Small world, indeed. That was Dark Carnival in Berkeley, and the book was the Difference Engine. Bruce Sterling was there as well. I remember him mentioning using a typewriter, but I think that was for the Neuromancer trilogy, not his work after that. I got the distinct impression however that he was not much of a technology enthusiast personally, along with what I took as almost physical dislike of the "cyberpunk" label. I don't know if my impression of his work has changed so much as that I simply have gotten older and seen more of the world. Neuromancer in 2005 simply can't have the same impact that it did on me in the summer of 1986, when a friend lent me his copy.
Uhh... OK, jimbro2k. Regardless of whether ITU is the best body for Internet governance, the United States was the principal roadblock on intervention in the Rwandan genocide (by refusing to call it one). Let us not forget the stellar turn by the Belgian government, who in a stunning show pulled their experienced troops out of the already-small peacekeeping force in Rwanda and thus demonstrated their utter disinterest in the genocidal end of an ethnic conflict that they started (and profited from). The United States all but created Saddam Hussein, advancing his career as an Arab anti-communist and then kicking his career into overdrive when he was the US counterforce to the Iranian Islamic Revolution (providing arms and intelligence while we averted our gaze to his use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, which killed one million). The US and UK approved every sale of oil under the Oil-for-Food Program, which despite the stinking clouds of propaganda issuing from the professional gasbags at Fox News kept the Iraqi people fed despite one of the most rigid sanction regimes in history. Pol Pot got his start not from UN Plaza but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when Nixon and Kissinger decided to light up Cambodia with more ordnance than was dropped on Japan in WWII. Having created a monster, the US government fed it by supporting the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam when they invaded. All in all, the world needs no more of that type of "help." So I, for one, welcome our new ITU overlords.
Competition makes sense, except in the case of the delivery of utilities. Municipalities, with their citizen review boards, elected officials, bond initiatives, and referenda, may be boring as hell, but they do utilities better than for-profit corporations. For one, accountability to their residents will encourage them to make money-losing choices such as provide utility service to all their residents. Pushing bits over a wire and pushing kilowatts through a powerline are par excellance utilities, and the ILECs, IXCs, and cable monopolies are fighting municipal data carriers for the same reason power companies are fighting municipal power generation -- so they can continue to game the system (see Enron, WorldCom, &c.) and make obscene dollars. This isn't a call for government to fix it -- this is a call for the local governments to step up to their responsibilities to provide the common infrastructure that their residents need in order to participate fully in the lives of their communities.
I was in the Johns Hopkins Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. They test you when you're a kid. I'm almost 40. That tells me that a) researchers have been looking at gender differences in mathematical ability for at least a generation and b) your post being moderated "Insightful" is clear evidence something is wrong with the either the moderation process or the mental processes of those doing the moderation. To give you a taste of how much scientific inquiry has been done in this area, I've taken the liberty of doing a Google search for you, to give you a leg up.
Just as Watergate didn't scale -- oh, wait, it did; the burglers got caught by a security guard, and the reality of 60 months in the pokey got someone to squeal, and even then, Watergate didn't make its true scale evident until testimony under oath at a congressional hearing revealed the existence of the Oval Office taping mechanism. Organizing a surprise birthday party doesn't scale; organizing a coup d'etat scales well, especially if the participants have a hierarchical, quasi-military structure.
With all due respect, "for the hell of it" isn't a reasonable explanation for a statistically significant deviation between the exit polls and the reported results in this case. This isn't random noise, which in this case would cancel out. This is a skew. That implies organization, which you and I agree is not realistic to expect of the exit poll respondents. Hence we must look elsewhere for an explanation, yes?
The key word that you're ignoring here is organized. You're not asserting that you got together with other people and agreed to lie to exit pollsters, right? If not, then perhaps you could illuminate why you've lied on multiple occasions to exit pollsters as an individual decision. What was your motivator to lie, as opposed to ignoring the pollster?
