Depending on how you want to define the term [WMD], the free and unfiltered exchange of ideas and information could well be described in such a fashion.
I mention this, because of some of the verbage in the appstore agreement.
When the pen is mightier than the sword, for those wishing to uphold the status quo, both must be controlled. The former moreso than the latter.
Given apple's philosophy about openness, (or lack thereof), I wouldn't doubt that they would remove the app from the appstore for "inciting violence" or some other absurd infraction.
It sounds like they need to disrupt wallstreet digitally.
this would actually be something good for anonymous's army of script kiddies to apply themselves to.
Essentially, you flood the automatic trade daemons with false quote data. You don't do this the way your typical con-man does, which is to selectively quote false prices to change the aggregate stock prices in such a way as to sweeten his own investment opportunities; instead, you selectively quote false prices to initiate a bear market, and drive down trading, if not encourage wholesale shorting of major stocks. Banks create money from thin air, this would return that conjured money back to the void whence it came.
Alternatively, if you don't want to have a hand in destroying the world economy on such a drastic scale, you could instead work from the standpoint of simply creating congestion. Remember those stories of new fiber runs being laid for wallstreet traffic, because a few ms of latency can translate to millions of dollars of lost trades? Bingo. Latency would injure wallstreet.
Both approaches lend themselves well to scriptkiddies. Anonymous is missing an epic opportunity.
The problem is a logistical one more than anything. Creating real random numbers is rather expensive. Creation of a random number electronically is problematic. It runs the risk of biased number sets. Take for instance, if you used bit reversals in a magnetic medium: certain crystal magnetic domains are larger or stronger than others, requiring more or less energy to flip the bit "randomly". The sizes/strength of the domains does not change, regardless of the initial bit pattern. This results in a statistically skewed random set, where sme bit patterns appear multiple times with regularity, and others don't appear at all.
Similar things happen with pure electronic decay based random number generators. Not all gate arrays are equal, and some hold their state better than others, so the same non uniform distribution happens.
In order for the collision risk to be minimal, the random has to not only be random, but also perfectly statistically distributed over the whole space. This increases the cost of the randomness considerably.
A clever psuedorandom creates complex patterns cheaply, and distributed over the whole space in a fashion that closely approximates random, and can further be garanteed to never repeat a sequence. This makes it the better solution to the problem.
The idea is to have a "legitimate" reason for having the game/app phone home with that information.
While I realize that the app store authorization evaluation Is not very comprehensive, it is still a good idea to keep apple in the "pot vs kettle" type position. Their apps use the guid to determine legitimacy of service use, why shouldn't a 3rd party app developer? See where I am going?
Said app developer does not leak the known whitelist. What he leaks is the prediction algorithm he builds from it.
This presumes that the guid assignments are done from the 128bit guid space using some garanteed form of true random.
Given the number of phones in existence, and that new phones will have to be whitelisted as time passes, (and that random guesses will run the risk of collision) it is more likely that the guid assignment is performed in some sophisticated pseudo random fashion, and as such, identifiable patterns could be detected given a sufficiently large number of known whitelisted guids.
Once you have that information, and perhaps some other information that apple might use in the guid assignment algorithm (serial number, manufacturing site, date of manufacture, etc...) it should be possible to determine which guids should be valid.
This sounds like an opportunity for a naughty idevice app developer, who should already be able to get such a list by having their app phone home, and request the device uuid as part of a purchase validation mecchanism. (A popular app could quickly get several hundred active unique ids to work with, perhaps more.)
Combined, the two technologies could be used to fashion an absurdly efficient solar collector. The problem is that not all photons are created equally, and that absorbed spectra might not carry sufficient energy to hop the bandgap. This would only cause the nanotubes to get hot, and reemit the photons only to be captured again by the neighbors.
Perhaps if total energy absorption is high enough, then multiple photons could be used to hop the gap, (like in red light on chlorophyll) but that would have to be some strange juju.
This is more a problem with lazy encode jobs, than with the presentation software.
