Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think its so much a shame that Linus isn't a billionaire than it is we have billionaires at all. There is limited rational or ethical reason for one human being to accumulate so much centralized wealth. There is being rewarded for hard work / skill / innovation and there is exploiting people to become rich, and the line between those is very hard to distinguish when talking about individuals making more than…
> it is we have billionaires at all. This line of thinking always makes me laugh. You don't complain when a doctors makes money by serving hundreds of patients every month right? Then, when someone builds a product/service that is used by hundreds of millions, or billions of people, the natural conclusion is that they will become millionaires and billionaires. It's very natural, and very logical. > we are talking abo…
All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
81–90 of 206 posts
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why I don't see many people in the UK going bankrupt of stockmarket investments opposed to say video poker in the Bookies Its just the Maggie meant what she said about a shareholding democracy And even Sweden has a strong retail shareholdings they even have national organisation that looks out for their interests
I don’t think you have the correct picture of what the US “accreditied investor” laws are about. Anyone can invest in publicly-traded companies. The law prevents unaccredited (i.e. not rich) investors from investing in private companies. A company has to go through a number of processes, such as disclosure and underwriting, when it goes public. These processes effectively make it a much safer investment vehicle, amen…
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why I don't see many people in the UK going bankrupt of stockmarket investments opposed to say video poker in the Bookies Its just the Maggie meant what she said about a shareholding democracy And even Sweden has a strong retail shareholdings they even have national organisation that looks out for their interests
I don’t think you have the correct picture of what the US “accreditied investor” laws are about. Anyone can invest in publicly-traded companies. The law prevents unaccredited (i.e. not rich) investors from investing in private companies. A company has to go through a number of processes, such as disclosure and underwriting, when it goes public. These processes effectively make it a much safer investment vehicle, amen…
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government isn't telling people what they can invest in; it's telling companies whether they can take people's money. It's not illegal to hand money to a private company (you will not be charged with a crime); it's illegal to, as the company, accept that money. Private companies are a very specific kind of company—they're supposed to be a temporary condition, a way for companies to not have to go through the effo…
Regarding the FDA I don't think the government should be telling me what drugs I can and can't take. Plenty of people are denied from taking early stage drugs because they are not FDA approved and dangerous, but if people are aware of the risks I think they should have every right to take them. In your poison cucumber example I think this would qualify as knowingly poisoning someone else which is clearly illegal and…
That's not what the FDA does (the DEA, OTOH...)
The FDA deals with how drugs can be marketed, not what people can take.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#85Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government isn't telling people what they can invest in; it's telling companies whether they can take people's money. It's not illegal to hand money to a private company (you will not be charged with a crime); it's illegal to, as the company, accept that money. Private companies are a very specific kind of company—they're supposed to be a temporary condition, a way for companies to not have to go through the effo…
Regarding the FDA I don't think the government should be telling me what drugs I can and can't take. Plenty of people are denied from taking early stage drugs because they are not FDA approved and dangerous, but if people are aware of the risks I think they should have every right to take them. In your poison cucumber example I think this would qualify as knowingly poisoning someone else which is clearly illegal and…
To be clear, the strict purpose of the FDA is to ensure that for things-where-you-can't-easily-tell-what's-in-them, like food or drugs—but which have ingredient labels (or names that serve as common-sense ingredient labels), the thing must actually contain what it's labelled (or common-sense expected) to contain.
The FDA looks for poisoned cucumbers, because the FDA's job is to define "cucumber" and stop people from selling something as a "cucumber" if it's not one.
That's about poisoning; but it's also about high levels of weird things like potassium, that are fine normally but which people don't think of as being in a cucumber and might interact with the drugs some people take. It's also about products that don't contain the right ingredients (i.e. why Cheez Whiz isn't Cheese Whiz.)
And, for drugs, it's about the name mapping to a registered claim of a particular effect, such that manufacturing pills that don't have that effect means you can't call them by the registered name. (Otherwise you could sell "ibuprofen" with 2 nanograms of ibuprofen per cap. The ingredients list wouldn't be a lie, per se; it would still contain ibuprofen.)
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think its so much a shame that Linus isn't a billionaire than it is we have billionaires at all. There is limited rational or ethical reason for one human being to accumulate so much centralized wealth. There is being rewarded for hard work / skill / innovation and there is exploiting people to become rich, and the line between those is very hard to distinguish when talking about individuals making more than…
> it is we have billionaires at all. This line of thinking always makes me laugh. You don't complain when a doctors makes money by serving hundreds of patients every month right? Then, when someone builds a product/service that is used by hundreds of millions, or billions of people, the natural conclusion is that they will become millionaires and billionaires. It's very natural, and very logical. > we are talking abo…
As it stands now there is a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth. Shouldn't there be a cap on how much one person can have and floor on how little a person can have? I think so.
My wife is a doctor in the U.S. Her salary is large. I think it should be less. But let's be clear that there is a huge difference between my wealth and the wealth of a billionaire. The delta between me and Bill Gates is quite a bit larger than between me and a poor person.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#88A win for open source. I was just thinking the other day that it's a shame that Linus is not a billionaire. Seems he's doing just fine however: "Finnish-American software engineer and hacker Linus Torvalds has as estimated net worth of $150 million and an estimated annual salary of $10 million. He earned his net worth as the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel." Source: https://www.therichest.c…
Please keep in mind however that many of the world's "supercomputers" are simply "bigger dick" projects where some government or organization slapped a few thousand blades into a rack and connected them with fiber crossbars so they could say they "built a supercomptuer." And also that there's no standardized definition of what a "supercomputer" is. My iPhone is not a "supercomputer" even though it has thousands of ti…
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding the FDA I don't think the government should be telling me what drugs I can and can't take. Plenty of people are denied from taking early stage drugs because they are not FDA approved and dangerous, but if people are aware of the risks I think they should have every right to take them. In your poison cucumber example I think this would qualify as knowingly poisoning someone else which is clearly illegal and…
The FDA doesn't tell you what drugs you can and cannot take. (That's what the DEA does, and why I don't like them.) The FDA just tells companies what drugs they can and cannot sell in the US. If the DEA didn't exist, and you wanted an early-stage drug, you could just mail-order it from another country where they do sell such drugs, and nobody would stop you from taking it. Or you could get in on an informal "clinical…
"In your phrasing, you could say that government also "tells people what they can and can't" eat, in the form of the FDA."
"The FDA doesn't tell you what drugs you can and cannot take."
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>> You make billions founding or investing early into a multinational corporation that amasses more wealth than many nations. Or you buy land in the 80s.
What if you weren't born yet?