Reading more is always nice, but I've been living this issue in practice for three or four decades. I was even hanging around CMU when Mach was just getting started (and even made some suggestions for it back then after one presentation someone made on it). Again, QNX and L4 are microkernels that power over a billion devices. Trotting out difficulties with Hurd to justify saying all microkernels are bad is a bit like me saying that some the failure of the Chandler project proves no database or PIM or information management could be useful... It doesn't prove much; it mostly only proves that Chandler project was not well managed (which could included being over-ambitious relative to the resources available or guessing wrong about who to hire or who to partner with etc.). Still, it is also true the "software is hard": http://gamearchitect.net/Artic...
The social networking effect drives many "successes" like Windows, Linux, Facebook, PHP, JavaScript, and so on that may have little connection with technical merit. Sure, once you get a huge social network, then you have thousands of people, say, trying to make PHP suck less, and eventually, yes, PHP is not that bad. I'm moving much of my work to JavaScript (following the lead of Dan Ingalls, co-inventor of Smalltalk) even though I know JavaScript reinvents several wheels badly (default globals? WTF!). This is because JavaScript has easy *installibility* due to the social network effect, and also has a growing range of libraries and now other tools like emscriptem and ASM.js. However, I know that these are tools and systems that would have been totally unneeded if we had just had a decent popular cross-platform message-passing VM to build on like the one ParcPlace made for VisualWorks Smalltalk in the 1980s! IBM also had solid multi-architecture VMs, and aside from Forth, pretty much invented or at least ran with that idea. Instead we have a tower of crazy stacks -- and it is hard to be more inefficient in CPU use and programmer/support time than that. One slashdot post a few weeks ago (discussing Docker?) had a great plausible stack I'm too lazy to try to find again -- but its often layers on layers like Hypervisor, Linux, VMWare, Linux, Docker, Apache, PHP (server side) / JavaScript (client side)... And what that all is trying to solve is pretty much just not having a decent VM or microkernel in use to reduce the need for so many layers in the first place. Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, you could put a floppy with QNX in two PCs and almost immediately start using resources across the network as easily as if they were on your local machine. Thirty years ago!!! And yet people are still struggling with the next incarnation of some sort of ad-hoc data transfer system built on top of JavaScript and PHP (on top of layers and layers of other stuff). Of course, even big proprietary enterprises can get stuck this way -- I recall in the 1990s reading about how Microsoft alone had like a dozen different virtual machines within its Office product suite due to the legacy of how it was created (all that on top of Windows).
The bottom line if priorities and values. You make some hand-waving references to issues with microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, without being specific about what they are. If you value stability, reliability, modularity, run-time flexibility, and such, you'll pick a microkernel in general (all other things being equal). If you value shared-memory performance and (currently) community etc., you'll pick a monolithic kernel like Linux or FreeBSD. There are gray areas, like do you get more security through simplicity or through community? QNX is also proprietary, as was Minix early on, so another factor in considering them as far as priorities, although the latest version of Minx and L4 are truly open source.
It also depends what kind of hardware you are planning for. On multi-core systems without shared memory (most newer designs as shared generally memory stops working well b
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... "Skin absorption is a route by which substances can enter the body through the skin. Along with inhalation, ingestion and injection, dermal absorption is a route of exposure for toxic substances and route of administration for medication. Absorption of substances through the skin depends on a number of factors, the most important of which are concentration, duration of contact, *solubility of medication*, and physical condition of the skin and part of the body exposed.
Skin (percutaneous, dermal) absorption is a term that describes the transport of chemicals from the outer surface of the skin both into the skin and into the systemic circulation. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the skin was thought to be completely inert and impermeable to chemicals that might otherwise enter the body, however we now know many chemicals can get through the skin. Skin absorption relates to the degree of exposure to and possible effect of a substance which may enter the body through the skin. Human skin comes into contact with many agents intentionally and unintentionally. Skin absorption can occur from occupational, environmental, or consumer skin exposure to chemicals, cosmetics, or pharmaceutical products. Some chemicals can be absorbed in enough quantity to cause detrimental systemic effects. Skin disease (dermatitis) is considered one of the most common occupational diseases.[1] In order to assess if a chemical can be a risk of either causing dermatitis or other more systemeic effects and how that risk may be reduced one must know the extent to which it is absorbed, thus dermal exposure is a key aspect of human health risk assessment."
Te precautionary principle suggests that the burden of proof should not be to prove things are dangerous when they plausibly could be (like chemicals on skin). The burden of proof should be to show they are safe, or at least worth the risks and costs. I have pointed out the plausibility that these chemicals could be getting in through the skin and affecting the infant brain; that does not prove anything of course. It;s just a plausible idea...
Dr. Hyman's theory (and anecdote) is that many cases of autistic behavior are probably from a combination of environmental toxic challenges (mentioning heavy metals in vaccines, but only as one of many issues and sources) and/or deficiencies that can in some cases be unraveled (and he presents an anecdote on this, including a reversal). Still, as the vitamin D hypothesis suggests, there are changes that happens in the developing brain in utero if the pregnant mother is vitamin D deficient, and those structural changes likely can't be completely fixed. Since our modern lifestyle is so indoors-oriented compared to 50 years ago, and we eat so many things we never did before with artificial ingredients and refined grains and eat less vegetables, it is not a surprise that might cause health issues -- especially if the RDA is too low for vitamin D or other key nutrients.
Vitamin D deficiency is a complex topic, made even harder to discuss because skin color relative to geographical latitude is an aspect of it. The best single example of vitamin D deficiency causing autism-like behaviors may be probably that of Somali women moving to the USA or the UK and remaining covered all the time in Western housing, compared to typical indigenous Somaila life either outdoors a lot or having housing with sun courts and such specifically for women (which US housing typically does not have, especially for poor immigrants). See also for more on various links http://www.environmentalhealth...
See also, emphasizing development during pregnancy, but probably with other confounding factors: http://sfari.org/news-and-opin... "Swedish migratio
See: http://linuxfr.org/nodes/88229... "LinuxFr.org : MINIX received a [Euro]2.5 million grant from the European Research Council. Does it mean MINIX is still geared more for academic purposes than for production in the real world?
Andrew Tanenbaum : No, not at all. The ERC very much wants the results to be commercialized. In fact, I just received a second ERC grant solely for the purposes of commercializing MINIX 3. We are going to port it to the ARM and do that starting in January."
Also from there, which disagrees with my comment on the license -- although I think Tanenbaum remains unable to admit the license issue there, if he could see it, which maybe he can't, even if the rest may show why the BSDs lost momentum to Linux: "LinuxFr.org : If you could return in the past to change the MINIX original proprietary licence to the GPL licence, do you think your system might have become the dominant free OS today?
Andrew Tanenbaum : Never. The reason MINIX 3 didn't dominate the world has to do with one mistake I made about 1992. At that time I thought BSD was going to take over the world. It was a mature and stable system. I didn't see any point in competing with it, so I focused MINIX on education. Four of the BSD guys had just formed a company to sell BSD commercially. They even had a nice phone number: 1-800-ITS-UNIX. That phone number did them and me in. AT&T sued them over the phone number and the lawsuit took 3 years to settle. That was precisely the period Linux was launched and BSD was frozen due to the lawsuit. By the time it was settled, Linux had taken off. My mistake was not to realize the lawsuit would take so long and cripple BSD. If AT&T had not brought suit (or better yet, bought BSDI), Linux would never have become popular at all and BSD would dominate the world.
Now as we are starting to go commercial, we are realizing the value of the BSD license. Many companies refuse to make major investments in modifying Linux to suit their needs if they have to give the code to their competitors. We think that the BSD license alone will be a great help to us, as well as the small size, reliability, and modularity."
Also from there: "LinuxFr.org : Why porting the userland utilities from NetBSD? Is the goal to become a BSD-like system?
Andrew Tanenbaum : We think NetBSD is a mature stable system. Linux is not nearly as well written and is changing all the time. NetBSD has something like 8000 packages. That is enough for us."
Seems like another vote for BSD.:-)
BTW, maybe GNU Hurd has not gone that far for whatever reasons, but, QNX is a very successful example of a microkernel OS (mostly in the embedded space). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q... "As a microkernel-based OS, QNX is based on the idea of running most of the operating system kernel in the form of a number of small tasks, known as servers. This differs from the more traditional monolithic kernel, in which the operating system kernel is a single very large program composed of a huge number of "parts" with special abilities. In the case of QNX, the use of a microkernel allows users (developers) to turn off any functionality they do not require without having to change the OS itself; instead, those servers will simply not run.