Flash video encoding forces the provider to reencode the video in a streamable media format. Prior to this, people were using terrible "live stream" type streaming media servers, like real audio or microsoft media servers.
This is an issue simply because of the following things:
1) at the time those were popular, the major industry push was akin to "live broadcast tv, but on the internet!" Not, "video on demand"
2) memory and processing power were much more limited, limiting how efficiently you could effectively stream a feed.
3) people simply didn't encode to perfectly capable streamable containers. Even old-school MPEG1 has features for streamed playback. The reason was because of shitty bandwidth, (mpeg1 has not so good compression at low bitrates), weak cpu power (just see what an h264 stream does on even a pentium2, let alone what was available in the pre-flash-video days.), and minimal ram, as outlined above. While streaming was "possible", it wasn't practical.
What flash video did, was enable the flash plugin to buffer a canned feed, so that even if your connection sucked balls, it could fill the buffer sufficiently to enable high quality playback while the file was still downloading. In addirion, flash was an ubiquitous format already used to make animations and adverts, and was browser agnostic (browser wars, et al.). This is what made flash video an instant success.
These days, we don't need a plugin to serve as a media cache. A properly implemented html5 video playback system would do this all by itself. The very point of making it part of the w3c standard is to make it browser agnostic, and we have the cpu, memory, and bandwidth capabilities to use more traditionally encoded streamable file types.
There is no real downside to dumping flash video, other than losing the programatic features that flash or silverlight provide. Then again, if you aren't an advertiser or a webgames developer, and just want to deliver video content on demand, this still isn't a problem.
Simplification has to different definitions, depending on who you ask.
1) uses less code, is more computationally efficient, is short, sweet, and to the point.
2) does all kinds of juggling behind the scenes to hide things that might confuse you, (because we think you are dumb) so that the total number of easily understood actions you can take are clearly and prominently displayed to you.
When I address the KISS principle, I am refering to definition #1. In terms of engineering (with exception to social engineering) only the first one really applies.
It looks like poe's law bit me in the ass pretty hard. I interpreted your prior post in the lines of "what was once very expensive and difficult we can now do so cheaply that it doesn't matter if I am wasteful."
Similar problems occur in large shipments of commodity aviation components, like shims, nutplates, etc.
A less than scrupulous outsource supplier could sprinkle 20% of the product yeild with improper components, and if the batch is large enough, never get noticed. This doesn't negate the issues that "bogus parts" cause downstream in the product's lifecycle. Bad shims (made from incorrect, but "similar" materials) can promote dielectrics to form in important assemblages, manifesting all sorts of failures.. all kinds of thing can go wrong because somebody some place didn't want to follow what was in the order to the letter and cut corners somewhere.
In electronics, I could see this being manifest in diodes that are of the wrong class being used where, eg, zener diodes are required for proper operation, or the use of poorly formulated capacitor electrolytes in mission critical noise filters, and failsafes.
The effects would be equally diasterous, and vexing to maintenance and service people. The properly sourced equipment simply shouldn't fail in those ways. The component choices were made for that specific reason.
It does not surprise me that chinese manufacturers are the big sources of this problem. The quality of manufacture and qa process from cheap factories are tied directly to the cost per unit: you get what you pay for.
The fact that resources are cheap, is not a license to add unnecessary complexity. That is the point of the KISS principle. The more elaborate you make a system, the more points of failure are introduced. This is why very large and complex systems are so difficult to make reasonably secure from external hacking attempts, and also why bug hunting and feature regressions increase dramatically as system complexity increases.
To look further at the "solitaire" example, we went from a very simple bitblit type rendering system that simply serves a dib to the gdi stack, to a complex multistep presentation involving at least 3 different processing queues, to ultimately do the same thing: display a stack of cards.
Given that a monitor is *still* a pixel oriented display surface, there is no real need to realtime render a 3d card, when the surface of the card is essentially 2 dimensional. The exact same visual effects can be accomplished far more computationally cheaply, by simply using pre-rendered dibs. (You could even have the program render all the dibs on first run, and simply cache them, and still use fewer resources.)
