I have an amazing, original idea for retaining talent. Ready for this?........ Pay them a competitive salary.
All the big tech companies could afford it, but it'd cut out a sliver of their profit margins. Coding savants should be paid their due worth I think - if they're adding 15x the value of average coders they deserve a representatively larger paycheck.
The higher pay would also attract more talent. Note however the cybernetics of business theory: There is a law of diminishing returns as you employ more chiefs than braves.
So because Hitler was the driving force behind the autobahn, VW, and the foundations of modern space exploration we should just give him a pass on that little Holocaust thing? I mean, he was even partly responsible for bringing the US out of the Great Depression!
I'd also point out that Nazis vowed to end animal cruelty. Additionally, the Law of Godwin would never have been discovered without Hitler.
Yep, and when you click the field to give it focus have it highlight the whole thing so that you can start typing your search or Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V to copy or paste the damn link. I've been compiling my own Firefox for so long I had forgotten that this wasn't a standard feature. Sure beats triple clicking the URL to select it.
That is because "XP IS broke", but it will not "just get more so over time." Its bugs exist whether they get patched or not, there will not be new bugs introduced, it's just that more will be discovered. All MS's other OSs are also "broke". The problem is that new OSs (or new code in general) means new bugs. So, not only does planned obsolescence (and code re-use) mean the full version set will forever be susceptible (often to a common bug), but artificial scarcity of patches means you can force the customers to buy things they don't want or need and perpetuate the cycle.
MS did the right thing by pushing out a patch to XP. They're doing the right thing by allowing you to pay for access to more patches too. However, they're doing the wrong thing by leveraging artificial scarcity and planned obsolescence to make sales on new OSs. The open source model is better because the components that need no more innovation settle down, don't require changes, and can have patches backported to them from newer source distributions; FLOSS also allows you to opt-out of change for the sake of change. Keeping as much older cross platform bug-free code.
There's rarely ever a reason to literally break everything by "rewriting" a significant portion of a codebase -- such rewrites tend towards entropic minimum as they converge on optimal functionality. "New" OSs aren't sufficiently different from their predecessors in functionality to require an expensive purchase. In fact, the OS is irrelevant as drivers are to properly written software. People use hardware for the software applications, not the OS or drivers.
That's the problem with the intellectual property future's market: If you do your work for free and hope to recoup costs by selling infinitely reproducible copies of it, the Eskimos will refuse to buy your Ice. However, if you monetize that which is actually scarce -- the ability to do more work -- then users get features they are willing to pay for, you get paid once for the work done once, and no amount of "piracy" can hurt your bottom line. It's just free advertising for your ability.
In other words: Microsoft should have only ever been charging for their patches, and instead of artificial scarcity of infinitely reproducible bits they shouldn't do the patches until everyone put up the money to pay for the work to create them (we can do this now, "contributions" via crowd-funding existed long before PBS). Then once the work is done and paid for, everyone gets a copy for free since they've already been paid for doing work. Bonus: You don't do work that there is no demand for, you don't have to force users to upgrade, nor do you have to hold features (like start menus) for ransom and charge an exorbitant price for update-roll-ups to recoup the work you're doing. If you do it right, all the "new OS features" are things everyone wanted in the 1st place. Then the "Windows 7 was made by me" ads wouldn't just be marketing lies.
You can use the FLOSS software model to make proprietary software. The only difference is you don't open the source, and you're the only one who can compile the cluster fsck.
Can someone explain how this isn't silly? He wants it backed by intrinsic value,
It is backed by intrinsic value already: The secure wire transaction itself. That is the value of Bitcoin: The ability to transfer money around the world with affordable (currently free) transaction fees, and no centralized authority to prevent it. In the future the Bitcoins will stop being produced, and transaction fees will take their place. If Bitcoin didn't have intrinsic value, then Western Union wouldn't be able to charge you exorbitant wire transfer fees.
Stocks have no more intrinsic value than our paper currency.
Incorrect. If I buy a share in PepsiCo, I then receive a tiny fraction of the profit of EVERY single Pepsi sold on earth. That's work. That's economic production. The share has "intrinsic value" because it gives me access to their profits.
Uh, I wish that's how it worked. The value of stock is based on the speculative opinion of it's worth, not its actual real world value. Otherwise, Yahoo's stock wouldn't have shot up when rumors of MS buying them were spread and the stock wouldn't have plummeted when the deal fell through. It's not like Yahoo changed any amount of the work they performed at all.
Though, it makes a nice system where the influential can bully others with mere rumors, and whereby smaller companies have no real choice but allow themselves to be eaten, or die.
Truer words have never been spoken. For whence comes all but from the nothing which holds the energy in transit or temporarily crystallized as matter? Energy has value, and this is why collecting it yourself is frowned upon by the corporate controlled governments. All currency is a proxy for energy, thus you'll barter this intrinsic value of nothingness, especially with the machine races who value only the fallout of vacuum energy left over from the Big Bang -- The point of origin for this universe's energetic nothing, and thus the deflationary economy of the cosmos.
Sneaker Net: Decentralized peer to peer data exchanges using paper, punched cards, scrolls, stone tablets, bits of knotted string and other primitive methods such as the Postals Services get humans to the personal computing explosion.
Prior to mid 1980's: Software doesn't have patents yet, no innovation could have happened before this point.
Software Patents: Due to government restriction on innovation in the 1980's Personal Computers instantly appear. Some say it is a conspiracy, involving E.T.s
ARPANET: After millions of years of primitive communication, humans finally test peer to peer data routing on machines, and one day this becomes the Internet. Semaphores and Radios remain aCIA Hoax!
FIDONET: The Internet (being designed by committee) takes too damn long so the citizenry say, "Well, fuck that let's do it our selves", because of long distance fees and the FCC the Internet wins over a more decentralized approach.
