I'm not suggesting conspiracy, here. It's just that enough stupidity combined with power is frequently capable of displays that appear malevolently intelligent or conspiracy-like. A self-organizing kind of thing.
I wasn't pretending to say that lust for power was universal, just terribly common. I think one of Clinton's best near-achievements went pretty much unrecognized, and it was undone before completed. (It also wasn't his alone, but it couldn't have been done without his concurrence and cooperation.) The economy had very nearly reached the proverbial "soft landing" right before the dot-com revolution took off. The soft landing was discarded, and has never been heard from since.
In the runup to the war in Iraq, it was obvious to me the whole time that we were going to war because the administration had a hard-on for Saddam. The reasons looked faked and trumped up from the start, as far as I was concerned.
Nor was I the only one not fooled. There were plenty of people taken in. We weren't laughing, because it was war, and people were going to die. But it wouldn't have mattered had we laughed or not, or whether any number of us read Slashdot or not. Nor does it matter if you point and laugh, or read Slashdot.
People with power, even incompetent people with power, do as they want, and the first thing they want is to stay in power.
Doesn't take competence to do what I talked about. Only greed and power. Maybe "they" don't gracefully "permit" disruptive advance in time of total war, either. Maybe this aspect of the comfy partnership between government and business breaks down, and it's the government permitting disruption of business models, so that they can keep their positions.
I'll give you a different, and possibly Slashdottian perspective on the "War drives Progress" model you proposed.
The reality is that Our Corporate Overlords don't like true Progress, of the disruptive sort. They like progress, (with the lower-case "p") of the incremental sort, the kind that keeps their guaranteed spot on top, and keeps them making money the same way they made it last year, only more of it. I would propose that most of the time, they're doing their very best to kill disruptive change, or at least slow it to the point where it is no longer disruptive. Microsoft once mentioned "managing the pace of change in the industry," which I would imply to mean managing the pace of change so they can retain their "leadership" role. Even so, every now and then a disruptive innovation like the Internet manages to sneak through. One might argue that now Corporate America is doing everything in it's power to kill the disruptive basics of the Internet, too.
War changes this.
Real War, that is. War like WWII, not war like Viet Nam or Iraq. Real war threatens the very existence of Our Corporate Overlords, because if we lose, they're toast. So when real War happens, the brakes on disruptive innovation are removed, because survival is at stake. As long as you win, you have a chance of retaining your spot on top, and will most likely be alive. If you lose, both are in doubt.
>I know girls who type at 100wpm and talk at what seems to be a hundred times that rate;)
But how fast are they moving information, as opposed to filling air with sound?
Like, you know I wouldn't even, like call some of those, like, extra like, sounds somthing like "error correction", you know, but just like, like more like extraneous junk, like you know, like junk DNA, you know. Unless of course junk DNA turns out to actually be useful, once we learn more about it.
Are you sure Linux really isn't a series of tubes?
On a slightly more serious note, many aspects of Linux are documented, perhaps a starting point for what you want is the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard". The name has changed a time or two, and I don't exactly know the latest, or the acronym.
That's my point, with what I propose, the twain only meet in the email/calendar client, not at any servers. I get the convenience, but the information remains separated, at respective "owners."
I'm on Lotus Notes right now. But let's say I installed a calendaring server on my home system. Then I'd have a "work calendar" and a "home calendar", and the twain would have no way of meeting, whatsoever.
Now let's pretend that email is the mechanism for getting stuff into the calendar, and I have imap mail at home, imap mail at work, etc. The interaction point becomes the calendar attached to the email client. Assuming I have appropriate VPN connectivity, I can look and see all of my events on one spot with no extra work.
As for power... I've heard that something like 30% of our blood flow goes to the head. I wonder if anyone has measured blood flow to the heads of various animals and drawn any sort of correlation to intelligence. As an anecdotal aside, the head is not just a power problem, it's a cooling problem. From Boy Scout days I got the fact that the single best piece of clothing you can have to keep warm in the winter is a good hat. On the flip side, when you're hot the first thing you want to do is make sure your head can shed heat effectively. (Shade the head if sunny, hat off if not, wet the hair, etc.)
It's just that we're not trained with respect to security. We have come to take it for granted. So far our model for security has been physical security, and we pretty much have been able to take it for granted. Violations of that assumption are pretty rare and shocking, and the common use of those 2 adjective for that situation validate the assumption.
