Once Microsoft's competitors opened the "anti-trust" Pandora's box on the software industry, it's gloves-off all around.
The entire whole volume of anti-trust "law" is arbitrary and capricious. It is a giant favor and influence peddling racket, with no basis in objective reality, and no underlying premise.
It takes a while to condition the public to allow a much-loved company to be "ready" for politicians to dig in and do some carving. Google is getting there.
I'm not convinced you've thought about this very hard. I won't hold it against you, because nobody, least of all government schools, will teach you this stuff.
Capitalism is simply this: individuals decide for themselves.
Socialism is simply this: some people decide for others.
There is no idelogical difference between socialism and communism. Both words mean: the state is absolute, and any individual can and will be made to sacrifice for the "good" of others. Who are the others? The presiding oligarchy. Sometimes, it claims to represent some of the people [european social democracies], sometimes, it doesn't bother [the USSR].
Coercion is the object, violence is the method, and submission is the response.
Socialism will always suppress the best a man has to offer because he will be forced act [or not act] contrary to his own wishes.
As long as it must contend with humans, socialism is a dead end. The essence of man is his mind, and its free excercise is his purpose. To the extent that socialism suppresses this, it will kill the lifeblood of everything that has created and provided worth in "your" schools and "your" healthcare and "your" skyscrapers.
Faced with oppressive socialism, men of the mind will invariably take one of three courses: - die - revolt - stop thinking
When enough have done this, the socialist state will finally die.
You can pick up "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", which is a collection of essays that will help you understand where I am coming from.
Now, I can explain why this specific story [and the "ethical labor" stuff, in general] is absolutely ridiculous very easily:
Let's consider the broad spectrum of employment opportunities for _15 year old asian girls_ who are poor and desperate enough to work in an electronics factory. The framing narrative is that this factory is hell, and no child should be forced to work, and they are paid a pittance wage, blah blah.
Let's suppose that all of that is true, yet still these girls are showing up to work anyway. Whatever horrors await them at work, something still worse must be pushing them to show up.
Now, you've taken away their factory job, but you didn't address the reality that _something_ was keeping these girls going to work. Compared to their broader situation, that factory job [i]was[/i] the lesser evil. And now they must confront their situation head on -- now with _no_ income, instead of their former "paltry" income.
What do you suppose desperate female children in poor countries do to get money when they've got no better alternative?
I dont have the numbers in front of me, but I'm going to take a guess: the number of people who "lift themselves out" of "oppressive" factory work are probably quite a bit higher than the number who lift themselves out of.. what you're leaving them with.
Reading has to do with the recognition of word boundaries and matching ordred sequences of letters to plausible patterns.
Comprehension is different: understanding what the author was attempting to communicate to you.
The original article used several words that have socio-politically ambiguous meanings. You have used "social welfare" to mean two different things in two consecutive sentences in your dismissive and condescending response. I beleive you've unintentionally highlighted part of the problem.
I was asking for feedback regarding my parsing of what the author meant. Specifically, I recognized a number of weasel-words and thus needed to try and translate them to something with actual meaning.
In the USA there is only one entity I'm aware of that teaches in any meaningful sense the ideas of rigorous individuality and non-coercive economics.. that being the Mises Institute.
It is very much the case in the USA that if you want to arrive at the unpopular worldview that pure, unbridled, unregulated capitalism is the only _ethical_ form of socio-political organization ever theorized (and rarely, if ever attempted), you'll have to go looking on your own.
For instance, no Republican actually beleives or says that he doesn't have the power and obligation to use the government to "take care of the needy". He just has a different idea of who the needy are than the "other" party.
What I am convinced of - and which is not taught or openly discussed _anywhere_, is that the government has no power or obligation to "take care" of _anyone_. At the federal level, it ought to be limited to preserving the negative liberties of individuals, and as such any notion of social welfare is completely synthetic, as "societies" don't have rights to be protected, and it is not the government's business to distribute "goodness", but to impair harm. Unfortuneately, all states in recorded history seem to be primarily the cheif agents of _doing_ harm against individuals.
I wish I didn't have to go looking for this stuff, and that it wasn't such a galvanizing and unpopular point of view. But despite all of the misattribution to mass brainwashing, the idea of authentic individual freedom never managed to come up in the 16+ years of public schooling, nor was it gleaned from watching "normal" TV news, nor did I learn of it from reading "reputable" news papers.
I am a little concerned when something done with the power of government can "mean anything". That's a recipie for problems. There are actually a number of people in the US that would argue that Churches and other religiously affiliated entities should stop receiving preferential tax treatment because the benefits are conditional and are distributed "unfairly".
I think this is actually the case with all things done in the name of "social welare". Some individuals receive benefits and others do not, and the distribution mechanism is always conditional to some extent.
I don't think it is ludicrous to question the benefits to "Society" afforded by F/OSS. I tried to do it in a quasi-numeric method in a different response on this thread. I agree with the _sentiment_ that the world is better off with F/OSS than without it. However, what governments should be funding in the name of "benefit to all" is a different matter, and requires discussion rather than mere sentiment or claims of self-evident truth.
The article is about the attempt to quantify the the _value_ of one F/OSS project, probably as the first step of this political endeavour.
Ok, so you read it as, the EU should setup tax incentives for companies to release code under F/OSS license, as F/OSS software benefits "society".
It's an interesting point of view for a few reasons. While on its face, I'd tend to agree that "F/OSS is good for the world", it's an interesting thing to actually measure.
One way to naively consider the point is to say that fewer than 5% of computer users are direct benefectors of the linux kernel and all linux / GNU distributions combined, as in, linux has had little penetration into the desktop thus far. Is a subsidy that benefits 5% of computer users appropriate for a government body to take on? Perhaps.
Widening the scope a bit, you might say that most computer users end up _communicating_ with a web server running F/OSS software [i.e. LAMP]. This is a bit spurious, however. In this case, the providers in question, who are often for-profit entities, are benefitting from F/OSS software. A person navigating to a website doesn't often know what software they are communicating with, much less its license, and much less drive financial or intangible benefit from same.
Services like Ebay and Hotmail have wavered between various F/OSS and commercially licensed systems over time, and their customer experience, impact, and costs have remained the same.
So if you want to argue that Apache has been a transformational peice of F/OSS software and has made society better, I might be inclined to agree, but I'd clarify that it has primarily made it cheaper for _corporations_ to deploy IT infrastructure. They may or may not pass on any such cost savings to the world at large.
In terms of what would do the most "good for society", and where government should either spend money it's taken (or collect less of it if certain conditions are met), would you argue for or against the EU paying extra money to Microsoft [or some 3rd party] for EU-specific security patches to Microsoft software. Naturally the EU would then freely distribute these fixes to its member nations and citizens.
