"So you'd become an armed sociopathic criminal. But a really self-righteous one, so it's all ok."
Yeah, that's about how I see it. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
"Would you remind me just who has the Hitler complex here?"
Um...Those guys! points Certainly not me!
Seriously, I'm a pacifist, but in the case of such a wholescale breakdown in society, I don't see a lot of survival potential in not being an armed sociopath. My post was partly tongue-in-cheek, partly realistic, partly the result of my disgust with such power-hungry entities as the RIAA, and substantially the result of not having any coffee yet.
Personally, I just want to ride around in a heavily armoured mid-70's road warrior-type car.
There would be panic at first. If we had a worldwide and permanent loss of electricity, people would go wild snapping up generators to keep "their" power going. Then they'd gradually realise that there wasn't any more refined diesel fuel being produced. More panic. Probably 25% of the world's population would die. (probably the most useless 15% would be in that count, thank god!)
Then we'd get along. Differently. We'd start rebuilding things, and in two centuries we'd be back to where we were, with the blackout of 2001 no more relevant than the industrial revolution is to us.
If it came about, I think I'd load up on weapons, and become an anti-organisation vigelante. Take down all of the current senior managers who have Hitler complexes, before they can start controlling people and resources again.
The mac hardware platform has kicked Intel around the room for years. Apple just wasn't capable of evolving their OS over time. Sun doesn't have that problem with Solaris.
I mean, honestly--has anyone ever used it, other than to see what it was about? Does it exist as the primary/sole OS on anyone's desktop? (I won't even ask about servers!)
Not arguing that it's good, bad, or indifferent. It just doesn't have ANY market share that I can see, and with Corel gasping for breath, I don't see that changing.
I figured that p2p was a truly new paradigm, until I read the specs for gnutella. Low and behold, you've got a client and a server glued together, and cleverly called a 'servent.'
Client. Server. Both running on the same machine. THIS is peer-to-peer? Gee, I guess ftp/ftpd was peer-to-peer back before the term existed then! How about UUCP?
AOL and Canter&Siegel were the death of community on the internet. Anything claiming 'peer' status after that is a lie.
Absolutely. In fact neither Matt Groenig or Scott Adams have ever claimed to be a pure artist, above such defilement as marketing. Both are perfectly happy with the idea. The Simpsons has been paid to mention numerous products over the years, but there's always been the understanding that Matt gets to write the product in the way _he_ feels like.
IF this happens, then expect it to be wickedly funny, and possibly merciless.
Also, as someone else pointed out, there was one tiny little line in the article about the Simpsons, and that was apparently enough for/. to start screaming "SELLOUT!!!!"
"And I would gladly pay a bit extra for the privilege of being left the hell alone."
<p>Not me. I would consider accepting payment to allow advertising. I WILL NOT PAY to avoid ads! If they want to advertise to me, let THEM pay up front for it, and pay ME. Otherwise, they can all piss off.
True enough. Napster is quite clearly out to break the law and not compensate the musicians for it.
On the other hand, the RIAA is out to uphold the law outrageously, and STILL not compensate the musicians for it. This is better how?
The best part of Napster in my mind (and similar technologies of course--Gnutella, etc.), is that it's turning the entire recording industry into swiss cheese. Rampant theft via Napster, etc. is eventually going to drive musicians away from the RIAA if they can't make a living there, and then things will start to get interesting.
Here's the thing: Local musicians can make a passable living through performing and selling CDs at their gigs. People will continue to buy those CDs (or recordings in whatever form) as a means of supporting the musicians, and keeping their music alive. In 5 years, we might see the end of megastars, but the small scale musicians will probably be _better_ off by selling a small amount of music online that they never would have had a market for before.
Napster is illegal, and arguably unethical. However, it's the thin edge of an inevitable revolution which will most likely be good for >90% of the professional musicians out there. Do the ends justify the means in this case? I dunno.