You don't use Jim Crow tactics to further a free and fair election. You use them to suppress votes from people you suspect will vote against you. Ever work as an election judge? I have. If you show up at a polling place and you're not on the roll, you file a provisional ballot. Poll challengers, like William Rehnquist in 1962, are there to intimidate and harass. Don't pretend that you're upholding the law by breaking it.
If you consider voter intimidation (one of the many fine legacies of Jim Crow in this land) to be part of the "process," then sure, it worked. I guess that's why people were still voting at 3am, because of how well the "process" worked...
So what you are alleging is that statistically significant numbers of voters decided to game the system to create the impression that Kerry was winning? This has happened before, I'll admit; usually when an African-American candidate is running against a White candidate, a significant number of those polled will claim to have voted for the African-American candidate, so as not to appear racist. Governor Wilder of Virginia's election provided an excellent example of this. However, given the divisions of the electorate, people inclined to vote Bush aren't shy about it, and have few misgivings about telling people. And "lefties for Bush" is as electorally empty a category as "swift-boat veterans for Nader." Hence, I find the idea of People lie in exit polls as an explanation for the serious mismatch between exit polls and reported results to be fanciful.
Why yes, they did. Right up until the point where they were revised to better reflect the reported results. But what drives me to reply is that you would seriously think that someone who has raised in excess of $100,000 for a particular candidate, and has put in writing a pledge to deliver his home states' electoral votes for that candidate, should be the CEO of a company which manufactures and distributes unaccountable, proprietary voting machines to be used in an election featuring that candidate. The old Daley machine had the dead voting Democratic; looks like the O'Dell Diebold machine has daemons voting Republican. When referring to the tinfoil hats of others, it's probably best to set that glass of Kool-Aid down first. It bothers those of us in the Reality-Based Community.
Given that TFA indicated that Win2K was going to drive submarines carrying the UK's "Trident thermo-nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles", I don't think we want to experience that particular "trial by fire."
Uhh... you didn't mean this Milton Friedman, did you? The one who helped Pinochet double the poverty rate in Chile? Unlike Free/Open Source Software, which extends the purchasing power of government dollars, stimulates local industry, and builds local knowledgebases, Friedman's neoliberalism kills local industry and impoverishes local people. Cardoso's administration of Friedman's poison left his country a Switzerland inside an India, with the widest disparity between rich and poor in the world. I am equally excited that Lula is championing FOSS and calling for trade that is both free and reciprocal (as well as noting in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos that free and secure citizens are one of the main prerequisites for a free market). Friedman just doesn't relate.
I haven't made my mind up yet whether your comment is serious. If you're seriously proposing that we strip citizenship from those people living in rural areas and force the rural Western states to secede from the Union, I just have to ask why you think Civil War is cheaper than Universal Service.
Your suggestion would mean that predominantly rural states would have to pay for unprofitable local phone service either by significantly higher USF contributions from its few metropolitan customers or by raising taxes. Effectively, this would kill landline service in some of the Western states, and would kill landline service in many rural counties across the country. It would have the additional "benefit" of deepening rural/urban political divides. Looking to abandon USF is essentially the same as looking to charge five bucks to send US Mail to a rural route -- it'll have the same impact of the dividing the country for no good reason.
Oops, sorry, forgot to append the quote for you...
"This is the perfect condition of slavery, which is nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive: for, if once compact enter between them, and make an agreement for a limited power on the one side, and obedience on the other, the state of war and slavery ceases, as long as the compact endures: for, as has been said, no man can, by agreement, pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a power over his own life." [Emphasis added.]
As to your need to curse in your response... I'm not surprised. Your level of ignorance must be embarrassing to you. But think about it. How many Turkish kids grow up knowing about the Armenian genocide, after all. Why, then, should your school have taught you where the wealth of the US came from? Don't feel bad. Read up! It'll help expand that vocabulary of yours.
