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Bruce Sterling on Geeks and Spooks
apsmith writes: "Bruce Sterling's
latest Viridian piece is a written version of a talk on why we're in such a mess with crypto, why the computer industry is going nowhere for the next few years, and what Lawrence Lessig, the NSA, Echelon, Oliver North and Abdullah Catli have in common. Thought-provoking stuff, even if you might not agree with quite everything ("Why don't you geeks just sit down with your cheap, crappy plastic boxes, and shut up? Here in the TV biz, our boxes look nicer anyway!")." This is a lunch-time talk, and it's meant to be entertaining, and it is. :)
You know why its not really going anywhere? Because there isn't that much innovation anymore. I mean, you have two options for software. Make it yourself, or get someone elses'. If you can dream it up, its probably been done (within reason). So, basically, the need for the software has to overcome the energy consumed in making the software in order for anything to be done. And the energy to acquire the software is becoming less and less as more and more software is produced. Hardware is the same way, only more closed. Not many people have their own chip fabs that could anywhere near compete with the major players in the chip industry.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
we geeks have all the cash and all the culture cred, and we're rich and sexy and cool
Is this guy in denial, or what?! Sounds like the wet dreams of (insert favorite tech company CEO/Microsoft poster boy here): "I'm rich.... and SEXY.. and COOL... and I'm an 3l3t3 ha(k0r to boot!"
A good read, though. Nice afternoon entertainment..
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
I myself don't do much 'best practice' for crypto, because personally, I don't have a dog in that race.
I tend to be kind of pro-geek, myself, because geeks buy a lot of my novels.
Thanks, for your valuable insight. Do I make the check out to Bruce Sterling, or just Self-Absorbed Blowhard?
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
A few people care an awful lot about cryptography, but the overwhelming majority of people just want safe credit card transactions. So that's what we've gotten. Cypherpunk types have colorful fantasies but are a joke if you're talking about real world implications. So the anti-crypto forces have beaten them but it's a Pyrrhic victory since the real challenge to the secret-keepers is highly available global information sharing.
Also, Sealand is stupid.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Taking the medieval analogy to its logical conclusion I have one question: who gets to be the pope? Bill Gates or Richard Stallman?
This is NOT off-topic...
42
I thought CIA guys were spooks. Is that term reserved for NSA people too? IS IT REALLY A GENERAL TERM FOR A SHADY Guv'ment worker?!
Aye aye aye aye, I am the Frito bandito.
The point of this device would be to arm the population in surveilling and recording acts of unconventional warfare.
Now, if you turn the entire population into anonymous snoops and peeping Toms, it's a nation of snitches, which is very destabilizing. I'm not suggesting that.
This is the civilian militia Minuteman version of surveillance.
How does Bruce distinguish this from a lynch mob or posse of surveillance?
I read through those paragraphs several times, and I really can't figure out how Bruce gets around the destabilization problem that he himself points out. Somehow the fact that these are really sophisticated, cool devices is supposed to make them immune to mis-use.
what's the AC take on this?
OSS projects as centers of power? Are you kidding me? The manager at your local K-Mart has more power than Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman combined.
What you're missing, is that the "code artists" are the serfs. Writing code is low-level labor--to the information age what plowing fields was to the age of agriculture. The only way you can cease to be a serf, is to cease writing code. Code is just a commodity, like wheat. Useless in and of itself. Useful if you can make money off its sale. The management class is the one that structures deals and creates wealth. That's the way it always has been and always will be.
I found this highly entertaining, but people who do not have a particularly dry sense of humour may not enjoy it. I think he makes some excellent points, especially when addressing some of the things our spy industry does that the mainstream media covers up.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Hey mod, I'm just trying to help my fellow /.ers.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
How could these be power holders? Power over what?
Exactly right. No one ever tries to describe use. They are running around but never define anything. What's the point?
