Have you ever wrote a letter to your congressman? Back when the DMCA was first being drafted I wrote a couple of letters to my representative and senators urging them to oppose it and warning them of the dangers it would have to the fledgling internet. I got replies from both of them assuring me that they fully supported the DMCA and thanks for the letter...
Well that's because you live in a democracy, not a dictatorship. By the same logic, why vote, why do anything? Why bother with the whole enterprise of the US constitution in the first place?
Democracy's move slowly, but they do move, and it doesn't happen unless public opinion is demonstrated in insightful, intelligent ways.
Then oppose regulatory over-reach. Oppose misrepresentation of standing laws. Fight court battles and write letters to congressmen about these issues. And stop turning every specific issue into a general one for whatever libertarian ideal you hold - there is nothing more toxic to effective opposition against bad laws then people who reframe every issue into some broader meta-fight, since it distracts from real discussion about the very specific issue's being addressed.
These things don't just happen - people let them happen. Our system of government is pretty uniquely equipped to prevent slippery slope fallacies from happening, but it doesn't work if when the vote is scheduled no one turns out for it.
Actually politically we probably could do it. If NASA and astronomers from around the world were sure it was a problem, then I suspect it would get the right attention (money) if it was all anyone ever talked about, and we were talking detailed trajectories and planning.
The real problem is no one wants to fund observation - though fortunately the enterprise of asteroid mining is probably going to solve that to everyone's satisfaction.
We have one billion chronically hungry people today and it's going to get far far worse in the coming decades. Man is more populous than the rat and is consuming the earth like a swarm of locusts consuming a crop field.
Your first sentence does not follow for your second.
There is more then enough food in the world today to feed the entire human race, plus some extra ones. Instead, most of it is wasted - not overconsumed - but wasted, because it's not possible to distribute it in an effective way.
Population crises are never going to be a problem because we straight up don't have to feed all the people in the world. We don't now, and that's not going to change in the forseeable future. And, it's not like starving people are able to swim across oceans or defeat a modern army, so the wealthy nations aren't going to be overwhelmed by the poor.
Additionally, let's suppose we did decide to feed everyone - which is a difficult endeavor. The infrastructure and education you need to make that a viable long term solution, empirically seems to have the side-effect of reducing population growth - if you succeed in preventing famine in an effective way, and start teaching farmers and educating women and children, then in every single place it's been tried, population growth levels off and then declines.
That's where I have a problem. Making "green" energy cheaper and more practical is a win and something I'd applaud, trying to force it by instead making everything else too expensive is stupid and hurts people, especially the poor, and the economy in general.
The "free market" is anything but - the whole point of making green energy cheaper is to address the fact that all those other energy sources have enormously expensive externality costs which they're not forced to bear, yet end up affecting everyone.
Fracking is the most recent offender, because the EPA regulations were changed to grant specific exemptions to fracking which no other industry in the US can benefit from. That's an enormous distortion - an industry is being allowed to freely poison groundwater and destroy farmland and pay only a fraction - if any - of the mitigation costs.
Or you know, just measure electrical consumption and then divide it up by the overall balance of the grid?
CO2 emissions from electric vehicle electricity use are irrelevant, since that's a whole separate problem. The problem with ICE vehicles today is that there is no practical way to run them on a CO2-neutral fuel, and it's a big challenge to find one. Whereas we basically know how to produce CO2 free electricity, even if we're not doing it enough yet.
I blame the MS Ribbon. It was the first shot fired in the modern era of UI redesigns, wherein it was decided that the real problem was there was no way to force user's to use it until they like it.
I didn't say that - but by definition there have to be less managers then there are laborers. It is conceptually possible we could sustain that kind of pyramid indefinitely by growing the economy so we were always employing more, but even then, you can't find the type of population for it - it would only work if you were aggressively trying to find people who can skill up and move on to different fields.
All things the current US political climate is against (education, welfare, stimulus spending to avoid recession...)
It's very very unlikely that we're going to find any kind of functional ecosystem over there. The best we can hope for is a surviving remnant - a few scraps of past life that still manage to live. Fossil evidence of past life would be second best. Curiosity is fossil hunting, among other things, and that includes chemical traces of long dead single celled life.