Slavery is a form of domesticated warfare, two populations at war essentially living together. The spoils of that war in the US created vast fortunes; if you steal something and then sell it (cotton, tobacco, etc.) you are essentially creating money. The descendents of those slaves have never been compensated, leaving those ill-gotten gains to continue circulating through the US economy, an economy which presents significant barriers blocking their full participation. Immigrants from Europe were able to integrate themselves into the US economy (at different speeds, mind you; e.g., it took longer for Italian-Americans than for Scandinavians) and hence were able to take advantage of those ill-gotten gains. Doesn't make them bad people, unless and until they knowingly become active or passive participants in perpetuating the problem. But if you live in the US, then slavery has an effect on your life. Now that the US is the sole superpower, that means US slavery has an effect on the entire world.
As others have said here, industrial-farmed corn is an fossil-fuel intensive crop. Methanol is a better fuel for fuel cells, for many reasons -- one being that biomass feedstocks for industrial-quantity methanol production require less energy input from non-renewable resources. Industrial-quantity methanol production can be achieved from ruminant dung, urine, and waste cellulose; utilize drought-resistant, cellulose-heavy crops that require little fertilizer, as well as ruminants that can adapt to drought, and the non-solar energy inputs go low enough that the production method is sustainable. All that, and a comparable energy density, gives a better fuel. But drink it, my friend, and blind you'll be...
I'd agree strongly that an energy storage and distribution system which leverages the existing fossil fuel network has a better chance of adoption. It seems to me, however, that catalysis of diesel or gasoline is much less of a solution than catalysis of biodiesel or methanol. Methanol can be combined with cooking grease and/or plant oils to make biodiesel; methanol also can be distributed directly utilizing the same road/rail/station network moving diesel today. It has high energy density, less excess carbon, very little sulfur contamination, and can be produced in sufficient quantities from biomass to be a sustainable, renewable energy solution. Of course, methanol also can generate electromotive force through catalysis directly, as more than one story on Slashdot has reported.
Although I've got strong opinions of these movies -- I love them, and am happy for the temporary corporate insanity which allowed them to be produced -- I've not said much about them online. At the end of Revolutions, the Oracle is responding to Seraph's question, "Did you always know?" Spelling that question out fully, what Seraph is asking is did you know that Neo, rather than Smith, would end the war? The answer to that question is no. The Oracle made the choice to help Neo, but it was a choice she did not understand -- she couldn't see past it. She told Neo that "one way or another, this war is going to end," but she did not know which way. When the Architect tells the Oracle that "you've played a dangerous game," it is to acknowledge the fact that had her belief in Neo been misplaced, the Oracle's choice would have ended all sentient life on Earth.
I believe that Reloaded and Revolutions would probably work best shown back-to-back with a 15-minute intermission between. They tell a complex story involving a large cast of characters, all of whom are involved in a fight for survival and many of whom have to deal with one or more invalidations of their worldview, most significantly Morpheus and Neo. That this story is told in a hair over four hours screen time is amazing. Since there is no preexisting text to draw on (LoTR), and no novelization either (2001), the understanding of what it is you're seeing -- what's real and not real -- has to come from you "making up your own damn mind." I love that.
"You've played a dangerous game." "Change always is."
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
Indeed, there are some choice revelations in this article. The highlights as I see them:
Business leaders expect that there will be deflation, long-term stagnation, and a collapse of the dollar, war or not;
Any war scenario short of the miraculous will lead to the Fed pushing interest rates towards zero, a spike in the US public debt and spot market oil prices, and global economic bad times for approximately a decade;
Good chance the "Middle East" could explode;
US economy is seen as the primary drag on the global economy;
US military planners acknowledge that war against Iraq has nothing to do with Iraq's current military capabilities, but is one stage in a campaign for what can only be called an empire;
South Africans know how to party (well, actually, I already knew that one;)
Is this as earth-shattering as publication of the Pentagon Papers? No. Should it have been distributed? Hell yeah.
Gosh, you are correct, US violations of international law and actions undermining implementation of UNSCR 687 have nothing to do with the Iraq conflict, which is all about the oil and dollars, except on Tuesday, when it may have something to do with the abundant water in the Tigris and Euphrates. Thanks for playing. See you at the impeachment!
