Argh! Goddamnit, if I see that argument one more time I think my head will explode. That argument only holds up if the company in question could charge $1 million for the software to the first purchaser. Of course, said first purchaser will be mightily *pissed off* when everyone else gets it for free.
But that is such a misstatement of the argument. If the company has a $1,000,001 itch then the $1,000,000 price tag is a rational price. It does not matter to the company that if they had of waited they could get it for free since they had no way of knowing when their itch was to be scratched. Now if you want to talk about including waiting time distributions and the marginal cost of money in the argument then the pricing question becomes much more sophisiticated, but in essence it still comes down to pricing your itch and pricing the cost to scratch it.
Further, from an economic perspective it is actually ineffecient to get even a dollar from the second person whose itch is scratched. Just think of it as sum(cost of itchiness) - sum(cost of solution) as the net social profit from a given piece of software. Clearly it may be that it may be required for their to be more than one itchy person in order to get enough cost to justify the cost of solution but once that threshold is reached then it simply becomes a question of getting the work done.
Please note that project risk and project failure, amongst other things, are not factored into that argument, but even if they are then it is just in the sense of influencing the pricing question, both in terms of the cost of the itch and the cost of the solution.
No, the many, many definitions of free are quite clear ans whilst there are several senses in which the word can be used, the essence is the same, free means without restriction.
To that end, I like the poster to whom you replied, believe that free means that one can include my code in their program and do with as they might please. However, doing so without due credit is a lie and lies should be actionable where harm is present and it becomes a question of fact whether by including my code without credit to me the liar is causing me damage. I would argue they are since my reputation, the thing on which I base my living, is not being enhanced as a result of the work I have done. I don't warrant compensation for the act of including my code in their system , the code is free, but I do warrant recognition that it is my code so that I may use the system as an example of my work (to the extent that my code is evident in the system) and an inability to do so damages me.
RMS is wrong about freedom. He is wrong because he requires the very existence of the thing he despises in order to allow his "Free Software" to exist, copyright. Ok, so he calls it copyleft, semantic twaddle. He requires the existence of _property_ in the output of intellect (code, music, literature, etc) in order to enforce the _restrictions_ he would have placed on its use. Freedom, by definition, demands no such restrictions. The are aspects of this reality that raise the spectre of the Tragedy of the Commons, but almost all of RMS own examples in the GNU manifesto hold just as well where there is no property at all and many of these examples are counterpoints to the tragedy of the commons. The critical thing is that the intellectual sphere is the one place where the tragedy of the commons is most able to be solved since it is only the sustenance of the creators that needs to be funded and they all have means by which to gain that sustenance through the funding of their next work. That is, the common is not _degraded_ by it's availability to all and each households desire to take from the commons does not detreact fromthe next households ability to do the same. Beautiful.
And yet the solutions are there. Interestingly enough there is, in the UK for example, the Data Protection Act (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980029.htm , see schedule 1 and s14), which describes the law surrounding the collecting, storage and distribution of "personal" data. Whilst most people think of it as protecting the distribution of data, in fact the legislation is designed to prevent, or at least provide recourse for people affected by, exactly the kind of crap data collection that this story reports.
You are very wrong, standing armies have always existed
Ok, clearly the "standing army" phrase has caused a lot of confusion. The Spartans, a warrior caste? Well perhaps a long bow to draw but certainly arguable, but even the Romans didn't really have a "standing army", they had an imperial army. The difference, technically perhaps not much, but politically enourmous. One does not leave an imperial army in barracks around the country it is out and about, fighting the conquests, barracking the frontier and _enforcing_ stuff. They are not a standing army.
The middle ages... Yes there was the knight warrior, templar or otherwise, and the group of men at arms that might be permanently employed by a given noblemen were far more a security force than an army. Indeed the sovereign would have fairly serious objections to the over zealous building of these forces by any given nobleman. One might say that as long as their forces didn't look like a "standing army" then all was ok. Further, the continualy references to "raising an army" highlights the fact that during these times it was not common for a bunch of soldiers to be sitting around the country but rather when the times demanded, people were signed up or conscripted to form these armies of need.
I never meant to imply that athe absence of a "standing army" meant that what armies there might have been couldn't be professional, just that they could be lying around idling doing nothing in enough of a size to be a threat to the political structure of the state that employed them.
My whole point wrt to Churchill was to remind us that it is the case now that a single person (along with the chain of people needed to get them in the right place with the right equipment) can now take the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people and that this simple reality means that the need for a standing army to act in the arena where such things are possible is, perhaps, a necessary evil. I understand that getting the world in to the state where such actions are prompted is blameworthy, but regardless of fault, it is not necessarily a failing to be the victim of such actions and that an army might be part of the solution. Regardless of how much we might agree with Eisenhower, the President who, IIRC, authorised the first use of nuclear weapons, and his sentiments about the failure of war.
