed.
Your post says what bit-coins are only in terms of their attributes or *what* they do (e.g. "Binary search trees are ways of efficiently searching"). I think the GP was asking for what they are in terms of their essence or *how* they do (e.g. "Binary search trees are binary trees sorted by their in-order traversal").
After all, if the GP doesn't trust the "sensationalism", then how is he to trust the attributes you ascribe to bit-coins? Your post says what bit-coins do not how they do it. How is the GP to trust that they actually do what you say if he doesn't know how they do it?
As an academic, I have only so much creative energy to spend on writting. My future ability to feed myself depends on me spending it wisely. Wikipedia doesn't fit in that equation.
Two exceptions are editing for the sake of fun and full professors with tenure. If wikipedia wants to bring in academics, then they need to either magically figure out a way to make it fun for me to continue writting about something I've already been writting about all day, or they need to target people high enough up the totem pole that they don't need more publications and aren't busy helping their students get publications.
"Generic" is a technical term in trademark law. It means using the name of a thing as the brand. For example Apple brand Apples would be generic. Operating System brand operating system would also be generic. Generic brands are never trademarkable.
However, Microsoft Windows falls in the "descriptive" category of trademarks. A descriptive trademark uses some aspect of a thing as the brand. For example "AllBran" brand cereal would be descriptive. Windows brand operating system would also be descriptive. Descriptive brands are trademarkable only if they have acquired secondary meaning.
The brand "AppStore" is pretty generic because it describes an application store though it may border on being descriptive. The Windows brand, however, is very firmly in descriptive territory.
longlived fission products like technetium99 (halflife over 200,000 years).
Don't long lived isotopes decay slowly? That is to say only a small fraction of the atoms actually decay and thus there are a small number of decays to produce radiation? With the half-life of T99 only 3.5e-7 of the system decays each year. Maybe that's enough to be worried. But how many Sv does a single T99 decay amount to? How pure and how much T99 are we typically talking about?
I agree as industry languages go, Java isn't all that bad. But it does sadden me since it is more a statement about industry languages more than Java.
There are many mature industry-strength languages out there that are much easier and nicer to work with and have astounding features like you wouldn't believe (e.g. some measurably reduce bug rates by a factor of ten). Unfortunately, they aren't widely used in industry dispite being industry strength. Most of those languages haven't made it outside accademia as they are viewed as "too hard" for ordinary programmers. That makes me sad. It's like the difference between a windows programmer that has to write a 50 line batch file to do his processing versus a linux programmer that does the same in a single five-program pipeline.
Then again I'm abount to finish a PhD in programming langauges, so I may be biased. And to be fair most of the resistance to these langauges may have more to do with compatability with legacy code.
Slashdot Mirror
When you put it that way, I think I see your point. There is a difference in that at the end of inflation, you still have the same number of dollars but they are worth something like half what they were at the start. At the end of the tax, each dollar is worth the same but you have something like half as many dollars.
In theory, you still own the same amount of actual value in both situations and only the units of measurement are different. In practice, they could have vastly psychological impacts and it is actually impossible to tax *every* dollar as many of them are outside US jurisdiction.
Yes, but so does a tax on holding money. By this I do *not* mean a tax on property value or transfers of money (e.g. sales tax, income tax). When you tax money itself instead of property or the transfer of money, people will avoid money. They will transfer there assets into non-monetary goods (e.g. other currencies) and will avoid accruing it. This in turn leads to a surplus of money as everyone tries to sell it and no one buys it. The high supply and low demand then leads to a devaluation of the money and a scramble to not be left "holding the bag" (of money). This leads to the same destruction as you mention. (Though I will grant that in those end stages, the inflation is running on its own independent of government taxes.)
P.S. This is fun. I'm having a sort of backwards Socratic-method moment with this discussion.
Actually, taxes also incur a dead-weight loss. In fact taxes are the standard example of dead-weight loss. I am unfamiliar with the mechanism of dead-weight loss from inflation. Can you elaborate?