Releasing software under an F/OSS license certainly benefits some people. I think there is a defensible argument that releasing features or security fixes for popular commercial software benefits many, many more people. How would one justify the former without making an even stronger argument for the latter?
The cost estimation is not of itself important, but it is an important means to and end: that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition that would set it as an alternative to decision-makers. Ideally, legal and regulatory framework must allow companies participating on commons-based R&D to generate intangible assets for their contribution to successful projects. Otherwise, expenses must have an equitable tax treatment as a donation to social welfare."
Can someone decode this for me?
Do they want to tax companies that sponsor F/OSS development? Or subsidize them? Or do they want the flexibility to do both, and will change their mind depending on which company and which year we're talking about?
Normally, my in-built translation apparatus resolves "Social Welfare" as "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence". But that's perhaps just my American perspective..
I actually think that its less about learning a specific technology and more about the technologies that you grew up with and took for granted, and which influenced your mental development.
One of the iphone jail breakers was like a 15 year old kid. There is at least one US university that is teaching software reverse-engineering courses.
Pulling off these whole-system type hacks is a different way of thinking with a different set of skills.. and the ability to "go deep" as necessary but with a reliance on mature tools in many related areas.
There's an older guy I used to work with that in the early 80s... built his own single-board computer out of discrete components. That guy clearly understands enough about hardware and software and everything inbetween to do the conceptual "same thing" as jailbreaking an iphone.
But I don't suspect he'd be able to pull it off. The complexity of a modern device at any spot you look is orders of magnitude higher than what he was used to working with.
Similarly, I don't think any of the iphone jailbreakers can, unless they've had some reason to try in the past, build a working computer out of discrete electronic components. Yet "finding the JTAG" and other such tricks are just something they can understand and use at a level of understanding sufficient for their goals.
Each new generation of computer folks stand on the shoulders of what came before. But as our levels of abstraction continue to shift ever higher... the types of problems we tackle are wider and shallower, asking us to go deep only where necessary in thin vertical columns.
I can understand the concepts behind hacking an iphone. But circumventing consumer hardware wasn't popular when I was growing up. The level of electronic and software complexity then was much lower than it is today. Right now I'm working with something called "MEF", which is a runtime dependancy injection framework for managed code. When something goes wrong in MEF I honestly have no __idea__ wtf the problem OR fix is, because there are moving parts here that are hidden away from me. I don't understand where to try and look deeper and what lens to look through, and as such, the whole box is opaque and frustrating to me.
I grew up in the days of static linking, reading data from files, and doing single-step debugging through every instruction that the processor got fed [if you needed to]. The Borland IDEs. When I work in any system where I cannot relate it to these techniques that I developed my knowledge and experience around, I get frustrated -- "the usual things no longer apply".
I really think that for many people, the level of technology you grew up with is what remains your comfort zone for the rest of your life.
People that want to remain "in industry" for an extended basis will probably need to re-create the time and activity commitment they had during their "intense immersive learning phase" on a re-occuring basis in order to re-center their thinking around present-day techniques and cultural uses of software.
But it simply isn't realistic for me to spend 5+ hours every day hacking at home like i did from middle school until the end of college. And I suspect that's the case for most people. I'd guess that 35 is probably the inflection point for software engineers, and if people develop their thinking in their highschool and university years as a rule, that age will probably stay put.
I hope they let me drive the bulldozer at the ground breaking for the new plants. Because when I drive it over the inevitable protesters, erasing those people will do more good for the country than actually building the power plant will.
Well, Microsoft bought at least one of the firetrucks in their area -- they were required to in order to get "permission" to build 6 story buildings [bldg 40 and 41, on main campus].
You're also assuming that all of those kids of Microsoft families are going to public schools. Some of them aren't. Or that they're all using roads in their personal cars [many of them aren't -- Microsoft is VERY gung ho about non-single-rider transit and funds a fair bit of it]
I used to live in Redmond. Microsoft money is _everywhere_. Your distaste for corporations and Microsoft in particular have blinded you to the reality of the situation: Microsoft is the economic engine of the entire Redmond econony. Also a sizable share of the greater King county economy.
When I lived there for just 3 short years, I saw brand new libraries, churches, schools, going up all the time, not to mention other for-profit businesses [which btw, create jobs]. I lived on "Education Hill", so named for all of the schools there. That money is coming from somewhere.
Basically, all of the arguments that people _try_ to use for getting pro sports teams to be paid for with public money apply to something like MS, except all of the arguments are true. Unlike a pro sports team, all those zillions of MS employees go to work every day, and are in town 95% of more of the year, and are spending their money in the local economy. Those service and maintenance people that would clean the stadium after "game night" do so multiple times a day 5 days a week eveyr week of the year... and not just for 1 stadium.. but something like 50 office buildings.
And Microsoft isn't using ANY public money or subsidy for this stuff.
[fwiw, i'm against public funding of sports stadiums / teams / etc].
Is there some agency or executive branch (pardon my Americanism) office that is supposed to be involved with this?
I am imagining the job description:
Keep the persons of Her Majesty's Austrailia safe from the deleterious effects of small breasts. Your difficult mission is to scour the visual mediae, carefully scrutinizing same for the size, age, and meritousness of the female mammary glands. You will be paid the handsomely salary of 180,000AUD annually, and receive the full offering of benefits and priviledges accorded to an agent of governance.
This position is not open to American college students.
there are well funded lobby groups and others with too much time on their hand looking for ANYTHING that is wrong.
Errors are only errors if they are reported by the "right" people?
Do you want to know how many questions Linus Torvalds has answered for me? Zero.
I actually _have_ gotten personal responses from Theo DeRaadt on some OpenBSD issues but they all have the general form of "you're not interesting, don't waste my time".
Nevertheless, I rely on OpenBSD. The fact that Theo has neither the time nor the interest in having a deep meaningful conversation with me about his code neither changes the quality of his code nor prevents him from releasing every 6 months, on schedule.
I don't think that there is an expectation that scientists stop doing their day jobs to do software support for people. I think there is an expectation that publicly funded research used to set public policy be easily available to all comers.
I'm a bit frustrated by the apparent contradiction. For the first time perhaps in history in the USA, you have armchair folks trying to do technical audits of scientific tools, research, and publications -- for free.
I thought the "normal" problem in America is that the population is too apathetic to care and too stupid to provide any critical analysis. And yet we see this happening more and more frequently and the climate-science establishment is circling the wagons instead of celebrating the fact that there are a handful of people that for once give a damn about interesting research tools and methods.
