Sorry, but the big problem is monoculture. This results in an entire crop being (nearly) genetically identical. THIS results in all plants being susceptible to the same invasive organism...of course it's also what makes the taste, shape, etc. so predictable, and until the invasive organism arrives, that's quite advantageous.
Basically I agree with your points. My feeling, however, is that new GMO products should be treated the same as new drugs. One can argue that the controls should be tighter, as they expose more people to the change. Often the changes created by a new GMO organism are greater than the change in a new drug (which is often just tweaking to preserve patentability).
I think this means that I'm in favor of tighter controls on GMO organisms than you are, but I'm not sure, as I also favor looser controls on new drugs (than are officially in place...I'm not considering here that drugs tests are run by the people who will profit from finding them safe and effective).
I have severe problems with the licenses used by both MS and Apple. In particular the provision that has been in several versions of their licenses that allow them to "add, copy, modify, change, or delete any file on your computer". That proviso was originally instituted by MS, but Apple tried to get me to accept it by sneaking it into the license on a security upgrade. So now I have two computers that I can never attach to the internet, but due to data locked in non-portable formats I can't every get rid of. (Well, ever is a long time. I'm probably getting near the end of it. Which is a very good thing since one of them hasn't be upgraded in nearly a decade.)
Unfortunately, MATE depends on a lot of Gnome2 applications which are no longer being maintained. Cinnamon is probably a better long-term bet...but not if Gnome3 really goes away.
If Vala would ever get ready to use. The documentation seems to require that you already know the language, or possibly just GObject, before you start using it.
The classic "fallback" mode was so unusable ugly that I quickly switched to something else after Gnome2 disappeared from the repository. I'm still not as happy with the replacement (KDE4) as I was with Gnome2, but then I was never as happy with Gnome2 as I was with KDE3.
I'm not really after a lightweight desktop, I'm after a usable desktop that doesn't interfere with my workflow. This means that I can't be needing to re-fix it every month or so.
Additionally the original Gnome3 wouldn't work with my hardware. I believe that this has been fixed now, but I find it's actually worse than Unity.
In the declaration of independence it talks about the government deriving it's "just powers" from the consent of the governed. I doubt that the signers would have considered the powers being discussed as just. I certainly don't.
P.S.: I don't think governmental prosecutions are random. Just unpredicable. Perhaps chaotic.
He said "taken as a whole". He didn't say the individual small pieces were difficult to understand. And if you don't understand the difference, you don't encourage one to see you as someone who could even potentially understand it...or probably a much simpler system.
It's sort of like "understanding weather". Small pieces are well understood, but the whole thing... I'm not sure it's even potentially understandable. Are there any reasonable bounds over what you would need to know? Do you need to predict the glactic equivalent of solar winds? Clearly you need to be able to predict nearby novae, but how close is nearby? What about supernovae? I don't know where noise trumps incoming signal, and I suspect that nobody does, because sometimes noise reinforces the incoming signal. (In the brain a certain level of noise improves signal detection.)
But when, like MIT, they select nearly the worst thing they could do, you should at LEAST question their ethical judgement.
They had lots of choices. Picking the best would have been difficult. Not picking a blatantly evil one would have been easy. They picked a blatantly evil one.
This will tarnish the name of MIT for at least the next decade. (To, admittedly, a decreasing amount.) But the people who made the decision should never again be put in a responsible position. They have proven that they are either ethical imbicles or actively evil. So their names should be made public.
Why would they bother? Slashdot records aren't all that secure...or that significant. The only ones that might give them (the NSA) ANY trouble are the anonymous cowards, and that would just be disentangling them.
Just for example, look at how they (Slashdot) disguise your e-mail id. It designed to be difficult to write a script that keeps working, but certainly not impossible. And histroic records of posts are kept in accessible form for months, if not years.
Now I'll admit that for the NSA to "break into" Slashdot and read their records is violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse law, but I don't think it would ever be applied to them.
What I think is that they are the entering wedge of a new kind of game interface. One that's played with a virtual reality overlay on top of ordinary reality. (I've seen one smartphone version of a game that does this, and I don't even own a smartphone. But it tended to lead people out into the traffic. However, read "Halting State" by Charles Stross for a more developed explanation. In particular the game "Spooks" played within the book.)
