You've got a point. Governments: the ultimate CA. I'm ok with that, though. People use that same government ID to get through the rest of life, so even if it's wrong, it becomes correct, almost by definition. Mostly.
A bank or online stock trader is probably gonna have to cough up for ALL the majors.
If people did things right, those examples wouldn't need trusted introducers at all. No CA. When I opened my bank account, I had to go there in person and show my id. (And they had to put on a good show to convince me there were really "the bank" and not some fly-by-night con artist renting an office for a week.) Banks and their customers could be certifying each other.
I could see a requirement for PCI compliance you must get certs from at least 3 of this list of 40 providers, etc.
Actually, PCI would be a good opportunity to require that people do things right (see above). Make it so that a bank and a customer have to directly authenticate each other or else they're not compliant with common-sense best practices.
Furthermore, since we're twisting peoples' arms here anyway, require that the banks' signatures of customers identities, be shared with the public. Instant WoT upgrade, for the non bank world to use.:-)
(Governments would hate this, though, since it would lead to a secure Internet for the mainstream.)
Not true. The last system I build used an Athlon II 610e and I used the stock cooler. Not because it was a tight budget machine, but because the stock cooler is totally adequate for a 45W TDP CPU.
If I were building a "hotrod" machine I might indeed use beefier cooling (and that's exactly what Intel's "extreme" CPUs are for), but for something that is on 24/7 if temperature is your problem, then you're probably doing it wrong (though yes, there might be exceptions).
WTF does any of this have to do with terrorist attacks?
The problem here is that TSA is facilitating a black market in beverages, shampoo and nail clippers. And instead of just letting me carry my pocket knife (it's a convenience, not a weapon, dammit) now I have to go through a government-enforced courier monopoly to get it through the checkpoints.
*sigh* Just another way to nickel and dime us to death.
I'm mostly just kidding, but not completely. Look at all the non-security-related effects that "security" checkpoints have. By government creating exceptions, a whole new flavorful realm of ideas is created along with it. Most of those ideas will be stupid, but not all of them.:-) Think of all the ways the ways a byzantine tax code ends up creating unanticipated emergent features of an economy.
President Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring!
Buck Turgidson: Well, I, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
What if analysis of the problem leads to the conclusion that it's unsafe? The practice might get banned, or they might have to pay for the externality instead of getting the subsidy they're currently getting. Shifting water-cleanup costs to people who drink water is a damn sweet deal.
What if all the competing companies are basically all using the same trade secret? Turn it into more of a patent thing, and then There Can Be Only One. And that's great it you're The One but kinda sucks if you're one of the rest, who Congress just said has to go out of business in order to support your former competitor's monopoly.
Sorry, but this is not nearly as hilarious as giving AIDS to cancer victims. I would prefer to make up a quotation, maybe something like:
In the Teller experiment, the researchers injected smallpox virus along with the HIV, resulting in cancer remission an additional 7% of the time. This exceeded the remission rate that had been provided by lobotomizing cancer patients (4.5% increase in remission), keeping them isolated in boxes without any human contact (3% increase in remission), and killing all their dreams (only 2% increase in remission). Experiments in combining the above treatments, on live human subjects drawn from low-income areas and racially-suppressed populations, are underway.
This guy thinks of Thunderbird and Evolution as "offline e-mail readers." Really, that's what he calls them, using "offline" very consistently. And while it's true that they can be used offline, and maybe some people still use 'em that way (POP download, hang up the modem, read your emails off the ISP's clock, send replies to local SMTP, then dial up again and let the email go out), referring to them that way shows a pretty major misunderstanding of what is by far the most common use case of mail readers.
So right off the bat, before he even really gets into the real topic at hand (web browsers as generic (but powerful) terminals, replacing specialized applications running locally), he's made it harder for people to take him seriously.
All that aside, while I understand people's attraction to web mail and other web services, the author's premise really seems to be that this shit is the inevitable future. Hey, for the short-term, he may really be right. Most people are getting away with it, and putting their heads in the sand whenever they read a news story about spying, "cyber-warfare" and other DoS stories, the lack of accountability for free services, etc. But long-term, really?