I must concede that there are some downsides to discussing your opinions and findings with others: When people disagree with you, it ends up taking some of your time.
If your goal is to do the best science possible, why not take the help where you can find it?
Suppose that I buy your argument that the bugs don't matter, or that only you can determine if the bugs matter.
What else doesn't matter? If you reduce the surface area of "things that matter" to "the things that only I am qualified to render an opinion on", it's kind of a circular dependancy, isn't it ?
I'm sure there are chemists who, upon seeing that their scales aren't graduated finely enough or do not reliably re-zero, opine that in the context of the measurements they are taking, that it doesn't significantly affect the outcome and so is a tolerable source of error.
But I'd like to think that any chemist, when a scale technician offers to fix her scale or provide her with a more accurate one [freely], would take advantage of that offer. Better results are always better, right?
However, 99.9% or more of the people in the world wouldn't be able to do a damn thing with it. I look at my classmates - we're all in the same degree program, yet probably only 5% of them would really be able to understand and do anything meaningful with the code I'm using.
I think the world is very lucky that Linus Torvalds wasn't as narrow-sighted and conceited as you are.
Why? We're that specialized. Here, I'm talking 5% of people studying atmospheric and oceanic sciences being able to make use of my code without taking several years to get up to speed. What's the incentive to release it? Why bother with the effort, when the audience is soooo small?
Release the code, and if some dumbass decides to dig into it, you either are in the position of having to waste time answering ignorant questions, or you ignore them, giving them ammo for "teh code is BOGUS!!!!" Far easier to just keep the code in-house, and hand it out to the few qualified researchers who might be interested. Unsurprisingly, a lot of scientific code is handled this way.
However, I do very much believe in completely transparent discourse. My research group has two major comparison studies of different climate models. We pulled in data from seven models from seven different universities, and analyzed the differences in CO2 predictions, among other things. The data was freely and openly given to us by these other research groups, and they happily contributed information about the inner workings of their models. This, in my book, is what it's all about. The relevant information was shared with people in a position to understand it and analyze it.
It'd be a whole different story if the public wasn't filled with a bunch of ignorant whack-jobs, trying to smear scientists. When we're trying to do science, we'd rather do science than defend ourselves against hacks with a public soapbox. If you want access to the data and the code, go to a school and study the stuff. All the doors are open then. The price of admission is just having some vague idea wtf you're talking about.
Have you heard of "ivory tower"? You're it.
Your position basically boils down to this: "unless you read all the same things I read, talked to all the same people I talked to, went to all the same schools I did... you're not qualified to talk to me".
That is _the_ definition of monocultural isolationism.. i.e. the Ivory Tower of Academia problem.
Here's the problem: if your requirement is that anyone you consider a "peer" must have had all of the same inputs and conditionings that you had... what basis do you have for allowing them to come out of the other side of that machine with a non-tainted point of view?
As a specific counterpoint to your way of thinking:
My dad is an actuary.. one of the best in the world. He regularly meets with the top handful of insurance regulators in foreign governments. He manages the risk of _billions_ of dollars. The maths involved in actuarial science embarass nearly any other branch of applied mathematics. I have an undergraduate math degree and I could only understand his problem domain in the crudest, rough-bounding box sort of fashion. Furthermore, he's been a programmer since the System/360 days.
Yet his code, while there is a lot of it, is something I am definitely able to help him with. We talk about software engineering and specific technical problems he is having on a frequent basis.
You don't need to be a problem domain expert in order to demonstrate value when auditing software.
Furthermore, as a professional software tester, I happen to find that occasionally, not over-familiarizing myself with the design docs and implementation details too early allow me to ask better "reset" questions when doing design and code reviews. "Why are you doing this?" And as the developer talks me through it, they understand how shaky their assumptions are. If I had been "travelling" with them in lock step
I've never met anyone at Microsoft internally who cares about this stuff.
We had some external "diversity expert" come to Microsoft and start berating us about how we lacked women in high places in the company, especially compared to our competitors like Novell, Oracle, etc, and what idiots we were.
So I stood up and suggested "we're kicking the crap out of all those competitors, maybe gender equality in management isn't as important as you are suggesting?"
Boy did that set off a shit-storm:)
A few weeks later, we had the MS "director of diversity" come by and try and tell us the same shit. She was better prepared. The reason why Diversity is so important at Microsoft?
You are disgusting. Does your irrational hate for Microsoft have no boundaries whatsoever?
If you are like 90% of people, you _would not be using a computer_ were it not for Microsoft.
But lets set Microsoft and software aside.
I encourage you to head to some disease infested rathole, pre-vaccination, and when people working with funds and medicine provided by the Gates foundation offer to give you an injection that gives you an order of magnitude improvement in survival over your ancestors and everyone in your peer group... I expect you to show them your printed out slashdot comment, [no doubt printed by a printer that Microsoft had some small role in bringing to market]......and I expect you to refuse the vaccine because you have principles that are beyond reproach.
I expect you to provide an eloquent lecture to the doctors [who will haved moved on to treating other people -- ones worth saving], extolling the evil of the foundation that makes it financially possible for them to help poverty stricken people without worrying about how _they_ are going to eat.
Before heading over, why don't you post it here? Why don't you explain for all of our benefit how Bill Gates created the patent system, and without it, free medicine would have invented itself, and subsequently sprouted wings and flown across the ocean to where it is needed; where doctors would materialize out of nothing riding in on glorious unicorns with silver manes, and then be well fed enough on all of the abundant free food in africa to gleefully risk their own lives to administer said drugs to the people that without such treatment would continue dying in mountainous heaps of human suffering.
My wife and I love Germany and had considered expatriating there until the practical issues of raising children presented themselves. Later in my life the theoretical "freedom issues" are also an obstacle, and seem to explain the practical problem.
Murray Rothbard has an easy read called "Education, Free and Compulsory" that details the historical context, motivations, and key figures in the development of public education throughout world history. Starting with [to keep it local!] Mr Martin Luther.
The key emergent theme in public and compulsory education is not so often the "well being" of the children, although that is how it is often wrapped up, but asserting the relevant authorities "interest" in shaping the indoctrination of all persons. In the earliest systems it was the Church, and a great deal of public education had to deal with [both sides] trying to gain new supporters in the Calvinist vs. Lutheran struggle.
The history of public education is less religiously themed in the US; as in most of the world the religious hierarchy of the day was superceded by the all-powerful state as the new religion. Writings of early public education advocates in the US all talk about the need to shape and mold the child in order to conform to the purposes of the state; some suggest that children ought to universally be taken from parents so that they can be in the proper educational environment 24 hours per day.
Rothbard [as usual] is an interesting read here, but there are many others who deal at a much less theoretical/epistemological level.
