The page is named theendalldynasty, because if you're looking for a band named Sai it's a very inuitive leap to search on the endalldynasty (seems to be the name of a previous band incarnation).
Seems Leonard Cohen is actually one of their MySpace friends. Go figure.
Hammers were actually invented for bashing skulls. Thor wasn't a carpenter. Almost all advances in hammer technology were first developed to make them more effective antiskull tools. The double headed hammer, with a striking surface on one side and some sort of pick on the other, is medieval. You'd hit the knight over the top of the head with the striking surface, and when he fell over concussed you'd pierce his helmet and make sure he was dead with the other.
The hammer remains one of the most effective weapons for short range hand to hand. The pointed pick autobody hammer is my urban weapon of choice (although a one piece, 3/4" low D PVC flute is what I usually carry). It is nearly identical to a medieval war hammer, just smaller and lighter. Few ghetto punks wear plate armor these days.
Smiths were the first to use a modern style, metal headed hammer as a tool of production (go figure), for making other tools of war. The whole iron nail thing came rather later.
. ..there's a LOT of ariable land in this country.
Too bad they scraped all the topsoil off of it in order to build housing developments for people who now have to drive 20 miles each way to get to work and back.
the current method of food production is completely dependent on fossil fuels, and INSUSTAINABLE.
You didn't RTFA. They're talking about local production of fuel by the farmers themselves from their own crops.
So I'll be able to fuel my farm machines, to grow my crops, to fuel my farm machines, to grow my crops, to. . .
And all I'll need is this reactor. ..oh, yeah, and an oil press. ..and a still to make the alcohol, from my crops. ..and some sort of fuel for the still. . .
But at least I can do all of this in my copious free time when I'm not actually tending to or harvesting the crops.
I was solicited to become the fiddler in a band the other night. I was rather ambivilent about the idea, but the guy was very enthusiastic about my sound and gave me a CD to listen to.
Turns out I kinda like it. Strange kinda celtic/gypsy/punk sound, as performed by the genetically engineered offspring of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. I'm inclined to at least try playing with them. If the money's decent I might be inclined to stay.
The contact address is a MySpace page. I didn't know you had to register with MySpace just to send an email.
And turning an invention into a product is likely to require a great deal of labor.
Software requires a good deal of invention to create, if it is, indeed, inventive. It requires a certain amount of labor to turn into a product.
It requires almost nothing to actually "produce." Hence the great sums of money accumulated by the heads of the major software houses for doing, and producing, essentially, nothing, but recieving large sums for it.
Just charging for something doesn't even move money around; I could charge a thousand dollars to smile at people, but all it would mean is that I wouldn't do much smiling.
Implicit in my statement was that a transaction was sucessfully concluded.
Stephen King writes books that people want to read. Thus his output is "wealth".
Argument ad crumenam.
At the moment I am actually making about half of my income as a street musician. I happen to believe that what I do is of actual value. I make people happy. Happy is of supreme value. Certainly of more real value than some stupid lump of gold. "Price" is not synonomous with "value."
I am not so bold as to believe that what I do creates wealth. It just moves money from somebody else's pocket into my own. When I make a flute or a bicycle I create wealth.
It takes a lot of work to turn his ideas into readable prose, and if he didn't get any return, he probably wouldn't do it.
The piano rag that I'm writing today, and will likely be writting days from now, and will certainly be practicing how to play for many, many hours, I do not expect to ever recieve a dime from. I enjoy the process itself and pay to be allowed to do it, and it is a gift for a loved one. Giving shall be my recompense.
What "pay" did the Neandertal inventor of the flute, or his cave painting brethern, recieve, other than the joy of creating and sharing the creation?
Invention is not done for money, it is done for love. Money just pays the bills so that you can be left alone to create, which the truely inventive will likely do unto their own destruction if necessary.
See Amadeus.
Of course there are those that love money, but their inventions almost always betray this sort of love.
See Microsoft, the root of all evil.
Oddly enough it is Microsoft I cite above, not Bill.
Bill is power mad. Money is just the way he keeps score and his "lifestyle" is just a public display of his power, because his ultimate desire is for his power to compel adoration.
