"Civil disobedience" is soft-headed 1960s hippie thinking. No one interested in real social/political/cultual change today has any interest or willingness to be entombed in a Rape & Torture Facility. Times are different. There is no civil disobedience, only obedience or revolt.
Swartz confronted the establishment directly, and was crushed. That tends to happen in direct confrontation with a ridiculously asymmetric force. Better to try to change the culture, and hope it drags politics along a decade later. Aaron Swartz is a hero - but both Linus and Stallman have done way more for freedom of information, yet are in little danger of being annihilated by the police/court/prison apparatus.
They won't be able to go head to head with us for a long time.
Five years maybe? Ten at the outside. The Chinese industrial base is so far beyond America's, both in terms of total productive capacity and terms of manufacturing technology, that it will be almost impossible for America to maintain it's current military superiority in the medium term.
America would better off by far if every GOP and DNC POS simultaneously had massive strokes. It could be called the stroke of luck in future history books.
Where's a deity with a sense of humor when you need one?
Sure. Or better yet, let's just let people immigrate the same way my ancestors did. Show up at Ellis Island equivalent, wait in a long line (like an actual line you stand in), get your papers stamped, and - congratulations, you're a citizen! Welcome to the New World, good luck, have fun, etc.
How long til a malicious person is able to crash (potentially lots of) cars in the real world by hacking into some cloud servers? Or make the cars run over pedestrians instead of avoid them?
This is potentially a really serious problem, that people so far are ignoring. Maybe we need a law requiring physical isolation of a self-driving car's control computer from all networks. They need access to GPS data, but this can probably accommodated with special hardware that does its best to ensure only GPS data is passed in.
Of course they crawl & analyze Slashdot! Probably directly tap the DB, too. No doubt have been doing so for years. Bet there are some pretty cool algos crunching away on our posts. The surveillance state is the present not the future.
My approach is, try not to make any political comment on/. that I wouldn't be okay saying in public on the steps of City Hall. It is after all a public forum. I don't use an pseudonymous username, because I'm confident my actual identity would be discoverable regardless
Actually this is probably the right solution. More and more I am convinced we must air gap all safety-critical systems from the internet. Big stuff like power stations and industrial equipment obviously; but also small stuff like building HVAC, generators, etc. This includes self-driving cars - the drive controller must be physically unable to communicate with any network.
It's basically a minimax situation. We have to minimize the damage from the maximal failure mode. With networked control systems, the worst case scenario is a remote hostile attacker gaining coordinated simultaneous access to multiple critical systems. That kind of godawful catastrophe is effectively prevented if remote control of the systems is physically impossible. With air gapped controls the worst case is reduced from "shit-tons of stuff destroyed" to "a handful of stuff destroyed".
Yes, in many cases this will require setting up (or retaining) control rooms full of monkeys pushing buttons. Not the most glamorous or ennobling work, but as a side effect it will create a few jobs. Yes, engineers will have to go in to the plant - or call people who are on-site - to work on the systems. That will suck, but it'll give them an excuse to ask for more pay or a nicer office setup. Yes, you'll periodically have to stick a piece of physical media into your self-driving car to update it's navigation system. Tough shit, it's a small price to pay.
No team I've ever worked with would even consider working while drunk.
Maybe teams in California work differently, who knows.
This is why California still produces the best software. It's not the drinking per se - rather, it's the culture that permits it. Creativity blooms more easily in a free culture.
Missile Command was such an awesome game! Gotta get an old Atari console...:) The great thing about that game is, no matter how well you play, it always ends in total annihilation. No one who played Missile Command as a kid will ever start a nuclear war, for sure.
A man is standing on the sidewalk, offering cookies to passers-by. A tourist approaches, and the man hands him a cookie. The tourist asks, "Is this cookie free?"
The man replies, "No, it is not. You may have it now, if you would enjoy it. But should you choose to eat it, in the future I may come calling and demand you pay any price I like." The tourist, although hungry, returns the cookie and walks away.
It's cool if you're not familiar with Soma architecture, no big deal unless you live there. But don't go posting poorly-researched links attempting to show off knowledge you don't have.
The first link, a restaurant, actually does look somewhat similar to Apple's style tho less shiny. Second one isn't even a coffee shop. Third one does illustrate the danger of sweeping generalizations like "every coffee shop" - Soma also includes a fair number of places whose architecture might best be described as "greasy spoon shithole".
The last link was, I think, Sightglass coffee. Their shop on the whole has a minimal mod look that feels similar to the Apple store, tho with a stronger industrial flavor. However Sightglass significantly postdates the Apple store. You need to research what was in Soma a decade ago.
And China makes them. So if they're the ones that turn us off, we may be buying them on their terms.