Exactly. The inflation becomes a tax on anyone holding currency. Each day, everyone looses some percent of their money's value and the government gains some number of dollars.
On the plus side you don't need to pay the IRS to collect this tax, but that is about the only positive aspect.
Why didn't it work out? (I don't know much about OpenID.)
If you hate social networking sites, then ignore them!
Easy to say, but now that many clubs and social activities are being organized solely via Facebook, not being in the soc-net club is actually quite difficult. I'm a fairly quiet guy so I don't have much need for things like Facebook and frankly I don't trust Facebook, but clubs that organize via Facebook kind of force me into it.
While I like the idea, I'm not sure how to get the implementation to work. The problem is I don't have to "license" the patent to you, I just have to wave my rights to or contractually promise not to sue you for infringing on my patent. I don't have to put you "under NDA", the contract just has to stipulate that the "license" becomes void if you reveal the contents of the contract.
Now, if we made void all contracts that contain in NDA on their contents, then I could see it working. But short of that, it seems like it would be pretty hard to define what constitutes "NDA licensing" contracts without leaving big loopholes.
So ... "just trust us"? The GP raises a legitimate concern. You haven't answered the concern other than to appeal to authority.
200MB?!! You must have only one tab open.
Hmm, after more thought, fashion might be a good example for explaining why software patents are a bad idea.
With patents, Amazon has no incentive to make a better one-click because even a basic one-click already distinguishes Amazon from it's competitors (which aren't allowed to have one-click). Without patents, six-months after Amazon introduces one-click everyone else would have it and Amazon would be forced to introduce a better one-click to continue to distinguish themselves. For those six-months Amazon would have a competitive advantage, but in order to maintain that advantage, they would have to keep keep innovating.
But (playing devils advocate) fashion has two major differences from music, books, video, software, etc. First, fashion is not digitally duplicable. The design might be digitally duplicable but it's not like you can torrent a dress. Thus "casual" copying is rare. Second, buying a dress doesn't give one access to the design merely the product of the design. A bit of effort is required to reverse engineer the design from the dress.
(Don't get me wrong. I would love to see good examples of a creative industry without copyright, but without answering these sort of objections, I don't think fashion is an example I could use to convince anyone.)
Thanks for pointing this out. That changes things. I'll put away my torches and pitchforks now.
WebM has a clear advantage when the alternative is not letting your users view video on pages that serve WebM. Other than that, evaluating the advantages of one video format versus another is up to the video producer not the video consumer.
I'm sorry but as a developer myself, my experience completely contradicts your claims. Perhaps this is because when I think of libraries, I'm thinking about things for implementing application internals (e.g. SSL, HTML parsing, B-trees, hashtables, lightweight atomic persistent storage (e.g. Berkly-DB or SQLite)) rather than GUI libraries. While I agree that very few developers would re-implement GTK or Qt, in my experience, developers do often reimplement functionality with things like strings, HTTP or HTML handling or particularly B-trees or hashtables.
It seems you object to a "mishmash" because it leads to an inconsistent user experience. I agree that is a problem, but only for user facing libraries that affect the user experience. In other areas there is no real reason to force all developers into the same libraries. Why should we decide? I'm sorry but the world is a better place because the world didn't stop at Berkley-DB and was ready to welcome competators like SQLite and will be ready to welcome whatever replaces SQLite. To paraphrase you, "Why should we be stuck in 1995? It doesn't have to all be the same. Just use something that works."
(At this point we could digress into "Cathedral vs Bazaar", and how competition has in the long run improved, for example, browsers despite causing developer headaches in the mean time, ... but I think we're reaching the limits of the productivity of this discussion.)
To reiterate, I agree that consistency of user experience is a valid concern for standardizing libraries, but it isn't the only concern and it isn't always a concern.
Besides, that greatly favors popular libraries and ignores libraries which may not be pre-installed whereas package management with external libraries are neutral to this.