If it doesn't find evidence of past life, it'll also be studying the geological history of mars to give us a much better idea of whether to give up on the fossil hunting entirely.
Being sure that mars is dead, and has always been dead, would actually be a good thing. It would mean we have no worries about contaminating the place with human missions. We could be as messy as we like whenver humans finally arrive, safe in the knowledge that we're not destroying irreplaceable unique evidence.
If something is living there, then by definition there's an ecosystem - it may not be a diverse one, but it would be there.
It would also be hugely significant. Mars is probably not the greatest target for finding interesting life in the solar system, but if Martian-evolved life of any type were discovered it would pretty drastically alter at least 1 of the variables of the Drake equation.
Actually they wouldn't be - flat tax's are disproportionately regressive, and military-industrial complex has made out like bandits from the wars. Halliburton would get the army's of lobbyists in.
Although, you're right in the sense that the people we need to reach on these issues are not the upper 1%, but the masses of people who either don't care to vote against them or perversely keep voting for them. But I'd much rather target the people who tend to profit from the current wars in the only language they understand and simply tax progressively. But make sure that every single person in the country saw a little "War Costs" itemized breakdown on their tax bill, with a note for which conflict it was.
Wrong comparison even though - I mean let's assume that we have to be in Afghanistan. That all that money isn't not going to armoring and arming actual US military personnel.
The F-22 program cost was $US 66.7 billion over about 14 years. $4.7 billion per year. The planes cost $150 million to produce each. The entire planetary science budget could have it's funding increased for less then the price of 4 of those planes per year. But that's programs over - unfair right?
Well then we have the F-35. Current production cost of the F-35A is US$197 million per unit. So 3 planes less a year to again, increase the funding of the planetary science budget. Total projected cost to date is $US 56.4 billion. That is probably going to go up. Total cost is projected at something like $323 billion for development and procurement.
So we have two new state-of-the-art fighter aircraft produced one after the other. In fact one was made, and another one was begun designing before the first program had even been mothballed. Neither is capable of replacing some of the planes the US actually needs - like the A-10 Warthog - for the wars the US actually fights - like in Afghanistan - where it's all about close-air support of ground forces.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan we have soldiers on the ground with insufficient body armor and unarmored Humm-Vees. Who'll come back to find veterans benefits programs being cut.
The US probably needs to stay well ahead in terms of military technology, but that sort of thing by all accounts could be done for a fraction of the current cost, while maintaining the same level of capability (in fact, probably gaining more, what with the idea of buying shit you actually need) and hey - as a sidebenefit you could maybe, just maybe, discover that fundamental science is surprisingly affordable.
The long term survival of the country is in Science and engineering. If your society doesn't do that, then you are done as a civilized society.
Thank goodness Congress was there to develop electricity, automobiles, radio, and telephones!
Oh, wait, those all happened before general income taxes when people still had money to spend on preposterous ideas.
It sure was a good thing those private companies built a massive national highway infrastructure for automobiles to run on, or standardized, built and maintained the telephone and electricity grids.
It's also an attitude born of the upper class, where a lifetime in suits and air conditioned office's certainly allows you to keep going well past the retirement age.
Manual labor jobs, things involving heavy lifting or the like, it is physically not possible to keep doing into your 60s nor would it make any sense to try and make people do.
Also one has to wonder how enthusiastic people would have been for the war if in the lead up to it the US government were front loading some of the tax costs. If every time it came up, the future annual tax increases for "Iraq invasion" were mentioned.
We must be bombing a dozen foreign countries on regular basis (now with drones). We are hardly "at peace". Oh, and we are in "War on Terror" which is projected to end approximately never.
Congress needs to man up and demand that the Administration has to get damn permission and issue official war declaration in order to bomb anyone. And de-fund any and all money that goes toward "unofficial" offensive military action.
Before 2001 we were at peace, with the only event since 1991 (Desert Storm) being a few cruise missles lobbed into Serbia to bring them to heel. Yet our military spending, despite cuts and closures, still ranked high while the Pentagon found all manner of toys in its version of the Sears & Roebucks Catalog that it just couldn't live without. Even when we're not at war, we're preparing for total war.
Also the cost of a bombing campaign like the one in Libya was "only" about $US1 billion for the US side of things.
