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Meet the Candidates

Background information to the nominees named by ICANN's top-down Nominations Committee

I almost vomited. Here's why:

The internet makes elections unnecessary let alone the thinly veiled insolence of top-down nominations committees. Why not let anyone anonymously list their nominations -- as many as they like, changing their lists whenever they like and then make the N "candidates" with the most nominations at the time of a vote be the ones who cast the votes? (Where N is the number of voting seats.)

Or, better yet, here is something I wrote up in 1982:

As a tool for coordinating organizations, a customer-driven videotex communications facility would be just as revolutionary in its impact. In particular, organizations with simple hierarchical structures could automate almost all of their accounting and coordination via a videotex network. In addition to the normal modes of organizational management, new modes will spring up that are impractical outside of an information utility. Perhaps the most important example involves the way individuals are given authority within organizations. Traditional organizations select authority via a top-down, authoritarian system or via a bottom-up democratic system. The authoritarian system is more efficient than the democratic system, but it is also more vulnerable to mistakes and corruption. The democratic system gets harder to maintain the larger it gets. People have a natural limit to the number of people they can effectively associate with. In large representative democracies, such as our government, a national union, etc. virtually no one voting for a candidate knows the candidate personally. This, combined with the event called "election" creates the "campaign" where the virtues of democracy are almost entirely subverted by its vices. A very simple system of selecting representation or proxy exists which eliminates "elections" and thus campaigns, excessive politics and corruption. It is called CAV: "continuous approval voting". It is too expensive to maintain manually, but with a videotex network, it becomes just as cheap as any other system (it may be less expensive).

In CAV, a group of people who associate with each other select a representative from among themselves. Each member has an "approval list" which only they can see and alter. On this list, they give the name of every individual they feel is competent to be their representative. The person whose name appears on the most approval lists is the representative. At any time, a member may change their approval list. That change could put another at the top of the approval heap and therefore force a recall of the previous representative. A hierarchy of such groups could grow to unlimited size, still with no campaigns and everyone evaluating only those who they are in a position to associate with. Of course, thresholds for recall, terms of office and other embellishments may be included to optimize the system for particular purposes. The point is that this represents just one of many new forms of democracy that could change the way privilege and accountability are allocated in our institutions.

First: We could do worse with a First Advisor of GH than of Bill Clinton. (Look Al, if you use the FATTER cigars...)

Second: It may be constitutionally weak (although if it is, why are the press trying to blame everything that has ever happened in Texas on GWB? From press reports, he not only controls the entire gov't of Texas, but also all the corps in Texas), but it is also a VERY large state bordering on a foreign nation. What experience did Billary have? Governor of Arkansas, who managed to make an already bad school system worse!

Third: Multi-term senator = Career Politician. Not what our founding fathers had in mind.

Fourth: Gore is a pathalogic liar. Don't believe me? Read this page detailing his downright idiotic lies, taken from actual speeches and interviews. Plus, if he's so intelligent, he's obviously lying about being the "Common Man" that he always runs as. After all, if you believe the Dem's own statistics, most Americans CAN'T read because Republicans don't throw enough money at failing public schools!

Fifth: Not even close. The credit for the budget surplus goes to where it should. The people of the United States have created a whole new section of the economy using technology. For this they are taxed repeatedly by Washington. The Republicans refused to spend insane amounts of money on waste, such as Hillary's Nation Health Care Program. This caused a budget surplus.

Sixth: How 'bout a president who lies repeatedly to the American people? How 'bout one so stupid as to lie about things that are easily checked? I invented the Internet. I found Love Canal. I'm the inspiration for the movie Love Story! I co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform even though I had left the Senate before Feingold was elected! I was shot at in Vietnam! (I guess Champagne corks must count!) Bah.

As for the sex thing, I agree. Had he taken the bimbo to his quarters, or taken her to a motel, or did her in a limo in the garage, that would be fine. What he did however, was have sexual relations (and then lie about it) in the Oral Office! I don't know what business you're in, but where I work, if I did that with an intern of my company in a company office while on company time (perhaps talking on the phone to a Senator or a Governor?), I'd be drawing unemployment right after it happened. Actually, I wouldn't since I would have been fired for cause. Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others... The Dem's think that they can do this stuff, get caught, and then just go on with their life. WRONG! In this world, we have consequences for our actions, or at least we should. The louse SHOULD have been fired. That's what would have happened to any manager at a major corporation that did such a thing. The disgraceful thing isn't that he did it. The disgraceful thing is that he did it, lied about it, subourned perjury, lied under oath, etc. etc.

At least Bush has been forthcoming about his accomplishments and his failings. Also, I have a lot of respect for someone that would strap on a fighter jet whether they went up to fight or went up for a lark. Those things are dangerous! Strapping on a fighter jet was probably FAR more dangerous than AlGore's experiences in Vietnam. As the photographer assigned to ferry him around put it:
'He requested that "Gore not get into situations that were dangerous,'" said Leo, who did what he could to carry out Cooper's directive. He described his half-dozen or so trips into the field with Gore as situations where 'I could have worn a tuxedo.'"(Newsweek, 12/6/99)

Let's quit patting this scoundrel on the back and get on with the process of electing a real person to the presidency, George W. Bush!

bullish. saving the word attack as a word file takes 19k.

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And Justice for None

http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq/

Even smaller than you think, 5 vowels and 7 consonants A E H I K L M N O P U W

See: http://www.geocities.com/TheTropi cs/Shores/6794//

You don't necessarilly need to be willing to go to court over it, you just have to be careful to avoid copyright infringement, defamation, or anything else that's illegal. That's the point of the article - how not to get sued for a parody or "sucks" site.

Unfortunately I can see an upset company sending its legal goons to intimidate a legitimate parody. The website owner, despite being correct, would have to back down simply becasue he can't afford to fight it in court. The EFF can only do so much.

So I suppose it also depends on the nature of the company which is being parodied and how popular/damaging the parody is. A really evil company - or a company which has been severly damaged by a parody might take the chance and try to shut down anything critical. I'm willing to wager that Slashdot took no legal action against the Hot Grits site.

On a related note, there were some recent cases of "tribute" sites which were shut down. Notable the Iron Chef and assorted Mac sites. I find it interesting that "fair use" of copyrighted materials includes criticism but not praise.



Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another

I once had a possibility of having to do some GameBoy Color work. I saw the raw specs and was quite impressed and a little surprised that games for the GBC were not better than what I had seen.

I then saw the constraints on the system and it was so heartbreaking, The real killer was that you can't write to the display while the screen is updating. There were so many things that I'd learnt in my C64 days that I had planned that suddenly I couldn't do.

In many respects I would have prefered a C64 Handheld over a GBC.