Now take a different location where the assumption of physical security is not valid, such as Iraq or places in Africa. Most of us would just not go there, or if we had to would probably invest seriously in physical security, ie flak jackets, bodyguards, etc.
Problem here is that from an information sense, we have never really been safe. We've also made the implicit assumption that because we're physically safe, our information is safe, too. That assumption is not valid.
We've spawned an industry spewing the message, "Buy our product and your information will be safe." However unwarranted that message is, we're used to buying products that fix problems. Unfortunately for our information safety, this assumption is currently not valid, either.
If people could truly realize that their information is not safe, and that most security products are like the "Catarrh Remedies" of the 1800s, they would act differently.
Because you send someone an appointment or meeting invitation with an email.
To use most anything other than email as the transmission mechanism would presume that you share access to some sort of server with the calendar function.
Hmmmm... Come to think if it, imagine some sort of IMAP-aware calendar server... The transmission mechanism is still email, but that email sits on your imap server. The calendar server can also see it, and keep meetings for everyone at a site or company, to facilitate group scheduling. At the same time, your home server could have both imap and calendar servers, to keep family schedules. One email client with calendar features could talk to both, and display both. Home would have no way to talk to work, but at least you could see both at the same time, presuming the client could connect to both at the same time.
On a quick rescan of the summary, I readily identified 3 judges names, though it may be more.
Perhaps you should list them more explicitly, It might help if you could add mailto: links with their email addresses, along with their email addresses in clear text. You might want to do that on your web pages, too.
Just for complete and correct information, of course.
Time to bring science fiction back into the discussion. It IS relevant, because good science fiction is where ramifications of the common and uncommon are frequently explored.
In the case I'm thinking about, there was a story about a space-living hive colony - essentially bees or ants, though with much more specialized form, living in an asteroid. There was some intra-human conflict in progress, (isn't there always) and one side was seeking an edge by contact with and learning biotechnology from the hive species. There was no "spokesman", but humans were able to enter the colony and poke around, being ignored, as long as they caused no problems. As they poked, they saw a new type of colony member, unlike anything they'd seen so far, being gestated. By the end of the story,
**** SPOILER WARNING ****
it turns out that this new colony member was "intelligent". Moreover, way the heck more intelligent than the humans, beyond that, that intelligent from birth with a pile of hereditary knowledge, none of this school stuff. Turns out that through its evolution the colony had "determined" (I use that word in quotes because it was determined in an evolutionary sense, not through intellectual means.) that intelligence is not a survival trait. Most of the time, intelligence just doesn't help survival, and in fact hinders it. But every now and then, intelligence is needed, especially during contact with an extra-colonial intelligence is made. So they keep an intelligent genome around and gestate it when necessary to deal with the situation. This intelligent colony member anticipated living a few thousand years, and it expected the human race be be extinct before it died, matching the general pattern in the colony's experience.
Won't argue with what you say, but I will add that one party has a higher inclination to put me into harm's way, both physically and financially. As long as I'm alive, I can at least vote for lesser evil. But once you ain't got your breath, if you're voting it's likely as someone else's ringer.
Sorry, but that's already taken. Type either "drano" or "dran-o" with no "www" or ".com", etc onto the bar, and you end up right where you'd guess: "www.drano.com".
>They were meant to be played over and over and enjoyed. By comparison, most games today are play though once, move on to the next.
This is the most insightful point of a highly-moderated post.
Why on Earth would a game company want you to play over and over, and keep enjoying your single purchase? Of course what they really want is "the next purchase," every time and on a continuing basis.
It's kind of like movie previews. They used to be a teaser, promising more and better, but now they pretty much show the best bits, and promise only more. Movies used to play longer at theaters, and it wasn't unusual to go to a really good movie more than once. Today they hope to get that once, and maybe the DVD, especially with the "extra" crap. But by all means let's get another movie onto that screen, to get that one sale + DVD on that one, too.
I'm really sorry to hear this, because it means I don't exist.
I've actually had the LEAST trouble getting WPA to work with my Atheros/Madwifi card. I've also used it to connect to LEAP as well as hotel and open access points, and they always take a bit of fiddling to get there. At home I'm connected using WPA before I can even start the tools to scan APs. Nor is it signal or distance, because I can be 10-20 feet line-of-sight to the AP antennae, and still have to fiddle. My home AP is in the basement when I connect from elsewhere in the house.
