One of the main reasons why I would be eager to devote much of my life to serving these children is that I would like to see their genome swamp yours.
You are a cretin and a f*ckhead of such a low order, that the extinction of your phenotype is of surpassing importance to me.
Firstly, *every* place is environmentally sensitive. Sensitivity to strategic perturbation is one of the definitive aspects of complex systems. The reason utilization of natural resources becomes controversial is that what *aspects* of any given environment are worthy of protection is a subjective value judgement.
In this case, failing to exploit the resource will result in a future ecological catastrophe which extends far beyond the region of Vancouver Island: Methane is a primary greenhouse gas. It is crucially important that we should extract the bulk of the undersea methane deposits (which extend to many, many other regions of the world as well) before the ocean temperature raises enough to vaporize those deposits. Otherwise, they will create a global warming catastrophe.
In almost every way, Europe does lag the U.S. In this case, you're talking about 182 million out of 325 million, versus 186 million out of something over 600 million. Europe is not just Norway and Switzerland. It includes Albania and Moldova... some places where a straw roof is a luxury.
The trend is to use iSCSI on the network side and IDE on the hardware side. Since a network file server only has FS daemons doing I/O, and the drives are always hot, there is no SCSI advantage as there is in a multitasking workstation environment.
a fully distributed content-addressible web infrastructure is the best way to resolve this problem once and for all. linked with a good distributed proxy infrastructure, or better yet, a fully anonymized transport it will take herculean efforts to do this kind of information-suppression.
In the public sector, the only jobs I would consider
are research positions which directly advance education, medicine, science or technology. They don't pay well, but for me, the value of making a real contribution to the welfare of people is more than enough to compensate.
In the public sector, most positions are governmental beaurocratic functionary and enabling positions, which only contribute to the ability of the government to kill people. Moreoever, they offer little hope of meaningful personal advancement, and consist largely of endless office politics -- much like a large corporate job, at an IBM or a Sun Microsystems. Anyone who has a conscience is likely to run into strong demands to violate their conscience in a very immediate and visceral manner, but on the plus side, it's a sinecure, and doesn't eat your life. 8 hours, and
*ding*, you're outta here.
I always keep coming back to small-enterprise.
In the entrepreneurial environment, the upside in
employee ownership is much greater, there's little of the political backside-covering toady gerrymandering of large organizations, and a great deal of opportunity for your personal contribution to shine, if you have initiative and intelligence.
Also, the pay is much better, if you have desirable skills and a resume to back it up.
On the downside, you can and will get terminated
due to changes in management, business failures,
and the occasional period of non-performance that
everyone experiences from time to time.
Best of all, if you can hack it, is out-and-out
entrepreneurship. Be your own boss. Earn the
benefits of your labors. The risks are big, but
the upside potential is enormous. If you can deal with your own bizdev or find a suitable partner who can, I think this is the way to go. You can do much more to benefit society if you gain wealth and power than you can if you wimp out and do your 9-5 tasks in a powerless and ineffective NGO.
If you are prone to self-aggrandizement and disinclined to charity, please ignore my advice, or better yet, invert it, because then I want you
to fail.
> I'm not sure I'll ever understand the "you should > be happy I stole your work" argument.
Of course not. You will never understand it until you stop begging the question by casting the issue in terms of theft. Why not go all the way and call it the "you should be happy I anally raped your little girl" argument?
To plagiarize is right right right. That's how society makes progress. If I can't use your stuff, why should I want it? It's only by plagiarism that intellectual labors gain value.
But nuclear power can also be decentralized. Consider a car that never needs to be refuelled during it's normal operational lifetime (perhaps 8-10 years). There's a lot more available uranium than oil, relative to power output.
Bill Gates doesn't whine? *Innovation* -whine- *innovation* -whine- *innovation*. Not only is he a whiner, but a lying one at that. McNealy is no whiner. An ass, perhaps, but not a whiner. Unless Winston Churchill was a whiner during the blitz.
> Communism and Socialism won't work. They are based > on the false assumption that people will work hard > for the good of society.
You are just wrong. Most of what people do, they do for the approval of those they respect. Most people who decide it's worthwhile to get a lot of money do it to get laid -- the rest of them can get laid without paying for it in cash.
Communism has worked for thousands of years. Capitalism in it's modern guise has been poisoning your children and corrupting your goverment for -- what -- 100 years? Sure it's more robust than the centrally-planned nation-state of Leninism, but how much more? It has only lasted 30 years longer. I don't think you can draw many conclusions yet.
No, communism has always worked well. Most human societies were organized in tribal communes for millenia. It's the nation-state and centralized planning that have been proven failures, not communism.
