It's shocking how the current generation is all about "gimme, gimme, gimme". I want free stuff!!!
Even if that's right, it still wouldn't be a "double-standard".
Really? Is that what you see? Where are you looking, and who are you listening too? Because from where I'm sitting, it isn't the current generation that's the problem, it's the 'Me' generation. The baby boomers are the most selfish generation imaginable, at least in America.
Oh come on, the boomers practically invented idealistic social protest!... when their ass was on the line...
when it was trendy...
Your plan needs 3 bombs (between 4 and 6 if you want to do more than one strike and you are lucky), and they only had 2, with the next one some time away.
Presuming you're correct -- which for me is a big presumption -- a variant of the plan could be performed with only two bombs. (1) Demo first, with threat to hit some unspecified city; (2) Hit the city only if surrender is not forthcoming.
Your plan demonstrates an unwillingness to use the bomb, precisely the opposite of what you want to do.
Because it's a rough and tough world and you've got to show you're tougher and nastier than anyone else on the planet -- but this isn't working so well for the Bush regime is it? There's something to be said for keeping the moral high ground.
Any human being whose reaction to the death of a quarter of a million people isn't sheer horror is a monster.
But this is just a verbal fig-leaf from you: you believe in being rough and tough and showing how nasty you are don't you?
However, that doesn't make the alternatives better.
Correct: it's all a matter of second-guessing on my part, and in any case, no one can play the counter-factual game with any certainty. Still, it's interesting that even at the time, a lot of people on the inside had their reservations, didn't they?
Software Freedom (in the FSF sense) has always been anti-capitalist. It's central tenet is sharing. The central tenet of capitalism is not sharing. Now you can like that or you can dislike it (and I couldn't care less), but don't pretend this is something new.
Will they kick you out of the United States if you share something?
If Company A cuts a deal with Company B to split the costs on something and share the resource,
does that mean they've ceased to be capitalists?
If I share the Xerox machine with the guys in the next office, have I become a dirty communist?
Really: The GPL was carefully designed to be orthogonal to "capitalism". It does not prohibit
you from being in business, or from making money... it does prohibit some things you're allowed
to do with someone else's code.
And it sure as hell is something new under the sun, or people with 5-digit slashids wouldn't need to have the basics recited to them over-and-over again.
If the problems could be worked out, it would pretty much fix most of the major problems with representative democracy, the worst of which being voting for people that don't represent you on many issues just to get your voice heard on one or two.
I think I see what you're going for, though as I've already outlined I think in actuality
you'd find problems with your system that are very similar to what we already have.
The EFF delegate would keep explaining to the troops that they just had to compromise on
those DRM issues in order to get the RIAA delegates support on those privacy issues, and so on.
One advantage of your delegates, though, is that it would be easier to fire them.
(I send notes every couple of weeks to Nancy Pelosi begging her to just impeach the bastards, and it's getting old...)
or they can delegate their vote to a representative (who can then delegate all of THOSE votes, and so on).
Interesting. In your system, would I have to hand all of my votes over to a single delegate, or could I sub-divide the issues among multiple delegates?
In any case, I think if you game it out, what ends up happening is that the delegates need to form voting blocks to get anything past the other delegates, and you end up with extreme levels of compromise going on to the point where your input into the system becomes nearly unrecognizeable... not unlike the American system of representative democracy.
(Or at least, that's the way representative democracy worked some decades ago, before it became totally corrupted. Part of the trouble is it's hard to distinguish the "normal" level of compromise from "representatives" that are only pretending to represent you.)
I can't believe your view is the minority here. I don't understand why people find it easier to believe that the all-powerful Al-Qaeda videos are doctored by Osama and his crew than the videos are made by foreign agents who are fabricating the needed vindication for the decision to go to war and justification for continuing it.
If you want to believe that We are the good guys, then you refuse to believe that We might release faked propaganda.
If you want to believe that The Terrorists are knuckle-dragging barbarians, then you don't want to believe that they can do basic video-editing.
If you want to believe that We are the best, then you don't want to believe that anyone else can do anything clever or effective and We must be behind everything.
Using what you want to believe as a primary premise is unlikely to get you to the truth.