The DOD's annual budget for 2012 was $US683 billion.
Why? Assume that everyone in the world bought nothing but Apple computers and they all ran Linux on them. Why would Apple be unhappy with that?
Apple does not sell OSes, the OS is a way to sell their hardware. They see themselves as being in the same business as Dell more than Microsoft.
Certainly that situation would still be quite profitable for Apple but the desire would be overwhelming to charge for the entire stack: hardware, OS, Applications, media, online storage, the list goes on. The App Store model is very profitable. In fact, Apple is already very well established in this arena for iOS devices. They aren't exactly going out of their way to open up the boot loaders on iPhones and iPads to allow for alternative OS's just to sell more hardware, otherwise they might as well sell them with Android preinstalled. With the App Store showing up in recent Mac OS X versions, one could argue that they are already going down this path for the desktop.
Or to put it another way, investors look for growth, not success. There would be enormous numbers of power point slides putting dollar figures on something or another and pointing out how massive the potential profits are, how much it's an "untapped" market.
This is why the LHC has ATLAS and CMS as I understand it - different detectors looking at the same beamlines, with independent teams (at least as I understand it).
Not in specific but in general that's the way Wayland is heading. Implementing something like RDP. So high level commands go between client and server and the client handles complex rendering. There are no pixel buffers being passed. But to do that requires going above the composition engine, the RDP level would exist at the GUI i.e. the Waylnad versions of Gnome or KDE not at the composer that wouldn't know the source of the high level commands.
See this approach can work for Windows or Mac OS though because it's a closed eco-system at that level, whereas *nix and open-source software pretty much by definition can't be. The benefit of dropping things down to a lower level is that the opportunities for fragmentation are minimized, and (personally) I think the user-experience is improved because we know what's going on there. The alternative is the approach you indicate - high level stuff - but in the open-source ecosystem that means we either have to support everything inefficiently (VNC) or we end up with dozens of protocols everywhere which don't agree with each other.
And its still quicker to type than to get the camera all lined up to QR code something you pass on a bus
Actually no, it's not quicker.just typing "tinyurl.com" takes more time than to acquire a QR code.Unless you use a catastrophically inefficient app/UI for the QR.
Also I already use my cellphone camera to record things I want to remember anyway. QR codes are a pretty obvious extension of the concept.
Probably more importantly though, they leverage something which has other benefits to the user - i.e. an NFC antenna *just* does NFC. Whereas there are all sorts of reasons to have a cellphone camera.
Right but not all applications will ever be forseeably designed this way, and to some extent its questionable whether we want to require all things to need to be.
90% of applications essentially render themselves by requesting the drawing of arrays of different types of vector graphics - and the rise of "retina" displays ensures that trend will accelerate.
The more I look into Wayland the less I like it. If you're going to go to the trouble of rendering everything in OpenGL of some sort, then why not commit to it and process out everything as OpenGL commands, and then let us stream that from client to server?
That to me, seems like the more sensible approach if you wanted to simplify X, since it doesn't eliminate functionality, but it does put everything in a language which can then be tackled by the rendering device however it wants. Wayland seems like it'll eventually head that way, but it's going to be left stuck with applications drawing themselves as big bitmaps to pixel buffers - blowing away a nice fast user experience when remoting.
This still seems like a backwards step though if we're not even going to be considering how Wayland should deal with running programs over a network.
We're in the world with rising tablets and "cloud" computing usage, so the need for an easy to use remote desktop/application system seems more obvious then ever. Where is the sense in developing a new display server and not including in the design some type of road map as to how this feature would be supported from the get go?
If you're starting from a blank slate, surely now is the time to learn some of the lessons from X and make sure the protocol will work well and fast for a remote desktop/application experience.
Revealing locations of conservatives now, that would lead to some real issues...
Every conservative or libertarian voter I know is a strong supporter of the 2nd amendment and has one or more guns. It would seem the group of people who's core defense is to "wait for the police" should be most concerned.
Actually not stupid people's core defense is "run the fuck away".
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever wrote a letter to your congressman? Back when the DMCA was first being drafted I wrote a couple of letters to my representative and senators urging them to oppose it and warning them of the dangers it would have to the fledgling internet. I got replies from both of them assuring me that they fully supported the DMCA and thanks for the letter...