There is a school of thought that recognises corporatism as a means of influencing public policy (be careful when googling, this is _NOT_ about the role of corporations but the role of interest groups in public policy) by giving interest groups a role to play in the determination of public policy. An alternative view is the pluralist view that takes interest groups as combatants with the public policy makers trying to "win" concessions to their particular interest.
It is clear that the techie vote will rise as the status quo proceeds to piss us off more and more (the size of the electorate in question is really pretty vast). But whilst that is interesting, it is reactionary, and by that very nature limited in what it can really achieve.
What is interesting is the idea that bodies made up from within the technically educated will form and be _consulted_ about the formulation of public policy. In the US this is made more problematic by the nature of your "democracy" but in places like Europe, more and more more input from more and more credible tech groups (EFF, FSF for example) will only increase the likelihood that when it comes time to look at the next idiot DMCA debacle, these groups will be sounded out _before_ the policy is drafted.
A good day indeed. Probably 5 - 10 years away unless some event occurs to precipitate the problem.
I think that the interesting thing is that the nation state standing army concept is a relatively recent phenomenon (ok so the nation state is pretty recent but even so...). I was as recent as the 17th century when the standing army was not a familiar concept, indeed it was an actively discouraged thing because of the negative imapcts.
I think the critical problem is that since the industrial revolution it has been, to paraphrase Churchill, that never in the field of human endeavour have so few been able to kill so many with so little. And this principle has become even more pertinent in our current world. As such a standing army is a necessary thing and whilst I agree with the sentiments of Eisenhower I find it difficult to reconcile the disaster that would result from an inability for the "enlightened" to protect the weak from the evil. And you can take that anyway you like.
I will not pay for online content. Ok, so it's a big generalisation, but... I used to get a whole bunch of united media syndicated comics mailed to me each day. Then they started charging for any more than one, so now it's just dilbert. Zagat used to be my online restaurant finder of choice and then they started charging so I just use another one.
If the service wasn't there, I wouldn't use it. I believe the net is about people creating content because they get benefit and people consuming the content because it's there, if there is a business model that allows the content creator to make a buck then more luck to em, but I don't care about them, it is their problem and I won't be the one to open a billing relationship with them cause none of that stuff is "essential" enough in my life to make me pay money.
This is the problem with most of these business models they just don't offer enough value to justify a price. Next player.
Advertising pays, or we wouldn't get junk TV, junk post, junk email.
Yes, well, does it? Really? I have always been extremely suspicious of the benefits of advertising. The thing that disturbs me most is that the information about the "success" of advertising comes from the industry who is selling the advertising in the first place. Smart business people who would never fall for this crap in their core business buy it all the time in their advertising/marketing it seems so naive.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that advertising is ineffectual, on the contrary, I believe it can work very effectively, but with respect to the "big ticket" advertising strategies, Superbowl adds, major athlete endorsements etc. I just can't see the economics working. It doesn't add up. However, having said all that, I think there is a growing sophistication in the buyers of advertising and the halcyon days of the advertisers are going. The next round of major sporting endorsements will be the start of the deflation as the true value of this stuff is brought home to the consumers of advertising services.
Two problems - Two solutions
on
Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It is probably the case that SPAM is a real "tragedy of the commons". However there are two separate issues. One is the end recipients problem, our problem, the pain of dealing with SPAM, and the cost in terms of the extent to which it costs us bandwidth money or degrading our "service". There are a number of different more or less successful methods for dealing with this and we can all do it on a case by case basis to scratch our respective itches.
But the more important problem is the impact that the problem has on the overall infrastructure of the net. For example LINX, the (one of?) the major link points into the UK, recently reported some metric about how much spam was coming down the lines. (Sorry can't find the reference). It is when the concentration of this rubbish gets so higha s to affect this level of infrastructure that we all have a problem.
Now the tricks required by the spammers to try and get around the filters may preclude some of these ideas, but the idea that I should receive 'a copy' of Jane, or Sarahy or Ken's Viagra offer, ie a copy of the same mail that was sent to all the people at my mailhost (this is particularly important for big providers like AOL or BT where they have millions of customers) rather than an individualised one would certainly reduce the strain on the underlying infrastrucutre. How would one achieve that? Good question, I haven't really thought about it enough, but I am not suggesting an economic answer, I don't want to try and coerce the spammers, let's try and make the solutions in their own interests before we use the price tool.
However having rasied the price question, it is critical to remember that the reason why the junk snail mail, SPAM comparison falls down is that the marginal cost of increasing the distribution list of a SPAM is zero and the marginal cost of increasing the distribution list of JUNK is (in addition to postage) the cost of the JUNK. This provides a natural price imperative to the mass mailer. Can we introduce such a cost to the spammers. Er, well um no. Not that it is hard, ot is just impossible. Think as hard as you like and anything you come up with will be flawed in some way. So don't try. Just accept it.
So, we must return to the politics of SPAM. Clearly the sender of the spam must be identifiable. Perhaps it must be identifiable from the "International register of spammers" what ever that might be. SPAM not sent by one of these servers is automatically dropped. Then one must decide how one determines what is SPAM and there is probably the rub. I don't really know maybe a global bayesian filter?