You are needlessly introducing software overhead, needlessly increasing system complexity, and not even getting a very good return on that investment.
As a paradigm, I find that disturbing and undesirable.
The way I look at this issue, is that these UI's are being written, not because there is some outstanding need to implement such new features, but because the vendors that made them wanted to look like they were still innovative and agile.
Sticking with the same tried and true ui, and simply optimizing every bit of code that makes it work, to the point of perfectly polished code perfection is not what gets non computer experts excited about purchases. What does, is "the shiny!".
Thses days, I could clearly see a need for a very efficient and simple ui system for cross device remote purposes. The less the window manager has to do to present information, the better it would be for that purpose. However, that is not the direction that the ui is being pushed.
Realistically, in terms of functionality, you could build a useful ui using blitting tech from 20 years ago, and be just fine.
Instead, we are using more processing and memory cability to run solitaire than entire mega corps had in their computing labs from that period. (That dx10 certified gpu you have rendering aero for you, so that solitaire can present pixel shaded 3d cards to you is able to crank out more flops than a cray supercomputer from the 90s. Think about what that means, when it is a requirement to play solitaire.)
Clearly, the ui designers simply reject the KISS principle of engineering, and do so because "we can, and resources are cheap."
This is the biggest reason that I hate nearly all newer generation ui flavors.
This proposal does not have any safeguards against the formation of intellectual aristocracies, (it does not enable permeability of social strata. Specific fields of study could be controlled to prevent the rest of the public becoming informed, and thus eligable to vote on the issues. Eg, concerning medicine, if med schools are run by doctors seeking self interest politically, and actively refuse admission to otherwise perfectly brilliant students, do this simply to intensify the power of their own votes.), and so is a stage set for the creation of an inviolate caste-based system.
The goal of taking an undeducated lay person, and training them into an intellectual who can take part in the decision process of the nation would not have any incentives to be undertaken. On the contrary, there would be many, many disincentives to prevent that from happening.
The end result would be a striated upper class of various intellectual castes (doctors, lawyers, researchers, etc..) and a huge, disenfranchised lower class, that would be actively prohibited from enacting any progressive social reforms except through violence.
While such a system might be stable, with sufficient social controls, it would also be highly dystopian.
The problem is easy to see when you think about it this way:
When the only body that can affirm the "phsycisian-ness" of a physician, is the body of practicing physicians, there is no external force to prevent this being exploited. (It creates the climate for a disturbing "no true scottsman" fallacy, where even if you are saving lives, you are not legally represented as a physician.)
When the physician-ness of a physician is determined objectively through patient recovery statistics, then if the "physician" is legally barred from practicing medicine by the established ones out of "safety concerns", then the only way to build that reputation is to curry favors. No favors, no practice, no history to evaluate == "not a physician"
Either way, the system is gamed.
If you determine merit of the physician by objective means, and prevent the obstruction of new physicians from practicing, you have basically deleted the very purpose of deferring to an educated position. (Anyone could become a physician.....)
If you determine merit by some objective testing aparatus, (perhaps through a supervised free clinic, where those claiming to have learned to be physicians can go to prove their merit) you still have the same self referential problem, as who defines the parameters of such testing, if not the experts?
About the only way this would work and not devolve into a dystopian caste society would be for there to be an inviolatable legal framework that pits these caste factions against each other. Eg, the physician caste is told by x other caste(s) that they must accept any reasonable applicant for training, etc. Such rules would have to be so set in stone that even if all ruling castes agreed they were a nuisance, they could not be overturned. This would require active selection and testing of the uneducated class for educational aptitudes. It would also require that all offspring belong to the uneducated class until proven otherwise. (Meaning that the children of a well respected doctor would have the same societal status as an uneducated drunk, until proven otherwise, by externalized testing. This could be further hardened against family vocationalism by ruling that such offspring must be educated for a different vocation from either parent. Inconvenient, and seemingly retarded, but done purposefully to break the power of nepotism, and increase the ratio of noise to signal in regard to organized attemps at gaining favoritism. Ironically, this would also prevent second generation uneducated class persons, as they would be mandated bt law to be trained in at last some vocation.)