The system is quite small, with earlier versions fitting on a single floppy disk.[3]
QNX Neutrino (2001) has been ported to a number of platforms and now runs on practically any modern CPU that is used in the embedded market. This includes the PowerPC, x86 family, MIPS, SH-4, and the closely inter-related family of ARM, StrongARM and XScale CPUs."
L4 is also a success according to the Tanenbaum and the LinuxFr article: "LinuxFr.org : The two most famous microkernels nowadays are MINIX and L4. What are the differences between these two systems?
http://www.rebellesociety.com/... http://www.wildcrafted.com.au/... http://www.optimumhealthnatura... "Putting chemicals on your skin is actually far worse than ingesting them. During the process of eating, the enzymes in your saliva and stomach help break these chemicals down and flush them out of your body. But when you slather these chemical concoctions onto your skin, they are deposited directly in your internal organs and body fat. And unlike things ingested orally, there is no "gate keeping" liver there to protect you from these chemicals entering into your body through your skin."
That's a rule of thumb, obviously -- everything has its limits...
Makes me wonder though if there could be any link between disposable diaper chemicals absorbed through the skin and autism or other early childhood issues?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking."
I've written before on how the monolithic Linux kernel design may be significantly increasing Linus' stress as a kernel manager (as the Kernel moves closer to some point of collapse or major security breach from complexity -- of which the systemd controversy is a big symptom). https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
But I don't see everyone migrating to Minix 3...:-) Or something else.
Tanenbaum's early choice of proprietary license for Minix will go down in history of one of the biggest licensing mistakes of all time -- even if it is free now, and recently had millions of euros of public funds poured into it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... http://www.minix3.org/
But had we all moved to Minix, we would probably not be hearing that much swearing by Andrew Tanenbaum or other Minix kernel maintainers compared to Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel maintainers, as with so few core lines, there is not much to maintain in the Minix kernel, and so it is easier to test and debug. See: http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.ph... "Monolithic operating systems (e.g., Windows, Linux, BSD) have millions of lines of kernel code. There is no way so much code can ever be made correct. In contrast, MINIX 3 has about 4000 lines of executable kernel code. We believe this code can eventually be made fairly close to bug free."
I feel ultimately that difference is why Linus Torvalds is stressed enough that he spouts so much profanity at kernel maintainers when they make a mistake -- a fact he may never be able to admit?:-)
Anyway, some of this is cultural. By contrast to the USA, people in, say, the Netherlands are more forthright and less quick to take offense (another cultural aspect). In the USA, you never know how quickly your cutting comment might make an enemy (including, say, the above). Anyway Linus, I may disagree on monolithic vs. micro kernel design obviously, but kudos to you for going free early and often!!! And git is great!:-)
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities)."
Even just to cope with the implications of what Google is doing in AI... Still working on them, slowly...
My feeling is that our trajectory coming out of any AI singularity will have a lot to do with out moral and social trajectory going into one. So, we should do all we can now to make the world a better place for everyone, to hopefully improve that outcome.
I used to do AI in the 1980s, with my undergrad work at Princeton related to the Pointrel system maybe helping a bit to inspire Wordnet (started by my undergrad advisor as I was graduating), and (accidentally) making probably the world's first simulation of self-replicating cannibalistic robots... But in hanging around CMU's Robotics Institute in the mid 1980s, I got the disturbing feeling that it might be too easy to make "Mind Children" good enough to destroy us humans, but not good enough to "replace" us. After all, an aggressive enough self-replicating robotic cockroach could probably do in the human species, and that does not take much intelligence. As I said at a talk I gave at a conference on AI and Simulation, it is very easy to make AI and robots that are destructive (as I learned unexpectedly from my own simulations); it is much harder to make robots that are cooperative (either with each other or humans). Someone from DARPA literally patted me on the back after that talk and said "keep up the good work" -- which gave me a lot of pause, but I'm not sure which aspect he emphasized (the destructive or constructive). But that sort-of cemented my feelings, and I have not worked much on "AI" since (in an independent AI sense; one might argue any knowledge management stuff has a flavor of AI, including my Pointrel system work).
Still, as with any arms race, and that is what the current push to AI has become, and arms race whether in commercial or military terms, it can be hard to figure out some way out of it before total destruction. So, better sensemaking tools might help with that. There are other problems we wrestle with as well that they could help with, like human health issues. Such tools, as they get smarter, will hopefully be designed as cooperative platforms, for each interaction between the machine and a person, and between people, and between machines. http://www.shareintl.org/archi... "These words written [praising competition] by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition. Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."
Good point on theft & fraud etc. as another cost. Insurance is another one, which is only tangentially related to "work".
I am in presumably general agreement with you that markets can be a force for good under certain circumstances; the issue is more what those circumstances are? Related: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa... "But changing the left's key message probably will be even more difficult. It involves nothing less than facing the fact that non-market planning (which is what is usually meant by the term "socialism") does not work."
I might not go that far, given high tech possibilities of gift economies via the WWW, subsistence production via 3D printing, and internet-mediated democratic planning, but there remains truth to that sentiment that markets are what have created so much material wealth by hearing the demands of people with currency to spend in markets (the big problem being such currency is less and less evenly distributed for various reasons).
As regarding land sales and the cost of products as far as labor vs. other costs, even if control of land changes hands based on money changing hands (where some of that money was "earned"), there is still rent seeking going on for all the owners. And likely as not, the original land owner will now be doing rent seeking on the financial capital instead of the land. The fact that people speculate about the value of the land or acquire it in whatever way by conquest or purchase does not change the fact that the land was originally privatized arbitrarily and whoever claims it currently is engaging in rent seeking (unless perhaps they are using it for subsistence production). The land itself was available without initial work, even if it may take work to use the land in various ways. We must be careful to distinguish between real physical assets, real physical work, political control of resources, and virtual fiat financial assets when doing this sort of analysis. The bottom line -- rent seeking is not "work" in a normal sense and should be accounted for differently when talking about whether all costs ultimately come down to labor costs.
As another twist on this, imagine a new government (like in Cuba?) takes the land from the latest purchaser by eminent domain or some form of nationalization and then makes it available for low or no cost to some preferred business, like a big farm. Does that now mean the land is worthless? To me, the land retains it utility value in such a situation; it is just that the "rents" from the land now go to some different people. Granted, a lot of people may be pissed off by such a change (some in the USA still hold a grudge against Cuba for 50 years). Of course, one may also talk about the feelings of Native Americans who were generally displaced under duress or questionable circumstances, with treaties broken, and so on.
BTW, even the physical bedrock of US capitalism, Manhattan, was acquired in questionable trades with a neighboring Canarsie tribe who probably thought it a great joke to accept some beads (essential information storage devices back then for use in Wampum belts, equivalent to USB Flash drives now) and metal hatchets and such from strangers in return for saying the strangers could hunt (or whatever) on a neighboring tribe's land. Which brings us back to your insightful comment on increased costs from fraud etc..:-)
Consider, say, Georgism for another perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... "Georgism (also known as geoism and geonomics) is an economic philosophy holding that the economic value derived from natural resources and natural opportunities should belong equally to all residents of a community, but that people own the value they create.[1][2][3] The Georgist paradigm offers solutions to social and ecological problems, relying on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate ec
Yeah, sad for me too. When I was a kid, in the late 1970s, with an interest in robotics and computers., my father and I would visit Radio Shacks to get various parts for my projects. Often he would drop me off at one specific one while he shopped around the mall, and I'd look at all the parts, and maybe type in some simple BASIC programs on a TRS-80. Usually when he came back he would pay for one or two small items of parts, like some LEDs or optoisolators or a pack of eight simple ICs (half of which often did not work well) or a relay or something like that. People in Radio Shacks on Long Island seemed to used to recognize us as a pair, perhaps in part because my dad was old enough to be my grandfather. On my website front page is a picture of of the robots I made that included Radio Shack parts (mostly for the interface between a Commodore PET and the robot motors, which included optoisolators and relays -- the RS relays sometimes stuck and smoked and I had to whack the relay box to fix it.:-). I miss those days in many ways, especially now that my father is gone. Thanks Dad!