(But I like the point that if they can do video editing, it seems weird they can't do a decent video.)
Some will end up without any ability to ever travel outside the borders of their own country, in fear of running afoul of foreign warcrimes legislation.
Counting votes by hand works when there are one or two issues on the ballot. When you have ballots with hundreds of races, and ammendments, etc. It does not scale well.
And you think that the electorate can make intelligent, informed decisions when asked to vote on hundreds of issues? Democracy doesn't scale well up to that level, that's why we're stuck with a Democratic-Republic [1]
Techie geeks have this amazing capability to focus on the wrong problem...
And if you worry about the reliability of condoms so much, shouldn't you worry about the reliability of monogamy? Some estimates of "cheating" rates are as high as 50%.
Slashdot readers have such high IQs that they realize that sex leads to babies, contraceptives don't work 100%, having intimate contact with some random person is a good way to get disease, and that one should save themselves for a life-partner so that they're ready for the responsibilities that come with sex while simultaneously avoiding the issue of STDs.
So, the reason intelligent people don't engage in promiscuous sex are practical? It's all about controlling disease and pregnancy?
Then why don't we all get together for erotic massage parties (house rules: no fucking, and strictly no fluid exchange allowed)?
And in case anyone cares, I cited an actual case where the Democrat
is doing a much better job than the Republian was. So much for
the "there's no difference" argument...
But it is a good point, that site decided to use a white background, why?
I tried to figure this out once, and I found some references to a single study that suggested entry error rates were lower for dark text on light backgrounds, but that was a pretty old one where the context was industrial settings: apparently they sometimes have problems with glare and reflections on the screen... so their solution is to give the users the third degree.
There's also the fact that Uncle Stevie went with a white background on the Mac, in an effort to imitate the look of paper -- that makes *a lot* of sense, eh? It couldn't be that glowing pixels are a different situation that reflected light off of fibers of dead trees, could it?
Anyway, if you mess around with different "themes" and such (Firefox lets you specify a color scheme to override the websites color scheme you know), you can get about 95% of the way to a light-on-dark linux system. (Some bozo has always hardcoded a white background somewhere or other...)
My personal opinion is that it looks better, and it's less fatiguing to use for long periods.
It could be that I'm extending the lifetime of my laptop's battery by using black backgrounds... I should try
a few experiments some time to see if that works.
Oh you're one of those eh? "The Democrats do it too!"... so it's fine when the Republicans do it!
By the way, did you notice
this story?.
This is all about the brand new Secretary of State in California, Debra Bowen, giving the
DRE manufacturers hell. There was no hope of getting these problems looked at under her
Republican predecessor, Bruce McPherson... he loved DREs for some strange reason...
Voting Democrat in the hopes that they'd fix the system was always an act of desperation, but what else could you do? Are you seriously suggesting we'd be better off in some way if Congress were Republican right now?
Remind me again what ESR's contribution has actually been?
He wrote some decent reviews of SF novels for the sf-lovers usenet news group (search for "Raymond's Reviews")
He did a number of useful, grunt work things, like managing the termcap info (if I remember right)
He wrote the original version of the fetchmail utility (whose point I still haven't grasped, myself, and the later maintainers went out of their way to dis his original work on it, but there you go).
He wrote the "Cathedral" essay, which while over-hyped and now somewhat dated, actually did play an important historical role in the formation of the mozilla project, which led to firefox.
Oh, he wrote the original vc.el package for emacs, which I think is PFC myself.
That's about it, off the top of my head. Someone else can handle the list of irritating quirks that have created so many ESR-haters...
And if you are completely wrong (I have all the other climate scientist on my side by the way)? Oh so we should put a big mirror in space and "fix" things?
You're missing the main point, dude: choosing not to mess with the situation is also a choice. And choosing not to have the capability of messing with things, in the event that the climate scientists decide that we really do need to do it, that is perhaps a tad irresponsible, no?
If you're trying to make the point that having a capability tempts people to use it in advance of any evidence of need... well sure. Should humanity then choose to remain powerless in hopes of minimizing it's mistakes?