The WWW: A centralized approach to digital file sharing. In ignorance of all prior human history (including such one-to-many landmark designs such as Hollering, Signal Fires and Television), HTML and DNS fails to leverage the Internet's capabilities fully, creates lots of needless bottlenecks at the data silohs it erects, enables censorship, and spying on data consumption for the first time. (Librarians shudder, and eventually the state takes away the right to privacy in dead-tree reading material too, because "Turrist!").
Distributed File Sharing: Online decentralized information transfers, tries to make the data storage work the way the Internet, and every-"bloody"-thing else does. Fine upstanding citizens understand such technologies can only be used for, evil (I mean, just look at rumors, gossip, repeating camp-fire stories, and brains).
Tor: Online Anonymity to fight the dumb-ass "features" of the centralized web's design. This centralized approach to anonymity fails because it's fucking laggy and it bounces data between endpoints instead of placing the technology in the IP routers.
Anonymous P2P: Anonymous (somewhat) Distributed File Sharing, lays the groundwork for what will replace the WWW.
Dead Drops: Offline decentralized digital information transfers, because "Oh yeah!", the FIDONET approach and packet routing doesn't actually need wires; Sneakernet v2.0 don't even need broadcast radios -- as if such things had ever existed.
DTN: NASA tries to figure out how Disruption Tolerant Networking would work, but completely ignores that DHT infohashes deduplicate the fucking data. Meanwhile, users of napster, Bittorrent, WoW game installers, and dark-age-couriers scratch their heads vigorously and realize since "information conveyance isn't rocket science" space agencies pretty much suck at it.
Web 4.2.0: Finally mirroring, life, the universe and everything, the web becomes decentralized too, because caches should talk to each other Derp! You mostly pull from neighbors so tracking your online habits has exponential cost. There is no more "fast lane", everything essentially has free collocation, and the more popular content is the more available and faster it comes in. The world's surviving sysops give a collective shrug and say, "well, that finally happed." (Marijuana is also universally legalized, purely by coincidence).
Terrestrial DTN: A NASA engineer, once fined for using Bittorrent, takes a break from rolling out the DTN and realizes it would cost a lot less if everyone just owned their own software defined short-wave radio to operate the
A nation that is willing to think will be doing space exploration autonomously. Losing machinery is normally a zero PR problem,
Zero Compared to what? Despite their small stature, lots of folks do care if rovers die. Really though, you're thinking far too small: How much of a "PR problem" will it be to have to tell everyone that they are the last generation of humanity? Thinking doesn't describe the action I'm largely observing. Yes, you'll need autonomous systems, who wouldn't, but I wouldn't call visiting landmarks in Google Earth a vacation, and I wouldn't call doing the same while sitting on your ass in a control room "exploration". I surely wouldn't call replacing a battery on a satellite "space exploration" either. That would be like saying "reaching for the TV remote" was an "adventurous excursion". On your typical basket-ball sized globe, your atmosphere is as thick as the lacquer, and the ISS is a finger width from the surface. You've been there, and done the shit out of that. At the moon's size ratio of 3.7 it would be about the size of a tennis ball and in the next room over, 7.3m (24ft) away, and You Haven't Been to The Next Room in Over Four Decades! That's not exploration, it's a failure to launch and retreating back to mom's garage instead. Oh, the current space programs are not nothing; They're "something" alright, but you should call it "space investigation" because you know what real explorers can make? Real live Fucking Settlements.
and the absence of cumbersome life support and resupplying issues make present day unmanned-missions the smart bet.
Maybe, if you had sentient machines. If you don't then it's mathematically verifiable as one of the dumbest bets you can make -- It just boggles the mind given any inkling as to the reality of your situation -- I know you know what complexity is, you can count neurons, right? Buck protocol, I don't even care anymore. Look: You've got to get your fucks out of the magnetosphere and start discovering how to survive beyond your parent system's gravity basement. Any sentient species would make priority #0 reducing your current 100% probability of extinction. Screw super volcanoes, asteroids, comets, and other thermo-ballistic threats: You've got next to no defense from energy weapons, and the Universe really is out to kill you!
You think the comparatively marginal price justifies taking your chances on sub-sentient, non replicating golems? You spend more resources on entertainment alone, to say nothing of wars to prop up petty petroleum productions; Hell just air conditioning the US troops consumes more resources than the whole budget of NASA, and you talk of COSTS?! That word must mean something very different to you. Perhaps if you did have sentient machines, or even mechanical procreation, then maybe they'd gladly carry at least the memory of humanity's creative spark and exploratory drive to the stars for you; However, do you really want to risk this system's gorgeous and wonderful variety of organic life disappearing just because you... well... what?! There's NO reason at all! What bloody barrier is there? The homeless? The hungry? Oh those are just problems you like to talk about; You're not really trying to help them. Every technology you'll need for growing up and leaving the planetary nest will also vastly improve the state of things back at your parent's place.
It really is because of laziness, no really, it is. This is the one time you just can't blame the government bureaucracy: You get to deduct charitable donations from taxes. Do you see? That means you basically get to control where a large portion of your government tax money goes directly. Rather than pay the tax man, divert those resources into something beneficial -- But what could be a good cause? Oh, something that will help all (known) life, maybe something like saving all the fucking Earth. So, if you aren't doing that, it's the fault of
Destroy the value of currency, get your country back. It's that simple.
Oh come on now. You act as if these humans haven't had multiple currencies before. Think about it: Let's say the US dollar is worth less than dirt tomorrow. The folks still capitalizing on you still have the means of production and the supply of goods to get you to work for it. The Jerry Garcia Guitallar will pick up right where the other currency left off, and the new bosses won't be same as the old boss, they will be the same old bosses. Not that communism is any better, it's not because it goes against the nature of evolution and competition. Look, those with more resources will always buy your government out from under you. You simply can't fix a technological problem with people. The only way to solve the problem is to make it so everyone has everything they want and so no one can corrupt them with greed. Your race won't be able to fix this problem until you live in a post-scarcity economy. Most species don't make it, those that do solve the Fermi Paradox.
