Ok, wise guy; what are we supposed to do about it? There are only four carriers in the US, and they all charge for receiving text messages. Obviously, you only have two options: either not own a cellphone, or to start your own carrier. Not owning a cellphone does not hurt the carrier, since they have plenty of other customers who don't mind paying for text messages, or just can't live without a cellphone. No carrier will miss you. They will, in fact, want you to leave, since you are a cheapskate who does not make them money by signing up for an expensive monthly contract. Heck, you probably use prepaid, which is not making them any money at all! Your other option of starting your own carrier is not viable due to lack of capital. You'll need to build a few million cell towers, since if you just rent from the existing carriers you'll have to conform to their pricing plans or lose money. Who will lend you the money? Nobody. So, as you can see, we're all pretty much screwed and can do nothing about it.
The reason is neither technological nor behavioural. It is purely financial. Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals need to make money. To make money they must offer drugs and services, the more expensive, the better. Since people really are healthy most of the time, they can avoid paying for health care at all, which naturally is unacceptable. Hence doctors try very hard to create more sick people to create more income. Whether it is by selling hypertension drugs to people with 140/90 (which was considered perfectly normal 50 years ago), cholesterol drugs to everybody, unnecessary vascular stents (which, according to studies, temporarily relieve pain but have no effect on longevity), unnecessary screenings, unnecessary surgery, unnecessary psychoactive drugs, and heck, heaps of drugs of all kinds. The average american is from birth convinced that he is sick all the time and that without health care he will die. What better incentive to buy medical services?
The front line is not a place for negotiation. You see the bad guys, you shoot them or they shoot you. If your conscience acts up, you die. If you want to stop a war, you'll have start top down; grunts on the ground are merely following orders. If they stop following orders, they get prosecuted and shot.
Every cost we pay ultimately comes down to peoples' labor for which there is a limited supply.
You must be living in some other world. Around here there is plenty of labor. Or, more precisely, there is plenty of labor in China, India, and the rest of south-east asia. There you will find hordes of people willing to work for peanuts, since they have the choice of peanuts or nothing. Even here, in the US, there is plenty of unemployed labor. They can't compete with the rest of the world because they are not cheap enough. While you can live on peanuts in Vietnam, you better have at least $10000/year in the US, and even at that level you'll be dirt poor.
If farming were really as easy as you say, the world could be fed without cutting down forests for farmland
Farming really is as easy as I say, and the world could easily be fed at our current production levels. It isn't, because insufficient agricultural output is not the problem. The problem is that the poor people who don't have the food, don't have anything to trade for the food either. Traditionally you are supposed to be able to trade your labor for your sustenance, but when people breed like rabbits the pool of labor eventually gets so large that it takes more than a day of your labor to buy enough food to feed you for that day. Then, of course, you have all those poor and hungry people, because there are so many of them, there is not enough work for them all to do. When they can't work, they don't get paid, and they don't get food, and they starve and die.
Saying the market is full reminds me of those amusing quotes like "everything that can be invented has been invented"
That's too bad, because the quote is not appropriate. The problem is not that there is not enough for those poor people to do. The problem is that there is not enough paid work for them to do. Sure, I can always find something to do. The question is whether what I'm doing is worth something to somebody else. Given the resources available to a typical poor man in Kenya, the only thing he could realistically produce is food. No matter how creative he can get, there is no way for him to produce cars for export, or container ships, or computers, or even furniture.
Large scale automation has made things very cheap, effectively bringing the profit margins on each item to near zero. A large corporation can make a million RAM chips at 1% profit margin and still support quite a few highly paid executives. A poor man making things one at a time can't afford a 1% profit margin because he makes too few to even feed himself at that rate. Automation does indeed create more wealth for the owners of the automation, and it does save money for people who buy products thus produced, but the resulting cheapening of labor makes it impossible to make things in any other way but with large scale automation.
Coal and uranium and the ingredients for making solar cells -- as well as clothing and food -- really are free, if you totally ignore the human cost of getting these things
Only if you ignore the question of who owns these resources. Do you expect people to just give them to you for free? Or are you a militant socialist who believes that nobody should own anything and all resources are to be taken by force by the state? Resources, after all, are limited, and you can't just let anyone come and take them on a first-come-first-serve basis. If nobody owns them, the state would have to ration their use, and we all know how well that system worked out in the Soviet Union.
