Likewise, nobody should have a car, unless, everybody gets a car, and Larry Ellison's car is no cooler or more expensive than your car?
And likewise, no city should establish a public park, unless everybody in the city can get to it with equal ease, and every other city also has an equally accessible public park, and your public park is no less pretty than the Mall, in Washington, D.C.?
And likewise, the government shouldn't send astronauts to the moon until everybody can afford a trip to the moon?
You'll never get the equality and the protection against bigotry that you hope for. And you'll never prevent the rich and powerful from adopting the new technology early, while it's still too expensive for the masses. And you'll never be able to turn back the clock. About the best you can hope for is to advance the state of the art, to level out the playing field as quickly as possible, and stop whining about how it's still getting easier for people to know more stuff about each other.
"Privacy was an illusion, perpetuated for millenia by a lack of technology."
I admit to indulging in hyperbole, with that statement. But your rebuttal-by-analogy is kinda weak. You said
By this logic, "Clean air and water was an illusion, perpetuated by a lack of pollution."
Clean air and water are concrete things, easily measurable. They can be evaluated according to biological standards. Pollution can be counted as a physical quantity, and judged according to ccertain absolute criteria for health.
Privacy is an abstract concept. Of what does it consist? It consists essentially of me having information that others do not have, and me having control over the spread of that information. But one of the reasons others know so little about me is not because I only act "in private", where nobody else can see me. I act in public all the time, and leave traces of my information everywhere I go. The only reason I still have privacy is because the information I leave lying around, "loose", is too thinly spread, and too poorly organized, and too difficult to collect and study in one place, for anybody else to learn anything useful about me unless I consciously and explicitly tell them.
In short, a huge part of what we think of as "privacy" hinges on the technological limitations of actually making sense of all my public information. And it is exactly these technological limitations that so many people, in so many sectors, have been working so diligently for so long to overcome.
It's true that government also has the technology to place a laser on your window and listen to your every word. But just because they have the technology doesn't make it ok to do.
That's not what we're talking about, though. We're talking about "loose" information, that for lack of cheap, effective technology, has never been gathered together in one place and properly analyzed. As the technology for that sort of thing advances, becoming cheaper and better, the government won't need to shoot spybeams at your windows--they'll know everything they need to know simply by studying the concatenated information about all your public acts and transactions.
The idea that mankind is limited to walking speed was an illusion facilitated by millenia without horseback riding, the railroad, and the airplane. Does this mean that the police should not use automobiles, because then they might go fast enough to catch more criminals than appropriate? Of course not.
Hasn't this been the whole point of the last century of effort in the field of computing? The constant push for faster processors? The drive for larger, faster storage, in smaller form factors? The constant advances in memory efficiency and effectiveness? For generations now, everybody has been working for smaller, cheaper, faster, computing--working very successfully at it.
Everybody wants it. Everybody wants their information to be more portable, more accessible. That's what the Internet is for. That's why relational databases were invented. That's why SQL and cross-platform development tools are so important. That's why everybody is lusting after Wi-Fi.
It's all so that more information can move with greater speed over greater distances, and be organized and studied with greater ease. That's what you've been working for. That's what you want. It's what everybody wants. The academics who used the original ARPAnet want it. The government wants it. The Open Source community wants it. Microsoft wants it. Your boss wants it. You want it. I want it.
Privacy was an illusion, perpetuated for millenia by a lack of technology. But the information is out there. It always has been. And you want it to be free. Now, you're finally getting what you want, and it's only going to get cheaper and easier from here.
Your revised design still doesn't solve the joints-and-servos problem you handwaved away in your original post. There's still moving parts, additional components that could conceivably fail, and whose success is now a factor of the overall success of the mission.
Also, not caring about the weight budget of the mission is doesn't strike me as a rational approach to solving the problem. As motivated as you are to have a long-lasting, productive mission, the idea that you are more motivated than the mission engineers themselves is, on the evidence, strikingly counter-intuitive.
That said, it's clear that the issue has been known since at least 1998, and that experiments have been proposed to study and solve the problem.
It's possible that the problem is much less trivial than you think, though, given that NASA is apparently considering atomic generators as a solution.
Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to track down any definitive links to the current missions' weight budgets, or any details on the hard choices the design teams had to make and the criteria they used to make those choices. However, it seems obvious even so that what looks like a trivial problem at first glance to you and me has actually turned out to be relatively intractable to the kind of quick fixes proposed here.
It's possible that future experimentation will yield an easy solution. Such a solution may even be in the works, but was not suitably proven in time to be included in the current missions.