The key issue is that in Germany, irrespective of what "hoops" you say exist to "let" parents homeschool, the position of the state is that children belong to the state, not the parents, and should the parents meet a sufficient number of criteria, the state will _permit_ parents to indoctrinate children in the only approved manner -- the one that serves the interests and ideology of the state.
A contrasting idea is that the state ought not to compel any particular ideology on anyone, least of all children, and that the state does not "own" children whatsoever, and as such has no actual say in the manner or content of the child's education.
I find that the best litmus test of the totalitarian tendencies of the state are as follows: - does the state permit individual firearms ownership that bypass any allegience or subservience to the state? - does the state permit parents to wholly control the nature and content of how children are to be raised and educated?
Theshort versions are: permissive gun laws annd permissive homeschooling laws are good indicators of a society that is "truly" free, that is, individuals are free to do things that the state may find distasteful.
In my view, the right way to think of individual freedom, and to compare/constrast different societies, is not by considering how broad the list of behaviors considered "permissible" by society is, but how tolerant the society is of behaviors it popularly considers non-permissible.
Said differently, I would consider a society that has a singular ideology of "almost anything goes" to be less free than a society that says "we don't care what your ideology is".
Germany, and most European nations, fair poorly on the challenge of tolerating differing ideologies. This is normally not a problem for most people, because the prevailing ideology is quite liberal and permissive in what they consider "normal". Yet the fair bit of socio-political unity in Western Europe since the end of WW2 has allowed it to postpone some of the teething problems that the US has and continues to deal with. The most visible effects of this is how european countries attempt to retain their identity in the face of an influx of Muslims who do not conform or integrate into their traditional politics and culture. The legal responses taken by different european nations to this specific problem are interesting, to say the least.
If you want to be treated like a child then I suppose you could defer to someone else to take care of you.
Rand discusses the value proposition and lack of self-sacrifice involved in the family unit when discussing who people were married to and the presence of children in Galt's Gulch, although she did so only very breifly.
The statement wasn't that nobody ever does anything that benefits anyone else, it's that Bob has no reason to expect anyone else is acting _sacrificially_ for Bob's best interests.
My son has never thanked me for taking care of him. Every day he pleads with me to not go to work and instead spend the whole day with him. He has no concept of the nature of his continued existance and survival and what makes it possible.
But you aren't a 2 year old, and neither are the people in Rand's books.
I'm not a "full bore" objectivist -- I think Rand gets it right when she explains why you mustn't be _coerced_ into supporting others. I think the Christian God gets it right when he says you'll feel _good_ if you _choose_ to support others.
If reading Atlas Shrugged gave you the idea that people "above you in the hierarchy" are or should be looking out for you, you should re-read it.
There is no arrangement anywhere in the history of the world where you don't have to look out for yourself.
Atlas Shrugged doesn't say "this is how it should be", it says "this is how it's always been, and you shouldn't be ashamed of it".
People have always wanted to abdicate their responsibility to THINK and to deal with reality to other people, yet this always turns out badly for them.
I will never join a union. I will never work for a shop that is union controlled.
Incidentally, I am also quite happy with my pay as a software tester, which started at just under 60k almost _10 years ago_, and has gone up considerably since that time.
Well, the New York Times is a clearinghouse for political hacks masquerading as professionals. It is a hive of villiany and evil. It is utterly and completely irredeemable unless you have a particular sense of humor, in which case it is probably funny sometimes.
But everyone knows this. It's water under the bridge, and intelligent people moved on. Do New Yorkers even read it?
Bruce, on the other hand, is a decent guy, wickedly smart, and we (the computing world, nevermind computer security) have a lot to thank him over. We hold him to a high standard because our previous interactions with him have trained us to do so.
Thus, it is jarring and disturbing if it looks like he's playing by different rules or talking to a different audience. He's "one of us", not "one of them", and it's troubling if he doesn't act that way.
I wish I was a researcher working on improving areola density. I didn't think IBM had those kinds of jobs. It certainly never came up at the job fair they were at when I was in college.
TFA says that - it may be more nuanced than people originally thought [i.e. the "absolute level of human-likeness" may not be the problem, but mismatched levels [great skin, awful eyes don't go together and are jarring] - may have gender bias - seems to depend on you viewing something remotely in 2d vs interacting with something real in the same room [the latter didn't seem to engender the same creepyness in those tested]
Since I don't live in japan nor do I visit robotics labs, I don't have much occasion to interact with near-humanoid robots. So my UV experiences are limited to movies and video games.
I remember seeing the Final Fantasy: Spirits Within movie in the theater and just minutes into the movie I was convinced I was looking at real humans. Or rather, there was nothing in the film that made me dissociate with the characters; they were as "real" to me as watching actors. I kept trying to "zoom out" of the movie/picture and try to critically evaluate the job they did rendering the characters, but I kept defaulting to treating them as humans and getting sucked back into the movie. Mission accomplished on their part, i guess.
I think the UV effect is definitely apparent in 2D matter -- as a fan of anime I am more inclined to "accept" characters that are absolutely impossible.. both physically and emotionally.. but which do not attempt to persuade me they are more than they are. Yet when video game makers get something slightly wrong it _is_ a jarring experience. I've seen video game cutscenes where there are clearly a lot of polygons and textures and art time involved...but something just seems off and instead of you being wowed [or ideally, _not wowed_] you are left feeling disappointed. You know everyone worked hard to try and make the scene but they absolutely did not pull it off.. and the game experience is worse as a result. Mistakes that land your artwork into the "UV" category turn people into videogame/art critics instead of people enjoying an interactive experience.
Actually, the separation of powers posits that the congress can make any law they want to, but - the supreme court can overrule it - the EXECUTIVE BRANCH can refuse to "execute" it, i.e. they can simply choose not to do anything about that law
So it's well within the power of the executive branch to say "fine, that's the law, but none of the resources under my control are going to prosecute anybody over it".
And the congress of course has the power to impeach the president.
The Obama administration is not making some principled move here based on a deep seated respect for the law and process. They are not tragically clinging to the process knowing full well that they hate what it implies, hands tied, blah blah.
The fact of the matter is that politicians want power. Not justice. Not to "help" you, not anything else. They may or may not have various schemes of rationalizatoin or delusion about their motives, but for a long time it's all been about increasing the power of the government and taking care of #1.
There are three ways that the Obama DOJ will calm down on filesharers - a few filesharers start donating substantial money to the DNC to get "heard" - a HUGE pile of voters credibly threaten to "Scott Brown" the current administration over this issue. - somebody between Obama and the RIAA pisses off Obama and he decides to squeeze them a bit..