It's the only plausible answer I've heard. Carbon sequestering isn't very plausible in any case, but it's definitely not a quick change kind of thing.
Solar reflection, though, is a possible weapon, though not one that's either very directional or very easy to implement. If you want to use it as a weapon you'd need to do something like use an h-bomb to set off a dormant volcano, or a series of them. That could produce a "year without a summer", but it's not very localized. Not very secret. And also not very quick.
Both are much more reasonable if you want to predict the effect of slow changes.
Nah. Free TV and computer game machines to those who can't afford them would help immensely. Combine that with a yearly prize for the most addictive game and the populations rate of increase will plumet. (This does need to be world wide, of course. So make a version of this program a part of foreign aid...with solar powered game machines with a good battery life, so they can be played after dark.)
Do this an no police state is required for a population drop. The problem is that there's a time lag. The population already born is going to really crush the planet. And in many places it's still true that parents depend on their children to support them in their old age, so children are a (long term) net benefit to the individuals. That link needs to be broken. So make elder-care another part of foreign aid...AND implement a better version locally.
To make this work, you also need to push automation, so people are free to not be all that economically productive. Not for survival level concerns. (It can be necessary for status, or for luxuries...as long as the luxuries aren't electricity, elecritc lights, elder-care, etc. Those act to decrease the population growth rate.)
P.S.: It won't help much. but stop discriminating against gays. Even give them tax benefits. They aren't increasing the population. Still, most people aren't very flexible along that spectrum, so it's not an important element for that reason. (Other reasons, like human rights, also urge acting in this direction, but that's nebulous, and reasonable people can disagree about that. About population sensible people can't disagree.)
Well, you could look at the Septunagent government in Stross' "Iron Sunrise". It was a minor feature, but that government could, when it chose, implement "sparrow-fart security" (which I took to mean that they not only noticed any sparrow falling, but even farting). Generally, however, they went in for a much lighter hand. Sometimes, as far as the protagonist was concerned, a bit too light. (And let people make decisions out of prejudice or malice rather than acting on good information.)
Stross doesn't like that series, but I don't see why he thinks that the ReMastered would inevitably win. Herman is, after all, only a low level antibody of the Escaton.
While I agree that many of the examples were implemented according to the existing rules (as far as I can tell from this distance in time), I disagree that this exhempts them from being the basis of the problem.
For that matter, the avoidance of the packing of the Supreme Court was also handled following the rules, and the president threatening to pack it was also according to the rules, so if that is your critrion, then I don't understand your selection of that case. I tend to see that as an argument WITHIN the federal government over who has how much of the power. And, yes, it might have been better if the executive hadn't won. So from my viewpoint, that's a minor consideration. (Even John Marshall's Supreme Court [the first] was highly political. So that's not a change.)
Sorry, but the turning point, if there is *one* most significant turning point, was the Civil War, where both sides massively increased the control of the central government over the populace. A secondary turning point was the passage of the income tax, where the power of the states was drastically reduced, because the federal money started collecting significan taxes directly. There are many others. The violent suppression of competing currencies is one. A really early one was the "Alien and Sedition acts", though that was rendered ineffective as government overreach. Direct election of Senators, however, was another major turning point. Again this increased the power of the federal government relative to the state governments.
The Constitution itself was a mixed bag. At least after the Bill of Rights was added. The Articles of Confederation didn't restrict the powers of the states very much, and some of them were more repressive than the federal government is yet. The Constitution set up a weak central government over the states, which gradually grew more and more powerful, until now the states are of minor significance in comparison. OTOH, we should never forget (I believe it was) Patrick Henry's response to the constitution: "I smell a rat, it squints towards monarchy." (I tried to check this on Google, but couldn't verify the source.)
That's one of several right answers. My favorites are all variants of "Plug in this cable connecting two ports on the chassis", or, alternatively, "Plug in this cable connecting this port on the server to the router". That way you don't need to be able to access even an active screen to set things up...but you do need physical access. Then access over that connection should be protected via encryption, but probably not ssh. Something simpler. Even ROT7 would probably suffice...though ROT8 wouldn't (assuming a byte oriented protocol).
They used to make great printers. Once upon a time.
So recently (a couple of years ago) I bought an OfficeJet. I have to use the damn thing in draft mode, or it refuses to print on colored paper. It refuses to print if the paper is half-size, etc. I've still got a G55, but modern computers don't come with Centronics ports...but the G55 is a LOT more flexible.