I learned much about electronics from various cheap electronics guides there, and much about the fundamentals of programming from Dr. David A. Lien's "Users' Manual for Level 1 TRS-80 Micro Computer System" which had various exercises in it. I did not have a TRS-80 at home, but I would work out the exercises with pencil and paper. I just picked up that manual from my bookshelves as I wrote this to check the author's name. Thanks Dr. Lien!
Looking up his name just now on the WWW, I see this interesting tidbit about a free and open source connection to my learning back then I was not aware of until now: http://www.trs-80.org/level-1-... "Level I BASIC was based on âoePalo Alto Tiny BASICâ, a 2K version of Tiny BASIC written by Dr. Li-Chen Wang for the May 1976 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. Because Dr. Li Chen-Wang placed his BASIC in the public domain (he labeled it "@COPYLEFT; ALL WRONGS RESERVED"), Steve Leininger, the designer of the TRS-80, was able to use it as a starting point. He added floating point math, cassette, keyboard, and video routines, doubling the size of the original code to 4K."
Anyway, makes me want to run out to a Radio Shack with my kid right now to buy something! Although it's also true I later learned I could buy higher quality parts for less elsewhere. Even now I could get a better Raspberry Pi on Amazon then what Radio Shack lists for more money on their website. And one trip to a store pushed by a father out of nostalgia is not the same as many trips to a store pushed by a kid.
Going to Radio Shacks years later was such a different experience, with the focus on selling cell phones and such. That did seem to be changing back to more educational DIY recently though. You would think Radio Shack would somehow have floated high on the maker movement, but apparently not, sadly. This also reminds me a bit of the "Sears" issue. Sears, given the history of the Sears catalog, should have dominated online sales the way Amazon ultimately did. But Sears somehow could not make the transition. It's so expensive to keep up a store front of course, so the price difference is understandable. It would take something else to make them a compelling destination, like a bigger emphasis on hands-on demos or training or starting MakerSpaces next door or something like that. Or maybe unique starter its with more stuff in them, even if they cost more.
I hope even in bankruptcy that Radio Shack retiree pensions are still paid out!
How workable could it be as a general desktop at this point, like to read email and browse the web? And do some development whether with Eclipse or something else, for C, Java, and JavaScript)?
Does Node.js work on it yet? http://stackoverflow.com/quest... "Thanks! I did try getting NodeJS to work in Minix3 but it simply did not work, worked with a couple of guys and there are too many unresolved dependencies and its just a pain... I will try other microkernels and see if I have better luck. Thanks for your reply! -- Purefan Sep 15 '11 at 8:11"
Personally, it seems to me we could have a much simpler OS than something UNIX-y based around Forth and Smalltalk somehow... There seems a lot of clutter and inconsistency of naming things in the UNIX world with various abbreviations (especially including command-line programs and their arguments). But perhaps something like Minix as a microkernel could still form a core for that...
Alan Kay's FONC project was a hopeful step in that direction, but I'm not sure it has really delivered more than some interesting experiments? http://vpri.org/mailman/listin...
But Alan Kay's heart is in the right place, regardless of recent outcomes. It would have been fun to work with him and maybe become the next Dan Ingalls!:-) http://www.drdobbs.com/article... "Kay: Yeah. You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101.
Binstock: How so?
Kay: I mean, look at it: The job of an operating system is to run arbitrary code safely. It's not there to tell you what kind of code you can run. Most operating systems have way too many features. The nice thing about UNIX when it was first done is not just that there were only 20 system commands, but the kernel was only about 1,000 lines of code. This is true of Linux also.
Binstock: Yes.
Kay: One of the ways of looking at it is the reason that WYSIWYG is slowly showing up in the browser is that it's a better way of interacting with the computer than the way they first did it. So of course they're going to reinvent it. I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward. If they reinvented what Engelbart, did we'd be way ahead of where we are now. "
People who claim ownership of the natural resources (including land underneath buildings) or of financial assets used to capitalize businesses may never have done any more work than cozy up to some King hundreds of years ago to get a "grant" of land, or, alternatively, (legally?) bribe some politician to get special monopoly or tax preferences, or something similar. Those "rents" can form a substantial part of many costs, and have little to do with "labor". Just think "feudalism" and "serfs" for an analogy, where feudal lords (who often provide nothing but protection against the feudal lord himself) taking much of the harvest from "their" lands for themselves despite however much work the "serfs" put in.
Also, even when up-front costs to consumers may be lower with cheaper labor (domestic or foreign), there are also social costs (like violence, failed families, welfare costs, etc.) such as shown by so many people who work at Walmart getting food stamps etc.. So, there can be a lot of indirect costs to "cheap labor" that are paid in indirect ways like higher taxes or greater fears of violence and so on.
Another example of externalities as indirect costs is low price for gasoline at the pump may ignore the huge taxes and debt obligations incurred to support a huge USA war machine which (in theory) defends long oil supply lines, and it also may ignore costs like polluted ground water from MTBE, or the health and crime crises caused by lead in gasoline in previous decades. It is possible the the cost of leaded gas may be (in my estimate) many trillions and trillions of dollars, which people never paid at the pump but paid in their personal lives and in taxes to pay for prisons and police: http://www.motherjones.com/env... "New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. "
Rent-seeking and externalities are reasons why markets need to be regulated by governments. There are other issues too, like ignored or under-appreciated systemic risks. On that, see Alan Greenspan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10... "âoeThose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholdersâ(TM) equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,â he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform."
See also a book by a founder of MasterCard which even included a section on the importance of "open books [for accounting]" that can be inspected by all employees and customers: "Honest Business" By Michael Phillips http://www.amazon.com/Honest-B... "An inspirational guide to ethical business practice explains how to create and manage a small business that emphasizes openness, personal integrity, and community involvement as the keys to success."
That said, I have a lot of respect for Bruce Schneier, especially for writing stuff like this: "The War on the Unexpected" https://www.schneier.com/blog/... "We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats...."
"I think you know we now live in a world where you can make a fairly benign statement and their exists a very real possibility someone with an axe to grind may strip it of its context and use it against you. "
Nothing new; see Cardinal De Richelieu (1585 -- 1642): "Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows."
As a socially-minded countess who lived through WWII told me once somewhat tounge-in-cheek yet also very seriously (paraphrasing, and she probably got it from elsewhere in those times): "If you think, don't talk; If you talk, don't write; If you write, don't publish; If you publish, don't sign."
So, again, this is not a new issue. That is one reason for the protections in the US constitution against "fishing expeditions" in people's lives. "Selective enforcement" of the law or "selective scrutiny" of political adversaries is a corrosive thing in a democracy.
But the problem is, in order to make social change on a broad scale, such as Martin Luther King was involved with regarding civil rights, is that you have to think, talk, write, publish, and sign. And as I've said before, that is the problem with an emphasis on security through "encryption" as opposed to community if you are interested in social change, because in order to make social change you need to spread a message generally in a very public and committed way. Related comments by me: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Wow, she was also an aunt of my father! Small world!:-) I think we might have commented on slashdot on that coincidence a few years back? But you'd have to be pretty old if she was your aunt, as opposed to, like me, a great aunt? I met her once with my father when she was still in her own home, and maybe incidentally another time or two perhaps (decades ago).
Glad that "open sourcing" runs in the family.:-) Although I might feel differently about open sourcing my body or DNA than open sourcing some software I've written.:-) Still, it is kind of a mental calculation of the risk that personal DNA sequences could be used against one or one's family somehow versus the benefits of medical breakthroughs for your own family and also everyone, and also that DNA is not that hard to get via copies of medical samples or from trash or whatever...
I've put some links in other replies to ideas about health sensemaking to help everyone live longer and healthier lives. https://www.newschallenge.org/...
And while I was born and raised in the USA, maybe it shows some Dutch roots that I believe we can make more "land" for a growing population by reclaiming it from "space" in addition to the sea. Of course, with falling birth rated in industrialized countries, long term population growth does not seem to be one of our problems/blessings, even if many people start living a lot longer. http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Health may be also be partially a function of what you do relative to your genes and environment, so her preferences, say, for orange juice and herring might have worked better for herself than for others in different situations. For health commonalities, one can read about "Blue Zones" and also I like Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work overall emphasizing eating more vegetables (but quibble about some parts). http://www.bluezones.com/ http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Attitude and "morale" is also a surprisingly big part, for many reasons including because it affects your connectedness to your community from which other good things flow. Probably easier to have higher morale in the Netherlands than in a much crazier place like the USA though.:-)
Contrast: http://www.findingdutchland.co... "According to Unicef's most recent Child Well Being in Rich Countries survey, Dutch kids ranked as the happiest kids in the world. Dutch kids led the way in three out of the five categories, namely- material well being, educational well being, and behavior and risks."