Anyway. The point is that the first problem is to contain SPAM, make it in the spammers interest to identify their mail as SPAM. From then we can manage the SPAM bit by bit. Of course the obvious solution is _don't buy from spamvertisers_ but then it only takes a few idiots to make that strategy infeasible.
Prolog (but I will trade with most any FP language as well). It blew my mind once I got my first success with it. I mean it just blew my mind that the particitioning problem could be 30 odd lines of code and then the N partitioning problem became 31 lines.
Well, yes and yet no. The lack of a commodity does not off itself imply gambling, the use of a derivative to move risk from the risk averse to the risk friendly is a totally legitimate form of investment. Taking this site at face value, the idea that the government might use the value of these derivatives to determine policy is kinda scary, but if you were a business with exposure to the Middle East, the idea of a derivative to help you hedge the risk of a war in the area is an extraordinarily powerful tool.
The big problem with the idea though is pricing the thing. I mean it wasn't until Black and Scholes showed that one could price a financial derivative using quantifiable metrics (albeit corollary metrics in some senses, ie price volatility for risk and interest rate for baseline return on investment) that financial derivatives took off. The explosion in credit derivatives in the last five years is another example where the discovery of pricing methods fuelled the creation of a market.
The other thing is that this is a futures market not an options market so there is a zero sum game at the end of every maturity so the pricing question is less of a showstopper for actually running the market, but the difference between a derviatives market and gambling is not the fact that there are no commodities involved, but rather that bookmakers determine price by current payout exposure not underlying metric. This market appears to be different and real metrics will be used in the end to determine strike price.
Returning to the interested parties, Arms manufacturers and Airline companies would be ideal counterparties for such derivatives since their businesses rise and fall on the opposite outcomes of the same "event". The issue is not profiting from these events but avoiding the catastrophic fallout from the side of the event that is bad for you. For example if the airline industry had been able to hedge with the military supply industry (and look at Boeings recent acquisition history for an example of an attempt) then maybe they would not have gone bust after 9/11. Though this may sound callous, it really isn't the spreading of risk is a way to smooth out the economic bumps. To enhance the efficiency of capital to avoid sloshing it around, in and out of different sectors as markets change and all the problems that causes.
From first hand experience with hardcore enterprise applications that handle big time loads,.NET has 10 years to go before it will handle medium/big loads. I'm not talking about some tiny e-commerce site that gets a couple hundred or thousand transactions a day. Anything that doesn't do 3 million requests a day to me is small/medium.
Whilst I agree with you, I think that any of the "framework" architectures have a way to go to meet your performance criteria where the scale comes in two dimensions. It it probably true that the framework approach can scale well when you are adding capacity to your problem domain by parallelising multiple transactions. However I cannot believe that any of them scale well when you must preclude parallelism by requiring exclusive access to _many_ entities in your problem domain. In these circumstances I believe you still need to make design time decisions about implementation to reach performance targets of 10k tran/sec and the byte code or abstracted implementations seem to be unable to reach these levels of performance.
My recent experience is that after many years of excellent performance when trying to move to the next level of performance (1k -> 10k) we found that we could not make CPU of our central transaction engine go to 100% because of the vagaries of the distriuted application. It was only by optimising and revisting some of the actual implementation that we were finally able to reach the point where the limit on the system was the CPU of the central engine. We can't parallelise that (easily:-) because the premise of the system is that there will be chains of consquences resulting from each transaction and these chains must be atomic and without risk. Our C application (and I am not suggesting C is the only answer) is pretty close to the wire and the comms is very efficient and we struggled. When there are layers and layers of guff between the business level and the wire, I cannot see the performance getting close (regardless of platform, Java,.net whatever).
Having said _all_ this, the "framework" approach makes the simple things easier and gives jobs for the monkeys and.net makes the framework approach even easier which means less talented monkeys. Good luck to 'em. That leaves the hard problems to those who understand them such as yourself. A nice little earner that!
Look, the only thing wrong with voter identity cards is if they are made "difficult" to get. Making access to the right to vote hard is the way that various immoral gerrymnaders were maintained, in particular the "literacy" test for voter eligability is a classic example of how to stop a sector of the electorate from voting, just make the application to get on the electoral role a process that required a literacy test (all for the most logical of reasons of course! Like to ensure that the elector can understand the ballot).