Actually Ron Paul, if he were abiding by the Austrian Economics playbook, (as he usually does) would never tell you that gold has "intrinsic" value, because nothing has an "intrinsic" value. Value is determined entirely by the transaction participants according to their own desires, and only at a specific point in time. Today, gold is worth ~1000/troy ounce to most Americans. Next week, post nuclear holocaust, you may have a hard time giving people 1oz of gold in exchange for 1 bag of radiation-free ramen.
What Paul and most clever people _will_ tell you is that gold is very useful as a medium of exchange and a store of value within socieites because it is very hard to systematically manipulate [read: inflate], and because it is much better at both functions than "fractional cows".
It was not an accident that many societies all independantly settled on weights of precious metals as their unit of monetary exchange and value.
Slashdot Mirror
Once Microsoft's competitors opened the "anti-trust" Pandora's box on the software industry, it's gloves-off all around.
The entire whole volume of anti-trust "law" is arbitrary and capricious. It is a giant favor and influence peddling racket, with no basis in objective reality, and no underlying premise.
It takes a while to condition the public to allow a much-loved company to be "ready" for politicians to dig in and do some carving. Google is getting there.
I'm not convinced you've thought about this very hard. I won't hold it against you, because nobody, least of all government schools, will teach you this stuff.
Capitalism is simply this: individuals decide for themselves.
Socialism is simply this: some people decide for others.
There is no idelogical difference between socialism and communism. Both words mean: the state is absolute, and any individual can and will be made to sacrifice for the "good" of others. Who are the others? The presiding oligarchy. Sometimes, it claims to represent some of the people [european social democracies], sometimes, it doesn't bother [the USSR].
Coercion is the object, violence is the method, and submission is the response.
Socialism will always suppress the best a man has to offer because he will be forced act [or not act] contrary to his own wishes.
As long as it must contend with humans, socialism is a dead end. The essence of man is his mind, and its free excercise is his purpose. To the extent that socialism suppresses this, it will kill the lifeblood of everything that has created and provided worth in "your" schools and "your" healthcare and "your" skyscrapers.
Faced with oppressive socialism, men of the mind will invariably take one of three courses:
- die
- revolt
- stop thinking
When enough have done this, the socialist state will finally die.
You can pick up "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", which is a collection of essays that will help you understand where I am coming from.
Now, I can explain why this specific story [and the "ethical labor" stuff, in general] is absolutely ridiculous very easily:
Let's consider the broad spectrum of employment opportunities for _15 year old asian girls_ who are poor and desperate enough to work in an electronics factory. The framing narrative is that this factory is hell, and no child should be forced to work, and they are paid a pittance wage, blah blah.
Let's suppose that all of that is true, yet still these girls are showing up to work anyway. Whatever horrors await them at work, something still worse must be pushing them to show up.
Now, you've taken away their factory job, but you didn't address the reality that _something_ was keeping these girls going to work. Compared to their broader situation, that factory job [i]was[/i] the lesser evil. And now they must confront their situation head on -- now with _no_ income, instead of their former "paltry" income.
What do you suppose desperate female children in poor countries do to get money when they've got no better alternative?
I dont have the numbers in front of me, but I'm going to take a guess: the number of people who "lift themselves out" of "oppressive" factory work are probably quite a bit higher than the number who lift themselves out of.. what you're leaving them with.
So much for not wanting to exploit children.
Reading has to do with the recognition of word boundaries and matching ordred sequences of letters to plausible patterns.
Comprehension is different: understanding what the author was attempting to communicate to you.
The original article used several words that have socio-politically ambiguous meanings. You have used "social welfare" to mean two different things in two consecutive sentences in your dismissive and condescending response. I beleive you've unintentionally highlighted part of the problem.
I was asking for feedback regarding my parsing of what the author meant. Specifically, I recognized a number of weasel-words and thus needed to try and translate them to something with actual meaning.
I wish it were so.
In the USA there is only one entity I'm aware of that teaches in any meaningful sense the ideas of rigorous individuality and non-coercive economics.. that being the Mises Institute.
It is very much the case in the USA that if you want to arrive at the unpopular worldview that pure, unbridled, unregulated capitalism is the only _ethical_ form of socio-political organization ever theorized (and rarely, if ever attempted), you'll have to go looking on your own.
For instance, no Republican actually beleives or says that he doesn't have the power and obligation to use the government to "take care of the needy". He just has a different idea of who the needy are than the "other" party.
What I am convinced of - and which is not taught or openly discussed _anywhere_, is that the government has no power or obligation to "take care" of _anyone_. At the federal level, it ought to be limited to preserving the negative liberties of individuals, and as such any notion of social welfare is completely synthetic, as "societies" don't have rights to be protected, and it is not the government's business to distribute "goodness", but to impair harm. Unfortuneately, all states in recorded history seem to be primarily the cheif agents of _doing_ harm against individuals.
I wish I didn't have to go looking for this stuff, and that it wasn't such a galvanizing and unpopular point of view. But despite all of the misattribution to mass brainwashing, the idea of authentic individual freedom never managed to come up in the 16+ years of public schooling, nor was it gleaned from watching "normal" TV news, nor did I learn of it from reading "reputable" news papers.
I am a little concerned when something done with the power of government can "mean anything". That's a recipie for problems. There are actually a number of people in the US that would argue that Churches and other religiously affiliated entities should stop receiving preferential tax treatment because the benefits are conditional and are distributed "unfairly".
I think this is actually the case with all things done in the name of "social welare". Some individuals receive benefits and others do not, and the distribution mechanism is always conditional to some extent.
I don't think it is ludicrous to question the benefits to "Society" afforded by F/OSS. I tried to do it in a quasi-numeric method in a different response on this thread. I agree with the _sentiment_ that the world is better off with F/OSS than without it. However, what governments should be funding in the name of "benefit to all" is a different matter, and requires discussion rather than mere sentiment or claims of self-evident truth.
The article is about the attempt to quantify the the _value_ of one F/OSS project, probably as the first step of this political endeavour.
Ok, so you read it as, the EU should setup tax incentives for companies to release code under F/OSS license, as F/OSS software benefits "society".
It's an interesting point of view for a few reasons. While on its face, I'd tend to agree that "F/OSS is good for the world", it's an interesting thing to actually measure.
One way to naively consider the point is to say that fewer than 5% of computer users are direct benefectors of the linux kernel and all linux / GNU distributions combined, as in, linux has had little penetration into the desktop thus far. Is a subsidy that benefits 5% of computer users appropriate for a government body to take on? Perhaps.