Re:Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animal
on
Uplifting Dolphins
·
· Score: 2
Yeah but to some extent, Koko has been a disappointment. Very quick learner, but they found that her (I think) intelligence was quite limited. No new insight or revelations on the human race.
Also, dolphins live in a more disparate world. That looks intriguing.
Re:Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animal
on
Uplifting Dolphins
·
· Score: 2
I can think of a reason that we should be worried about dolphins before tuna, and that is that tuna breed much faster. There is more tuna, they're being replenished faster, and we're much less likely to drive them into extinction.
That said, I agree--we shouldn't be looking at driving ANYTHING into extinction.
The other thing is that we (well, many of us) have an urge to find proof of 'higher' intelligence. Not just the intelligence present in spiders, but intelligence on the level that we could carry on a discussion with. It's a fascinating concept to think of what we might (potentially) learn from something as 'alien' as a non-human (and in this case, ocean-going) life. I think a lot of us are looking for something to help us avoid killing ourselves off, and taking half the planet with us.
Something like this was bound to happen, and it's a bit of a surprise it took so long.
Napster is a centralised index and a company. That means there's ONE source to go after, ONE company to sue, and ONE entity to force changes on. Napster knuckles under, and here we are.
However, fewer people are going to use this new Napster, especially when other (better) systems are coming to maturity. This may be the push Gnutella needs for widespread legitimacy.
...when you reject all of the submissions!
Sorry, just a little bitter. In the meantime, here's an interesting article on Larry Ellison views on computing.
Go read the stupid patent announcement. It says, "The patent application was filed in April 1997." In other words, we have to find prior art from before this!
Admittedly it's out there, and this truly is a stupid, dumb, brainless, fucked patent; but please quit citing "I was doing this in 199[89]" sources, folks!
Good points, all of them. That said, nearly everyone in our computer consulting company is still using P-133 to P-233MMX machines. (except for managers, of course--fuck!)
There are some other points though.
1) The home user will be screwed by subscriptionware. This is NOT what I want on my home PC.
2) Code bloat happens, and will continue to happen. With a forced software upgrade path, the software and hardware manufacturers can get together to substantially ramp up the overall cost of hardware upgrades required for the new software.
3) Schools and other charities will end up getting more hardware, but be unable to run anything on it! If a school gets a P-166 and runs Office95 on it, it's still a productive machine. If in a few years they get a P4-1800, because it can't run _any_ available version of office, it's a paperweight.
Although there are some real benefits to the subscription model, we have to keep in mind that it is ultimately and fundamentally a way for the software companies to make _more_ money. They wouldn't do it if it weren't.
Most of the people I know who use PGP stuck with 2.--the last pre-NAI version--until GPG came along. Nobody uses NAI PGP.
Nobody trusts NAI.
Nobody likes the NAI license agreements.
In short, NAI did more to SLOW DOWN the widespread use of PGP than any government ruling or censure. Almost makes one wonder what their agenda _really_ was for all of those years.
Anyways, congrats to Phil for getting away from those bastards.
Actually, I _was_ thinking of Schroedinger, and his cat; but then I got sidetracked towards uncertainty.
And for the record, the uncertainty principle applies equally on all scales. However, the effect of it shrinks as scale increases, and so for more than a few atoms, is pretty much irrelevant. Correct, applicable, but irrelevant.
I know that you've already claimed otherwise, but you are not questioning things as a skeptic--you're questioning them for the sake of being contrary.
There are three questions you can ask about any bit of scientific research:
1) What are the initial conditions and assumptions?
2) Were the results interpreted correctly?
3) Are there any other interpretations for the data?
If the data is interpreted correctly and doesn't have any other possible interpretations, then the conclusion is correct for the initial assumptions, within the limits of the experiment. Anything that refines this process and comes to different conclusions doesn't make the previous experiment wrong, it corrects _incomplete_ initial assumptions or data.
Also, questioning 1+1=2 is a complete and utter red herring. 1+1=2 is not a fact!!! It is, instead, a definition. Definitions and facts aren't the same thing.