(By the way: should the United States have an "economic policy"? After all, the US economy -- not to mention the global economy -- is an astoundingly complex system that no one understands in it's entirety, certainly no one can predict it's behavior with any accuracy. What right do we have to think we can mess with it with any degree of wisdom?)
Perhaps folks who have no idea what they are talking about shouldn't make critical decisions, or assume that they can?
And yet, you feel comfortable making critical decisions about the future of the human race, eh?
The Jimmy Wales talk I was refering to is summarized here but to get the Q&A
session you'll need to listen to it.
Here's a quotation from the summary:
The secret of Wikipedia's content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust. He said that most social software systems are designed around expected problems. "Suppose you ran a restaurant that way. If you serve steak, that means steak knives, which are really dangerous in the wrong hands, so you need to put barriers between the tables."
"If you prevent people from doing bad things, you prevent them from doing good things, and it eliminates opportunities for trust."
I fully expect that the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, etc., probably have propaganda agencies astroturfing Wikipedia and other web sites to their own advantage. This is what countries do.
Well, sure, that's what they do when they're not restrained by a responsible, informed citizenry that's concerned with maintaining the integrity of information flow in a democracy.
The actual question in my mind is "What should wikipedia do?". Wikipedia functions remarkably well when all it has to worry about is cranks and vandals. How can it repeal a well-funded, large scale attempt at subversion?
What changes could it possibly make to it's proceedures to make it resistant to subversion?
(And if your attitude toward wikipedia is something like "who cares, it's just a toy", cross out wikipedia and fill in the name of any other collaborative website. You sometimes get people engaging in lots of hifalutin rhetoric about how the web is the last hope for a true citizen's democracy and so on... is that all nonsense? Is there any way to fix the problem?)
Good golly, if my country's intelligence services are not monitoring every major web site (plus a lot of obscure minor web sites of which I've never heard), then they're incompetent idiots and I want them all shot, or at least fired.
If they want to contribute true information to Wikipedia out of
their own knowledge, well that's nice. If they want to contribute
false information to Wikipedia for some obscure reason -- to fox
the opposition, I guess, who are clueless newbs who believe
anything they read on the 'net -- then that's an annoying waste
of my tax dollars, but hardly seems worth raising a fuss over.
There are some cases that definitely would be worth raising
a fuss over. Take a really far-fetched hypothetical case:
imagine a US administration that decided to use covert operations
to influence an election to keep itself in power.
If
the Wikipedia has to rely on the honesty of every last J. Random
Web User --
Now, that's not the issue --
if they can't easily detect a nontrivial campaign of
deliberate falsehood -- then they're clearly doomed.
Yes, that is the issue, and yes, I do think that they're
probably doomed... unless Jimbo Wales wakes up and stops singing
Kumbaya for long enough to realize that trusting everyone
isn't a strategy that scales very well.
The reason wikipedia works despite rogue users is the odds that vandalism will be corrected because the whole world is watching. That model can't compensate for mischief by administrators with direct database access.
The way I would put it is that the safe guards in place that do such an excellent job of repelling
small-scale amateur vandals on a site such as wikipedia are in no way adequate to repel a well-funded attack from a large organization.
Whether or not the "SlimVirgin" cabal is such a case, I think cases like this are inevitable as wikipedia grows in importance... Jimbo Wales appears to be in a state of denial on the subject. E.g. after his talk at Long Now Foundation, someone asked the question: "What if the Chinese government changed tactics and instead of banning wikipedia set out actively to subvert it?" He essentially punted on the question, and told an anecdote about how they dealt with a small group of neo-nazi idiots, as though the two cases have anything to do with each other.
(If anyone cares, the state of my thinking thus far on the subject is: the
the toy web
is being (or is about to be) exploited by
the rover boys
or some other purveyors of a
surrogate truth).
You are making the assumption that our models are good enough to predict what would happen if we do X. Show me the data of predictive accuracy over centuries (Or even decades for that matter).
Hardly. I'm making the assumption that we're stuck: we need to make critically important decisions in the absence of anything like perfect information. Heigh-ho.
We are not doomed, everybody is not going to die. Things may change..a little, and even then its going to take 100's of years.