By the way, I'm using the distribution-updated (Gentoo) madwifi-ng-0.9.3, and the fix went in as of madwifi-0.9.2.1.
In days long gone, I wrote a re-entrant software interrupt handler (TSR) for DOS with Modula-2. It swapped to one of a pool of stacks which, while crude and limited, sufficed for DOS. I used an "extended" Modula-2, (JPI) and had I needed to handle hardware, the facilities were there for it. On another project, I read and wrote "legacy binary formats" teasing apart bits'n'bytes, complete with endian and ASCII/EBCDIC conversions.
So yes, you CAN write to bare metal with something besides C/C++. (Some would argue that it's really only C, not C++.) Maybe Modula-2 is fully obsolete these days, but I believe Ada95 can do all of that and more. I just have never managed to scrape together the time to fiddle with it. Some people figure a little more discipline and time up-front save on the back-end, and the compiler/language can help with that. Too bad they're in a tiny minority.
I'll say it more delicately than the other guy who got moderated "flamebait!"
While many aspects may have been indistinguishable between Bush and Gore/Kerry, there are still many which are. While it's not clear that 9/11 wouldn't have happened with Gore in office, it's entirely possible. The current administration steadfastly and deliberately ignored the Middle East until 9/11. (Their #1 priority was getting out of the ABM treaty so they could begin testing and deploying the stuff.) Then there's the Clean Air Act, Katrina, not to mention Iraq. (And I haven't even mentioned Peak Oil or greenhouse.)
No matter how Libertarian or Progressive you want to think you are, you simply can't say that there is no distinction whatsoever between Democrats and Republicans.
Slashdot Mirror
Show us your "Smedley Butler fan club card."
Actually, I'm adding a search term to the thread, "Smedley Butler". (The "fan club card" was just smart alec.)
I'm not suggesting conspiracy, here. It's just that enough stupidity combined with power is frequently capable of displays that appear malevolently intelligent or conspiracy-like. A self-organizing kind of thing.
I wasn't pretending to say that lust for power was universal, just terribly common. I think one of Clinton's best near-achievements went pretty much unrecognized, and it was undone before completed. (It also wasn't his alone, but it couldn't have been done without his concurrence and cooperation.) The economy had very nearly reached the proverbial "soft landing" right before the dot-com revolution took off. The soft landing was discarded, and has never been heard from since.
Laugh and point all you want.
In the runup to the war in Iraq, it was obvious to me the whole time that we were going to war because the administration had a hard-on for Saddam. The reasons looked faked and trumped up from the start, as far as I was concerned.
Nor was I the only one not fooled. There were plenty of people taken in. We weren't laughing, because it was war, and people were going to die. But it wouldn't have mattered had we laughed or not, or whether any number of us read Slashdot or not. Nor does it matter if you point and laugh, or read Slashdot.
People with power, even incompetent people with power, do as they want, and the first thing they want is to stay in power.
Doesn't take competence to do what I talked about. Only greed and power. Maybe "they" don't gracefully "permit" disruptive advance in time of total war, either. Maybe this aspect of the comfy partnership between government and business breaks down, and it's the government permitting disruption of business models, so that they can keep their positions.
I'll give you a different, and possibly Slashdottian perspective on the "War drives Progress" model you proposed.
The reality is that Our Corporate Overlords don't like true Progress, of the disruptive sort. They like progress, (with the lower-case "p") of the incremental sort, the kind that keeps their guaranteed spot on top, and keeps them making money the same way they made it last year, only more of it. I would propose that most of the time, they're doing their very best to kill disruptive change, or at least slow it to the point where it is no longer disruptive. Microsoft once mentioned "managing the pace of change in the industry," which I would imply to mean managing the pace of change so they can retain their "leadership" role. Even so, every now and then a disruptive innovation like the Internet manages to sneak through. One might argue that now Corporate America is doing everything in it's power to kill the disruptive basics of the Internet, too.
War changes this.
Real War, that is. War like WWII, not war like Viet Nam or Iraq. Real war threatens the very existence of Our Corporate Overlords, because if we lose, they're toast. So when real War happens, the brakes on disruptive innovation are removed, because survival is at stake. As long as you win, you have a chance of retaining your spot on top, and will most likely be alive. If you lose, both are in doubt.
