http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... "This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals."
From a new campaign I just saw yesterday on the immune boosting theme: http://www.standup2cancer.org/... --- The battle against cancer is hard fought and hard won, and often treatments are as debilitating as the disease itself. But inside each of us is the power to fight cancer: our immune system. Stand Up To Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute have joined forces in one of the most promising new research areas, using the science of immunology to get our bodies' own natural defenses to fight the disease. Immunotherapy has the potential to significantly change the treatment of cancer as we know it. Stand Up with us. Together, we can impact millions of lives.
Immunotherapy is a new class of cancer treatment that works to harness the innate powers of the immune system to fight cancer.
From the preventive vaccine for cervical cancer to the first therapy ever proven to extend the lives of patients with metastatic melanoma, immunology has already led to major treatment breakthroughs for a number of cancers.
Because of the immune system's unique properties, these therapies may hold greater potential than current treatment approaches to fight cancer more powerfully, to offer longer-term protection against the disease, to come with fewer side effects, and to benefit more patients with more cancer types.
who just had a heart attack: http://www.forbes.com/sites/go... "The man credited with turning Samsung into one of the world's most powerful companies is in recovery after suffering a heart attack on Saturday night. In an official statement Samsung confirmed Chairman Lee Kun-hee, 72, was rushed to hospital and treated with CPR. Both the company and hospital officials have declined to say how long he is expected to be hospitalised."
We have a Samsung SSD, a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Tablet, and quite a few Samsung LCD displays, among other things Samsung. Thanks for the quality products, and thanks for apologizing about the leukemia risk among Samsung workers and offering to help them and their families. Now here is some advice that could help Chairman Lee Kun-hee back to good health. I hope he gets it in time. Please let the appropriate people know if you are connected to Samsung.
Aggressive nutritional therapy by eating a lot of vegetables and some other things can reverse heart disease, as practiced by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and others: https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise... "When it comes to combating heart disease, most information sources promote drugs and surgery as the only viable lines of defense. As a result, the demand for high-tech, expensive and largely ineffective medical care is overwhelming, causing medical costs and insurance rates to skyrocket. This chase for "cures" is both financially devastating and futile. Morbidity and premature mortality from heart disease continue to rise with no sign of abating. Interventional cardiology offers only partial benefits, since these procedures do not remove the causes of the problem. Attempts to intervene with invasive procedures or surgery after the damage already has been done have not been shown to offer a significant reduction in cardiac deaths.
We need to keep in mind that angioplasty and bypass surgery have some significant adverse outcomes, including heart attacks, stroke and death. These invasive procedures only attempt to treat a small segment of the diseased heart, usually with only temporary benefit. Patients treated with angioplasty and bypass surgery continue to experience progressive disability, and most still die prematurely as a result of their heart disease.
The average person is not aware that there are safer, more effective options available. Unfortunately, government agencies are often slow to respond to new scientific information and continue to advocate outdated recommendations. Economic and political forces also make it difficult for Americans to be clearly informed that heart disease is self-induced and totally avoidable by eating a diet of nutritional excellence."
The same is no doubt true in many other countries, probably including South Korea. Even GW Bush got scammed in that sense: "Was George W. Bush's stent necessary?" http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra... "President Bush needed aggressive nutritional counseling and potentially life-saving nutritional information. It sounds like he was not properly informed of these studies documenting the ineffectiveness of PCI and the value of the proper dietary intervention. If not, I consider that malpractice. Every potential candidate for angioplasty (PCI) should know that their disease can be effectively reversed via superior nutrition and that surgical interventions are not protective against future events. Remember too, that almost half of all those on optimal medical therapy for high cholesterol and high blood pressure, still ultimately suffer heart attacks. Was President Bush informed about Dr. Ornish's Lifestyle Heart Trial, which scientifically documented that lifestyle changes alone can reverse coronary artery disease? Even President Clinton could have shared his ex
Not sure how they look on a cell phone screen, but they were both informative on regular TV and laptop screens. I watched both for fun twenty years ago (post college), and also the one on chemistry with my kid a few years back (the physics one was not as engaging though). I liked being able to rewind them to review some complex issue several times. They are not the same as doing hands-on lab exercises though.
There is also the Khan Academy now, which also has a supportive community and online problem sets in some areas. So, I'd say good things are possible. Of course, so much of schooling is boring if it is not what you want to be doing at the time. That's part of why I prefer learned-directed education as much as possible, including via homeschooling/unschooling.
Self-replicating space habitats that could duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore were a long favorite "ark" idea of mine to deal with the risk of global nuclear war (although JD Bernal proposed them first in the 1920s it turns out). Anyway, arks are just another option to umbrellas -- given umbrellas may not work depending in the size of the storm. For me, the idea of a basic income is also a sort of an "ark". But I've tried others -- like helping people be more self-reliant with growing stuff via the garden simulator or helping people with making stuff with OSCOMAK (not to say how successful I've been, which is not much, especially for OSCOMAK, pretty much a big nothing except others are doing related ideas now in a smaller way like Thingiverse or Appropedia).
I agree there is a tension of where to invest your time and other resources. You have to find something that works for you and your unique interests and abilities. It;s true though that when you invest in yourself, or your family, or even your local neighborhood, you have a much better sense of whether the investment is paying off than doing general advocacy for something to contribute to global change. As I say on my site when I talk about five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned and theft): "The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society." I guess the same goes for individuals and families, too?
Anyway, I had my kid around age 40. I've come to learn that being an older parent has its pros and cons. My dad had me around age 50 though. So, good luck if you want kids!!!
And don't let worries about the future stop you, or no one would have kids, since even for billionaires, money can come and go. Example (and kind of makes your point about techies vs. legal sharks, plus mine about a basic income to support inventors): "Goldman Sachs Not Liable for Failed $580 Million Deal" http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... "Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) defeated a $580 million negligence suit over its role as adviser to speech- recognition pioneer Dragon Systems Inc. in a doomed merger, one of its biggest victories in a string of claims by dissatisfied clients since the financial crisis.A federal jury in Boston yesterday rejected the claims of Dragonâ(TM)s founders Jim and Janet Baker and two other shareholders that Goldman Sachs failed to properly vet Belgium-based Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV. The all-stock deal in June 2000 was rendered worthless months later when the fraud at Lernout & Hauspie was exposed and the company filed for bankruptcy. The verdict relieves Goldman Sachs of responsibility for a sale that left its clients with worthless shares in a failed company. The four Dragon founders sold some Lernout & Hauspie shares for $11 million before the stock collapsed and the Bakers lost the technology they spent decades developing."
I met Janet once at a trade show and she and her husband were also students of my college adviser They lost about most of their wealth, but worse, they lost access to all the Dragon speech recognition source code that was in some sense their "baby".
We all have our personal choices to make. And they are often hard ones. A book I just ordered: "In Good Company: The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience" http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... "From the Wharton Business School and a secure place in corporate America to a $35-a-month allowance and the insecurity of a life of faith. This may seem a precautionary tale of downward secular mobility, but as we follow James Martin through his life and Jesuit training, we find it is all about ascent -- to God and to true happiness. (Paul Wilkes, Author
"most of us in the industrialized world have a driving license and can drive, but track and bus drivers are still professionals with special license. The question is - do you want to be a track driver?"
Very good analogy. Thanks! (Typos fixed, sorry)
I feel that the world needs more people who understand computing and information management, but we probably already have perhaps 10X-100X more professional programmers than we need -- mostly making work for each other with slightly different proprietary (or even free) versions of essentially the same thing but with different bugs.
Agriculture used to employ 90%of US workers 200 years ago, and now it employs about 2% Manufacturing is also on its way down. Yet, gardening is the most popular outdoor recreational hobby, and the Maker movement is rapidly growing. People like making and growing things -- often they like that more when they are not forced to do it endlessly in a boring or stressful way due to economic necessity.
Programming may well go the same way more towards a hobby. It already is in various areas. For example, a dozen years ago, everyone was writing web frameworks or ecommerce frameworks, and now there are so many off-the-shelf ones, only hobbyists or researchers are focusing on that (mostly, always rare exceptions). As we get more free software piling up, how many jobs do we really need writing more? The jobs become more "software archaeologist" or "software chooser" or "software customizer" if even any of that depending on how far standards have spread -- so similar to your point between daily drivers versus specialized drivers.
To build on your car analogy -- there is also a difference between car drivers, gas station attendants, car sales people, car mechanics, car delivery people, car rental agents, drivers ed teachers, gasoline refinery workers, and car designers. All are involved with cars, but in very different ways. There are right now very few car designer jobs compared to all the others. One hundred years ago though, 100s of small companies were designing cars, and with fewer drivers the ratio of designers to drivers was much higher. Although this analogy maybe breaks down because in theory software may need less maintenance once the software ecosystem settles down and also software may eventually maintain itself as AIs.
Not because my kid is a dummy (far from it), but because I know becoming and staying an "owner" in the 1% is like winning the lottery. And societies with big rich/poor divides are less happy to live in -- even for the 1%. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08... "Stiglitz and his allies argue that a free and competitive market is highly beneficial to society at large, but that it needs government regulation and oversight to remain functional. Without constraint, dominant interests use their leverage to make gains at the expense of the majority. Concentration of power in private hands, Stiglitz believes, can be just as damaging to the functioning of markets as excessive regulation and political control. "
See also on how aspiring millionaires are used to keep everyone down: "The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's" http://conceptualguerilla.com/... "But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" -- not by the people who haven't. And maybe -- just maybe-- the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."
The fact is, most paid jobs are going away as robots and AIs become cheaper to employ than humans for more and more jobs -- even "creative" ones, like I discuss here http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...
Preparing your kid to win the 20th century economic rat race leaves him or her a rat on a sinking economic ship in a 21st century economy...
That said, independence when needed, cooperation when needed, hard work, prudence, saving, frugality, investing in the future -- in broad sense, these are all good things to learn however a kid applies them later in life.
On code, the free code and content I write now and in the past like our free garden simulator and other tools has helped (a teeny tiny bit, I hope) to help bring about a 21st century transformation to a bigger gift economy, to better planning, to a more informed and enlightened and empowered citizenry. For example, this freely usable software someone else lets me reformat my slashdot posts to remove smart quotes from quotations in the above that display wrong: http://dan.hersam.com/tools/sm...
So, free code and free content can make a difference in the world by making the world a better place in various ways. And then, such a society can hopefully do a better job of taking care of old farts like I will be soon enough -- if I am not already.:-) As well as doing a better job of taking care of the next generation which is much more important than taking care of the previous generation -- although you would not know that looking at who gets "Social Security" and Medicare in the USA -- the old, not the young). As Daniel Moynihan said, "the young don't vote, and it shows".