Unless you happen to be completely wrong. Note: the arctic region has been thawing out a lot faster than anyone predicted.
In any case: I think the time to start working on global warming amelioration tricks is now, not when we're
(even more) desperate for them.
Sure cut CO2 emissions, its a great idea with a lot more going for it than just climate change
Sure does. Something like hundreds of thousands of American deaths annually can be attributed to coal burning.
Slashdot Mirror
spun wrote:
Even if that's right, it still wouldn't be a "double-standard". Oh come on, the boomers practically invented idealistic social protest!... when their ass was on the line... when it was trendy...Presuming you're correct -- which for me is a big presumption -- a variant of the plan could be performed with only two bombs. (1) Demo first, with threat to hit some unspecified city; (2) Hit the city only if surrender is not forthcoming.
Because it's a rough and tough world and you've got to show you're tougher and nastier than anyone else on the planet -- but this isn't working so well for the Bush regime is it? There's something to be said for keeping the moral high ground.
But this is just a verbal fig-leaf from you: you believe in being rough and tough and showing how nasty you are don't you?
Correct: it's all a matter of second-guessing on my part, and in any case, no one can play the counter-factual game with any certainty. Still, it's interesting that even at the time, a lot of people on the inside had their reservations, didn't they?
Well, This is my idea.
And if we don't use the ones you specify, we're cheating.
gowen wrote:
Will they kick you out of the United States if you share something?
If Company A cuts a deal with Company B to split the costs on something and share the resource, does that mean they've ceased to be capitalists?
If I share the Xerox machine with the guys in the next office, have I become a dirty communist?
Really: The GPL was carefully designed to be orthogonal to "capitalism". It does not prohibit you from being in business, or from making money... it does prohibit some things you're allowed to do with someone else's code.
And it sure as hell is something new under the sun, or people with 5-digit slashids wouldn't need to have the basics recited to them over-and-over again.
I think I see what you're going for, though as I've already outlined I think in actuality you'd find problems with your system that are very similar to what we already have. The EFF delegate would keep explaining to the troops that they just had to compromise on those DRM issues in order to get the RIAA delegates support on those privacy issues, and so on.
One advantage of your delegates, though, is that it would be easier to fire them.
(I send notes every couple of weeks to Nancy Pelosi begging her to just impeach the bastards, and it's getting old...)
Interesting. In your system, would I have to hand all of my votes over to a single delegate, or could I sub-divide the issues among multiple delegates?
In any case, I think if you game it out, what ends up happening is that the delegates need to form voting blocks to get anything past the other delegates, and you end up with extreme levels of compromise going on to the point where your input into the system becomes nearly unrecognizeable... not unlike the American system of representative democracy.
(Or at least, that's the way representative democracy worked some decades ago, before it became totally corrupted. Part of the trouble is it's hard to distinguish the "normal" level of compromise from "representatives" that are only pretending to represent you.)
Moraelin wrote:
"Oh damn! My gun went off by mistake. Sorry about that. It was an accident. Really."
MrNaz wrote:
Using what you want to believe as a primary premise is unlikely to get you to the truth.
(But I like the point that if they can do video editing, it seems weird they can't do a decent video.)
But there's always Albania.
sommere wrote:
And you think that the electorate can make intelligent, informed decisions when asked to vote on hundreds of issues? Democracy doesn't scale well up to that level, that's why we're stuck with a Democratic-Republic [1]
Techie geeks have this amazing capability to focus on the wrong problem...
[1] Or we were, before the New Regime took over.
So, the reason intelligent people don't engage in promiscuous sex are practical? It's all about controlling disease and pregnancy?
Then why don't we all get together for erotic massage parties (house rules: no fucking, and strictly no fluid exchange allowed)?
And in case anyone cares, I cited an actual case where the Democrat is doing a much better job than the Republian was. So much for the "there's no difference" argument...
There's also the fact that Uncle Stevie went with a white background on the Mac, in an effort to imitate the look of paper -- that makes *a lot* of sense, eh? It couldn't be that glowing pixels are a different situation that reflected light off of fibers of dead trees, could it?