You don't have to believe it to be true. Truth is axiomatically what remains after you stop believing in it. I don't have to believe I know how to survive, I know I can, as I have done it before. The skills to do it are not necessarily hard, just not the skills most people today have.
No, not a plane crash survivor. What I am is a survivor of dire poverty, which is actually worse.
There is a reason why I know about edible plants, how to tie snares, and about sustainable foraging and hunting practices; my family depended upon them to survive.
No, I do not have a newsletter, but if you really want one, I would suggest the foxfire series. They started out as a postal order newsletter. The older publications are chock full of goodness. Everything from how to make wicker fishtraps, to wigwams. Good stuff.
Now, do you feel good about yourself for being snide and pretentious? I know I don't.
It is only an intellectual world, due to the existence of the support systems in place by modern society to enable that trend. (Green revolution and mechanized farming, etc...)
Pull that rug out from underneath, and the ones unable to survive will simply die.
Ironically, this will be the vast majority of the population, as most people in the western world have no conception of how to survive even a plane crash, let alone the crash of civilization as they know it.
In 30 years, civilization would be unrecognizable, but still existent.
I don't know about you, but I can survive totally unplugged for very extended periods. (I routinely used to 'feral camp' for over a month in the summer as a kid.)
Couple that with the engineering background and diverse set of motley skills I have, as long as I didn't have to worry about idiots trying to mug me by force, I could live quite comfortably, even in otherwise total desolation.
I actually wish the wold would break down already in fact. The vast majority of the current crop of world leaders causing these problems, and a fair chunk of the people who enable them, would not be able to survive the collapse of western civilization.
(I would actually disappear from current society, if there were any sensible place to disappear TO, and would have done so years ago. A mass population reduction would defacto create such places.)
What you refer to as "humanity" is little more than a currently accepted social more. Look for example at ancient spartans. They put newborn babies outside in the cold to weed out the weak, and also culturally subjugated a native culture they called "the helionauts", in the same ways we subjugate and exploit animals, or machines.
These were people, and every bit "homosapien" as you or I, yet they would have no problems accepting and encouraging the acceptance of the "unpopular" reality presented by the GP.
The problem then becomes one totally borne from culture, and society's views on morality and acceptability.
There are many modes of cultural development that could persist and thrive through such a decline.
Everytime I see this argument, I question the educational background of the person posing it.
That field of weeds and trees does have significant value exactly as it is. Contrary to many people's opinions on the matter, rampant destruction of biodiversity to develop farmland has a significant detrimental effect on the quality and viability of the total biosphere, human requirements included.
This means that such so called "undeveloped areas" serve a fundemental and necessary function for society exactly as they are, other than mere asthetic and entertainment values. They are NOT "worthles unless exploited".
The lack of total biodiversity is one of the reasons why the biosphere 2 project failed so miserably. The idea of a giant citywide metropolis like those from science fiction is not sustainably realistic, and human carry capacity of the planet is not merely bounded by bulk storage and nutritional requirements. The earth's biosphere is a terribly complex thing, and treating it as though it weren't and without due caution invites very serious consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on how you want to define the term [WMD], the free and unfiltered exchange of ideas and information could well be described in such a fashion.
I mention this, because of some of the verbage in the appstore agreement.
When the pen is mightier than the sword, for those wishing to uphold the status quo, both must be controlled. The former moreso than the latter.
Given apple's philosophy about openness, (or lack thereof), I wouldn't doubt that they would remove the app from the appstore for "inciting violence" or some other absurd infraction.
It sounds like they need to disrupt wallstreet digitally.
this would actually be something good for anonymous's army of script kiddies to apply themselves to.
Essentially, you flood the automatic trade daemons with false quote data. You don't do this the way your typical con-man does, which is to selectively quote false prices to change the aggregate stock prices in such a way as to sweeten his own investment opportunities; instead, you selectively quote false prices to initiate a bear market, and drive down trading, if not encourage wholesale shorting of major stocks. Banks create money from thin air, this would return that conjured money back to the void whence it came.