Do you think there's a trend toward less spying (both by governments and in terms of the diversification of other parties who do it)? Do you think liability laws won't catch up or might even get more lenient?
Those seem like bad predictions, to me. I don't think working on local clients is last decade's battle at all; it's next decade's battle, after this luddite flirtation with the mainframe passes. People still take "the cloud ate my homework" and "I didn't know storing confidential info over there is a bad idea" excuse cards today, and I don't think there is a trend toward people generally acting more responsible, but nevertheless, people are eventually going to want good results, so they'll hold people who inappropriately use the cloud responsible, even if that motivation doesn't come from within.
If you subscribe to (now government-backed, thanks Blizzard) view that software EULAs are enforceable and software copies that come with EULAs don't have their titles transferred, then your "gift" of a computer will also come with contractual obligations upon the user that they never opted into and don't have the power to opt out of (except by replacing the OS). Furthermore, they probably won't even know what those obligations are, since you will be clicking through the 52-page "I agree" screen instead of the children reading it carefully and clicking "I agree" to indicate the child's fully informed consent to the binding contract.
(If this sounds totally fucked up, don't blame me.)
Doing this to anyone would hardly be "charitable," and doing it to children who don't even have a chance of understanding all the risks, would be even less so. Thus, you might want to avoid that if you're thinking in terms of charities.
Those game links are awesome. I wish I hadn't spent my one-shot mod-any-post-to-6 upgrade already, so I could do your post, getting you a rare achievement.
a lowish steady inflation IS a good thing. Without it, there's no incentive to continue investing money in the economy instead of under your mattress.
The return on the investment, itself, is that incentive. If there's no return, then the investment did not help the economy.
If you have inflation, it means that either we had a nuclear war and lost some techs, or that someone took something away from you. Encouraging investment is a dumb idea. By all means, allow it, because many investments are good for the economy. But punishing people for not doing it, will only be destructive.
Would you prefer deflation? The last time that was arranged we called it The Great Depression.
That's funny, because I call it "The Intel-vs-AMD war" (actually it goes by a great many names, as I peruse newegg), and it looks like a desirable quality for an economy to have.
Deflation is something we must learn to live with, if we want anything to get better. Why wouldn't you want to buy a house for a couple days worth of labor? Why wouldn't you want to fuel your vehicle for the LA-NY trip by risking breaking a nail as you switch on your fusion generator? Why wouldn't you want to live in the ST:TNG universe where unemployment is apparent somewhere around 99%?
Don't view deflation as a bad thing. It is a consequence you should expect to flow from advances. Everything you pay for should be getting cheaper, unless you think those things are already been done as well as can ever possibly be done.
is it really fair to say they're against bailouts and runaway health care spending?
Oops, I left out stimulus. Since Republicans are taking the position of not raising taxes on "job creators" (i.e. take a hit to the budget in the hopes that it causes growth -- i.e. the same strategy as stimulus but using a different tactic) I want to make sure the stimulus issue is on the table too here, as we discuss this party being against debt.
Yeah, it's the people [GOP] against bailouts, runaway health care spending, and stimulus to prop up bloated government payrolls that are the problem.
Wait a minute here.. can we explore this assertion? I know and will immediately concede that Republicans say those things, so no need to quote Republican platforms or speeches on this; I believe you. But if we look at their votes (or inaction) and Bush II signatures (or vetos), is it really fair to say they're against bailouts and runaway health care spending?
Let's see them on a dimensionless scale by dividing by something of equal measure, say GDP.
This isn't really attractive, because when someone says GDP they usually mean some made-up number published by the government, rather than an idealistic measurement of "real" production. (Not that I'm saying I know how to come up with that figure. It's hard.)
What I mean is that if a company can produce widgets but externalize the pollution instead of paying for it, not only is that externally cost not subtracted from their production which is added to GDP, but then if the pollution makes people sick, then the money we spend treating them is also added (rather than subtracted) to the GDP. Same for the money we spend on lawyers (!) to sue the widget company, and the money they spend on lobbyists to keep what they're doing legal.
