Slashdot Mirror

"Miss Edie, as long as there are chicken layin' and truck drivin' and my feet walkin', you can be sure that l will bring you the finest of the fine, the largest of the large and the whitest of the white. ln other words, that thin-shelled ovum of the domestic fowl will never be safe as long as there are chicken layin' and l'm alive because l am your eggman and there ain't a better one in town!"

- The Eggman

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

That phrase, "mostly harmless" rings a bell.

It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the Presidency, a decision which had sent waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy -- Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President? Many had seen it as a clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas. ... The President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.

Short sighted people make short sighted errors.

Most people foresee the future by looking at the past so it's not as obvious as you would think. Those who have the gift of foresight end up joining the million dollar club because they're ahead of the curve. Most of us just follow what they lay in front of us.

My opinion of the situation is that the decision was made with financials in mind (keep the cost low) and using the existing architecture "for now" was good enough. They could NOT have known that their temporary design would end up feeding into a standard need caused by the popularization of an OS.

The "640 kB is enough" is a myth attributed . The blame for this should actually be placed at IBM's feet

From this wiki: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
More about Bill Gates and this comment about 640K: http://www.computerworld.com/a...

And I suppose you think you're a Keyboard Cowboy...

"hypocrisy is essential"
"Game theory sets out conditions"
"flip-flopping as a necessary evil"
"inherent to democracy"
"a necessary part of democratic politics."

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time
they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." --- Frédéric Bastiat

The statement was about socialism (source). It's never been true for liberalism. In fact, it is something that liberals often bring up when discussing socialism.

English equivalent: "once bitten, twice shy" - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...

According to this native Swedish speaker, Google Translate is spot on (well, "burned" -> "burnt"). It is a jocular rewrite of "bränt barn skyr elden", aka "burnt child shuns the fire".

From Wikipedia:

Bränt barn skyr elden.

• Translation: Burnt child shuns fire.
• Note: Sometimes jokingly put as "bränt barn luktar illa" ("burnt child smells bad").
• English equivalent: Once bitten, twice shy.
• "Somebody who has had an unpleasant experience thereafter shrinks from the cause of that experience."

Everyone wants a piece of the cheap real estate in Detroit. I live here (inner ring burb). Here's my advice:

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

SAT and IQ tests certain domains that are predictive of intelligence and achievement but don't gauge the most important intelligence for life: social intelligence

much as you can have as autistic savant/ asperger's individual who can play 12 games of chess in his head but doesn't know the difference between the price of a candy bar and a car, the rest of us also have small mental domains where we are geniuses, but in other domains we are idiots. all of us. for those who attach much value to topological manipulation or word memorization, tested intelligences, real life will come as a shock when someone else who isn't "smart," according to traditional testing methods, achieves highly and surpasses the "smart" individuals, because they are able to perceive, communicate, and manipulate in the social sphere of life at a more advanced level

social intelligence is the real iq, the real true intelligence, and the most crucial and vital mental skill you can have in your life. the rest are pathetic sideshows. there are math professors who can't balance their checkbooks. see the problem?

btw, i scored near perfect on my SAT and very highly on my IQ tests. i attach no self-worth to either. they are cute little games, sandboxed kiddie stuff, not my sense of meaning in life. anyone who attaches meaning to their SAT scores or IQ tests is, in all serious, an idiot

I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.

- Response upon being questioned as to his IQ, in interview with Deborah Solomon "The Science of Second-Guessing", The New York Times (12 December 2004).

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/S...

Time to cue up the "what if he turns out to be innocent?" cruft.

Why, is he suddenly going to claim "SOMEONE SET US UP THE BOMB!"

misattributed to Socrates.
a paraphrase of a quote from Aristophanes' Clouds, (see w:The Clouds,) a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates.

From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Y...

The team decides what the indentation style should be

Not on any project I run. "Discussions" about indentation style lead to some of the most unpleasant, passive-aggressive, time-wasting and downright unproductive meetings I've ever attended. There's always at least one or two people who are unwilling to compromise on what they consider to be the "best" style (as you can see by scrolling around this discussion).

The reason I tend to prefer the IDE default (for languages where it's a no-brainer to use the IDE, like Java) is because it requires the least effort to get right. There's always some bonehead who joins the project later, doesn't read the style guide, and starts committing using the default settings. If your project standard is the default settings, this is fine. On projects where you wasted around 8 hours determining that the indent should be four spaces and there should be a rigid right-column margin of 80 chars, this means that someone will check out the source, open it in Eclipse, and start committing changes indented with tabs. The IDE guys already had all those arguments about style, and they almost certainly have more collective experience than you. Use that experience, don't waste your life reinventing the wheel.