Widening the scope a bit, you might say that most computer users end up _communicating_ with a web server running F/OSS software [i.e. LAMP]. This is a bit spurious, however. In this case, the providers in question, who are often for-profit entities, are benefitting from F/OSS software. A person navigating to a website doesn't often know what software they are communicating with, much less its license, and much less drive financial or intangible benefit from same.
Services like Ebay and Hotmail have wavered between various F/OSS and commercially licensed systems over time, and their customer experience, impact, and costs have remained the same.
So if you want to argue that Apache has been a transformational peice of F/OSS software and has made society better, I might be inclined to agree, but I'd clarify that it has primarily made it cheaper for _corporations_ to deploy IT infrastructure. They may or may not pass on any such cost savings to the world at large.
In terms of what would do the most "good for society", and where government should either spend money it's taken (or collect less of it if certain conditions are met), would you argue for or against the EU paying extra money to Microsoft [or some 3rd party] for EU-specific security patches to Microsoft software. Naturally the EU would then freely distribute these fixes to its member nations and citizens.
Releasing software under an F/OSS license certainly benefits some people. I think there is a defensible argument that releasing features or security fixes for popular commercial software benefits many, many more people. How would one justify the former without making an even stronger argument for the latter?
Can someone decode this for me?
Do they want to tax companies that sponsor F/OSS development? Or subsidize them? Or do they want the flexibility to do both, and will change their mind depending on which company and which year we're talking about?
Normally, my in-built translation apparatus resolves "Social Welfare" as "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence". But that's perhaps just my American perspective..
I actually think that its less about learning a specific technology and more about the technologies that you grew up with and took for granted, and which influenced your mental development.
One of the iphone jail breakers was like a 15 year old kid.
There is at least one US university that is teaching software reverse-engineering courses.
Pulling off these whole-system type hacks is a different way of thinking with a different set of skills.. and the ability to "go deep" as necessary but with a reliance on mature tools in many related areas.
There's an older guy I used to work with that in the early 80s... built his own single-board computer out of discrete components. That guy clearly understands enough about hardware and software and everything inbetween to do the conceptual "same thing" as jailbreaking an iphone.
But I don't suspect he'd be able to pull it off. The complexity of a modern device at any spot you look is orders of magnitude higher than what he was used to working with.
Similarly, I don't think any of the iphone jailbreakers can, unless they've had some reason to try in the past, build a working computer out of discrete electronic components. Yet "finding the JTAG" and other such tricks are just something they can understand and use at a level of understanding sufficient for their goals.
Each new generation of computer folks stand on the shoulders of what came before. But as our levels of abstraction continue to shift ever higher... the types of problems we tackle are wider and shallower, asking us to go deep only where necessary in thin vertical columns.
I can understand the concepts behind hacking an iphone. But circumventing consumer hardware wasn't popular when I was growing up. The level of electronic and software complexity then was much lower than it is today. Right now I'm working with something called "MEF", which is a runtime dependancy injection framework for managed code. When something goes wrong in MEF I honestly have no __idea__ wtf the problem OR fix is, because there are moving parts here that are hidden away from me. I don't understand where to try and look deeper and what lens to look through, and as such, the whole box is opaque and frustrating to me.
I grew up in the days of static linking, reading data from files, and doing single-step debugging through every instruction that the processor got fed [if you needed to]. The Borland IDEs. When I work in any system where I cannot relate it to these techniques that I developed my knowledge and experience around, I get frustrated -- "the usual things no longer apply".
I really think that for many people, the level of technology you grew up with is what remains your comfort zone for the rest of your life.
People that want to remain "in industry" for an extended basis will probably need to re-create the time and activity commitment they had during their "intense immersive learning phase" on a re-occuring basis in order to re-center their thinking around present-day techniques and cultural uses of software.
But it simply isn't realistic for me to spend 5+ hours every day hacking at home like i did from middle school until the end of college. And I suspect that's the case for most people. I'd guess that 35 is probably the inflection point for software engineers, and if people develop their thinking in their highschool and university years as a rule, that age will probably stay put.
I hope they let me drive the bulldozer at the ground breaking for the new plants. Because when I drive it over the inevitable protesters, erasing those people will do more good for the country than actually building the power plant will.
Well, Microsoft bought at least one of the firetrucks in their area -- they were required to in order to get "permission" to build 6 story buildings [bldg 40 and 41, on main campus].
You're also assuming that all of those kids of Microsoft families are going to public schools. Some of them aren't. Or that they're all using roads in their personal cars [many of them aren't -- Microsoft is VERY gung ho about non-single-rider transit and funds a fair bit of it]
I used to live in Redmond. Microsoft money is _everywhere_. Your distaste for corporations and Microsoft in particular have blinded you to the reality of the situation: Microsoft is the economic engine of the entire Redmond econony. Also a sizable share of the greater King county economy.
When I lived there for just 3 short years, I saw brand new libraries, churches, schools, going up all the time, not to mention other for-profit businesses [which btw, create jobs]. I lived on "Education Hill", so named for all of the schools there. That money is coming from somewhere.
Basically, all of the arguments that people _try_ to use for getting pro sports teams to be paid for with public money apply to something like MS, except all of the arguments are true. Unlike a pro sports team, all those zillions of MS employees go to work every day, and are in town 95% of more of the year, and are spending their money in the local economy. Those service and maintenance people that would clean the stadium after "game night" do so multiple times a day 5 days a week eveyr week of the year... and not just for 1 stadium.. but something like 50 office buildings.
And Microsoft isn't using ANY public money or subsidy for this stuff.
[fwiw, i'm against public funding of sports stadiums / teams / etc].
Is there some agency or executive branch (pardon my Americanism) office that is supposed to be involved with this?
I am imagining the job description:
I just got one of the 1TB 64mb WD drives that is known to be 4kb sector based.
Here is how it shows up in dmesg:
[ 3.420488] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
and here's what hdparm -I says:
ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1
Serial Number: WD-WCAV55227529
Firmware Revision: 80.00A80
Transport: Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6
Standards:
Supported: 8 7 6 5
Likely used: 8
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16383
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064
LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 1953525168
Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 953869 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 1000204 MBytes (1000 GB)
cache/buffer size = unknown
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Queue depth: 32
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 1
Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
* Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
* READ_B
Errors are only errors if they are reported by the "right" people?
Do you want to know how many questions Linus Torvalds has answered for me? Zero.
I actually _have_ gotten personal responses from Theo DeRaadt on some OpenBSD issues but they all have the general form of "you're not interesting, don't waste my time".
Nevertheless, I rely on OpenBSD. The fact that Theo has neither the time nor the interest in having a deep meaningful conversation with me about his code neither changes the quality of his code nor prevents him from releasing every 6 months, on schedule.