Isn't this one of the real dangers here? It seems the US is fast reaching a point where we no longer have sufficient domestic industrial capacity even to maintain our own existing infrastructure, let alone do major reconstruction.
Why do Stallman's ideas whip you up into such a frenzy of hatred?
This man has devoted his life to the struggle for Freedom for the whole internet, even for folks who despise or are otherwise unworthy of liberty. Perhaps you resent that, despite his outlandish appearance and comparative material poverty, he has already earned his title as a Father of the Internet? While the world will little remember you and I, it would not surprise me a bit if in the future RMS is venerated as a saint.
I don't regret getting to like Unity - current versions remain imho a big improvement over Gnome. What I do regret is that I can no longer recommend Ubuntu to anyone. This after having recommended it to dozens of people over the past few years, several of whom adopted it.
Now I honestly don't know what to recommend to non-techie people who want to live in the Free world. Mint is highly unappealing, not only for the outdated UI, but also for the militant bad taste of its supporters. Most of the other popular distros are "too hard" to be a realistic satisfactory option for that class of user.
$40/hour for writing code? Seriously? Jesus. I'd do real work for that much. Unpleasant shit work. Cleaning monkey cages. Cleaning the inside of nuclear reactors. Now I think I understand why prices in the US are so absurdly high. You guys can afford to pay them. I make $10-$12/hour and that's when I'm lucky.
So move to the Bay Area. If you're rather unlucky you'll make only $40/hr. I'm not saying that just for rhetorical effect - if you really are unhappy with your current compensation, sometimes it pays to move to a region with a stronger economy.
So you'd hire someone with no professional programming experience and no college degree?
I would, if he were good at programming. The hard thing for such an applicant would be demonstrating his skill. But open source projects make that possible. "Show me your github" is the new mantra I hear around the Valley.
Slashdot Mirror
"Civil disobedience" is soft-headed 1960s hippie thinking. No one interested in real social/political/cultual change today has any interest or willingness to be entombed in a Rape & Torture Facility. Times are different. There is no civil disobedience, only obedience or revolt.
Swartz confronted the establishment directly, and was crushed. That tends to happen in direct confrontation with a ridiculously asymmetric force. Better to try to change the culture, and hope it drags politics along a decade later. Aaron Swartz is a hero - but both Linus and Stallman have done way more for freedom of information, yet are in little danger of being annihilated by the police/court/prison apparatus.
Indeed. He probably should have stood in front of a judge for three minutes and been ordered to pay a $250 fine for all of the actions he took.
Shortly whereafter he should have been paraded down to City Hall, taken up on the steps, and awarded a medal for his contribution to human progress.
Honestly speaking, I'm hoping for an attack
Clearly you don't live in Honolulu, SF, or Ellay...
They won't be able to go head to head with us for a long time.
Five years maybe? Ten at the outside. The Chinese industrial base is so far beyond America's, both in terms of total productive capacity and terms of manufacturing technology, that it will be almost impossible for America to maintain it's current military superiority in the medium term.
America would better off by far if every GOP and DNC POS simultaneously had massive strokes. It could be called the stroke of luck in future history books.
Where's a deity with a sense of humor when you need one?
Sure. Or better yet, let's just let people immigrate the same way my ancestors did. Show up at Ellis Island equivalent, wait in a long line (like an actual line you stand in), get your papers stamped, and - congratulations, you're a citizen! Welcome to the New World, good luck, have fun, etc.
100% serious.
Self-driving cars are not a bad idea. Self-driving cars that can even potentially be hacked remotely, are a bad idea.
How long til a malicious person is able to crash (potentially lots of) cars in the real world by hacking into some cloud servers? Or make the cars run over pedestrians instead of avoid them?
This is potentially a really serious problem, that people so far are ignoring. Maybe we need a law requiring physical isolation of a self-driving car's control computer from all networks. They need access to GPS data, but this can probably accommodated with special hardware that does its best to ensure only GPS data is passed in.
Of course they crawl & analyze Slashdot! Probably directly tap the DB, too. No doubt have been doing so for years. Bet there are some pretty cool algos crunching away on our posts. The surveillance state is the present not the future.
My approach is, try not to make any political comment on /. that I wouldn't be okay saying in public on the steps of City Hall. It is after all a public forum. I don't use an pseudonymous username, because I'm confident my actual identity would be discoverable regardless
delete from users where id='myself'; delete from posts where user_id='myself';
TRUNCATE users CASCADE;
Actually this is probably the right solution. More and more I am convinced we must air gap all safety-critical systems from the internet. Big stuff like power stations and industrial equipment obviously; but also small stuff like building HVAC, generators, etc. This includes self-driving cars - the drive controller must be physically unable to communicate with any network.