Science questions the initial assumptions and the interpretation of results. Non-science (conveniently close to nonsense:-) questions the logic of whether those results are really the "right" results. That's just silly.
OK, for the record, I DON'T give a toss for credentials--it's just that the only people I've met who use phrases like "The moral relativism and the relativism in all areas that it promotes..." have been second or maybe third year arts/philosophy students. Before that they don't have the total immersion required, and after that, they get some perspective.
When I said people are stupid, I mean people are stupid. WAY too many people (the large majority) fail to use that grey matter for critical thinking. This doesn't require education, it just requires a willingness to think. Many people don't LIKE to think, and that's stupid behavior.
Well for starters, you mean objectivity. Objectivism is a very different ( and fairly harsh) philosophy.
But Schroedinger had nothing to do with 'postmodernist' philosophy. He was a physicist and mathematician. The fact that observing changes the observations doesn't invalidate your experiment, but it _could_ be extrapolated to mean that you'll never get to the absolute truth of what you're trying to find.
"People take on the attitudes and values of the society that surrounds them, and what determines this society's values and world view is the whims of the 'intelligentsia' - in this case us, the eloi.
"
Nope. I don't buy this. People do take on the attitudes of the society surrounding them, but at the same time they help shape those attitudes. It goes both ways. People create and react to society simultaneously.
Furthermore, I don't think that there's any extra strength or credence given to scientists or other members of the so-called intelligentsia in forming society's views. If anything, they're laughed at and ignored, in favour of the REAL shaper of society: The media.
(important aside here: If I agree with any part of the 'postmodern' argument, it's this one: Many people don't believe scientists because it's currently unhip to believe us. Regardless, all that does is give us less of a chance to make a difference, not more responsibility to make the RIGHT difference)
Anyways, the media is the key shaper of minds, mores, and values nowadays. They are the ones who should have some sense of responsibility and care, but instead they're hell-bent on making money at all costs, and the dumber a society is as a whole, the easier it is for them. So what do we do now?
Holy crap, what year of your BA are you in? This sounds like an essay written for a metaphysics class by a terribly _earnest_ student with a dictionary.
Furthermore, postmodernism is generally ascribed to a movement in art, literature, or so on. Postmodernist _existence_ is a bit of a leap. Postmodernist science is something of an oxymoron.
Facts and objective truth have never been too well received by the general populace. _Never._ There's nothing special about our current time that makes us more susceptible to it, other than perhaps that we have _more_ information and differing (sometimes nonsensical) viewpoints than ever before. Jung's 'collective unconscious' in a very limited way is true, but completely irrelevant to this argument. If we once thought of visions from heaven where we now see UFOs, we're still interpreting things as subjectively as ever.
Also, it could be put forth that Schroedinger argues against the existence of objective fact, or at least against the possiblity of ever knowing anything objectively. The act of observing affects the observation always and fundamentally. There's no way around it. What's objective then?
Regardless, we can drag yet ANOTHER Name into this discussion to explain it all: Occam, and his lovely razor. The simplest explanation in this case is that most people are just fucking STUPID. We are a race of stupid people, many of who willfully refuse to use their powers of logical thinking and deduction. Seems like as life gets easier, we get worse at it too.
Jim Allchin certainly isn't an idiot. No matter what we may occasionally believe, you don't get that high is that big of a company by being an idiot.
His statements, however, are utterly idiotic. They're stupid, brainless, and paranoid. HOWEVER, by saying the, and repeating them as often as possible, he may well convince the majority of the public and the majority of the government that he's right. In other words, idiotic statements geared towards an audience of idiots, delivered by a smart guy who's ruthlessly interested in nothing more than his own fortunes and power.
Slashdot Mirror
"So you'd become an armed sociopathic criminal. But a really self-righteous one, so it's all ok."
Yeah, that's about how I see it. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
"Would you remind me just who has the Hitler complex here?"