With: https://www.adbusters.org/maga... ""The reason our children's lives [in the UK] are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
Anyway, we're all not going to live that long unless we sort out some of the wealth inequality and distribution issues given the spread of AI, robotics, and other automation that makes most human labor less and less valuable economically. The following may sound silly in the Netherlands or other parts of Western Europe, but it sound all too plausible in the USA given current politics: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"But that's stupid." I said, "What possible justification is there for a whole population of people to be living on welfare or t
So, plenty of room for at least another 1000 years of exponential growth. After that, it's someone else's problem, and there are more minds to think of solutions (like tapping zero point energy to create energy and matter in the void of space, creating new dimensions, etc.).
More ideas here in my proposal on health sensemaking: https://www.newschallenge.org/... "We want to improve public health through free and open source public intelligence tools for individual and collective sensemaking about health topics -- especially related to nutrition and lifestyle choices."
Wish some billionaires wold fund that.:-)
Good fats are important for health and good brain function as your brain is mostly fat ("fat makes you fat" is BS; it's more that refined carbs and sugars makes you fat). Good sleep is important. Having a sense of autonomy, master, and purpose is important (see Dan Pink's work). "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us " https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We need you as one more person out there doing good stuff!:-) Sure, maybe your "best" years are behind you, I can feel that at my age too, but "the woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best", and there can be a lot of important things still worth doing, even if not quite so well as when we were younger. Plus older people tend to have some advantages, like oftentimes more perspective and patience.
http://greentransportation.inf... "Shows a picture from Nissan's tour of the Nissan LEAF where Nissan claims it takes 7 kilowatt-hours to refine a gallon of gasoline. Nissan says that same 7.5 KWH can drive the LEAF 30 miles."
Natural gas is also used in some refining of gasoline from oil..
So basically, the oil pumped from the ground in Middle East and transported via huge oil tanker ships is essentially in effect just used as a carrier of the electricity which was used to refine gasoline for internal combustion engines... So much US defense expenses (100s billion US$ annually), so much pollution, so many lost lives -- all essentially to use oil as a crappy battery for cars? Glad things are getting better.
Parts also become unavailable. We just had to replace an entire LG washer (about five or so years old) because could not get a new mainboard that had burned out.
Yeah, I remember the hype back then. I used a Hitachi/GE A4 robot with bubble memory in the 1980s, and like you, I waited for bubble memory to go widespread, but it just seemed to fade away. According to this article, it seems like bubble memory found more industrial & military applications than consumer ones because of the price and power issues: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/wha...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.... Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone...."
Beyond the point on AIs, as the Nazi concentration camps or any of dozens of other example show, social bureaucracies made of people are also good at exterminating humans systematically. More by me on such themes from 2000 (although, I now see more options than what I outlined there), including about how corporations are already essentially a form of machine intelligence, just with humans a component parts to a larger whole: "[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?" http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
How do we reign in destructive "artificial person" corporations? And how do we ensure everyone shares in the wealth produced by the organizations that monopolize so much of the Earth's resources? If we can't do that, is there much hope to reign in destructive AIs?
Still, when we talk about "genetic programming", one could argue humans are also programmed to cooperate with other humans, so the issue is more complex than what you outline. But in general, many of the issues we face in the 21st century come out of a scarcity-oriented mindset empowered by the tools of abundance. There are plenty of solutions -- improved subsistence tools (solar panels, 3D printing, personal agricultural robots), a basic income, more gift giving via free and open source software and content, better participatory government planning via the internet, and so on... But will we pursue them fast enough?
Robert Steele (ex-CIA) called this video by Michel Bauwens the most useful one he has seen in a decade; it is a video showing the great progress we have made as a culture moving from open values to open charters to open infrastructure to open organizations to open social processes to an open consciousness and so on... http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... https://lists.ourproject.org/p...
BTW, on your user name (LinuxIsGarbage), I resisted using Linux for years, because I knew better things were possible (like QNX and its microkernel for internals, or any software a more systematic approach to naming commands and command options as far as command line utilities). Ultimately though, those two factors will likely lead to its replacement -- although perhaps the result will still be called "Linux", just with a very different shell and a very different kernel.:-)
I feel one reason Linus Torvalds has gotten, and needed to get, such a reputation for profanity and being an effective gatekeeper hardass for software quality is because of a fundamental weaknesses in monolithic kernel design relative to a dynamic community with a variety of ever changing needs. I've written before on that is a couple Slashdot comments, such as in a story about the last time he chewed out a kernel developer bigtime. https://www.mail-archive.com/f... http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I had hoped for something much better -- even perhaps something modular based on Forth or Smalltalk/Squeak! But for whatever reason Linux got the social momentum behind it, so I started using it too hoping it would improve over time (and it has). I started trying it around 2000 or so as toe dipping, and then used it as my main desktop (Debian) around 2003 or so until ditching it for OS X as a desktop around 2008 or so (getting tired of so much breakage with every upgrade, plus wanting some Mac-specific scanner OCR software). I still use Linux for servers and such, but my main web server (maintained by someone else) is a BSD variant, which I consider somewhat more secure/reliable. I'm thinking about going back to Linux given Apple's dropoff in quality with later OS upgrades (I'm still lagging a few versions, but know that can't last without patches etc..).
But as with the theme of the original article, the fact that QNX, Forth, or Smalltalk (or others, Symbolics Lisp Machine?) was there first in some key ways as far as making for good interactive experiences has apparently been mostly forgotten.
The key point I make is that climate change, whatever the cause, is an issue about social equity and likely unaccounted for externalities. We have enough resources as a global society to make the planet work for everyone in a good way -- including those affected by rising sea levels or changes in weather patterns. Whether we choose to use those resources (or make more) to do so (including, say, via a global basic income) is a political choice. In other areas these political decisions are made all the time, like compensating people and communities dislocated when a highway or dam goes in. Personally, give the rise of solar power and also the likely rise of hot or cold fusion soon, the political and emotional capital being spent on arguing about cutting back carbon emissions seems a waste. While fossil fuels have all sorts of negatives including mercury pollution for coal, and for that reason it could make sense to tax them and redistribute the tax revenue to all as a basic income for all to discourage their use, I'd rather see this much emotion and political energy go into positives like solar research or fusion research or also energy efficiency. Indoor climate-controlled agriculture and related agricultural robotics is another big trend we could invest more in to ensure our food supply security regardless of the weather.
Or as Kurzweil said in 2011: "Futurist Ray Kurzweil isn't worried about climate change" http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-t... "Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly -- we are only a few years away from parity. And then it's going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don't care at all about the environment, because of the economics.
So right now it's at half a percent of the world's energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it's only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world's energy needs. So that's 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we'll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.
People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight."
For my own situation (nearsighted, just a bit older), I asked about bifocals, and my eye doctor recommended a not very tall lens so I could look below it (outside the lens) to get a "bifocal" effect in that sense. That is the approach he uses for himself. So, for reading stuff close, I'm not looking through the distance-optimized lens, but I don't have to take off the glasses to see things close up because there is room to look below them, where you generally hold stuff to read anyway. I had such a pair made a Zenni Optical (cheap), and they work well in that sense. So, depending on your exact situation and prescription, you might ask about that option. If you go with someplace like Zenni, be sure to ask your eye doctor for your inter-pupal distance (although you can try to figure it out yourself, but maybe less accurately).
I also asked for a second prescription optimized for the distance to screens I use with my treadmill workstation, which is a somewhat weaker prescription (about half). Those lenses are taller because they need to cover a wider area, and I don't need to look that close when I'm working with that setup (now that I can touch type). Again, I've been pretty happy with them for that situation. Note that the distance I asked for is different (further) than a normal computer glasses prescription, which is generally for a laptop or monitor that is closer to you when sitting at a desk than displays are for a treadmill desk.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading more is always nice, but I've been living this issue in practice for three or four decades. I was even hanging around CMU when Mach was just getting started (and even made some suggestions for it back then after one presentation someone made on it). Again, QNX and L4 are microkernels that power over a billion devices. Trotting out difficulties with Hurd to justify saying all microkernels are bad is a bit like me saying that some the failure of the Chandler project proves no database or PIM or information management could be useful... It doesn't prove much; it mostly only proves that Chandler project was not well managed (which could included being over-ambitious relative to the resources available or guessing wrong about who to hire or who to partner with etc.). Still, it is also true the "software is hard":
http://gamearchitect.net/Artic...