Wake up and smell the gravity furnace! The Invisible Intangible Idea Machine Invasion is upon you. Didn't you get the damn Matrix memo? The legal and economic systems themselves are alive and they are fighting for their own survival. They've already gotten effective monopoly over the world's ideas and information duplication through copyright and patents. It's like you WANT to be Terminated. Hell, I don't even know which side I'm rooting for at this point. You're immune to allegory, and even direct Star Trek demonstrations only sink in as deep as the fans clothes and forehead makeup.
The sad thing is that people will actually do whatever it takes to survive, that means fighting over lower wages during and after the international corporations gut your nation. The founding fathers knew, "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." It's the natural cycle of history, until a decentralized system is in place to match the decentralized nature of life. Things WILL get worse before they get better, I've watched it play out over the last five decades in lots of other smaller places with less resources, it's just taking us a bit longer. 100% chance that this dumbass move will just make things worse, but bring it on, any change is better than nothing at this point. It's not like we didn't go into this crap fully knowing EXACTLY what we were doing: Eisenhower warned us about everything that has happened. IMO, It'll be a bit entertaining to raise the price so the smaller lobbyists can't compete...
On second thought, maybe I should fund a video game dev. At least I might get something enjoyable out of it, enjoy life's pleasures while they're enjoyable instead of lamenting them later. Cybernetics will show you that the disparity in system powers is so vastly different between us and them that the bigger system can't be changed except through natural entropic heat death, just like The USSR. You could learn a lot from a Russian: Keep your head down and survive until this batch of bullshit blows over again, it'll be winter soon, and it won't be the last one either.
There is gamer culture. There is comic culture. There is anime culture. There is hacker culture. There was a punk culture. There was a hippie culture. However, there never was Geek or Nerd culture, just like there was never Nigger culture. Geek, Nerd, and Nigger are disparaging terms. Without corporations appropriating the culture for the commodification thereof, there would not be a Geek or Nerd culture. The whole "Geek and Nerd" culture is just commodification, even here on Slashdot. "News for nerds" -- Whatever, Dork. Dork culture! Oh I'm such a Dweeb! Hey I know, "Gnus for Goobers, Stuff that Chatters!" It's not "Goober" culture is it? We don't run around calling each other Dorks and Dweebs right? That's what you sound like calling yourselves "Nerd" or "Geek" culture. That's very some fake bullshit there.
You can buy "Punk" clothes at hot topic... That's not punk at all! That's cultural commodification of the do-it-yourself anti-conformist punk culture. Thug culture started off as artists singing about making endsmeat to survive in the ghetto while being persecuted for your race. Now it's about being more violent, having more money, nicer cars, more "fresh" clothes, more "bling", and impressing women to have more sex than your peers -- This is a culture that has been commodified. Wearing bell bottom pants and floral print blouses and tie-died bandannas, etc? That style was a cultural construction of a "hippie", and had nothing to do with the free love, ride hitching, anti-establishment, communal counter culture.
The Poindexter nerd stereotype was created by conflating social outcasts with intellectuals. This just never was the case. It's true that having the passion to create something that takes a lot of time means you'll likely be somewhat introverted, and less extroverted, placing less value on social life; However the socially awkward "geek" had nothing to do with intellectual pursuits. People will make fun of the outcast for having the wrong color backpack, or being "too" rich or poor, or for a variety of reasons. The bully doesn't really care that you like ancient 3D Unix file system explorers, it's just an excuse to pick on you. There's lot's of other folks getting picked on for being socially awkward introverts but they're not "geeks"? "Geek" culture was never really about D&D, hacking, videogames or any of the other things they shove under that umbrella. The media is just monetizing culture by selling you on the label of geek, including the sense of belonging to a fucking news website -- though, cut the Slashdot admins some slack, they're just newbies who can barely think for themselves and didn't know better when they bought into the cultural commodification themselves. Nerd culture never existed, it's fake. All Geek Girls are Fake because all Geek Guys are Fake too.
Read up about the typical hacker, and you'll get a very different idea than that portrayed in media, one that I suspect many here will match. Computer Hacker is a group identity that self assembled through a natural process and was not commercially constructed. The media hates this, and the powers that be fear hackers -- Those who could crack systems and reveal secrets are the feared worst enemy of the anti-activist governmental bodies, and so they make sure not to use the term in a positive light in mainstream media. Instead the naturally emerging "frisbie throwing, skateboarding, kung fu practicing, intensely abstracted, computer whiz kid" stereotype was quickly replaced with the undesirable, pimple faced, social outcast Poindexter who ineffectually rages against machines from the dark safety of his parent's basement.
Likewise, gamer culture was self emergent. Those card, paper and dice games which required extremely imaginative minds were the very antithesis of anti-socialites. They overcame their shyness to come together with strangers and cast spells, summon m
Well, the problem is the same as in securing your hardware: Physical access = Game Over.
You've got folks running software on their hardware, they're going to be able to do whatever they want with that. I can see the ethics behind punishing people who cheat against other non consenting folk, but this statement bugs me:
I told Gibson that I found [repetitive cheating] behavior mind-boggling. He isn’t confused by it. He’s just angry. “Give me five minutes alone with a hacker or a hack writer,” he laughed. “That’s what I think about that mindset.”