If I find out any more details on why NASA is willing to put up with dust on their solar panels, I'll let you know.
Of course! If only those stupid-heads at NASA had managed to figure out some kind of motor-and-pulley arrangement that didn't use any joints or servos!
I mean, there must be some way to make a motor-and-pulley system that doesn't involve joining moving parts together!
And hey--if we take the word "servo" out of the word "servomotor", that means that the actual device doesn't need any of those pesky "servos" either, doesn't it?
If we really work at it, we can spend a lot of our limited monetary budget coming up with an additional system that may or may not actually work, and either way it will cut into the weight and power budget that we could be applying to more science, instead! And if it doesn't work, the whole thing is a waste--we've already lost the science that could've taken the place of this miraculous jointless, servo-less servomotor-and-pulley design, and we get no benefit at all from said design! But hey--it's worth the risk, isn't it?
Isn't it?
Maybe it isn't worth the risk. Maybe the techs at NASA have been going around and around, debating these very issues (minus the retarded jointless, servoless jointed servomotor issue--there's a reason that 4th graders get to name the things, but actual adults design and build them, you know) for, oh, YEARS AND YEARS, trying to find the optimal balance between longevity, durability, science, and cost, and this is the best they can come up with.
John Carmack is an ass. If he's gotten this far into his X-Prize project without realizing that EVERYTHING having to do with the monetary, power, and weight budgets of a rocket program is, in fact, Rocket Science, then he... well, nobody really deserves to die in a fiery explosion, but...
Here, you're talking about the efficacy of killing/incarcerating/intimidating limited numbers of people, in order to keep worker unrest at a manageable level.
In your parent post, you were talking about how unruly workers weren't a problem because modern regimes have the tools to kill lots of unruly workers very quickly.
The scenario you're describing now is just as effective if the government thugs are using revolvers, or clubs, or fists, or two-by-fours with a nail in them. After all, the Mob doesn't usually require much in the way of high-tech industrial firepower in order to collect their "protection" fees.
I totally agree that total annihilation of all the workers is usually unnecessary, and that a much more limited approach is probably quite effective.
But earlier you seemed to be arguing that large mobs of angry workers weren't a problem because the government could just bomb or shoot them all with modern weaponry.
My counter-argument is that modern mass-killing devices (or "weapons of mass-destruction") are not actually a good solution to the "angry mob" problem. Killing a large number of workers may seem like a good idea in the short term, but it's pretty damn stupid in the long term--especially because as your workforce shrinks drastically, you'll have to push the surviving workers even harder. This will make them even more angry, and you'll have to kill a lot of them, too. Or else they'll start dying from overwork. Either way, efficient mass killings aren't really a good solution, economically speaking.
If that's not what you meant by "angry citizens are irrelevant in the face of modern weaponry wielded by a military that is on the side of the government and not the people", then I apologize for wasting your time.
The argument I was originally replying to was the argument that modern regimes can get away with sweatshops because modern regimes can efficiently kill angry citizens before they become a major threat to the regime.
My counter-argument is that efficiently killing lots of people makes your economy--and therefore the overall value of your sweatshops--decline, not improve. Therefore, being able to kill lots of workers quickly is actually counter-productive. I'd be quick to question the sanity of any leader who thought machinegunning workers was a good way to improve industrial output.
Sure, you can terrify the remaining workers into working a little harder, but that's not very sustainable. And every time you use the machinegun option, your workforce diminishes even further, forcing you to pressure your remaining workers even more, causing those workers to become even more disgruntled or else die in droves from overwork. Either way, efficient killing is not a practical long-term solution to worker unrest. The parent poster seems to think it is, and I have hopefully explained why I disagree.
Angry citizens are extremely relevant even (especially) in an age of highly efficient government killing machines. If your citizens are so angry about the sweatshop conditions that you have to kill them all, your economy is just as fucked as if they were so angry that they stopped work, rioted, and forcibly removed you from office--probably more fucked than that, now that I think about it. Disgruntled citizens can easily rebuild an economy after installing a more human government, but dead citizens aren't really ever going to be useful again.
Yes, but how many of the systems that comprise the Internet are currently being managed by people who are skilled coders fluent in several languages and operating environments; and who are also skilled sysadmins proficient in all aspects of security, network administration, system administration, and database administration?
Now that being said my biggest issue is not with the regular network admin guy but with all those new fangled deployment admins and security admins. Even in this sour economy some companies still seem to have too much cash on their hands.