Have the team lead pick a simple, easily followed style, and allow a certain amount of leeway - as the saying goes foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. The point is to make the code easier to understand, and if there are occasions when deviating from the style guide improves this, do it.

Spend the time you would have wasted arguing about tabs or spaces creating a culture of discussion about what makes for clearer, more understandable code. Rules of thumb like "if you find yourself with the urge to comment a particular stretch of code, consider that you might just write the code more clearly".

In Ferguson we see that blacks have "contraband" in their vehicles at a lower rate than whites, yet black cars still get searched more.

Happens in Illinois, too, according to on-going reporting by the ACLU. "Statewide in 2013, black and Hispanic motorists were nearly twice as likely as white motorists to have their vehicles consent searched during traffic stops. Specifically, black motorists were 95% more likely, and Hispanic motorists were 89% more likely. There are similar disparities every year such data has been collected starting in 2004. ... On the other hand, when police in Illinois performed a consent search in 2013, white motorists were far more likely than minority motorists to be found with contraband. Specifically, white motorists were 49% more likely than black motorists, and 56% more likely than Hispanic motorists. Again, there are similar disparities every year such data has been collected starting in 2004."

I agree that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they tend to be lower income than whites. They're also scrutinized more as you can see in Ferguson. ... The bottom line is that blacks who commit the same crimes are more likely to be convicted and get harsher punishment.

That is one of the problems with interpreting statistics. As an example, suppose someone looks at prison records and find that the proportion of Black inmates is double the proportion in the population: that is, there are twice as many Black prisoners as there should be. Does that mean Blacks are inherently more criminal, or does it mean they get, on average, sentences twice as long for the same crimes? Either interpretation is valid, given only that one piece of information.

Another example: in Ferguson, the proportion of Blacks pulled over for traffic stops is higher than the proportion of Blacks in the population. Looks like selective enforcement -- unless you know that Ferguson is also on the main path between the airport and St Louis. How many of the people pulled over actually live in Ferguson compared to the number just passing through? I don't know.

Getting to the truth by way of statistics is a long, hard, winding road.Consequently, I sometimes feel rather testy toward people who make assertions like this: "Blacks commit crimes at rates higher than whites."

There's also a long distance between "convicted of committing a crime" and "inherently criminal", with a lot of confounding variables: exposure to lead is a big one, which has mostly been fixed in the US; also poverty, disparities in education, employment, diet, pre-natal care, child care, exposure to violence, differential policing (more scrutiny of poor neighborhoods); selective enforcement (do the police arrest both drug seller and drug buyer?); racial bias in sentencing, whether direct or incidental (such as the difference in mandatory sentences for powder cocaine as compared to crack); and many others.

In some cases, the law itself is biased: to borrow from Anatole France, in The Red Lily: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." (Wikiquote)

Of course, it is a funny quote, but it almost certainly never happened.

Her history is actually kind of interesting. Her husband was previously governor of Texas but was convicted of a number of charges. Despite this, she able to overcome this and win the governorship defeating the Republican opponent in a landslide in the 1924 election.

Policywise, perhaps the most interesting thing was that she issued thousands of pardons to reduce prison overcrowding. Mostly those convicted for violation of prohibition laws.

As Miriam Ferguson, first female governor of Texas, said, "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the children of Texas!"

Apparently that is an urban myth. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/M...

Was that really the goal of the "SJW" group? This quote from TFA is spot-on:

Wherever they emerge, social-justice warriors claim to be champions of diversity. But they always reveal themselves to be relentlessly hostile to it: they applaud people of different genders, races, and cultures just so long as those people all think the same way. Theirs is a diversity of the trivial; a diversity of skin-deep, ephemeral affiliations.

SJW of all stripes have one thing in common: a relentless drive for conformist groupthink on the issues they fight for. Few people are as scary and dangerous as the ones who are convinced that theirs is a righteous battle, and are prepared to fight it, whether their belief flows from religion or from ideals. And what appears to make the SJW crowd more belligerent is the fact that often they are right, in that there are still plenty of inequities and social injustices. Compared to other "noisy" groups like extreme right wingers, these are the noisiest, most exclusionary, and indeed most violent. And the really scary part is that because the issues they attack are real, this mindset is percolating into the mainstream. Writers being excluded from an association or from an award because they have the wrong ideas. Or in my home country, where no one so much as blinked when a school official stated that "if you have the wrong ideas or are a member of the wrong political party, perhaps you shouldn't be a student or a teacher here". Remember Churchill: "The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists".