Mod parent up. Not sure if this New Yorker cartoon from the most recent issue will stay around long, but I saw it this morning and it sums up how I feel about much of computer software development the last thirty years since Smalltalk: http://www.newyorker.com/image...
A character says "The new house is almost ready!" and it looks exactly the same as the rundown house in almost exactly the same location.
Software could be better, like the character could in theory have built a better house. But in practice, watching this play out of 30 years myself, much of what we get is just re-re-re-inventing the wheel. And there is a terrible waste in having to re-learning it slightly differently with slightly different bugs and limits, and little true progress. Often there is regress, since Smalltalk's keyword syntax is still more readable and expandable than C-like syntax.
Where would we be now if a truly free Smalltalk had had all the billions poured into it that Java had due to IBM and Sun's marketing clout and all the effort that has gone into JavaScript dues to Netscape/Mozilla/Google/etc.? Including the best of any LightTable ideas (a view with source when you hover over a name in code is indeed cool) and any other GUI improvements? As well as better libraries and better cross-platform support and better browser integration and so on?
Still, maybe JavaScript is the best we could hope for at this point, and better than we deserve, as someone else said and I echo in this submission from yesterday about James Mickens' last "USENIX "login" column explaining all that is wrong with the Web pages technically: http://slashdot.org/submission... Citing: https://www.usenix.org/system/...
But we got that mess for social reasons (competition, centralization, monetarization), not technical one, like I mention here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Social stuff like ParcPlace not being willing to license ObjectWorks/VisualWorks cheaply to Sun when they wanted to do a set top project (which ultimately lead to sun making Java).
Could Smalltalk be improved? Yes. Even the syntax could, like by using more C-like strings and comments while keeping the keywords. Could it benefit from type annotations for optimization? Probably yes too. And could it benefit from being built from textual sources instead of an image (like GNU smalltalk). Again yes. But investments in that direction would have produced so much more benefits than something like Java or JavaScript.
That said, after all the pain and suffering and waste, Java and JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 have finally become half-way decent platforms. I'm moving more in a JavaScript direction myself for mostly social and practical reasons, despite knowing how great Smalltalk was and seeing how much it could have become. I talk about that on Slashdot here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... http://developers.slashdot.org...
Mickens' comments are mostly true, but end up being tradeoffs for ubiquity and easy installs in the case of JavaScript -- even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls agreed on that with their efforts toward the Lively Kernel driven by the fact they could not get many people to install Squeak or Squeak-based apps). http://www.lively-k
That reference is to link this to a broader discussion. It's true the $30 Kyocera Hydro phone from Amazon is only for Boost Mobile -- but you don't need to activate it or sign a contract to buy it. If you use it as WiFi only, that is all you pay. One of the first apps we installed was a work in progress for disaster relief agencies and others called Serval Mesh which does direct phone-to-phone WiFi. http://www.servalproject.org/ "Simply put, Serval is a telecommunications system comprised of at least two mobile phones that are able to work outside of regular mobile phone tower range due thanks to the Serval App and Serval Mesh. "
So, I think the low US$30 cost for the Hydro from Amazon shows what is possible. And that new Slashdot article sounds like an exploration of it. This is a broad trend related to Moore's law that I (and many others) have been talking about for years.
More by me on that from 2000: "[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?" http://www.dougengelbart.org/c... " Commtech -- Twenty years to ubiquitous cheap wireless communications
Source: This is already happening now with cell phones, but needs time to percolate throughout the world. "
Or more recently from 2008: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"
I suggest in that one that the current cost of Princeton University hoarding its endowment is that it could have bought $100 OLPC-like computers for a couple hundred million poor families (assume five people each, for the bottom billion) in the world to give them access to education via the internet (like via Khan Academy). Or you could now buy Hydro phones for a the bottom billion families and pre-load them with WIkipeida. That shows how much the socio-economic landscape revolving around knowledge and privilege has changed given the playing out of Moore's law.
So, with or without Firefox OS, these trends are happening. What is frustrating about this is to see what is possible materially, but then see out socio-economic processes shaping that into something so much less than it could be (by increasing the rich-poor divide by always choosing the design that better supports central control with a gatekeeper who can monetize it). But that is also why it is so frustrating to see Mozilla with an idealistically better mission get a billion dollars recently and then so far have so little to show for it (other than a "me too" version of Android and WebOS) -- while also letting innovation in Thunderbird and Firefox seemingly grind to a halt.
As others have said, if you want to free Android users, you need to make a good suite of free apps and services, and even that is not enough because the phone carriers control the lowest layer of connection. Firefox OS by itself does not solve that problem. And it still leaves Android
http://soylentnews.org/comment... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... http://www.damninteresting.com... "Furthermore, both radiotherapy and chemotherapy have an immune-suppressing side-effect. Since both treatments kill the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system along with the rapidly dividing cancer cells, both can be used together if care is taken. But immune-stimulating Coley's Toxins work entirely differently, and their effect would be cancelled out if used at the same time as high-dose immunosuppressant chemo- or radiotherapy. It became an either/or situation-- and in the end, the fashionable new treatments won out over Coleyâ(TM)s fiddly reworking of an ancient 'natural' remedy. "
Some other suggestions by me here (primarily nutritional, but also on fasting helping with chemotherapy): http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
It is hard to know who to trust in the cancer industry to find, as you suggest, the best individualized treatment. It's certainly true that people selling alternative products and books (including Furhman, mentioned in my other post) have a conflict of interest. In general, the entire field of oncology is also sadly full of conflict of interest because oncologists make so much money by doing treatments. https://www.burtongoldberg.com... "Here is a shocking fact you most likely did not know: Unlike other kinds of doctors, cancer doctors (oncologists) are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. In fact, most of the annual income oncologists earn comes from the profit that they make from selling these highly toxic drugs to their patients."
And: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/20... "And that is where oncologic decision making gets really messy. Because in the United States, at least, many oncologists make a good deal of their income selling drugs to their patients.... Many oncologists vehemently deny being influenced by this financial conflict of interest. But such denials defy both logic and data. Oncologists would have to be superhuman not to be influenced, at least unconsciously, by such strong incentives. After all, there is often no single "best" way to treat any given tumor, and there's often good reason to believe that expensive new therapies might be better than older, cheaper treatments. In the face of such uncertainty, how could oncologists avoid being influenced by the knowledge that those promising expensive new treatments also help generate so much income?"
Regardless of the future, I wish you the best in making the most of each day like this celebrity with cancer: http://www.reuters.com/article... http://www.people.com/people/a... "Resolved to face her last days with courage and humor, "I don't think of dying," says the actress, 73, who previously battled lung cancer in 2009. "I think of being here now.""
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?"
That said, sure, I've always likes Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. He explores how they work and how they don't work. Asimov came from strong Jewish religious tradition, and it seems to me likely aspects of religion influenced his thoughts on them. A big part of religion is about how we interact with other people to be in community with them. So, to some extent, what the Navy is asking for is religious robots. See also Albert Einstein on "Religion and Science" and how science tells us nothing about how things *should* be,
Intelligent robots will probably eventually gain human rights, like in "The Bicentennial Man" by Isaac Asimov.
A big reason for keeping humans in the loop is in theory their veto power when things get too far out of hand. However, science and technology has gotten ever better at shaping humans into killing machines for their own kinds, sadly, if you even just look at how many more soldiers fire their guns in combat now than 100 years ago,
And let's have them act as nannies to a new generation of more ethical humans like James P. Hogan wrote about::-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... http://p2pfoundation.net/Voyag... "What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"
Anyway, even if it misses the big picture about post-scarcity as in my sig, this sounds like one of the more worthwhile things the Navy has spent money on recently.
Also look into iodine, vitamin D, and exercise (including to keep the lymph moving so it can do its job). And good sleep and various ways to relax (friends, music, laughter, nature walks, pets,etc.-- see Andrew Weil and also Blue Zones) and put the nervous system in a health-promoting state of mind as far as controlling the immune system.
And also avoiding toxins/radiation in food and the environment (including consumer products).
We need to learn about the role of some compounds or organisms found in moldy fruit and pond water (and mushrooms, as above, and also various herbs) that may also help the body deal with cancer. Our too clean environments may have their costs, since our bodies are adapted to live in a certain context of threats and opportunities.
Fasting can also sometimes help prevent cancer, since the body can selectively get rid of problematical cells first. Fasting also makes chemotherapy less bad because normal cells go into a sort of resting phase during fasting whereas the cancer cells keep growing and are more exposed to the chemotherapy toxins (not that the benefits of most chemotherapy seem worth the costs from what I read -- although some treatments may be worth it).
People are always getting cancerous cells, and most times their immune systems get rid of them. We nee do do what we can to boost the immune system (nutrition etc.) and also reduce the frequency of cells going rogue (toxins).
That said, sure it would be good to have better treatments for when people's immune systems fail to regulate their cancer cells. As you said, it is heart breaking to watch such a progression. And as Dr. Fuhrman says, once cancer is detected as a macro scale, it is iffy to get rid of if by means known today in most cases. So yes, better magic bullets would be great. But what we can do right now is try to minimize the need for magic bullets.
My guess as to why this measles treatment works is that cancer cells have shifted so much of their cellular pathways to replication that they are unable to defend at all against the measles virus, compared to other cells. This probably either causes them to self-destruct or tags them in some way that triggers the immune system. This effect is probably not specific to the measles virus but may well apply to any of many broad classes of virus.
And similar specs. The waterproof Kyocera Hydro is US$29.64 right now with free Prime shipping on Amazon for the Kyocera (carrier locked though, but WiFi works fine; unfortunately not sunlight readable though) versus US$99.00 (and free shipping) for the ZTE Open C. The Hydro is three times cheaper than the Firefox OS device. The ZTE Open C has slightly better hardware specs though and is not locked to a carrier given the SIM card slots. http://www.amazon.com/Kyocera-... https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
So I guess I don't see where there are any cost of hardware advantages to this first offering with Firefox OS. Maybe there will be more to come? It's true you can only run that Kyocera on Boost Mobile, but WiFi works fine even without a plan. I don't know if that phone is carrier subsidized to any degree. I bought three Hydros (one a bit better) for developer testing for writing networked Android apps. I've paid for a few days of phone service for one of them mostly as a test; I have no plans on activating the other two as phones. I doubt those are subsidized much if at all, but I have no proof of that other than the fact than anyone can buy them and just use them as WiFi only devices.
Anyway, just thought more about your point on cost... Firefox OS is currently more expensive than low-end Android. So the (one billion Mozilla/Google US dollars later) question is, how fast will that change?
Even if Firefox OS was better than Android (still to be seen other than for privacy), it would still face the same uphill adoption of, say, FireWire/Thunderbolt vs. USB1/2/3.