It's basically a minimax situation. We have to minimize the damage from the maximal failure mode. With networked control systems, the worst case scenario is a remote hostile attacker gaining coordinated simultaneous access to multiple critical systems. That kind of godawful catastrophe is effectively prevented if remote control of the systems is physically impossible. With air gapped controls the worst case is reduced from "shit-tons of stuff destroyed" to "a handful of stuff destroyed".
Yes, in many cases this will require setting up (or retaining) control rooms full of monkeys pushing buttons. Not the most glamorous or ennobling work, but as a side effect it will create a few jobs. Yes, engineers will have to go in to the plant - or call people who are on-site - to work on the systems. That will suck, but it'll give them an excuse to ask for more pay or a nicer office setup. Yes, you'll periodically have to stick a piece of physical media into your self-driving car to update it's navigation system. Tough shit, it's a small price to pay.
No team I've ever worked with would even consider working while drunk.
Maybe teams in California work differently, who knows.
This is why California still produces the best software. It's not the drinking per se - rather, it's the culture that permits it. Creativity blooms more easily in a free culture.
Missile Command was such an awesome game! Gotta get an old Atari console... :) The great thing about that game is, no matter how well you play, it always ends in total annihilation. No one who played Missile Command as a kid will ever start a nuclear war, for sure.
Thanks for the video link!
A related parable:
A man is standing on the sidewalk, offering cookies to passers-by. A tourist approaches, and the man hands him a cookie. The tourist asks, "Is this cookie free?"
The man replies, "No, it is not. You may have it now, if you would enjoy it. But should you choose to eat it, in the future I may come calling and demand you pay any price I like." The tourist, although hungry, returns the cookie and walks away.
that you can't link to any images to support the claim
Or that I don't feel like spending hours digging for pictures of coffee shops from ten years ago, in order to appease an aggressive iClone.
If commenters here could read, they'd notice simple facts like that this is a trademark, not a patent.
Maybe they just don't give a fuck? One form of intellectual serfdom is not that much different from other forms of intellectual serfdom.
Dude, apple didn't just invent the clear glass storefront.. nor even just clear glass. No sir - apple invented the storefront!
It's cool if you're not familiar with Soma architecture, no big deal unless you live there. But don't go posting poorly-researched links attempting to show off knowledge you don't have.
The first link, a restaurant, actually does look somewhat similar to Apple's style tho less shiny. Second one isn't even a coffee shop. Third one does illustrate the danger of sweeping generalizations like "every coffee shop" - Soma also includes a fair number of places whose architecture might best be described as "greasy spoon shithole".
The last link was, I think, Sightglass coffee. Their shop on the whole has a minimal mod look that feels similar to the Apple store, tho with a stronger industrial flavor. However Sightglass significantly postdates the Apple store. You need to research what was in Soma a decade ago.
My point is that the look of the Apple store is unoriginal.
The Apple store looks like every yuppie bar & coffee lounge in Soma.. and they had that look well before Apple got started with it. Just sayin'...
And China makes them. So if they're the ones that turn us off, we may be buying them on their terms.
Isn't this one of the real dangers here? It seems the US is fast reaching a point where we no longer have sufficient domestic industrial capacity even to maintain our own existing infrastructure, let alone do major reconstruction.
Why do Stallman's ideas whip you up into such a frenzy of hatred?
This man has devoted his life to the struggle for Freedom for the whole internet, even for folks who despise or are otherwise unworthy of liberty. Perhaps you resent that, despite his outlandish appearance and comparative material poverty, he has already earned his title as a Father of the Internet? While the world will little remember you and I, it would not surprise me a bit if in the future RMS is venerated as a saint.
I really regret getting to like Unity.
I don't regret getting to like Unity - current versions remain imho a big improvement over Gnome. What I do regret is that I can no longer recommend Ubuntu to anyone. This after having recommended it to dozens of people over the past few years, several of whom adopted it.
Now I honestly don't know what to recommend to non-techie people who want to live in the Free world. Mint is highly unappealing, not only for the outdated UI, but also for the militant bad taste of its supporters. Most of the other popular distros are "too hard" to be a realistic satisfactory option for that class of user.
A sad time for Free Software, really...
$40/hour for writing code? Seriously? Jesus. I'd do real work for that much. Unpleasant shit work. Cleaning monkey cages. Cleaning the inside of nuclear reactors. Now I think I understand why prices in the US are so absurdly high. You guys can afford to pay them. I make $10-$12/hour and that's when I'm lucky.
So move to the Bay Area. If you're rather unlucky you'll make only $40/hr. I'm not saying that just for rhetorical effect - if you really are unhappy with your current compensation, sometimes it pays to move to a region with a stronger economy.
So you'd hire someone with no professional programming experience and no college degree?
I would, if he were good at programming. The hard thing for such an applicant would be demonstrating his skill. But open source projects make that possible. "Show me your github" is the new mantra I hear around the Valley.