The social networking effect drives many "successes" like Windows, Linux, Facebook, PHP, JavaScript, and so on that may have little connection with technical merit. Sure, once you get a huge social network, then you have thousands of people, say, trying to make PHP suck less, and eventually, yes, PHP is not that bad. I'm moving much of my work to JavaScript (following the lead of Dan Ingalls, co-inventor of Smalltalk) even though I know JavaScript reinvents several wheels badly (default globals? WTF!). This is because JavaScript has easy *installibility* due to the social network effect, and also has a growing range of libraries and now other tools like emscriptem and ASM.js. However, I know that these are tools and systems that would have been totally unneeded if we had just had a decent popular cross-platform message-passing VM to build on like the one ParcPlace made for VisualWorks Smalltalk in the 1980s! IBM also had solid multi-architecture VMs, and aside from Forth, pretty much invented or at least ran with that idea. Instead we have a tower of crazy stacks -- and it is hard to be more inefficient in CPU use and programmer/support time than that. One slashdot post a few weeks ago (discussing Docker?) had a great plausible stack I'm too lazy to try to find again -- but its often layers on layers like Hypervisor, Linux, VMWare, Linux, Docker, Apache, PHP (server side) / JavaScript (client side)... And what that all is trying to solve is pretty much just not having a decent VM or microkernel in use to reduce the need for so many layers in the first place. Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, you could put a floppy with QNX in two PCs and almost immediately start using resources across the network as easily as if they were on your local machine. Thirty years ago!!! And yet people are still struggling with the next incarnation of some sort of ad-hoc data transfer system built on top of JavaScript and PHP (on top of layers and layers of other stuff). Of course, even big proprietary enterprises can get stuck this way -- I recall in the 1990s reading about how Microsoft alone had like a dozen different virtual machines within its Office product suite due to the legacy of how it was created (all that on top of Windows).
The bottom line if priorities and values. You make some hand-waving references to issues with microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, without being specific about what they are. If you value stability, reliability, modularity, run-time flexibility, and such, you'll pick a microkernel in general (all other things being equal). If you value shared-memory performance and (currently) community etc., you'll pick a monolithic kernel like Linux or FreeBSD. There are gray areas, like do you get more security through simplicity or through community? QNX is also proprietary, as was Minix early on, so another factor in considering them as far as priorities, although the latest version of Minx and L4 are truly open source.
It also depends what kind of hardware you are planning for. On multi-core systems without shared memory (most newer designs as shared generally memory stops working well b
AC wrote: "Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these :)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Skin absorption is a route by which substances can enter the body through the skin. Along with inhalation, ingestion and injection, dermal absorption is a route of exposure for toxic substances and route of administration for medication. Absorption of substances through the skin depends on a number of factors, the most important of which are concentration, duration of contact, *solubility of medication*, and physical condition of the skin and part of the body exposed.
Skin (percutaneous, dermal) absorption is a term that describes the transport of chemicals from the outer surface of the skin both into the skin and into the systemic circulation. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the skin was thought to be completely inert and impermeable to chemicals that might otherwise enter the body, however we now know many chemicals can get through the skin. Skin absorption relates to the degree of exposure to and possible effect of a substance which may enter the body through the skin. Human skin comes into contact with many agents intentionally and unintentionally. Skin absorption can occur from occupational, environmental, or consumer skin exposure to chemicals, cosmetics, or pharmaceutical products. Some chemicals can be absorbed in enough quantity to cause detrimental systemic effects. Skin disease (dermatitis) is considered one of the most common occupational diseases.[1] In order to assess if a chemical can be a risk of either causing dermatitis or other more systemeic effects and how that risk may be reduced one must know the extent to which it is absorbed, thus dermal exposure is a key aspect of human health risk assessment."
Te precautionary principle suggests that the burden of proof should not be to prove things are dangerous when they plausibly could be (like chemicals on skin). The burden of proof should be to show they are safe, or at least worth the risks and costs. I have pointed out the plausibility that these chemicals could be getting in through the skin and affecting the infant brain; that does not prove anything of course. It;s just a plausible idea...
Dr. Hyman's theory (and anecdote) is that many cases of autistic behavior are probably from a combination of environmental toxic challenges (mentioning heavy metals in vaccines, but only as one of many issues and sources) and/or deficiencies that can in some cases be unraveled (and he presents an anecdote on this, including a reversal). Still, as the vitamin D hypothesis suggests, there are changes that happens in the developing brain in utero if the pregnant mother is vitamin D deficient, and those structural changes likely can't be completely fixed. Since our modern lifestyle is so indoors-oriented compared to 50 years ago, and we eat so many things we never did before with artificial ingredients and refined grains and eat less vegetables, it is not a surprise that might cause health issues -- especially if the RDA is too low for vitamin D or other key nutrients.
Vitamin D deficiency is a complex topic, made even harder to discuss because skin color relative to geographical latitude is an aspect of it. The best single example of vitamin D deficiency causing autism-like behaviors may be probably that of Somali women moving to the USA or the UK and remaining covered all the time in Western housing, compared to typical indigenous Somaila life either outdoors a lot or having housing with sun courts and such specifically for women (which US housing typically does not have, especially for poor immigrants). See also for more on various links
http://www.environmentalhealth...
See also, emphasizing development during pregnancy, but probably with other confounding factors:
http://sfari.org/news-and-opin...
"Swedish migratio
See: http://linuxfr.org/nodes/88229...
"LinuxFr.org : MINIX received a [Euro]2.5 million grant from the European Research Council. Does it mean MINIX is still geared more for academic purposes than for production in the real world?
Andrew Tanenbaum : No, not at all. The ERC very much wants the results to be commercialized. In fact, I just received a second ERC grant solely for the purposes of commercializing MINIX 3. We are going to port it to the ARM and do that starting in January."
Also from there, which disagrees with my comment on the license -- although I think Tanenbaum remains unable to admit the license issue there, if he could see it, which maybe he can't, even if the rest may show why the BSDs lost momentum to Linux:
"LinuxFr.org : If you could return in the past to change the MINIX original proprietary licence to the GPL licence, do you think your system might have become the dominant free OS today?
Andrew Tanenbaum : Never. The reason MINIX 3 didn't dominate the world has to do with one mistake I made about 1992. At that time I thought BSD was going to take over the world. It was a mature and stable system. I didn't see any point in competing with it, so I focused MINIX on education. Four of the BSD guys had just formed a company to sell BSD commercially. They even had a nice phone number: 1-800-ITS-UNIX. That phone number did them and me in. AT&T sued them over the phone number and the lawsuit took 3 years to settle. That was precisely the period Linux was launched and BSD was frozen due to the lawsuit. By the time it was settled, Linux had taken off. My mistake was not to realize the lawsuit would take so long and cripple BSD. If AT&T had not brought suit (or better yet, bought BSDI), Linux would never have become popular at all and BSD would dominate the world.
Now as we are starting to go commercial, we are realizing the value of the BSD license. Many companies refuse to make major investments in modifying Linux to suit their needs if they have to give the code to their competitors. We think that the BSD license alone will be a great help to us, as well as the small size, reliability, and modularity."
Also from there:
"LinuxFr.org : Why porting the userland utilities from NetBSD? Is the goal to become a BSD-like system?
Andrew Tanenbaum : We think NetBSD is a mature stable system. Linux is not nearly as well written and is changing all the time. NetBSD has something like 8000 packages. That is enough for us."
Seems like another vote for BSD. :-)
BTW, maybe GNU Hurd has not gone that far for whatever reasons, but, QNX is a very successful example of a microkernel OS (mostly in the embedded space).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q...
"As a microkernel-based OS, QNX is based on the idea of running most of the operating system kernel in the form of a number of small tasks, known as servers. This differs from the more traditional monolithic kernel, in which the operating system kernel is a single very large program composed of a huge number of "parts" with special abilities. In the case of QNX, the use of a microkernel allows users (developers) to turn off any functionality they do not require without having to change the OS itself; instead, those servers will simply not run.
The system is quite small, with earlier versions fitting on a single floppy disk.[3]
QNX Neutrino (2001) has been ported to a number of platforms and now runs on practically any modern CPU that is used in the embedded market. This includes the PowerPC, x86 family, MIPS, SH-4, and the closely inter-related family of ARM, StrongARM and XScale CPUs."