Also for development/testing/networking purposes I bought a ~$120 Android OLPC XO tablet that comes pre-loaded with educational software: http://www.amazon.com/XO-7-inc...
In a few years, those prices will continue to fall. It's much more pleasant to browse the web on that Android tablet than on an Android phone. I'm not convinced a Firefox OS tablet is going to beat that price anytime soon -- even if it might have privacy benefits.
Thanks for the reply to this and my other in this thread. Yes, "supposed" was intentional.:-) My point about Google's service offerings and Android was not to express a preference, just to point out why Google's Android had an edge in adoption. I'd rather use services that spy/track/advertise less, even if you still have to assume for prudence that all communications are logged and decryptable.
And for my other comment and your reply, I read on Glassdoor a lot of people inside Mozilla are unhappy with the current direction anyway, so agreeing with them could have been a plus, who knows.:-) http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie... "Con: "And if you work in Firefox OS expect no understanding of what's happening and when" in 3 reviews" And: "Most of the org is in service to Firefox OS - this is necessary given the company's direction, but sucks resources from other projects." And: "They're now spending $100m/yr on developers. It's very hard to see what that's achieving. Seems as if top talent is wasting its time there compared to what's being achieved at Google, Apple and others. One reason is massive technical debt and an insane codebase."
To respond to your points on cost and underserved markets, it sounds like you know a lot about Mozilla. I won't disagree that their strategy is plausible. However, I've seen a similar approach not work our well for the OLPC as an entire new software ecosystem, so I remain skeptical. If even Microsoft can't succeed in the smart phone market, is Mozilla likely to?
Here were some comments I wrote about five years ago on the OLPC project as a software developer who participated in the Give-One-Get-One program (getting two and giving two): http://p2pfoundation.net/backu... "Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers -- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might greatly boost current sales.:-) Maybe someone should forward this note to someone they know at Google or Verizon?:-) Seriously, what US teacher would not buy a Droid over an iPhone knowing it was going to teach some poor kid to read in two years? (Of course, Apple might eventually have to follow suit.:-) And that gives me and the rest of the free software developer world two years to write all that free software for those kids.:-) "
As I suggest there, hand-me-down phones (perhaps with new batteries) may well be much cheaper than anything else for emerging markets. And those phones run Android plus some other OSes. I also think it unlikely Firefox will meet any special low-power goals or cost goals that Android phones would not meet. Most apps are not that performance critical so Java on Android is good enough, and Java will probably be more power efficient than JavaScript in Firefox OS. So where is the power savings or other costs savings really going to come from? I like ideas like "Design For The Other 90%", but it is still hard to beat a free Android phone given Moore's law and continued falling prices. The Kyocera Hydro is now US$30 on Amazon. It is better than probably any Android phone from 2009 when I wrote the above -- especially the G1 Android Phone I got as an Android developer which dies eight months later. In another couple years that same Hydro phone might be US$20 or less in the USA. And it would probably be already much cheaper now if purchas
From a law firm (biased, perhaps): http://consumerjusticegroup.co... "Workers at IBM and at other microchip fabs, or "fabrication plants," are exposed to benzene and other toxic carcinogens that can cause birth defects, leukemia, and other serious, debilitating medical conditions. While "bunny suits" prevent dust, hair, and skin cells from coming into contact with microchips, too often not enough is done in microchip factories to prevent the person inside the suit from breathing dangerous cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde while at the workplace. Since 2000, IBM has faced lawsuits from more than 250 former microchip plant employees. And since 2000, IBM has worked to suppress scientific findings showing the increase of cancer incidences in their microchip plant workers."
And also: "Life In The Plume: IBM's Pollution Haunts a Village" http://www.syracuse.com/specia... "But for much of its history, Big Blue routinely polluted its birthplace. Tons of industrial solvents used to clean computer parts were dumped down drains or leached from leaky pipes into the ground for years before environmental rules required that such "spills" be reported. In 2002, scientists discovered the ground was exacting its revenge: The large underground chemical plume was releasing gases into homes and offices in a 350-acre swath south of the plant. The main chemical was a liquid cleaning agent called trichloroethylene, or TCE, that has been linked to cancer and other illnesses. IBM took responsibility and launched a multimillion-dollar cleanup. At the same time, the company announced plans to sell the plant and to ship many jobs overseas.... "We found out that IBM had two faces in this community," said Matt LaTessa, a barber whose shop is on Monroe Street in The Plume. "One was a nice face, beautiful, big buildings and a lot of jobs. But underneath they were rotten. They were poisoning us."..."
Versus:
"MD Anderson Taps IBM Watson to Power "Moon Shots" Mission Aimed at Ending Cancer, Starting with Leukemia" http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us... "MD Anderson's Oncology Expert Advisor powered by IBM Watson is designed to integrate the knowledge of MD Anderson's clinicians and researchers, and to advance the cancer center's goal of treating patients with the most effective, safe and evidence-based standard of care available. Starting with the fight against Leukemia, MD Anderson's Oncology Expert Advisor is expected to help MD Anderson clinicians develop, observe and fine-tune treatment plans for patients, while helping them recognize adverse events that may occur throughout the care continuum. The cognitive-powered technology is also expected to help researchers advance novel discoveries."
Also Vitamin D and iodine can help prevent cancer...
When I worked at IBM Watson as a software developer, part of that time my workstation was put in windowless old labs that has been used for who knows what... To his credit, my supervisor tried really hard to make sure the second lab had been fully renovated...
Someone from Switzerland who saw other windowless offices at Watson said all that would be illegal in Switzerland, to have people working in windowless rooms... Not sure what the Swiss lawas are on chemical exposure... Back then was when I thought a lot about how all fabs and related labs should be 100% roboticized on the production floor. Bunny suits in that sense are such a quaint 20th century idea...
... if I looked up my old slashdot postings from then talking about Gatto and Holt and homeschooling and unschooling.
You wrote: "the entire job of a teacher, particularly a K-8 teacher, is to evaluate students and set good progression goals for that student...."
Fairly accurate, but interesting you did not mention activities like communicating information or values in that... Or who sets the "goals" or what they actually are. As John Taylor Gatto says, the problem with most US schools is they are working as designed (originally in Prussia to deliver obedient cannon-fodder soldiers, obedient factory workers, and obedient citizens). So, if you give schools more money, they will only do that job better!
See: http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc... http://www.johntaylorgatto.com... http://www.the-open-boat.com/G... https://www.johntaylorgatto.co... "I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there...."
An alternative by me: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa... "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point f
an elderly relative they took in did not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... "The Dutch famine of 1944, known as the Hongerwinter ("Hunger winter") in Dutch, was a famine that took place in the German-occupied part of the Netherlands, especially in the densely populated western provinces above the great rivers, during the winter of 1944-1945, near the end of World War II. A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm areas. Some 4.5 million were affected and survived because of soup kitchens. About 22,000 died because of the famine. Most vulnerable according to the death reports were elderly men.... After the national railways complied with the exiled Dutch government's appeal for a railway strike starting September 1944 to further the Allied liberation efforts, the German administration retaliated by placing an embargo on all food transports to the western Netherlands. By the time the embargo was partially lifted in early November 1944, allowing restricted food transports over water, the unusually early and harsh winter had already set in. The canals froze over and became impassable for barges...."
So yes, it is the height of foolishness that the USA has reduced its food stocks to bare minimums for "just in time" delivery. I read somewhere a few years ago that the USA was divesting itself of its government reserve grain supplies too. It is even more insanity to convert grain to fuel. A trillion dollars a year or more for security spending in the USA, and the government can't even get the basics right...
See also: http://articles.latimes.com/20... "But when it comes to food prices, our country cannot even threaten to bolster the national supply because the United States does not possess a national grain reserve. Such was not always the case. The modern concept of a strategic grain reserve was first proposed in the 1930s by Wall Street legend Benjamin Graham.... In the inflationary 1970s, the USDA revamped FDR's program into the Farmer-Owned Grain Reserve, which encouraged farmers to store grain in government facilities by offering low-cost and even no-interest loans and reimbursement to cover the storage costs. But over the next quarter of a century the dogma of deregulated global markets came to dominate American politics, and the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act abolished our national system of holding grain in reserve. As for all that wheat held in storage, it became part of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, a food bank and global charity under the authority of the secretary of Agriculture. The stores were gradually depleted until 2008, when the USDA decided to convert all of what was left into its dollar equivalent. And so the grain that once stabilized prices for farmers, bakers and American consumers ended up as a number on a spreadsheet in the Department of Agriculture. Now, as the United States must confront climate change, commodity markets riddled by speculation, increased import costs, hosts of regional conflicts and the return of international grain tariffs and export bans, we have put our faith entirely in transnational agribusiness and the global grain market...."
More neoliberal neocon madness... But most people in the USA did not have a parent who saw a relative starve to death during wartime... You always think the basic services will be there -- until you test them in a crisis and they are not... "Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Or also: http://www.taobackup.com/testi... "No matter how sophisticated or comprehensive your backup system is, you will never know if it works unless you actually test it. Without testing, you can have no confidence at all. Here are
See for alternatives,with a section on fever: http://www.amazon.com/Raise-He... "Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, renowned pediatrician and author advises parents on home treatment and diagnosis of colds and flus, childhood illnesses, vision and hearing problems, allergies, and more. PLUS, a complete section on picking the right doctor for your child, step-by-step instructions for knowing when to call a doctor, and much more."
Dr. Sears on fevers: http://www.askdrsears.com/topi... "If your child of any age has one or more of the following symptoms, you should probably call your doctor right away: High fevers of 104 (40 Celcius) or higher that don't come down to 101 or 102 (38.3 to 38.9 Celcius) with the treatment measures below....."
Fevers are part of how the body activates parts of the immune response and also makes an environment less hospitable for disease.
I've also found this advice helpful: https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil... "Scientific research has demonstrated that humans have a powerful immune system, even stronger than other animals. Our bodies are self-repairing, self-defending organisms, which have the innate ability to defend themselves against microbes and prevent chronic illnesses. This can only happen if we give our bodies the correct raw materials."
Vitamin D deficiency and iodine deficiency are things to look into too. We take that regularly as pills and also dulse seaweed on popcorn -- I've read that iodine forms a protective layer at the edge of cells against some viruses. Elderberry and zinc may also help with a cold or flu; I just stocked upon some of those two as lozenges and other forms for the next time someone in my family gets a cold. See also: http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra... "Don't be alarmed if your cold symptoms last longer than you expect. On average, patients report that their common cold symptoms last one and a half to two weeks. In children, earaches tend to last anywhere from less than one day to 9 days, sore throat 2 to 7 days, cough up to 25 days, and the common cold 7 to 15 days.32 In time, the body will clear the virus on its own. Remember, over-the-counter medications merely mask symptoms, and may even impair healing. However, if you experience a sudden worsening of symptoms, especially including labored breathing, or a fever above 103 degrees for three days, then it is time to call the doctor."
