Back in the early '90s when I was sysadmin for secure systems, we used removeable hard drives. These were kept under lock and key, and had to be checked out. They were only for use in secured computers in a secured environment. The computers were checked over and sealed with a tamper-evident seal. They had no removeable media except the removeable hard drives. The secure environment was electromagnetically sealed and not connected to any network. You could only check the hard rives out for a day at a time. This was just for a defense contractor making missile parts, not the FBI or CIA.
Just wait. We'll all be required to have "reality filter" chips installed between our optic and auditory nerves, and our brain. Only properly licensed material will be permitted to be perceived. And you'll have to license EVERYTHING, because it potentially competes with MAFIAA controlled content. I'm guessing we have it by 2025. >:-(
It's a specific concept, different that just "obscuring the way to get into something." With security through obscurity, knowing the underlying implementation will grant you access, not just knowing the authentication factor. It's the difference between "The password must remain obscure or people will get into our system" and "The algorithm must remain obscure or prople will get into any system using it, regardless of the obscurity of the password."
I come from the Harlan Ellison school of summarizing. The story goes, he was teching a class in editing Sci Fi and asked the students to summarize Dune. After several rambling summaries, he yelled, "No! Too wordy. Dune: The fallen prince regains his throne with the help of the noble savages. That's it. That's a summary."
Okay, I'm not quite as good as Harlan at condensing things...
No, the fact that he even made Gigli means that every single person in the world who so much as had to sit through a commercial for it has the right to kick him in the nuts, repeatedly and with steel-toed boots.
How much is your tme worth? I make bread, too, but because it tastes better and is better for you, not because it's cheaper. A lot of prep time in bread making is waiting for it to rise, but there is quite a bit of kneading involved, at least 15 minutes by hand. Plus mixing and checking to see how it's rising every so often, punching down, more kneading, shaping & putting in loaf pans, more rising, and baking.
Or did you perhaps invest in a bread machine, or a Kitchenaid mixer? Are you counting the opportunity cost of that investment? It's like the thing the trolls say about Linux: it's only cheaper if your time is worth nothing. Of course, some people find bread making relaxing, and there's the free whole-house aroma thereapy (is there anything better than the smell of baking bread?) but still, it's a really a hobby, not a money saver, and poor people working three jobs just don't have the time for a hobby like that.
You have no idea what it's like to be poor, and your snide comments merely show your ignorance, not your superior problem solving skills. Don't think you are mentally superior to everyone who is poor.
I'm not poor (now) and I still eat frozen dinners for lunch because it's economical. $0.80 to $1.00 per cheap dinner, 350-500 calories per dinner plus decent amount of vitamins and minerals added. I love to cook, but figuring in my time, cost of ingredients, and so forth, the dinners are far more economical than what I can make. Not nearly as tasty or good for you, but I'm a busy guy so frozen dinners make sense for me.
Why do they love power? One of two reasons: they are sociopaths or psychopaths, or they have been emotionally traumatized somehow. Unhurt, genetically normal humans do not desire power over other humans, because this is generally inefficient. Cooperation or "power with" is more efficient because power is shared and multiplied. When one has to maintain "power over" one uses some personal power controlling the other, and the other uses some resisting, so overall efficiency is reduced.
There are too many people acting out power trips for it all to be genetically caused mental illness. Therefore, I think it is emotional trauma. Most likely fear of not being able to survive.
But certainly the "They're just bad people who want power over others" theory is useful and has explanatory power as well...
Nah, it could be a good movie, or a good video game, or paper RPG module, or book for that matter. I had the same exact thought, "Whoah, that would make a cool story!"
Imagine, it starts out in some desolate village, with people scraping by on a few mutant crops and canned goods. Every year, the situation becomes a little more desperate as the crops produce few viable seeds and the canned goods are running out. Our intrepid hero (probably a moon-headed youth out exploring some old ruins instead of working) finds a fragment of an ancient magazine mentioning the seed-vault. He has some difficulty convincing his elders to invest any of the villages precious food-stuffs in his hair-brained scheme, but then the village seed stocks are plundered by raiders, leaving no choice. Of course, the raiders find out about the seed-vault and thus become recurring bad-guys throughout the rest of the story.