I have never met the man myself, but I know people who have (someone I used to hold on my knee and show how to type things into the keyboard now reports to him), and I'm certainly well acquainted with the "type."
See cancer research. Money motivates you to show up to collect the money. It can do nothing to motivate invention, or even the inventive spirit. You either have it or you don't. If you have it, you will pay to be allowed to invent. If you do not have it you can spend all the time you want at your job, but history will almost certainly record your life as having been wasted on passing busy time to collect a wage.
I invent on both the technology and art sides of the coin (Yesterday I spent working on a fully analog optical controler, today I'm writing a classic piano rag). Beyond the basic necessities of life my only requirements are to be left the bloody hell alone to invent. I do not need pay to produce. I need pay to be reduced to servitude.
If I were made a gift of a gold ingot I would immediately seek some idiot who thinks that the gold itself is of great value, and trade it to him for the tools and materials of invention.
And in order to keep my job, I have to produce.
Typing code is not equal to invention. It is mere labor. Most code written has been written before, better. Indeed, much code that is going to be written today, and go into production, is code that was abandoned as a bad idea decades ago, but people are "motivated" by money to recapitulate it out of ignorance.
See "Code Monkey."
See also Thoreau:
On the state of the software industry:
"Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now."
Of course these men are ignorant of their state; and so defend it vigorously.
On production:
"As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs."
. ..thus motivated to invent when a paycheck is on the line.
Labor can be motivated by money. Invention cannot.
. ..then by chargin for their product they would be causing their econmy to grow.
Simply charging for something does not create wealth, it just moves money around. Money is just a bit of paper that represents something. If there is no something behind the money there is very little point in moving it.
There is very little something behind most software, thus most software expenditures are a drain on the economy, because they sap real wealth.
Excess of money much beyond your real needs does not actually aqcuire you wealth. It acquires you power, the ability to get people to serve you, for the money.
Power does not cause economies to grow. It just pools the money into the pockets of the powerful. The most stable growth economies are those where the acquisition of power is limited and the disparity between the richest and poorest is the smallest.
If Linux snobs where a problem with the wider adoption of Linux then people who are interested in buying Ford or Dodge trucks would be put off by the hostility that each side has towards the other, etc. But yet there are millions of Ford and Dodge truck owners.
Ford and Dodge are just distros. Motor vehicle is the system.
Ford/Dodge distro wars have nothing to do with buying into truck, in part because people know there is a plethora of available, generic support for truck. You can even get a clear, lucid, fully illustrated explanation of the underlying technology from Reader's Frickin' Digest.
It helps if the manual is written by and for grownups, instead of by a teenager who thinks he's a grown up, but is really just another asshole kid.
Oh, I understand fully getting irritated at a blurb that doesn't provide the needed information. There are too many here that simply state the stupid and unintuitive name of someone's pet OSS project followed by a string of undefined acronyms, without a link in sight, leaving you without the slightest notion of what the article is about, or even how to find out what the article is about, because even Google can't tell you certainly (Hint: Don't name your software project "My pet fish Eric").
However, I still see this particular example as a reasonably good example of the way things should be done on the web. The main story was well described, it was about editorial conduct at Wikipedia, not about Brian Peppers, who was only raised as an example and a link to whatever relavant biographical material was already available on him was the appropriate way to handle providing that information.
It was perfectly clear from context that his name was raised because he was a person at the center of some controversy for some reason and that's all you really needed to know to unstand the article; about removing pages from Wikipedia.
I'd go so far as to say this is a reasonably good example of what hyperlinks are for.
Hyperlinks: Don't rewrite the manual on the wheel. RTFA. That lets you know what they're about. In this case the articles are presumably about . ..Justin Perry and Brian Peppers.
Ok, there's this Slashdot effect thingy to take into account . . .
WTF do I care what some guy who's been dead for a few centuries *may* have thought?
Because he *may* have got it right? And because even if he got it wrong there may be instruction in examining the error?
But speculating on what he may have thought. ..
I am not speculating, because he communicated using exactly the same communications technology we use today, hence his thoughts are still available.
Having examined his thoughts and relating them to the two and half centuries of history I have on him I know that:
Think for yourself about what's changed.