Extended breastfeeding also helps reduce illness in young children if the mother is getting adequate nutrition and is in the same environment with the kid, since her immune system will scan the environment for threats and produce antibodies for the nursing child. WHO recommend nursing for up to two years or beyond, even if that is not the norm in the USA: http://www.who.int/topics/brea... "Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond."
When I was last in an urgent care facility for a physical injury, the guy ahead of me was there for the flu (he had diabetes and was worried about complications). I remember thinking of that when being asked to sit in the same chair he had sat in for paperwork, and probably handed the same pen he used, and of course breathing the same air in a confined space, etc.. I ended up with the flu, which made the recovery process longer and harder (although I might have gotten the flu elsewhere too, perhaps from my own family). Hospitals are full of a lot of worse stuff than the flu, too, so I guess I got lucky in that sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.
There ares still days when I feel I would prefer the Commodore VIC or 64 with a Forth cartridge or Machine Language Monitor cartridge where the whole system was so much more understandable and predicable and also restartable with a warm boot.
While I never tired one, the Cannon Cat sounds like it had merit, and I did get the somewhat similar AlphaSmart Pro for keyboarding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... "The Cat was primarily the brainchild of Jef Raskin, originator of the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979. It featured a text user interface, not making use of any mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command line interface or menu system, the Cat made use of its special keyboard, with commands being activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key. The Cat also used special "Leap keys" which, when held down, allowed the user to incrementally search for strings of characters.... There was a software project no longer under development, that was initiated by the late Jef Raskin himself, to develop a similar yet even more capable system for today's computing systems. The project (called Archy) was designed to eventually replace current software interfaces."
But your point is really more about appropriateness, configurability, directness, and the power of the command line than mine about simplicity -- although they are all related.
Part of the problem is that it is much easier to add new features than to take some away or to figure out new paradigms that require less "features" to get work done. As in: http://www.brainyquote.com/quo... "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery"
Another part is Doug Englelbart's point about investments in skills by professionals. We now expect people who do engineering or programming to go to a four year college and more, but we can't expect them to spend a few weeks learning how to use a chord keyboard or how to use, say, easier to read Smalltalk keyword syntax instead of C-like function name syntax? So everyone suffers from a lowest common denominator of two-handed QWERTY and C-looking languages...
That said, I still think innovations are possible... Just a question of which ones are worth actually using... And worth bucking convention for (typing this on a QWERTY keyboard on a C-powered Chromebook -- yet I like some aspects of the simplicity of the Chromebook).
As I suggested in this thread here in Dec 2012: http://developers.slashdot.org... "One thing of concern to me about this (not knowing the kernel communications culture or the previous interactions of Linus and this maintainer) is whether the Linux kernel (and development community) has maybe reached some point where old development methods are breaking down in trying to support an every growing monolithic kernel approach? I initially [resisted] using Linux in the 1990s because I knew there were alternative architectures available, like from QNX, Erlang, Actor, or Smalltalk, and I had hoped those alternatives would prevail. I started using GNU/Linux only when it seemed like the social momentum there was unstoppable. Thus my previous comment on "message passing" as perhaps a better architecture for software in the 21st century because if can help address theses issues of redundancy, modularity, and testability as ways to manage risk from complexity."
It comes down to priorities. The Linux Kernel community seems to have historically prioritized maximum speed over things like security, reliability, ease-of-use, or even driver developer sanity (like statements of Linux leaders saying stuff like like APIs can be changed at will and it does not matter how much time it takes driver developers to deal with it). I'm not saying they don't care at all about these other issues, just that historically it was not a priority. If they did priorities these other things, then a message passing microkernel (more like QNX) makes more sense. Also, using a language with better bounds checking and such might also be valuable, however with a microkernel choice of language may not matter as much since most of the code for most drivers could be outside the kernel.
Anger often comes from fear. What is Linus afraid of? A big worry must be kernel getting severely broken by some contribution, That's what really sets him off into profanity. The more code involved, the more likely that can happen. I would predict that the amount of profanity Linus needs to use to keep the Kernel team in order is a good inverse metric of Kernel design quality relative to current needs.:-) And I'd suggest the amount of profanity needed is growing given the current design and current community needs and it does not bode well.:-(
Personally, at this point, I would *gladly* use a computer system that was half as fast but never crashed, never put my privacy or security at risk by bugs, never required a "recompile" just to install drivers, never had weird problems dues to incompatible versions of drivers it could not detect or manage, was ported easily to any hardware so it was truly universal, was easily upgradable indefinitely, was transparently networkable with other hardware running the same OS as one big virtual computer, which had a community of developers making new useful stuff instead of being pinned down by just keeping up with kernel API changes, and so on...
One of the reason Linux on the desktop failed is because of all these things and the pain all these continual changes to a monolithic kernel cause a general user and what a pain in the butt it would be to get any hardware installed and configured. Linux had tremendous amounts of goodwill and human time devoted to it, but it seems much of that got wasted on dealing with a monolithic kernel which meant at best that Linux computers worked 30% faster (or as fast as next years models would otherwise) -- but only when they worked, which was painful enough that people just abandoned Linux on the desktop. That is true even people like me who ran Debian as a desktop for about five years and eventually got tired of all the random breakage and moved to the Mac (maybe regretting it a bit now with Apple's new annual OS releases and developers abandoning versions from just a year or two ago...) -- and while some of the break
Well as a followup, I got a generic email yesterday from Mozilla saying I did not get the Mozilla "Software Engineer, Platform" job. Fast turn-around considering I applied last week -- probably not related to this post saying Firefox the app was more import than Firefox OS, but I'll never know? Kind of sad, as it can be hard to find well-paying mostly-work-from-home gigs -- especially doing righteous and interesting non-profit-y stuff like Mozilla does. Such jobs are very few and far between. I felt the same way when I applied to Mozilla about three years ago for a Thunderbird support job and did not get it -- I said then I'd like to turn Thunderbird into a social semantic desktop platform eventually (which I still think is a good idea). Firefox and Thunderbird are tools I've used every day for over a decade and it would have been nice to make them even better while still being able to pay the mortgage and feed my family. Well, at least it is good to know someone else will get such a worthwhile opportunity; I hope that person makes the most of it.
http://remineralize.org/ "Better soil, better food, better planet.... We see a future of thriving farms and gardens producing healthy, nutrient-dense food in great abundance. We see exuberant forests returned to a state of grandeur not seen in centuries, silently sequestering the carbon dioxide that so threatens our planet today. We see a stable climate and a cleaner, healthier environment. We see all of this being possible through the simple and effective process of soil remineralization."
Indoor agriculture is also becoming more feasible with LED lighting -- and perhaps someday soon hot or cold fusion power. Example (but from a vendor of related technology, so no-doubt biased): http://www.terraspheresystems.... "One such indoor farm opened in September in Vancouver, growing lettuce and spinach inside an 8,000-square-foot warehouse using a hydroponic system that replaces dirt and weather with peat moss plugs and circulated water. High-efficiency LED lighting hits plants grown on stacked shelves.... Despommier says a stacked hydroponic operation might yield about 64 heads of lettuce per square foot annually, compared to about three heads at a traditional outside farm.... Cityscape CEO Mike Yohay predicts that by eliminating transportation costs and fertilizer, a 10,000-square-foot greenhouse could produce $500,000 in profit and 20 to 30 tons of food a year for local supermarkets and corporate cafeterias."
"It seems to me the only rational approach is to assume that nothing can be trusted and and act accordingly. Assume that whatever you are doing online is being observed by someone or anyone..."
I've been saying to make the best of this since at least 2008 (chain of citations): http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d... https://groups.google.com/foru... https://groups.google.com/foru... https://groups.google.com/foru... "Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.:-) And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.:-) And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.:-)"
Of course, growing up in a Christian ideological environment, the idea is nothing new that all my actions are under constant surveillance 100% 24X7 by an omniscient entity who can even read my thoughts and decides my ultimate fate day by day... Just got to make the best of it...:-)
Not saying that means it will end well if humans are entrusted with that kind of surveillance power... Although "The Light of Other Days" and "The Transparent Society" are both books to think about... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
It's probably only a matter of time anyway until the halls of all governments are saturated with nanotech "smart dust" by all sorts of actors (see Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" or some other stories for examples). Governments might want to get their houses in order before then... In that sense, Manning and Snowden might both just be the tip of the iceberg -- even if smart dust like that is still probably ten or twenty years off...
Or also from me in 2008: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"
Or in this case, will 20th-century-mindset security institutions start sinking when their procedures are dinged by revelations moved via small cheap USB sticks apparently carried around by Manning and Snowden? Really, how "secure" or wise is a plan in the 21st century when it depends on 100% secrecy forever? Shouldn't so-called security experts employed at great expense by governments know better by now? Security by obscurity is problematical, especially over the
"just people applying 20th century ideas to 21st century conflicts."
All too true. Although the results may be far worse than becoming a "quaint has-been". To expand on your point: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.... 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."
And also on intelligence specifically: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... "A failure to realize this irony will produce ever greater problems down the road as we develop ever greater technologies that can become ever greater amplifiers of destructive impulses (including self-replicating nanotech and biotech) or ever greater inhibitors of constructive impulses (like pervasive surveillance to enforce arbitrary unhealthy norms as a "war on the unexpected"" [see Schneier]). So, how can we have an intelligence community in the 21st century that is truly worthy of the name? How can we have an intelligence community that truly helps prevent misadventures that waste trillions of US dollars while millions of US children grow up in poverty and tens of millions of US citizens lack access to health care or even adequate nutritious food?"
And: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... "As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."
"Good will" is an important resource. Slowly the USA has been squandering what goodwill it including from WWII. Fortunately, good will can be a renewable resource depending on the political choices the USA makes going forward.
For example, imagine how much goodwill the USA would have right now if we had given the people of Iraq US$6 trillion dollars (US$300
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals."
This pot smoking issue is just one more way...
And I wrote the virtual machine you three are simulated on. :-)
Dang that time travel bug again; I thought I had fixed that...
From a new campaign I just saw yesterday on the immune boosting theme: http://www.standup2cancer.org/...
---
The battle against cancer is hard fought and hard won, and often treatments are as debilitating as the disease itself. But inside each of us is the power to fight cancer: our immune system.
Stand Up To Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute have joined forces in one of the most promising new research areas, using the science of immunology to get our bodies' own natural defenses to fight the disease. Immunotherapy has the potential to significantly change the treatment of cancer as we know it. Stand Up with us. Together, we can impact millions of lives.