Howard Roark
I think somebody forgot to tell Bruce that 1994 cyber-chic is over. Wired was never cool, and certainly isn't anymore. Most of the "geeks" that got rich off the internet bubble are now back in their parents's basements. The yuppies have moved on, too. Now, instead of geeks they idolize cops and firefighters (and that's the way it should be).
Geeks in general, and Bruce Sterling in particular, need to stop living in a fantasy world where they are the center of attention. So, you work in the world of technology? So what? You want a prize? There are millions of people working in more essential jobs than you.
If...wait, BIG IF...Sterling and Lessig are right about the concentration and fragmentation of power going on right now, then in order to attract new features/projects, the big remaining software powers, lacking all creativity, will eventually be forced to grant monopolies to the most promising software creators. (Just as in the medieval period, guilds were often established as a "recruiting tool" to snarf the foreign experts in some new field.)
It is the combined package of code that works, lore about that code, and restricted access to the CVS tree that is interesting... Without this, I agree with you that serfdom is the unfortunate result.
42
Bruce decided that our government should be the primary distributors of crypto, and that it should arm private citizens with secure transmitting devices. At first, this sounds like a great idea: the masses rise up in defense of their great nation and take the evil barbarians by storm! The intelligence agencies would love it because they would now have information streaming in, and they would not have to go through the trouble of getting a warrant for a wiretap or bugs. However, the problem arises when you consider the government presumably giving the worlds most powerful crypto to Joe and Jane Citizen These are the people who the government would not trust with conventional military hardware, much less something with the capability to destroy people's lives by ultimately providing their closest held secrets to Washington, free of charge. It brings to mind several scenes from Orwell's 1984, where it was the 'private' citizen who turned in his fellows to Big Brother.
Just this morning I submitted a question to ASK /. In effect I was trying to find out what new tech was being developed in the labs. You know Plan9, Inferno & EROS are really just like *nix. That KDE, windows, gnome etc etc are much of a muchnes. That hardware is running in circles and not going anywhere.
/. rushes to post it. It helps that he spiced it up with violence and Mikey thought it entertaining.
I wanted to know what revolutionary thinkers were working on, the moderen equivalents of Fenyman and Da Vinci. Suprise, suprise it was rejected obviously far to difficult for mere geeks to ponder.
But Bruce Sterling points out the same thing and
SO WHAT SITES ARE GOOD FOR DISCUSSING COMPUTING AND FUTURE TECH?
/. NEWS FOR KIDS, STUFF THAT SELLS ADS
Sure, perhaps we would suddenly see thousands more videos a la Rodney King or perhaps even volunteer "Thought Police"-types of citizan groups (there's a Louisville, KY paper called "Snitch") but isn't that reason alone NOT to make such things? Enabling people to securely document unseemly behaviour of authorities would surely prompt many "corporate privacy protection" laws or the outright declaration that video recordings of Federal, State, and Municipal employees are verboten. On the other hand, the goody-two-shoes neighborhood snitch crowd would threaten the private citizen's right to be anonymous.
But despite these objections, these things are already starting to happen -- the surveilence culture is already well established. Xcam, anyone? Indymedia is an example of how cheap video equipment, the internet, and PHP can provide an alternative news service for those who disdain the mainstream sources. The cops routinely videotape everything they do, and sometimes re-edit it later as they see fit.
The difference between the current trend of surveillence culture and Sterlings's pleas to geeks are that regular joe can't compete with the likes of CNN in getting those memes out there. Plus States' resources in information management; ie. linking downtown London's streetcorner cameras to Interpol mugshots.
Imagine a Slashdot style system of posting video clips (except really really user-friendly); user-moderated, with "karma" exploded into multiple ratings axes (rather than being 1-dimensional), decentralized, with multiple points of entry (not just different browsers -- different ways of getting the info).
The difference between this and TV news is a reported doesn't simply present information -- they interpret and filter it to a large degree. However, how could a news organization ignore a video clip that gets boosted to the top of the pile?
Brainstorm, rant, reaction....