OTOH, I'm not sure who does a better multifunction printer. (All I want is scan and print. Fax is optional. Internet services are actively disliked....which means I'd really perfer someone beside HP, even if the machine was otherwise desireable.) I tried a Brother, but it didn't have decent Linux drivers. (Yes, I know, I'm not supposed to call them printer drivers. But I can't remember what I'm supposed to call them, and drivers are what they are called on the company websites.)
It is mischaracterized as "the last general-interest magazine", as at least when I last read it, over a decade ago now, it was quite MSWind centric. It didn't even cover Apple.
Admittedly, i didn't make a large sample at that time, but that was merely to confirm that it hadn't change. Byte and Dr. Dobbs were much more general interest (though Dr. Dobbs was a bit technical for that description).
Some people have reported good success with Trinity. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. I have never even succeeded in getting it to install. (Usually this was because the servers were down, or perhaps just "inaccessible" whenever I tried to access the debs. This made apt-get quite a slow process...one that often failed because it was unable to access the repository.) After about a month, perhaps a bit less, I gave up and removed the repositories.
Evolution is lots of different (essentially random) changes. Most of them die off, because they were worse than what preceeded them. Some have niche uses. Only very rarely is one of them globally better. (For very rarely, estimate one out of millions.)
Evolution doesn't mean improvment for any particular purpose. That's progress. (And even there, others may rationally disagree that it's a general improvement. Bigger bombs are an improvement, but not everyone considers them better.)
P.S.: Both MATE and xfce depend on the Gnome2 underpinnings continuing to work. This is so dubious that xfce is, IIUC, currently rebasing itself around Qt, even at the cost of converting to C++.) So what are MATE's long term prospects? Probably to recommend that you shift to Cinnamon, unless they engage in a truely heroic coding effort and replicate most of the Gnome2 development team. This is a lot more dificult than just renaming a bunch of libraries and converting a few GUI files. (But at least maybe they could drop mono.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but the big problem is monoculture. This results in an entire crop being (nearly) genetically identical. THIS results in all plants being susceptible to the same invasive organism...of course it's also what makes the taste, shape, etc. so predictable, and until the invasive organism arrives, that's quite advantageous.
Basically I agree with your points. My feeling, however, is that new GMO products should be treated the same as new drugs. One can argue that the controls should be tighter, as they expose more people to the change. Often the changes created by a new GMO organism are greater than the change in a new drug (which is often just tweaking to preserve patentability).
I think this means that I'm in favor of tighter controls on GMO organisms than you are, but I'm not sure, as I also favor looser controls on new drugs (than are officially in place...I'm not considering here that drugs tests are run by the people who will profit from finding them safe and effective).
I have severe problems with the licenses used by both MS and Apple. In particular the provision that has been in several versions of their licenses that allow them to "add, copy, modify, change, or delete any file on your computer". That proviso was originally instituted by MS, but Apple tried to get me to accept it by sneaking it into the license on a security upgrade. So now I have two computers that I can never attach to the internet, but due to data locked in non-portable formats I can't every get rid of. (Well, ever is a long time. I'm probably getting near the end of it. Which is a very good thing since one of them hasn't be upgraded in nearly a decade.)
Unfortunately, MATE depends on a lot of Gnome2 applications which are no longer being maintained. Cinnamon is probably a better long-term bet...but not if Gnome3 really goes away.
If Vala would ever get ready to use. The documentation seems to require that you already know the language, or possibly just GObject, before you start using it.
The classic "fallback" mode was so unusable ugly that I quickly switched to something else after Gnome2 disappeared from the repository. I'm still not as happy with the replacement (KDE4) as I was with Gnome2, but then I was never as happy with Gnome2 as I was with KDE3.
I'm not really after a lightweight desktop, I'm after a usable desktop that doesn't interfere with my workflow. This means that I can't be needing to re-fix it every month or so.
Additionally the original Gnome3 wouldn't work with my hardware. I believe that this has been fixed now, but I find it's actually worse than Unity.
In the declaration of independence it talks about the government deriving it's "just powers" from the consent of the governed. I doubt that the signers would have considered the powers being discussed as just. I certainly don't.
P.S.: I don't think governmental prosecutions are random. Just unpredicable. Perhaps chaotic.