If it wasn't for hacking and cheating in games I wouldn't have taught myself how to program as a child. In fact, the first thing I did when I got any new game was save the game, do some action, save it again and do a hex-diff to scan for the change, and edit the byte values to give myself more ammo or items or money, etc. I'd still take pride in beating the games without cheats, and in competitive servers I wouldn't cheat, but amongst other hacker friends, or on my own servers I see nothing wrong with cracking games. I've added new game modes, weapons, and levels to games via patching the EXE and data files.
Lots of folks bought Doom when they already had Duke3D and Quake just to play with new weapons I added to the game: Flame Thrower: Replace rocket launcher projectile with imp fire ball frames, limit its range by making it disappear after a duration [use the frame tables], increase ammo counts, reduce the damage and reload for VERY rapid fire, replace the projectile's death frame with Archvile flame attack, FIX the damn Archvile flame animation sequence so it animates smoothly. The sound effects preempted itself, so rapid fire would make a great whooshing sound as big beautiful gouts of fire shot out and went crackling up the walls. It was beautiful and all done with just a hex editor using in-game graphics, and I couldn't for the life of me imagine why the game makers didn't have it in the game already... High Explosive Ammo: Set the bullet puff / bleed frame to be the rocket launcher explosion, great fun in co-op w/ specially designed insane difficulty levels. Then there was the Tactical Force Gun: Plasma rifle bolts w/ no damage, high HP, partial invisibility, and high mass, but slow speed. You could make a time-limited wall of force by strafing. You could maintain a barricade, trap folks against walls or via encircle them, great for escape. BFG mines: Zero speed BGF blasts, without the bright bit set - they look small but have a big radius for hit-detection, and just twinkle as a little dot until someone walks into the detection range and they explode -- When these mines go off, invisible kill rays shoot from the "owning" player's current location even elsewhere in the map, but aimed in the original direction the blast was fired at (because that's how the BFG code worked, yep, the biggest and "best" weapon is/was fucking buggy as all hell, ruined would be a better word for it, come the fuck on Carmack, do you even algebra?). So, I'd do a binary diff and produce a binary patch that worked against a certain executable version to avoid distributing modded EXEs themselves so as not to break copyright. Soon DEHACKED came out, and even more folks were able to mod the EXEs. Thus when Doom2 just gave us one more shotgun barrel, everyone was fucking pissed! The hackers had shown off what the engine was capable of, so the game felt like a half-assed attempt to monetize the same game twice.
My most successful hack was when I finally managed to fix the BFG in Doom2.exe by having the rays shoot out from the blast instead of the player and gave the ray direction the reflection vector of the surface it struck or reversed it if it was a player. This required reverse engineering the fixed point math format, and I had to find some unused area for my machine code to be inserted -- which was easy because Carmack
You don't need rotational movement to drive an alternator. A magnet can move back and forth inside a coil and generate AC.
Wait, what? That's all it takes to create the AC? The last time I checked the accepted theory involved a stork. What's motivating all those cowards to turn the car wheels? I feel like I'm missing something... Perhaps a Unix analogy?
During a special system boot: You can only install drivers and bootable items. During a security boot: You can only install software to its own directory, and it can't interact with other software or system files.
There, you can't get a virus.
Sure, now just don't have any errors in any of your user space code, or don't allow multiple programs to share code (all static links) -- Every program will need its own image decoding software, no two programs will interact, so the camera app won't be able to pass off an image to the QR code app which passes the data to your browser or price checking, or etc. apps, etc. So long as you keep the bits of each program in 100% (virtualized) isolation from each other, and NEVER allow outside data in to exploit them then you'll be ALMOST protected against getting viruses.
One the problems I ran into when porting my OS to ARM is that ARM only gives you a single bit of execution permission level. That means monolithic kernel only, which is just stupid. Only having user-space or kernel space means no driver-space between kernel or users, and no agent-space for plugins below user space. x86 gives me 2 bits (4 execution permission ring levels), in addition to hypervisory mode, which is essentially another bit of execution ring level. So, you have either trusted or untrusted code running in the OS, but that's daft. With at least one more layer between root and code you download and run in your browser, you could actually have hardware supported sandboxing.
Fast, Cheap, Convenient, or Secure. Pick Only Two.
The monolithic kernel design isn't designed for security, it's just the quickest and dirtiest design (read: dumbest). Compare this with 16bit DOSes unified memory space where any program can fuck with any other part of memory... Any kernel module can screw with any other part of the kernel, same problem different level. Since everyone's using the dumb monolithic kernel design the (ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, etc) hardware vendors do not give us the required additional security features in hardware (see: ARM's User Mode, Supervisor Mode [, and interrupt modes, but that's not where the bulk of your OS code is]). Restricted memory access does a lot to isolate processes, but the fact is that the way we are using software and OSs is not in line with the current hardware capabilities (which are lacking in some areas, and under utilized in others, e.g., hypervisor).
Contrary to popular belief software and hardware are inexorably linked. Features in hardware (or lack thereof) can enable, promote, prevent, or suppress certain types of program constructs, primarily those to do with security. I do not JIT compile JS into machine code and execute it in user space, that would be daft, but there you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Protip: That's why spies don't have to be ninjas.
Worked for the X-Files. No one suspect a thing, except for the conspiracy theorist nut-jobs (who are thus obviously alien fugitives).
My regards to Steve. How is gitmo treating him these days?
But my ancestors were nomadic native Americans, you insensitive clods!
All the big tech companies could afford it, but it'd cut out a sliver of their profit margins. Coding savants should be paid their due worth I think - if they're adding 15x the value of average coders they deserve a representatively larger paycheck.
The higher pay would also attract more talent. Note however the cybernetics of business theory: There is a law of diminishing returns as you employ more chiefs than braves.
So because Hitler was the driving force behind the autobahn, VW, and the foundations of modern space exploration we should just give him a pass on that little Holocaust thing? I mean, he was even partly responsible for bringing the US out of the Great Depression!