Um...Those guys! points Certainly not me!
Seriously, I'm a pacifist, but in the case of such a wholescale breakdown in society, I don't see a lot of survival potential in not being an armed sociopath. My post was partly tongue-in-cheek, partly realistic, partly the result of my disgust with such power-hungry entities as the RIAA, and substantially the result of not having any coffee yet.
Personally, I just want to ride around in a heavily armoured mid-70's road warrior-type car.
Personally, I can hardly wait.
There would be panic at first. If we had a worldwide and permanent loss of electricity, people would go wild snapping up generators to keep "their" power going. Then they'd gradually realise that there wasn't any more refined diesel fuel being produced. More panic. Probably 25% of the world's population would die. (probably the most useless 15% would be in that count, thank god!)
Then we'd get along. Differently. We'd start rebuilding things, and in two centuries we'd be back to where we were, with the blackout of 2001 no more relevant than the industrial revolution is to us.
If it came about, I think I'd load up on weapons, and become an anti-organisation vigelante. Take down all of the current senior managers who have Hitler complexes, before they can start controlling people and resources again.
Well yes, if the OS didn't suck.
The mac hardware platform has kicked Intel around the room for years. Apple just wasn't capable of evolving their OS over time. Sun doesn't have that problem with Solaris.
I mean, honestly--has anyone ever used it, other than to see what it was about? Does it exist as the primary/sole OS on anyone's desktop? (I won't even ask about servers!)
Not arguing that it's good, bad, or indifferent. It just doesn't have ANY market share that I can see, and with Corel gasping for breath, I don't see that changing.
Goddamn right.
I figured that p2p was a truly new paradigm, until I read the specs for gnutella. Low and behold, you've got a client and a server glued together, and cleverly called a 'servent.'
Client. Server. Both running on the same machine. THIS is peer-to-peer? Gee, I guess ftp/ftpd was peer-to-peer back before the term existed then! How about UUCP?
AOL and Canter&Siegel were the death of community on the internet. Anything claiming 'peer' status after that is a lie.
Out of curiosity, why?
I'm running NetBSD and FreeBSD on various x86 machines, and yeah--it's low overhead.
But having designed hardware with an architecture-specific OS tends to make for a nice system.
Absolutely. In fact neither Matt Groenig or Scott Adams have ever claimed to be a pure artist, above such defilement as marketing. Both are perfectly happy with the idea. The Simpsons has been paid to mention numerous products over the years, but there's always been the understanding that Matt gets to write the product in the way _he_ feels like.
/. to start screaming "SELLOUT!!!!"
IF this happens, then expect it to be wickedly funny, and possibly merciless.
Also, as someone else pointed out, there was one tiny little line in the article about the Simpsons, and that was apparently enough for
"And I would gladly pay a bit extra for the privilege of being left the hell alone."
<p>Not me. I would consider accepting payment to allow advertising. I WILL NOT PAY to avoid ads! If they want to advertise to me, let THEM pay up front for it, and pay ME. Otherwise, they can all piss off.
True enough. Napster is quite clearly out to break the law and not compensate the musicians for it.
On the other hand, the RIAA is out to uphold the law outrageously, and STILL not compensate the musicians for it. This is better how?
The best part of Napster in my mind (and similar technologies of course--Gnutella, etc.), is that it's turning the entire recording industry into swiss cheese. Rampant theft via Napster, etc. is eventually going to drive musicians away from the RIAA if they can't make a living there, and then things will start to get interesting.
Here's the thing: Local musicians can make a passable living through performing and selling CDs at their gigs. People will continue to buy those CDs (or recordings in whatever form) as a means of supporting the musicians, and keeping their music alive. In 5 years, we might see the end of megastars, but the small scale musicians will probably be _better_ off by selling a small amount of music online that they never would have had a market for before.
Napster is illegal, and arguably unethical. However, it's the thin edge of an inevitable revolution which will most likely be good for >90% of the professional musicians out there. Do the ends justify the means in this case? I dunno.