Immunotherapy is a new class of cancer treatment that works to harness the innate powers of the immune system to fight cancer.
From the preventive vaccine for cervical cancer to the first therapy ever proven to extend the lives of patients with metastatic melanoma, immunology has already led to major treatment breakthroughs for a number of cancers.
Because of the immune system's unique properties, these therapies may hold greater potential than current treatment approaches to fight cancer more powerfully, to offer longer-term protection against the disease, to come with fewer side effects, and to benefit more patients with more cancer types.
who just had a heart attack: http://www.forbes.com/sites/go...
"The man credited with turning Samsung into one of the world's most powerful companies is in recovery after suffering a heart attack on Saturday night. In an official statement Samsung confirmed Chairman Lee Kun-hee, 72, was rushed to hospital and treated with CPR. Both the company and hospital officials have declined to say how long he is expected to be hospitalised."
We have a Samsung SSD, a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Tablet, and quite a few Samsung LCD displays, among other things Samsung. Thanks for the quality products, and thanks for apologizing about the leukemia risk among Samsung workers and offering to help them and their families. Now here is some advice that could help Chairman Lee Kun-hee back to good health. I hope he gets it in time. Please let the appropriate people know if you are connected to Samsung.
Aggressive nutritional therapy by eating a lot of vegetables and some other things can reverse heart disease, as practiced by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and others:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise...
"When it comes to combating heart disease, most information sources promote drugs and surgery as the only viable lines of defense. As a result, the demand for high-tech, expensive and largely ineffective medical care is overwhelming, causing medical costs and insurance rates to skyrocket. This chase for "cures" is both financially devastating and futile. Morbidity and premature mortality from heart disease continue to rise with no sign of abating. Interventional cardiology offers only partial benefits, since these procedures do not remove the causes of the problem. Attempts to intervene with invasive procedures or surgery after the damage already has been done have not been shown to offer a significant reduction in cardiac deaths.
We need to keep in mind that angioplasty and bypass surgery have some significant adverse outcomes, including heart attacks, stroke and death. These invasive procedures only attempt to treat a small segment of the diseased heart, usually with only temporary benefit. Patients treated with angioplasty and bypass surgery continue to experience progressive disability, and most still die prematurely as a result of their heart disease.
The average person is not aware that there are safer, more effective options available. Unfortunately, government agencies are often slow to respond to new scientific information and continue to advocate outdated recommendations. Economic and political forces also make it difficult for Americans to be clearly informed that heart disease is self-induced and totally avoidable by eating a diet of nutritional excellence."
The same is no doubt true in many other countries, probably including South Korea. Even GW Bush got scammed in that sense:
"Was George W. Bush's stent necessary?"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"President Bush needed aggressive nutritional counseling and potentially life-saving nutritional information. It sounds like he was not properly informed of these studies documenting the ineffectiveness of PCI and the value of the proper dietary intervention. If not, I consider that malpractice. Every potential candidate for angioplasty (PCI) should know that their disease can be effectively reversed via superior nutrition and that surgical interventions are not protective against future events. Remember too, that almost half of all those on optimal medical therapy for high cholesterol and high blood pressure, still ultimately suffer heart attacks. Was President Bush informed about Dr. Ornish's Lifestyle Heart Trial, which scientifically documented that lifestyle changes alone can reverse coronary artery disease? Even President Clinton could have shared his ex
The Mechanical Universe: http://www.learner.org/resourc...
The World of Chemistry : http://www.learner.org/resourc...
Not sure how they look on a cell phone screen, but they were both informative on regular TV and laptop screens. I watched both for fun twenty years ago (post college), and also the one on chemistry with my kid a few years back (the physics one was not as engaging though). I liked being able to rewind them to review some complex issue several times. They are not the same as doing hands-on lab exercises though.
There is also the Khan Academy now, which also has a supportive community and online problem sets in some areas. So, I'd say good things are possible. Of course, so much of schooling is boring if it is not what you want to be doing at the time. That's part of why I prefer learned-directed education as much as possible, including via homeschooling/unschooling.
Self-replicating space habitats that could duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore were a long favorite "ark" idea of mine to deal with the risk of global nuclear war (although JD Bernal proposed them first in the 1920s it turns out). Anyway, arks are just another option to umbrellas -- given umbrellas may not work depending in the size of the storm. For me, the idea of a basic income is also a sort of an "ark". But I've tried others -- like helping people be more self-reliant with growing stuff via the garden simulator or helping people with making stuff with OSCOMAK (not to say how successful I've been, which is not much, especially for OSCOMAK, pretty much a big nothing except others are doing related ideas now in a smaller way like Thingiverse or Appropedia).
I agree there is a tension of where to invest your time and other resources. You have to find something that works for you and your unique interests and abilities. It;s true though that when you invest in yourself, or your family, or even your local neighborhood, you have a much better sense of whether the investment is paying off than doing general advocacy for something to contribute to global change. As I say on my site when I talk about five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned and theft): "The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society." I guess the same goes for individuals and families, too?
Anyway, I had my kid around age 40. I've come to learn that being an older parent has its pros and cons. My dad had me around age 50 though. So, good luck if you want kids!!!
And don't let worries about the future stop you, or no one would have kids, since even for billionaires, money can come and go. Example (and kind of makes your point about techies vs. legal sharks, plus mine about a basic income to support inventors):
"Goldman Sachs Not Liable for Failed $580 Million Deal"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
"Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) defeated a $580 million negligence suit over its role as adviser to speech- recognition pioneer Dragon Systems Inc. in a doomed merger, one of its biggest victories in a string of claims by dissatisfied clients since the financial crisis.A federal jury in Boston yesterday rejected the claims of Dragonâ(TM)s founders Jim and Janet Baker and two other shareholders that Goldman Sachs failed to properly vet Belgium-based Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV. The all-stock deal in June 2000 was rendered worthless months later when the fraud at Lernout & Hauspie was exposed and the company filed for bankruptcy. The verdict relieves Goldman Sachs of responsibility for a sale that left its clients with worthless shares in a failed company. The four Dragon founders sold some Lernout & Hauspie shares for $11 million before the stock collapsed and the Bakers lost the technology they spent decades developing."
I met Janet once at a trade show and she and her husband were also students of my college adviser They lost about most of their wealth, but worse, they lost access to all the Dragon speech recognition source code that was in some sense their "baby".
We all have our personal choices to make. And they are often hard ones. A book I just ordered:
"In Good Company: The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
"From the Wharton Business School and a secure place in corporate America to a $35-a-month allowance and the insecurity of a life of faith. This may seem a precautionary tale of downward secular mobility, but as we follow James Martin through his life and Jesuit training, we find it is all about ascent -- to God and to true happiness. (Paul Wilkes, Author
"most of us in the industrialized world have a driving license and can drive, but track and bus drivers are still professionals with special license. The question is - do you want to be a track driver?"
Very good analogy. Thanks! (Typos fixed, sorry)
I feel that the world needs more people who understand computing and information management, but we probably already have perhaps 10X-100X more professional programmers than we need -- mostly making work for each other with slightly different proprietary (or even free) versions of essentially the same thing but with different bugs.
Agriculture used to employ 90%of US workers 200 years ago, and now it employs about 2% Manufacturing is also on its way down. Yet, gardening is the most popular outdoor recreational hobby, and the Maker movement is rapidly growing. People like making and growing things -- often they like that more when they are not forced to do it endlessly in a boring or stressful way due to economic necessity.
Programming may well go the same way more towards a hobby. It already is in various areas. For example, a dozen years ago, everyone was writing web frameworks or ecommerce frameworks, and now there are so many off-the-shelf ones, only hobbyists or researchers are focusing on that (mostly, always rare exceptions). As we get more free software piling up, how many jobs do we really need writing more? The jobs become more "software archaeologist" or "software chooser" or "software customizer" if even any of that depending on how far standards have spread -- so similar to your point between daily drivers versus specialized drivers.
To build on your car analogy -- there is also a difference between car drivers, gas station attendants, car sales people, car mechanics, car delivery people, car rental agents, drivers ed teachers, gasoline refinery workers, and car designers. All are involved with cars, but in very different ways. There are right now very few car designer jobs compared to all the others. One hundred years ago though, 100s of small companies were designing cars, and with fewer drivers the ratio of designers to drivers was much higher. Although this analogy maybe breaks down because in theory software may need less maintenance once the software ecosystem settles down and also software may eventually maintain itself as AIs.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
Not because my kid is a dummy (far from it), but because I know becoming and staying an "owner" in the 1% is like winning the lottery. And societies with big rich/poor divides are less happy to live in -- even for the 1%.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08...
"Stiglitz and his allies argue that a free and competitive market is highly beneficial to society at large, but that it needs government regulation and oversight to remain functional. Without constraint, dominant interests use their leverage to make gains at the expense of the majority. Concentration of power in private hands, Stiglitz believes, can be just as damaging to the functioning of markets as excessive regulation and political control. "
See also on how aspiring millionaires are used to keep everyone down:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" -- not by the people who haven't. And maybe -- just maybe-- the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."
I wrote an essay on why even rich people should support a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
The fact is, most paid jobs are going away as robots and AIs become cheaper to employ than humans for more and more jobs -- even "creative" ones, like I discuss here
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...
Preparing your kid to win the 20th century economic rat race leaves him or her a rat on a sinking economic ship in a 21st century economy...
That said, independence when needed, cooperation when needed, hard work, prudence, saving, frugality, investing in the future -- in broad sense, these are all good things to learn however a kid applies them later in life.
On code, the free code and content I write now and in the past like our free garden simulator and other tools has helped (a teeny tiny bit, I hope) to help bring about a 21st century transformation to a bigger gift economy, to better planning, to a more informed and enlightened and empowered citizenry. For example, this freely usable software someone else lets me reformat my slashdot posts to remove smart quotes from quotations in the above that display wrong:
http://dan.hersam.com/tools/sm...
So, free code and free content can make a difference in the world by making the world a better place in various ways. And then, such a society can hopefully do a better job of taking care of old farts like I will be soon enough -- if I am not already. :-) As well as doing a better job of taking care of the next generation which is much more important than taking care of the previous generation -- although you would not know that looking at who gets "Social Security" and Medicare in the USA -- the old, not the young). As Daniel Moynihan said, "the young don't vote, and it shows".
Kids grow so fast. Enjoy them while you can! See also:
http://www.katsandogz.com/onch...
----
On Children
Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
Mod parent up. Not sure if this New Yorker cartoon from the most recent issue will stay around long, but I saw it this morning and it sums up how I feel about much of computer software development the last thirty years since Smalltalk:
http://www.newyorker.com/image...