Alternatively, if you don't want to have a hand in destroying the world economy on such a drastic scale, you could instead work from the standpoint of simply creating congestion. Remember those stories of new fiber runs being laid for wallstreet traffic, because a few ms of latency can translate to millions of dollars of lost trades? Bingo. Latency would injure wallstreet.
Both approaches lend themselves well to scriptkiddies. Anonymous is missing an epic opportunity.
The problem is a logistical one more than anything. Creating real random numbers is rather expensive. Creation of a random number electronically is problematic. It runs the risk of biased number sets. Take for instance, if you used bit reversals in a magnetic medium: certain crystal magnetic domains are larger or stronger than others, requiring more or less energy to flip the bit "randomly". The sizes/strength of the domains does not change, regardless of the initial bit pattern. This results in a statistically skewed random set, where sme bit patterns appear multiple times with regularity, and others don't appear at all.
Similar things happen with pure electronic decay based random number generators. Not all gate arrays are equal, and some hold their state better than others, so the same non uniform distribution happens.
In order for the collision risk to be minimal, the random has to not only be random, but also perfectly statistically distributed over the whole space. This increases the cost of the randomness considerably.
A clever psuedorandom creates complex patterns cheaply, and distributed over the whole space in a fashion that closely approximates random, and can further be garanteed to never repeat a sequence. This makes it the better solution to the problem.
The idea is to have a "legitimate" reason for having the game/app phone home with that information.
While I realize that the app store authorization evaluation Is not very comprehensive, it is still a good idea to keep apple in the "pot vs kettle" type position. Their apps use the guid to determine legitimacy of service use, why shouldn't a 3rd party app developer? See where I am going?
Said app developer does not leak the known whitelist. What he leaks is the prediction algorithm he builds from it.
This presumes that the guid assignments are done from the 128bit guid space using some garanteed form of true random.
Given the number of phones in existence, and that new phones will have to be whitelisted as time passes, (and that random guesses will run the risk of collision) it is more likely that the guid assignment is performed in some sophisticated pseudo random fashion, and as such, identifiable patterns could be detected given a sufficiently large number of known whitelisted guids.
Once you have that information, and perhaps some other information that apple might use in the guid assignment algorithm (serial number, manufacturing site, date of manufacture, etc...) it should be possible to determine which guids should be valid.
This sounds like an opportunity for a naughty idevice app developer, who should already be able to get such a list by having their app phone home, and request the device uuid as part of a purchase validation mecchanism. (A popular app could quickly get several hundred active unique ids to work with, perhaps more.)
Really? All I got was rick astley on every channel....
Does that constitute a national emergency?
While soot contains nanotubes, it also contains other fullerenes, and amorphous carbon microparticles.
This subsrance, on the other had, is nothing but nanotubes, and in a very densely packed, and orderly configuration.
Devil in the details and all that.
It *is* possible to create nanotube based semiconductors by carefully introducing latice defects into the tube walls. (Creates a nanotube diode)
Sorry, paywalled:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.matsci.34.040203.112300
Combined, the two technologies could be used to fashion an absurdly efficient solar collector. The problem is that not all photons are created equally, and that absorbed spectra might not carry sufficient energy to hop the bandgap. This would only cause the nanotubes to get hot, and reemit the photons only to be captured again by the neighbors.
Perhaps if total energy absorption is high enough, then multiple photons could be used to hop the gap, (like in red light on chlorophyll) but that would have to be some strange juju.
Seriously, this was released to the media about 3 years or so ago, and touted as "scientists create blackest material ever".
Here is a link to a wired magazine article from march 2009:
http://m.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/ultrablack/
Must be a slow news week.
This is more a problem with lazy encode jobs, than with the presentation software.
Flash video encoding forces the provider to reencode the video in a streamable media format. Prior to this, people were using terrible "live stream" type streaming media servers, like real audio or microsoft media servers.