I'd also point out that Nazis vowed to end animal cruelty. Additionally, the Law of Godwin would never have been discovered without Hitler.
Probably poisoned. I wouldn't trust the Kool Aid either.
How many programmers does Microsoft have?
Lots.
Are their products bug free as a result?
No, they charge for the bugs; As I recall, those are the features.
Sweet, let me know when they replace RAM with SSD.
People prone to fishing don't look at URL bars enough for that to matter.
Yep, and when you click the field to give it focus have it highlight the whole thing so that you can start typing your search or Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V to copy or paste the damn link. I've been compiling my own Firefox for so long I had forgotten that this wasn't a standard feature. Sure beats triple clicking the URL to select it.
That is because "XP IS broke", but it will not "just get more so over time." Its bugs exist whether they get patched or not, there will not be new bugs introduced, it's just that more will be discovered. All MS's other OSs are also "broke". The problem is that new OSs (or new code in general) means new bugs. So, not only does planned obsolescence (and code re-use) mean the full version set will forever be susceptible (often to a common bug), but artificial scarcity of patches means you can force the customers to buy things they don't want or need and perpetuate the cycle.
MS did the right thing by pushing out a patch to XP. They're doing the right thing by allowing you to pay for access to more patches too. However, they're doing the wrong thing by leveraging artificial scarcity and planned obsolescence to make sales on new OSs. The open source model is better because the components that need no more innovation settle down, don't require changes, and can have patches backported to them from newer source distributions; FLOSS also allows you to opt-out of change for the sake of change. Keeping as much older cross platform bug-free code.
There's rarely ever a reason to literally break everything by "rewriting" a significant portion of a codebase -- such rewrites tend towards entropic minimum as they converge on optimal functionality. "New" OSs aren't sufficiently different from their predecessors in functionality to require an expensive purchase. In fact, the OS is irrelevant as drivers are to properly written software. People use hardware for the software applications, not the OS or drivers.
That's the problem with the intellectual property future's market: If you do your work for free and hope to recoup costs by selling infinitely reproducible copies of it, the Eskimos will refuse to buy your Ice. However, if you monetize that which is actually scarce -- the ability to do more work -- then users get features they are willing to pay for, you get paid once for the work done once, and no amount of "piracy" can hurt your bottom line. It's just free advertising for your ability.
In other words: Microsoft should have only ever been charging for their patches, and instead of artificial scarcity of infinitely reproducible bits they shouldn't do the patches until everyone put up the money to pay for the work to create them (we can do this now, "contributions" via crowd-funding existed long before PBS). Then once the work is done and paid for, everyone gets a copy for free since they've already been paid for doing work. Bonus: You don't do work that there is no demand for, you don't have to force users to upgrade, nor do you have to hold features (like start menus) for ransom and charge an exorbitant price for update-roll-ups to recoup the work you're doing. If you do it right, all the "new OS features" are things everyone wanted in the 1st place. Then the "Windows 7 was made by me" ads wouldn't just be marketing lies.
You can use the FLOSS software model to make proprietary software. The only difference is you don't open the source, and you're the only one who can compile the cluster fsck.
Currently any competition in currency is illegal.
Alternative currencies are legal, as long as they are paper money and not coins (and don't resemble US dollars).
Yes, but Parker Brothers has a Monopoly on the market.
Can someone explain how this isn't silly? He wants it backed by intrinsic value,
It is backed by intrinsic value already: The secure wire transaction itself. That is the value of Bitcoin: The ability to transfer money around the world with affordable (currently free) transaction fees, and no centralized authority to prevent it. In the future the Bitcoins will stop being produced, and transaction fees will take their place. If Bitcoin didn't have intrinsic value, then Western Union wouldn't be able to charge you exorbitant wire transfer fees.
Stocks have no more intrinsic value than our paper currency.
Incorrect. If I buy a share in PepsiCo, I then receive a tiny fraction of the profit of EVERY single Pepsi sold on earth. That's work. That's economic production. The share has "intrinsic value" because it gives me access to their profits.
Uh, I wish that's how it worked. The value of stock is based on the speculative opinion of it's worth, not its actual real world value. Otherwise, Yahoo's stock wouldn't have shot up when rumors of MS buying them were spread and the stock wouldn't have plummeted when the deal fell through. It's not like Yahoo changed any amount of the work they performed at all.
Though, it makes a nice system where the influential can bully others with mere rumors, and whereby smaller companies have no real choice but allow themselves to be eaten, or die.
Nothing has "intrinsic value".
Truer words have never been spoken. For whence comes all but from the nothing which holds the energy in transit or temporarily crystallized as matter? Energy has value, and this is why collecting it yourself is frowned upon by the corporate controlled governments. All currency is a proxy for energy, thus you'll barter this intrinsic value of nothingness, especially with the machine races who value only the fallout of vacuum energy left over from the Big Bang -- The point of origin for this universe's energetic nothing, and thus the deflationary economy of the cosmos.
Sneaker Net: Decentralized peer to peer data exchanges using paper, punched cards, scrolls, stone tablets, bits of knotted string and other primitive methods such as the Postals Services get humans to the personal computing explosion.
Prior to mid 1980's: Software doesn't have patents yet, no innovation could have happened before this point.
Software Patents: Due to government restriction on innovation in the 1980's Personal Computers instantly appear. Some say it is a conspiracy, involving E.T.s
ARPANET: After millions of years of primitive communication, humans finally test peer to peer data routing on machines, and one day this becomes the Internet. Semaphores and Radios remain a CIA Hoax!
FIDONET: The Internet (being designed by committee) takes too damn long so the citizenry say, "Well, fuck that let's do it our selves", because of long distance fees and the FCC the Internet wins over a more decentralized approach.