Same with land. If you want to grow your own food, you need to own enough land to do so. An acre can probably feed a family of four, if you are a good farmer and don't waste anything. But arable land is a limited resource. There is not enough of it to give an acre to each family in the world. Even if there were, those poor people would just keep breeding until
A scientist does not publish papers so they could be read. He publishes so he can put the citation on his CV for the purpose of improving his employment. Most of those "peer-reviewed" journals are not read by anybody; their value lies not in availability, but in prestige.
replacing people with machines is desirable. It frees up the people to do something more important, instead of a tedious job of threshing grain, carrying buckets of water, digging trenches with shovels, or adding up columns of numbers.
That could be valid logic if people were assigned to their jobs by some central planning authority. In a free market where you are free to choose your job, nobody forces you to choose an unimportant tedious job like threshing grain by hand, carrying buckets of water, or digging with shovels. You are already free to choose some important job that can not be automated. So why don't you? Why don't all these checkout clerks become lawyers, programmers, senators, or whatever it is that you believe to be important? The answer, of course, is that the market is already full. There is only so much that needs to be done in the world to keep everyone fed, clothed, and happy.
A single farmer with modern equipment can feed hundreds of people. A factory worker making clothes can make hundreds of garments a day. High efficiency means that only a fraction of the population is actually needed to do everything. Only that leaves the rest unemployed and unable to buy anything. What does it matter if the products are cheap when nobody has money? Money only works in a world where everybody is a producer and can trade their labor for the labor of others. If there is nothing sellable you can produce, because an automation owned by someone else can do it for free, you'll always be broke, starving, and homeless.
Mathematicians are way too full of themselves. Just because encryption can be discussed in terms of number theory, doesn't mean any knowledge of number theory is required for encryption. People have been encrypting at least since Caesar, and except for basic arithmetic no mathematics knowledge is required. Modern cryptography is no exception. RSA is little more than multiplying a few numbers together and xoring the result with the message. Number theory may have been somewhat useful in designing attacks on the algorithm, but those have not yet produced anything significantly damaging.
Management can also be outsourced. Eventually those engineers in India will realize that having the manager in your own timezone is a good thing. It isn't like management requires years of training and heaps of intelligence. All you need is good people skills and some competence in assigning the right resources to the right problem. Most people have some of the former, and the latter can be easily learned by playing Empire Earth. Once the manager is in India, why bother having a US presence at all? The only thing it gets you is having to pay US taxes. India is not a bad place to live, when you have a job. The endgame, therefore, is to have everyone and everything move to India. The US will be populated exclusively by HFT traders, who will be too busy grabbing each other's money to notice.
I blame W3C, who in their small minds failed to create any decent method of creating a div layout with multiple equal height columns, which is what every damn site wants to do.
if true, then all political systems would converge to liberal/conservative dichotomy given enough time.
Only if there were only two possible sets of values, which there aren't. In practice there are multiple such dichotomies. Look at the current Republican party split between the corporate warmongers, who want a big government at war, and the tea party, who want a small government. The number of such controversial values, however, is finite, so people's beliefs indeed do converge to that of a limited number of political parties. In an elected government, you will always see that. In a non-elected government there is only the party in power.
wealth redistribution as a necessary part of maintaining a stable society. right to self-defense and to efficient means thereof. I see this set as entirely self-consistent.
It isn't. The right to self-defense also includes the right to defend yourself from those who wish to take your money by force and "redistribute" it (as opposed to taxation for more legitimate purposes like national defense, which benefits you)
I do not believe that human beings are even 1% as logical and rational as your comment assumes.
Of course human beings are rational. We can't help it, since that is how our brain works. When a man makes a choice that seems stupid to you, it is not because he is making the choice irrationally, but because his premises are different from yours. When premises differ, so must the outcome of any argument based on them.
Please point to the causative claims made in TFA. Note that saying "members of group X are more likely to be in group Y" does not constitute a claim of causation.
Yes, it does! While people of scientific mindset will usually know the difference between correlation and causation, the vast majority of the population does not have the mindset and does not know. When you say "Mac users tend to be more liberal" to the average Joe, he always hears "Using a Mac will make a person more liberal". Look at all the other stupid beliefs propagated by correlation: eating fat makes you fat, eating cholesterol causes heart attacks, eating salt raises blood pressure. If you look at the original data from which these conclusions came from, you'll find it purely correlation with no causative claims. Additionally, in all of the above mentioned beliefs, the correlation was extremely weak.