If Sun licensed Windows, then delivered a broken version bundled with every laptop, and whenever it crashed, suggested that users install Solaris instead, I think it would be a no-brainer for any court in the WIPO world to enjoin their behaviour and grant remedies for trademark pollution.
> Capitalism requires far less control over the > people, since it regards fewer actions or > transactions as fundamentally illegitimate.
Au contraire. Acts are illegitimate if they violate a right. In addition to other rights, Capitalism recognizes individual property rights. Thus, it renders involuntary "sharing" illegitimate. A primitive tribal communism would not recognize individual property rights in such a high degree, and therefore would render fewer acts illegitimate. Now Marism-Leninism, or Maoism, for example, would only remove rights over real property, i.e. the means of production, from the individual, and then would add many restrictions based on a notion of the rights of society and the party as the expression of historical progress, but that is another comparison entirely.
> The question is not should we give up freedom for > security, but how much and for how long, and what > are we getting in return.
Since the trade-off that has been made has been an effective cancellation of the bulk of the bill of rights and several original articles of the constitution in exchange for approximately *nothing* -- nada, zip -- I'd have to call it a hum deal.
Re:One of my favourite quotes...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
Certainly it is a war, but it is not conducted legally, under U.S. law, nor is it conducted under the internationally agreed rules of war which the U.S. has accepted by treaty. There is no war, in the sense that Congress has not declared war. There are acts of war, and war crimes, but no war.
Re:One of my favourite quotes...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
It was not a military attack. It was a criminal attack, certainly, but in no sense was it a military attack. It was not conducted by the government of Afghanistan. It was conducted by mostly Saudi wahabbists. Can you provide any reason to even *suspect* that the government of Afghanistan had any knowledge of their intentions? I know the Pakistani ISI chief wired $100K to Atta before the attack, but he's Pak, not Afg. By the way, he was meeting with several Senators and U.S. intelligence chiefs in D.C. when the attacks occurred, and flew back to Pak. shortly thereafter.
One thing this underlines is how badly your project can be undermined by inadequate requirements specification, and the sloppy practice of producing a specification-satisfying implementation which has environmental dependencies.
A second point which it makes very clear is that EA cannot achieve its full potential without substantially better fitness functions -- but as anyone with EA experience knows, excessively refined fitness functions are death to early convergence -- hence it also underlines the importance of co-evolution of the fitness criteria.
I'm sure this experience, which is not entirely new, but should be familiar to anyone who has read the EA literature, from many similar examples, is pregnant with many more suggestive results, but that's all that occurs to me at the moment.
Oh, they do. Most people will ditch a sinecure at IBM for a telecommuting start-up with stock options in quick order. If you open your jobs to 100% telecommuters, suddenly you're hiring from a pool of 6 billion people instead of a local pool of the small disaffected percentage of qualified candidates in your local metropolitan area. The result is that you can focus your requirements much more finely, and get much higher-quality candidates willing to work for less money.
> Unless you're insanely lucky, no-one will give > you a telecommute job
This is just not true. Many companies are now entirely virtual, and there is little or no opportunity in such organizations for non-telecommuters. I've been telecommuting since 1990, and I've gone through several cycles of acquisition/bankruptcy/option-cash-out/disgrun tlem ent without once doing the anti-environment, anti- family 2-hours-in-gridlock thing that passed for productivity in the standard model of the old millenium.
My advice to anyone who values quality of life over ego-boosting is to refuse all non-tele positions, if your skill set is sufficiently desirable.
Of course if all you can do is reboot AS/400 consoles, matters are very different.
As much as I dislike office politics, it is not something that can be disregarded or discounted. To me the most important practical feature of any telecommuting environment is an even playing field. That means that an organization in which all or the bulk of the employees are telecommuting is 10,000% more desirable to work for than an organization that merely allows telecommuting.
From my point of view, the single positions that benefit the most from telecommuting are software development and HR. Software development because of the immense gains in efficiency from a quiet, uninterrupted period of work, which categorically outweight any losses due to the increased expense of team co-ordination, and HR because it *is* the network, so to speak.
I've been telecommuting for 12 years now, and I would never go back, unless I was offered an opportunity to accomplish some over-ridingly important goal by taking a commuting position. Much more important than the choice of job desc, I think, is the choice of organization. Telecommuting in a Nasdaq/Fortune 500 will always stink, because office politics are vastly more important than production, delivery, in that environment. Go for a well-founded start-up or a deeply entrenched niche-market organization.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the main reasons why I would be eager to devote much of my life to serving these children is that I would like to see their genome swamp yours. You are a cretin and a f*ckhead of such a low order, that the extinction of your phenotype is of surpassing importance to me.