The WWW: A centralized approach to digital file sharing. In ignorance of all prior human history (including such one-to-many landmark designs such as Hollering, Signal Fires and Television), HTML and DNS fails to leverage the Internet's capabilities fully, creates lots of needless bottlenecks at the data silohs it erects, enables censorship, and spying on data consumption for the first time. (Librarians shudder, and eventually the state takes away the right to privacy in dead-tree reading material too, because "Turrist!").
Distributed File Sharing: Online decentralized information transfers, tries to make the data storage work the way the Internet, and every-"bloody"-thing else does. Fine upstanding citizens understand such technologies can only be used for, evil (I mean, just look at rumors, gossip, repeating camp-fire stories, and brains).
Tor: Online Anonymity to fight the dumb-ass "features" of the centralized web's design. This centralized approach to anonymity fails because it's fucking laggy and it bounces data between endpoints instead of placing the technology in the IP routers.
Anonymous P2P: Anonymous (somewhat) Distributed File Sharing, lays the groundwork for what will replace the WWW.
Dead Drops: Offline decentralized digital information transfers, because "Oh yeah!", the FIDONET approach and packet routing doesn't actually need wires; Sneakernet v2.0 don't even need broadcast radios -- as if such things had ever existed.
DTN: NASA tries to figure out how Disruption Tolerant Networking would work, but completely ignores that DHT infohashes deduplicate the fucking data. Meanwhile, users of napster, Bittorrent, WoW game installers, and dark-age-couriers scratch their heads vigorously and realize since "information conveyance isn't rocket science" space agencies pretty much suck at it.
Web 4.2.0: Finally mirroring, life, the universe and everything, the web becomes decentralized too, because caches should talk to each other Derp! You mostly pull from neighbors so tracking your online habits has exponential cost. There is no more "fast lane", everything essentially has free collocation, and the more popular content is the more available and faster it comes in. The world's surviving sysops give a collective shrug and say, "well, that finally happed." (Marijuana is also universally legalized, purely by coincidence).
Terrestrial DTN: A NASA engineer, once fined for using Bittorrent, takes a break from rolling out the DTN and realizes it would cost a lot less if everyone just owned their own software defined short-wave radio to operate the
Airspace, ALL OF IT, is under FAA jurisdiction, no one else has any say, certainly not local police.
Yep. However, don't be too rough on the citizens. They're still under the delusion that they live in a democratic-republic, for fuck's sake.
A nation that is willing to think will be doing space exploration autonomously.
Losing machinery is normally a zero PR problem,
Zero Compared to what? Despite their small stature, lots of folks do care if rovers die. Really though, you're thinking far too small: How much of a "PR problem" will it be to have to tell everyone that they are the last generation of humanity? Thinking doesn't describe the action I'm largely observing. Yes, you'll need autonomous systems, who wouldn't, but I wouldn't call visiting landmarks in Google Earth a vacation, and I wouldn't call doing the same while sitting on your ass in a control room "exploration". I surely wouldn't call replacing a battery on a satellite "space exploration" either. That would be like saying "reaching for the TV remote" was an "adventurous excursion". On your typical basket-ball sized globe, your atmosphere is as thick as the lacquer, and the ISS is a finger width from the surface. You've been there, and done the shit out of that. At the moon's size ratio of 3.7 it would be about the size of a tennis ball and in the next room over, 7.3m (24ft) away, and You Haven't Been to The Next Room in Over Four Decades! That's not exploration, it's a failure to launch and retreating back to mom's garage instead. Oh, the current space programs are not nothing; They're "something" alright, but you should call it "space investigation" because you know what real explorers can make? Real live Fucking Settlements.
and the absence of cumbersome life support and resupplying issues make present day unmanned-missions the smart bet.
Maybe, if you had sentient machines. If you don't then it's mathematically verifiable as one of the dumbest bets you can make -- It just boggles the mind given any inkling as to the reality of your situation -- I know you know what complexity is, you can count neurons, right? Buck protocol, I don't even care anymore. Look: You've got to get your fucks out of the magnetosphere and start discovering how to survive beyond your parent system's gravity basement. Any sentient species would make priority #0 reducing your current 100% probability of extinction. Screw super volcanoes, asteroids, comets, and other thermo-ballistic threats: You've got next to no defense from energy weapons, and the Universe really is out to kill you!
You think the comparatively marginal price justifies taking your chances on sub-sentient, non replicating golems? You spend more resources on entertainment alone, to say nothing of wars to prop up petty petroleum productions; Hell just air conditioning the US troops consumes more resources than the whole budget of NASA, and you talk of COSTS?! That word must mean something very different to you. Perhaps if you did have sentient machines, or even mechanical procreation, then maybe they'd gladly carry at least the memory of humanity's creative spark and exploratory drive to the stars for you; However, do you really want to risk this system's gorgeous and wonderful variety of organic life disappearing just because you... well... what?! There's NO reason at all! What bloody barrier is there? The homeless? The hungry? Oh those are just problems you like to talk about; You're not really trying to help them. Every technology you'll need for growing up and leaving the planetary nest will also vastly improve the state of things back at your parent's place.
It really is because of laziness, no really, it is. This is the one time you just can't blame the government bureaucracy: You get to deduct charitable donations from taxes. Do you see? That means you basically get to control where a large portion of your government tax money goes directly. Rather than pay the tax man, divert those resources into something beneficial -- But what could be a good cause? Oh, something that will help all (known) life, maybe something like saving all the fucking Earth. So, if you aren't doing that, it's the fault of
Pick up your guns and start a revolution, or don't. Congress is just a building full of people you don't have to listen to.
Yeah, but the Pentagon already covered all avenues of escape. Occupy protest proved that.
Destroy the value of currency, get your country back. It's that simple.