You seem like a reasonable, open minded person, but you have to learn not to believe anything rightwingers tell you without checking the primary source: which in this case does not exist, in that Churchill apparently never said that, at least anywhere where it could be recorded, written down, or heard by enough people to remember it. Particularly ironic when you're talking about how groupthink based on belief is the province of lefties.
A version of that quote, which maligns "Americanism" rather than antifascism, was stated by the Rev. Dr. Halford Luccock of Yale in a rather fiery antifascist sermon on 11 September 1938, as reported in the New York Times (a pdf is visible without a paywall at http://standuptohate.blogspot....).
If you want to see what Churchill actually said about fascism, it was "What a man! I have lost my heart! If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism. Your movement has rendered a service to the whole world.", to Mussolini in 1927. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/F...

It just sounds barking mad to a layman.

Not just to a layman. To quote Richard Feynman: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

And there are plenty more quotes in that spirit.

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have no net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a daemon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

... or this rant. Since most sites no longer work without javascript, hahahaha. He's still, for all intents and purposes, stuck in the last century.

That's a common misattribution. As that link notes, however, it is aa paraphrasing of a comedic play from 400 BC in which Socrates was caricatured:

I will, therefore, describe the ancient system of education, how it was ordered, when I flourished in the advocacy of justice, and temperance was the fashion. In the first place it was incumbent that no one should hear the voice of a boy uttering a syllable; and next, that those from the same quarter of the town should march in good order through the streets to the school of the harp-master, naked, and in a body, even if it were to snow as thick as meal. Then again, their master would teach them, not sitting cross-legged, to learn by rote a song, either “pallada persepolin deinan” or “teleporon ti boama” raising to a higher pitch the harmony which our fathers transmitted to us. But if any of them were to play the buffoon, or to turn any quavers, like these difficult turns the present artists make after the manner of Phrynis, he used to be thrashed, being beaten with many blows, as banishing the Muses. And it behooved the boys, while sitting in the school of the Gymnastic-master, to cover the thigh, so that they might exhibit nothing indecent to those outside; then again, after rising from the ground, to sweep the sand together, and to take care not to leave an impression of the person for their lovers. And no boy used in those days to anoint himself below the navel; so that their bodies wore the appearance of blooming health. Nor used he to go to his lover, having made up his voice in an effeminate tone, prostituting himself with his eyes. Nor used it to be allowed when one was dining to take the head of the radish, or to snatch from their seniors dill or parsley, or to eat fish, or to giggle, or to keep the legs crossed.

I'm particularly amused about the reference to dutifully marching to school, naked, in the snow. That the joke should be 2400 years old speaks to the truth of how the old perceive the young.

Obama invented "repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth"?! That's gotta be the most subtle Godwin's Law ever.

Government spending money on anything is terrible except for the military, naturally

Exactly. Because military is one of the very few things, which is the government's actual responsibility per the Constitution.

Most of the rest is just that — unconstitutional:

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

- James Madison

Republicans love them some war boners.

The lost "War on Poverty", which we've been fighting for the last 50 years, has cost us — inflation-adjusted — $22 trillion or, roughly three times more than all actual wars combined since founding of the Republic .

Please, don't hate.

I broadly agree with this. That said, it's worth considering a comment by the mathematician Mark Kac in making a distinction between an "ordinary genius" like Hans Bethe and a "magician" like Richard Feynman:

"There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians.’ an ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians... Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Kac

If you own land, the title comes from someone who stole it. You didn't pay what the original inhabitants paid (usually their life). If you drink water, you depend on title to land that was stolen from the original inhabitants. Et multitudinous cetera.

Money is based on fraudulent accounting, and has been since its inception in the US, I can't say for sure WRT other countries, but that would be my expectation. The countries that used honestly founded money (that I'm aware of) only exist multiple centuries into the past. Greece, e.g., is not the same country as Classical Greece (which wasn't a country, but a collection of cities and the land separating them). Classical Greeks had honest money, though not much of it. The Romans that followed them engaged in governmentally authorized counterfeiting, though perhaps not under the Republic. Perviously fraudulent money was called "adulterating the currency", but that doen't easily apply to money printed on clothish paper (or paperish cloth). So what you paid wasn't anything honest, no matter what your intentions. Current money has it's value changed out from under you at the whim of the treasury department.