Funny you should mention that. Every single insecure, unstable, unscalable, unmaintainable project in my datacenter got here precisely because there was no "deployment admin" (or equivalent role) involved in the planning process.
I wouldn't dream of telling you how your code works internally, but if I find out that you have everything running as root in your lab because it's easier that way... well, I'm sorry, but there's no way in hell you're getting that design into my production datacenter. I spend enough time trying to fix poor architectures after the fact as it is, without having a whole new craptastic one-off shoved down my throat by some PHB who blessed the damn thing three months ago and is too busy being smug about his fait accompli to hear me explain how thoroughly fucked up his decision was.
The scenario you describe doesn't scale for shit, you know. I'm on a team of about 300 sysadmins, netadmins, security admins, and DBAs. We support dev, production-test, and production environments for some 800 different projects ranging from "astoundingly trivial" to "major investment". There's no way you could find 300+ people who were all equally and highly competent system, network and security admins, and highly competent DBAs, and skilled programmers. Even if you could, you'd actually need 600 such people, since the first 300 or so wouldn't have enough time or energy to do all the planning and administration and do all the code design and production.
There's simply not that many rennaissance hackers to staff even our company at our current size--and heaven forbid we grow at all! Let alone enough virtuoso geniuses to staff entire sectors of industry in the manner you describe.
I count them as spacecraft, and I'm assuming that they are either too slow to require an anti-gas shield, and/or that even TIE Fighters have the minimal shields necessary to deflect gaseous impacts--even if they don't have room for the much more powerful shields used to deflect weapons fire.
Perhaps I will apply to your new company. Your business plans sound interesting. Would you be willing to answer a few questions, before I submit my resume?
First, what are you medical benefits like? Will there be a ship's doctor on every mission? I think that workplace safety is important, and that having qualified medical personnel on board will go a long way towards preventing severe injury and loss of life.
Also, would I be able to review any "hidden" company policies before I signed a contract? I saw a documentary on the SciFi channel the other day about a space crew that got killed by deadly aliens of death, because the company they worked for had some sort of bullshit policy about "take onboard any deadly alien of death you stumble across", or something. It was pretty lame, and I'd prefer not to work for a company with a policy like that.
Finally, if I were hired as a space mechanic, would I get the same shares as the flight officers, or are you planning on a multi-tiered payment scheme?
Unless they figure out a way to stay out there indefinitely, in order to avoid prosecution. Perhaps by exchanging nefarious illegal space services for a steady stream of consumables.
Also, I don't think it'll be the Wild West on an individual level, but on a corporate level. The companies will bring their own security solutions (to protect their interests, rather than to uphold the law). I could definitely see corporations investing in permanent out-of-jurisdiction space bases, and keeping them well-supplied so that the residents--company employees, all--could continue to work that revenue stream without ever having to come back home and stand trial.
Sure, the earth governments could claim jurisdiction, but unless they have a meaningful military or law-enforcement presence in the region, their claims are irrelevant.
If people are starving we are not doing the work necessary to take care of them. Its not their fault they are starving.
Unless, of course, they're starving because they're not doing the work necessary to take care of themselves. Then it is their fault that they're starving.
The necessary amount to make a noticeable difference in the motions of the Earth and Moon amounts to around a million tons of iron for each person on Earth.
What do you plan to do with your million tons?
Star Wars spacecraft have shields. These shields protect the ship from high-speed gaseous impacts.
Re:Isn't limited availibility what makes it valuab
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Is Space Mining Feasible?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I imagine the cost of getting the materials safely to Earth, where they can compete with local sources, would do a lot to offset the savings generated by the sudden surplus of such minerals.
I further imagine that the value of these space minerals will be based on the new things they allow us to do: manufacture things in space. That is, their value will be based on the demand for space-built items (stations, mining facilities, moonbases, city-ships, &c.). So long as these space-built items remain desireable, demand will remain high, even as scarcity is reduced in space the same way it's been reduced on earth.
quote: Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?
i don't see how... can any linguist/CS person explain to me why this is not a bu%^&*)t question?
That's easy. I only speak two languages fluently, but I can still answer this question.
"bu%^&*)t" is a meaningless string of characters. Since we know from direct experience that the question conveys meaning, we can safely conclude that it is not a meaningless question. Perhaps you're thinking of a "bullshit" question?
Agent Smith obviously hadn't been patched because Neo exploited him immediately upon gaining Administrator access.
The whole point of Administrator access is being able to exploit whatever system component you damn well please. That's why it's called "Administrator access", and that's why it's usually restricted.