Putting that stuff in GDP reminds me of those accounting tricks where you treat a liability as revenue, or an expense as an asset.;-)
The result is that GDP can't really be used as a factor in determining the health of the economy, nor its capacity to pay off a debt.
Not entirely true. One of the fairly common criticisms of Reagan is that it was during that particular administration that debt accelerated so much, in spite of a so-called "conservative" president. (Not that it really makes sense to hold presidents totally responsible for Congress' budgets, but they do deserve a share of the blame at least, and for better or worse the president tends to be the highest profile person in government.) Republicans explain this by saying that luxurious military spending was justified to win the cold war.
If they want to make that argument, ok, but that's just becomes another one of that many ways that Republicans distinguish themselves from their laughably inaccurate stereotype. (It's one of the reasons that when someone says they want small government, but then also say they support Republicans, that person it outed as either a liar or a fool. You an take one position or the other and still look principled, but taking both positions just looks silly.)
Of course, we have Bush II to use for illustrations now; there's really no reason to bring up Reagan anymore. Bush II is not only more recent and relevant to the current situation, but helps make the point to a more extreme degree. It's in retrospect that we've stopped batting our eyes at the Reagan years; at the time, though, the huge deficit was a big deal. It's almost quaint to think that people used to be pretty concerned when the debt exceeded one and two trillion dollar milestones, since even at that time, so many people thought it could never be paid off, and would therefore be a permanent injury to the country.
Even multiples of trillion might be arbitrary places to draw lines but still hold some pretty big psychological powers. This century we think in tens of trillions, though. At least until we hit one hundred trillion...;-)
You didn't store a current position, length and offset. That's just redundant. You just decremented the "remaining length" on every iteration, got the free zero check, and then used "branch if not zero". Takes one more register, not two
You're exactly right. I realized that a few minutes after my post, thinking, "Oh geez, someone is going to call me on my shitty inefficient programming" but a day went by and it looked like I was getting away with it. And then.. damn you. Oh well.
Privacy, more often than not, really is a shield for misconduct.
You've got it completely backwards. Privacy is a shield against misconduct.
Privacy is what you have when you say only to a small group of friends, instead of broadcasting to the whole world, "let's go camping next weekend." And the misconduct that privacy protects you from, is someone who isn't in that group, inferring that next weekend is a particularly low-risk time to burgle you house.
Privacy is what you have when you securely exchange login credentials with your bank, instead of sharing them your ISP or their ISP or anyone who has infiltrated any of them. The misconduct that privacy protects you against, is someone paying their own bills from your account.
What any of this has to do with libertarianism, I can't figure out. I gather from your rant that you don't like libertarianism and you don't like privacy. Maybe what connects those two things, is that they're both on the list of things you don't like?
All that aside, I think you actually do have some great points, especially about people expecting privacy in situations where they have no reason to believe they've secured it, and about people giving victory to their opponents by being silent about their beliefs.
I thought the purpose of.NET was to lure developers away from writing portable apps in Java. As long as the apps stay unportable, those developers' customers remain stuck with Windows.
(Whether Java was a credible threat at the time (pre-Android) we'll never know, but what's done is done and.NET happened.)
Assuming that's what the purpose was, it pretty much did its job for the better part of a decade and can hardly be called a mistake. Let's see you try to prevent the spread of technology at the beginning of the 21st century, and then we'll talk about who makes "mistakes" and who is the meta-luddite genius.
"Gentlemen," [All raise their drink glasses] "To Evil!" [Wild cheering]
Which architecture does what you claim? Seriously. I know it isn't PDP-11, x86, 6502, or 65816.
PDP-11 was very long time ago for me and only wrote a few hundred lines of assembly on it, so maybe you're right. I know I could test a register for zeroness pretty damn fast, though -- if it wasn't "free" is was faster than just about anything else the processor was capable of doing.
But 6502, are you serious? Load the accumulator with a zero and the Z flag is set. Load it with any other value and Z flag is clear. It's that easy. LDA followed by BNE or BEQ and that's your way out of the loop.
The whole TIVO clause is nothing more than "I don't like what you're doing with my software I said was free, so I'm making it less free, and calling it more free".