This is an issue simply because of the following things:
1) at the time those were popular, the major industry push was akin to "live broadcast tv, but on the internet!" Not, "video on demand"
2) memory and processing power were much more limited, limiting how efficiently you could effectively stream a feed.
3) people simply didn't encode to perfectly capable streamable containers. Even old-school MPEG1 has features for streamed playback. The reason was because of shitty bandwidth, (mpeg1 has not so good compression at low bitrates), weak cpu power (just see what an h264 stream does on even a pentium2, let alone what was available in the pre-flash-video days.), and minimal ram, as outlined above. While streaming was "possible", it wasn't practical.
What flash video did, was enable the flash plugin to buffer a canned feed, so that even if your connection sucked balls, it could fill the buffer sufficiently to enable high quality playback while the file was still downloading. In addirion, flash was an ubiquitous format already used to make animations and adverts, and was browser agnostic (browser wars, et al.). This is what made flash video an instant success.
These days, we don't need a plugin to serve as a media cache. A properly implemented html5 video playback system would do this all by itself. The very point of making it part of the w3c standard is to make it browser agnostic, and we have the cpu, memory, and bandwidth capabilities to use more traditionally encoded streamable file types.
There is no real downside to dumping flash video, other than losing the programatic features that flash or silverlight provide. Then again, if you aren't an advertiser or a webgames developer, and just want to deliver video content on demand, this still isn't a problem.
Simplification has to different definitions, depending on who you ask.
1) uses less code, is more computationally efficient, is short, sweet, and to the point.
2) does all kinds of juggling behind the scenes to hide things that might confuse you, (because we think you are dumb) so that the total number of easily understood actions you can take are clearly and prominently displayed to you.
When I address the KISS principle, I am refering to definition #1. In terms of engineering (with exception to social engineering) only the first one really applies.
Oh! Please accept my most sincere apologies!
It looks like poe's law bit me in the ass pretty hard. I interpreted your prior post in the lines of "what was once very expensive and difficult we can now do so cheaply that it doesn't matter if I am wasteful."
Hence my sardonic reply.
Again, my sincere apologies.
Similar problems occur in large shipments of commodity aviation components, like shims, nutplates, etc.
A less than scrupulous outsource supplier could sprinkle 20% of the product yeild with improper components, and if the batch is large enough, never get noticed. This doesn't negate the issues that "bogus parts" cause downstream in the product's lifecycle. Bad shims (made from incorrect, but "similar" materials) can promote dielectrics to form in important assemblages, manifesting all sorts of failures.. all kinds of thing can go wrong because somebody some place didn't want to follow what was in the order to the letter and cut corners somewhere.
In electronics, I could see this being manifest in diodes that are of the wrong class being used where, eg, zener diodes are required for proper operation, or the use of poorly formulated capacitor electrolytes in mission critical noise filters, and failsafes.
The effects would be equally diasterous, and vexing to maintenance and service people. The properly sourced equipment simply shouldn't fail in those ways. The component choices were made for that specific reason.
It does not surprise me that chinese manufacturers are the big sources of this problem. The quality of manufacture and qa process from cheap factories are tied directly to the cost per unit: you get what you pay for.
The fact that resources are cheap, is not a license to add unnecessary complexity. That is the point of the KISS principle. The more elaborate you make a system, the more points of failure are introduced. This is why very large and complex systems are so difficult to make reasonably secure from external hacking attempts, and also why bug hunting and feature regressions increase dramatically as system complexity increases.
To look further at the "solitaire" example, we went from a very simple bitblit type rendering system that simply serves a dib to the gdi stack, to a complex multistep presentation involving at least 3 different processing queues, to ultimately do the same thing: display a stack of cards.
Given that a monitor is *still* a pixel oriented display surface, there is no real need to realtime render a 3d card, when the surface of the card is essentially 2 dimensional. The exact same visual effects can be accomplished far more computationally cheaply, by simply using pre-rendered dibs. (You could even have the program render all the dibs on first run, and simply cache them, and still use fewer resources.)
You are needlessly introducing software overhead, needlessly increasing system complexity, and not even getting a very good return on that investment.