[pink beam of light]
Interesting reading. His resolution seems sorta like 1984 to me. IMO hes angry that crypto is not as cool as he wished it would be by now. If you guys have read Cybernation by Tom Clancy, its exactyl what he was expecting of the cripto industry. I dont understand what he expects from spooks, they are government and it really is irrelevant to most people's lives what they do. What is relevant though, is what we do with our lives, and I'm pretty sure we (geeks) are not working real hard to make the best out of it...
Troll? sure...
True enterpreneurship is about failing and failing until at last one learns and does it right. Usually, getting the chance to "start all over" involves moving away with the clothes on your back, burnt bridges behind, and lofty ideals ahead. This is what America was founded on, this is why people left their countries (if they were wealthy and successful, they stayed in them european countries). Being able to shed one's identity and become truly anonymous is a requirement. This is why it's so important not to have lifelong tracking devices. They have them in Europe, and dang they were annoying. They served to remind everyone of their lowly position in life, of their expected behavior based on status...
"Piter, too, is dead."
When people start saying that the computer industry will be going nowhere for the next few years, it means something totally new and world-altering is about to happen.
:)
:)
Before the microprocessor, the world was under the impression nothing would change until mainframes got a LOT bigger, made of fewer discrete components. Before handhelds, people thought laptops were going nowhere. Before the Internet people thought BBSes were going nowhere.
Before Linux started picking up, people thought the only thing that could run on PCs was Windows and DOS. Little did they know!
So, something big is gonna happen in the computer industry soon. Sweet
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
I suppose I should be proud to have someone like Bruce Sterling making any kind of comments about me... (I wonder if he'd show up if I invited him to a party?)
Actually, our quality of life out on Sealand is pretty high. Any geek thing which fits in 5k square feet of dedicated-to-accomodations space, for a fairly small number of people, we have. Gig-e, dvd library, 5 TB of mp3s (and divx), wavelan throughout, on-site anonymizing proxies and mixmaster remailers, a pool of laptops, IEC 320 outlets on the walls, and about 16L of diet coke per person per week. It's really no different from a big house in the middle of nowhere, except in 2 hours I can be in London, or 4 hours in Amsterdam, or 11 hours in San Francisco, LA, etc. Admittedly, I'd far prefer living in one of the 5 interesting cities in the world, but this makes money. And, most of the people living here are security/maintenance, not geeks. The big drawback is our no-drug/no-alcohol policy, and the lack of random unplanned social interaction; friends of mine from SF fly out and visit, but nothing really happens spontaneously or serindipitously. Again, much like living on a farm or something.
No one really promotes Sealand as a tourist destination or place to live; it's effectively a big colocation facility at present, and likely to remain so indefinitely.
I *do* agree with his fundamental point there, though -- if I were going to be living in isolation with a small number of people, I don't know if people who are dedicated to bringing down governments and complete individual liberty are the best companions. Although *bland* people are probably the "easiest" to get along with, if I were picking some people to spend long amounts of time with in a remote location, once basic skills were taken care of, people interested in science, art, literature, etc. would be a lot more interesting than "glee club" or debating society or politicians or lawyers or the others Sterling mentions as the most interesting. A lot of the "hacker" conferences attract a good cross-section of people; I think of all the 5000-person subsets of the world, the people at events like HAL, nanotech conferences, Burning Man, etc. would be some of the better ones.
As for his overall point about the rate of cypherpunk progress; I don't know. A lot of the things we want already exist -- ssh is *widely* deployed (to the point that anyone sending passwords in the clear over the net is a fucking moron, and widely recognized as such); SSL web pages are common; anonymization through mixmaster or proxies is understood and deployed. HavenCo provides a small piece of the puzzle by making it easy to anonymously, reliabily, and security host servers. The only thing we're missing is true blinded ecash, but progress is still being made on that front, and almost-as-good alternatives, like e-gold, paypal, etc., already exist. I'd say we've done a pretty good job on the datahaven front, given that it's been discussed in sci-fi for 20-30 years, and most of the pieces are there now; how long were they discussing space travel, biotech, wide area networks, etc. before they were deployed to a similar degree? The dotcom collapse is certainly a setback for everyone, but the underlying trend of decentralization and individual control which started before the dotcom boom is still going strong.