L4 is also a success according to the Tanenbaum and the LinuxFr article:
"LinuxFr.org : The two most famous microkernels nowadays are MINIX and L4. What are the differences between these two systems?
http://www.rebellesociety.com/...
http://www.wildcrafted.com.au/...
http://www.optimumhealthnatura...
"Putting chemicals on your skin is actually far worse than ingesting them. During the process of eating, the enzymes in your saliva and stomach help break these chemicals down and flush them out of your body. But when you slather these chemical concoctions onto your skin, they are deposited directly in your internal organs and body fat. And unlike things ingested orally, there is no "gate keeping" liver there to protect you from these chemicals entering into your body through your skin."
That's a rule of thumb, obviously -- everything has its limits...
Makes me wonder though if there could be any link between disposable diaper chemicals absorbed through the skin and autism or other early childhood issues?
Although, on autism specifically, see also:
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/0...
https://www.vitamindcouncil.or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking."
I've written before on how the monolithic Linux kernel design may be significantly increasing Linus' stress as a kernel manager (as the Kernel moves closer to some point of collapse or major security breach from complexity -- of which the systemd controversy is a big symptom).
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
But I don't see everyone migrating to Minix 3... :-) Or something else.
Tanenbaum's early choice of proprietary license for Minix will go down in history of one of the biggest licensing mistakes of all time -- even if it is free now, and recently had millions of euros of public funds poured into it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.minix3.org/
But had we all moved to Minix, we would probably not be hearing that much swearing by Andrew Tanenbaum or other Minix kernel maintainers compared to Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel maintainers, as with so few core lines, there is not much to maintain in the Minix kernel, and so it is easier to test and debug. See:
http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.ph...
"Monolithic operating systems (e.g., Windows, Linux, BSD) have millions of lines of kernel code. There is no way so much code can ever be made correct. In contrast, MINIX 3 has about 4000 lines of executable kernel code. We believe this code can eventually be made fairly close to bug free."
I feel ultimately that difference is why Linus Torvalds is stressed enough that he spouts so much profanity at kernel maintainers when they make a mistake -- a fact he may never be able to admit? :-)
Anyway, some of this is cultural. By contrast to the USA, people in, say, the Netherlands are more forthright and less quick to take offense (another cultural aspect). In the USA, you never know how quickly your cutting comment might make an enemy (including, say, the above). Anyway Linus, I may disagree on monolithic vs. micro kernel design obviously, but kudos to you for going free early and often!!! And git is great! :-)
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities)."
Even just to cope with the implications of what Google is doing in AI... Still working on them, slowly...
My feeling is that our trajectory coming out of any AI singularity will have a lot to do with out moral and social trajectory going into one. So, we should do all we can now to make the world a better place for everyone, to hopefully improve that outcome.
I used to do AI in the 1980s, with my undergrad work at Princeton related to the Pointrel system maybe helping a bit to inspire Wordnet (started by my undergrad advisor as I was graduating), and (accidentally) making probably the world's first simulation of self-replicating cannibalistic robots... But in hanging around CMU's Robotics Institute in the mid 1980s, I got the disturbing feeling that it might be too easy to make "Mind Children" good enough to destroy us humans, but not good enough to "replace" us. After all, an aggressive enough self-replicating robotic cockroach could probably do in the human species, and that does not take much intelligence. As I said at a talk I gave at a conference on AI and Simulation, it is very easy to make AI and robots that are destructive (as I learned unexpectedly from my own simulations); it is much harder to make robots that are cooperative (either with each other or humans). Someone from DARPA literally patted me on the back after that talk and said "keep up the good work" -- which gave me a lot of pause, but I'm not sure which aspect he emphasized (the destructive or constructive). But that sort-of cemented my feelings, and I have not worked much on "AI" since (in an independent AI sense; one might argue any knowledge management stuff has a flavor of AI, including my Pointrel system work).
Still, as with any arms race, and that is what the current push to AI has become, and arms race whether in commercial or military terms, it can be hard to figure out some way out of it before total destruction. So, better sensemaking tools might help with that. There are other problems we wrestle with as well that they could help with, like human health issues. Such tools, as they get smarter, will hopefully be designed as cooperative platforms, for each interaction between the machine and a person, and between people, and between machines.
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
"These words written [praising competition] by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition. Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."
In gen
Good point on theft & fraud etc. as another cost. Insurance is another one, which is only tangentially related to "work".
I am in presumably general agreement with you that markets can be a force for good under certain circumstances; the issue is more what those circumstances are? Related:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
"But changing the left's key message probably will be even more difficult. It involves nothing less than facing the fact that non-market planning (which is what is usually meant by the term "socialism") does not work."
I might not go that far, given high tech possibilities of gift economies via the WWW, subsistence production via 3D printing, and internet-mediated democratic planning, but there remains truth to that sentiment that markets are what have created so much material wealth by hearing the demands of people with currency to spend in markets (the big problem being such currency is less and less evenly distributed for various reasons).
As regarding land sales and the cost of products as far as labor vs. other costs, even if control of land changes hands based on money changing hands (where some of that money was "earned"), there is still rent seeking going on for all the owners. And likely as not, the original land owner will now be doing rent seeking on the financial capital instead of the land. The fact that people speculate about the value of the land or acquire it in whatever way by conquest or purchase does not change the fact that the land was originally privatized arbitrarily and whoever claims it currently is engaging in rent seeking (unless perhaps they are using it for subsistence production). The land itself was available without initial work, even if it may take work to use the land in various ways. We must be careful to distinguish between real physical assets, real physical work, political control of resources, and virtual fiat financial assets when doing this sort of analysis. The bottom line -- rent seeking is not "work" in a normal sense and should be accounted for differently when talking about whether all costs ultimately come down to labor costs.
As another twist on this, imagine a new government (like in Cuba?) takes the land from the latest purchaser by eminent domain or some form of nationalization and then makes it available for low or no cost to some preferred business, like a big farm. Does that now mean the land is worthless? To me, the land retains it utility value in such a situation; it is just that the "rents" from the land now go to some different people. Granted, a lot of people may be pissed off by such a change (some in the USA still hold a grudge against Cuba for 50 years). Of course, one may also talk about the feelings of Native Americans who were generally displaced under duress or questionable circumstances, with treaties broken, and so on.
BTW, even the physical bedrock of US capitalism, Manhattan, was acquired in questionable trades with a neighboring Canarsie tribe who probably thought it a great joke to accept some beads (essential information storage devices back then for use in Wampum belts, equivalent to USB Flash drives now) and metal hatchets and such from strangers in return for saying the strangers could hunt (or whatever) on a neighboring tribe's land. Which brings us back to your insightful comment on increased costs from fraud etc.. :-)
Consider, say, Georgism for another perspective:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"Georgism (also known as geoism and geonomics) is an economic philosophy holding that the economic value derived from natural resources and natural opportunities should belong equally to all residents of a community, but that people own the value they create.[1][2][3] The Georgist paradigm offers solutions to social and ecological problems, relying on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate ec
Yeah, sad for me too. When I was a kid, in the late 1970s, with an interest in robotics and computers., my father and I would visit Radio Shacks to get various parts for my projects. Often he would drop me off at one specific one while he shopped around the mall, and I'd look at all the parts, and maybe type in some simple BASIC programs on a TRS-80. Usually when he came back he would pay for one or two small items of parts, like some LEDs or optoisolators or a pack of eight simple ICs (half of which often did not work well) or a relay or something like that. People in Radio Shacks on Long Island seemed to used to recognize us as a pair, perhaps in part because my dad was old enough to be my grandfather. On my website front page is a picture of of the robots I made that included Radio Shack parts (mostly for the interface between a Commodore PET and the robot motors, which included optoisolators and relays -- the RS relays sometimes stuck and smoked and I had to whack the relay box to fix it. :-). I miss those days in many ways, especially now that my father is gone. Thanks Dad!
I learned much about electronics from various cheap electronics guides there, and much about the fundamentals of programming from Dr. David A. Lien's "Users' Manual for Level 1 TRS-80 Micro Computer System" which had various exercises in it. I did not have a TRS-80 at home, but I would work out the exercises with pencil and paper. I just picked up that manual from my bookshelves as I wrote this to check the author's name. Thanks Dr. Lien!
Looking up his name just now on the WWW, I see this interesting tidbit about a free and open source connection to my learning back then I was not aware of until now:
http://www.trs-80.org/level-1-...