Absolutely nothing that has any relevance to his thoughts has changed, because his thoughts were not based on protecting your job; and, oddly enough, he appears to have had thousands of years of history on you, because he knew his history, and you do not appear to.
You cannot "think about it yourself" until you have supplied yourself with the relevant ideas to think about.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go formulate laws of motion. I understand there was some guy about 350 years ago who formulated some, and a guy 100 years ago who refined them somewhat, but those guys are long dead. What do I care about what they *may* have thought about motion?
It would just be a waste of my time to even read them and try to understand them, because so much has changed since then.
A new communications channel is an invention, and a new communication format is an invention, but merely thinking "hey, we could do that over this"?
Thomas Jefferson, the original formulator of what is and is not patentable in America would disagree with you somewhat. He was rather stricter in his ideas of what was a patentable invention, i.e., the sort of invention that could be given a government enforced monopoly on copying.
He understood the difference between invention as an idea which could be passed mind to mind and no man or government has the right to control and the invention which was a device which required manufacturing; and thus could be held as a monopoly by force of arms.
Under Jefferson the Morse Code would not have been patenable, because it is a just an alternative alphabet. A pure abstract idea; and one already prevelant at that.
Slashdot Mirror
If we import anyone elses corn in significant quantities, someone's screwed up.
Yeah, like relying on it as a major fuel source.
KFG
Locally produced hemp oil was actually Henry Ford's national fuel of choice.
He fought a huge war against J.D. over it. He lost. Hence the banning of "marijuana" as one of the tools of the war.
KFG
This post was not a troll. I'd just come back from one of my now former favorite bike rides in the country.
The post was the voice of despair.
It is also factual. Go take a bike ride in the country and see for yourself.
KFG
Sai.
The page is named theendalldynasty, because if you're looking for a band named Sai it's a very inuitive leap to search on the endalldynasty (seems to be the name of a previous band incarnation).
Seems Leonard Cohen is actually one of their MySpace friends. Go figure.
KFG
Hammers were actually invented for bashing skulls. Thor wasn't a carpenter. Almost all advances in hammer technology were first developed to make them more effective antiskull tools. The double headed hammer, with a striking surface on one side and some sort of pick on the other, is medieval. You'd hit the knight over the top of the head with the striking surface, and when he fell over concussed you'd pierce his helmet and make sure he was dead with the other.
The hammer remains one of the most effective weapons for short range hand to hand. The pointed pick autobody hammer is my urban weapon of choice (although a one piece, 3/4" low D PVC flute is what I usually carry). It is nearly identical to a medieval war hammer, just smaller and lighter. Few ghetto punks wear plate armor these days.
Smiths were the first to use a modern style, metal headed hammer as a tool of production (go figure), for making other tools of war. The whole iron nail thing came rather later.
KFG
So what's your better idea?
Get used to using less fuel, and using it more wisely.
KFG
. . .there's a LOT of ariable land in this country.
Too bad they scraped all the topsoil off of it in order to build housing developments for people who now have to drive 20 miles each way to get to work and back.
KFG
the current method of food production is completely dependent on fossil fuels, and INSUSTAINABLE.
.oh, yeah, and an oil press. . .and a still to make the alcohol, from my crops. . .and some sort of fuel for the still. . .
You didn't RTFA. They're talking about local production of fuel by the farmers themselves from their own crops.
So I'll be able to fuel my farm machines, to grow my crops, to fuel my farm machines, to grow my crops, to. . .
And all I'll need is this reactor. .
But at least I can do all of this in my copious free time when I'm not actually tending to or harvesting the crops.
KFG
Energy independence ... Priceless!
So it's really going to suck that we have to buy the corn from Mongolia.
KFG
I was solicited to become the fiddler in a band the other night. I was rather ambivilent about the idea, but the guy was very enthusiastic about my sound and gave me a CD to listen to.
Turns out I kinda like it. Strange kinda celtic/gypsy/punk sound, as performed by the genetically engineered offspring of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. I'm inclined to at least try playing with them. If the money's decent I might be inclined to stay.
The contact address is a MySpace page. I didn't know you had to register with MySpace just to send an email.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
KFG
And turning an invention into a product is likely to require a great deal of labor.