Mr Sterling's manifesto reads a lot like many other anti-establishment whack-job's ramblings. Just as he starts to make a point, he wanders off into anecdotal bits of dead-spy arcana which somehow is supposed to make you think he must know what he's talking about. Except he forgets to ever really say anything that can be grabbed onto so you can say, yeah! you got a point, (or even, hey, that not right).
When it comes right down to it, the culprit is the maturation of the tech industry. Its not so fun anymore, all the low hanging fruit has been picked. And the drama about crypto and spy-hackers that gave geeks a sort of mystery and coolness just never amounted to much, and wishing won't make it so.
Yeah, right.
"Holy shit! Citizen CX29BR7 just saw Homeland Defence Squad HDS4787 gunning down dissident JF78Z4 and reported it as a terrorist act. Homeland Response Squyad HRS5651 has been dispatched to terminate CX29BR7."
geeks are outlaws.
spooks want to FIGHT Redmond.
Republicans are on the side of geeks.
All geeks want to sell pirated software.
He must be smoking some real cheap Peruvian marching powder.
...this guy should switch to decaf? Oh, and maybe lay off the hallucinogens just a tad. Not totally, but just a tad, because we all know writers need hallucinogens.
Proteus' Child
Doko ni datte; hito wa, tsunagette iru.
Maybe there aren't many interesting things to run on a high-end PC *now*, but there will be.
;)
I firmly believe that a moment will come when there will be something better to run than a desktop OS. (And for the desktop head over to www.kde.org right away
Speaking AI? Knowledge based systems, machine learning, planning, language processing, and a whole lot more. There will be stuff that you wouldn't dare write in a novel.
Speaking network? Where is my distributed OS, will there be one Avalon that I can login to? Who knows... Today we've got lots of cluster stuff, computational network projects and a beowulf at our research lab but tomorrow...
Speaking privacy? Come and decypher my GnuPG encrypted emails. The better algo's we need, the more they will be made.
Happy writing,
--exa--
I just this past weekend read Stephen King's book 'The Long Walk.' It's main subject is about something I won't touch on in this comment (read the book if you want to know) but little hints about what kind of 'future' (or parallel) world the book takes place in are given. Ominous mention of people being 'squadded' and such.
Also, there was explicit mention in the book of an airplane being deliberately crashed into a highrise tower.
The book was published in like 1970. Go figure.
Sorry, you lose.
Mondo 2000 was just another Wired-style attempt to cash-in on early 1990s cyber-chic. They did (do?) run the occasional amusing article, but I could say the same about Wired.
Face it. If you're taking your cues from a magazine, "you'll never be cool."
Certainly, managers, leaders, executives earn even more money... But really, compare "code serf"'s income to that of general population, and see if it looks all that bad. About "programming in and of itself is useless"; I agree. Same can be said about practically any single activity known to humankind. Earning money is pretty much useless, in and of itself; using money makes earning much more interesting.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Useless in and of itself. Useful if you can make money off its sale.
Is this the value system for everything in your life or just coding?
The management class is the one that structures deals and creates wealth. That's the way it always has been and always will be.
You must be in management.
even if he wrote romance novels I'd read them!!!
Then again, the average person in the age of agriculture probably knew a hell of a lot more about plowing than the average person now knows about kernel hacking. Back then the serfs might have just been doing the manual labor for people who didn't want to waste their time with it, but now geeks are doing work that other people don't want to waste their time learning about.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
When people say "code monkeys" they mean people churning out java for the dumb web database front end of the week.
You can't lump all programming into one category.