I tend to agree more with the author than with Minsky, but do agree with you that the realization of Good-Old-Fashioned AI would be inaugurating the same exciting life of endless leisure that industrialization did: for those who own the machines, not for those who keep them running.
Slashdot Mirror
Small world, indeed. That was Dark Carnival in Berkeley, and the book was the Difference Engine. Bruce Sterling was there as well. I remember him mentioning using a typewriter, but I think that was for the Neuromancer trilogy, not his work after that. I got the distinct impression however that he was not much of a technology enthusiast personally, along with what I took as almost physical dislike of the "cyberpunk" label. I don't know if my impression of his work has changed so much as that I simply have gotten older and seen more of the world. Neuromancer in 2005 simply can't have the same impact that it did on me in the summer of 1986, when a friend lent me his copy.
Bullshit.
Uhh... OK, jimbro2k. Regardless of whether ITU is the best body for Internet governance, the United States was the principal roadblock on intervention in the Rwandan genocide (by refusing to call it one). Let us not forget the stellar turn by the Belgian government, who in a stunning show pulled their experienced troops out of the already-small peacekeeping force in Rwanda and thus demonstrated their utter disinterest in the genocidal end of an ethnic conflict that they started (and profited from). The United States all but created Saddam Hussein, advancing his career as an Arab anti-communist and then kicking his career into overdrive when he was the US counterforce to the Iranian Islamic Revolution (providing arms and intelligence while we averted our gaze to his use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, which killed one million). The US and UK approved every sale of oil under the Oil-for-Food Program, which despite the stinking clouds of propaganda issuing from the professional gasbags at Fox News kept the Iraqi people fed despite one of the most rigid sanction regimes in history. Pol Pot got his start not from UN Plaza but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when Nixon and Kissinger decided to light up Cambodia with more ordnance than was dropped on Japan in WWII. Having created a monster, the US government fed it by supporting the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam when they invaded. All in all, the world needs no more of that type of "help." So I, for one, welcome our new ITU overlords.
Competition makes sense, except in the case of the delivery of utilities. Municipalities, with their citizen review boards, elected officials, bond initiatives, and referenda, may be boring as hell, but they do utilities better than for-profit corporations. For one, accountability to their residents will encourage them to make money-losing choices such as provide utility service to all their residents. Pushing bits over a wire and pushing kilowatts through a powerline are par excellance utilities, and the ILECs, IXCs, and cable monopolies are fighting municipal data carriers for the same reason power companies are fighting municipal power generation -- so they can continue to game the system (see Enron, WorldCom, &c.) and make obscene dollars. This isn't a call for government to fix it -- this is a call for the local governments to step up to their responsibilities to provide the common infrastructure that their residents need in order to participate fully in the lives of their communities.
I was in the Johns Hopkins Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. They test you when you're a kid. I'm almost 40. That tells me that a) researchers have been looking at gender differences in mathematical ability for at least a generation and b) your post being moderated "Insightful" is clear evidence something is wrong with the either the moderation process or the mental processes of those doing the moderation. To give you a taste of how much scientific inquiry has been done in this area, I've taken the liberty of doing a Google search for you, to give you a leg up.
Just as Watergate didn't scale -- oh, wait, it did; the burglers got caught by a security guard, and the reality of 60 months in the pokey got someone to squeal, and even then, Watergate didn't make its true scale evident until testimony under oath at a congressional hearing revealed the existence of the Oval Office taping mechanism. Organizing a surprise birthday party doesn't scale; organizing a coup d'etat scales well, especially if the participants have a hierarchical, quasi-military structure.
With all due respect, "for the hell of it" isn't a reasonable explanation for a statistically significant deviation between the exit polls and the reported results in this case. This isn't random noise, which in this case would cancel out. This is a skew. That implies organization, which you and I agree is not realistic to expect of the exit poll respondents. Hence we must look elsewhere for an explanation, yes?