I don't think that there is an expectation that scientists stop doing their day jobs to do software support for people. I think there is an expectation that publicly funded research used to set public policy be easily available to all comers.
I'm a bit frustrated by the apparent contradiction. For the first time perhaps in history in the USA, you have armchair folks trying to do technical audits of scientific tools, research, and publications -- for free.
I thought the "normal" problem in America is that the population is too apathetic to care and too stupid to provide any critical analysis. And yet we see this happening more and more frequently and the climate-science establishment is circling the wagons instead of celebrating the fact that there are a handful of people that for once give a damn about interesting research tools and methods.
I must concede that there are some downsides to discussing your opinions and findings with others: When people disagree with you, it ends up taking some of your time.
If your goal is to do the best science possible, why not take the help where you can find it?
Suppose that I buy your argument that the bugs don't matter, or that only you can determine if the bugs matter.
What else doesn't matter? If you reduce the surface area of "things that matter" to "the things that only I am qualified to render an opinion on", it's kind of a circular dependancy, isn't it ?
I'm sure there are chemists who, upon seeing that their scales aren't graduated finely enough or do not reliably re-zero, opine that in the context of the measurements they are taking, that it doesn't significantly affect the outcome and so is a tolerable source of error.
But I'd like to think that any chemist, when a scale technician offers to fix her scale or provide her with a more accurate one [freely], would take advantage of that offer. Better results are always better, right?
I think the world is very lucky that Linus Torvalds wasn't as narrow-sighted and conceited as you are.
Have you heard of "ivory tower"? You're it.
Your position basically boils down to this: "unless you read all the same things I read, talked to all the same people I talked to, went to all the same schools I did... you're not qualified to talk to me".
That is _the_ definition of monocultural isolationism.. i.e. the Ivory Tower of Academia problem.
Here's the problem: if your requirement is that anyone you consider a "peer" must have had all of the same inputs and conditionings that you had... what basis do you have for allowing them to come out of the other side of that machine with a non-tainted point of view?
As a specific counterpoint to your way of thinking:
My dad is an actuary.. one of the best in the world. He regularly meets with the top handful of insurance regulators in foreign governments. He manages the risk of _billions_ of dollars. The maths involved in actuarial science embarass nearly any other branch of applied mathematics. I have an undergraduate math degree and I could only understand his problem domain in the crudest, rough-bounding box sort of fashion. Furthermore, he's been a programmer since the System/360 days.
Yet his code, while there is a lot of it, is something I am definitely able to help him with. We talk about software engineering and specific technical problems he is having on a frequent basis.
You don't need to be a problem domain expert in order to demonstrate value when auditing software.
Furthermore, as a professional software tester, I happen to find that occasionally, not over-familiarizing myself with the design docs and implementation details too early allow me to ask better "reset" questions when doing design and code reviews. "Why are you doing this?" And as the developer talks me through it, they understand how shaky their assumptions are. If I had been "travelling" with them in lock step
I've never met anyone at Microsoft internally who cares about this stuff.
We had some external "diversity expert" come to Microsoft and start berating us about how we lacked women in high places in the company, especially compared to our competitors like Novell, Oracle, etc, and what idiots we were.
So I stood up and suggested "we're kicking the crap out of all those competitors, maybe gender equality in management isn't as important as you are suggesting?"
Boy did that set off a shit-storm :)
A few weeks later, we had the MS "director of diversity" come by and try and tell us the same shit. She was better prepared. The reason why Diversity is so important at Microsoft?
"Because Ballmer says so. And there's the door."
I knew this comment would appear.
You are disgusting. Does your irrational hate for Microsoft have no boundaries whatsoever?
If you are like 90% of people, you _would not be using a computer_ were it not for Microsoft.
But lets set Microsoft and software aside.
I encourage you to head to some disease infested rathole, pre-vaccination, and when people working with funds and medicine provided by the Gates foundation offer to give you an injection that gives you an order of magnitude improvement in survival over your ancestors and everyone in your peer group... I expect you to show them your printed out slashdot comment, [no doubt printed by a printer that Microsoft had some small role in bringing to market]... ...and I expect you to refuse the vaccine because you have principles that are beyond reproach.
I expect you to provide an eloquent lecture to the doctors [who will haved moved on to treating other people -- ones worth saving], extolling the evil of the foundation that makes it financially possible for them to help poverty stricken people without worrying about how _they_ are going to eat.
Before heading over, why don't you post it here? Why don't you explain for all of our benefit how Bill Gates created the patent system, and without it, free medicine would have invented itself, and subsequently sprouted wings and flown across the ocean to where it is needed; where doctors would materialize out of nothing riding in on glorious unicorns with silver manes, and then be well fed enough on all of the abundant free food in africa to gleefully risk their own lives to administer said drugs to the people that without such treatment would continue dying in mountainous heaps of human suffering.
I'm all ears, hot shot.
My wife and I love Germany and had considered expatriating there until the practical issues of raising children presented themselves. Later in my life the theoretical "freedom issues" are also an obstacle, and seem to explain the practical problem.
Murray Rothbard has an easy read called "Education, Free and Compulsory" that details the historical context, motivations, and key figures in the development of public education throughout world history. Starting with [to keep it local!] Mr Martin Luther.
The key emergent theme in public and compulsory education is not so often the "well being" of the children, although that is how it is often wrapped up, but asserting the relevant authorities "interest" in shaping the indoctrination of all persons. In the earliest systems it was the Church, and a great deal of public education had to deal with [both sides] trying to gain new supporters in the Calvinist vs. Lutheran struggle.
The history of public education is less religiously themed in the US; as in most of the world the religious hierarchy of the day was superceded by the all-powerful state as the new religion. Writings of early public education advocates in the US all talk about the need to shape and mold the child in order to conform to the purposes of the state; some suggest that children ought to universally be taken from parents so that they can be in the proper educational environment 24 hours per day.
Rothbard [as usual] is an interesting read here, but there are many others who deal at a much less theoretical/epistemological level.
The key issue is that in Germany, irrespective of what "hoops" you say exist to "let" parents homeschool, the position of the state is that children belong to the state, not the parents, and should the parents meet a sufficient number of criteria, the state will _permit_ parents to indoctrinate children in the only approved manner -- the one that serves the interests and ideology of the state.
A contrasting idea is that the state ought not to compel any particular ideology on anyone, least of all children, and that the state does not "own" children whatsoever, and as such has no actual say in the manner or content of the child's education.
I find that the best litmus test of the totalitarian tendencies of the state are as follows:
- does the state permit individual firearms ownership that bypass any allegience or subservience to the state?
- does the state permit parents to wholly control the nature and content of how children are to be raised and educated?