I would've been shocked if Neo hadn't been able to exploit Smith, using Admin privileges. If Smith really did have an unpatched security hole, then Neo should've been able to exploit the agent before he rooted the system.
Which, considering how much of a loser Neo was, could very well have been possible--he just never noticed.
And don't try to pretend that Neo used an upatched hole to root the system. He rooted the system after being resurrected from the dead by True Love. The Machines were pretty impressive, but I seriously doubt there's a way to patch "supernatural powers derived from traveling beyond Death's gate and then returning to the world of the living on the wings of True Love".
Which, of course, speaks to the absurdity of the screenplay, rather than the absurdity of drawing parallels between the Matrix and MS.
Heh. The world is waking up and seeing this thing for what it is: A blatant attempt by some big money corporate thugs to take over the finest collaborative work this world has ever seen.
I'm not saying Linux is crap, or anything, but the finest? Please. I'm partial to the Bill of Rights, myself.
I've never really understood the "limited resources" argument. "We should pretend there's a shortage now, in order to postpone the date of the real shortage". It doesn't make sense. For one thing, we're not going to run out of oil (say) all in one day. It's not like we're going to wake up one morning and world oil production is suddenly at zero, thus destroying civilization as we know it in some sort of Mad Max parody.
Rather, as oil reserves dwindle (gradually, over time), the cost of oil-based energy will go up. At various points, other energy sources will become more ecnomical than oil, and development of those sources will begin to accelerate. Economies of scale will kick in. There will probably be some fluctuations in the overall cost of living during the transition, but I doubt it will be anything drastic.
Moving to those technologies now, while oil is still cheaper and the infrastructure is already well in place, would have an even bigger impact on the cost of living. Furthermore, it would have a huge impact on economic growth. We'd be saving our children (or grandchildren, or whatever) the cost of conversion, by taking that cost on ourselves. But it seems likely that our descendants will have more wealth available to pay those costs than we do.
Another thing is, they're called "resources" because we use them for stuff. If they just sit there, not being used, they're not resources and there is no shortage. Saving resources for future generations makes no sense. There's no reason to think they have any greater need for iron (say), than we do, or that they'll make better use of it than we are.
That sounds like eating a cake and keeping it to me. Either there is a limit, and that's adhered to, or officials can keep anything they want to secret as long as they choose to. At least that's what you ARE saying; hey, they should disclose it, if they feel like it, but not if they don't.
That's exactly what I'm saying. It's not a question of having the cake and eating it too, it's a question of what do do with secrets.
If you open up secrets for public review, then they're no longer secrets. If certain information should be made public, that decision must be made before the public gains access to the information. The U.S. solution is to establish several groups of appointed and elected "trustees", who review sensitive information and make the decision of whether or not to make it public. There's also legislative and judicial mechanisms to force a review (and possibly a release) of sensitive information that has aged over time. But rote adherence to the "aging" guidelines can result in things being made public which should not be. So the trustees retain the authority to override the guidelines. This authority is necessary, to preserve the secrecy of long-term sensitive information. If "eating the cake" is automatically declassifying aged information, then "having the cake" is what I'm saying--granting trustees the authority to maintain the secrecy of aged information.
But furthermore, how exactly would those guidelines be enforced? There would be no way for anyone to ever verify adherence to the said guidelines?
Government is not a purely mechanical operation. A given input does not lead automatically to a given predictable, legalistic output in every case. There's judgement involved, and trust. These guidelines, and the confidence we place in the trustees, are enforced the same way we enforce all the other instances of trust in our government: by periodically reviewing the performance of our elected representatives, and electing new ones based on our level of trust in the current representatives.
The legislative branch of our government has committees with the authority to review secret material on behalf of the people they represent. If I feel that my Congressmen or Senators are screwing me over in the secrets department, I can vote for different ones.
Likewise the Executive branch of our government is headed by an elected representative. If I don't like his policies or appointments, I can vote against him, and argue against him, and otherwise exercise all my power as a citizen to oppose him on this issue.
In the end, it comes down to trust--do I trust my representatives to make the right decisions? Controlling secrets in a free society involves trust, and compromise. I think the current system is a much better trade-off than a system which blindly, mechanically released secrets after an arbitrary-but-reasonable time period.
I don't have much trouble with either fixed duration or the general idea of limiting the maximum period of classification. Reasonable limits and guidelines should definitely be set.
But a reasonable exception policy must also be set.
Once I admit that some things should be kept secret--kept secret even from me, a citizen!--then I have to also admit that there must be some small body of elected and appointed officials who have the authority to first know these secret things, and second decide whether or not to keep them secret from me.