Please note that all this isn't to extol the gold standard. It was a terrible standard (but don't think that bitcoins are any better). It's just that no individual has "earned" their position in life. NOBODY. Richer people tend to be given larger subsidies by the government, and though they usually think of them as "no more than my due" they usually get all huffy if you suggest that the same subsidies be extended to less wealthy individuals. Of course, the most desireable subsidy changes as your wealth increases, so it's usually possible to arrange things so that:

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. -- Anatole France -- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A...

cite "I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment..."

HELLO?
Could you please take that thing off?
There is a dreary urban landscape to explore.

You know that door opening on to the empty lot, the one that someone painted too thickly, large flakes shedding from the rotting wood? A tiny spider has laid eggs there, they will hatch in a couple weeks. The chain link fence to the South has one link untwisted on the bottom. What could have done that? In your bathroom cabinet under the sink there is a hole where the drain goes into the wall. If you shine a flashlight there you just might glimpse something. Once in a great while a white cockroach is born. How many have you seen? Where would you look? One of the buildings in town has a really incredible basement. Subterranean parking garages typically contain strange crawlspaces. At the bottom of every elevator shaft is a pit where lost items have fallen. There is nothing as exciting and terrifying as a rotten wooden ladder on the roof of a tall building, which (shakily) allows one to climb to its most dramatic and amazing place, where one can sit and dangle the legs over empty space. Where is a largest storm drain, that one can walk into the gloom with a flashlight? Some empty lots in tornado country have storm cellars. One of them is waiting for you to discover the hatch. Do you know where that creek goes? How far could you follow it? Set out right now. Bring a change of clothes, water and snacks and bus fare. That empty lot with the discarded furniture, old tires and lumber is so haphazardly arranged. If someone were to re-arrange the items so that they would touch one another and form a labyrinth, children would find it and walking through. Somewhere next to the railroad track there are discarded metal spikes and the green glass insulators that once suspended telegraph wires. If you spotted your town's wooded areas in Google Earth you might discover a clearing where there is the old foundation of a building. Perhaps it has a basement. Head for that power pylon, the one where massive cable or chain is suspended high above the ground carrying hundreds of thousands of volts. Follow it. Every now and then you will come to a spot that buzzes. Can you hear the variations in power load drawn into distant cities? Somewhere nearby is a tower with a climbable ladder. Somewhere nearby is a small wooded area where people dump old appliances. With a pliers, a cutter and a couple of screwdrivers you could fill a bag with interesting things, that you might some day fit together in a surprising way. Start out in a park or off to one side of town. Now close your eyes and listen until you hear something interesting. Open your eyes and head in the direction of the sound. Discover what it is. Now listen for another. At the end of four hours, where have you traveled to? I had the great fortune to discover one day, while I was out walking, a large steel door leading into the side of a hill. It was slightly open and led into the gloom of a a tunnel with a side tunnel, two other entrances, ladders and hatches. I hope you will find one too some day but you best start looking. Near the ruins of old houses you can spot where there were tended gardens. What might still be growing there? That creek has a spot where water tumbles over something and falls a few feet. Scrounge around to find bits and pieces that harness the power of the water to make a little sculpture that moves or spins. Every few days, bring something else there to add to it. Many buildings in your town have fallout shelters from the 50s and 60s. Somewhere in one of them you'll find the remains of a Civil Defense stockpile, or at the very least, a rusty s

It seems the situation in Greece described by this quote:

Elmer T. Peterson in The Daily Oklahoman (9 December 1951): "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/... under "missattributed".

Yes. It's weirder.

In support of that: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J B S Haldane in "Possible Worlds and Other Papers" (1927), p. 286 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane

to Mr. Spock's tricorder in everyone's pocket.

Spock - is that a tricorder in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Kirk out.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Attributed (questionably) to Edmund Burke.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

-Bjarne_Stroustrup, Creator of C++; cite

"Drag a hundred-dollar bill through Congress, you never know what you'll find."

(Original here)

I can't be the only one who thinks that is a terribly bad idea...

When I first heard about wikipedia and the theory driving it I thought it was a terribly bad idea at the time... but ya know, I find it really useful. It's got lots of problems but on balance it's s lot more useful than problematic.

We've identified many deep problems with scientific research on this very forum, and to my knowledge little progress has been made over the last decade.

Can't we at least *try* different solutions?

Where is it written(*) that the old ways are the best?

(*) The script to Skyfall of course. I got that from Wikiquotes.