Requiring proof of identity is not a problem, and a card is a pretty reasonable way of doing it, the dye approach is equally reasonable. In Australia, by way of contrast, the whole problem of fraud is largely avoided by making the voting process mandatory (it aint completely avoided but anomalies are much easier to detect). One is registered at a specific location for voting and one is expected to vote at that location (elections are on Saturdays) your name is checked off and clearly if you get there and your name is already checked off then there is a problem. There is a mechanism for absentee and postal ballots for those who are away, but these numbers are few and indeed for many electorates these votes are not relevant for the outcome. Clearly this process would be 50 times larger in india, but that is probable still manageable and there is a strong tradition of voting so making it compulsory shouldn't be impossible. Then the identity fraud problem really goes away (other more overt forms of fraud remain however:-)
C'mon, surely you realise that Blakes 7 is just the legend of Arthur (and the classic medieval character cast) relocated to the future? I mean they "stumble" on The Liberator (Excalibur) and it is only Blakes "purity" that enables him to defend against Zens defences (ie pull the sword from the stone). The other characters start with the basics, the giant, the maiden (originally Dayna), the rougue the anti-hero and then the wicked witch )Servelan.
Having said that, love the show, and the best settings are always ripe for a revisit. IMHO, the Liberator must be involved for it to succeed.
I have no real position on wheter you are right or wrong, but none of the factors you mention are the reason why China would become most powerful. China was in the position to dominate the world 2000 years ago and they basically went home and stayed home. In my opinion China will have to ensure that they keep the vast majority of their people out of the middle class (and I mean that ina technical sense) until their population falls to much lower than its current level lest they will end up with a disaster that will consume their economy to destruction. If the transition is managed well then it may well be the economy that drags Africa into the middle class as well, just to be able to feed them all.
Indeed, I would also argue that "most powerful" is a meaningless position. What end does it serve? There are a significant number of countries who are technically self sufficient, these countries do not answer to any "power" other than the threat of military invasion and despite what people may think there is no carte blanche that enables the "most powerful" nation, no matter who it is, to act with impunity.
The music/media distribution industry is _dead_. They serve _no_ purpose any more. The time in which we are living will be remembered as the birth of the artistic (for want of a better word) revolution where the mass audience has _direct_ access to the artist. Where is the role for the distributor? That's right, there isn't one. They (the industry) are behaving in _exactly_ the same way that the church acted towards the printing press in the 15th century, look where that got them, and the industry will have the same fate. Whilst it is unlikely that anyone will burn at the stake for this (well at least I hope not) we will suffer a lot of pain whilst the industry is in the death throws and some more bad laws will be made but I am actually pretty confident that in the end (and it may be several decades) all will be well, I just wish that we could forshorten all that pain and cut to the chase where the industry is dead and we are all the better for it.
That free market stuff is only good in a carefully regulated environment. Laissez faire capitalism was successfully debunked in 1929, and many times since then - think Microsoft.
That is complete bunk. Laissez faire is fine when there are no (few or small) externalities. 1929, very complex, shan't enter into here, but there where externalities a plenty. As for Microsoft... puh-lease. Think IP, the biggest externality of them all.
The problem is that the name C++ already contains the uncertainty of incrementation. IIRC correctly, the issue was that since C was a successor to the language B which in turn was the successor to BCPL, the tough call was whether to go for D (as in ABCD) or P (as in BCPL) or something all together different. So the hack was why decide, lets just make it C++ and avoid the whole problem.
As a result, to really go forward with the lame humour, I would recommend *C, starsee, or what C points to.
and the sites are specifically for US customers, no drama, no pack drill. The reasons why this is so are many and varied and irrelevant. Deal with it.
Are they losing customers, probably, but then the economy of Hungary is 1% the size of the US so do they care? Probably not. Indeed the US is 20% of the world economy and the countries that make up the vast majority of the consumable other 80% almost certainly do have web sites that will service their needs.
Doesn't anyone open fscking ports anymore. For god's sake why are wrapping Remote invocation in a protocol that was designed to transfer text, just open a fsking port. This is just insanity.
have told everyone that it actually has a decent C++ compiler
Well then you told 'em wrong. I believe the VS.NET C++ compiler to be a piece of toilet. It is buggy and even when you, take Microsofts advice and "rearrange your header files" to get code to compile, you still have apply Microsofts magical unreleased patch to get the compiler to stop barfing on compiling the system headers!!!
Oh, and how do I know it is them and not us causing the problem? Well because _exactly_ the same code compiles just fine under g++ (2.9x and 3) , Solaris C++ compiles (5.6 and forte), HPUX aCC and Visual Studio versions 5 and 7 and even Tru64. I bet we could even make it work under AIX. In fairness, it may well end up a good compiler but it aint there yet.
What 'artificial scarcity' are you talking about? There is nothing 'scarce' about music. You can go to any number of internet sites and buy CDs.
Artificial scarcity is a techinical term. If I create a recording and you take a copy, I still have my copy, no scarcity. Bread is different, cars are different, the right to enjoy a piece of land is different. Therefore these things have scarcity and thus price. Art, through copyright has an artificial scarcity created through copyright, without that constraint there is no scarcity. That is what is meant by artificial scarcity. Not some childish idea that there is some conspiricy to make recordings artificially scarce by retricting their production.
Slashdot Mirror
Argh! Goddamnit, if I see that argument one more time I think my head will explode. That argument only holds up if the company in question could charge $1 million for the software to the first purchaser. Of course, said first purchaser will be mightily *pissed off* when everyone else gets it for free.