Too, I have to admit that these officials must be able to extend the secrecy of these things beyond the default time limits, and that they must be able to do so without sharing the secret with me so that I can decide for myself whether it should still be a secret or not.
Otherwise, there's really no point in keeping things secret in the first place, if you have to make them public anyway, just to decide if they should be secret.
You're talking about the specific implementation of a security policy. The policy assumes by default that all documents become not-sensitive after 50 years (or 10 years for new documents). This seems like a reasonable assumption. The strict limits on policy exceptions also seem reasonable. But nothing in the policy makes a document insensitive by virtue of its age alone. Rather, the policy requires that a document's sensitivity be reviewed after a specific period of time, according to specific guidelines. It doesn't say that secrets should stop being secrets because they're old secrets. It says that old secrets usually don't need to be kept secret anymore, and should be reviewed periodically.
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And likewise, no city should establish a public park, unless everybody in the city can get to it with equal ease, and every other city also has an equally accessible public park, and your public park is no less pretty than the Mall, in Washington, D.C.?
And likewise, the government shouldn't send astronauts to the moon until everybody can afford a trip to the moon?
You'll never get the equality and the protection against bigotry that you hope for. And you'll never prevent the rich and powerful from adopting the new technology early, while it's still too expensive for the masses. And you'll never be able to turn back the clock. About the best you can hope for is to advance the state of the art, to level out the playing field as quickly as possible, and stop whining about how it's still getting easier for people to know more stuff about each other.
I admit to indulging in hyperbole, with that statement. But your rebuttal-by-analogy is kinda weak. You said
Clean air and water are concrete things, easily measurable. They can be evaluated according to biological standards. Pollution can be counted as a physical quantity, and judged according to ccertain absolute criteria for health.
Privacy is an abstract concept. Of what does it consist? It consists essentially of me having information that others do not have, and me having control over the spread of that information. But one of the reasons others know so little about me is not because I only act "in private", where nobody else can see me. I act in public all the time, and leave traces of my information everywhere I go. The only reason I still have privacy is because the information I leave lying around, "loose", is too thinly spread, and too poorly organized, and too difficult to collect and study in one place, for anybody else to learn anything useful about me unless I consciously and explicitly tell them.
In short, a huge part of what we think of as "privacy" hinges on the technological limitations of actually making sense of all my public information. And it is exactly these technological limitations that so many people, in so many sectors, have been working so diligently for so long to overcome.
It's true that government also has the technology to place a laser on your window and listen to your every word. But just because they have the technology doesn't make it ok to do.
That's not what we're talking about, though. We're talking about "loose" information, that for lack of cheap, effective technology, has never been gathered together in one place and properly analyzed. As the technology for that sort of thing advances, becoming cheaper and better, the government won't need to shoot spybeams at your windows--they'll know everything they need to know simply by studying the concatenated information about all your public acts and transactions.
The idea that mankind is limited to walking speed was an illusion facilitated by millenia without horseback riding, the railroad, and the airplane. Does this mean that the police should not use automobiles, because then they might go fast enough to catch more criminals than appropriate? Of course not.
"Information wants to be free", right?
Hasn't this been the whole point of the last century of effort in the field of computing? The constant push for faster processors? The drive for larger, faster storage, in smaller form factors? The constant advances in memory efficiency and effectiveness? For generations now, everybody has been working for smaller, cheaper, faster, computing--working very successfully at it.
Everybody wants it. Everybody wants their information to be more portable, more accessible. That's what the Internet is for. That's why relational databases were invented. That's why SQL and cross-platform development tools are so important. That's why everybody is lusting after Wi-Fi.
It's all so that more information can move with greater speed over greater distances, and be organized and studied with greater ease. That's what you've been working for. That's what you want. It's what everybody wants. The academics who used the original ARPAnet want it. The government wants it. The Open Source community wants it. Microsoft wants it. Your boss wants it. You want it. I want it.
Privacy was an illusion, perpetuated for millenia by a lack of technology. But the information is out there. It always has been. And you want it to be free. Now, you're finally getting what you want, and it's only going to get cheaper and easier from here.
Everything is going according to plan. Your plan.
Also, not caring about the weight budget of the mission is doesn't strike me as a rational approach to solving the problem. As motivated as you are to have a long-lasting, productive mission, the idea that you are more motivated than the mission engineers themselves is, on the evidence, strikingly counter-intuitive.
That said, it's clear that the issue has been known since at least 1998, and that experiments have been proposed to study and solve the problem.