Yeah but to some extent, Koko has been a disappointment. Very quick learner, but they found that her (I think) intelligence was quite limited. No new insight or revelations on the human race.
Also, dolphins live in a more disparate world. That looks intriguing.
I can think of a reason that we should be worried about dolphins before tuna, and that is that tuna breed much faster. There is more tuna, they're being replenished faster, and we're much less likely to drive them into extinction.
That said, I agree--we shouldn't be looking at driving ANYTHING into extinction.
The other thing is that we (well, many of us) have an urge to find proof of 'higher' intelligence. Not just the intelligence present in spiders, but intelligence on the level that we could carry on a discussion with. It's a fascinating concept to think of what we might (potentially) learn from something as 'alien' as a non-human (and in this case, ocean-going) life. I think a lot of us are looking for something to help us avoid killing ourselves off, and taking half the planet with us.
Something like this was bound to happen, and it's a bit of a surprise it took so long.
Napster is a centralised index and a company. That means there's ONE source to go after, ONE company to sue, and ONE entity to force changes on. Napster knuckles under, and here we are.
However, fewer people are going to use this new Napster, especially when other (better) systems are coming to maturity. This may be the push Gnutella needs for widespread legitimacy.
But this page gives me the warm fuzzies.
Ah! Intelligence. Amazing what happens when it strikes against the brainless (MPAA).
...when you reject all of the submissions! Sorry, just a little bitter. In the meantime, here's an interesting article on Larry Ellison views on computing.
Go read the stupid patent announcement. It says, "The patent application was filed in April 1997." In other words, we have to find prior art from before this!
Admittedly it's out there, and this truly is a stupid, dumb, brainless, fucked patent; but please quit citing "I was doing this in 199[89]" sources, folks!
Good points, all of them. That said, nearly everyone in our computer consulting company is still using P-133 to P-233MMX machines. (except for managers, of course--fuck!)
There are some other points though.
1) The home user will be screwed by subscriptionware. This is NOT what I want on my home PC.
2) Code bloat happens, and will continue to happen. With a forced software upgrade path, the software and hardware manufacturers can get together to substantially ramp up the overall cost of hardware upgrades required for the new software.
3) Schools and other charities will end up getting more hardware, but be unable to run anything on it! If a school gets a P-166 and runs Office95 on it, it's still a productive machine. If in a few years they get a P4-1800, because it can't run _any_ available version of office, it's a paperweight.
Although there are some real benefits to the subscription model, we have to keep in mind that it is ultimately and fundamentally a way for the software companies to make _more_ money. They wouldn't do it if it weren't.
Good on Phil! He should have done this years ago.
Most of the people I know who use PGP stuck with 2.--the last pre-NAI version--until GPG came along. Nobody uses NAI PGP.
Nobody trusts NAI.
Nobody likes the NAI license agreements.
In short, NAI did more to SLOW DOWN the widespread use of PGP than any government ruling or censure. Almost makes one wonder what their agenda _really_ was for all of those years.
Anyways, congrats to Phil for getting away from those bastards.
Actually, I _was_ thinking of Schroedinger, and his cat; but then I got sidetracked towards uncertainty.
And for the record, the uncertainty principle applies equally on all scales. However, the effect of it shrinks as scale increases, and so for more than a few atoms, is pretty much irrelevant. Correct, applicable, but irrelevant.
I know that you've already claimed otherwise, but you are not questioning things as a skeptic--you're questioning them for the sake of being contrary.
:-) questions the logic of whether those results are really the "right" results. That's just silly.
There are three questions you can ask about any bit of scientific research:
1) What are the initial conditions and assumptions?
2) Were the results interpreted correctly?
3) Are there any other interpretations for the data?
If the data is interpreted correctly and doesn't have any other possible interpretations, then the conclusion is correct for the initial assumptions, within the limits of the experiment. Anything that refines this process and comes to different conclusions doesn't make the previous experiment wrong, it corrects _incomplete_ initial assumptions or data.