More like "I don't like that you've taken software that I tried to make perpetually user-auditable and user-maintainable, and found a way to prevent users from having the capacity to audit or maintain it."
As soon as you look at the question in terms of "less free" or "more free" you will get it wrong. It's not about degrees of freedom; it's about whose freedom when there's a conflict. GPL3 looks at the situation where developers' and users' interests conflict, and like Tron, fights for the users.
This is dead simple to understand if you go back and look at the roots of all this stuff. RMS wasn't just a programmer; he was a guy who had a printer that he wanted to use. It is really cool that a lot of programmers have followed his ideals, but dudes, it's not for us. It's for them (the people who hire us) because we recognize that sometimes we're them. Unless you're totally building all your computers out of transistors from the ground up, you're always one of "them," to some degree.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got a point. Governments: the ultimate CA. I'm ok with that, though. People use that same government ID to get through the rest of life, so even if it's wrong, it becomes correct, almost by definition. Mostly.
If people did things right, those examples wouldn't need trusted introducers at all. No CA. When I opened my bank account, I had to go there in person and show my id. (And they had to put on a good show to convince me there were really "the bank" and not some fly-by-night con artist renting an office for a week.) Banks and their customers could be certifying each other.
Actually, PCI would be a good opportunity to require that people do things right (see above). Make it so that a bank and a customer have to directly authenticate each other or else they're not compliant with common-sense best practices.
Furthermore, since we're twisting peoples' arms here anyway, require that the banks' signatures of customers identities, be shared with the public. Instant WoT upgrade, for the non bank world to use. :-)
(Governments would hate this, though, since it would lead to a secure Internet for the mainstream.)
Not true. The last system I build used an Athlon II 610e and I used the stock cooler. Not because it was a tight budget machine, but because the stock cooler is totally adequate for a 45W TDP CPU.
If I were building a "hotrod" machine I might indeed use beefier cooling (and that's exactly what Intel's "extreme" CPUs are for), but for something that is on 24/7 if temperature is your problem, then you're probably doing it wrong (though yes, there might be exceptions).
WTF does any of this have to do with terrorist attacks?
The problem here is that TSA is facilitating a black market in beverages, shampoo and nail clippers. And instead of just letting me carry my pocket knife (it's a convenience, not a weapon, dammit) now I have to go through a government-enforced courier monopoly to get it through the checkpoints.
*sigh* Just another way to nickel and dime us to death.
I'm mostly just kidding, but not completely. Look at all the non-security-related effects that "security" checkpoints have. By government creating exceptions, a whole new flavorful realm of ideas is created along with it. Most of those ideas will be stupid, but not all of them. :-) Think of all the ways the ways a byzantine tax code ends up creating unanticipated emergent features of an economy.
President Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring!
Buck Turgidson: Well, I, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
The industry might not like that. Two big risks:
Sorry, but this is not nearly as hilarious as giving AIDS to cancer victims. I would prefer to make up a quotation, maybe something like:
Ha! Near the end I kept saying "local clients" where I meant "local applications". That just happens to include email clients. ;-)
This guy thinks of Thunderbird and Evolution as "offline e-mail readers." Really, that's what he calls them, using "offline" very consistently. And while it's true that they can be used offline, and maybe some people still use 'em that way (POP download, hang up the modem, read your emails off the ISP's clock, send replies to local SMTP, then dial up again and let the email go out), referring to them that way shows a pretty major misunderstanding of what is by far the most common use case of mail readers.
So right off the bat, before he even really gets into the real topic at hand (web browsers as generic (but powerful) terminals, replacing specialized applications running locally), he's made it harder for people to take him seriously.
All that aside, while I understand people's attraction to web mail and other web services, the author's premise really seems to be that this shit is the inevitable future. Hey, for the short-term, he may really be right. Most people are getting away with it, and putting their heads in the sand whenever they read a news story about spying, "cyber-warfare" and other DoS stories, the lack of accountability for free services, etc. But long-term, really?
Do you think there's a trend toward less spying (both by governments and in terms of the diversification of other parties who do it)? Do you think liability laws won't catch up or might even get more lenient?