Firstly, *every* place is environmentally sensitive.
Sensitivity to strategic perturbation is one of the
definitive aspects of complex systems. The reason
utilization of natural resources becomes controversial
is that what *aspects* of any given environment are
worthy of protection is a subjective value judgement.
In this case, failing to exploit the resource will
result in a future ecological catastrophe which
extends far beyond the region of Vancouver Island:
Methane is a primary greenhouse gas. It is crucially
important that we should extract the bulk of the
undersea methane deposits (which extend to many,
many other regions of the world as well) before
the ocean temperature raises enough to vaporize
those deposits. Otherwise, they will create a
global warming catastrophe.
In almost every way, Europe does lag the U.S.
In this case, you're talking about 182 million
out of 325 million, versus 186 million out of
something over 600 million. Europe is not just
Norway and Switzerland. It includes Albania
and Moldova... some places where a straw roof
is a luxury.
The trend is to use iSCSI on the network side and IDE on the hardware side. Since a network file
server only has FS daemons doing I/O, and the drives
are always hot, there is no SCSI advantage as there
is in a multitasking workstation environment.
a fully distributed content-addressible web
infrastructure is the best way to resolve this
problem once and for all. linked with a
good distributed proxy infrastructure, or better yet, a fully anonymized transport it will take herculean efforts
to do this kind of information-suppression.
I'd make a beeline for henan and start a group home
for the orphaned children of AIDS victims.
In the public sector, most positions are governmental beaurocratic functionary and enabling positions, which only contribute to the ability of the government to kill people. Moreoever, they offer little hope of meaningful personal advancement, and consist largely of endless office politics -- much like a large corporate job, at an IBM or a Sun Microsystems. Anyone who has a conscience is likely to run into strong demands to violate their conscience in a very immediate and visceral manner, but on the plus side, it's a sinecure, and doesn't eat your life. 8 hours, and *ding*, you're outta here.
I always keep coming back to small-enterprise. In the entrepreneurial environment, the upside in employee ownership is much greater, there's little of the political backside-covering toady gerrymandering of large organizations, and a great deal of opportunity for your personal contribution to shine, if you have initiative and intelligence. Also, the pay is much better, if you have desirable skills and a resume to back it up. On the downside, you can and will get terminated due to changes in management, business failures, and the occasional period of non-performance that everyone experiences from time to time.
Best of all, if you can hack it, is out-and-out entrepreneurship. Be your own boss. Earn the benefits of your labors. The risks are big, but the upside potential is enormous. If you can deal with your own bizdev or find a suitable partner who can, I think this is the way to go. You can do much more to benefit society if you gain wealth and power than you can if you wimp out and do your 9-5 tasks in a powerless and ineffective NGO. If you are prone to self-aggrandizement and disinclined to charity, please ignore my advice, or better yet, invert it, because then I want you to fail.
Which just proves that MIT is replete with twits
and losers with no backbone.
> I'm not sure I'll ever understand the "you should
> be happy I stole your work" argument.
Of course not. You will never understand it
until you stop begging the question by casting
the issue in terms of theft. Why not go all the
way and call it the "you should be happy I anally
raped your little girl" argument?
To plagiarize is right right right.
That's how society makes progress.
If I can't use your stuff, why should
I want it? It's only by plagiarism
that intellectual labors gain value.
you can't ignite dilute methanol with a blowtorch.
But nuclear power can also be decentralized.
Consider a car that never needs to be refuelled
during it's normal operational lifetime (perhaps
8-10 years). There's a lot more available
uranium than oil, relative to power output.
Bill Gates doesn't whine? *Innovation* -whine-
*innovation* -whine- *innovation*. Not only is
he a whiner, but a lying one at that. McNealy is
no whiner. An ass, perhaps, but not a whiner.
Unless Winston Churchill was a whiner during the
blitz.
> Communism and Socialism won't work. They are based
> on the false assumption that people will work hard
> for the good of society.
You are just wrong. Most of what people do, they
do for the approval of those they respect. Most
people who decide it's worthwhile to get a lot of
money do it to get laid -- the rest of them can
get laid without paying for it in cash.
Communism has worked for thousands of years.
Capitalism in it's modern guise has been
poisoning your children and corrupting your
goverment for -- what -- 100 years? Sure it's
more robust than the centrally-planned nation-state
of Leninism, but how much more? It has only
lasted 30 years longer. I don't think you can
draw many conclusions yet.
No, communism has always worked well. Most human
societies were organized in tribal communes for
millenia. It's the nation-state and centralized
planning that have been proven failures, not
communism.