The key word that you're ignoring here is organized. You're not asserting that you got together with other people and agreed to lie to exit pollsters, right? If not, then perhaps you could illuminate why you've lied on multiple occasions to exit pollsters as an individual decision. What was your motivator to lie, as opposed to ignoring the pollster?
You don't use Jim Crow tactics to further a free and fair election. You use them to suppress votes from people you suspect will vote against you. Ever work as an election judge? I have. If you show up at a polling place and you're not on the roll, you file a provisional ballot. Poll challengers, like William Rehnquist in 1962, are there to intimidate and harass. Don't pretend that you're upholding the law by breaking it.
If you consider voter intimidation (one of the many fine legacies of Jim Crow in this land) to be part of the "process," then sure, it worked. I guess that's why people were still voting at 3am, because of how well the "process" worked...
So what you are alleging is that statistically significant numbers of voters decided to game the system to create the impression that Kerry was winning? This has happened before, I'll admit; usually when an African-American candidate is running against a White candidate, a significant number of those polled will claim to have voted for the African-American candidate, so as not to appear racist. Governor Wilder of Virginia's election provided an excellent example of this. However, given the divisions of the electorate, people inclined to vote Bush aren't shy about it, and have few misgivings about telling people. And "lefties for Bush" is as electorally empty a category as "swift-boat veterans for Nader." Hence, I find the idea of People lie in exit polls as an explanation for the serious mismatch between exit polls and reported results to be fanciful.
Why yes, they did. Right up until the point where they were revised to better reflect the reported results. But what drives me to reply is that you would seriously think that someone who has raised in excess of $100,000 for a particular candidate, and has put in writing a pledge to deliver his home states' electoral votes for that candidate, should be the CEO of a company which manufactures and distributes unaccountable, proprietary voting machines to be used in an election featuring that candidate. The old Daley machine had the dead voting Democratic; looks like the O'Dell Diebold machine has daemons voting Republican. When referring to the tinfoil hats of others, it's probably best to set that glass of Kool-Aid down first. It bothers those of us in the Reality-Based Community.
Given that TFA indicated that Win2K was going to drive submarines carrying the UK's "Trident thermo-nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles", I don't think we want to experience that particular "trial by fire."
Uhh... you didn't mean this Milton Friedman, did you? The one who helped Pinochet double the poverty rate in Chile? Unlike Free/Open Source Software, which extends the purchasing power of government dollars, stimulates local industry, and builds local knowledgebases, Friedman's neoliberalism kills local industry and impoverishes local people. Cardoso's administration of Friedman's poison left his country a Switzerland inside an India, with the widest disparity between rich and poor in the world. I am equally excited that Lula is championing FOSS and calling for trade that is both free and reciprocal (as well as noting in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos that free and secure citizens are one of the main prerequisites for a free market). Friedman just doesn't relate.
I haven't made my mind up yet whether your comment is serious. If you're seriously proposing that we strip citizenship from those people living in rural areas and force the rural Western states to secede from the Union, I just have to ask why you think Civil War is cheaper than Universal Service.
Your suggestion would mean that predominantly rural states would have to pay for unprofitable local phone service either by significantly higher USF contributions from its few metropolitan customers or by raising taxes. Effectively, this would kill landline service in some of the Western states, and would kill landline service in many rural counties across the country. It would have the additional "benefit" of deepening rural/urban political divides. Looking to abandon USF is essentially the same as looking to charge five bucks to send US Mail to a rural route -- it'll have the same impact of the dividing the country for no good reason.
Oops, sorry, forgot to append the quote for you...
"This is the perfect condition of slavery, which is nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive: for, if once compact enter between them, and make an agreement for a limited power on the one side, and obedience on the other, the state of war and slavery ceases, as long as the compact endures: for, as has been said, no man can, by agreement, pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a power over his own life." [Emphasis added.]
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter IV, Section 23.
As to your need to curse in your response... I'm not surprised. Your level of ignorance must be embarrassing to you. But think about it. How many Turkish kids grow up knowing about the Armenian genocide, after all. Why, then, should your school have taught you where the wealth of the US came from? Don't feel bad. Read up! It'll help expand that vocabulary of yours.