>I know girls who type at 100wpm and talk at what seems to be a hundred times that rate ;)
But how fast are they moving information, as opposed to filling air with sound?
Like, you know I wouldn't even, like call some of those, like, extra like, sounds somthing like "error correction", you know, but just like, like more like extraneous junk, like you know, like junk DNA, you know. Unless of course junk DNA turns out to actually be useful, once we learn more about it.
Certainly better than being made of tubes...
Are you sure Linux really isn't a series of tubes?
On a slightly more serious note, many aspects of Linux are documented, perhaps a starting point for what you want is the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard". The name has changed a time or two, and I don't exactly know the latest, or the acronym.
That's my point, with what I propose, the twain only meet in the email/calendar client, not at any servers. I get the convenience, but the information remains separated, at respective "owners."
I'm on Lotus Notes right now. But let's say I installed a calendaring server on my home system. Then I'd have a "work calendar" and a "home calendar", and the twain would have no way of meeting, whatsoever.
Now let's pretend that email is the mechanism for getting stuff into the calendar, and I have imap mail at home, imap mail at work, etc. The interaction point becomes the calendar attached to the email client. Assuming I have appropriate VPN connectivity, I can look and see all of my events on one spot with no extra work.
I've never heard of reversed blood flow. How does it work? Can you give me a reference?
As for power... I've heard that something like 30% of our blood flow goes to the head. I wonder if anyone has measured blood flow to the heads of various animals and drawn any sort of correlation to intelligence. As an anecdotal aside, the head is not just a power problem, it's a cooling problem. From Boy Scout days I got the fact that the single best piece of clothing you can have to keep warm in the winter is a good hat. On the flip side, when you're hot the first thing you want to do is make sure your head can shed heat effectively. (Shade the head if sunny, hat off if not, wet the hair, etc.)
I'll disagree...
It's just that we're not trained with respect to security. We have come to take it for granted. So far our model for security has been physical security, and we pretty much have been able to take it for granted. Violations of that assumption are pretty rare and shocking, and the common use of those 2 adjective for that situation validate the assumption.
Now take a different location where the assumption of physical security is not valid, such as Iraq or places in Africa. Most of us would just not go there, or if we had to would probably invest seriously in physical security, ie flak jackets, bodyguards, etc.
Problem here is that from an information sense, we have never really been safe. We've also made the implicit assumption that because we're physically safe, our information is safe, too. That assumption is not valid.
We've spawned an industry spewing the message, "Buy our product and your information will be safe." However unwarranted that message is, we're used to buying products that fix problems. Unfortunately for our information safety, this assumption is currently not valid, either.
If people could truly realize that their information is not safe, and that most security products are like the "Catarrh Remedies" of the 1800s, they would act differently.
Because you send someone an appointment or meeting invitation with an email.
To use most anything other than email as the transmission mechanism would presume that you share access to some sort of server with the calendar function.
Hmmmm...
Come to think if it, imagine some sort of IMAP-aware calendar server... The transmission mechanism is still email, but that email sits on your imap server. The calendar server can also see it, and keep meetings for everyone at a site or company, to facilitate group scheduling. At the same time, your home server could have both imap and calendar servers, to keep family schedules. One email client with calendar features could talk to both, and display both. Home would have no way to talk to work, but at least you could see both at the same time, presuming the client could connect to both at the same time.
Actually, there are 2 in the house. One I bought back in its day, the other came with a Lucas Arts Collection we bought for my son.
On a quick rescan of the summary, I readily identified 3 judges names, though it may be more.
Perhaps you should list them more explicitly, It might help if you could add mailto: links with their email addresses, along with their email addresses in clear text. You might want to do that on your web pages, too.
Just for complete and correct information, of course.
Never did have time to finish The Dig. But a while back, I did at least fire it up under ScummVM, though I don't know how much of it works that way.
Time to bring science fiction back into the discussion. It IS relevant, because good science fiction is where ramifications of the common and uncommon are frequently explored.