A character says "The new house is almost ready!" and it looks exactly the same as the rundown house in almost exactly the same location.
Software could be better, like the character could in theory have built a better house. But in practice, watching this play out of 30 years myself, much of what we get is just re-re-re-inventing the wheel. And there is a terrible waste in having to re-learning it slightly differently with slightly different bugs and limits, and little true progress. Often there is regress, since Smalltalk's keyword syntax is still more readable and expandable than C-like syntax.
Where would we be now if a truly free Smalltalk had had all the billions poured into it that Java had due to IBM and Sun's marketing clout and all the effort that has gone into JavaScript dues to Netscape/Mozilla/Google/etc.? Including the best of any LightTable ideas (a view with source when you hover over a name in code is indeed cool) and any other GUI improvements? As well as better libraries and better cross-platform support and better browser integration and so on?
Still, maybe JavaScript is the best we could hope for at this point, and better than we deserve, as someone else said and I echo in this submission from yesterday about James Mickens' last "USENIX "login" column explaining all that is wrong with the Web pages technically:
http://slashdot.org/submission...
Citing: https://www.usenix.org/system/...
But we got that mess for social reasons (competition, centralization, monetarization), not technical one, like I mention here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Social stuff like ParcPlace not being willing to license ObjectWorks/VisualWorks cheaply to Sun when they wanted to do a set top project (which ultimately lead to sun making Java).
Could Smalltalk be improved? Yes. Even the syntax could, like by using more C-like strings and comments while keeping the keywords. Could it benefit from type annotations for optimization? Probably yes too. And could it benefit from being built from textual sources instead of an image (like GNU smalltalk). Again yes. But investments in that direction would have produced so much more benefits than something like Java or JavaScript.
That said, after all the pain and suffering and waste, Java and JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 have finally become half-way decent platforms. I'm moving more in a JavaScript direction myself for mostly social and practical reasons, despite knowing how great Smalltalk was and seeing how much it could have become. I talk about that on Slashdot here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://developers.slashdot.org...
Smalltalk might still get there building on Java and JavaScript as with these projects:
http://amber-lang.net/
http://www.redline.st/
Mickens' comments are mostly true, but end up being tradeoffs for ubiquity and easy installs in the case of JavaScript -- even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls agreed on that with their efforts toward the Lively Kernel driven by the fact they could not get many people to install Squeak or Squeak-based apps).
http://www.lively-k
http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto...
That reference is to link this to a broader discussion. It's true the $30 Kyocera Hydro phone from Amazon is only for Boost Mobile -- but you don't need to activate it or sign a contract to buy it. If you use it as WiFi only, that is all you pay. One of the first apps we installed was a work in progress for disaster relief agencies and others called Serval Mesh which does direct phone-to-phone WiFi.
http://www.servalproject.org/
"Simply put, Serval is a telecommunications system comprised of at least two mobile phones that are able to work outside of regular mobile phone tower range due thanks to the Serval App and Serval Mesh. "
So, I think the low US$30 cost for the Hydro from Amazon shows what is possible. And that new Slashdot article sounds like an exploration of it. This is a broad trend related to Moore's law that I (and many others) have been talking about for years.
More by me on that from 2000:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
" Commtech -- Twenty years to ubiquitous cheap wireless communications
Source: This is already happening now with cell phones, but needs time to percolate throughout the world. "
Or more recently from 2008:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"
I suggest in that one that the current cost of Princeton University hoarding its endowment is that it could have bought $100 OLPC-like computers for a couple hundred million poor families (assume five people each, for the bottom billion) in the world to give them access to education via the internet (like via Khan Academy). Or you could now buy Hydro phones for a the bottom billion families and pre-load them with WIkipeida. That shows how much the socio-economic landscape revolving around knowledge and privilege has changed given the playing out of Moore's law.
So, with or without Firefox OS, these trends are happening. What is frustrating about this is to see what is possible materially, but then see out socio-economic processes shaping that into something so much less than it could be (by increasing the rich-poor divide by always choosing the design that better supports central control with a gatekeeper who can monetize it). But that is also why it is so frustrating to see Mozilla with an idealistically better mission get a billion dollars recently and then so far have so little to show for it (other than a "me too" version of Android and WebOS) -- while also letting innovation in Thunderbird and Firefox seemingly grind to a halt.
As others have said, if you want to free Android users, you need to make a good suite of free apps and services, and even that is not enough because the phone carriers control the lowest layer of connection. Firefox OS by itself does not solve that problem. And it still leaves Android
http://soylentnews.org/comment...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.damninteresting.com...
"Furthermore, both radiotherapy and chemotherapy have an immune-suppressing side-effect. Since both treatments kill the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system along with the rapidly dividing cancer cells, both can be used together if care is taken. But immune-stimulating Coley's Toxins work entirely differently, and their effect would be cancelled out if used at the same time as high-dose immunosuppressant chemo- or radiotherapy. It became an either/or situation-- and in the end, the fashionable new treatments won out over Coleyâ(TM)s fiddly reworking of an ancient 'natural' remedy. "
Some other suggestions by me here (primarily nutritional, but also on fasting helping with chemotherapy):
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
More on mushrooms and preventing cancer as also mentioned:
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
It is hard to know who to trust in the cancer industry to find, as you suggest, the best individualized treatment. It's certainly true that people selling alternative products and books (including Furhman, mentioned in my other post) have a conflict of interest. In general, the entire field of oncology is also sadly full of conflict of interest because oncologists make so much money by doing treatments.
https://www.burtongoldberg.com...
"Here is a shocking fact you most likely did not know: Unlike other kinds of doctors, cancer doctors (oncologists) are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. In fact, most of the annual income oncologists earn comes from the profit that they make from selling these highly toxic drugs to their patients."
And: ... Many oncologists vehemently deny being influenced by this financial conflict of interest. But such denials defy both logic and data. Oncologists would have to be superhuman not to be influenced, at least unconsciously, by such strong incentives. After all, there is often no single "best" way to treat any given tumor, and there's often good reason to believe that expensive new therapies might be better than older, cheaper treatments. In the face of such uncertainty, how could oncologists avoid being influenced by the knowledge that those promising expensive new treatments also help generate so much income?"
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/20...
"And that is where oncologic decision making gets really messy. Because in the United States, at least, many oncologists make a good deal of their income selling drugs to their patients.
Integrative alternatives:
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/PA...
Regardless of the future, I wish you the best in making the most of each day like this celebrity with cancer:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
http://www.people.com/people/a...
"Resolved to face her last days with courage and humor, "I don't think of dying," says the actress, 73, who previously battled lung cancer in 2009. "I think of being here now.""
Good luck!
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?"
That said, sure, I've always likes Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. He explores how they work and how they don't work. Asimov came from strong Jewish religious tradition, and it seems to me likely aspects of religion influenced his thoughts on them. A big part of religion is about how we interact with other people to be in community with them. So, to some extent, what the Navy is asking for is religious robots. See also Albert Einstein on "Religion and Science" and how science tells us nothing about how things *should* be,
Intelligent robots will probably eventually gain human rights, like in "The Bicentennial Man" by Isaac Asimov.
And as in my first point, an ethical and intelligent robot might ask, "Is War a Racket"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
A big reason for keeping humans in the loop is in theory their veto power when things get too far out of hand. However, science and technology has gotten ever better at shaping humans into killing machines for their own kinds, sadly, if you even just look at how many more soldiers fire their guns in combat now than 100 years ago,
So yes, let us build Gandhi-bots! :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
And let's have them act as nannies to a new generation of more ethical humans like James P. Hogan wrote about: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://p2pfoundation.net/Voyag...
"What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"
Anyway, even if it misses the big picture about post-scarcity as in my sig, this sounds like one of the more worthwhile things the Navy has spent money on recently.
"Eat For Health - The Anti-Cancer Diet" https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
Especially mushrooms as discussed there...
Also look into iodine, vitamin D, and exercise (including to keep the lymph moving so it can do its job). And good sleep and various ways to relax (friends, music, laughter, nature walks, pets,etc.-- see Andrew Weil and also Blue Zones) and put the nervous system in a health-promoting state of mind as far as controlling the immune system.
And also avoiding toxins/radiation in food and the environment (including consumer products).
We need to learn about the role of some compounds or organisms found in moldy fruit and pond water (and mushrooms, as above, and also various herbs) that may also help the body deal with cancer. Our too clean environments may have their costs, since our bodies are adapted to live in a certain context of threats and opportunities.
Fasting can also sometimes help prevent cancer, since the body can selectively get rid of problematical cells first. Fasting also makes chemotherapy less bad because normal cells go into a sort of resting phase during fasting whereas the cancer cells keep growing and are more exposed to the chemotherapy toxins (not that the benefits of most chemotherapy seem worth the costs from what I read -- although some treatments may be worth it).
People are always getting cancerous cells, and most times their immune systems get rid of them. We nee do do what we can to boost the immune system (nutrition etc.) and also reduce the frequency of cells going rogue (toxins).
That said, sure it would be good to have better treatments for when people's immune systems fail to regulate their cancer cells. As you said, it is heart breaking to watch such a progression. And as Dr. Fuhrman says, once cancer is detected as a macro scale, it is iffy to get rid of if by means known today in most cases. So yes, better magic bullets would be great. But what we can do right now is try to minimize the need for magic bullets.
My guess as to why this measles treatment works is that cancer cells have shifted so much of their cellular pathways to replication that they are unable to defend at all against the measles virus, compared to other cells. This probably either causes them to self-destruct or tags them in some way that triggers the immune system. This effect is probably not specific to the measles virus but may well apply to any of many broad classes of virus.
Good luck with your career. Maybe someday something like this will take off (my proposal for better software for medical sensemaking):
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://www.changemakers.com/di...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
And similar specs. The waterproof Kyocera Hydro is US$29.64 right now with free Prime shipping on Amazon for the Kyocera (carrier locked though, but WiFi works fine; unfortunately not sunlight readable though) versus US$99.00 (and free shipping) for the ZTE Open C. The Hydro is three times cheaper than the Firefox OS device. The ZTE Open C has slightly better hardware specs though and is not locked to a carrier given the SIM card slots.
http://www.amazon.com/Kyocera-...
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
So I guess I don't see where there are any cost of hardware advantages to this first offering with Firefox OS. Maybe there will be more to come? It's true you can only run that Kyocera on Boost Mobile, but WiFi works fine even without a plan. I don't know if that phone is carrier subsidized to any degree. I bought three Hydros (one a bit better) for developer testing for writing networked Android apps. I've paid for a few days of phone service for one of them mostly as a test; I have no plans on activating the other two as phones. I doubt those are subsidized much if at all, but I have no proof of that other than the fact than anyone can buy them and just use them as WiFi only devices.