So it has a decent CPU and it has pretty Screenshots, but as this link shows, even the GameBoy Color can do pretty pictures. It just can't move them very well. The proof of the GB Advance pudding will be when we see the moving images or the full hardware spec (With the big N the latter is hardly likely).

On second thoughts, What I would really like to see is A C64 handheld. Surely we have the tech to do one well now. Of course there are a few little changes that could be made here and there just to spiff things up a little.

Provide changable rgb defs for each of the colors.
Let the border be turned off without the hacks.

On third thoughts, what I would like to see is the video chipset from my second thoughts filling a frame buffer like a video signal and an Arm for the CPU. Then you'd have the possibility of

1. Run the Fancy Chipset emulate a 6510 on the arm and play old c64 games (cool)
2. Run the Fancy chipset and use the arm natively. (Lots and lots of tricks available then)
3. Just let the Arm write to the framebuffer directly (lets you do things the boring way).

On fourth thoughts, When are we going to get an Amiga Handheld?

he's a BRILLIANT musician. but in the context you're speaking, let's remember that he signed his first contract at the age of 17!!! they could have made him sign anything!

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And Justice for None

Yeah, and have you seen the "style" those car manufacturers came up with? *shudder* Dear sweet JESUS, what were they THINKING?! What a car.

While I'm not about to sit here and say I think it's a good site, or has good content, I would argue that http://www.geocities.com/ SoHo/Cafe/8781/wyldestorms2.html doesn't deserve to be blocked, despite containing lots of images, and text that I would classify as (poorly written) erotica.
----------------------------

So, does the "@" have a pronunciation yet?
Not as far as I know, unless you mean as in e-mails. As someone else already pointed out, it's called "arroba" (Ah-roe-bah), and you say it like that when giving out your email address.

Here's a couple of links which use the @ as I described:
Amig@s de Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez en el Mundo
NUESTR@S AMIG@S Y SUS SERVICIOS.

No dobuts there's tons more. It's just a matter of finding them.

Jobs' presentation provided a Photoshop (TM) shootout between a dual-processor 500 MHz Power Mac G4 and a single processor 1 GHz Pentium. As expected, the PowerPC finished the test in about half the time it took the PC.

That's because the test was, as expected, rigged. That is, it only used a certain set of filters which happen to run faster on PPC than on x86. It would be quite easy to pick a different set of filters and "show" that the PIII is faster than the G4 clock-for-clock on Photoshop. (Not to mention the fact that Photoshop is perhaps the only mainstream program better optimized for the Mac than the PC.)

A fairer Photoshop benchmark (and using Photoshop as your sole benchmark is pretty shortsighted, to say the least) is PSBench, which runs not 3 specially selected filters like Steve did, but a full 21. The results? A 500 MHz G4 is a bit slower than an 800 MHz P3. A dual 500 MHz G4 is probably not much faster than a 1 GHz P3, and certainly no faster than a (cheaper) dual 800 MHz P3.

For a rather exhaustive look at G4 vs. x86 benchmarks, try here. The upshot? A G4 500 is maybe as fast in raw integer and FPU speed as...a PIII 400. That is to say, the G3 was about equal with the PII clock-for-clock; however, the Coppermine PIII's have since added some stuff which the G3/G4 can't match--namely, a much faster L2 cache and 133 MHz FSB.

Where the G4 really shines, of course, is in those programs which can take advantage of AltiVec--and indeed, those are about the only benchmarks you'll find on that page. (You won't, however, find any gaming benchmarks, because the Mac would of course be "unfairly" limited by its lack of good graphics cards.) In raw SIMD-plus-FPU, a 500 MHz G4 performs about as well as...well, it depends, but a fair guesstimate would be a PIII 750 or an Athlon 650. If you look at the page, you'll find that the Mac wins quite a few benchmarks, and that one or both of the x86 chips wins most of them, and that the margins of victory vary widely.

Suffice it to say, though, that even if you do run Photoshop all day, the performance of Apple's hardware is not a good reason to buy a Mac. With the exception of Seti@Home and RC5 (but not OGR!), there is a significantly cheaper PC which will run any program faster. This isn't to say there aren't other good reasons to buy Macs. But when one platform's top chips double in speed in a year, and the other's only go up by 50 MHz, you can bet that the first platform is going to be faster.

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And Justice for None

But now the garbage collector will notice that all those ListenerServers's are unreachable from FooServer, and they all get destroyed, although they may be running and doing useful stuff.

This might not be what you wanted to happen!

if this only happens when you run threads as daemons. if not, they keep on ticking.

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And Justice for None

Tag line: Utilising GeoCities to subvert humanity.

wrighty.

So stop whining...

Hey,

I wondered about this... by my testing, it looks like you were right. Here's what I did:

I had to find a relitavely popular website. One that had publicbly viewable stats. I went for http://www.geocities.com/walters_mission/. If you look at the site, apparently it had, like, a million hits so it seems like a good stats source to me. Obviously, it isn't a totally representative cross-section of teh internet-using population, but it's good enouth for our reasons.

Decided on this site, I looked at it's system stats. Here are the stats for Resolution.

Res -> Count -> % of total
800x600 -> 139348 -> 41.32%
1024x768 -> 124705 -> 36.98%
1280x1024 -> 23333 -> 6.92%
1152x864 -> 17569 -> 5.21%
640x480 -> 17142 -> 5.08%
Other -> 9909 -> 2.93%
1600x1200 -> 5170 -> 1.53%

So yes, most people do use 800x600, but 1024x768 isn't at all far behind. 16bpp was the top colour depth too. Good call.

Michael


...another insightless comment from Michael Tandy.

To be honest, I've never had much success with Mandrake (I've tried to install their distro both by FTP and from a CD image numerous times and always had it fail for some non-user-related error (a crash, a failed dependency, something). However, they most unheralded project which they currently support and use has got to be Supermount. The new author (forget his name) has managed to update the patches all the way up to 2.3.99pre5, and those patches should work with the latest 2.4.0test kernels as well.

What does supermount do? Basically, it virtually mounts your filesystems and then monitors the drives to see whether or not they should be really mounted. This means that you can mount the floppy drive as supermountfs, stick in a floppy, access the drive, remove the floppy, stick in a new floppy, access the drive, etc. etc. Basic removeable media flexibility, just like other OSs. It's something that Linux desperately needs to allow it to compete in the desktop market, and it isn't a kludge like autofs.

I've used it for quite some time with no problems, but Mandrake continues to help maintain this when it needs to and their distro has included it for quite some time. I may not be able to use Mandrake, but at least I can use some of their efforts.