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64 K to 640 K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
1989 speech on the history of the microcomputer industry.

Said in 1989 about a 1981 decision. While it's not "640kB should be enough for anyone", verbatim, it's where that quote seems to come from.

I hadn't heard that, though it could be. Your last reference provided an unrelated though quite interesting observation:

What about the open-source movement, which over the past decade has won considerable loyalty and enthusiasm in many programming quarters?

“There’s this wonderful outpouring of creativity in the open-source world,” Lanier said. “So what do they make — another version of Unix?”

I've often thought the same thing. I guess "embrace, extend, and extinguish" is OK so long as one replaces the "extinguish" part with "world domination".

Unfortunately, your source contains well-known misquotes and totally faked quotes from Albert Einstein. http://skepticaesoterica.com/d... and http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A...

All too true, from drones to these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"In 2006, Samsung Techwin announced a $200,000, all weather, 5.56 mm robotic machine gun and optional grenade launcher to guard the Korean DMZ. It is capable of tracking multiple moving targets using IR and visible light cameras, and is under the control of a human operator. The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot can "identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles (3.2 km) away." The robot, which was developed by a South Korean university, uses "twin optical and infrared sensors to identify targets from 2.5 miles (4 km) in daylight and around half that distance at night." It is also equipped with communication equipment (a microphone and speakers), "so that passwords can be exchanged with human troops." If the person gives the wrong password, the robot can "sound an alarm or fire at the target using rubber bullets or a swivel-mounted K-3 machine gun." South Korea's soldiers in Iraq are "currently using robot sentries to guard home bases."[3]"

And the movie Elysium painted such a picture as well, with robot guards and robot police.
http://www.santafe.edu/news/it...
"he makers of this summer's Hollywood blockbuster Elysium got one thing right, according to a column in the Washington Examiner that cites a 2005 research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles: The abundance of 'guard labor' depicted in the movie -- in the movie's case case robot police and sleeper agents -- is an expected feature of a society with a high degree of economic inequality. The 2005 paper, co-authored by Bowles and Arjun Jayadev and published as an SFI working paper, connects inequality with a larger proportion of a population engaged in enforcing the property rights and protecting the assets of the elite. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. labor force was dedicated to guard labor in 2002, they wrote."

Even without robots, see also:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J...
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

As Keynes wrote in his book about his own predecessors: "The completeness of the [classical] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."

We have a choice as a society (at least in theory) like the choice presented in Marshall Brain's book Manna. For Plan A, we can create a world of wealth for all that takes us all (if we want) to the planets and asteroids and stars and beyond, by using fusion power and dirt cheap solar and 3D printing and nanotech and robotic helpers and cybernetic augmentation and so on. Or, for Plan B, we can let all but the super rich starve as the economy implodes from automation, and then, if society does not self-destruct in that starvation process, the children of the super rich can go to the stars eventually if they want. Either way, humanity, if it survives, ends up entirely super rich from technology. With exponential technological growth and declining human fertility in industrialized countries, and a solar system that can likely house quad

And yet somehow, there is always a key - some centralized process somewhere that is the Achilles' heel.

And this is why there are hundreds of root DNS servers with over a dozen "names" (list).

TOR has (or had) "directory servers." Although it was discarded as not being practical, TOR or its predecessors considered using fully-distributed directory information (see 2004 documentation). TOR now has the option of using bridge-nodes. The addresses of these nodes are typically distributed "out of band" (e.g. by email or personal contact) on a need-to-use basis.

In short, "centralized servers" are not a bad thing as long as there are enough of them without any significant risk of common failure (short of a catastrophic event that would take down the whole Internet or for that matter the whole planet).

/Oblg.George Shaw quote ...

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world:
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

That doesn't mean that just because you're unreasonable you are making progress.

/Oblg.George Shaw quote ...

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world:
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Nice quote:
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."

From the movie "Primer" see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P...

Yeah, that's one of my favorite movies. And it had a production value of what, $10k?
http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

Nice quote:
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."

From the movie "Primer" see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P...

That would be our mutual friend, Albert.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A... (ctrl-F, dice, [enter])

Scientists' efforts to understand nature were subverted by the industrialists' (JP Morgan et al) vision of an electric meter on every home. The pre-established Laws of Thermodynamics (which were figured out by examining steam engines in the 1840's) guided later scientists' efforts to understand electricity and magnetism.