The journey to the seed-vault would be fraught with danger. Mutants, savages, the ever-present raiders, hot-zones and weather run amok all dog our heros on their journey. I say heros, because of course we need a team. There has to be the strong and capable ranger-type who doesn't quite trust the kid; the plucky heroine, tomboyish until she lets her hair down and we discover just how beautiful she is; the kid's geeky friend who knows how to fix things; the brawny muscle-type with a secret heart of gold who sacrifices himself when all seems lost, and the sneaky one who turns out to be a traitor like we always suspected he would.
When they finally get there, they discover... well, it could go lots of ways here. I'll leave it up to the imagination.
Indeed, that is the danger. It should be noted too that there are reasons why the Nordic countries have been so succsessful with socialism. One, they are quite culturally homogenous, so one never feels that outsiders are leaching off of them. Two, they have a culture of cooperation brought about by extremes of climate. That's my theory, anyway.
Funny, I don't recall saying it meant anything. Someone asked where I had gotten the idea, and I replied. Nowhere in this thread did I say that those rights were currently being enforced. Only that they should be.
Are the concepts behind the document equally worthless in your opinion?
Every "invention" we have is a revised,accelerated, optimized and controlled process that the nature already did.
Yes, those rocket powered four-wheeled animals are certainly a hoot to watch, skating across the savannah. Do be careful of the ones with fricken' laser beams, though. They might kill you and then microwave you before they slather you with condiments and eat you. They may be dangerous, but the little ones wearing diapers are adorable.
Employers do not garauntee anything. They exist to make profits for the shareholders. They don't give a rats ass how many people starve, and in fact profit from keeping people scared. Scared people are more likely to accept low wages and poor working conditions. Contrary to popular belief, most people actually do want to contribute to society, and if offered a choice between getting the bare minimum to survive while not contributing, or getting even a little more but being a productive member of society, most will choose the later. As long as people are worried about their very survival, they can't really be free.
Large corporations also suffer from beaurocracy and inflexibility. I can't believe I'm saying this being as lefty-liberal as I am, but the difference is that companies follow a natural life cycle. They start out small and agile, get bigger through success against their less nimble rivals, become less nimble themselves, and get beaten in their turn. Government has no natural rivals and thus never dies. It just shambles on, zombie-like.
I'll put that down to people's fear of not being able to support themselves, and thus being unable to let go of a job even if that job is no longer relevant. Perhaps if rights to food, clothing and shelter were garaunteed, government departments that had outlived their usefulness would be less resistant to being dissolved.
Whew! Almost let a pro-capitalist thought slip through unchallenged.;-)
No, it is not a logical fallacy, and nothing in your post says it is. Your post supports my point. If you consider all of us to be shareholders in society, then it makes sense for society to be organized as corporations are, cooperatively. If it makes sense for a corporation to have one larger division rather than several smaller ones, because of overhead costs and duplication of effort, it makes sense for all of society to be so organized. If there are a number of studies proving competition boosts productivity, perhaps you could point them out?
Regarding us vs. the animals, perhaps I was being a bit glib. And I agree, companies do both cooperate and compete. But the balance between cooperation and competition is what I was really trying to address. We are the best cooperators, would you disagree? Then why not use that strength in organizing our society?
This is an outrage up with which we will not put. -- Winston Churchill, on the practice of rearranging sentences to make sure they don't end in a preposition.
It is interesting to note the origin of such practices. Nothing in English forbids ending with a proposition. In Victorian England, the educated middle classes invented grammatical shibboleths to differentiate themselves from the uneducated lower classes. To do so, they took rules from Latin that had never before applied to English.
Rules such as this one and not splitting an infinitive were not originally part of the English language. They were invented for elitist reasons. People who insist on them should in their nuts be kicked.
The free market is indeed a good solution. But the good is the enemy of the best. Is there room for improvement? We shouldn't dismiss the possiblity. From what I've seen of formerly socialist countries moving towards a free market economy, when factories and such-like businesses are privatized, efficiency increases. When public utilites are privatized, disaster follows. Look at Bechtel's privatization of water utlities in South America.
People do indeed have to work to eat. But billions world-wide are forced to accept the unpleasant compromise of giving up freedoms in order to survive. The free market is not magical, it is not divine, and it is not the ultimate or only solution.