There's already too much information, code, hardware, people, you name it to keep track of. Your average feudal lord didn't have to keep track of a gazillion different people doing a gazillion different things. You don't need Sealand or Grenada to make an Island in the Net; all you really need is relative obscurity and the ability to quickly shut it down and set it up somewhere or somehow else. He makes the mistake of regarding anarchists as these in-your-face kind of people who are out on the streets raising hell, when I bet most of them are just quietly going about their business keeping a low profile. He also makes the mistake of regarding the spooks as these omnipotent, omnipresent gods; the events of 9/11 alone disproves that idea. High profile people like Dimitri and that Finnish kid get the heat while shadowy crackers and sharers continue on, barely being noticed by anyone. We've got a brand new spanking Homeland Sercuity department and a Justice Department that's wanting to wiretap and spy all over the country, but neither of them can stop that kid downloading MP3s or knocking off the corner liquor store. Remember the war on drugs? Last time I checked, drugs were winning.
If one looks at the technology and software that's out there, it can be easy to conclude that there's little real innovation out there. It would seem that we're in a period of small refinements to old hat stuff. But isn't it the social innovation that really makes the internet unique?
Part of the problem with science fiction writers is they tend to write novels where one person single-handedly saves the world or changes it in opposition to some monolithic oppressive entity. I'm afraid Sterling's fallen prey to that - he's looking at the people who want to be big players and what they're doing, while all the time, the bit actors are stealing the show by sheer force of numbers. Yeah, great, the government's going to have a number on everyone and observe everything they do - but how in the hell are they going to keep track of it all? How many words are created on the internet a day and how many people would you need to keep track of them all? People argue about anomynity all the time, but there's a simple truth - if you are one of millions, you are anomynous unless you do something very obvious to draw attention to yourself or get very unlucky.
What he's done here is the equivalent of judging the ocean by what he can see looking down on it. He sees the first few surface feet and meanwhile, 99.99% of the water goes uninspected.
I can't wait for cyber-communism. With all of these size 12+ cities around, imagine how many modern armour and mechanized infantry we will be able to support for free.
Also, there was explicit mention in the book of an airplane being deliberately crashed into a highrise tower.
That was in The Running Man, not The Long Walk
Reboot macht Frei.
Okay, although this has probably been pointed out by someone 'neath the +3 thresh that I browse at, I'd like to ask: What is this with the `geek tribe' inventing microsoft and stagnating tech?
I've always been under the impression that Microsoft was more a marketing-management invention; Aside from the founder-coders, Microsoft is actually (I've heard) rather rough on its geeks (outsourced labour and permatemps and all that 'Niaomi Klein' jazz. I would be more inclined to think of geeks as the usual Slashdot cast --- interested in technological innovation and (as a distant second) society in general, not so interested in thumbing through wads of cash made by market hammerlock (a lot of us write code for free, for chrissakes.)
And what is it with Bruce's prediliction for, you know, the second tense colloqualisms? Sorry. IMO speeches shouldn't read like character dialogue.
- undoware.ca
Microsoft was more a marketing-management invention ... Microsoft is actually (I've heard) rather rough on its geeks
Microsoft is populated by Nerds,
The Slashdot crowd is primarily Geeks.
The best way I've heard to describe the difference between the two is that both are good with technology, but Geeks enjoy it.
It's an important distinction; when you look at Bill Gates, you see someone who is successful, but severely pissed off with everything in the world. He'll never be happy until he dominates the world (and probably not even then!) Gates epitomizes "Nerd"
When you look at Linus Torvalds, you see someone who's successful, and happy with his life - and he's not happy because he's successful, he's successful because he's happy. Linus epitomizes "Geek"
Nerds are socially-maladjusted Geeks.
Bill Gates = Pope
Richard Stallman = Martin Luther
WRONG
Stallman = Idiot
Shouldn't that be Citizen THX-1138?
You may find it boring, but here are some of my cyberanarchy papers: http://www.robertgraham.com/cyberanarchy/. I put a lot of work into the speaker notes for this presentation.