But that is such a misstatement of the argument. If the company has a $1,000,001 itch then the $1,000,000 price tag is a rational price. It does not matter to the company that if they had of waited they could get it for free since they had no way of knowing when their itch was to be scratched. Now if you want to talk about including waiting time distributions and the marginal cost of money in the argument then the pricing question becomes much more sophisiticated, but in essence it still comes down to pricing your itch and pricing the cost to scratch it.
Further, from an economic perspective it is actually ineffecient to get even a dollar from the second person whose itch is scratched. Just think of it as sum(cost of itchiness) - sum(cost of solution) as the net social profit from a given piece of software. Clearly it may be that it may be required for their to be more than one itchy person in order to get enough cost to justify the cost of solution but once that threshold is reached then it simply becomes a question of getting the work done.
Please note that project risk and project failure, amongst other things, are not factored into that argument, but even if they are then it is just in the sense of influencing the pricing question, both in terms of the cost of the itch and the cost of the solution.
No, the many, many definitions of free are quite clear ans whilst there are several senses in which the word can be used, the essence is the same, free means without restriction.
To that end, I like the poster to whom you replied, believe that free means that one can include my code in their program and do with as they might please. However, doing so without due credit is a lie and lies should be actionable where harm is present and it becomes a question of fact whether by including my code without credit to me the liar is causing me damage. I would argue they are since my reputation, the thing on which I base my living, is not being enhanced as a result of the work I have done. I don't warrant compensation for the act of including my code in their system , the code is free, but I do warrant recognition that it is my code so that I may use the system as an example of my work (to the extent that my code is evident in the system) and an inability to do so damages me.
RMS is wrong about freedom. He is wrong because he requires the very existence of the thing he despises in order to allow his "Free Software" to exist, copyright. Ok, so he calls it copyleft, semantic twaddle. He requires the existence of _property_ in the output of intellect (code, music, literature, etc) in order to enforce the _restrictions_ he would have placed on its use. Freedom, by definition, demands no such restrictions. The are aspects of this reality that raise the spectre of the Tragedy of the Commons, but almost all of RMS own examples in the GNU manifesto hold just as well where there is no property at all and many of these examples are counterpoints to the tragedy of the commons. The critical thing is that the intellectual sphere is the one place where the tragedy of the commons is most able to be solved since it is only the sustenance of the creators that needs to be funded and they all have means by which to gain that sustenance through the funding of their next work. That is, the common is not _degraded_ by it's availability to all and each households desire to take from the commons does not detreact fromthe next households ability to do the same. Beautiful.
And as off topic as this may be, I bet they are _REAL_ happy they made that decision. Kinda really convenient timing huh!
And yet the solutions are there. Interestingly enough there is, in the UK for example, the Data Protection Act (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980029.htm , see schedule 1 and s14), which describes the law surrounding the collecting, storage and distribution of "personal" data. Whilst most people think of it as protecting the distribution of data, in fact the legislation is designed to prevent, or at least provide recourse for people affected by, exactly the kind of crap data collection that this story reports.
You are very wrong, standing armies have always existed
Ok, clearly the "standing army" phrase has caused a lot of confusion. The Spartans, a warrior caste? Well perhaps a long bow to draw but certainly arguable, but even the Romans didn't really have a "standing army", they had an imperial army. The difference, technically perhaps not much, but politically enourmous. One does not leave an imperial army in barracks around the country it is out and about, fighting the conquests, barracking the frontier and _enforcing_ stuff. They are not a standing army.
The middle ages... Yes there was the knight warrior, templar or otherwise, and the group of men at arms that might be permanently employed by a given noblemen were far more a security force than an army. Indeed the sovereign would have fairly serious objections to the over zealous building of these forces by any given nobleman. One might say that as long as their forces didn't look like a "standing army" then all was ok. Further, the continualy references to "raising an army" highlights the fact that during these times it was not common for a bunch of soldiers to be sitting around the country but rather when the times demanded, people were signed up or conscripted to form these armies of need.
I never meant to imply that athe absence of a "standing army" meant that what armies there might have been couldn't be professional, just that they could be lying around idling doing nothing in enough of a size to be a threat to the political structure of the state that employed them.
My whole point wrt to Churchill was to remind us that it is the case now that a single person (along with the chain of people needed to get them in the right place with the right equipment) can now take the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people and that this simple reality means that the need for a standing army to act in the arena where such things are possible is, perhaps, a necessary evil. I understand that getting the world in to the state where such actions are prompted is blameworthy, but regardless of fault, it is not necessarily a failing to be the victim of such actions and that an army might be part of the solution. Regardless of how much we might agree with Eisenhower, the President who, IIRC, authorised the first use of nuclear weapons, and his sentiments about the failure of war.
Yes, there was a rank of "knights"There is a school of thought that recognises corporatism as a means of influencing public policy (be careful when googling, this is _NOT_ about the role of corporations but the role of interest groups in public policy) by giving interest groups a role to play in the determination of public policy. An alternative view is the pluralist view that takes interest groups as combatants with the public policy makers trying to "win" concessions to their particular interest.