In the case I'm thinking about, there was a story about a space-living hive colony - essentially bees or ants, though with much more specialized form, living in an asteroid. There was some intra-human conflict in progress, (isn't there always) and one side was seeking an edge by contact with and learning biotechnology from the hive species. There was no "spokesman", but humans were able to enter the colony and poke around, being ignored, as long as they caused no problems. As they poked, they saw a new type of colony member, unlike anything they'd seen so far, being gestated. By the end of the story,
**** SPOILER WARNING ****
it turns out that this new colony member was "intelligent". Moreover, way the heck more intelligent than the humans, beyond that, that intelligent from birth with a pile of hereditary knowledge, none of this school stuff. Turns out that through its evolution the colony had "determined" (I use that word in quotes because it was determined in an evolutionary sense, not through intellectual means.) that intelligence is not a survival trait. Most of the time, intelligence just doesn't help survival, and in fact hinders it. But every now and then, intelligence is needed, especially during contact with an extra-colonial intelligence is made. So they keep an intelligent genome around and gestate it when necessary to deal with the situation. This intelligent colony member anticipated living a few thousand years, and it expected the human race be be extinct before it died, matching the general pattern in the colony's experience.
Won't argue with what you say, but I will add that one party has a higher inclination to put me into harm's way, both physically and financially. As long as I'm alive, I can at least vote for lesser evil. But once you ain't got your breath, if you're voting it's likely as someone else's ringer.
Sorry, but that's already taken. Type either "drano" or "dran-o" with no "www" or ".com", etc onto the bar, and you end up right where you'd guess: "www.drano.com".
Whoooooa, now that you mention it, I remember those.
My old favorite was the Star Wars game with the vector graphics. Play too many in a row, and it made the drive home a little dicey.
>They were meant to be played over and over and enjoyed. By comparison, most games today are play though once, move on to the next.
This is the most insightful point of a highly-moderated post.
Why on Earth would a game company want you to play over and over, and keep enjoying your single purchase? Of course what they really want is "the next purchase," every time and on a continuing basis.
It's kind of like movie previews. They used to be a teaser, promising more and better, but now they pretty much show the best bits, and promise only more. Movies used to play longer at theaters, and it wasn't unusual to go to a really good movie more than once. Today they hope to get that once, and maybe the DVD, especially with the "extra" crap. But by all means let's get another movie onto that screen, to get that one sale + DVD on that one, too.
I'm really sorry to hear this, because it means I don't exist.
I've actually had the LEAST trouble getting WPA to work with my Atheros/Madwifi card. I've also used it to connect to LEAP as well as hotel and open access points, and they always take a bit of fiddling to get there. At home I'm connected using WPA before I can even start the tools to scan APs. Nor is it signal or distance, because I can be 10-20 feet line-of-sight to the AP antennae, and still have to fiddle. My home AP is in the basement when I connect from elsewhere in the house.
By the way, I'm using the distribution-updated (Gentoo) madwifi-ng-0.9.3, and the fix went in as of madwifi-0.9.2.1.
In days long gone, I wrote a re-entrant software interrupt handler (TSR) for DOS with Modula-2. It swapped to one of a pool of stacks which, while crude and limited, sufficed for DOS. I used an "extended" Modula-2, (JPI) and had I needed to handle hardware, the facilities were there for it. On another project, I read and wrote "legacy binary formats" teasing apart bits'n'bytes, complete with endian and ASCII/EBCDIC conversions.
So yes, you CAN write to bare metal with something besides C/C++. (Some would argue that it's really only C, not C++.) Maybe Modula-2 is fully obsolete these days, but I believe Ada95 can do all of that and more. I just have never managed to scrape together the time to fiddle with it. Some people figure a little more discipline and time up-front save on the back-end, and the compiler/language can help with that. Too bad they're in a tiny minority.
I'll say it more delicately than the other guy who got moderated "flamebait!"
While many aspects may have been indistinguishable between Bush and Gore/Kerry, there are still many which are. While it's not clear that 9/11 wouldn't have happened with Gore in office, it's entirely possible. The current administration steadfastly and deliberately ignored the Middle East until 9/11. (Their #1 priority was getting out of the ABM treaty so they could begin testing and deploying the stuff.) Then there's the Clean Air Act, Katrina, not to mention Iraq. (And I haven't even mentioned Peak Oil or greenhouse.)
No matter how Libertarian or Progressive you want to think you are, you simply can't say that there is no distinction whatsoever between Democrats and Republicans.