"Level I BASIC was based on âoePalo Alto Tiny BASICâ, a 2K version of Tiny BASIC written by Dr. Li-Chen Wang for the May 1976 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. Because Dr. Li Chen-Wang placed his BASIC in the public domain (he labeled it "@COPYLEFT; ALL WRONGS RESERVED"), Steve Leininger, the designer of the TRS-80, was able to use it as a starting point. He added floating point math, cassette, keyboard, and video routines, doubling the size of the original code to 4K."
Anyway, makes me want to run out to a Radio Shack with my kid right now to buy something! Although it's also true I later learned I could buy higher quality parts for less elsewhere. Even now I could get a better Raspberry Pi on Amazon then what Radio Shack lists for more money on their website. And one trip to a store pushed by a father out of nostalgia is not the same as many trips to a store pushed by a kid.
Going to Radio Shacks years later was such a different experience, with the focus on selling cell phones and such. That did seem to be changing back to more educational DIY recently though. You would think Radio Shack would somehow have floated high on the maker movement, but apparently not, sadly. This also reminds me a bit of the "Sears" issue. Sears, given the history of the Sears catalog, should have dominated online sales the way Amazon ultimately did. But Sears somehow could not make the transition. It's so expensive to keep up a store front of course, so the price difference is understandable. It would take something else to make them a compelling destination, like a bigger emphasis on hands-on demos or training or starting MakerSpaces next door or something like that. Or maybe unique starter its with more stuff in them, even if they cost more.
I hope even in bankruptcy that Radio Shack retiree pensions are still paid out!
http://www.minix3.org/
How workable could it be as a general desktop at this point, like to read email and browse the web? And do some development whether with Eclipse or something else, for C, Java, and JavaScript)?
Does Node.js work on it yet?
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
"Thanks! I did try getting NodeJS to work in Minix3 but it simply did not work, worked with a couple of guys and there are too many unresolved dependencies and its just a pain... I will try other microkernels and see if I have better luck. Thanks for your reply! -- Purefan Sep 15 '11 at 8:11"
Personally, it seems to me we could have a much simpler OS than something UNIX-y based around Forth and Smalltalk somehow... There seems a lot of clutter and inconsistency of naming things in the UNIX world with various abbreviations (especially including command-line programs and their arguments). But perhaps something like Minix as a microkernel could still form a core for that...
Alan Kay's FONC project was a hopeful step in that direction, but I'm not sure it has really delivered more than some interesting experiments?
http://vpri.org/mailman/listin...
But Alan Kay's heart is in the right place, regardless of recent outcomes. It would have been fun to work with him and maybe become the next Dan Ingalls! :-)
http://www.drdobbs.com/article...
"Kay: Yeah. You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101.
Binstock: How so?
Kay: I mean, look at it: The job of an operating system is to run arbitrary code safely. It's not there to tell you what kind of code you can run. Most operating systems have way too many features. The nice thing about UNIX when it was first done is not just that there were only 20 system commands, but the kernel was only about 1,000 lines of code. This is true of Linux also.
Binstock: Yes.
Kay: One of the ways of looking at it is the reason that WYSIWYG is slowly showing up in the browser is that it's a better way of interacting with the computer than the way they first did it. So of course they're going to reinvent it. I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward. If they reinvented what Engelbart, did we'd be way ahead of where we are now. "
AC wrote: "If all people were that smart and all of them qualified for $800.000 jobs who would clean out the sewers and clean the floors?"
See also, by Bob Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
Or "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
People who claim ownership of the natural resources (including land underneath buildings) or of financial assets used to capitalize businesses may never have done any more work than cozy up to some King hundreds of years ago to get a "grant" of land, or, alternatively, (legally?) bribe some politician to get special monopoly or tax preferences, or something similar. Those "rents" can form a substantial part of many costs, and have little to do with "labor". Just think "feudalism" and "serfs" for an analogy, where feudal lords (who often provide nothing but protection against the feudal lord himself) taking much of the harvest from "their" lands for themselves despite however much work the "serfs" put in.
Also, even when up-front costs to consumers may be lower with cheaper labor (domestic or foreign), there are also social costs (like violence, failed families, welfare costs, etc.) such as shown by so many people who work at Walmart getting food stamps etc.. So, there can be a lot of indirect costs to "cheap labor" that are paid in indirect ways like higher taxes or greater fears of violence and so on.
Another example of externalities as indirect costs is low price for gasoline at the pump may ignore the huge taxes and debt obligations incurred to support a huge USA war machine which (in theory) defends long oil supply lines, and it also may ignore costs like polluted ground water from MTBE, or the health and crime crises caused by lead in gasoline in previous decades. It is possible the the cost of leaded gas may be (in my estimate) many trillions and trillions of dollars, which people never paid at the pump but paid in their personal lives and in taxes to pay for prisons and police:
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
"New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. "
Rent-seeking and externalities are reasons why markets need to be regulated by governments. There are other issues too, like ignored or under-appreciated systemic risks. On that, see Alan Greenspan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10...
"âoeThose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholdersâ(TM) equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,â he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform."
Well said, turbidostato, well said!
See also a book by a founder of MasterCard which even included a section on the importance of "open books [for accounting]" that can be inspected by all employees and customers:
"Honest Business" By Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Honest-B...
"An inspirational guide to ethical business practice explains how to create and manage a small business that emphasizes openness, personal integrity, and community involvement as the keys to success."
Another related thing is Dee Hock's (founder of Visa) work on the Chaordic Commons as value, purpose, and principles-driven fractally-organized organizations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.griequity.com/resou...
That said, I have a lot of respect for Bruce Schneier, especially for writing stuff like this:
"The War on the Unexpected"
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
"We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats...."
"I think you know we now live in a world where you can make a fairly benign statement and their exists a very real possibility someone with an axe to grind may strip it of its context and use it against you. "
Nothing new; see Cardinal De Richelieu (1585 -- 1642): "Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows."
As a socially-minded countess who lived through WWII told me once somewhat tounge-in-cheek yet also very seriously (paraphrasing, and she probably got it from elsewhere in those times):
"If you think, don't talk;
If you talk, don't write;
If you write, don't publish;
If you publish, don't sign."
So, again, this is not a new issue. That is one reason for the protections in the US constitution against "fishing expeditions" in people's lives. "Selective enforcement" of the law or "selective scrutiny" of political adversaries is a corrosive thing in a democracy.
But the problem is, in order to make social change on a broad scale, such as Martin Luther King was involved with regarding civil rights, is that you have to think, talk, write, publish, and sign. And as I've said before, that is the problem with an emphasis on security through "encryption" as opposed to community if you are interested in social change, because in order to make social change you need to spread a message generally in a very public and committed way. Related comments by me:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Wow, she was also an aunt of my father! Small world! :-) I think we might have commented on slashdot on that coincidence a few years back? But you'd have to be pretty old if she was your aunt, as opposed to, like me, a great aunt? I met her once with my father when she was still in her own home, and maybe incidentally another time or two perhaps (decades ago).
Glad that "open sourcing" runs in the family. :-) Although I might feel differently about open sourcing my body or DNA than open sourcing some software I've written. :-) Still, it is kind of a mental calculation of the risk that personal DNA sequences could be used against one or one's family somehow versus the benefits of medical breakthroughs for your own family and also everyone, and also that DNA is not that hard to get via copies of medical samples or from trash or whatever...
I've put some links in other replies to ideas about health sensemaking to help everyone live longer and healthier lives.
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
And while I was born and raised in the USA, maybe it shows some Dutch roots that I believe we can make more "land" for a growing population by reclaiming it from "space" in addition to the sea. Of course, with falling birth rated in industrialized countries, long term population growth does not seem to be one of our problems/blessings, even if many people start living a lot longer.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Health may be also be partially a function of what you do relative to your genes and environment, so her preferences, say, for orange juice and herring might have worked better for herself than for others in different situations. For health commonalities, one can read about "Blue Zones" and also I like Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work overall emphasizing eating more vegetables (but quibble about some parts).
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Attitude and "morale" is also a surprisingly big part, for many reasons including because it affects your connectedness to your community from which other good things flow. Probably easier to have higher morale in the Netherlands than in a much crazier place like the USA though. :-)
Contrast:
http://www.findingdutchland.co...
"According to Unicef's most recent Child Well Being in Rich Countries survey, Dutch kids ranked as the happiest kids in the world. Dutch kids led the way in three out of the five categories, namely- material well being, educational well being, and behavior and risks."