It is clear that the techie vote will rise as the status quo proceeds to piss us off more and more (the size of the electorate in question is really pretty vast). But whilst that is interesting, it is reactionary, and by that very nature limited in what it can really achieve.
What is interesting is the idea that bodies made up from within the technically educated will form and be _consulted_ about the formulation of public policy. In the US this is made more problematic by the nature of your "democracy" but in places like Europe, more and more more input from more and more credible tech groups (EFF, FSF for example) will only increase the likelihood that when it comes time to look at the next idiot DMCA debacle, these groups will be sounded out _before_ the policy is drafted.
A good day indeed. Probably 5 - 10 years away unless some event occurs to precipitate the problem.
I think that the interesting thing is that the nation state standing army concept is a relatively recent phenomenon (ok so the nation state is pretty recent but even so...). I was as recent as the 17th century when the standing army was not a familiar concept, indeed it was an actively discouraged thing because of the negative imapcts.
I think the critical problem is that since the industrial revolution it has been, to paraphrase Churchill, that never in the field of human endeavour have so few been able to kill so many with so little. And this principle has become even more pertinent in our current world. As such a standing army is a necessary thing and whilst I agree with the sentiments of Eisenhower I find it difficult to reconcile the disaster that would result from an inability for the "enlightened" to protect the weak from the evil. And you can take that anyway you like.
I will not pay for online content. Ok, so it's a big generalisation, but... I used to get a whole bunch of united media syndicated comics mailed to me each day. Then they started charging for any more than one, so now it's just dilbert. Zagat used to be my online restaurant finder of choice and then they started charging so I just use another one.
If the service wasn't there, I wouldn't use it. I believe the net is about people creating content because they get benefit and people consuming the content because it's there, if there is a business model that allows the content creator to make a buck then more luck to em, but I don't care about them, it is their problem and I won't be the one to open a billing relationship with them cause none of that stuff is "essential" enough in my life to make me pay money.
This is the problem with most of these business models they just don't offer enough value to justify a price. Next player.
Advertising pays, or we wouldn't get junk TV, junk post, junk email.
Yes, well, does it? Really? I have always been extremely suspicious of the benefits of advertising. The thing that disturbs me most is that the information about the "success" of advertising comes from the industry who is selling the advertising in the first place. Smart business people who would never fall for this crap in their core business buy it all the time in their advertising/marketing it seems so naive.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that advertising is ineffectual, on the contrary, I believe it can work very effectively, but with respect to the "big ticket" advertising strategies, Superbowl adds, major athlete endorsements etc. I just can't see the economics working. It doesn't add up. However, having said all that, I think there is a growing sophistication in the buyers of advertising and the halcyon days of the advertisers are going. The next round of major sporting endorsements will be the start of the deflation as the true value of this stuff is brought home to the consumers of advertising services.
It is probably the case that SPAM is a real "tragedy of the commons". However there are two separate issues. One is the end recipients problem, our problem, the pain of dealing with SPAM, and the cost in terms of the extent to which it costs us bandwidth money or degrading our "service". There are a number of different more or less successful methods for dealing with this and we can all do it on a case by case basis to scratch our respective itches.
But the more important problem is the impact that the problem has on the overall infrastructure of the net. For example LINX, the (one of?) the major link points into the UK, recently reported some metric about how much spam was coming down the lines. (Sorry can't find the reference). It is when the concentration of this rubbish gets so higha s to affect this level of infrastructure that we all have a problem.
Now the tricks required by the spammers to try and get around the filters may preclude some of these ideas, but the idea that I should receive 'a copy' of Jane, or Sarahy or Ken's Viagra offer, ie a copy of the same mail that was sent to all the people at my mailhost (this is particularly important for big providers like AOL or BT where they have millions of customers) rather than an individualised one would certainly reduce the strain on the underlying infrastrucutre. How would one achieve that? Good question, I haven't really thought about it enough, but I am not suggesting an economic answer, I don't want to try and coerce the spammers, let's try and make the solutions in their own interests before we use the price tool.
However having rasied the price question, it is critical to remember that the reason why the junk snail mail, SPAM comparison falls down is that the marginal cost of increasing the distribution list of a SPAM is zero and the marginal cost of increasing the distribution list of JUNK is (in addition to postage) the cost of the JUNK. This provides a natural price imperative to the mass mailer. Can we introduce such a cost to the spammers. Er, well um no. Not that it is hard, ot is just impossible. Think as hard as you like and anything you come up with will be flawed in some way. So don't try. Just accept it.
So, we must return to the politics of SPAM. Clearly the sender of the spam must be identifiable. Perhaps it must be identifiable from the "International register of spammers" what ever that might be. SPAM not sent by one of these servers is automatically dropped. Then one must decide how one determines what is SPAM and there is probably the rub. I don't really know maybe a global bayesian filter?