Theshort versions are: permissive gun laws annd permissive homeschooling laws are good indicators of a society that is "truly" free, that is, individuals are free to do things that the state may find distasteful.
In my view, the right way to think of individual freedom, and to compare/constrast different societies, is not by considering how broad the list of behaviors considered "permissible" by society is, but how tolerant the society is of behaviors it popularly considers non-permissible.
Said differently, I would consider a society that has a singular ideology of "almost anything goes" to be less free than a society that says "we don't care what your ideology is".
Germany, and most European nations, fair poorly on the challenge of tolerating differing ideologies. This is normally not a problem for most people, because the prevailing ideology is quite liberal and permissive in what they consider "normal". Yet the fair bit of socio-political unity in Western Europe since the end of WW2 has allowed it to postpone some of the teething problems that the US has and continues to deal with. The most visible effects of this is how european countries attempt to retain their identity in the face of an influx of Muslims who do not conform or integrate into their traditional politics and culture. The legal responses taken by different european nations to this specific problem are interesting, to say the least.
There are certainly Muslims in the US that would
If you want to be treated like a child then I suppose you could defer to someone else to take care of you.
Rand discusses the value proposition and lack of self-sacrifice involved in the family unit when discussing who people were married to and the presence of children in Galt's Gulch, although she did so only very breifly.
The statement wasn't that nobody ever does anything that benefits anyone else, it's that Bob has no reason to expect anyone else is acting _sacrificially_ for Bob's best interests.
My son has never thanked me for taking care of him. Every day he pleads with me to not go to work and instead spend the whole day with him. He has no concept of the nature of his continued existance and survival and what makes it possible.
But you aren't a 2 year old, and neither are the people in Rand's books.
I'm not a "full bore" objectivist -- I think Rand gets it right when she explains why you mustn't be _coerced_ into supporting others. I think the Christian God gets it right when he says you'll feel _good_ if you _choose_ to support others.
If reading Atlas Shrugged gave you the idea that people "above you in the hierarchy" are or should be looking out for you, you should re-read it.
There is no arrangement anywhere in the history of the world where you don't have to look out for yourself.
Atlas Shrugged doesn't say "this is how it should be", it says "this is how it's always been, and you shouldn't be ashamed of it".
People have always wanted to abdicate their responsibility to THINK and to deal with reality to other people, yet this always turns out badly for them.
I will never join a union. I will never work for a shop that is union controlled.
Incidentally, I am also quite happy with my pay as a software tester, which started at just under 60k almost _10 years ago_, and has gone up considerably since that time.
Well, the New York Times is a clearinghouse for political hacks masquerading as professionals. It is a hive of villiany and evil. It is utterly and completely irredeemable unless you have a particular sense of humor, in which case it is probably funny sometimes.
But everyone knows this. It's water under the bridge, and intelligent people moved on. Do New Yorkers even read it?
Bruce, on the other hand, is a decent guy, wickedly smart, and we (the computing world, nevermind computer security) have a lot to thank him over. We hold him to a high standard because our previous interactions with him have trained us to do so.
Thus, it is jarring and disturbing if it looks like he's playing by different rules or talking to a different audience. He's "one of us", not "one of them", and it's troubling if he doesn't act that way.
I wish I was a researcher working on improving areola density. I didn't think IBM had those kinds of jobs. It certainly never came up at the job fair they were at when I was in college.
TFA says that
- it may be more nuanced than people originally thought [i.e. the "absolute level of human-likeness" may not be the problem, but mismatched levels [great skin, awful eyes don't go together and are jarring]
- may have gender bias
- seems to depend on you viewing something remotely in 2d vs interacting with something real in the same room [the latter didn't seem to engender the same creepyness in those tested]
Since I don't live in japan nor do I visit robotics labs, I don't have much occasion to interact with near-humanoid robots. So my UV experiences are limited to movies and video games.
I remember seeing the Final Fantasy: Spirits Within movie in the theater and just minutes into the movie I was convinced I was looking at real humans. Or rather, there was nothing in the film that made me dissociate with the characters; they were as "real" to me as watching actors. I kept trying to "zoom out" of the movie/picture and try to critically evaluate the job they did rendering the characters, but I kept defaulting to treating them as humans and getting sucked back into the movie. Mission accomplished on their part, i guess.
I think the UV effect is definitely apparent in 2D matter -- as a fan of anime I am more inclined to "accept" characters that are absolutely impossible.. both physically and emotionally.. but which do not attempt to persuade me they are more than they are. Yet when video game makers get something slightly wrong it _is_ a jarring experience. I've seen video game cutscenes where there are clearly a lot of polygons and textures and art time involved...but something just seems off and instead of you being wowed [or ideally, _not wowed_] you are left feeling disappointed. You know everyone worked hard to try and make the scene but they absolutely did not pull it off.. and the game experience is worse as a result. Mistakes that land your artwork into the "UV" category turn people into videogame/art critics instead of people enjoying an interactive experience.
Actually, the separation of powers posits that the congress can make any law they want to, but
- the supreme court can overrule it
- the EXECUTIVE BRANCH can refuse to "execute" it, i.e. they can simply choose not to do anything about that law
So it's well within the power of the executive branch to say "fine, that's the law, but none of the resources under my control are going to prosecute anybody over it".
And the congress of course has the power to impeach the president.
The Obama administration is not making some principled move here based on a deep seated respect for the law and process. They are not tragically clinging to the process knowing full well that they hate what it implies, hands tied, blah blah.
The fact of the matter is that politicians want power. Not justice. Not to "help" you, not anything else. They may or may not have various schemes of rationalizatoin or delusion about their motives, but for a long time it's all been about increasing the power of the government and taking care of #1.
There are three ways that the Obama DOJ will calm down on filesharers
- a few filesharers start donating substantial money to the DNC to get "heard"
- a HUGE pile of voters credibly threaten to "Scott Brown" the current administration over this issue.
- somebody between Obama and the RIAA pisses off Obama and he decides to squeeze them a bit..
Actually Ron Paul, if he were abiding by the Austrian Economics playbook, (as he usually does) would never tell you that gold has "intrinsic" value, because nothing has an "intrinsic" value. Value is determined entirely by the transaction participants according to their own desires, and only at a specific point in time. Today, gold is worth ~1000/troy ounce to most Americans. Next week, post nuclear holocaust, you may have a hard time giving people 1oz of gold in exchange for 1 bag of radiation-free ramen.
What Paul and most clever people _will_ tell you is that gold is very useful as a medium of exchange and a store of value within socieites because it is very hard to systematically manipulate [read: inflate], and because it is much better at both functions than "fractional cows".
It was not an accident that many societies all independantly settled on weights of precious metals as their unit of monetary exchange and value.