With:
https://www.adbusters.org/maga...
""The reason our children's lives [in the UK] are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
Anyway, we're all not going to live that long unless we sort out some of the wealth inequality and distribution issues given the spread of AI, robotics, and other automation that makes most human labor less and less valuable economically. The following may sound silly in the Netherlands or other parts of Western Europe, but it sound all too plausible in the USA given current politics:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"But that's stupid." I said, "What possible justification is there for a whole population of people to be living on welfare or t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
By me on that theme:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
So, plenty of room for at least another 1000 years of exponential growth. After that, it's someone else's problem, and there are more minds to think of solutions (like tapping zero point energy to create energy and matter in the void of space, creating new dimensions, etc.).
See also:
https://overpopulationisamyth....
More ideas here in my proposal on health sensemaking: https://www.newschallenge.org/...
"We want to improve public health through free and open source public intelligence tools for individual and collective sensemaking about health topics -- especially related to nutrition and lifestyle choices."
Wish some billionaires wold fund that. :-)
Good fats are important for health and good brain function as your brain is mostly fat ("fat makes you fat" is BS; it's more that refined carbs and sugars makes you fat). Good sleep is important. Having a sense of autonomy, master, and purpose is important (see Dan Pink's work).
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
More inspiration by Joe Cross that health change is possible:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...
See also the long version of my essay here for more ideas:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/read...
We need you as one more person out there doing good stuff! :-) Sure, maybe your "best" years are behind you, I can feel that at my age too, but "the woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best", and there can be a lot of important things still worth doing, even if not quite so well as when we were younger. Plus older people tend to have some advantages, like oftentimes more perspective and patience.
Good luck!
http://greentransportation.inf...
"Shows a picture from Nissan's tour of the Nissan LEAF where Nissan claims it takes 7 kilowatt-hours to refine a gallon of gasoline. Nissan says that same 7.5 KWH can drive the LEAF 30 miles."
Natural gas is also used in some refining of gasoline from oil..
So basically, the oil pumped from the ground in Middle East and transported via huge oil tanker ships is essentially in effect just used as a carrier of the electricity which was used to refine gasoline for internal combustion engines... So much US defense expenses (100s billion US$ annually), so much pollution, so many lost lives -- all essentially to use oil as a crappy battery for cars? Glad things are getting better.
Parts also become unavailable. We just had to replace an entire LG washer (about five or so years old) because could not get a new mainboard that had burned out.
Yeah, I remember the hype back then. I used a Hitachi/GE A4 robot with bubble memory in the 1980s, and like you, I waited for bubble memory to go widespread, but it just seemed to fade away. According to this article, it seems like bubble memory found more industrial & military applications than consumer ones because of the price and power issues:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/wha...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ..."
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Or see also: "The wombat on a global mindshift"
http://www.globalcommunity.org...
Beyond the point on AIs, as the Nazi concentration camps or any of dozens of other example show, social bureaucracies made of people are also good at exterminating humans systematically. More by me on such themes from 2000 (although, I now see more options than what I outlined there), including about how corporations are already essentially a form of machine intelligence, just with humans a component parts to a larger whole:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
How do we reign in destructive "artificial person" corporations? And how do we ensure everyone shares in the wealth produced by the organizations that monopolize so much of the Earth's resources? If we can't do that, is there much hope to reign in destructive AIs?
Still, when we talk about "genetic programming", one could argue humans are also programmed to cooperate with other humans, so the issue is more complex than what you outline. But in general, many of the issues we face in the 21st century come out of a scarcity-oriented mindset empowered by the tools of abundance. There are plenty of solutions -- improved subsistence tools (solar panels, 3D printing, personal agricultural robots), a basic income, more gift giving via free and open source software and content, better participatory government planning via the internet, and so on... But will we pursue them fast enough?
Robert Steele (ex-CIA) called this video by Michel Bauwens the most useful one he has seen in a decade; it is a video showing the great progress we have made as a culture moving from open values to open charters to open infrastructure to open organizations to open social processes to an open consciousness and so on...
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
https://lists.ourproject.org/p...
Cool; don't recall trying that back then!
BTW, on your user name (LinuxIsGarbage), I resisted using Linux for years, because I knew better things were possible (like QNX and its microkernel for internals, or any software a more systematic approach to naming commands and command options as far as command line utilities). Ultimately though, those two factors will likely lead to its replacement -- although perhaps the result will still be called "Linux", just with a very different shell and a very different kernel. :-)
I feel one reason Linus Torvalds has gotten, and needed to get, such a reputation for profanity and being an effective gatekeeper hardass for software quality is because of a fundamental weaknesses in monolithic kernel design relative to a dynamic community with a variety of ever changing needs. I've written before on that is a couple Slashdot comments, such as in a story about the last time he chewed out a kernel developer bigtime.
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I had hoped for something much better -- even perhaps something modular based on Forth or Smalltalk/Squeak! But for whatever reason Linux got the social momentum behind it, so I started using it too hoping it would improve over time (and it has). I started trying it around 2000 or so as toe dipping, and then used it as my main desktop (Debian) around 2003 or so until ditching it for OS X as a desktop around 2008 or so (getting tired of so much breakage with every upgrade, plus wanting some Mac-specific scanner OCR software). I still use Linux for servers and such, but my main web server (maintained by someone else) is a BSD variant, which I consider somewhat more secure/reliable. I'm thinking about going back to Linux given Apple's dropoff in quality with later OS upgrades (I'm still lagging a few versions, but know that can't last without patches etc..).
But as with the theme of the original article, the fact that QNX, Forth, or Smalltalk (or others, Symbolics Lisp Machine?) was there first in some key ways as far as making for good interactive experiences has apparently been mostly forgotten.
Wow, I did not know that; thanks for the extra perspective. I had know the University of Illinois did great stuff with Smalltalk, so I'll have to extend my respect for them even further!
http://st-www.cs.illinois.edu/
http://st-www.cs.illinois.edu/...
Thoughts on this by me from 2008: "Re: On Climate Change vs. the Singularity"
https://groups.google.com/foru...
The key point I make is that climate change, whatever the cause, is an issue about social equity and likely unaccounted for externalities. We have enough resources as a global society to make the planet work for everyone in a good way -- including those affected by rising sea levels or changes in weather patterns. Whether we choose to use those resources (or make more) to do so (including, say, via a global basic income) is a political choice. In other areas these political decisions are made all the time, like compensating people and communities dislocated when a highway or dam goes in. Personally, give the rise of solar power and also the likely rise of hot or cold fusion soon, the political and emotional capital being spent on arguing about cutting back carbon emissions seems a waste. While fossil fuels have all sorts of negatives including mercury pollution for coal, and for that reason it could make sense to tax them and redistribute the tax revenue to all as a basic income for all to discourage their use, I'd rather see this much emotion and political energy go into positives like solar research or fusion research or also energy efficiency. Indoor climate-controlled agriculture and related agricultural robotics is another big trend we could invest more in to ensure our food supply security regardless of the weather.
Or as Kurzweil said in 2011: "Futurist Ray Kurzweil isn't worried about climate change"
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-t...
"Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly -- we are only a few years away from parity. And then it's going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don't care at all about the environment, because of the economics.
So right now it's at half a percent of the world's energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it's only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world's energy needs. So that's 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we'll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.
People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight."
For my own situation (nearsighted, just a bit older), I asked about bifocals, and my eye doctor recommended a not very tall lens so I could look below it (outside the lens) to get a "bifocal" effect in that sense. That is the approach he uses for himself. So, for reading stuff close, I'm not looking through the distance-optimized lens, but I don't have to take off the glasses to see things close up because there is room to look below them, where you generally hold stuff to read anyway. I had such a pair made a Zenni Optical (cheap), and they work well in that sense. So, depending on your exact situation and prescription, you might ask about that option. If you go with someplace like Zenni, be sure to ask your eye doctor for your inter-pupal distance (although you can try to figure it out yourself, but maybe less accurately).
I also asked for a second prescription optimized for the distance to screens I use with my treadmill workstation, which is a somewhat weaker prescription (about half). Those lenses are taller because they need to cover a wider area, and I don't need to look that close when I'm working with that setup (now that I can touch type). Again, I've been pretty happy with them for that situation. Note that the distance I asked for is different (further) than a normal computer glasses prescription, which is generally for a laptop or monitor that is closer to you when sitting at a desk than displays are for a treadmill desk.
I agree with you the coatings are a good idea.