• Carbon-14 Dating
• How old is the earth?
• Misc. chronometrics links

this sucks. i'm a big delphi fan and the chief architect totally sells himself out to microsoft. anyway, i'm so tired of hearing that portability in java doesn't exist! i write my code on an nt machine and install my classes on hp-ux, linux, and nt servers all the time. also, i can move code from one application server to another with no recompilation. i wish these people knew what they were talking about! it pisses me off!

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And Justice for None

Let the man speak for himself. You'll find lots of fabulous Bush quotations here.

Enjoy.

Holy Cow.

This is clearly a weak troll. Slashdot are notoriously, even admirably, impassive about all the shit like this that they have to put up with. They've stoically ignored a lot of crap from ab/users; I can't imagine your beer ASCII posts would break them, unless their pet peeve is ASCII art that doesn't line up right. Further, I have a bit more respect for the Partnership for a Drug Free America (more than I have for you, anyway) than to believe that they would go after some pissant spammer on an internet message board which accepts anonymous posts. They would probably start harassing someone who was verifiably responsible for the offending content, like maybe Smokedot, before they would attack Slashdot for a flood of comments for which they were not responsible.

Hardcore free-speech zealot though I may be, I wouldn't mind one bit if Slashdot banned you. I wish they would, if there were a way to do it that wouldn't ban innocent users as well. Ordinarily I would be opposed to banning you because if we ban one person, where will it stop? But I'll make an exception in your case because of how badly you need a muzzle. You're the reason there needs to be a moderation system.

I've done some spamming before, myself. You know why my spam was better than yours? Because it was funny. People replied to it and told me so. I also limited it to one post per story.

Here's a short list of people I dislike less than you:

• Vladinator
• Signal 11
• Rob Malda
• The "'I am a goat fucker' -RMS" guy
• Penis Bird Guy
• All the Signal 11 and Vladinator clones

This "Slashdot is threatening me legally" crap is lame. It might be funny if osm hadn't done it already. But the important difference between him and you is that he never said he was being sued, he just planted evidence and got everyone else to invent a complete story themselves. Next time you feel the need to bite off someone else's style, try writing a play about Natalie Portman. It might be worth reading. I've never even been able to maintain the interest to read your MDMA posts all the way through, despite how short they are, and despite how much I love trolls (not that anything you've posted was ever as good as a real troll). 45 days of silence from you was hardly enough. I have little love for Slashdot, but even less for you. You make the karma whores look good.

I would suggest that you get off your ass and do something purposeful with your life, but it's obvious you lack the necessary creativity or intelligence. I'm amazed that you managed to craft a post with so few grammatical and typographical errors. That's probably what took you 45 days. Rejoice in the fact that you have probably made many people break down and raise their thresholds to 1. It's likely the most exciting accomplishment you'll ever achieve.

Please stop breathing so much. There are many others who could put all that oxygen to good use. Next time you take a breath, which should be in a couple of seconds, think about all the creative, funny, beautiful, and constructive things other people have done with all the other breaths they've taken. Think about following their example.

Congratulations. You've managed to suck enough that it makes me appreciate what a great place Slashdot was without you. It was easier to read the trolls. In short, the only remotely enjoyable or amusing thing about you is flaming you. I wish you would reply so I can do it some more. Unfortunately, you are most likely using a script, and may never read this. Well, to this script, I say, fuck you, script.

I think that's a Utah Mormon thing. They have a long-standing tradition of giving their children really unique names, which perhaps arose as a reaction to the limited range of family names in the original Mormon colony.

There are a lot of people who think MBTI and similar things are on the same level as astrology. What does the personality test portend for the future?

MBTI is a tool for gaining insight into how people work, and I think it serves its purpose well. Even though most people aren't pure, prototypical specimens of any single type, I find the accuracy of MBTI representations to be remarkably on-target. Like many of my fellow Slashdot readers, I am an INTP. This typological framework has helped me to better understand and deal with personal differences.

The best book I know of on this topic is _Personality Type: An Owner's Manual_ by Lenore Thompson. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is curious about personality type theory. Whether this knowledge can help one get past programmer's block, I don't know. But it's a surprisingly interesting subject that is worth checking out, IMHO.

No it means the Lumber Cartel has lost its hold on the USPS.

Many of the important theoretic issues have been addressed at the nuts-and-bolts level by the Mozart Programming System. Specifically, if you read Distributed Programming in Mozart - A Tutorial Introduction you'll have an idea of the kind of distributed programming power provided by a network of Mozart systems.

The key to Mozart's power is its use of ultra-light-weight threads that can share single-assignment distributed variables within heirarchical computation spaces. What this means is you can have unlimited "processes" that are waiting on all sorts of things all over the network -- and failures are easily confined to the minimum logical spaces.

By "ultra-light-weight threads" I mean a virtual unification of process structure with data structure.

And there are all those stolen brains that could be recovered. Since many of these come from hundreds of years past, at the least they would be of historical interest.

(-;

And down the nether pits to that foul lake Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep. But oh! If only they would make some sound, Or wear a face where faces should be found! -- HPL

They said their intital goal is compatability. As far as that goes, nobody is going to be interested. I mean, all y'all who are running Windows, didn't it come with your computer whether you wanted it or not, or didn't you pirate, err... borrow it?

However, if they manage to get to phase two, IMPROVING it, I'm all for it. The idea of being able to choose between many different free distributions of Windows like you can with Linux appeals to me. This of course presumes that Red Hat Windows, etc, will be stable (Hell, I'd even care less about the Blue Screen of Death if it came in different colors).

Propping Linux here is preaching to the choir, but my limited newbie experience with Linux has been underwhelming thus far. I KNOW that Linux kicks ass, but unfortunately, not at anything that I care about. I likeWord97. GIMP is still Photoshop's bitch. Corel Linux is slower than Win95 at everything (at least on my p166).

I'm not bashing Linux, and I'm not advocating Windows. Both are different, and both need work (IMHO). For me, this open Windows clone project is a great idea.

....

Here's something I wrote over 10 years ago about this ridiculous situation:

Date: Wed, 13 Sep 89 10:46:54 PDT
From: mordor!lll-tis!oodis01!riacs!rutgers!pnet01.cts.co m!jim@angband.s1.gov (Jim Bowery)
To: ucsd!nosc!crash!space@angband.s1.gov
Subject: re: Private launch costs

John Roberts writes:
> Another problem: the USSR has just one "company" to supply all its launch
> needs. If the US has 10 private launch companies, will it have to have 10
> times the USSR's launch volume for all the companies to have good economy
> of scale?

The Soviet government's effectiveness in space activities can, in general,
be attributed to the fact that while our private sector is more effective
than the Soviet public sector, our public sector is LESS effective than
the Soviet public sector. Why this is so becomes obvious when you
consider that the Soviet public sector has no private sector to tax --
any costs are born by itself, directly, whereas in the US (and other
relatively free market economies) the governments have the luxury of
becoming fat and lazy at the expense of the private sector.