Also, questioning 1+1=2 is a complete and utter red herring. 1+1=2 is not a fact!!! It is, instead, a definition. Definitions and facts aren't the same thing.
Science questions the initial assumptions and the interpretation of results. Non-science (conveniently close to nonsense
OK, for the record, I DON'T give a toss for credentials--it's just that the only people I've met who use phrases like "The moral relativism and the relativism in all areas that it promotes..." have been second or maybe third year arts/philosophy students. Before that they don't have the total immersion required, and after that, they get some perspective.
When I said people are stupid, I mean people are stupid. WAY too many people (the large majority) fail to use that grey matter for critical thinking. This doesn't require education, it just requires a willingness to think. Many people don't LIKE to think, and that's stupid behavior.
Well for starters, you mean objectivity. Objectivism is a very different ( and fairly harsh) philosophy.
But Schroedinger had nothing to do with 'postmodernist' philosophy. He was a physicist and mathematician. The fact that observing changes the observations doesn't invalidate your experiment, but it _could_ be extrapolated to mean that you'll never get to the absolute truth of what you're trying to find.
"People take on the attitudes and values of the society that surrounds them, and what determines this society's values and world view is the whims of the 'intelligentsia' - in this case us, the eloi. "
Nope. I don't buy this. People do take on the attitudes of the society surrounding them, but at the same time they help shape those attitudes. It goes both ways. People create and react to society simultaneously.
Furthermore, I don't think that there's any extra strength or credence given to scientists or other members of the so-called intelligentsia in forming society's views. If anything, they're laughed at and ignored, in favour of the REAL shaper of society: The media.
(important aside here: If I agree with any part of the 'postmodern' argument, it's this one: Many people don't believe scientists because it's currently unhip to believe us. Regardless, all that does is give us less of a chance to make a difference, not more responsibility to make the RIGHT difference)
Anyways, the media is the key shaper of minds, mores, and values nowadays. They are the ones who should have some sense of responsibility and care, but instead they're hell-bent on making money at all costs, and the dumber a society is as a whole, the easier it is for them. So what do we do now?
Holy crap, what year of your BA are you in? This sounds like an essay written for a metaphysics class by a terribly _earnest_ student with a dictionary.
Furthermore, postmodernism is generally ascribed to a movement in art, literature, or so on. Postmodernist _existence_ is a bit of a leap. Postmodernist science is something of an oxymoron.
Facts and objective truth have never been too well received by the general populace. _Never._ There's nothing special about our current time that makes us more susceptible to it, other than perhaps that we have _more_ information and differing (sometimes nonsensical) viewpoints than ever before. Jung's 'collective unconscious' in a very limited way is true, but completely irrelevant to this argument. If we once thought of visions from heaven where we now see UFOs, we're still interpreting things as subjectively as ever.
Also, it could be put forth that Schroedinger argues against the existence of objective fact, or at least against the possiblity of ever knowing anything objectively. The act of observing affects the observation always and fundamentally. There's no way around it. What's objective then?
Regardless, we can drag yet ANOTHER Name into this discussion to explain it all: Occam, and his lovely razor. The simplest explanation in this case is that most people are just fucking STUPID. We are a race of stupid people, many of who willfully refuse to use their powers of logical thinking and deduction. Seems like as life gets easier, we get worse at it too.
I agree...and disagree.
Jim Allchin certainly isn't an idiot. No matter what we may occasionally believe, you don't get that high is that big of a company by being an idiot.
His statements, however, are utterly idiotic. They're stupid, brainless, and paranoid. HOWEVER, by saying the, and repeating them as often as possible, he may well convince the majority of the public and the majority of the government that he's right. In other words, idiotic statements geared towards an audience of idiots, delivered by a smart guy who's ruthlessly interested in nothing more than his own fortunes and power.
Scott? Is that you?
:-). Ever!
Nah. I can't imagine Scott using