It's possible that the problem is much less trivial than you think, though, given that NASA is apparently considering atomic generators as a solution.
Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to track down any definitive links to the current missions' weight budgets, or any details on the hard choices the design teams had to make and the criteria they used to make those choices. However, it seems obvious even so that what looks like a trivial problem at first glance to you and me has actually turned out to be relatively intractable to the kind of quick fixes proposed here.
It's possible that future experimentation will yield an easy solution. Such a solution may even be in the works, but was not suitably proven in time to be included in the current missions.
If I find out any more details on why NASA is willing to put up with dust on their solar panels, I'll let you know.
Of course! If only those stupid-heads at NASA had managed to figure out some kind of motor-and-pulley arrangement that didn't use any joints or servos!
I mean, there must be some way to make a motor-and-pulley system that doesn't involve joining moving parts together!
And hey--if we take the word "servo" out of the word "servomotor", that means that the actual device doesn't need any of those pesky "servos" either, doesn't it?
If we really work at it, we can spend a lot of our limited monetary budget coming up with an additional system that may or may not actually work, and either way it will cut into the weight and power budget that we could be applying to more science, instead! And if it doesn't work, the whole thing is a waste--we've already lost the science that could've taken the place of this miraculous jointless, servo-less servomotor-and-pulley design, and we get no benefit at all from said design! But hey--it's worth the risk, isn't it?
Isn't it?
Maybe it isn't worth the risk. Maybe the techs at NASA have been going around and around, debating these very issues (minus the retarded jointless, servoless jointed servomotor issue--there's a reason that 4th graders get to name the things, but actual adults design and build them, you know) for, oh, YEARS AND YEARS, trying to find the optimal balance between longevity, durability, science, and cost, and this is the best they can come up with.
John Carmack is an ass. If he's gotten this far into his X-Prize project without realizing that EVERYTHING having to do with the monetary, power, and weight budgets of a rocket program is, in fact, Rocket Science, then he... well, nobody really deserves to die in a fiery explosion, but...
This is a slightly different issue.
Here, you're talking about the efficacy of killing/incarcerating/intimidating limited numbers of people, in order to keep worker unrest at a manageable level.
In your parent post, you were talking about how unruly workers weren't a problem because modern regimes have the tools to kill lots of unruly workers very quickly.
The scenario you're describing now is just as effective if the government thugs are using revolvers, or clubs, or fists, or two-by-fours with a nail in them. After all, the Mob doesn't usually require much in the way of high-tech industrial firepower in order to collect their "protection" fees.
I totally agree that total annihilation of all the workers is usually unnecessary, and that a much more limited approach is probably quite effective.
But earlier you seemed to be arguing that large mobs of angry workers weren't a problem because the government could just bomb or shoot them all with modern weaponry.
My counter-argument is that modern mass-killing devices (or "weapons of mass-destruction") are not actually a good solution to the "angry mob" problem. Killing a large number of workers may seem like a good idea in the short term, but it's pretty damn stupid in the long term--especially because as your workforce shrinks drastically, you'll have to push the surviving workers even harder. This will make them even more angry, and you'll have to kill a lot of them, too. Or else they'll start dying from overwork. Either way, efficient mass killings aren't really a good solution, economically speaking.
If that's not what you meant by "angry citizens are irrelevant in the face of modern weaponry wielded by a military that is on the side of the government and not the people", then I apologize for wasting your time.
The argument I was originally replying to was the argument that modern regimes can get away with sweatshops because modern regimes can efficiently kill angry citizens before they become a major threat to the regime.
My counter-argument is that efficiently killing lots of people makes your economy--and therefore the overall value of your sweatshops--decline, not improve. Therefore, being able to kill lots of workers quickly is actually counter-productive. I'd be quick to question the sanity of any leader who thought machinegunning workers was a good way to improve industrial output.
Sure, you can terrify the remaining workers into working a little harder, but that's not very sustainable. And every time you use the machinegun option, your workforce diminishes even further, forcing you to pressure your remaining workers even more, causing those workers to become even more disgruntled or else die in droves from overwork. Either way, efficient killing is not a practical long-term solution to worker unrest. The parent poster seems to think it is, and I have hopefully explained why I disagree.
Angry citizens are extremely relevant even (especially) in an age of highly efficient government killing machines. If your citizens are so angry about the sweatshop conditions that you have to kill them all, your economy is just as fucked as if they were so angry that they stopped work, rioted, and forcibly removed you from office--probably more fucked than that, now that I think about it. Disgruntled citizens can easily rebuild an economy after installing a more human government, but dead citizens aren't really ever going to be useful again.