It is a simple matter of accountability, the US private sector is
most accountable for its costs, the Soviet system is next most
accountable for its costs and the US government is least accountable
for its costs.
-------------------------------------------------- -------------------------
Jim Bowery Phone: 619/295-8868
PO Box 1981 Join the Mark Hopkins Society!
La Jolla, CA 92038 (A member of the Mark Hopkins family of organizations.)

UUCP: {cbosgd, hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, nosc}!crash!pnet01!jim
ARPA: crash!pnet01!jim@nosc.mil
INET: jim@pnet01.cts.com

I've decided to patent the concept of a three dimensional universe. If anyone wants to perceive their surroundings in three dimensions, I will be offering liscenses for just $250. Of course, older versions of 'reality' such as v2.1, which allows up to two dimensions of perception, will be availible for evaluation purposes here.

Finally - something small enough to compete in coolness with the Minox B spy camera. Minox makes a variety of cameras, and the best place to find the classic Minox B is used on EBay, typically about $150-200US. They use 8x11mm film instead of 35mm, but they're extremely small, and come with a watch-chain that lets you measure the distance from those classified documents you're photographing. Here's a picture (on a Geocities page, which is likely to be less bothered by slashdotting than Minox's web site :-)

In otherwords, be businessmen.

It appears the corporate establishment types are so concerned about real money going into the hands of young guys with an attitude that they would rather subject the Internet community to unnecessary risks, and their stockholders to violations of their fiduciary trust than pay the grey hats what they are worth.

For example, Dan Brumleve, the developer of DBarter (which won the Hackers Conference prize for "best work in progress" last year) was quite young when he discovered his first Netscape exploit Tracker. Netscape subsequently gave credit for finding the "Tracker" hole to a guy from Bell Labs. Their excuse for doing this was that they already knew about the Tracker exploit, having been told of it by Bell Labs -- an act that might have been rational if the Bell Labs exploit had been the one posted to Dan's web site. The problem was, Dan's exploit still functioned under the Netscape's fix to the Bell Labs exploit.

Dan has documented the behavior of corporate establishment types in this fiasco.

Inspired by such wisdom from corporate establishment wisdom, Dan went on to discover and publish other exploits.

At no time was Dan offered more money by Netscape than he was making as an independent contractor hacking Perl scripts for e-commerce web sites, although Dan did ask for such compensation.

Each time Dan published one of his exploits, Netscape stock went down 5%, and some of Dans friends made some money shorting Netscape on advanced knowledge of these exploits before Netscape was finally bought out by AOL.

OK, Dan's exploits may not have caused the Netscape stock price drops (though, try telling that to the guys who made money assuming they did). But even so, this attitude toward grey hats, that controlling them by legislating against them, is going to drive them underground. Society has "punkified" a lot of these young men already so threatening them with prisoner gang rape isn't going to twist their heads around that much -- aside from being a morally reprehensible, not to mention unconstitutional, way of dealing with any problem.

there alot more unsigned musicians than signed ones. why not a class action suit against the riaa for restriction of trade. the musicians should detail their experiences of how they didn't get a fair shake with record companies and that alternative distribution didn't exist before napster. now that the riaa has succeeded in shutting napster down, isn't this restriction of trade?

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And Justice for None

What's coming, it's speculated, is some form of subnotebook or tablet.

That space is for Pismo, which is not the 1999 Powerbook G3 as everyone thinks. It's a superslim notebook enclosure, all curvy and sexy but pretty much what you'd imagine the Elle MacPherson version of the PBG3 would look like. About the only nifty innovation is that there's speakers in little forward-pointing 'ears' on either side of the screen that give this sucker really remarkable sound for a portable.

I'm eagerly anticipating this... watch Seybold very, very, carefully :)

Actually, it was supposed to be introduced in Japan this spring, the Japanese being the kind to have a collective orgasm at the sight of this thing. Heat problems have put Pismo on indefinite hold until a suitably cool processor can be found, since of COURSE they couldn't POSSIBLY compromise on the design. That would be like SO not Apple :)

I order an $80 CPU, no customs charge.

I order a Laserdisc player, $20 charge.

New hard drive, can't remember but the charge was small.

I ordered $40 of tapes, $20 charge.

A friend ordered some DragonBall Z episodes, and they were confiscated because they were "pornography." (WTF?! It's a Saturday morning cartoon!)

He ordered some more, and they were stopped because the company he ordered from "didn't have distribution rights to DBZ in Canada."

Basically, customs has power to do whatever it likes. If this sounds unbelievable, here are some related links:

CBC#2 History and case study
A history of censorship in Canada
Racial profiling by customs

I think you mean Mozart.

I got some spam this morning directing me to www.paypal.x.com. is this a scam too?

I don't remember this x.com from my previous dealings with paypal.com...

anyone know about this already? before I start digging in and whoising/tracerouting all afternoon?

thanks,

:)Fudboy

but in the streets, people know coke over windows. and us rich spoiled brats are a minority. no way is microsoft more recognized than coke!

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And Justice for None

While I agree SQL leaves a lot to be desired, Date and Darwen have some fundamental problems of their own. Here are some comments on Date and Darwen composed by Tom Etter and myself during a Relation Arithmetic research subproject at Hewlett-Packard's E-Speak project:

* Date and Darwen: All logical differences are big differences ... and all non-logical differences are small differences.

Comment: This is wrong. All differences are logical differences. All big differences are rational differences. Rationality requires more than logic - it requires a sense of proportion. One of the chief aims of our new relational model is to bring a sense of proportion into the querying of data.

Their message here is perhaps better expressed in their discussion of conceptual integrity (p. 8), where they speak of the need to rigidly adhere to "a coherent mental model" at the foundational level, to which we say amen.

* Date and Darwin: The first logical difference we want to discuss is between model and implementation, which we define thus. A model is an abstract, self-contained logical definition of ... the abstract machine with which the users interact. An implementation of a model is the physical realization on a real computer system of the components of that model. Comment: In this quote we witness the great tragedy of the computer industry:

Ignorance of the complimentary roles of man and machine exposed by the computational intractability of relational systems.

This quote is all the more poignant because Date and Darwin are authorities in relational systems.

Instead of a hard definition of "the abstract machine" as the "model" with which "the users interact", an man/machine partnership interaction of humans and machines is needed in which both all are rational about their limits and ask the others for assistance. This partnership ranges continuously from the start of the software process through the execution of workflow to the solution of immediate problems. The interaction starts when humans specify their intention with intractable queries. The machines detects intractability and queryies humans other actors for increasingly specific predicates until reaching tractable problem specifications.

Actors are rational about their limits when know when to count on the actions of others and when not to. Counting is fundamental to accountability. It is this notion of counting that we introduce at the foundation of our relational system.