Human nature does not have a single, static state. It has two stable states, let's call them feast mode and famine mode. In feast mode, humans are loving, open, sharing, cooperative creatures because when resources are relatively abundant but there may be local scarcities of certain commodities, this is the most efficient strategy. When resources are very scarce, humans enter famine mode. Unfortunately, a large climatic shift happened in the Sahara and Central Asian areas after we had developed agriculture and animal husbandry, settled down, and developed a more complex society with our newfound surplus. This happened about 4500BC. Before that point, you do not see weapons whose sole purpose is killing other humans. You do not see mass graves. You do not see fortified towns. After the fertile plains of the Sahara and Central Asian regions dried up, the people who had settled there were thrown into a massive famine. Instead of doing the hunter gatherer thing and moving on, they used their organization and surplus to wage war on theier neighbors. For the first time in human history, war was waged on a large scale. You had a whole generation of post-traumatic stress disordered parents raising a whole generation of brain damaged children. (no B vitamins, no myelin sheaths) The famine mentality was locked in, so that even now, when we have more abundance than ever, people still act as if we need to fight tooth-and-nail for every last scrap.
Ah yes, the "No True Scotsman Fallacy." Ironic, as the capitalists level this very charge against any who say that real communism has never been implemented.
You would really like to go back to the lassez faire days of child labor, sweatshops, 18/7 work weeks, no worker safety laws, enormous poverty, violent strikebreaking, etc.?
The free market does not self correct. Money can be used to manipulate the system just as effectively as political power can be. The more money one accumulates, the more power one has to change the way the market functions, leading to even more accumulation of wealth and power in a runaway feedback loop.
Dude, I would NOT want to be in that capsule. Do you have any idea what the personal hygiene habits of hippies are like? Let's just say that they make computer nerds look like OCD cases with a cleaning fetish.
Dude, stoners are not lazy, unmotivated, and unfocused. Let me prove it to you. ... Ah, what was I saying again? Fuck it, pass the spliff. No I'm not getting up, bring it over here...
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the early '90s when I was sysadmin for secure systems, we used removeable hard drives. These were kept under lock and key, and had to be checked out. They were only for use in secured computers in a secured environment. The computers were checked over and sealed with a tamper-evident seal. They had no removeable media except the removeable hard drives. The secure environment was electromagnetically sealed and not connected to any network. You could only check the hard rives out for a day at a time. This was just for a defense contractor making missile parts, not the FBI or CIA.
Just wait. We'll all be required to have "reality filter" chips installed between our optic and auditory nerves, and our brain. Only properly licensed material will be permitted to be perceived. And you'll have to license EVERYTHING, because it potentially competes with MAFIAA controlled content. I'm guessing we have it by 2025. >:-(
It's a specific concept, different that just "obscuring the way to get into something." With security through obscurity, knowing the underlying implementation will grant you access, not just knowing the authentication factor. It's the difference between "The password must remain obscure or people will get into our system" and "The algorithm must remain obscure or prople will get into any system using it, regardless of the obscurity of the password."
I come from the Harlan Ellison school of summarizing. The story goes, he was teching a class in editing Sci Fi and asked the students to summarize Dune. After several rambling summaries, he yelled, "No! Too wordy. Dune: The fallen prince regains his throne with the help of the noble savages. That's it. That's a summary."
Okay, I'm not quite as good as Harlan at condensing things...
No, the fact that he even made Gigli means that every single person in the world who so much as had to sit through a commercial for it has the right to kick him in the nuts, repeatedly and with steel-toed boots.
How much is your tme worth? I make bread, too, but because it tastes better and is better for you, not because it's cheaper. A lot of prep time in bread making is waiting for it to rise, but there is quite a bit of kneading involved, at least 15 minutes by hand. Plus mixing and checking to see how it's rising every so often, punching down, more kneading, shaping & putting in loaf pans, more rising, and baking.
Or did you perhaps invest in a bread machine, or a Kitchenaid mixer? Are you counting the opportunity cost of that investment? It's like the thing the trolls say about Linux: it's only cheaper if your time is worth nothing. Of course, some people find bread making relaxing, and there's the free whole-house aroma thereapy (is there anything better than the smell of baking bread?) but still, it's a really a hobby, not a money saver, and poor people working three jobs just don't have the time for a hobby like that.