He said "taken as a whole". He didn't say the individual small pieces were difficult to understand. And if you don't understand the difference, you don't encourage one to see you as someone who could even potentially understand it...or probably a much simpler system.
It's sort of like "understanding weather". Small pieces are well understood, but the whole thing... I'm not sure it's even potentially understandable. Are there any reasonable bounds over what you would need to know? Do you need to predict the glactic equivalent of solar winds? Clearly you need to be able to predict nearby novae, but how close is nearby? What about supernovae? I don't know where noise trumps incoming signal, and I suspect that nobody does, because sometimes noise reinforces the incoming signal. (In the brain a certain level of noise improves signal detection.)
But when, like MIT, they select nearly the worst thing they could do, you should at LEAST question their ethical judgement.
They had lots of choices. Picking the best would have been difficult. Not picking a blatantly evil one would have been easy. They picked a blatantly evil one.
This will tarnish the name of MIT for at least the next decade. (To, admittedly, a decreasing amount.) But the people who made the decision should never again be put in a responsible position. They have proven that they are either ethical imbicles or actively evil. So their names should be made public.
Why would they bother? Slashdot records aren't all that secure...or that significant. The only ones that might give them (the NSA) ANY trouble are the anonymous cowards, and that would just be disentangling them.
Just for example, look at how they (Slashdot) disguise your e-mail id. It designed to be difficult to write a script that keeps working, but certainly not impossible. And histroic records of posts are kept in accessible form for months, if not years.
Now I'll admit that for the NSA to "break into" Slashdot and read their records is violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse law, but I don't think it would ever be applied to them.
What I think is that they are the entering wedge of a new kind of game interface. One that's played with a virtual reality overlay on top of ordinary reality. (I've seen one smartphone version of a game that does this, and I don't even own a smartphone. But it tended to lead people out into the traffic. However, read "Halting State" by Charles Stross for a more developed explanation. In particular the game "Spooks" played within the book.)
It's the only plausible answer I've heard. Carbon sequestering isn't very plausible in any case, but it's definitely not a quick change kind of thing.
Solar reflection, though, is a possible weapon, though not one that's either very directional or very easy to implement. If you want to use it as a weapon you'd need to do something like use an h-bomb to set off a dormant volcano, or a series of them. That could produce a "year without a summer", but it's not very localized. Not very secret. And also not very quick.
Both are much more reasonable if you want to predict the effect of slow changes.
Nah. Free TV and computer game machines to those who can't afford them would help immensely. Combine that with a yearly prize for the most addictive game and the populations rate of increase will plumet. (This does need to be world wide, of course. So make a version of this program a part of foreign aid...with solar powered game machines with a good battery life, so they can be played after dark.)
Do this an no police state is required for a population drop. The problem is that there's a time lag. The population already born is going to really crush the planet. And in many places it's still true that parents depend on their children to support them in their old age, so children are a (long term) net benefit to the individuals. That link needs to be broken. So make elder-care another part of foreign aid...AND implement a better version locally.
To make this work, you also need to push automation, so people are free to not be all that economically productive. Not for survival level concerns. (It can be necessary for status, or for luxuries...as long as the luxuries aren't electricity, elecritc lights, elder-care, etc. Those act to decrease the population growth rate.)
P.S.: It won't help much. but stop discriminating against gays. Even give them tax benefits. They aren't increasing the population. Still, most people aren't very flexible along that spectrum, so it's not an important element for that reason. (Other reasons, like human rights, also urge acting in this direction, but that's nebulous, and reasonable people can disagree about that. About population sensible people can't disagree.)
Well, you could look at the Septunagent government in Stross' "Iron Sunrise". It was a minor feature, but that government could, when it chose, implement "sparrow-fart security" (which I took to mean that they not only noticed any sparrow falling, but even farting). Generally, however, they went in for a much lighter hand. Sometimes, as far as the protagonist was concerned, a bit too light. (And let people make decisions out of prejudice or malice rather than acting on good information.)
Stross doesn't like that series, but I don't see why he thinks that the ReMastered would inevitably win. Herman is, after all, only a low level antibody of the Escaton.
And sanctions his lawyer for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
While I agree that many of the examples were implemented according to the existing rules (as far as I can tell from this distance in time), I disagree that this exhempts them from being the basis of the problem.