Codd's SQL was a "fourth generation programming language" which was envisioned to dramatically reduce the distinction between users and programmers. Too much cynicism has been attached to this vision. While leaving much to be desired, SQL was a giant leap forward in the computer industry because it was a small step toward a relational paradigm of man/machine interaction.

Further Comment: We see the need to distinguish three levels here rather than the two levels of model and implementation. Our fundamental level is what we'll call relational structure. We'll turn to this in detail shortly, but suffice to say here that it is essentially self-contained. Next is the level of predication, which encompasses relational algebra and predicate calculus. Unlike the structural level, the level of predication is not self-contained but spans the gap from structure to implementation and connects the two. It is tied to structure through logic and becomes increasingly concerned with the practicalities of language and the needs of the user as it approaches the physical computer. The third level is of course that of the physical computer itself, which is the "realization" of this middle level.

Where, then, is Date and Darwen's relational model in this scheme? It certainly involves the structural level, but it also includes a good deal of predication. The authors call their model a "self-contained logical definition of the abstract machine with which the users interact." We believe that it is better not to think of this abstract machine as self-contained, since its proper design has a lot to do with who is using it for what. We do share their desire for "conceptual integrity", but we believe this is better directed toward the level of structure.

* Date and Darwin: The question of what data types are allowed IS COMPLETELY ORTHOGONAL to the relational model (Appendix G p. 439).

Comment: This is a very revealing statement, and points straight at what we mean by relational structure. Here is the key definition:

The shape of a relation is defined as that about a relation which remains unchanged when we replace its values one-for-one by other values.

A one-for-one substitution of values will be called a similarity substitution, and if R' can be obtained from R by a similarity substitution, we say that R' is similar to R. The shape of a relation can be formally defined as its similarity class. Thus the structural level is about entities called relational shapes, or simply shapes for short.

Cells in a relation table with the same value will be called congruent (later we'll extend congruence to sets of cells). Another way to define a shape is as a table for which we are given a congruence relation on the cells rather than an assignment of values. Clearly there is only one such table for each similarity class (we are ignoring the row and column orders in the tables - see below).

The concept of shape comes from Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (1912), though they used the term relation number instead of shape. They had planned to write a fourth book of Principia devoted what they called relation arithmetic, whose point of departure was Cantor's arithmetic of ordinals. Russell had a vision of relation-arithmetic as a powerful tool that would enable us to deal with every kind of structure, including the structure of the empirical world:

"I think relation-arithmetic important, not only as an interesting generalization, but because it supplies a symbolic technique required for dealing with structure. It has seemed to me that those who are not familiar with mathematical logic find great difficulty in understanding what is meant by 'structure', and, owing to this difficulty, are apt to go astray in attempting to understand the empirical world. For this reason, if for no other, I am sorry that the theory of relation-arithmetic has been largely unnoticed." Bertrand Russell [ref.]

Relation arithmetic didn't get very far, however, and in retrospect it's easy to see why. The problem is that the most important combining operators for relations, such as Cartesian product and join, are not invariant under similarity. That is, if A is similar to A' and B is similar to B', it does not follow that the Cartesian product or join of A and B is similar to the Cartesian product or join of A' and B' [ref.1, section --]. To put it more simply, shapes don't combine into shapes. We'll return to this point.

* Date and Darwin: RM PROSCRIPTION 3: NO DUPLICATE TUPLES (p. 173)

How may words in the sentence "First come first served"? Four if you count duplicates, three if you don't. Duplicates arise in relation tables when you project onto certain columns, ignoring the rest. In the sentence above we must have two occurrences of "first", since the two reach out into the context in different ways. The same is true of duplicate rows, which reach out into the other columns in different ways.

It is crucial to count duplicate rows when we need to know if several (projected) parts of a table are independent. To see why this is so, we must carefully distinguish between two meanings of independence. Let P and Q be two projections. Then:

Logical independence: Every pair of distinct rows in the P and Q is a distinct row of PQ, and there are no other distinct rows in PQ.

Independence in place: Every pair of rows in P and Q is a row of PQ, and there are no other rows in PQ.

Clearly the first does not imply the second. The duplicate row counts in PQ provide a numerical profile of how P and Q are correlated, and indeed it's possible for P and Q to be almost perfectly correlated despite being logically independent. Conversely, they can be independent for all practical purposes despite being logically dependent. In the real world there are occasions when logical differences are very small differences and non-logical differences very big differences.

Etter and Bowery: RM PRESCRIPTION 3: YES! DUPLICATE TUPLES. In practice duplicate tuples are represented by a count associated with every distinct row.

* Date and Darwin: RM PROSCRIPTION 1: NO ATTRIBUTE ORDERING (p. 171)

* Date and Darwin: RM PROSCRIPTION 3: NO TUPLE ORDERING (p. 172)

Comment: We agree.

* Date and Darwin: RM PROSCRIPTION 10: RELATIONS. A relation consists of a header and a body, where the header is the set of column names.

Comment: Names, including column names, belong to the level of predication, and for now we are considering the structural level. However, the role of column names can be filled at the structural level by key rows, or more generally, by sets of rows the constitute keys. We believe it is better to do as much as possible at the structural level, if for no other reason than that computers operate on structure.

While I agree SQL leaves a lot to be desired, Date and Darwen have some fundamental problems of their own. Here are some comments on Date and Darwen composed by Tom Etter and myself during a Relation Arithmetic research subproject at Hewlett-Packard's E-Speak project:

* Date and Darwen: All logical differences are big differences ... and all non-logical differences are small differences.

Comment: This is wrong. All differences are logical differences. All big differences are rational differences. Rationality requires more than logic - it requires a sense of proportion. One of the chief aims of our new relational model is to bring a sense of proportion into the querying of data.

Their message here is perhaps better expressed in their discussion of conceptual integrity (p. 8), where they speak of the need to rigidly adhere to "a coherent mental model" at the foundational level, to which we say amen.

* Date and Darwin: The first logical difference we want to discuss is between model and implementation, which we define thus. A model is an abstract, self-contained logical definition of ... the abstract machine with which the users interact. An implementation of a model is the physical realization on a real computer system of the components of that model. Comment: In this quote we witness the great tragedy of the computer industry:

Ignorance of the complimentary roles of man and machine exposed by the computational intractability of relational systems.

This quote is all the more poignant because Date and Darwin are authorities in relational systems.

Instead of a hard definition of "the abstract machine" as the "model" with which "the users interact", an man/machine partnership interaction of humans and machines is needed in which both all are rational about their limits and ask the others for assistance. This partnership ranges continuously from the start of the software process through the execution of workflow to the solution of immediate problems. The interaction starts when humans specify their intention with intractable queries. The machines detects intractability and queryies humans other actors for increasingly specific predicates until reaching tractable problem specifications.