You have no idea what it's like to be poor, and your snide comments merely show your ignorance, not your superior problem solving skills. Don't think you are mentally superior to everyone who is poor.
I'm not poor (now) and I still eat frozen dinners for lunch because it's economical. $0.80 to $1.00 per cheap dinner, 350-500 calories per dinner plus decent amount of vitamins and minerals added. I love to cook, but figuring in my time, cost of ingredients, and so forth, the dinners are far more economical than what I can make. Not nearly as tasty or good for you, but I'm a busy guy so frozen dinners make sense for me.
Why do they love power? One of two reasons: they are sociopaths or psychopaths, or they have been emotionally traumatized somehow. Unhurt, genetically normal humans do not desire power over other humans, because this is generally inefficient. Cooperation or "power with" is more efficient because power is shared and multiplied. When one has to maintain "power over" one uses some personal power controlling the other, and the other uses some resisting, so overall efficiency is reduced.
There are too many people acting out power trips for it all to be genetically caused mental illness. Therefore, I think it is emotional trauma. Most likely fear of not being able to survive.
But certainly the "They're just bad people who want power over others" theory is useful and has explanatory power as well...
Nah, it could be a good movie, or a good video game, or paper RPG module, or book for that matter. I had the same exact thought, "Whoah, that would make a cool story!"
Imagine, it starts out in some desolate village, with people scraping by on a few mutant crops and canned goods. Every year, the situation becomes a little more desperate as the crops produce few viable seeds and the canned goods are running out. Our intrepid hero (probably a moon-headed youth out exploring some old ruins instead of working) finds a fragment of an ancient magazine mentioning the seed-vault. He has some difficulty convincing his elders to invest any of the villages precious food-stuffs in his hair-brained scheme, but then the village seed stocks are plundered by raiders, leaving no choice. Of course, the raiders find out about the seed-vault and thus become recurring bad-guys throughout the rest of the story.
The journey to the seed-vault would be fraught with danger. Mutants, savages, the ever-present raiders, hot-zones and weather run amok all dog our heros on their journey. I say heros, because of course we need a team. There has to be the strong and capable ranger-type who doesn't quite trust the kid; the plucky heroine, tomboyish until she lets her hair down and we discover just how beautiful she is; the kid's geeky friend who knows how to fix things; the brawny muscle-type with a secret heart of gold who sacrifices himself when all seems lost, and the sneaky one who turns out to be a traitor like we always suspected he would.
When they finally get there, they discover... well, it could go lots of ways here. I'll leave it up to the imagination.
Indeed, that is the danger. It should be noted too that there are reasons why the Nordic countries have been so succsessful with socialism. One, they are quite culturally homogenous, so one never feels that outsiders are leaching off of them. Two, they have a culture of cooperation brought about by extremes of climate. That's my theory, anyway.
Funny, I don't recall saying it meant anything. Someone asked where I had gotten the idea, and I replied. Nowhere in this thread did I say that those rights were currently being enforced. Only that they should be.
Are the concepts behind the document equally worthless in your opinion?
Every "invention" we have is a revised,accelerated, optimized and controlled process that the nature already did.
Yes, those rocket powered four-wheeled animals are certainly a hoot to watch, skating across the savannah. Do be careful of the ones with fricken' laser beams, though. They might kill you and then microwave you before they slather you with condiments and eat you. They may be dangerous, but the little ones wearing diapers are adorable.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Also, common decency, enlightened self interest and common sense.
Employers do not garauntee anything. They exist to make profits for the shareholders. They don't give a rats ass how many people starve, and in fact profit from keeping people scared. Scared people are more likely to accept low wages and poor working conditions. Contrary to popular belief, most people actually do want to contribute to society, and if offered a choice between getting the bare minimum to survive while not contributing, or getting even a little more but being a productive member of society, most will choose the later. As long as people are worried about their very survival, they can't really be free.
Large corporations also suffer from beaurocracy and inflexibility. I can't believe I'm saying this being as lefty-liberal as I am, but the difference is that companies follow a natural life cycle. They start out small and agile, get bigger through success against their less nimble rivals, become less nimble themselves, and get beaten in their turn. Government has no natural rivals and thus never dies. It just shambles on, zombie-like.