If Sun licensed Windows, then delivered a broken
version bundled with every laptop, and whenever it
crashed, suggested that users install Solaris
instead, I think it would be a no-brainer for any
court in the WIPO world to enjoin their behaviour
and grant remedies for trademark pollution.
> Capitalism requires far less control over the
> people, since it regards fewer actions or
> transactions as fundamentally illegitimate.
Au contraire. Acts are illegitimate if they
violate a right. In addition to other rights,
Capitalism recognizes individual property rights.
Thus, it renders involuntary "sharing" illegitimate.
A primitive tribal communism would not recognize
individual property rights in such a high degree,
and therefore would render fewer acts illegitimate.
Now Marism-Leninism, or Maoism, for example,
would only remove rights over real property,
i.e. the means of production, from the individual,
and then would add many restrictions based on
a notion of the rights of society and the
party as the expression of historical progress,
but that is another comparison entirely.
> The question is not should we give up freedom for
> security, but how much and for how long, and what
> are we getting in return.
Since the trade-off that has been made has been
an effective cancellation of the bulk of the bill
of rights and several original articles of the
constitution in exchange for approximately
*nothing* -- nada, zip -- I'd have to call it a
hum deal.
Certainly it is a war, but it is not conducted
legally, under U.S. law, nor is it conducted
under the internationally agreed rules of war
which the U.S. has accepted by treaty. There is
no war, in the sense that Congress has not
declared war. There are acts of war, and
war crimes, but no war.
It was not a military attack. It was a criminal
attack, certainly, but in no sense was it a
military attack. It was not conducted by the
government of Afghanistan. It was conducted by
mostly Saudi wahabbists. Can you provide any
reason to even *suspect* that the government of
Afghanistan had any knowledge of their intentions?
I know the Pakistani ISI chief wired $100K to
Atta before the attack, but he's Pak, not Afg.
By the way, he was meeting with several Senators
and U.S. intelligence chiefs in D.C. when the
attacks occurred, and flew back to Pak. shortly
thereafter.
and as such it is far above the cognitive reach of
the majority of slashdot readers.
One thing this underlines is how badly your
project can be undermined by inadequate
requirements specification, and the sloppy
practice of producing a specification-satisfying
implementation which has environmental
dependencies.
A second point which it makes very clear is that
EA cannot achieve its full potential without
substantially better fitness functions -- but as
anyone with EA experience knows, excessively
refined fitness functions are death to early
convergence -- hence it also underlines the
importance of co-evolution of the fitness
criteria.
I'm sure this experience, which is not entirely
new, but should be familiar to anyone who has
read the EA literature, from many similar examples,
is pregnant with many more suggestive results,
but that's all that occurs to me at the moment.
Oh, they do. Most people will ditch a sinecure
at IBM for a telecommuting start-up with stock
options in quick order. If you open your jobs to
100% telecommuters, suddenly you're hiring from a
pool of 6 billion people instead of a local pool
of the small disaffected percentage of qualified
candidates in your local metropolitan area. The
result is that you can focus your requirements much
more finely, and get much higher-quality candidates
willing to work for less money.
> Unless you're insanely lucky, no-one will give
> you a telecommute job
This is just not true. Many companies are now
entirely virtual, and there is little or no
opportunity in such organizations for non-telecommuters. I've been telecommuting since
1990, and I've gone through several cycles of
acquisition/bankruptcy/option-cash-out/disgru
without once doing the anti-environment, anti-
family 2-hours-in-gridlock thing that passed for
productivity in the standard model of the old
millenium.
My advice to anyone who values quality of life
over ego-boosting is to refuse all non-tele
positions, if your skill set is sufficiently
desirable.
Of course if all you can do is reboot AS/400
consoles, matters are very different.
As much as I dislike office politics, it is not
something that can be disregarded or discounted.
To me the most important practical feature of any
telecommuting environment is an even playing field.
That means that an organization in which all or the
bulk of the employees are telecommuting is 10,000%
more desirable to work for than an organization
that merely allows telecommuting.
From my point of view, the single positions that
benefit the most from telecommuting are software
development and HR. Software development because
of the immense gains in efficiency from a quiet,
uninterrupted period of work, which categorically
outweight any losses due to the increased expense
of team co-ordination, and HR because it *is* the
network, so to speak.
I've been telecommuting for 12 years now, and I
would never go back, unless I was offered an
opportunity to accomplish some over-ridingly
important goal by taking a commuting position.
Much more important than the choice of job desc,
I think, is the choice of organization.
Telecommuting in a Nasdaq/Fortune 500 will always
stink, because office politics are vastly more
important than production, delivery, in that
environment. Go for a well-founded start-up
or a deeply entrenched niche-market organization.