There is a reason for this, and that is that correlation by itself is meaningless; for a scientist it is merely a guide for further research. To actually make use of any knowledge to make any real world decision, such as whether to buy a Mac, it must be causative. Because research data such as this is assumed to be important (or why else publish it?), it is natural to assume causation where only correlation is strictly implied. If liberals merely tend to use macs (and from my numbers, you can see that that is not true: it is the conservatives who are less likely to use them), nobody cares except advertisers. If macs cause people to become liberals, I guarantee you that people will care. The right wing will no doubt start a campaign against all use of Macs due to the corruption of our children's mind that they cause.
Once again researchers have a head up their ass by looking for correlations while ignoring causation, and then presenting the correlation in the wrong order. Don't they know that people never see the distinction and assume that the correlation translates to causation as presented? An OS is not going to influence your political views, but your political views may influence your choice of OS. If you are going to imply causation, may as well imply the right one.
It would have been more appropriate to state that of the 308000 people polled, 44% were liberal and 56% were conservative. Of the liberals, 58% used a PC, 42% used a Mac. Of the conservatives, 75% used a PC, 25% used a Mac. A much more informative correlation, don't you think?
We have liberals and we have conservatives for a reason. Each represents a self-consistent set of beliefs based on a certain set of core values. Once you adopt those values, you will adopt one or the other set of beliefs. The only reason you have not is that you have not given the subject enough thought yet. Once you make all your beliefs conform to your values, you will inevitably belong to one of the political groups. Liberal, socialist, conservative, libertarian, are all merely labels for the final outcomes of this process.
My radeon card no longer has functioning power management, as of 2.6.37. It used to be possible to echo dynpm to a sysfs interface and it would downclock the card. That no longer does anything. I did send in the bug to the maintainer, but it apparently is not a high priority item.
You might ask the same thing about physical sports. What's wrong with just letting your kids play football instead of pushing them to make the team, win the game, get the trophy? Why does every sport turn into a competition? It's a game, people; it's played for fun. Running should be for fun, not track and field. Baseball should be a game in the park, not a national championship. Basketball, swimming, volleyball, all turned into fights with the "enemy", whoever that may be. And don't get me started on people who like to sit around and watch these things on TV instead of getting off their fat asses and learning to play.
Unless you're a millionaire, internet over 3G is way too expensive. You can get by without WiFi only if you do nothing more intensive than checking your mail.
The whole point of this is to have a physical device that can authenticate you instead of transmitting a password. The device would go through a challenge-response protocol and prove your identity without exposing its private key. The only way to steal your identity in this system is to steal the physical device from you, which is MUCH harder than stealing your password.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that basically the philosophy of open source?
Ok, wise guy; what are we supposed to do about it? There are only four carriers in the US, and they all charge for receiving text messages. Obviously, you only have two options: either not own a cellphone, or to start your own carrier. Not owning a cellphone does not hurt the carrier, since they have plenty of other customers who don't mind paying for text messages, or just can't live without a cellphone. No carrier will miss you. They will, in fact, want you to leave, since you are a cheapskate who does not make them money by signing up for an expensive monthly contract. Heck, you probably use prepaid, which is not making them any money at all! Your other option of starting your own carrier is not viable due to lack of capital. You'll need to build a few million cell towers, since if you just rent from the existing carriers you'll have to conform to their pricing plans or lose money. Who will lend you the money? Nobody. So, as you can see, we're all pretty much screwed and can do nothing about it.
HEY! Not getting out of bed is not an american tradition. It's a Russian tradition, centuries old.
The reason is neither technological nor behavioural. It is purely financial. Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals need to make money. To make money they must offer drugs and services, the more expensive, the better. Since people really are healthy most of the time, they can avoid paying for health care at all, which naturally is unacceptable. Hence doctors try very hard to create more sick people to create more income. Whether it is by selling hypertension drugs to people with 140/90 (which was considered perfectly normal 50 years ago), cholesterol drugs to everybody, unnecessary vascular stents (which, according to studies, temporarily relieve pain but have no effect on longevity), unnecessary screenings, unnecessary surgery, unnecessary psychoactive drugs, and heck, heaps of drugs of all kinds. The average american is from birth convinced that he is sick all the time and that without health care he will die. What better incentive to buy medical services?
You can. Just get DosBox for Android.
The front line is not a place for negotiation. You see the bad guys, you shoot them or they shoot you. If your conscience acts up, you die. If you want to stop a war, you'll have start top down; grunts on the ground are merely following orders. If they stop following orders, they get prosecuted and shot.