;-)
I'll put that down to people's fear of not being able to support themselves, and thus being unable to let go of a job even if that job is no longer relevant. Perhaps if rights to food, clothing and shelter were garaunteed, government departments that had outlived their usefulness would be less resistant to being dissolved.
Whew! Almost let a pro-capitalist thought slip through unchallenged.
No, it is not a logical fallacy, and nothing in your post says it is. Your post supports my point. If you consider all of us to be shareholders in society, then it makes sense for society to be organized as corporations are, cooperatively. If it makes sense for a corporation to have one larger division rather than several smaller ones, because of overhead costs and duplication of effort, it makes sense for all of society to be so organized. If there are a number of studies proving competition boosts productivity, perhaps you could point them out?
Regarding us vs. the animals, perhaps I was being a bit glib. And I agree, companies do both cooperate and compete. But the balance between cooperation and competition is what I was really trying to address. We are the best cooperators, would you disagree? Then why not use that strength in organizing our society?
Kittens give Morbo hydrogen gas.
This is an outrage up with which we will not put.
-- Winston Churchill, on the practice of rearranging sentences to make sure they don't end in a preposition.
It is interesting to note the origin of such practices. Nothing in English forbids ending with a proposition. In Victorian England, the educated middle classes invented grammatical shibboleths to differentiate themselves from the uneducated lower classes. To do so, they took rules from Latin that had never before applied to English.
Rules such as this one and not splitting an infinitive were not originally part of the English language. They were invented for elitist reasons. People who insist on them should in their nuts be kicked.
What a lovely pram. Let's all thank Lord Tennis-ball.
Tennyson!
Excuse me, Lord Tennis-ball's son.
The free market is indeed a good solution. But the good is the enemy of the best. Is there room for improvement? We shouldn't dismiss the possiblity. From what I've seen of formerly socialist countries moving towards a free market economy, when factories and such-like businesses are privatized, efficiency increases. When public utilites are privatized, disaster follows. Look at Bechtel's privatization of water utlities in South America.
People do indeed have to work to eat. But billions world-wide are forced to accept the unpleasant compromise of giving up freedoms in order to survive. The free market is not magical, it is not divine, and it is not the ultimate or only solution.
Could you explain that joke for me? I don't get it.
Human nature does not have a single, static state. It has two stable states, let's call them feast mode and famine mode. In feast mode, humans are loving, open, sharing, cooperative creatures because when resources are relatively abundant but there may be local scarcities of certain commodities, this is the most efficient strategy. When resources are very scarce, humans enter famine mode. Unfortunately, a large climatic shift happened in the Sahara and Central Asian areas after we had developed agriculture and animal husbandry, settled down, and developed a more complex society with our newfound surplus. This happened about 4500BC. Before that point, you do not see weapons whose sole purpose is killing other humans. You do not see mass graves. You do not see fortified towns. After the fertile plains of the Sahara and Central Asian regions dried up, the people who had settled there were thrown into a massive famine. Instead of doing the hunter gatherer thing and moving on, they used their organization and surplus to wage war on theier neighbors. For the first time in human history, war was waged on a large scale. You had a whole generation of post-traumatic stress disordered parents raising a whole generation of brain damaged children. (no B vitamins, no myelin sheaths) The famine mentality was locked in, so that even now, when we have more abundance than ever, people still act as if we need to fight tooth-and-nail for every last scrap.
Ah yes, the "No True Scotsman Fallacy." Ironic, as the capitalists level this very charge against any who say that real communism has never been implemented.
You would really like to go back to the lassez faire days of child labor, sweatshops, 18/7 work weeks, no worker safety laws, enormous poverty, violent strikebreaking, etc.?
The free market does not self correct. Money can be used to manipulate the system just as effectively as political power can be. The more money one accumulates, the more power one has to change the way the market functions, leading to even more accumulation of wealth and power in a runaway feedback loop.
Dude, I would NOT want to be in that capsule. Do you have any idea what the personal hygiene habits of hippies are like? Let's just say that they make computer nerds look like OCD cases with a cleaning fetish.
Dude, stoners are not lazy, unmotivated, and unfocused. Let me prove it to you.
...
Ah, what was I saying again? Fuck it, pass the spliff. No I'm not getting up, bring it over here...