Actors are rational about their limits when know when to count on the actions of others and when not to. Counting is fundamental to accountability. It is this notion of counting that we introduce at the foundation of our relational system.

Codd's SQL was a "fourth generation programming language" which was envisioned to dramatically reduce the distinction between users and programmers. Too much cynicism has been attached to this vision. While leaving much to be desired, SQL was a giant leap forward in the computer industry because it was a small step toward a relational paradigm of man/machine interaction.

Further Comment: We see the need to distinguish three levels here rather than the two levels of model and implementation. Our fundamental level is what we'll call relational structure. We'll turn to this in detail shortly, but suffice to say here that it is essentially self-contained. Next is the level of predication, which encompasses relational algebra and predicate calculus. Unlike the structural level, the level of predication is not self-contained but spans the gap from structure to implementation and connects the two. It is tied to structure through logic and becomes increasingly concerned with the practicalities of language and the needs of the user as it approaches the physical computer. The third level is of course that of the physical computer itself, which is the "realization" of this middle level.

Where, then, is Date and Darwen's relational model in this scheme? It certainly involves the structural level, but it also includes a good deal of predication. The authors call their model a "self-contained logical definition of the abstract machine with which the users interact." We believe that it is better not to think of this abstract machine as self-contained, since its proper design has a lot to do with who is using it for what. We do share their desire for "conceptual integrity", but we believe this is better directed toward the level of structure.

* Date and Darwin: The question of what data types are allowed IS COMPLETELY ORTHOGONAL to the relational model (Appendix G p. 439).

Comment: This is a very revealing statement, and points straight at what we mean by relational structure. Here is the key definition:

The shape of a relation is defined as that about a relation which remains unchanged when we replace its values one-for-one by other values.

A one-for-one substitution of values will be called a similarity substitution, and if R' can be obtained from R by a similarity substitution, we say that R' is similar to R. The shape of a relation can be formally defined as its similarity class. Thus the structural level is about entities called relational shapes, or simply shapes for short.

Cells in a relation table with the same value will be called congruent (later we'll extend congruence to sets of cells). Another way to define a shape is as a table for which we are given a congruence relation on the cells rather than an assignment of values. Clearly there is only one such table for each similarity class (we are ignoring the row and column orders in the tables - see below).

The concept of shape comes from Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (1912), though they used the term relation number instead of shape. They had planned to write a fourth book of Principia devoted what they called relation arithmetic, whose point of departure was Cantor's arithmetic of ordinals. Russell had a vision of relation-arithmetic as a powerful tool that would enable us to deal with every kind of structure, including the structure of the empirical world:

"I think relation-arithmetic important, not only as an interesting generalization, but because it supplies a symbolic technique required for dealing with structure. It has seemed to me that those who are not familiar with mathematical logic find great difficulty in understanding what is meant by 'structure', and, owing to this difficulty, are apt to go astray in attempting to understand the empirical world. For this reason, if for no other, I am sorry that the theory of relation-arithmetic has been largely unnoticed." Bertrand Russell [ref.]

Relation arithmetic didn't get very far, however, and in retrospect it's easy to see why. The problem is that the most important combining operators for relations, such as Cartesian product and join, are not invariant under similarity. That is, if A is similar to A' and B is similar to B', it does not follow that the Cartesian product or join of A and B is similar to the Cartesian product or join of A' and B' [ref.1, section --]. To put it more simply, shapes don't combine into shapes. We'll return to this point.

* Date and Darwin: RM PROSCRIPTION 3: NO DUPLICATE TUPLES (p. 173)

How may words in the sentence "First come first served"? Four if you count duplicates, three if you don't. Duplicates arise in relation tables when you project onto certain columns, ignoring the rest. In the sentence above we must have two occurrences of "first", since the two reach out into the context in different ways. The same is true of duplicate rows, which reach out into the other columns in different ways.

It is crucial to count duplicate rows when we need to know if several (projected) parts of a table are independent. To see why this is so, we must carefully distinguish between two meanings of independence. Let P and Q be two projections. Then:

Logical independence: Every pair of distinct rows in the P and Q is a distinct row of PQ, and there are no other distinct rows in PQ.

Independence in place: Every pair of rows in P and Q is a row of PQ, and there are no other rows in PQ.

Clearly the first does not imply the second. The duplicate row counts in PQ provide a numerical profile of how P and Q are correlated, and indeed it's possible for P and Q to be almost perfectly correlated despite being logically independent. Conversely, they can be independent for all practical purposes despite being logically dependent. In the real world there are occasions when logical differences are very small differences and non-logical differences very big differences.

Etter and Bowery: RM PRESCRIPTION 3: YES! DUPLICATE TUPLES. In practice duplicate tuples are represented by a count associated with every distinct row.

* Date and Darwin: RM PROSCRIPTION 1: NO ATTRIBUTE ORDERING (p. 171)

* Date and Darwin: RM PROSCRIPTION 3: NO TUPLE ORDERING (p. 172)

Comment: We agree.

* Date and Darwin: RM PROSCRIPTION 10: RELATIONS. A relation consists of a header and a body, where the header is the set of column names.

Comment: Names, including column names, belong to the level of predication, and for now we are considering the structural level. However, the role of column names can be filled at the structural level by key rows, or more generally, by sets of rows the constitute keys. We believe it is better to do as much as possible at the structural level, if for no other reason than that computers operate on structure.

An appropriately conceived relational calculus is more powerful than a similarly conceived functional calculus because functions are special cases of relations.

When I was manager of interactive architectures at the precursor to Prodigy I spent about a year pursuing functional programming languages as a possible public standard for the network programming language. By network programming language, I mean a language used to make programming distributed applications as transparent as possible with dynamic redistribution of functions based on load leveling and security requirements.

I chose functional programming because the dataflow graphs provided a natural network map, the nodes of which could be redistributed on the physical network without altering any of the logical analysis that went into the writing of the program. The inspiration for this work was my prior experience with the Plato network where I had pushed the creation of a mass market version of that product. (Worthy of digression is the fact that middle management killed the release of that product and may have, thereby, killed Seymour Cray's first company, Control Data Corporation along with the Midwest's chances to be the locus of the network revolution -- 20 years earlier than it finally happened.) I realized that a widely distributed mass market Plato network needed parallel distributed authoring tools for novice programmers. Combined with the Turing Award Lecture by John Backus of BNF and FORTRAN fame I was inspired to pursue functional programming when I left Plato to join with AT&T and Knight Ridder in their joint venture mass market information service experiment.