Slavery is a form of domesticated warfare, two populations at war essentially living together. The spoils of that war in the US created vast fortunes; if you steal something and then sell it (cotton, tobacco, etc.) you are essentially creating money. The descendents of those slaves have never been compensated, leaving those ill-gotten gains to continue circulating through the US economy, an economy which presents significant barriers blocking their full participation. Immigrants from Europe were able to integrate themselves into the US economy (at different speeds, mind you; e.g., it took longer for Italian-Americans than for Scandinavians) and hence were able to take advantage of those ill-gotten gains. Doesn't make them bad people, unless and until they knowingly become active or passive participants in perpetuating the problem. But if you live in the US, then slavery has an effect on your life. Now that the US is the sole superpower, that means US slavery has an effect on the entire world.
As others have said here, industrial-farmed corn is an fossil-fuel intensive crop. Methanol is a better fuel for fuel cells, for many reasons -- one being that biomass feedstocks for industrial-quantity methanol production require less energy input from non-renewable resources. Industrial-quantity methanol production can be achieved from ruminant dung, urine, and waste cellulose; utilize drought-resistant, cellulose-heavy crops that require little fertilizer, as well as ruminants that can adapt to drought, and the non-solar energy inputs go low enough that the production method is sustainable. All that, and a comparable energy density, gives a better fuel. But drink it, my friend, and blind you'll be...
I'd agree strongly that an energy storage and distribution system which leverages the existing fossil fuel network has a better chance of adoption. It seems to me, however, that catalysis of diesel or gasoline is much less of a solution than catalysis of biodiesel or methanol. Methanol can be combined with cooking grease and/or plant oils to make biodiesel; methanol also can be distributed directly utilizing the same road/rail/station network moving diesel today. It has high energy density, less excess carbon, very little sulfur contamination, and can be produced in sufficient quantities from biomass to be a sustainable, renewable energy solution. Of course, methanol also can generate electromotive force through catalysis directly, as more than one story on Slashdot has reported.
Although I've got strong opinions of these movies -- I love them, and am happy for the temporary corporate insanity which allowed them to be produced -- I've not said much about them online. At the end of Revolutions, the Oracle is responding to Seraph's question, "Did you always know?" Spelling that question out fully, what Seraph is asking is did you know that Neo, rather than Smith, would end the war? The answer to that question is no. The Oracle made the choice to help Neo, but it was a choice she did not understand -- she couldn't see past it. She told Neo that "one way or another, this war is going to end," but she did not know which way. When the Architect tells the Oracle that "you've played a dangerous game," it is to acknowledge the fact that had her belief in Neo been misplaced, the Oracle's choice would have ended all sentient life on Earth.
I believe that Reloaded and Revolutions would probably work best shown back-to-back with a 15-minute intermission between. They tell a complex story involving a large cast of characters, all of whom are involved in a fight for survival and many of whom have to deal with one or more invalidations of their worldview, most significantly Morpheus and Neo. That this story is told in a hair over four hours screen time is amazing. Since there is no preexisting text to draw on (LoTR), and no novelization either (2001), the understanding of what it is you're seeing -- what's real and not real -- has to come from you "making up your own damn mind." I love that.
"You've played a dangerous game."
"Change always is."
Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.
I find him a bit more authoritative than the man who said "a little bit of hypocrisy is a good thing" when it comes to life and death issues.
Is this as earth-shattering as publication of the Pentagon Papers? No. Should it have been distributed? Hell yeah.
Gosh, you are correct, US violations of international law and actions undermining implementation of UNSCR 687 have nothing to do with the Iraq conflict, which is all about the oil and dollars, except on Tuesday, when it may have something to do with the abundant water in the Tigris and Euphrates. Thanks for playing. See you at the impeachment!
I tend to agree more with the author than with Minsky, but do agree with you that the realization of Good-Old-Fashioned AI would be inaugurating the same exciting life of endless leisure that industrialization did: for those who own the machines, not for those who keep them running.