Anyway, if you mess around with different "themes" and such (Firefox lets you specify a color scheme to override the websites color scheme you know), you can get about 95% of the way to a light-on-dark linux system. (Some bozo has always hardcoded a white background somewhere or other...) My personal opinion is that it looks better, and it's less fatiguing to use for long periods.
It could be that I'm extending the lifetime of my laptop's battery by using black backgrounds... I should try a few experiments some time to see if that works.
Oh you're one of those eh? "The Democrats do it too!"... so it's fine when the Republicans do it!
By the way, did you notice this story?. This is all about the brand new Secretary of State in California, Debra Bowen, giving the DRE manufacturers hell. There was no hope of getting these problems looked at under her Republican predecessor, Bruce McPherson... he loved DREs for some strange reason...
That's about it, off the top of my head. Someone else can handle the list of irritating quirks that have created so many ESR-haters...
You're missing the main point, dude: choosing not to mess with the situation is also a choice. And choosing not to have the capability of messing with things, in the event that the climate scientists decide that we really do need to do it, that is perhaps a tad irresponsible, no?
If you're trying to make the point that having a capability tempts people to use it in advance of any evidence of need... well sure. Should humanity then choose to remain powerless in hopes of minimizing it's mistakes?
(By the way: should the United States have an "economic policy"? After all, the US economy -- not to mention the global economy -- is an astoundingly complex system that no one understands in it's entirety, certainly no one can predict it's behavior with any accuracy. What right do we have to think we can mess with it with any degree of wisdom?)
And yet, you feel comfortable making critical decisions about the future of the human race, eh?
The Jimmy Wales talk I was refering to is summarized here but to get the Q&A session you'll need to listen to it.
Here's a quotation from the summary:
Kadin2048 wrote:
Well, sure, that's what they do when they're not restrained by a responsible, informed citizenry that's concerned with maintaining the integrity of information flow in a democracy.
The actual question in my mind is "What should wikipedia do?". Wikipedia functions remarkably well when all it has to worry about is cranks and vandals. How can it repeal a well-funded, large scale attempt at subversion? What changes could it possibly make to it's proceedures to make it resistant to subversion?
(And if your attitude toward wikipedia is something like "who cares, it's just a toy", cross out wikipedia and fill in the name of any other collaborative website. You sometimes get people engaging in lots of hifalutin rhetoric about how the web is the last hope for a true citizen's democracy and so on... is that all nonsense? Is there any way to fix the problem?)
Quadraginta wrote:
There are some cases that definitely would be worth raising a fuss over. Take a really far-fetched hypothetical case: imagine a US administration that decided to use covert operations to influence an election to keep itself in power.
Now, that's not the issue -- Yes, that is the issue, and yes, I do think that they're probably doomed... unless Jimbo Wales wakes up and stops singing Kumbaya for long enough to realize that trusting everyone isn't a strategy that scales very well.(The current state of my thinking on the subject, if anyone cares: THE_TOY_WEB, THE_ROVERS, SURROGATE_TRUTH)
The way I would put it is that the safe guards in place that do such an excellent job of repelling small-scale amateur vandals on a site such as wikipedia are in no way adequate to repel a well-funded attack from a large organization.
Whether or not the "SlimVirgin" cabal is such a case, I think cases like this are inevitable as wikipedia grows in importance... Jimbo Wales appears to be in a state of denial on the subject. E.g. after his talk at Long Now Foundation, someone asked the question: "What if the Chinese government changed tactics and instead of banning wikipedia set out actively to subvert it?" He essentially punted on the question, and told an anecdote about how they dealt with a small group of neo-nazi idiots, as though the two cases have anything to do with each other.
(If anyone cares, the state of my thinking thus far on the subject is: the the toy web is being (or is about to be) exploited by the rover boys or some other purveyors of a surrogate truth).
Hardly. I'm making the assumption that we're stuck: we need to make critically important decisions in the absence of anything like perfect information. Heigh-ho.
Unless you happen to be completely wrong. Note: the arctic region has been thawing out a lot faster than anyone predicted.
In any case: I think the time to start working on global warming amelioration tricks is now, not when we're (even more) desperate for them.
Sure does. Something like hundreds of thousands of American deaths annually can be attributed to coal burning.