For that matter, the avoidance of the packing of the Supreme Court was also handled following the rules, and the president threatening to pack it was also according to the rules, so if that is your critrion, then I don't understand your selection of that case. I tend to see that as an argument WITHIN the federal government over who has how much of the power. And, yes, it might have been better if the executive hadn't won. So from my viewpoint, that's a minor consideration. (Even John Marshall's Supreme Court [the first] was highly political. So that's not a change.)
Sorry, but the turning point, if there is *one* most significant turning point, was the Civil War, where both sides massively increased the control of the central government over the populace. A secondary turning point was the passage of the income tax, where the power of the states was drastically reduced, because the federal money started collecting significan taxes directly. There are many others. The violent suppression of competing currencies is one. A really early one was the "Alien and Sedition acts", though that was rendered ineffective as government overreach. Direct election of Senators, however, was another major turning point. Again this increased the power of the federal government relative to the state governments.
The Constitution itself was a mixed bag. At least after the Bill of Rights was added. The Articles of Confederation didn't restrict the powers of the states very much, and some of them were more repressive than the federal government is yet. The Constitution set up a weak central government over the states, which gradually grew more and more powerful, until now the states are of minor significance in comparison. OTOH, we should never forget (I believe it was) Patrick Henry's response to the constitution: "I smell a rat, it squints towards monarchy."
(I tried to check this on Google, but couldn't verify the source.)
It doesn't even take much duress. Pointed questions and leading questions are often enough to insert false memories.
I believe the correct quote (translated) is: "Kill them all, God will know his own." Don't remember the origin, though.
It is *nominally* a republic with a constitution. The actuality is somewhat different.
That's one of several right answers. My favorites are all variants of "Plug in this cable connecting two ports on the chassis", or, alternatively, "Plug in this cable connecting this port on the server to the router". That way you don't need to be able to access even an active screen to set things up...but you do need physical access. Then access over that connection should be protected via encryption, but probably not ssh. Something simpler. Even ROT7 would probably suffice...though ROT8 wouldn't (assuming a byte oriented protocol).
They used to make great printers. Once upon a time.
So recently (a couple of years ago) I bought an OfficeJet. I have to use the damn thing in draft mode, or it refuses to print on colored paper. It refuses to print if the paper is half-size, etc. I've still got a G55, but modern computers don't come with Centronics ports...but the G55 is a LOT more flexible.
OTOH, I'm not sure who does a better multifunction printer. (All I want is scan and print. Fax is optional. Internet services are actively disliked....which means I'd really perfer someone beside HP, even if the machine was otherwise desireable.) I tried a Brother, but it didn't have decent Linux drivers. (Yes, I know, I'm not supposed to call them printer drivers. But I can't remember what I'm supposed to call them, and drivers are what they are called on the company websites.)
It is mischaracterized as "the last general-interest magazine", as at least when I last read it, over a decade ago now, it was quite MSWind centric. It didn't even cover Apple.
Admittedly, i didn't make a large sample at that time, but that was merely to confirm that it hadn't change. Byte and Dr. Dobbs were much more general interest (though Dr. Dobbs was a bit technical for that description).
Some people have reported good success with Trinity. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. I have never even succeeded in getting it to install. (Usually this was because the servers were down, or perhaps just "inaccessible" whenever I tried to access the debs. This made apt-get quite a slow process...one that often failed because it was unable to access the repository.) After about a month, perhaps a bit less, I gave up and removed the repositories.
Sorry, but you misunderstand evolution.
Evolution is lots of different (essentially random) changes. Most of them die off, because they were worse than what preceeded them. Some have niche uses. Only very rarely is one of them globally better. (For very rarely, estimate one out of millions.)
Evolution doesn't mean improvment for any particular purpose. That's progress. (And even there, others may rationally disagree that it's a general improvement. Bigger bombs are an improvement, but not everyone considers them better.)
P.S.: Both MATE and xfce depend on the Gnome2 underpinnings continuing to work. This is so dubious that xfce is, IIUC, currently rebasing itself around Qt, even at the cost of converting to C++.) So what are MATE's long term prospects? Probably to recommend that you shift to Cinnamon, unless they engage in a truely heroic coding effort and replicate most of the Gnome2 development team. This is a lot more dificult than just renaming a bunch of libraries and converting a few GUI files. (But at least maybe they could drop mono.)