Yes, but how many of the systems that comprise the Internet are currently being managed by people who are skilled coders fluent in several languages and operating environments; and who are also skilled sysadmins proficient in all aspects of security, network administration, system administration, and database administration?
Funny you should mention that. Every single insecure, unstable, unscalable, unmaintainable project in my datacenter got here precisely because there was no "deployment admin" (or equivalent role) involved in the planning process.
I wouldn't dream of telling you how your code works internally, but if I find out that you have everything running as root in your lab because it's easier that way... well, I'm sorry, but there's no way in hell you're getting that design into my production datacenter. I spend enough time trying to fix poor architectures after the fact as it is, without having a whole new craptastic one-off shoved down my throat by some PHB who blessed the damn thing three months ago and is too busy being smug about his fait accompli to hear me explain how thoroughly fucked up his decision was.
There's simply not that many rennaissance hackers to staff even our company at our current size--and heaven forbid we grow at all! Let alone enough virtuoso geniuses to staff entire sectors of industry in the manner you describe.
I count them as spacecraft, and I'm assuming that they are either too slow to require an anti-gas shield, and/or that even TIE Fighters have the minimal shields necessary to deflect gaseous impacts--even if they don't have room for the much more powerful shields used to deflect weapons fire.
Perhaps I will apply to your new company. Your business plans sound interesting. Would you be willing to answer a few questions, before I submit my resume?
First, what are you medical benefits like? Will there be a ship's doctor on every mission? I think that workplace safety is important, and that having qualified medical personnel on board will go a long way towards preventing severe injury and loss of life.
Also, would I be able to review any "hidden" company policies before I signed a contract? I saw a documentary on the SciFi channel the other day about a space crew that got killed by deadly aliens of death, because the company they worked for had some sort of bullshit policy about "take onboard any deadly alien of death you stumble across", or something. It was pretty lame, and I'd prefer not to work for a company with a policy like that.
Finally, if I were hired as a space mechanic, would I get the same shares as the flight officers, or are you planning on a multi-tiered payment scheme?
Unless they figure out a way to stay out there indefinitely, in order to avoid prosecution. Perhaps by exchanging nefarious illegal space services for a steady stream of consumables.
Also, I don't think it'll be the Wild West on an individual level, but on a corporate level. The companies will bring their own security solutions (to protect their interests, rather than to uphold the law). I could definitely see corporations investing in permanent out-of-jurisdiction space bases, and keeping them well-supplied so that the residents--company employees, all--could continue to work that revenue stream without ever having to come back home and stand trial.
Sure, the earth governments could claim jurisdiction, but unless they have a meaningful military or law-enforcement presence in the region, their claims are irrelevant.
Unless, of course, they're starving because they're not doing the work necessary to take care of themselves. Then it is their fault that they're starving.
Give each ton one of my million IPv6 addresses?
Star Wars spacecraft have shields. These shields protect the ship from high-speed gaseous impacts.
I imagine the cost of getting the materials safely to Earth, where they can compete with local sources, would do a lot to offset the savings generated by the sudden surplus of such minerals.
I further imagine that the value of these space minerals will be based on the new things they allow us to do: manufacture things in space. That is, their value will be based on the demand for space-built items (stations, mining facilities, moonbases, city-ships, &c.). So long as these space-built items remain desireable, demand will remain high, even as scarcity is reduced in space the same way it's been reduced on earth.
i don't see how... can any linguist/CS person explain to me why this is not a bu%^&*)t question?
That's easy. I only speak two languages fluently, but I can still answer this question.
"bu%^&*)t" is a meaningless string of characters. Since we know from direct experience that the question conveys meaning, we can safely conclude that it is not a meaningless question. Perhaps you're thinking of a "bullshit" question?
The whole point of Administrator access is being able to exploit whatever system component you damn well please. That's why it's called "Administrator access", and that's why it's usually restricted.
I would've been shocked if Neo hadn't been able to exploit Smith, using Admin privileges. If Smith really did have an unpatched security hole, then Neo should've been able to exploit the agent before he rooted the system.
Which, considering how much of a loser Neo was, could very well have been possible--he just never noticed.
And don't try to pretend that Neo used an upatched hole to root the system. He rooted the system after being resurrected from the dead by True Love. The Machines were pretty impressive, but I seriously doubt there's a way to patch "supernatural powers derived from traveling beyond Death's gate and then returning to the world of the living on the wings of True Love".