I "meept" Ben Franklin's daughter in the ass last night. What a slut, she kept begging for it so I gave it to her. Man did I give it to her.
Perhaps an imbalance of power like that can exist on a local level. We're talking about surveillance data that whose source is verifiable on a national scale. And if the United States is capable of mob injustice on a national level, these little doohickies aren't going to make things any worse.
What happens if copyright, just like patent, is returned to its constitutional "limited time"? Say 7 years.
What were you using, reading, buying in 1994 that the company/writer is still making money off of today? And I mean real money, not penny-ante "residules" for M*A*S*H re-runs.
I assert that it's *squat*. Except for massive self-serving multinational corps like Disney who thrive on no one ever, EVER using an idea that they bought with out their permission, the actual individuals who do the work and write the stories and invent this wonderful shared culture have already made their money and moved on to new projects in that "limited time" that patent and copyright were designed to protect.
As if I'm going to use Win3.1 today just because it wouldn't be a crime to copy it? Get real.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Bruce Sterling might be a great SF writer, and there is a lot of great material in this piece, but it reads kind of like a jumble written in one shot late at night.
Taking the medieval analogy to its logical conclusion I have one question: who gets to be the pope? Bill Gates or Richard Stallman?
Who says there has to be only a single Pope? Ever hear of the Great Schism? Even in the middle ages there were times when 2 or even 3 popes existed, each excommunicating the other(s).
There's nothing new under the sun.
Sterling claims this in his article. It would seem to add some extra cache to his Lessig quotes but it doesn't seem to be true, according to Lessig's cv.
Perhaps this is what confused Sterling. Lessig was asked by Judge Jackson to submit a brief in the Microsoft case and apparently it was quite influential.
If electricity is produced by electrons is morality produced by morons?
Hmmm. Can't tell if you're serious. The only reason that Sterling's idea makes any sense is that citizen CX29BR7 could distribute his video footage (and perhaps the footage of his own murder, if he's organized) so widely that everyone would know about it. Of course if we lost the ability to distribute information freely, then this would not work at all, and there would be no reason to expect any benefit from this technology.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Know what would be really neat...if Jon Katz did a review of this article.
This is a really really neat idea. Might be totally wrongheaded, but it's interesting. The biggest problem that leaps to mind is with the fifth amendment.
If an accuser comes forward with information implicating an alleged criminal/terrorist/whatever, then the accused party would want every single peice of evidence that even slightly pertains to the crime at his disposal. That might include every peice of video that the accuser produced for months preceding the crime, and all video produced within a mile of the incident.
I don't know if this would be a legitimate request on the part of the accused, but I have a feeling it might be. Of course it would be impossible to supply, because it would require people to testify against themselves if they were filming something unrelated and incriminating.
Is there a good way to compare this problem to a present day scenario in evidence rules?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
"If I am going into a Japanese restaurant in Japan, I would rather like to be able to haul out some gizmo and flash it at my fellow civilians, and have these kindly people understand with a high degree of likelihood that I am not a mass murderer. On the contrary, I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately."
So he couldn't get some booze in a foreign restaurant and blamed it on crypto. It woulda pissed me off too.
Writing code _should_ be a monkey job, given a decent design and a proper understanding of the language. That's why in large projects, the majority of ppl's time shouldn't be spent coding. I don't mean that they shouldn't _be_ _able_ to code, merely that they shouldn't have to hack their way out of trouble. To take an analogy, the best F1 mechanic is the one who never has to conduct emergency repairs on the car - he should only need to when someone else breaks it, and then he should be shit-hot.
Grab.
WRONG
yuo=idiot
Sorry, but I live out in the sticks. SF is one of the five; what are the other 4? (NY, HK, Bangkok, Tokyo, KL, London, Paris, other candidates ?????)
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
It's still the case. The Eastern Orthodox recognizes Patriach Bartholomew I as it's equvilant to pope, and just as John Paul II is the eventual successor to Martin V, Bartholomew I is the eventual successor to Dionysius I.