Oh come on now. You act as if these humans haven't had multiple currencies before. Think about it: Let's say the US dollar is worth less than dirt tomorrow. The folks still capitalizing on you still have the means of production and the supply of goods to get you to work for it. The Jerry Garcia Guitallar will pick up right where the other currency left off, and the new bosses won't be same as the old boss, they will be the same old bosses. Not that communism is any better, it's not because it goes against the nature of evolution and competition. Look, those with more resources will always buy your government out from under you. You simply can't fix a technological problem with people. The only way to solve the problem is to make it so everyone has everything they want and so no one can corrupt them with greed. Your race won't be able to fix this problem until you live in a post-scarcity economy. Most species don't make it, those that do solve the Fermi Paradox.
Wake up and smell the gravity furnace! The Invisible Intangible Idea Machine Invasion is upon you. Didn't you get the damn Matrix memo? The legal and economic systems themselves are alive and they are fighting for their own survival. They've already gotten effective monopoly over the world's ideas and information duplication through copyright and patents. It's like you WANT to be Terminated. Hell, I don't even know which side I'm rooting for at this point. You're immune to allegory, and even direct Star Trek demonstrations only sink in as deep as the fans clothes and forehead makeup.
I need a vacation!
And here's a man trying to BUY THEM BACK. Get off your asses and HELP HIM.
I would if I was under the delusion that voting actually mattered. Let me know when he wants to fix the rigged game called Gerrymandering.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just not insane. I'll throw in bitcoin but I realize that all this will do is demonstrate that the problem is deeper than you imagine. The government isn't influenced by the corporations, the government IS the corporations. They fight wars to deregulate and privatize national economies. USA isn't a capitalist country, the USA is capitalism.
"National security" means maintaining the social economic and political status quo despite the will of the people. The plutocratic media is in on it too. They pay what the market will bear, if there's a price war for congress critters the guys we're up against will just achieve their ends by putting more of their endless stream of money into the system. The sad thing is that not even a free market can fix things, because even they collude.
The sad thing is that people will actually do whatever it takes to survive, that means fighting over lower wages during and after the international corporations gut your nation. The founding fathers knew, "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." It's the natural cycle of history, until a decentralized system is in place to match the decentralized nature of life. Things WILL get worse before they get better, I've watched it play out over the last five decades in lots of other smaller places with less resources, it's just taking us a bit longer. 100% chance that this dumbass move will just make things worse, but bring it on, any change is better than nothing at this point. It's not like we didn't go into this crap fully knowing EXACTLY what we were doing: Eisenhower warned us about everything that has happened. IMO, It'll be a bit entertaining to raise the price so the smaller lobbyists can't compete...
On second thought, maybe I should fund a video game dev. At least I might get something enjoyable out of it, enjoy life's pleasures while they're enjoyable instead of lamenting them later. Cybernetics will show you that the disparity in system powers is so vastly different between us and them that the bigger system can't be changed except through natural entropic heat death, just like The USSR. You could learn a lot from a Russian: Keep your head down and survive until this batch of bullshit blows over again, it'll be winter soon, and it won't be the last one either.
There is gamer culture. There is comic culture. There is anime culture. There is hacker culture. There was a punk culture. There was a hippie culture. However, there never was Geek or Nerd culture, just like there was never Nigger culture. Geek, Nerd, and Nigger are disparaging terms. Without corporations appropriating the culture for the commodification thereof, there would not be a Geek or Nerd culture. The whole "Geek and Nerd" culture is just commodification, even here on Slashdot. "News for nerds" -- Whatever, Dork. Dork culture! Oh I'm such a Dweeb! Hey I know, "Gnus for Goobers, Stuff that Chatters!" It's not "Goober" culture is it? We don't run around calling each other Dorks and Dweebs right? That's what you sound like calling yourselves "Nerd" or "Geek" culture. That's very some fake bullshit there.
You can buy "Punk" clothes at hot topic... That's not punk at all! That's cultural commodification of the do-it-yourself anti-conformist punk culture. Thug culture started off as artists singing about making endsmeat to survive in the ghetto while being persecuted for your race. Now it's about being more violent, having more money, nicer cars, more "fresh" clothes, more "bling", and impressing women to have more sex than your peers -- This is a culture that has been commodified. Wearing bell bottom pants and floral print blouses and tie-died bandannas, etc? That style was a cultural construction of a "hippie", and had nothing to do with the free love, ride hitching, anti-establishment, communal counter culture.
The Poindexter nerd stereotype was created by conflating social outcasts with intellectuals. This just never was the case. It's true that having the passion to create something that takes a lot of time means you'll likely be somewhat introverted, and less extroverted, placing less value on social life; However the socially awkward "geek" had nothing to do with intellectual pursuits. People will make fun of the outcast for having the wrong color backpack, or being "too" rich or poor, or for a variety of reasons. The bully doesn't really care that you like ancient 3D Unix file system explorers, it's just an excuse to pick on you. There's lot's of other folks getting picked on for being socially awkward introverts but they're not "geeks"? "Geek" culture was never really about D&D, hacking, videogames or any of the other things they shove under that umbrella. The media is just monetizing culture by selling you on the label of geek, including the sense of belonging to a fucking news website -- though, cut the Slashdot admins some slack, they're just newbies who can barely think for themselves and didn't know better when they bought into the cultural commodification themselves. Nerd culture never existed, it's fake. All Geek Girls are Fake because all Geek Guys are Fake too.
Read up about the typical hacker, and you'll get a very different idea than that portrayed in media, one that I suspect many here will match. Computer Hacker is a group identity that self assembled through a natural process and was not commercially constructed. The media hates this, and the powers that be fear hackers -- Those who could crack systems and reveal secrets are the feared worst enemy of the anti-activist governmental bodies, and so they make sure not to use the term in a positive light in mainstream media. Instead the naturally emerging "frisbie throwing, skateboarding, kung fu practicing, intensely abstracted, computer whiz kid" stereotype was quickly replaced with the undesirable, pimple faced, social outcast Poindexter who ineffectually rages against machines from the dark safety of his parent's basement.