Software requires a good deal of invention to create, if it is, indeed, inventive. It requires a certain amount of labor to turn into a product.
It requires almost nothing to actually "produce." Hence the great sums of money accumulated by the heads of the major software houses for doing, and producing, essentially, nothing, but recieving large sums for it.
Just charging for something doesn't even move money around; I could charge a thousand dollars to smile at people, but all it would mean is that I wouldn't do much smiling.
Implicit in my statement was that a transaction was sucessfully concluded.
Stephen King writes books that people want to read. Thus his output is "wealth".
Argument ad crumenam.
At the moment I am actually making about half of my income as a street musician. I happen to believe that what I do is of actual value. I make people happy. Happy is of supreme value. Certainly of more real value than some stupid lump of gold. "Price" is not synonomous with "value."
I am not so bold as to believe that what I do creates wealth. It just moves money from somebody else's pocket into my own. When I make a flute or a bicycle I create wealth.
It takes a lot of work to turn his ideas into readable prose, and if he didn't get any return, he probably wouldn't do it.
The piano rag that I'm writing today, and will likely be writting days from now, and will certainly be practicing how to play for many, many hours, I do not expect to ever recieve a dime from. I enjoy the process itself and pay to be allowed to do it, and it is a gift for a loved one. Giving shall be my recompense.
What "pay" did the Neandertal inventor of the flute, or his cave painting brethern, recieve, other than the joy of creating and sharing the creation?
Invention is not done for money, it is done for love. Money just pays the bills so that you can be left alone to create, which the truely inventive will likely do unto their own destruction if necessary.
See Amadeus.
Of course there are those that love money, but their inventions almost always betray this sort of love.
See Microsoft, the root of all evil.
Oddly enough it is Microsoft I cite above, not Bill.
Bill is power mad. Money is just the way he keeps score and his "lifestyle" is just a public display of his power, because his ultimate desire is for his power to compel adoration.
I have never met the man myself, but I know people who have (someone I used to hold on my knee and show how to type things into the keyboard now reports to him), and I'm certainly well acquainted with the "type."
KFG
Why can invention not be motivated by money?
See cancer research. Money motivates you to show up to collect the money. It can do nothing to motivate invention, or even the inventive spirit. You either have it or you don't. If you have it, you will pay to be allowed to invent. If you do not have it you can spend all the time you want at your job, but history will almost certainly record your life as having been wasted on passing busy time to collect a wage.
I invent on both the technology and art sides of the coin (Yesterday I spent working on a fully analog optical controler, today I'm writing a classic piano rag). Beyond the basic necessities of life my only requirements are to be left the bloody hell alone to invent. I do not need pay to produce. I need pay to be reduced to servitude.
If I were made a gift of a gold ingot I would immediately seek some idiot who thinks that the gold itself is of great value, and trade it to him for the tools and materials of invention.
And in order to keep my job, I have to produce.
Typing code is not equal to invention. It is mere labor. Most code written has been written before, better. Indeed, much code that is going to be written today, and go into production, is code that was abandoned as a bad idea decades ago, but people are "motivated" by money to recapitulate it out of ignorance.
See "Code Monkey."
See also Thoreau:
On the state of the software industry:
"Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now."
Of course these men are ignorant of their state; and so defend it vigorously.
On production:
"As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs."
See Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.
KFG
. . .thus motivated to invent when a paycheck is on the line.
.then by chargin for their product they would be causing their econmy to grow.
Labor can be motivated by money. Invention cannot.
. .
Simply charging for something does not create wealth, it just moves money around. Money is just a bit of paper that represents something. If there is no something behind the money there is very little point in moving it.
There is very little something behind most software, thus most software expenditures are a drain on the economy, because they sap real wealth.
Excess of money much beyond your real needs does not actually aqcuire you wealth. It acquires you power, the ability to get people to serve you, for the money.
Power does not cause economies to grow. It just pools the money into the pockets of the powerful. The most stable growth economies are those where the acquisition of power is limited and the disparity between the richest and poorest is the smallest.
As was once said about the Danes:
"Few own two good coats, but none go without."