Those seem like bad predictions, to me. I don't think working on local clients is last decade's battle at all; it's next decade's battle, after this luddite flirtation with the mainframe passes. People still take "the cloud ate my homework" and "I didn't know storing confidential info over there is a bad idea" excuse cards today, and I don't think there is a trend toward people generally acting more responsible, but nevertheless, people are eventually going to want good results, so they'll hold people who inappropriately use the cloud responsible, even if that motivation doesn't come from within.
Local clients will return.
porntipsguzzardo
If you subscribe to (now government-backed, thanks Blizzard) view that software EULAs are enforceable and software copies that come with EULAs don't have their titles transferred, then your "gift" of a computer will also come with contractual obligations upon the user that they never opted into and don't have the power to opt out of (except by replacing the OS). Furthermore, they probably won't even know what those obligations are, since you will be clicking through the 52-page "I agree" screen instead of the children reading it carefully and clicking "I agree" to indicate the child's fully informed consent to the binding contract.
(If this sounds totally fucked up, don't blame me.)
Doing this to anyone would hardly be "charitable," and doing it to children who don't even have a chance of understanding all the risks, would be even less so. Thus, you might want to avoid that if you're thinking in terms of charities.
With MacOS or Windows the situation isn't really any different, because someone will just write:
Those game links are awesome. I wish I hadn't spent my one-shot mod-any-post-to-6 upgrade already, so I could do your post, getting you a rare achievement.
That's good advice whether you're flying or not, unless it's January.
The return on the investment, itself, is that incentive. If there's no return, then the investment did not help the economy.
If you have inflation, it means that either we had a nuclear war and lost some techs, or that someone took something away from you. Encouraging investment is a dumb idea. By all means, allow it, because many investments are good for the economy. But punishing people for not doing it, will only be destructive.
That's funny, because I call it "The Intel-vs-AMD war" (actually it goes by a great many names, as I peruse newegg), and it looks like a desirable quality for an economy to have.
Deflation is something we must learn to live with, if we want anything to get better. Why wouldn't you want to buy a house for a couple days worth of labor? Why wouldn't you want to fuel your vehicle for the LA-NY trip by risking breaking a nail as you switch on your fusion generator? Why wouldn't you want to live in the ST:TNG universe where unemployment is apparent somewhere around 99%?
Don't view deflation as a bad thing. It is a consequence you should expect to flow from advances. Everything you pay for should be getting cheaper, unless you think those things are already been done as well as can ever possibly be done.
Oops, I left out stimulus. Since Republicans are taking the position of not raising taxes on "job creators" (i.e. take a hit to the budget in the hopes that it causes growth -- i.e. the same strategy as stimulus but using a different tactic) I want to make sure the stimulus issue is on the table too here, as we discuss this party being against debt.
Wait a minute here.. can we explore this assertion? I know and will immediately concede that Republicans say those things, so no need to quote Republican platforms or speeches on this; I believe you. But if we look at their votes (or inaction) and Bush II signatures (or vetos), is it really fair to say they're against bailouts and runaway health care spending?
This isn't really attractive, because when someone says GDP they usually mean some made-up number published by the government, rather than an idealistic measurement of "real" production. (Not that I'm saying I know how to come up with that figure. It's hard.)
What I mean is that if a company can produce widgets but externalize the pollution instead of paying for it, not only is that externally cost not subtracted from their production which is added to GDP, but then if the pollution makes people sick, then the money we spend treating them is also added (rather than subtracted) to the GDP. Same for the money we spend on lawyers (!) to sue the widget company, and the money they spend on lobbyists to keep what they're doing legal.
Putting that stuff in GDP reminds me of those accounting tricks where you treat a liability as revenue, or an expense as an asset. ;-)
The result is that GDP can't really be used as a factor in determining the health of the economy, nor its capacity to pay off a debt.
Not entirely true. One of the fairly common criticisms of Reagan is that it was during that particular administration that debt accelerated so much, in spite of a so-called "conservative" president. (Not that it really makes sense to hold presidents totally responsible for Congress' budgets, but they do deserve a share of the blame at least, and for better or worse the president tends to be the highest profile person in government.) Republicans explain this by saying that luxurious military spending was justified to win the cold war.