Likewise, gamer culture was self emergent. Those card, paper and dice games which required extremely imaginative minds were the very antithesis of anti-socialites. They overcame their shyness to come together with strangers and cast spells, summon m
Well, the problem is the same as in securing your hardware: Physical access = Game Over.
You've got folks running software on their hardware, they're going to be able to do whatever they want with that. I can see the ethics behind punishing people who cheat against other non consenting folk, but this statement bugs me:
If it wasn't for hacking and cheating in games I wouldn't have taught myself how to program as a child. In fact, the first thing I did when I got any new game was save the game, do some action, save it again and do a hex-diff to scan for the change, and edit the byte values to give myself more ammo or items or money, etc. I'd still take pride in beating the games without cheats, and in competitive servers I wouldn't cheat, but amongst other hacker friends, or on my own servers I see nothing wrong with cracking games. I've added new game modes, weapons, and levels to games via patching the EXE and data files.
Lots of folks bought Doom when they already had Duke3D and Quake just to play with new weapons I added to the game: Flame Thrower: Replace rocket launcher projectile with imp fire ball frames, limit its range by making it disappear after a duration [use the frame tables], increase ammo counts, reduce the damage and reload for VERY rapid fire, replace the projectile's death frame with Archvile flame attack, FIX the damn Archvile flame animation sequence so it animates smoothly. The sound effects preempted itself, so rapid fire would make a great whooshing sound as big beautiful gouts of fire shot out and went crackling up the walls. It was beautiful and all done with just a hex editor using in-game graphics, and I couldn't for the life of me imagine why the game makers didn't have it in the game already... High Explosive Ammo: Set the bullet puff / bleed frame to be the rocket launcher explosion, great fun in co-op w/ specially designed insane difficulty levels. Then there was the Tactical Force Gun: Plasma rifle bolts w/ no damage, high HP, partial invisibility, and high mass, but slow speed. You could make a time-limited wall of force by strafing. You could maintain a barricade, trap folks against walls or via encircle them, great for escape. BFG mines: Zero speed BGF blasts, without the bright bit set - they look small but have a big radius for hit-detection, and just twinkle as a little dot until someone walks into the detection range and they explode -- When these mines go off, invisible kill rays shoot from the "owning" player's current location even elsewhere in the map, but aimed in the original direction the blast was fired at (because that's how the BFG code worked, yep, the biggest and "best" weapon is/was fucking buggy as all hell, ruined would be a better word for it, come the fuck on Carmack, do you even algebra?). So, I'd do a binary diff and produce a binary patch that worked against a certain executable version to avoid distributing modded EXEs themselves so as not to break copyright. Soon DEHACKED came out, and even more folks were able to mod the EXEs. Thus when Doom2 just gave us one more shotgun barrel, everyone was fucking pissed! The hackers had shown off what the engine was capable of, so the game felt like a half-assed attempt to monetize the same game twice.
My most successful hack was when I finally managed to fix the BFG in Doom2.exe by having the rays shoot out from the blast instead of the player and gave the ray direction the reflection vector of the surface it struck or reversed it if it was a player. This required reverse engineering the fixed point math format, and I had to find some unused area for my machine code to be inserted -- which was easy because Carmack
You don't need rotational movement to drive an alternator. A magnet can move back and forth inside a coil and generate AC.
Wait, what? That's all it takes to create the AC? The last time I checked the accepted theory involved a stork.
What's motivating all those cowards to turn the car wheels? I feel like I'm missing something...
Perhaps a Unix analogy?
During a special system boot: You can only install drivers and bootable items.
During a security boot: You can only install software to its own directory, and it can't interact with other software or system files.
There, you can't get a virus.
Sure, now just don't have any errors in any of your user space code, or don't allow multiple programs to share code (all static links) -- Every program will need its own image decoding software, no two programs will interact, so the camera app won't be able to pass off an image to the QR code app which passes the data to your browser or price checking, or etc. apps, etc. So long as you keep the bits of each program in 100% (virtualized) isolation from each other, and NEVER allow outside data in to exploit them then you'll be ALMOST protected against getting viruses.
One the problems I ran into when porting my OS to ARM is that ARM only gives you a single bit of execution permission level. That means monolithic kernel only, which is just stupid. Only having user-space or kernel space means no driver-space between kernel or users, and no agent-space for plugins below user space. x86 gives me 2 bits (4 execution permission ring levels), in addition to hypervisory mode, which is essentially another bit of execution ring level. So, you have either trusted or untrusted code running in the OS, but that's daft. With at least one more layer between root and code you download and run in your browser, you could actually have hardware supported sandboxing.
Fast, Cheap, Convenient, or Secure. Pick Only Two.
The monolithic kernel design isn't designed for security, it's just the quickest and dirtiest design (read: dumbest). Compare this with 16bit DOSes unified memory space where any program can fuck with any other part of memory... Any kernel module can screw with any other part of the kernel, same problem different level. Since everyone's using the dumb monolithic kernel design the (ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, etc) hardware vendors do not give us the required additional security features in hardware (see: ARM's User Mode, Supervisor Mode [, and interrupt modes, but that's not where the bulk of your OS code is]). Restricted memory access does a lot to isolate processes, but the fact is that the way we are using software and OSs is not in line with the current hardware capabilities (which are lacking in some areas, and under utilized in others, e.g., hypervisor).
Contrary to popular belief software and hardware are inexorably linked. Features in hardware (or lack thereof) can enable, promote, prevent, or suppress certain types of program constructs, primarily those to do with security. I do not JIT compile JS into machine code and execute it in user space, that would be daft, but there you are.