I see multiple unlocked Android phones on Amazon for about US$100:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sel...
Anyway, just thought more about your point on cost... Firefox OS is currently more expensive than low-end Android. So the (one billion Mozilla/Google US dollars later) question is, how fast will that change?
Even if Firefox OS was better than Android (still to be seen other than for privacy), it would still face the same uphill adoption of, say, FireWire/Thunderbolt vs. USB1/2/3.
Also for development/testing/networking purposes I bought a ~$120 Android OLPC XO tablet that comes pre-loaded with educational software:
http://www.amazon.com/XO-7-inc...
In a few years, those prices will continue to fall. It's much more pleasant to browse the web on that Android tablet than on an Android phone. I'm not convinced a Firefox OS tablet is going to beat that price anytime soon -- even if it might have privacy benefits.
Thanks for the reply to this and my other in this thread. Yes, "supposed" was intentional. :-) My point about Google's service offerings and Android was not to express a preference, just to point out why Google's Android had an edge in adoption. I'd rather use services that spy/track/advertise less, even if you still have to assume for prudence that all communications are logged and decryptable.
And for my other comment and your reply, I read on Glassdoor a lot of people inside Mozilla are unhappy with the current direction anyway, so agreeing with them could have been a plus, who knows. :-)
http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie...
"Con: "And if you work in Firefox OS expect no understanding of what's happening and when" in 3 reviews"
And: "Most of the org is in service to Firefox OS - this is necessary given the company's direction, but sucks resources from other projects." And: "They're now spending $100m/yr on developers. It's very hard to see what that's achieving. Seems as if top talent is wasting its time there compared to what's being achieved at Google, Apple and others. One reason is massive technical debt and an insane codebase."
To respond to your points on cost and underserved markets, it sounds like you know a lot about Mozilla. I won't disagree that their strategy is plausible. However, I've seen a similar approach not work our well for the OLPC as an entire new software ecosystem, so I remain skeptical. If even Microsoft can't succeed in the smart phone market, is Mozilla likely to?
Here were some comments I wrote about five years ago on the OLPC project as a software developer who participated in the Give-One-Get-One program (getting two and giving two): :-) Maybe someone should forward this note to someone they know at Google or Verizon? :-) Seriously, what US teacher would not buy a Droid over an iPhone knowing it was going to teach some poor kid to read in two years? (Of course, Apple might eventually have to follow suit. :-) And that gives me and the rest of the free software developer world two years to write all that free software for those kids. :-) "
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers -- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might greatly boost current sales.
As I suggest there, hand-me-down phones (perhaps with new batteries) may well be much cheaper than anything else for emerging markets. And those phones run Android plus some other OSes. I also think it unlikely Firefox will meet any special low-power goals or cost goals that Android phones would not meet. Most apps are not that performance critical so Java on Android is good enough, and Java will probably be more power efficient than JavaScript in Firefox OS. So where is the power savings or other costs savings really going to come from? I like ideas like "Design For The Other 90%", but it is still hard to beat a free Android phone given Moore's law and continued falling prices. The Kyocera Hydro is now US$30 on Amazon. It is better than probably any Android phone from 2009 when I wrote the above -- especially the G1 Android Phone I got as an Android developer which dies eight months later. In another couple years that same Hydro phone might be US$20 or less in the USA. And it would probably be already much cheaper now if purchas
From a law firm (biased, perhaps): http://consumerjusticegroup.co...
"Workers at IBM and at other microchip fabs, or "fabrication plants," are exposed to benzene and other toxic carcinogens that can cause birth defects, leukemia, and other serious, debilitating medical conditions. While "bunny suits" prevent dust, hair, and skin cells from coming into contact with microchips, too often not enough is done in microchip factories to prevent the person inside the suit from breathing dangerous cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde while at the workplace. Since 2000, IBM has faced lawsuits from more than 250 former microchip plant employees. And since 2000, IBM has worked to suppress scientific findings showing the increase of cancer incidences in their microchip plant workers."
And also: ... "We found out that IBM had two faces in this community," said Matt LaTessa, a barber whose shop is on Monroe Street in The Plume. "One was a nice face, beautiful, big buildings and a lot of jobs. But underneath they were rotten. They were poisoning us." ..."
"Life In The Plume: IBM's Pollution Haunts a Village"
http://www.syracuse.com/specia...
"But for much of its history, Big Blue routinely polluted its birthplace. Tons of industrial solvents used to clean computer parts were dumped down drains or leached from leaky pipes into the ground for years before environmental rules required that such "spills" be reported. In 2002, scientists discovered the ground was exacting its revenge: The large underground chemical plume was releasing gases into homes and offices in a 350-acre swath south of the plant. The main chemical was a liquid cleaning agent called trichloroethylene, or TCE, that has been linked to cancer and other illnesses. IBM took responsibility and launched a multimillion-dollar cleanup. At the same time, the company announced plans to sell the plant and to ship many jobs overseas.
Versus:
"MD Anderson Taps IBM Watson to Power "Moon Shots" Mission Aimed at Ending Cancer, Starting with Leukemia"
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us...
"MD Anderson's Oncology Expert Advisor powered by IBM Watson is designed to integrate the knowledge of MD Anderson's clinicians and researchers, and to advance the cancer center's goal of treating patients with the most effective, safe and evidence-based standard of care available. Starting with the fight against Leukemia, MD Anderson's Oncology Expert Advisor is expected to help MD Anderson clinicians develop, observe and fine-tune treatment plans for patients, while helping them recognize adverse events that may occur throughout the care continuum. The cognitive-powered technology is also expected to help researchers advance novel discoveries."
Although, consider:
"Eat For Health - The Anti-Cancer Diet"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
Also Vitamin D and iodine can help prevent cancer...
When I worked at IBM Watson as a software developer, part of that time my workstation was put in windowless old labs that has been used for who knows what... To his credit, my supervisor tried really hard to make sure the second lab had been fully renovated...
Someone from Switzerland who saw other windowless offices at Watson said all that would be illegal in Switzerland, to have people working in windowless rooms... Not sure what the Swiss lawas are on chemical exposure... Back then was when I thought a lot about how all fabs and related labs should be 100% roboticized on the production floor. Bunny suits in that sense are such a quaint 20th century idea...
... if I looked up my old slashdot postings from then talking about Gatto and Holt and homeschooling and unschooling.
You wrote: "the entire job of a teacher, particularly a K-8 teacher, is to evaluate students and set good progression goals for that student. ..."
Fairly accurate, but interesting you did not mention activities like communicating information or values in that... Or who sets the "goals" or what they actually are. As John Taylor Gatto says, the problem with most US schools is they are working as designed (originally in Prussia to deliver obedient cannon-fodder soldiers, obedient factory workers, and obedient citizens). So, if you give schools more money, they will only do that job better!
See: ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. ..."
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?
That said, investments in groups like Khan Academy seem worthwhile... One of the few really good Gates Foundation investments perhaps...
https://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.gatesfoundation.org...
The Broad Foundation is making the exact same mistake as Zuckerberg...
http://www.broadcenter.org/
An alternative by me: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point f
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
an elderly relative they took in did not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... ... After the national railways complied with the exiled Dutch government's appeal for a railway strike starting September 1944 to further the Allied liberation efforts, the German administration retaliated by placing an embargo on all food transports to the western Netherlands. By the time the embargo was partially lifted in early November 1944, allowing restricted food transports over water, the unusually early and harsh winter had already set in. The canals froze over and became impassable for barges. ..."
"The Dutch famine of 1944, known as the Hongerwinter ("Hunger winter") in Dutch, was a famine that took place in the German-occupied part of the Netherlands, especially in the densely populated western provinces above the great rivers, during the winter of 1944-1945, near the end of World War II. A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm areas. Some 4.5 million were affected and survived because of soup kitchens. About 22,000 died because of the famine. Most vulnerable according to the death reports were elderly men.
So yes, it is the height of foolishness that the USA has reduced its food stocks to bare minimums for "just in time" delivery. I read somewhere a few years ago that the USA was divesting itself of its government reserve grain supplies too. It is even more insanity to convert grain to fuel. A trillion dollars a year or more for security spending in the USA, and the government can't even get the basics right...
See also: ... In the inflationary 1970s, the USDA revamped FDR's program into the Farmer-Owned Grain Reserve, which encouraged farmers to store grain in government facilities by offering low-cost and even no-interest loans and reimbursement to cover the storage costs. But over the next quarter of a century the dogma of deregulated global markets came to dominate American politics, and the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act abolished our national system of holding grain in reserve. As for all that wheat held in storage, it became part of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, a food bank and global charity under the authority of the secretary of Agriculture. The stores were gradually depleted until 2008, when the USDA decided to convert all of what was left into its dollar equivalent. And so the grain that once stabilized prices for farmers, bakers and American consumers ended up as a number on a spreadsheet in the Department of Agriculture. Now, as the United States must confront climate change, commodity markets riddled by speculation, increased import costs, hosts of regional conflicts and the return of international grain tariffs and export bans, we have put our faith entirely in transnational agribusiness and the global grain market. ..."
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
"But when it comes to food prices, our country cannot even threaten to bolster the national supply because the United States does not possess a national grain reserve. Such was not always the case. The modern concept of a strategic grain reserve was first proposed in the 1930s by Wall Street legend Benjamin Graham.
More neoliberal neocon madness... But most people in the USA did not have a parent who saw a relative starve to death during wartime... You always think the basic services will be there -- until you test them in a crisis and they are not...
"Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Or also:
http://www.taobackup.com/testi...
"No matter how sophisticated or comprehensive your backup system is, you will never know if it works unless you actually test it. Without testing, you can have no confidence at all. Here are
See for alternatives,with a section on fever: http://www.amazon.com/Raise-He...
"Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, renowned pediatrician and author advises parents on home treatment and diagnosis of colds and flus, childhood illnesses, vision and hearing problems, allergies, and more. PLUS, a complete section on picking the right doctor for your child, step-by-step instructions for knowing when to call a doctor, and much more."
Dr. Sears on fevers: ...."
http://www.askdrsears.com/topi...
"If your child of any age has one or more of the following symptoms, you should probably call your doctor right away: High fevers of 104 (40 Celcius) or higher that don't come down to 101 or 102 (38.3 to 38.9 Celcius) with the treatment measures below.
Fevers are part of how the body activates parts of the immune response and also makes an environment less hospitable for disease.
I've also found this advice helpful:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...
"Scientific research has demonstrated that humans have a powerful immune system, even stronger than other animals. Our bodies are self-repairing, self-defending organisms, which have the innate ability to defend themselves against microbes and prevent chronic illnesses. This can only happen if we give our bodies the correct raw materials."