And I should care... why?
Because if developers choose what libraries to use mainly based on whether the library is likely to be already installed, then new but useful libraries are unlikely to become popular enough to become a standard install. In addition it becomes tempting for the developer to just implement the libraries functionality, but of course that is a drain on application developer time and is likely to have bugs that were already shaken out of the library. In an ideal world, developers would choose what library to use solely based on how well the library does the job. The real world already falls short of that (e.g. API stability and likelihood of the library still being maintained down the road are major concerns), but we should try to avoid making the situation worse than it already is.
However, I'm not sure I agree with the GP that static linking favors popular libraries. Usually I'd only dynamic link against a library if I think it's already popular enough to already be installed.
Scissors are not banned, so instead of bringing one knife, you just need to bring two of knives that combine into a pair of scissors.
One knife: banned. Two knives joined by a pivot: not banned.
Fair enough. Chalk up one more for the unfortunate ambiguities of the English language.
Your post says what bit-coins are only in terms of their attributes or *what* they do (e.g. "Binary search trees are ways of efficiently searching"). I think the GP was asking for what they are in terms of their essence or *how* they do (e.g. "Binary search trees are binary trees sorted by their in-order traversal").
After all, if the GP doesn't trust the "sensationalism", then how is he to trust the attributes you ascribe to bit-coins? Your post says what bit-coins do not how they do it. How is the GP to trust that they actually do what you say if he doesn't know how they do it?
This post is false. I am a graduate student at a (United States) university and I have checked on this. My is my own.
Four words?! Strunk did it in three: "Omit needless words".
Bingo! Someone give this man some points.
As an academic, I have only so much creative energy to spend on writting. My future ability to feed myself depends on me spending it wisely. Wikipedia doesn't fit in that equation.
Two exceptions are editing for the sake of fun and full professors with tenure. If wikipedia wants to bring in academics, then they need to either magically figure out a way to make it fun for me to continue writting about something I've already been writting about all day, or they need to target people high enough up the totem pole that they don't need more publications and aren't busy helping their students get publications.
You misunderstand the law.
"Generic" is a technical term in trademark law. It means using the name of a thing as the brand. For example Apple brand Apples would be generic. Operating System brand operating system would also be generic. Generic brands are never trademarkable.
However, Microsoft Windows falls in the "descriptive" category of trademarks. A descriptive trademark uses some aspect of a thing as the brand. For example "AllBran" brand cereal would be descriptive. Windows brand operating system would also be descriptive. Descriptive brands are trademarkable only if they have acquired secondary meaning.
The brand "AppStore" is pretty generic because it describes an application store though it may border on being descriptive. The Windows brand, however, is very firmly in descriptive territory.
Source: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm
longlived fission products like technetium99 (halflife over 200,000 years).
Don't long lived isotopes decay slowly? That is to say only a small fraction of the atoms actually decay and thus there are a small number of decays to produce radiation? With the half-life of T99 only 3.5e-7 of the system decays each year. Maybe that's enough to be worried. But how many Sv does a single T99 decay amount to? How pure and how much T99 are we typically talking about?
I agree as industry languages go, Java isn't all that bad.
But it does sadden me since it is more a statement about industry languages more than Java.
There are many mature industry-strength languages out there that are much easier and nicer to work with and have astounding features like you wouldn't believe (e.g. some measurably reduce bug rates by a factor of ten). Unfortunately, they aren't widely used in industry dispite being industry strength. Most of those languages haven't made it outside accademia as they are viewed as "too hard" for ordinary programmers. That makes me sad. It's like the difference between a windows programmer that has to write a 50 line batch file to do his processing versus a linux programmer that does the same in a single five-program pipeline.
Then again I'm abount to finish a PhD in programming langauges, so I may be biased. And to be fair most of the resistance to these langauges may have more to do with compatability with legacy code.
wxWindows is not a GUI element. It is a GUI framework/toolkit and a software product. The wxWindow widget never needed to be renamed.