Which, of course, speaks to the absurdity of the screenplay, rather than the absurdity of drawing parallels between the Matrix and MS.
I'm not saying Linux is crap, or anything, but the finest? Please. I'm partial to the Bill of Rights, myself.
I've never really understood the "limited resources" argument. "We should pretend there's a shortage now, in order to postpone the date of the real shortage". It doesn't make sense. For one thing, we're not going to run out of oil (say) all in one day. It's not like we're going to wake up one morning and world oil production is suddenly at zero, thus destroying civilization as we know it in some sort of Mad Max parody.
Rather, as oil reserves dwindle (gradually, over time), the cost of oil-based energy will go up. At various points, other energy sources will become more ecnomical than oil, and development of those sources will begin to accelerate. Economies of scale will kick in. There will probably be some fluctuations in the overall cost of living during the transition, but I doubt it will be anything drastic.
Moving to those technologies now, while oil is still cheaper and the infrastructure is already well in place, would have an even bigger impact on the cost of living. Furthermore, it would have a huge impact on economic growth. We'd be saving our children (or grandchildren, or whatever) the cost of conversion, by taking that cost on ourselves. But it seems likely that our descendants will have more wealth available to pay those costs than we do.
Another thing is, they're called "resources" because we use them for stuff. If they just sit there, not being used, they're not resources and there is no shortage. Saving resources for future generations makes no sense. There's no reason to think they have any greater need for iron (say), than we do, or that they'll make better use of it than we are.
That's exactly what I'm saying. It's not a question of having the cake and eating it too, it's a question of what do do with secrets.
If you open up secrets for public review, then they're no longer secrets. If certain information should be made public, that decision must be made before the public gains access to the information. The U.S. solution is to establish several groups of appointed and elected "trustees", who review sensitive information and make the decision of whether or not to make it public. There's also legislative and judicial mechanisms to force a review (and possibly a release) of sensitive information that has aged over time. But rote adherence to the "aging" guidelines can result in things being made public which should not be. So the trustees retain the authority to override the guidelines. This authority is necessary, to preserve the secrecy of long-term sensitive information. If "eating the cake" is automatically declassifying aged information, then "having the cake" is what I'm saying--granting trustees the authority to maintain the secrecy of aged information.
But furthermore, how exactly would those guidelines be enforced? There would be no way for anyone to ever verify adherence to the said guidelines?
Government is not a purely mechanical operation. A given input does not lead automatically to a given predictable, legalistic output in every case. There's judgement involved, and trust. These guidelines, and the confidence we place in the trustees, are enforced the same way we enforce all the other instances of trust in our government: by periodically reviewing the performance of our elected representatives, and electing new ones based on our level of trust in the current representatives.
The legislative branch of our government has committees with the authority to review secret material on behalf of the people they represent. If I feel that my Congressmen or Senators are screwing me over in the secrets department, I can vote for different ones.
Likewise the Executive branch of our government is headed by an elected representative. If I don't like his policies or appointments, I can vote against him, and argue against him, and otherwise exercise all my power as a citizen to oppose him on this issue.
In the end, it comes down to trust--do I trust my representatives to make the right decisions? Controlling secrets in a free society involves trust, and compromise. I think the current system is a much better trade-off than a system which blindly, mechanically released secrets after an arbitrary-but-reasonable time period.
I don't have much trouble with either fixed duration or the general idea of limiting the maximum period of classification. Reasonable limits and guidelines should definitely be set. But a reasonable exception policy must also be set. Once I admit that some things should be kept secret--kept secret even from me, a citizen!--then I have to also admit that there must be some small body of elected and appointed officials who have the authority to first know these secret things, and second decide whether or not to keep them secret from me. Too, I have to admit that these officials must be able to extend the secrecy of these things beyond the default time limits, and that they must be able to do so without sharing the secret with me so that I can decide for myself whether it should still be a secret or not. Otherwise, there's really no point in keeping things secret in the first place, if you have to make them public anyway, just to decide if they should be secret.
You're talking about the specific implementation of a security policy. The policy assumes by default that all documents become not-sensitive after 50 years (or 10 years for new documents). This seems like a reasonable assumption. The strict limits on policy exceptions also seem reasonable. But nothing in the policy makes a document insensitive by virtue of its age alone. Rather, the policy requires that a document's sensitivity be reviewed after a specific period of time, according to specific guidelines. It doesn't say that secrets should stop being secrets because they're old secrets. It says that old secrets usually don't need to be kept secret anymore, and should be reviewed periodically.