Vitamin D deficiency and iodine deficiency are things to look into too. We take that regularly as pills and also dulse seaweed on popcorn -- I've read that iodine forms a protective layer at the edge of cells against some viruses. Elderberry and zinc may also help with a cold or flu; I just stocked upon some of those two as lozenges and other forms for the next time someone in my family gets a cold. See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"Don't be alarmed if your cold symptoms last longer than you expect. On average, patients report that their common cold symptoms last one and a half to two weeks. In children, earaches tend to last anywhere from less than one day to 9 days, sore throat 2 to 7 days, cough up to 25 days, and the common cold 7 to 15 days.32 In time, the body will clear the virus on its own. Remember, over-the-counter medications merely mask symptoms, and may even impair healing. However, if you experience a sudden worsening of symptoms, especially including labored breathing, or a fever above 103 degrees for three days, then it is time to call the doctor."
Extended breastfeeding also helps reduce illness in young children if the mother is getting adequate nutrition and is in the same environment with the kid, since her immune system will scan the environment for threats and produce antibodies for the nursing child. WHO recommend nursing for up to two years or beyond, even if that is not the norm in the USA:
http://www.who.int/topics/brea...
"Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond."
When I was last in an urgent care facility for a physical injury, the guy ahead of me was there for the flu (he had diabetes and was worried about complications). I remember thinking of that when being asked to sit in the same chair he had sat in for paperwork, and probably handed the same pen he used, and of course breathing the same air in a confined space, etc.. I ended up with the flu, which made the recovery process longer and harder (although I might have gotten the flu elsewhere too, perhaps from my own family). Hospitals are full of a lot of worse stuff than the flu, too, so I guess I got lucky in that sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.
+1 Insightful
There ares still days when I feel I would prefer the Commodore VIC or 64 with a Forth cartridge or Machine Language Monitor cartridge where the whole system was so much more understandable and predicable and also restartable with a warm boot.
While I never tired one, the Cannon Cat sounds like it had merit, and I did get the somewhat similar AlphaSmart Pro for keyboarding: ... There was a software project no longer under development, that was initiated by the late Jef Raskin himself, to develop a similar yet even more capable system for today's computing systems. The project (called Archy) was designed to eventually replace current software interfaces."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
"The Cat was primarily the brainchild of Jef Raskin, originator of the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979. It featured a text user interface, not making use of any mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command line interface or menu system, the Cat made use of its special keyboard, with commands being activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key. The Cat also used special "Leap keys" which, when held down, allowed the user to incrementally search for strings of characters.
But your point is really more about appropriateness, configurability, directness, and the power of the command line than mine about simplicity -- although they are all related.
Part of the problem is that it is much easier to add new features than to take some away or to figure out new paradigms that require less "features" to get work done. As in:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quo...
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery"
Another part is Doug Englelbart's point about investments in skills by professionals. We now expect people who do engineering or programming to go to a four year college and more, but we can't expect them to spend a few weeks learning how to use a chord keyboard or how to use, say, easier to read Smalltalk keyword syntax instead of C-like function name syntax? So everyone suffers from a lowest common denominator of two-handed QWERTY and C-looking languages...
That said, I still think innovations are possible... Just a question of which ones are worth actually using... And worth bucking convention for (typing this on a QWERTY keyboard on a C-powered Chromebook -- yet I like some aspects of the simplicity of the Chromebook).
As I suggested in this thread here in Dec 2012: http://developers.slashdot.org...
"One thing of concern to me about this (not knowing the kernel communications culture or the previous interactions of Linus and this maintainer) is whether the Linux kernel (and development community) has maybe reached some point where old development methods are breaking down in trying to support an every growing monolithic kernel approach? I initially [resisted] using Linux in the 1990s because I knew there were alternative architectures available, like from QNX, Erlang, Actor, or Smalltalk, and I had hoped those alternatives would prevail. I started using GNU/Linux only when it seemed like the social momentum there was unstoppable. Thus my previous comment on "message passing" as perhaps a better architecture for software in the 21st century because if can help address theses issues of redundancy, modularity, and testability as ways to manage risk from complexity."
It comes down to priorities. The Linux Kernel community seems to have historically prioritized maximum speed over things like security, reliability, ease-of-use, or even driver developer sanity (like statements of Linux leaders saying stuff like like APIs can be changed at will and it does not matter how much time it takes driver developers to deal with it). I'm not saying they don't care at all about these other issues, just that historically it was not a priority. If they did priorities these other things, then a message passing microkernel (more like QNX) makes more sense. Also, using a language with better bounds checking and such might also be valuable, however with a microkernel choice of language may not matter as much since most of the code for most drivers could be outside the kernel.
Anger often comes from fear. What is Linus afraid of? A big worry must be kernel getting severely broken by some contribution, That's what really sets him off into profanity. The more code involved, the more likely that can happen. I would predict that the amount of profanity Linus needs to use to keep the Kernel team in order is a good inverse metric of Kernel design quality relative to current needs. :-) And I'd suggest the amount of profanity needed is growing given the current design and current community needs and it does not bode well. :-(
Personally, at this point, I would *gladly* use a computer system that was half as fast but never crashed, never put my privacy or security at risk by bugs, never required a "recompile" just to install drivers, never had weird problems dues to incompatible versions of drivers it could not detect or manage, was ported easily to any hardware so it was truly universal, was easily upgradable indefinitely, was transparently networkable with other hardware running the same OS as one big virtual computer, which had a community of developers making new useful stuff instead of being pinned down by just keeping up with kernel API changes, and so on...
One of the reason Linux on the desktop failed is because of all these things and the pain all these continual changes to a monolithic kernel cause a general user and what a pain in the butt it would be to get any hardware installed and configured. Linux had tremendous amounts of goodwill and human time devoted to it, but it seems much of that got wasted on dealing with a monolithic kernel which meant at best that Linux computers worked 30% faster (or as fast as next years models would otherwise) -- but only when they worked, which was painful enough that people just abandoned Linux on the desktop. That is true even people like me who ran Debian as a desktop for about five years and eventually got tired of all the random breakage and moved to the Mac (maybe regretting it a bit now with Apple's new annual OS releases and developers abandoning versions from just a year or two ago...) -- and while some of the break
Well as a followup, I got a generic email yesterday from Mozilla saying I did not get the Mozilla "Software Engineer, Platform" job. Fast turn-around considering I applied last week -- probably not related to this post saying Firefox the app was more import than Firefox OS, but I'll never know? Kind of sad, as it can be hard to find well-paying mostly-work-from-home gigs -- especially doing righteous and interesting non-profit-y stuff like Mozilla does. Such jobs are very few and far between. I felt the same way when I applied to Mozilla about three years ago for a Thunderbird support job and did not get it -- I said then I'd like to turn Thunderbird into a social semantic desktop platform eventually (which I still think is a good idea). Firefox and Thunderbird are tools I've used every day for over a decade and it would have been nice to make them even better while still being able to pay the mortgage and feed my family. Well, at least it is good to know someone else will get such a worthwhile opportunity; I hope that person makes the most of it.
http://remineralize.org/
"Better soil, better food, better planet.... We see a future of thriving farms and gardens producing healthy, nutrient-dense food in great abundance. We see exuberant forests returned to a state of grandeur not seen in centuries, silently sequestering the carbon dioxide that so threatens our planet today. We see a stable climate and a cleaner, healthier environment. We see all of this being possible through the simple and effective process of soil remineralization."
Indoor agriculture is also becoming more feasible with LED lighting -- and perhaps someday soon hot or cold fusion power. Example (but from a vendor of related technology, so no-doubt biased): ... Despommier says a stacked hydroponic operation might yield about 64 heads of lettuce per square foot annually, compared to about three heads at a traditional outside farm. ... Cityscape CEO Mike Yohay predicts that by eliminating transportation costs and fertilizer, a 10,000-square-foot greenhouse could produce $500,000 in profit and 20 to 30 tons of food a year for local supermarkets and corporate cafeterias."
http://www.terraspheresystems....
"One such indoor farm opened in September in Vancouver, growing lettuce and spinach inside an 8,000-square-foot warehouse using a hydroponic system that replaces dirt and weather with peat moss plugs and circulated water. High-efficiency LED lighting hits plants grown on stacked shelves.
"It seems to me the only rational approach is to assume that nothing can be trusted and and act accordingly. Assume that whatever you are doing online is being observed by someone or anyone ..."
I've been saying to make the best of this since at least 2008 (chain of citations): :-) :-) :-)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
https://groups.google.com/foru...
https://groups.google.com/foru...
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.
Or more recently:
"A way forward through openness? (Score:5, Informative)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Of course, growing up in a Christian ideological environment, the idea is nothing new that all my actions are under constant surveillance 100% 24X7 by an omniscient entity who can even read my thoughts and decides my ultimate fate day by day... Just got to make the best of it... :-)
Not saying that means it will end well if humans are entrusted with that kind of surveillance power... Although "The Light of Other Days" and "The Transparent Society" are both books to think about...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
It's probably only a matter of time anyway until the halls of all governments are saturated with nanotech "smart dust" by all sorts of actors (see Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" or some other stories for examples). Governments might want to get their houses in order before then... In that sense, Manning and Snowden might both just be the tip of the iceberg -- even if smart dust like that is still probably ten or twenty years off...
Or also from me in 2008:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"
Or in this case, will 20th-century-mindset security institutions start sinking when their procedures are dinged by revelations moved via small cheap USB sticks apparently carried around by Manning and Snowden? Really, how "secure" or wise is a plan in the 21st century when it depends on 100% secrecy forever? Shouldn't so-called security experts employed at great expense by governments know better by now? Security by obscurity is problematical, especially over the
"just people applying 20th century ideas to 21st century conflicts."
All too true. Although the results may be far worse than becoming a "quaint has-been". To expand on your point: ... 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."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
And also on intelligence specifically:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"A failure to realize this irony will produce ever greater problems down the road as we develop ever greater technologies that can become ever greater amplifiers of destructive impulses (including self-replicating nanotech and biotech) or ever greater inhibitors of constructive impulses (like pervasive surveillance to enforce arbitrary unhealthy norms as a "war on the unexpected"" [see Schneier]). So, how can we have an intelligence community in the 21st century that is truly worthy of the name? How can we have an intelligence community that truly helps prevent misadventures that waste trillions of US dollars while millions of US children grow up in poverty and tens of millions of US citizens lack access to health care or even adequate nutritious food?"
And:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."
"Good will" is an important resource. Slowly the USA has been squandering what goodwill it including from WWII. Fortunately, good will can be a renewable resource depending on the political choices the USA makes going forward.
For example, imagine how much goodwill the USA would have right now if we had given the people of Iraq US$6 trillion dollars (US$300