While authorized to pursue this vision by AT&T and Knight RIdder, I initiated working groups involving computer telecommunications departments from Bell Labs, Atari, Apple, Xerox PARC, MIT, Software Arts and Knight-Ridder News to explore a staged evolution from tokenized FORTH-based programmable graphics communications protocol that would fit in the earliest Videotex terminals being produced by Western Electric (which became PostScript) through distributed Smalltalk based on a FORTH VM, and on to either functional programming with data abstraction or possibly a more radical revision of Codd's work in relational programming. During this time of intense activity, I was fortunate to actually meet Alonzo Church and Haskell Curry at the 1982 ACM conference on functional programming at Carnegie Mellon shortly before Haskell's death and at least get them to sign my conference proceedings and personally thank them for their contributions.

The closest I came to finding a working foundation for distributed functional programming (with object semantics) was a synthesis between David P. Reed's distributed file system transaction protocols and Arvind and Gostellow's U-Interpreter for dataflow computations (see the special "Dataflow" issue of IEEE "Computer", I believe it was December 1980). It turns out that Reed, Arvind and Gostellow had come, from two distinct directions, on virtual machines to describe their programming systems that were isomorphic to one another. Reed's distributed transaction file system was based on the object oriented CLU programming language developed for OO research at MIT, and Arvind and Gostellow had come at theirs from the work on dataflow computers arising from the excitement inspired by Backus's previously mentioned Turing Award Lecture. Reed's system was particularly important for funcitional programming enthusiasts because he was directly addressing the concept of network state, transaction mechanisms and the practicalities of network timeouts, faults and other real-world difficulties. Unfortunately, although Reed would go on to become chief scientist at Lotus Corporation, where some collegues of mine from the Plato project were developing a distributed programming system called Lotus Notes, Reed never actually pursued his conception of network state within the context of functional programming, nor even within the context of Lotus Notes! Perhaps this was my fault for not attempting to beat Ray Ozzie over the head with Reed's thesis, but Ray was pretty cagey about what he was up to at Iris Associates back in 1984. By the time I found out Reed was Ray's chief scientist, I assumed he and Reed were working on something related to Reed's thesis. Imagine my surprise to discover Notes was not only a distributed file system of sorts, but that Reed's primary theoretic expertiese was never actually discussed as a foundation for Notes! But it gets better: the most ironic twist is that Reed and Arvind were both at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science when I discovered their respective works. When I went to visit them at MIT's LCS, I walked up the stairs from Arvind's office to Reed's office to discover that they had no idea that their respective VM's were nearly identical despite being based on entirely different approaches -- and that neither of them were particularly interested in talking to the other about a synthesis between their works!

Academics...

In any case without a good foundation for handling network state in distributed functional programming, I was left facing the same sort of problems faced by John McCarthy when Marvin Minsky et al took off and started to kludge in all kinds of arbitrary state handling "formalisms" into McCarthy's mathematically pure implementation of Church's lambda calculus: LISP. I saw where that road led...

While a degeneration of Reed's approach was actually tried on the Intel 432 project under the iMAX operating system's distributed OO file system, to the best of my knowledge, the only other attempt to implement his system was a distributed archive object base that I prototyped a few years back at Filoli Information Systems (formerly Memex -- the company that bought out Xanadu Operating Company and attempted to resurrect hypertext after Autodesk dropped support when John Walker was displaced as CEO from that company and ultimately from the entire country).

However, I've never really been happy with the functional approach because functions are a degeneration of relations. That's why I've always been more interested in advancing the state of relational programming than that of functional programming. The problem is, functional thinking is embedded in our mechanistic views of time and causality -- sort of the way up and down are embedded in our physical structures due to having evolved on the surface of a planet. If we're going to deal with distributed persistence and transaction problems, we may as well handle the more general case -- especially since relational programming is at the root of the relational database industry, and it appears a relational formulation of time based on a revision of Russell and Whitehead's Relation Arithmetic, may end up dominating the future of physics.

An appropriately conceived relational calculus is more powerful than a similarly conceived functional calculus because functions are special cases of relations.

When I was manager of interactive architectures at the precursor to Prodigy I spent about a year pursuing functional programming languages as a possible public standard for the network programming language. By network programming language, I mean a language used to make programming distributed applications as transparent as possible with dynamic redistribution of functions based on load leveling and security requirements.

I chose functional programming because the dataflow graphs provided a natural network map, the nodes of which could be redistributed on the physical network without altering any of the logical analysis that went into the writing of the program. The inspiration for this work was my prior experience with the Plato network where I had pushed the creation of a mass market version of that product. (Worthy of digression is the fact that middle management killed the release of that product and may have, thereby, killed Seymour Cray's first company, Control Data Corporation along with the Midwest's chances to be the locus of the network revolution -- 20 years earlier than it finally happened.) I realized that a widely distributed mass market Plato network needed parallel distributed authoring tools for novice programmers. Combined with the Turing Award Lecture by John Backus of BNF and FORTRAN fame I was inspired to pursue functional programming when I left Plato to join with AT&T and Knight Ridder in their joint venture mass market information service experiment.

While authorized to pursue this vision by AT&T and Knight RIdder, I initiated working groups involving computer telecommunications departments from Bell Labs, Atari, Apple, Xerox PARC, MIT, Software Arts and Knight-Ridder News to explore a staged evolution from tokenized FORTH-based programmable graphics communications protocol that would fit in the earliest Videotex terminals being produced by Western Electric (which became PostScript) through distributed Smalltalk based on a FORTH VM, and on to either functional programming with data abstraction or possibly a more radical revision of Codd's work in relational programming. During this time of intense activity, I was fortunate to actually meet Alonzo Church and Haskell Curry at the 1982 ACM conference on functional programming at Carnegie Mellon shortly before Haskell's death and at least get them to sign my conference proceedings and personally thank them for their contributions.

The closest I came to finding a working foundation for distributed functional programming (with object semantics) was a synthesis between David P. Reed's distributed file system transaction protocols and Arvind and Gostellow's U-Interpreter for dataflow computations (see the special "Dataflow" issue of IEEE "Computer", I believe it was December 1980). It turns out that Reed, Arvind and Gostellow had come, from two distinct directions, on virtual machines to describe their programming systems that were isomorphic to one another. Reed's distributed transaction file system was based on the object oriented CLU programming language developed for OO research at MIT, and Arvind and Gostellow had come at theirs from the work on dataflow computers arising from the excitement inspired by Backus's previously mentioned Turing Award Lecture. Reed's system was particularly important for funcitional programming enthusiasts because he was directly addressing the concept of network state, transaction mechanisms and the practicalities of network timeouts, faults and other real-world difficulties. Unfortunately, although Reed would go on to become chief scientist at Lotus Corporation, where some collegues of mine from the Plato project were developing a distributed programming system called Lotus Notes, Reed never actually pursued his conception of network state within the context of functional programming, nor even within the context of Lotus Notes! Perhaps this was my fault for not attempting to beat Ray Ozzie over the head with Reed's thesis, but Ray was pretty cagey about what he was up to at Iris Associates back in 1984. By the time I found out Reed was Ray's chief scientist, I assumed he and Reed were working on something related to Reed's thesis. Imagine my surprise to discover Notes was not only a distributed file system of sorts, but that Reed's primary theoretic expertiese was never actually discussed as a foundation for Notes! But it gets better: the most ironic twist is that Reed and Arvind were both at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science when I discovered their respective works. When I went to visit them at MIT's LCS, I walked up the stairs from Arvind's office to Reed's office to discover that they had no idea that their respective VM's were nearly identical despite being based on entirely different approaches -- and that neither of them were particularly interested in talking to the other about a synthesis between their works!