Well that's because you live in a democracy, not a dictatorship. By the same logic, why vote, why do anything? Why bother with the whole enterprise of the US constitution in the first place?
Democracy's move slowly, but they do move, and it doesn't happen unless public opinion is demonstrated in insightful, intelligent ways.
Then oppose regulatory over-reach. Oppose misrepresentation of standing laws. Fight court battles and write letters to congressmen about these issues. And stop turning every specific issue into a general one for whatever libertarian ideal you hold - there is nothing more toxic to effective opposition against bad laws then people who reframe every issue into some broader meta-fight, since it distracts from real discussion about the very specific issue's being addressed.
These things don't just happen - people let them happen. Our system of government is pretty uniquely equipped to prevent slippery slope fallacies from happening, but it doesn't work if when the vote is scheduled no one turns out for it.
Actually politically we probably could do it. If NASA and astronomers from around the world were sure it was a problem, then I suspect it would get the right attention (money) if it was all anyone ever talked about, and we were talking detailed trajectories and planning.
The real problem is no one wants to fund observation - though fortunately the enterprise of asteroid mining is probably going to solve that to everyone's satisfaction.
We have one billion chronically hungry people today and it's going to get far far worse in the coming decades. Man is more populous than the rat and is consuming the earth like a swarm of locusts consuming a crop field.
Your first sentence does not follow for your second.
There is more then enough food in the world today to feed the entire human race, plus some extra ones. Instead, most of it is wasted - not overconsumed - but wasted, because it's not possible to distribute it in an effective way.
Population crises are never going to be a problem because we straight up don't have to feed all the people in the world. We don't now, and that's not going to change in the forseeable future. And, it's not like starving people are able to swim across oceans or defeat a modern army, so the wealthy nations aren't going to be overwhelmed by the poor.
Additionally, let's suppose we did decide to feed everyone - which is a difficult endeavor. The infrastructure and education you need to make that a viable long term solution, empirically seems to have the side-effect of reducing population growth - if you succeed in preventing famine in an effective way, and start teaching farmers and educating women and children, then in every single place it's been tried, population growth levels off and then declines.
That's where I have a problem. Making "green" energy cheaper and more practical is a win and something I'd applaud, trying to force it by instead making everything else too expensive is stupid and hurts people, especially the poor, and the economy in general.
The "free market" is anything but - the whole point of making green energy cheaper is to address the fact that all those other energy sources have enormously expensive externality costs which they're not forced to bear, yet end up affecting everyone.
Fracking is the most recent offender, because the EPA regulations were changed to grant specific exemptions to fracking which no other industry in the US can benefit from. That's an enormous distortion - an industry is being allowed to freely poison groundwater and destroy farmland and pay only a fraction - if any - of the mitigation costs.
Or you know, just measure electrical consumption and then divide it up by the overall balance of the grid?
CO2 emissions from electric vehicle electricity use are irrelevant, since that's a whole separate problem. The problem with ICE vehicles today is that there is no practical way to run them on a CO2-neutral fuel, and it's a big challenge to find one. Whereas we basically know how to produce CO2 free electricity, even if we're not doing it enough yet.
I blame the MS Ribbon. It was the first shot fired in the modern era of UI redesigns, wherein it was decided that the real problem was there was no way to force user's to use it until they like it.
I didn't say that - but by definition there have to be less managers then there are laborers. It is conceptually possible we could sustain that kind of pyramid indefinitely by growing the economy so we were always employing more, but even then, you can't find the type of population for it - it would only work if you were aggressively trying to find people who can skill up and move on to different fields.
All things the current US political climate is against (education, welfare, stimulus spending to avoid recession...)
It's very very unlikely that we're going to find any kind of functional ecosystem over there. The best we can hope for is a surviving remnant - a few scraps of past life that still manage to live. Fossil evidence of past life would be second best. Curiosity is fossil hunting, among other things, and that includes chemical traces of long dead single celled life.
If it doesn't find evidence of past life, it'll also be studying the geological history of mars to give us a much better idea of whether to give up on the fossil hunting entirely.
Being sure that mars is dead, and has always been dead, would actually be a good thing. It would mean we have no worries about contaminating the place with human missions. We could be as messy as we like whenver humans finally arrive, safe in the knowledge that we're not destroying irreplaceable unique evidence.