If they want to make that argument, ok, but that's just becomes another one of that many ways that Republicans distinguish themselves from their laughably inaccurate stereotype. (It's one of the reasons that when someone says they want small government, but then also say they support Republicans, that person it outed as either a liar or a fool. You an take one position or the other and still look principled, but taking both positions just looks silly.)
Of course, we have Bush II to use for illustrations now; there's really no reason to bring up Reagan anymore. Bush II is not only more recent and relevant to the current situation, but helps make the point to a more extreme degree. It's in retrospect that we've stopped batting our eyes at the Reagan years; at the time, though, the huge deficit was a big deal. It's almost quaint to think that people used to be pretty concerned when the debt exceeded one and two trillion dollar milestones, since even at that time, so many people thought it could never be paid off, and would therefore be a permanent injury to the country.
Even multiples of trillion might be arbitrary places to draw lines but still hold some pretty big psychological powers. This century we think in tens of trillions, though. At least until we hit one hundred trillion... ;-)
You're exactly right. I realized that a few minutes after my post, thinking, "Oh geez, someone is going to call me on my shitty inefficient programming" but a day went by and it looked like I was getting away with it. And then.. damn you. Oh well.
You've got it completely backwards. Privacy is a shield against misconduct.
Privacy is what you have when you say only to a small group of friends, instead of broadcasting to the whole world, "let's go camping next weekend." And the misconduct that privacy protects you from, is someone who isn't in that group, inferring that next weekend is a particularly low-risk time to burgle you house.
Privacy is what you have when you securely exchange login credentials with your bank, instead of sharing them your ISP or their ISP or anyone who has infiltrated any of them. The misconduct that privacy protects you against, is someone paying their own bills from your account.
What any of this has to do with libertarianism, I can't figure out. I gather from your rant that you don't like libertarianism and you don't like privacy. Maybe what connects those two things, is that they're both on the list of things you don't like?
All that aside, I think you actually do have some great points, especially about people expecting privacy in situations where they have no reason to believe they've secured it, and about people giving victory to their opponents by being silent about their beliefs.
I thought the purpose of .NET was to lure developers away from writing portable apps in Java. As long as the apps stay unportable, those developers' customers remain stuck with Windows.
(Whether Java was a credible threat at the time (pre-Android) we'll never know, but what's done is done and .NET happened.)
Assuming that's what the purpose was, it pretty much did its job for the better part of a decade and can hardly be called a mistake. Let's see you try to prevent the spread of technology at the beginning of the 21st century, and then we'll talk about who makes "mistakes" and who is the meta-luddite genius.
"Gentlemen," [All raise their drink glasses] "To Evil!" [Wild cheering]
PDP-11 was very long time ago for me and only wrote a few hundred lines of assembly on it, so maybe you're right. I know I could test a register for zeroness pretty damn fast, though -- if it wasn't "free" is was faster than just about anything else the processor was capable of doing.
But 6502, are you serious? Load the accumulator with a zero and the Z flag is set. Load it with any other value and Z flag is clear. It's that easy. LDA followed by BNE or BEQ and that's your way out of the loop.
x86 is irrelevant to 1970s programmers.
More like "I don't like that you've taken software that I tried to make perpetually user-auditable and user-maintainable, and found a way to prevent users from having the capacity to audit or maintain it."
As soon as you look at the question in terms of "less free" or "more free" you will get it wrong. It's not about degrees of freedom; it's about whose freedom when there's a conflict. GPL3 looks at the situation where developers' and users' interests conflict, and like Tron, fights for the users.
This is dead simple to understand if you go back and look at the roots of all this stuff. RMS wasn't just a programmer; he was a guy who had a printer that he wanted to use. It is really cool that a lot of programmers have followed his ideals, but dudes, it's not for us. It's for them (the people who hire us) because we recognize that sometimes we're them. Unless you're totally building all your computers out of transistors from the ground up, you're always one of "them," to some degree.
The same way you transfer an int.