As a paradigm, I find that disturbing and undesirable.
The way I look at this issue, is that these UI's are being written, not because there is some outstanding need to implement such new features, but because the vendors that made them wanted to look like they were still innovative and agile.
Sticking with the same tried and true ui, and simply optimizing every bit of code that makes it work, to the point of perfectly polished code perfection is not what gets non computer experts excited about purchases. What does, is "the shiny!".
Thses days, I could clearly see a need for a very efficient and simple ui system for cross device remote purposes. The less the window manager has to do to present information, the better it would be for that purpose. However, that is not the direction that the ui is being pushed.
Realistically, in terms of functionality, you could build a useful ui using blitting tech from 20 years ago, and be just fine.
Instead, we are using more processing and memory cability to run solitaire than entire mega corps had in their computing labs from that period. (That dx10 certified gpu you have rendering aero for you, so that solitaire can present pixel shaded 3d cards to you is able to crank out more flops than a cray supercomputer from the 90s. Think about what that means, when it is a requirement to play solitaire.)
Clearly, the ui designers simply reject the KISS principle of engineering, and do so because "we can, and resources are cheap."
This is the biggest reason that I hate nearly all newer generation ui flavors.
This proposal does not have any safeguards against the formation of intellectual aristocracies, (it does not enable permeability of social strata. Specific fields of study could be controlled to prevent the rest of the public becoming informed, and thus eligable to vote on the issues. Eg, concerning medicine, if med schools are run by doctors seeking self interest politically, and actively refuse admission to otherwise perfectly brilliant students, do this simply to intensify the power of their own votes.), and so is a stage set for the creation of an inviolate caste-based system.
The goal of taking an undeducated lay person, and training them into an intellectual who can take part in the decision process of the nation would not have any incentives to be undertaken. On the contrary, there would be many, many disincentives to prevent that from happening.
The end result would be a striated upper class of various intellectual castes (doctors, lawyers, researchers, etc..) and a huge, disenfranchised lower class, that would be actively prohibited from enacting any progressive social reforms except through violence.
While such a system might be stable, with sufficient social controls, it would also be highly dystopian.
The problem is easy to see when you think about it this way:
When the only body that can affirm the "phsycisian-ness" of a physician, is the body of practicing physicians, there is no external force to prevent this being exploited. (It creates the climate for a disturbing "no true scottsman" fallacy, where even if you are saving lives, you are not legally represented as a physician.)
When the physician-ness of a physician is determined objectively through patient recovery statistics, then if the "physician" is legally barred from practicing medicine by the established ones out of "safety concerns", then the only way to build that reputation is to curry favors. No favors, no practice, no history to evaluate == "not a physician"
Either way, the system is gamed.
If you determine merit of the physician by objective means, and prevent the obstruction of new physicians from practicing, you have basically deleted the very purpose of deferring to an educated position. (Anyone could become a physician.....)
If you determine merit by some objective testing aparatus, (perhaps through a supervised free clinic, where those claiming to have learned to be physicians can go to prove their merit) you still have the same self referential problem, as who defines the parameters of such testing, if not the experts?
About the only way this would work and not devolve into a dystopian caste society would be for there to be an inviolatable legal framework that pits these caste factions against each other. Eg, the physician caste is told by x other caste(s) that they must accept any reasonable applicant for training, etc. Such rules would have to be so set in stone that even if all ruling castes agreed they were a nuisance, they could not be overturned. This would require active selection and testing of the uneducated class for educational aptitudes. It would also require that all offspring belong to the uneducated class until proven otherwise. (Meaning that the children of a well respected doctor would have the same societal status as an uneducated drunk, until proven otherwise, by externalized testing. This could be further hardened against family vocationalism by ruling that such offspring must be educated for a different vocation from either parent. Inconvenient, and seemingly retarded, but done purposefully to break the power of nepotism, and increase the ratio of noise to signal in regard to organized attemps at gaining favoritism. Ironically, this would also prevent second generation uneducated class persons, as they would be mandated bt law to be trained in at last some vocation.)