If something is living there, then by definition there's an ecosystem - it may not be a diverse one, but it would be there.
It would also be hugely significant. Mars is probably not the greatest target for finding interesting life in the solar system, but if Martian-evolved life of any type were discovered it would pretty drastically alter at least 1 of the variables of the Drake equation.
Actually they wouldn't be - flat tax's are disproportionately regressive, and military-industrial complex has made out like bandits from the wars. Halliburton would get the army's of lobbyists in.
Although, you're right in the sense that the people we need to reach on these issues are not the upper 1%, but the masses of people who either don't care to vote against them or perversely keep voting for them. But I'd much rather target the people who tend to profit from the current wars in the only language they understand and simply tax progressively. But make sure that every single person in the country saw a little "War Costs" itemized breakdown on their tax bill, with a note for which conflict it was.
Wrong comparison even though - I mean let's assume that we have to be in Afghanistan. That all that money isn't not going to armoring and arming actual US military personnel.
The F-22 program cost was $US 66.7 billion over about 14 years. $4.7 billion per year. The planes cost $150 million to produce each. The entire planetary science budget could have it's funding increased for less then the price of 4 of those planes per year. But that's programs over - unfair right?
Well then we have the F-35. Current production cost of the F-35A is US$197 million per unit. So 3 planes less a year to again, increase the funding of the planetary science budget. Total projected cost to date is $US 56.4 billion. That is probably going to go up. Total cost is projected at something like $323 billion for development and procurement.
So we have two new state-of-the-art fighter aircraft produced one after the other. In fact one was made, and another one was begun designing before the first program had even been mothballed. Neither is capable of replacing some of the planes the US actually needs - like the A-10 Warthog - for the wars the US actually fights - like in Afghanistan - where it's all about close-air support of ground forces.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan we have soldiers on the ground with insufficient body armor and unarmored Humm-Vees. Who'll come back to find veterans benefits programs being cut.
The US probably needs to stay well ahead in terms of military technology, but that sort of thing by all accounts could be done for a fraction of the current cost, while maintaining the same level of capability (in fact, probably gaining more, what with the idea of buying shit you actually need) and hey - as a sidebenefit you could maybe, just maybe, discover that fundamental science is surprisingly affordable.
The long term survival of the country is in Science and engineering. If your society doesn't do that, then you are done as a civilized society.
Thank goodness Congress was there to develop electricity, automobiles, radio, and telephones!
Oh, wait, those all happened before general income taxes when people still had money to spend on preposterous ideas.
It sure was a good thing those private companies built a massive national highway infrastructure for automobiles to run on, or standardized, built and maintained the telephone and electricity grids.
It's also an attitude born of the upper class, where a lifetime in suits and air conditioned office's certainly allows you to keep going well past the retirement age.
Manual labor jobs, things involving heavy lifting or the like, it is physically not possible to keep doing into your 60s nor would it make any sense to try and make people do.
Also one has to wonder how enthusiastic people would have been for the war if in the lead up to it the US government were front loading some of the tax costs. If every time it came up, the future annual tax increases for "Iraq invasion" were mentioned.
even when we are at complete peace.
We must be bombing a dozen foreign countries on regular basis (now with drones). We are hardly "at peace". Oh, and we are in "War on Terror" which is projected to end approximately never.
Congress needs to man up and demand that the Administration has to get damn permission and issue official war declaration in order to bomb anyone. And de-fund any and all money that goes toward "unofficial" offensive military action.
Before 2001 we were at peace, with the only event since 1991 (Desert Storm) being a few cruise missles lobbed into Serbia to bring them to heel. Yet our military spending, despite cuts and closures, still ranked high while the Pentagon found all manner of toys in its version of the Sears & Roebucks Catalog that it just couldn't live without. Even when we're not at war, we're preparing for total war.
Also the cost of a bombing campaign like the one in Libya was "only" about $US1 billion for the US side of things.
The DOD's annual budget for 2012 was $US683 billion.
Why? Assume that everyone in the world bought nothing but Apple computers and they all ran Linux on them. Why would Apple be unhappy with that?
Apple does not sell OSes, the OS is a way to sell their hardware. They see themselves as being in the same business as Dell more than Microsoft.
