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Comment Re:I am curious... (Score 1) 243

...what DOES make someone better? [...] In what useful and practical sense of the word is everyone "equal?"

He didn't say equal, he said not better.

Consider: is i > 1? Is i 1.

The world is not composed strictly of totally ordered sets. There's absolutely no reason that, just because some people are stronger than others, smarter than others, nicer than others, etc., that anybody is better than anyone else.

Comment Re:Adding Politics to Engineering Decisions (Score 2) 173

No, not compared to Russian Roulette, compared to the things typical people do in a typical day. Also, with cars, death isn't the only danger. Permanent injury, significant temporary injury, and massive property damage are also dangers.

Typical people live their entire lives without playing Russian Roulette even once.

I don't really know why this is hard. Most people don't do a lot of dangerous things in a day.

In fact, even in terms of death: 22% of people who die between the ages of 1 and 44 in the United States die from a motor vehicle accident. Most of the other itemized are not daily (eg. fire, except for firefighters; firearm, etc.).

http://www.cdc.gov/injury/over...

If there was a more deadly daily activity, it should show up on that list. I mostly see things that are more deadly, but not daily. I have to admit I'm not quite sure what to make of "falls" from the under-45 crowd.

Comment Re:Not my kind of person. (Score 1) 465

Real property has a specific definition that makes it irrelevant to the discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

I'm going to assume that's not what you meant. But other things commonly viewed as property do have an expiration date. Consider food, or batteries.

For that matter, consider money. It's intangible property represented at times by dollar bills and coins, but usually by a number in a bank database.

Comment Re:Publicly Funded Governments (Score 1) 159

Copyright turns what is "naturally" a communal asset, in that it is trivially duplicated, and turns it into a capital asset. Thus, it is *absolutely* more capitalist than it is communist.

I think you're confusing capitalist vs. communist, with liberty vs. authority.

(I don't find some degree of copyright bad in a capitalist context, nor do I find communism necessarily bad, but it's hard to even imagine how copyright could make sense in a communist context).

Comment Re:Publicly Funded Governments (Score 1) 159

With proprietary software, you do not know what the software is doing, cannot modify it to your liking, and cannot hire someone else to modify it.

None of these are necessarily the case. For instance, Google has obtained a source license to Adobe's Flash player. They can read the source, they can edit it, they can hire people to edit it, and they can redistribute in binary form -- but they cannot redistribute the source code because it is not open source.

This is before we dive into the fine distinctions made between open source and free software.

Comment Re:Why focus on the desktop? (Score 3, Informative) 727

What's he doubling down though? That term implies some stakes are being allocated.

It goes on to say he doesn't think the desktop is a kernel problem. Well, that kind of means he's not spending specific resources on desktop, which means that wanting the desktop doesn't contradict "doubling down" on the device market.

The actual part of the article that talks about investing is when he talked about shrinking Linux and about addressing the embedded market.

Comment Re:What a bunch of Wuss (Score 1) 579

Fair in the sense that it was unclear which side would win the war.

Compare the Afghanistan war or the Iraq war, where it was entirely predictable that the coalition and the US (respectively) would substantially "win" in a matter of weeks (though the problems with a long drawn-out occupation are well-documented).

Comment Re:"Dance" = rolling blackouts (Score 1) 442

every damn widget produced, be at 0.01% production capacity or 100% capacity, is a profit earner once sold.

No, it's a revenue earner once sold. It's extremely unlikely that a factory at 0.01% production capacity can ever produce a profit -- and if it can, it means that demand so outstips supply that it is probably critical to society that we get that factory up to near 100%.

You can never realistically operate a business without this understanding, not under any economic system.

Idle workers are not wasted (unless they happens to still get paid).

So wait, you want people to be employed variably? Nobody is going to sign up to be an employee at a random 0.01% of the time. Yes, there are fields of variable employment, but they are limited.

Idle production equipment is not wasted

It absolutely is. What do you think "wasted" means?

Even aside from inefficient use of resources, it costs money to hold the land for the factory (and land costs aren't artificial costs -- you get to use the land because *nobody else does*), and basically everything needs maintenance eventually or it will fall apart. Security to prevent people from stealing all your shit (although in this case, the economy would probably be better off if somebody stole it from a 0.01% production factory and used it in a 10% production factory, making 1000x as many widgets).

Sure, there is a "loss" of potential profits if the market is screaming for the widgets the factory is providing.

I don't know why loss is in quotes here. Again, it's not just the owner's money that's wasted. All the resources invested into producing widgets are being used inefficiently.

That right there is economist talk, and do not hold up to a reality check what so ever.

There's lots of things we can say about the "dismal science" that I'd agree with, but this is not just economist talk, and things are not wrong simply because economists say this. It's accountant talk, business administration talk, and reality talk.

Comment Re:Rise of the middlemen (Score 1) 127

That sounds unlikely...at 3 days, that comes out to under $42k, and at 4 days it comes out to just over $31k. 42k would be low for an entry-level video game developer in a low cost of living area even as just a salary. But a common rule of thumb is to take salary * 2 as an employee's total cost. $31k would be nearly unheard of -- only an indie title.

This particular team has membership in the US, Canada, and the UK, and is done by remote work, so it might not actually cost them salary * 2 since office space is an enormous part of that. Still, I'd be shocked if anybody made that little, except maybe a summer intern.

I'd expect the average all salary to be in the low 6 figures, and certainly the all-in cost to be around there.

And all of this is angels on the head of a pin, because even 4 days' salary is small unless you can replace what that thing is doing in less than 4 days (or use half the team to replace it in 8 days, etc.).

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