You missed the rest of the anectdote.
The 10k install figure was only the beginning. They want a 100% ROI for 10 years, based on that figure.
Eg, 20k/year, for 10 years.
I would be hesitant to spend a quarter million dollars just for dsl servie myself. That 25k dslam is peanuts in comparison.
You can't just dump the heat into the basement! That's heat pollution!
You need to dispose of it properly!
Actually, I was a child at the time.
Yes, my childhood sucked.
You don't have to believe it to be true. Truth is axiomatically what remains after you stop believing in it. I don't have to believe I know how to survive, I know I can, as I have done it before. The skills to do it are not necessarily hard, just not the skills most people today have.
No, not a plane crash survivor. What I am is a survivor of dire poverty, which is actually worse.
There is a reason why I know about edible plants, how to tie snares, and about sustainable foraging and hunting practices; my family depended upon them to survive.
No, I do not have a newsletter, but if you really want one, I would suggest the foxfire series. They started out as a postal order newsletter. The older publications are chock full of goodness. Everything from how to make wicker fishtraps, to wigwams. Good stuff.
Now, do you feel good about yourself for being snide and pretentious? I know I don't.
It is only an intellectual world, due to the existence of the support systems in place by modern society to enable that trend. (Green revolution and mechanized farming, etc...)
Pull that rug out from underneath, and the ones unable to survive will simply die.
Ironically, this will be the vast majority of the population, as most people in the western world have no conception of how to survive even a plane crash, let alone the crash of civilization as they know it.
In 30 years, civilization would be unrecognizable, but still existent.
I don't know about you, but I can survive totally unplugged for very extended periods. (I routinely used to 'feral camp' for over a month in the summer as a kid.)
Couple that with the engineering background and diverse set of motley skills I have, as long as I didn't have to worry about idiots trying to mug me by force, I could live quite comfortably, even in otherwise total desolation.
I actually wish the wold would break down already in fact. The vast majority of the current crop of world leaders causing these problems, and a fair chunk of the people who enable them, would not be able to survive the collapse of western civilization.
(I would actually disappear from current society, if there were any sensible place to disappear TO, and would have done so years ago. A mass population reduction would defacto create such places.)
What you refer to as "humanity" is little more than a currently accepted social more. Look for example at ancient spartans. They put newborn babies outside in the cold to weed out the weak, and also culturally subjugated a native culture they called "the helionauts", in the same ways we subjugate and exploit animals, or machines.
These were people, and every bit "homosapien" as you or I, yet they would have no problems accepting and encouraging the acceptance of the "unpopular" reality presented by the GP.
The problem then becomes one totally borne from culture, and society's views on morality and acceptability.
There are many modes of cultural development that could persist and thrive through such a decline.
Everytime I see this argument, I question the educational background of the person posing it.
That field of weeds and trees does have significant value exactly as it is. Contrary to many people's opinions on the matter, rampant destruction of biodiversity to develop farmland has a significant detrimental effect on the quality and viability of the total biosphere, human requirements included.
http://www.news-medical.net/news/20091204/Habitat-destruction-and-biodiversity-loss-can-increase-the-incidence-of-infectious-diseases.aspx
This means that such so called "undeveloped areas" serve a fundemental and necessary function for society exactly as they are, other than mere asthetic and entertainment values. They are NOT "worthles unless exploited".
The lack of total biodiversity is one of the reasons why the biosphere 2 project failed so miserably. The idea of a giant citywide metropolis like those from science fiction is not sustainably realistic, and human carry capacity of the planet is not merely bounded by bulk storage and nutritional requirements. The earth's biosphere is a terribly complex thing, and treating it as though it weren't and without due caution invites very serious consequences.
These are giant amoebas! I think HP Lovecraft warned about giant bags of protoplasm from deep beneath the sea like these.
Yes, by all means, bring those infant shoggoth up here for study... preferably in heavily populated areas!
Genetically engineer them? Sure! What could possibly go wrong?!
(Note, this is meant to be funny.)