KFG
If Linux snobs where a problem with the wider adoption of Linux then people who are interested in buying Ford or Dodge trucks would be put off by the hostility that each side has towards the other, etc. But yet there are millions of Ford and Dodge truck owners.
Ford and Dodge are just distros. Motor vehicle is the system.
Ford/Dodge distro wars have nothing to do with buying into truck, in part because people know there is a plethora of available, generic support for truck. You can even get a clear, lucid, fully illustrated explanation of the underlying technology from Reader's Frickin' Digest.
It helps if the manual is written by and for grownups, instead of by a teenager who thinks he's a grown up, but is really just another asshole kid.
KFG
Why isn't the old school gone yet?
They converted it into condos.
KFG
I hope you ain't been lobotomized by the the evil
academic singularity bastards.
KFG
Oh, I understand fully getting irritated at a blurb that doesn't provide the needed information. There are too many here that simply state the stupid and unintuitive name of someone's pet OSS project followed by a string of undefined acronyms, without a link in sight, leaving you without the slightest notion of what the article is about, or even how to find out what the article is about, because even Google can't tell you certainly (Hint: Don't name your software project "My pet fish Eric").
However, I still see this particular example as a reasonably good example of the way things should be done on the web. The main story was well described, it was about editorial conduct at Wikipedia, not about Brian Peppers, who was only raised as an example and a link to whatever relavant biographical material was already available on him was the appropriate way to handle providing that information.
It was perfectly clear from context that his name was raised because he was a person at the center of some controversy for some reason and that's all you really needed to know to unstand the article; about removing pages from Wikipedia.
I'd go so far as to say this is a reasonably good example of what hyperlinks are for.
KFG
Piano is the dog on the Piscataway kazoo manual.
Banana box zygote of the elephant maple comics
Answer that!
KFG
Hyperlinks: Don't rewrite the manual on the wheel. RTFA. That lets you know what they're about. In this case the articles are presumably about . . .Justin Perry and Brian Peppers.
Ok, there's this Slashdot effect thingy to take into account . . .
KFG
On the way to serfdom via tenant farming.
KFG
WTF do I care what some guy who's been dead for a few centuries *may* have thought?
.
Because he *may* have got it right? And because even if he got it wrong there may be instruction in examining the error?
But speculating on what he may have thought. .
I am not speculating, because he communicated using exactly the same communications technology we use today, hence his thoughts are still available.
Having examined his thoughts and relating them to the two and half centuries of history I have on him I know that:
Think for yourself about what's changed.
Absolutely nothing that has any relevance to his thoughts has changed, because his thoughts were not based on protecting your job; and, oddly enough, he appears to have had thousands of years of history on you, because he knew his history, and you do not appear to.
You cannot "think about it yourself" until you have supplied yourself with the relevant ideas to think about.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go formulate laws of motion. I understand there was some guy about 350 years ago who formulated some, and a guy 100 years ago who refined them somewhat, but those guys are long dead. What do I care about what they *may* have thought about motion?
It would just be a waste of my time to even read them and try to understand them, because so much has changed since then.
KFG
A new communications channel is an invention, and a new communication format is an invention, but merely thinking "hey, we could do that over this"?
Thomas Jefferson, the original formulator of what is and is not patentable in America would disagree with you somewhat. He was rather stricter in his ideas of what was a patentable invention, i.e., the sort of invention that could be given a government enforced monopoly on copying.
He understood the difference between invention as an idea which could be passed mind to mind and no man or government has the right to control and the invention which was a device which required manufacturing; and thus could be held as a monopoly by force of arms.
Under Jefferson the Morse Code would not have been patenable, because it is a just an alternative alphabet. A pure abstract idea; and one already prevelant at that.
It was the telegraph that was patentable.
KFG
Who invented the electric light bulb?
[ ]Warren De la Rue
[ ]Henricg Globel
[ ]Joseph Swann
[ ]Thomas Edison's PR machine
KFG
The browser wars have a mess of variables, interactions, and effects, and they are pretty much the worst kind of observation you can find.
Unless your ultimate goal is to write a business school working paper about them.
KFG
This is the "publish or perish" project for art professor John Fillwalk and the university considers it a part of providing better education.
It all comes from teaching art instead of "useful" things.
KFG