Anyway. The point is that the first problem is to contain SPAM, make it in the spammers interest to identify their mail as SPAM. From then we can manage the SPAM bit by bit. Of course the obvious solution is _don't buy from spamvertisers_ but then it only takes a few idiots to make that strategy infeasible.
Prolog (but I will trade with most any FP language as well). It blew my mind once I got my first success with it. I mean it just blew my mind that the particitioning problem could be 30 odd lines of code and then the N partitioning problem became 31 lines.
Well, yes and yet no. The lack of a commodity does not off itself imply gambling, the use of a derivative to move risk from the risk averse to the risk friendly is a totally legitimate form of investment. Taking this site at face value, the idea that the government might use the value of these derivatives to determine policy is kinda scary, but if you were a business with exposure to the Middle East, the idea of a derivative to help you hedge the risk of a war in the area is an extraordinarily powerful tool.
The big problem with the idea though is pricing the thing. I mean it wasn't until Black and Scholes showed that one could price a financial derivative using quantifiable metrics (albeit corollary metrics in some senses, ie price volatility for risk and interest rate for baseline return on investment) that financial derivatives took off. The explosion in credit derivatives in the last five years is another example where the discovery of pricing methods fuelled the creation of a market.
The other thing is that this is a futures market not an options market so there is a zero sum game at the end of every maturity so the pricing question is less of a showstopper for actually running the market, but the difference between a derviatives market and gambling is not the fact that there are no commodities involved, but rather that bookmakers determine price by current payout exposure not underlying metric. This market appears to be different and real metrics will be used in the end to determine strike price.
Returning to the interested parties, Arms manufacturers and Airline companies would be ideal counterparties for such derivatives since their businesses rise and fall on the opposite outcomes of the same "event". The issue is not profiting from these events but avoiding the catastrophic fallout from the side of the event that is bad for you. For example if the airline industry had been able to hedge with the military supply industry (and look at Boeings recent acquisition history for an example of an attempt) then maybe they would not have gone bust after 9/11. Though this may sound callous, it really isn't the spreading of risk is a way to smooth out the economic bumps. To enhance the efficiency of capital to avoid sloshing it around, in and out of different sectors as markets change and all the problems that causes.
From first hand experience with hardcore enterprise applications that handle big time loads, .NET has 10 years to go before it will handle medium/big loads. I'm not talking about some tiny e-commerce site that gets a couple hundred or thousand transactions a day. Anything that doesn't do 3 million requests a day to me is small/medium.
Whilst I agree with you, I think that any of the "framework" architectures have a way to go to meet your performance criteria where the scale comes in two dimensions. It it probably true that the framework approach can scale well when you are adding capacity to your problem domain by parallelising multiple transactions. However I cannot believe that any of them scale well when you must preclude parallelism by requiring exclusive access to _many_ entities in your problem domain. In these circumstances I believe you still need to make design time decisions about implementation to reach performance targets of 10k tran/sec and the byte code or abstracted implementations seem to be unable to reach these levels of performance.
My recent experience is that after many years of excellent performance when trying to move to the next level of performance (1k -> 10k) we found that we could not make CPU of our central transaction engine go to 100% because of the vagaries of the distriuted application. It was only by optimising and revisting some of the actual implementation that we were finally able to reach the point where the limit on the system was the CPU of the central engine. We can't parallelise that (easily :-) because the premise of the system is that there will be chains of consquences resulting from each transaction and these chains must be atomic and without risk. Our C application (and I am not suggesting C is the only answer) is pretty close to the wire and the comms is very efficient and we struggled. When there are layers and layers of guff between the business level and the wire, I cannot see the performance getting close (regardless of platform, Java, .net whatever).
Having said _all_ this, the "framework" approach makes the simple things easier and gives jobs for the monkeys and .net makes the framework approach even easier which means less talented monkeys. Good luck to 'em. That leaves the hard problems to those who understand them such as yourself. A nice little earner that!
Look, the only thing wrong with voter identity cards is if they are made "difficult" to get. Making access to the right to vote hard is the way that various immoral gerrymnaders were maintained, in particular the "literacy" test for voter eligability is a classic example of how to stop a sector of the electorate from voting, just make the application to get on the electoral role a process that required a literacy test (all for the most logical of reasons of course! Like to ensure that the elector can understand the ballot).
:-)
Requiring proof of identity is not a problem, and a card is a pretty reasonable way of doing it, the dye approach is equally reasonable. In Australia, by way of contrast, the whole problem of fraud is largely avoided by making the voting process mandatory (it aint completely avoided but anomalies are much easier to detect). One is registered at a specific location for voting and one is expected to vote at that location (elections are on Saturdays) your name is checked off and clearly if you get there and your name is already checked off then there is a problem. There is a mechanism for absentee and postal ballots for those who are away, but these numbers are few and indeed for many electorates these votes are not relevant for the outcome. Clearly this process would be 50 times larger in india, but that is probable still manageable and there is a strong tradition of voting so making it compulsory shouldn't be impossible. Then the identity fraud problem really goes away (other more overt forms of fraud remain however
C'mon, surely you realise that Blakes 7 is just the legend of Arthur (and the classic medieval character cast) relocated to the future? I mean they "stumble" on The Liberator (Excalibur) and it is only Blakes "purity" that enables him to defend against Zens defences (ie pull the sword from the stone). The other characters start with the basics, the giant, the maiden (originally Dayna), the rougue the anti-hero and then the wicked witch )Servelan.