You must be living in some other world. Around here there is plenty of labor. Or, more precisely, there is plenty of labor in China, India, and the rest of south-east asia. There you will find hordes of people willing to work for peanuts, since they have the choice of peanuts or nothing. Even here, in the US, there is plenty of unemployed labor. They can't compete with the rest of the world because they are not cheap enough. While you can live on peanuts in Vietnam, you better have at least $10000/year in the US, and even at that level you'll be dirt poor.
Farming really is as easy as I say, and the world could easily be fed at our current production levels. It isn't, because insufficient agricultural output is not the problem. The problem is that the poor people who don't have the food, don't have anything to trade for the food either. Traditionally you are supposed to be able to trade your labor for your sustenance, but when people breed like rabbits the pool of labor eventually gets so large that it takes more than a day of your labor to buy enough food to feed you for that day. Then, of course, you have all those poor and hungry people, because there are so many of them, there is not enough work for them all to do. When they can't work, they don't get paid, and they don't get food, and they starve and die.
That's too bad, because the quote is not appropriate. The problem is not that there is not enough for those poor people to do. The problem is that there is not enough paid work for them to do. Sure, I can always find something to do. The question is whether what I'm doing is worth something to somebody else. Given the resources available to a typical poor man in Kenya, the only thing he could realistically produce is food. No matter how creative he can get, there is no way for him to produce cars for export, or container ships, or computers, or even furniture.
Large scale automation has made things very cheap, effectively bringing the profit margins on each item to near zero. A large corporation can make a million RAM chips at 1% profit margin and still support quite a few highly paid executives. A poor man making things one at a time can't afford a 1% profit margin because he makes too few to even feed himself at that rate. Automation does indeed create more wealth for the owners of the automation, and it does save money for people who buy products thus produced, but the resulting cheapening of labor makes it impossible to make things in any other way but with large scale automation.
Only if you ignore the question of who owns these resources. Do you expect people to just give them to you for free? Or are you a militant socialist who believes that nobody should own anything and all resources are to be taken by force by the state? Resources, after all, are limited, and you can't just let anyone come and take them on a first-come-first-serve basis. If nobody owns them, the state would have to ration their use, and we all know how well that system worked out in the Soviet Union.
Same with land. If you want to grow your own food, you need to own enough land to do so. An acre can probably feed a family of four, if you are a good farmer and don't waste anything. But arable land is a limited resource. There is not enough of it to give an acre to each family in the world. Even if there were, those poor people would just keep breeding until
A scientist does not publish papers so they could be read. He publishes so he can put the citation on his CV for the purpose of improving his employment. Most of those "peer-reviewed" journals are not read by anybody; their value lies not in availability, but in prestige.
Soon you'll need HFT algorithms to get a decent price on a book. There could already be a few banks out there fast-trading book futures.
That could be valid logic if people were assigned to their jobs by some central planning authority. In a free market where you are free to choose your job, nobody forces you to choose an unimportant tedious job like threshing grain by hand, carrying buckets of water, or digging with shovels. You are already free to choose some important job that can not be automated. So why don't you? Why don't all these checkout clerks become lawyers, programmers, senators, or whatever it is that you believe to be important? The answer, of course, is that the market is already full. There is only so much that needs to be done in the world to keep everyone fed, clothed, and happy.
A single farmer with modern equipment can feed hundreds of people. A factory worker making clothes can make hundreds of garments a day. High efficiency means that only a fraction of the population is actually needed to do everything. Only that leaves the rest unemployed and unable to buy anything. What does it matter if the products are cheap when nobody has money? Money only works in a world where everybody is a producer and can trade their labor for the labor of others. If there is nothing sellable you can produce, because an automation owned by someone else can do it for free, you'll always be broke, starving, and homeless.
Mathematicians are way too full of themselves. Just because encryption can be discussed in terms of number theory, doesn't mean any knowledge of number theory is required for encryption. People have been encrypting at least since Caesar, and except for basic arithmetic no mathematics knowledge is required. Modern cryptography is no exception. RSA is little more than multiplying a few numbers together and xoring the result with the message. Number theory may have been somewhat useful in designing attacks on the algorithm, but those have not yet produced anything significantly damaging.
He's being paid $400000/year + $50000 for expenses. How much are you paid, with your engineering degree? Who's looking stupid now?
Deniability gets less and less plausible every time you get hit with a $5 wrench.