Bruce may think he's is "cool", "in touch" and wired", but I think he is just another silly socialist zealot who would sell all our privacy and freedom down the river for a little imagined security. (and of course his jet-setting, in-person monologues in London or something)
The problem we are seeing with the 9-11 tradegy is that this is the price we pay for sticking our collective nose into other peoples business.
It is the result of cowardice of Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr. GB Sr. was too much of a coward to do what Stormin Norman told him to do and take over Baghdad. After totally destroying the city's infrastructure and its population's means of survival they just waltzed off and left the children to starve and die of typhoid. If Stormin Normin had just taken the city they'd be drinking clean water, building hard drives for Seagate, running up too much credit on their VISA and complaining about late fees at Blockbuster like the rest of us.
Of course the alternative was to permanently install bases in Saudi Arabia where we could annoy Sadam, gnatlike, and piss off all the Suad nationalists like Osama by keeping our planes on their bases. For god's sake, if you are going to break eggs at least make the f'ing omelette. Who cares what the "coaltion" governments think. They couldn't have stopped us, we are the most powerful military on the planet. Thats why we are there in the first place.
Coalition governments, bah. Its like a bad episode of STNG where the friggin psychologist is questioning every move the captain makes.
And as for Senor Clinton, that little stunt he pulled when he sent off 30 cruise missiles after Osama was a masterstroke of bad example. Clinton needed to divert attention from another Bimbo erruption so he sent cruise missiles to get Osama. Never mind that he didn't get anyone, but he did succeed in blowing up a pharmaceutical factory. The only one in the entire region. Probably killed a lot of innocent people too. Good work, Bill. Just to buy you some time from Bimbogate. Lets not forget that the cruise missiles that didn't explode were sold to China, further cementing the massive leak of high-tech intelligence to the Chinese.
Now when you have a bunch of fanatics out there who can't find our damn troops because they are hiding on a ship 100 miles away you have a serious problem. They have to find a way to hurt us. The way they do that is by killing innocent civilians. 4000 of them to be exact. In New York. In a tower. With an airplane.
So we have the cowardice of our presidents essentially creating half-baked wars, with armed miscreants looking for revenge in places we have no business being in. The cowardice of presidents putting our innocent civilians lives at risk. If you are going in to do a job, do the friggin thing. Don't leave them armed and dangerous to come back and blow up aunt Martha.
Don't forget the cowardly and inept intelligence services who, for all their billions in funding, can't put enough spies in country to see this before it happens.
I'm not going to sacrifice my privacy and my freedom for the likes of them.
Screw that!
Just my opinion of course.
Well, this is an age old argument about "what is coding"... But I still disagree with notion of good non-coding design eliminating (or even seriously lessening) need for good code-level architecture and design.
I don't believe in having a few barely literate programmers writing out stupid code based on smart design. If that is possible, then the design work has already been programming, to large degree. And if so, programmers have all but entered the source code to computer. The only stupid component required here is the compiler (compiler plus other tools that help people do their job, that is).
In large projects, huge amounts of time are spent on requirements and design phases (I should know, working for a largish company). Most of that stuff is required, yet it doesn't even touch implementation. Business requirements, business logics, some high-level architectural questions, all are necessary prerequisites... After which implementation phase starts, consisting of more low-level design etc, including actual 'physical' implementation, programming.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I certainly agree in that there are varying levels of (technical) expertise. Saying all programmers are highly skilled craftsmen is as wrong as saying they are all just disposable code serfs.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
We already have a global ID card. Ever check out the screens behind those booths at the INS checkin points when you present your passport?
We already have a global ID card only it's not mandatory if you never leave the CONUS- it's called your passport.
Comments like "it's already been done" remind me of the politician in the 19th century who wanted to close the patent office because "everything worthwhile has already been invented" or words to that effect. Just because *you* can't think of anything new doesn't mean there *can't be* anything new.