Academics...

In any case without a good foundation for handling network state in distributed functional programming, I was left facing the same sort of problems faced by John McCarthy when Marvin Minsky et al took off and started to kludge in all kinds of arbitrary state handling "formalisms" into McCarthy's mathematically pure implementation of Church's lambda calculus: LISP. I saw where that road led...

While a degeneration of Reed's approach was actually tried on the Intel 432 project under the iMAX operating system's distributed OO file system, to the best of my knowledge, the only other attempt to implement his system was a distributed archive object base that I prototyped a few years back at Filoli Information Systems (formerly Memex -- the company that bought out Xanadu Operating Company and attempted to resurrect hypertext after Autodesk dropped support when John Walker was displaced as CEO from that company and ultimately from the entire country).

However, I've never really been happy with the functional approach because functions are a degeneration of relations. That's why I've always been more interested in advancing the state of relational programming than that of functional programming. The problem is, functional thinking is embedded in our mechanistic views of time and causality -- sort of the way up and down are embedded in our physical structures due to having evolved on the surface of a planet. If we're going to deal with distributed persistence and transaction problems, we may as well handle the more general case -- especially since relational programming is at the root of the relational database industry, and it appears a relational formulation of time based on a revision of Russell and Whitehead's Relation Arithmetic, may end up dominating the future of physics.

Check this out:

National Electric Drag Racing Association

For pictures of a bunch of EV's see:

Electric Vehicle Discussion List Photo Album

For EV's for sale see:

EV Tradin' Post

-cajun

Check this out:

National Electric Drag Racing Association

For pictures of a bunch of EV's see:

Electric Vehicle Discussion List Photo Album

For EV's for sale see:

EV Tradin' Post

-cajun

This is also my experience with their current distribution. I abandoned efforts to get Linux working on my desktop, removed the linux partition, and went with Win98. The LILO boot menu still came up, thankfully with Windows/DOS as an option. I'm currently bypassing it with Boot Magic - it's a dumbass way of "fixing" the problem, but for the life of me I don't yet know how to remove Corel's boot menu without reformatting my hard drive. My Linux Newbie jounal here.

....

It installed pretty much without a hitch on my Compaq Armada 1590DMT Pentium 166MMX 48megs laptop. However, initial experience has been somewhat disappointing. It's been much slower than Windows 95 (which really surprises me) and Word Perfect looks like MSWord97's bitch. Unless I got a stripped down version, WP sucks (lack of fonts, features, options). Hopefully, Star Office will be an improvement. Also, little things, like not being able to turn off "tapping" for the touchpad make this user's experience less satisfying.

It looks like I'm going to (reluctantly) continue using Windows as my primary OS. I HATE Windows, but when it isn't crashing, or slow, it does what I need my computer to do. Linux (Corel Linux, anyway), just doesn't seem quite ready. For someone who does no programming, isn't running a server, and doesn't need a multi-user environment, Linux feels "not quite ready for prime-time." I fully intend to learn more about Linux - try other distributions (recommendations?), watch it grow, but for now, I'm stuck using Windows. Damn.

....

CrotchShot for Unreal Tournament

The demand for launches isn't flat with respect to cost. The cost of launches just hasn't fallen much since the 1970s. This is because the political powers found the prospect of the boomer generation breaking out into space more threatening than the prospect of them becoming earth-bound basket cases -- even if it meant a neo-Guttenberg revolution via computer networking.

The threatening-but-far-less-so information technology revolution occured because Moore's law was already unleashed by 1970. By the time the bulk of the boomers were hitting the age where they were making career committments (1975) the network revolution was inevitable. The "market analysis" by a "government sponsored industry group" upon which the Space Access Society relies is reminiscent of when, in the early computer industry of the 1950's, IBM president Thomas J. Watson's market analysts provided a similarly flawed estimate of the demand for computers: six. That's right -- their cost demand calculations "flattened out" at six computers total -- no more computers would be built because the demand wouldn't justify it. Of course, it didn't take the transistor, let alone the integrated circuit and Moore, to show that estimate to be nonsense. Reality was that the cost demand curve wasn't as "flat" as the industry-dominating IBM would have liked and there simply wasn't as much perception that political power would be lost by expanding the access to computing as there was that, at the height of the Apollo program, power would be decentralized by expanding access to space for the boomer generation.

The historic analogue of the current situation is to be found in the fact that Leif Erikson not only mapped the first routes to the new world --he provided (under duress of the christian King of Norway) Iceland with its first Bishop of the Roman church -- which probably provided Rome with crucial information, if not maps, of potential new trade routes. But like all empires, they have to keep things "manageable". What followed was a similar "flat demand curve" for new world exploration as Mediterranean theocratic nepotism ("Is the Pope Italian?" used to be rhetorical question.) over potential trade-routes excluded northern european peoples until the Sephardic Jews, expelled by the theocratic Spanish Inquisition, teamed up with the Dutch and then, via Cromwell, with the British. This created the Protestant reformation which broke the Mediterranean monopoly on the trade routes (although it didn't allow the reestablishment of real mythic independence as would have the mass printing of the Eddas and Sagas) -- thus unleashing the age of exploration and establishment of the protestant colonies of north and west Europe.

Who are the Sephardim and potential "protestants" of the modern era? I tend to believe we should belooking for hysterical inquisitions against more genetically dominant cultures by the current theocracy of "political correctness" as it realizes African tribes, for example, are far from "politically correct". What will happen if more traditional African tribes team up with rural Americans, Russians, Australians, etc.? Certainly no one expected the combination of Guttenberg and Sephardic-edited Masoretic texts to unleash the old germanics from their domination to Rome's monopoly on trade routes.

This is the main reason why I recently spent a month travelling in Africa.

As I've said repeatedly in the past:

Promotion of politics exterminates apolitical genes in the population.
Promotion of frontiers gives apolitical genes a route to survival.

Change the tools and you change the rules.