Certainly that situation would still be quite profitable for Apple but the desire would be overwhelming to charge for the entire stack: hardware, OS, Applications, media, online storage, the list goes on. The App Store model is very profitable. In fact, Apple is already very well established in this arena for iOS devices. They aren't exactly going out of their way to open up the boot loaders on iPhones and iPads to allow for alternative OS's just to sell more hardware, otherwise they might as well sell them with Android preinstalled. With the App Store showing up in recent Mac OS X versions, one could argue that they are already going down this path for the desktop.
Or to put it another way, investors look for growth, not success. There would be enormous numbers of power point slides putting dollar figures on something or another and pointing out how massive the potential profits are, how much it's an "untapped" market.
NX via x2go solves that problem really nicely though since it cleans up the chattiness of the X server protocol.
Meanwhile Microsoft is the only company that has gone ahead and said "no, both platforms should run the same OS".
You can always install Linux later IF Apple turns that way as well.
Seems some Linux distros are going that way too. Yes, I am looking at you Ubuntu.
Thankfully we have Linux Mint, which at the end of the day is Ubuntu-but-not-stupid.
This is why the LHC has ATLAS and CMS as I understand it - different detectors looking at the same beamlines, with independent teams (at least as I understand it).
Not in specific but in general that's the way Wayland is heading. Implementing something like RDP. So high level commands go between client and server and the client handles complex rendering. There are no pixel buffers being passed. But to do that requires going above the composition engine, the RDP level would exist at the GUI i.e. the Waylnad versions of Gnome or KDE not at the composer that wouldn't know the source of the high level commands.
See this approach can work for Windows or Mac OS though because it's a closed eco-system at that level, whereas *nix and open-source software pretty much by definition can't be. The benefit of dropping things down to a lower level is that the opportunities for fragmentation are minimized, and (personally) I think the user-experience is improved because we know what's going on there. The alternative is the approach you indicate - high level stuff - but in the open-source ecosystem that means we either have to support everything inefficiently (VNC) or we end up with dozens of protocols everywhere which don't agree with each other.
And its still quicker to type than to get the camera all lined up to QR code something you pass on a bus
Actually no, it's not quicker.just typing "tinyurl.com" takes more time than to acquire a QR code.Unless you use a catastrophically inefficient app/UI for the QR.
Also I already use my cellphone camera to record things I want to remember anyway. QR codes are a pretty obvious extension of the concept.
Probably more importantly though, they leverage something which has other benefits to the user - i.e. an NFC antenna *just* does NFC. Whereas there are all sorts of reasons to have a cellphone camera.
Right but not all applications will ever be forseeably designed this way, and to some extent its questionable whether we want to require all things to need to be.
90% of applications essentially render themselves by requesting the drawing of arrays of different types of vector graphics - and the rise of "retina" displays ensures that trend will accelerate.
The more I look into Wayland the less I like it. If you're going to go to the trouble of rendering everything in OpenGL of some sort, then why not commit to it and process out everything as OpenGL commands, and then let us stream that from client to server?
That to me, seems like the more sensible approach if you wanted to simplify X, since it doesn't eliminate functionality, but it does put everything in a language which can then be tackled by the rendering device however it wants. Wayland seems like it'll eventually head that way, but it's going to be left stuck with applications drawing themselves as big bitmaps to pixel buffers - blowing away a nice fast user experience when remoting.
This still seems like a backwards step though if we're not even going to be considering how Wayland should deal with running programs over a network.
We're in the world with rising tablets and "cloud" computing usage, so the need for an easy to use remote desktop/application system seems more obvious then ever. Where is the sense in developing a new display server and not including in the design some type of road map as to how this feature would be supported from the get go?
If you're starting from a blank slate, surely now is the time to learn some of the lessons from X and make sure the protocol will work well and fast for a remote desktop/application experience.
Revealing locations of conservatives now, that would lead to some real issues...
Every conservative or libertarian voter I know is a strong supporter of the 2nd amendment and has one or more guns. It would seem the group of people who's core defense is to "wait for the police" should be most concerned.
Actually not stupid people's core defense is "run the fuck away".
Future AIs would still have senses though. A digital camera is sight. Streams of digital data are still senses.