Management can also be outsourced. Eventually those engineers in India will realize that having the manager in your own timezone is a good thing. It isn't like management requires years of training and heaps of intelligence. All you need is good people skills and some competence in assigning the right resources to the right problem. Most people have some of the former, and the latter can be easily learned by playing Empire Earth. Once the manager is in India, why bother having a US presence at all? The only thing it gets you is having to pay US taxes. India is not a bad place to live, when you have a job. The endgame, therefore, is to have everyone and everything move to India. The US will be populated exclusively by HFT traders, who will be too busy grabbing each other's money to notice.
Tell us, Mr.President, why did you major in law instead of engineering?
I blame W3C, who in their small minds failed to create any decent method of creating a div layout with multiple equal height columns, which is what every damn site wants to do.
Only if there were only two possible sets of values, which there aren't. In practice there are multiple such dichotomies. Look at the current Republican party split between the corporate warmongers, who want a big government at war, and the tea party, who want a small government. The number of such controversial values, however, is finite, so people's beliefs indeed do converge to that of a limited number of political parties. In an elected government, you will always see that. In a non-elected government there is only the party in power.
It isn't. The right to self-defense also includes the right to defend yourself from those who wish to take your money by force and "redistribute" it (as opposed to taxation for more legitimate purposes like national defense, which benefits you)
Of course human beings are rational. We can't help it, since that is how our brain works. When a man makes a choice that seems stupid to you, it is not because he is making the choice irrationally, but because his premises are different from yours. When premises differ, so must the outcome of any argument based on them.
Yes, it does! While people of scientific mindset will usually know the difference between correlation and causation, the vast majority of the population does not have the mindset and does not know. When you say "Mac users tend to be more liberal" to the average Joe, he always hears "Using a Mac will make a person more liberal". Look at all the other stupid beliefs propagated by correlation: eating fat makes you fat, eating cholesterol causes heart attacks, eating salt raises blood pressure. If you look at the original data from which these conclusions came from, you'll find it purely correlation with no causative claims. Additionally, in all of the above mentioned beliefs, the correlation was extremely weak.
There is a reason for this, and that is that correlation by itself is meaningless; for a scientist it is merely a guide for further research. To actually make use of any knowledge to make any real world decision, such as whether to buy a Mac, it must be causative. Because research data such as this is assumed to be important (or why else publish it?), it is natural to assume causation where only correlation is strictly implied. If liberals merely tend to use macs (and from my numbers, you can see that that is not true: it is the conservatives who are less likely to use them), nobody cares except advertisers. If macs cause people to become liberals, I guarantee you that people will care. The right wing will no doubt start a campaign against all use of Macs due to the corruption of our children's mind that they cause.
Once again researchers have a head up their ass by looking for correlations while ignoring causation, and then presenting the correlation in the wrong order. Don't they know that people never see the distinction and assume that the correlation translates to causation as presented? An OS is not going to influence your political views, but your political views may influence your choice of OS. If you are going to imply causation, may as well imply the right one.
It would have been more appropriate to state that of the 308000 people polled, 44% were liberal and 56% were conservative. Of the liberals, 58% used a PC, 42% used a Mac. Of the conservatives, 75% used a PC, 25% used a Mac. A much more informative correlation, don't you think?
We have liberals and we have conservatives for a reason. Each represents a self-consistent set of beliefs based on a certain set of core values. Once you adopt those values, you will adopt one or the other set of beliefs. The only reason you have not is that you have not given the subject enough thought yet. Once you make all your beliefs conform to your values, you will inevitably belong to one of the political groups. Liberal, socialist, conservative, libertarian, are all merely labels for the final outcomes of this process.
My radeon card no longer has functioning power management, as of 2.6.37. It used to be possible to echo dynpm to a sysfs interface and it would downclock the card. That no longer does anything. I did send in the bug to the maintainer, but it apparently is not a high priority item.
You might ask the same thing about physical sports. What's wrong with just letting your kids play football instead of pushing them to make the team, win the game, get the trophy? Why does every sport turn into a competition? It's a game, people; it's played for fun. Running should be for fun, not track and field. Baseball should be a game in the park, not a national championship. Basketball, swimming, volleyball, all turned into fights with the "enemy", whoever that may be. And don't get me started on people who like to sit around and watch these things on TV instead of getting off their fat asses and learning to play.
Unless you're a millionaire, internet over 3G is way too expensive. You can get by without WiFi only if you do nothing more intensive than checking your mail.
The whole point of this is to have a physical device that can authenticate you instead of transmitting a password. The device would go through a challenge-response protocol and prove your identity without exposing its private key. The only way to steal your identity in this system is to steal the physical device from you, which is MUCH harder than stealing your password.