Having said that, love the show, and the best settings are always ripe for a revisit. IMHO, the Liberator must be involved for it to succeed.
I have no real position on wheter you are right or wrong, but none of the factors you mention are the reason why China would become most powerful. China was in the position to dominate the world 2000 years ago and they basically went home and stayed home. In my opinion China will have to ensure that they keep the vast majority of their people out of the middle class (and I mean that ina technical sense) until their population falls to much lower than its current level lest they will end up with a disaster that will consume their economy to destruction. If the transition is managed well then it may well be the economy that drags Africa into the middle class as well, just to be able to feed them all.
Indeed, I would also argue that "most powerful" is a meaningless position. What end does it serve? There are a significant number of countries who are technically self sufficient, these countries do not answer to any "power" other than the threat of military invasion and despite what people may think there is no carte blanche that enables the "most powerful" nation, no matter who it is, to act with impunity.
The music/media distribution industry is _dead_. They serve _no_ purpose any more. The time in which we are living will be remembered as the birth of the artistic (for want of a better word) revolution where the mass audience has _direct_ access to the artist. Where is the role for the distributor? That's right, there isn't one. They (the industry) are behaving in _exactly_ the same way that the church acted towards the printing press in the 15th century, look where that got them, and the industry will have the same fate. Whilst it is unlikely that anyone will burn at the stake for this (well at least I hope not) we will suffer a lot of pain whilst the industry is in the death throws and some more bad laws will be made but I am actually pretty confident that in the end (and it may be several decades) all will be well, I just wish that we could forshorten all that pain and cut to the chase where the industry is dead and we are all the better for it.
That free market stuff is only good in a carefully regulated environment. Laissez faire capitalism was successfully debunked in 1929, and many times since then - think Microsoft.
That is complete bunk. Laissez faire is fine when there are no (few or small) externalities. 1929, very complex, shan't enter into here, but there where externalities a plenty. As for Microsoft ... puh-lease. Think IP, the biggest externality of them all.
Since I haven't paid for a Microsoft license since Windows 95, I consider myself a squatter.
Well if you're still there by Windows 2007 you will have adverse posession and it will be yours forever.
Particularly since the landlord has done nothing to improve the property since you started your occupation
The problem is that the name C++ already contains the uncertainty of incrementation. IIRC correctly, the issue was that since C was a successor to the language B which in turn was the successor to BCPL, the tough call was whether to go for D (as in ABCD) or P (as in BCPL) or something all together different. So the hack was why decide, lets just make it C++ and avoid the whole problem.
As a result, to really go forward with the lame humour, I would recommend *C, starsee, or what C points to.
and the sites are specifically for US customers, no drama, no pack drill. The reasons why this is so are many and varied and irrelevant. Deal with it.
Are they losing customers, probably, but then the economy of Hungary is 1% the size of the US so do they care? Probably not. Indeed the US is 20% of the world economy and the countries that make up the vast majority of the consumable other 80% almost certainly do have web sites that will service their needs.
Doesn't anyone open fscking ports anymore. For god's sake why are wrapping Remote invocation in a protocol that was designed to transfer text, just open a fsking port. This is just insanity.
have told everyone that it actually has a decent C++ compiler
Well then you told 'em wrong. I believe the VS.NET C++ compiler to be a piece of toilet. It is buggy and even when you, take Microsofts advice and "rearrange your header files" to get code to compile, you still have apply Microsofts magical unreleased patch to get the compiler to stop barfing on compiling the system headers!!!
Oh, and how do I know it is them and not us causing the problem? Well because _exactly_ the same code compiles just fine under g++ (2.9x and 3) , Solaris C++ compiles (5.6 and forte), HPUX aCC and Visual Studio versions 5 and 7 and even Tru64. I bet we could even make it work under AIX. In fairness, it may well end up a good compiler but it aint there yet.
Sorry, I thought the one nice thing about .nyet, sory .net was the single class library for all languages. Seems kinda cool to me.
What 'artificial scarcity' are you talking about? There is nothing 'scarce' about music. You can go to any number of internet sites and buy CDs.
Artificial scarcity is a techinical term. If I create a recording and you take a copy, I still have my copy, no scarcity. Bread is different, cars are different, the right to enjoy a piece of land is different. Therefore these things have scarcity and thus price. Art, through copyright has an artificial scarcity created through copyright, without that constraint there is no scarcity. That is what is meant by artificial scarcity. Not some childish idea that there is some conspiricy to make recordings artificially scarce by retricting their production.