Nikola Tesla grokked electromagnetism, but the robber barons couldn't allow us to use these insights. Heaviside and Lorentz eventually simplified James Clerk Maxwell's 20 equations and 20 unknowns down to the 4 equations still used today, but nature is not simple. Future scientists will eventually realize their predecessors' old assumptions are not entirely accurate.

My main point is not to argue for more copyright; it is to say that, like Rodney Dangerfield, API designers "no respect". :-)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R...

Granted, so many APIs suck for all the reasons the Google engineer said they were hard to make that it's understandable why people don't respect them. It's like how general tankers in World of Tank have so little respect for Artillery (another hard job). :-)
http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/i...
"Arty seems like the best choice to blame at for some idiot players who have no idea where to go in battle and cock up the whole battle. Arty is not air strike, it takes time to aim and reload, most importantly, i cant shoot at target that i cant even see on my map. For those noobs who always blame at other player in order to feel good abt their own IQ, stop pissing ppl off and learn how to play."

I get the feeling you perhaps have not designed any complex software more than one, especially software libraries intended to be supported for years? Otherwise you might not so easily dismiss the creative challenge of creating good APIs. Sure, implementations may require hard work up front, but a sucky API generally creates massive amounts of hard work for everyone else for years to come. A bad API in that sense is much, much worse than a bad implementation, which as Linux shows, can be fairly easily replaced eventually. While it may look trivial, creating a good API demands immense amounts of understanding of the problem space, the limits of computers, the user community, and so on, including imagining future needs. And choosing the right simplification can be the hardest, most creative act of all -- which is just as true for programmers as it is for painters, novelists, architects, screenwriters, illustrators, actors, and so on.

Actually, it is more and more rare that someone can get anyone to pay something for what want to get paid for in the USA. See for example, from the 1990s by the then Vice Provost of Caltech
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ..."

Sure, you can always point to funding successes, but as a successful percentage of aspirants, the odds get longer and longer with more qualified people and less global-scale opportunities as big winners dominate the landscape.

BTW, people did get funding for creating triple stores and similar thing, just not me (not that I ever tried to raise funding for the Pointrel System, in part because I wanted it to be free and open source).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Besides, in a world of so much potential plenty, why make people justify what they want to do based on the possibility that "investors" who are already financially obese can monopolize it for a profit? Also, in a supposed democracy, why should a system like "Freedombox" get the left-overs while phones and tablets full of essentially spyware get vast amounts of money poured into them?
http://freedomboxfoundation.or...

But regardless of funding issues, this whole case shows how valuable the Java API had become, given Google took such pains to use it exactly... Part of the value of that API was the immense amounts of marketing put into Java by IBM and Sun for a decade (given Java sucked at the start, and is not that great even now although it has become OK-ish after vast investments). For good or bad, Oracle bought that Java asset, including communit

Paraphrasing John Gilmore:Corporations interpret taxation as damage and route around it.

If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.
  -- Cardinal Richelieu

Do you have any idea how many “lines written by [your] hand” are on your phone? I would bet you your phone that a dedicated investigator could find either evidence of a crime OR evidence sufficient to bolster suspicion of a crime which would be adequate to secure further warrants to search your home, vehicle, person, etc. The only question is whether you’re interesting enough to an investigator or if one of those crimes is in vogue for “zero tolerance” prosecutions at that time.

When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.

From Socrates, The Apology (399 B.C. or so)

Everything old is new again.

In the full quote — in all its different permutations — the given up freedom (liberty) must be essential and the security gained — temporary. With such qualifiers, it becomes a little less obvious, does not it? For example, if the security gained is permanent (as long as device-makers cooperate with authorities), is it worth an essential liberty? Franklin didn't leave any guidance for such case...

I'll take my chance and live life, rather than cower in some hole.

Fortunately, no one — certainly not the FBI — are forcing you into "some hole". Excluded middle much?

That said, I like your spirit, because I too prefer the Individual over Collective...

swb's comment is insightful too. The best reason to go into space is because we are happy on Earth and want to grow that happiness further.

That said, it is not unreasonable to want a distributed population for reasons of backup and resiliency, as well as reasons for new perspectives/exploration/innovation. Humans run simulations to learn things, and space habitats may develop a variety of approaches to things that are new and useful.

Also, as human technological power grows, the Earth becomes ever smaller and the stakes for a global mistake (e.g. bioweapon, nuclear war) get every higher -- even as we should do what we can to reduce and contain those risks as appropriate.

See also:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/K...
"A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."

NASA should have been doing these sort of hab missions decades ago IMHO. Better late than never!