But it will eliminate power over your neighbor and greed from the equation, and enforce that with an expert system.
This is the exact point that I'm questioning. It's not that I don't like the idea. It sounds great. But I'm saying that it doesn't seem realistic, and that unreality will cause the system to fail. Having an equal and finite amount of resources available to everyone doesn't achieve what you suggest, and that's almost provable. For example, what if I create something or provide a service that other people want? Can they pay me with their credits? What are the consequences of the resulting inequity?
Part of the reason I'm bothering to even respond is it would be great to see someone address these sorts of issues seriously. But post-scarcity ideas have been around a long time, and the "best" answers I've ever seen are the simple hand-waving ones - technology will solve all the problems. I think that's a copout which relegates these ideas to the realm of fantasy.
Perhaps, if your utopia is only going to consist of self-selecting people who've all agreed not to compete in (allegedly) unproductive ways, there'd be some limited chance of success - as there are with communes today - but that's likely to imply (a) limits on scalability and (b) if you really succeed, external competition. I look forward to the robot wars!
That's just one aspect of presentations, and I agree it's a very basic one. But if the point is to communicate complex information, you need more than the tricks used to sell iPhones. The problem of information absorption, which TFA deals with, isn't really arising with an iPhone presentation, because there's precious little real information to absorb.
The problem is, learning about some new phone doesn't exactly require much intellectual effort on the part of the audience. I really don't think that's the sort of thing that this study is referring to.
If you want your project to succeed, I'd recommend applying some critical thought. The story in question is a fantasy, and I hinted at some of the reasons why. A much more likely scenario is that the utopia and dystopia would evolve towards a similar balance, with some different details, for the kinds of reasons I mentioned. Blaming humanity's ills on the system in use (e.g. capitalist, socialist) is just scapegoating that avoids the real problem, which is human nature.
Maybe read some sociobiology - for a popular intro, you could try The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. Do you think that the availability of a standard number of credits for everyone is somehow going to stop sexual competition? To put it crudely, who'll get the hot chicks in your utopia? On what basis will people compete? Are you sure that control of resources will have nothing to do with it, and if so, why?
I'm sure it's an interesting read to someone who hasn't encountered the ideas before. But that's a separate question from whether it's relevant to the Amazon Mechanical Turk process, and my point is just that its relevance is not all that great, since even very early on it strays beyond the realm of what's currently possible in order to set up its initial dystopia.
The contrasting utopia, btw, is quite childishly impractical, even ignoring the requirement of incredibly advanced technology, including highly intelligent robots. A better story would have explored the possible problems: what are the effects of the human competitive spirit in such a scenario? Would some people, having the freedom to create, use their creations as leverage to gain access to more resources than are available to everyone else? To what extent would that devalue the basic credits that everyone gets, turning people who live on only those credits into the equivalent of welfare recipients (albeit wealthier ones relative to those living in terrafoam)? Etc.
No, it's a story for purposes of entertainment and philosophical reflection.
It's a science fiction story in that it postulates advances in technology that we aren't even close to achieving. As such, it doesn't have all that much relevance to the Amazon Mechanical Turk situation. Although some parallels can be drawn. There are certainly some scary potential consequences of the Amazon system, but they're rather different from those in the story.
The U.S. government has a history of overzealous prosecution in hacker cases, particularly ones in which the hacker exposes incompetence within the government. Why should a UK citizen be subject to U.S. capriciousness in this regard, especially considering that he didn't commit the "crime" on U.S. soil?
Worse, the U.S. apparently cares far more about punishment than rehabilitation, particularly in cases like this, where I presume they feel that since they're not competent to protect their own systems, they have to scare off those with the ability to compromise them. So McKinnon, having done no real damage (despite the bogus claim of $700K) is going to have to pay for the U.S. government's incompetence and vindictiveness.
For the record, I live in the U.S. and I'm speaking from first-hand experience.
I don't think open source advocates would claim "release everything, and no-one will criticize it". Criticism is crucial to open source (and everything else), since that's how the good stuff is separated from the bad. Someone who doesn't want to ever receive any criticism should simply avoid doing anything and interacting with other people.
One pragmatic argument for releasing your code is then you'll find out how good and useful it really is, compared to the competition, beyond just what your own little team thinks. It's code review with the world as the reviewer. Not for those with delusions of grandeur, or for the faint of heart.
So as a presumably non-lefty, you don't care about this SCOTUS decision? That's good, because there are plenty more where that one came from, and it's nice to know you're just going to sit back and accept them!
One advantage over Scheme is ease of integration with C/C++, both due to the lightweight implementation, and the lack of full continuations. Also, a syntax that doesn't scare your average programmer.
A stripped-down Scheme which offered a one-shot alternative to Scheme continuations, more like Lua's coroutines, might help. To compete with Lua, it would also need to be implemented as a bytecode interpreter. Existing Schemes like MzScheme and Guile are relatively heavyweight. TinyScheme isn't bytecode-based, afaik. SIOD is outdated and messy. So, Lua can be a pretty rational choice, although I'd definitely go for Scheme if I wanted a more full-fledged language.
Excuse me, it is somethin ehich is called commonly a "preprint server". That defines it to be a preprint.
"Commonly", huh? ArXiv calls itself an "e-print service", and many of the papers on it have been published elsewhere, as well as being published on arXiv. See how I used the word just then? Check the definition, it's a valid use, and that's my point.
In any case, the paper in question was also published in Physical Review Letters, Mar 9. So even by your definition, it's published.
He made the "paper" available on the internet, which qualifies as publishing even if not in a peer-reviewed sense. Our terminology haven't really caught up to the internet yet. For example, calling a paper a "preprint" doesn't necessarily make sense if it isn't going to ever be published in a traditional form.
I've wondered about that myself. My theory is that the full-face helmet allows you to project any character you like onto Boba Fett, if you're so inclined. He's the ultimate Rorschach character. People like him because they get to create him themselves.
Just a theory -- I'm still mystified by it myself.
I think that to an extent, you missed the GP's points. Of course these comments are horrible and misogynistic (and in that regard, the GP's wrong)
That was all I was saying. The post in question spent its first two paragraphs arguing that the comments were not misogynistic, which is adding insult to injury in this case.
but I don't see how you extrapolate to the entire tech industry based on a handful of comments from one person.
I wasn't taking a position on that point, but since you raise it: the reason the "tech industry" gets this reputation is that it is extremely male-dominated, much more so than many other fields today. I've seen severely misogynistic comments here on Slashdot, for example. I've never seen anything remotely similar directed against males. Amongst any given group of males, unfortunately, there are usually a surprising number who hold very negative attitudes towards women. My pop-psych take on this is that it's the same issue behind Islam's requirement that its women cover themselves in public: some men have difficulty dealing with their hard-wired desire for women, and use women as scapegoats for their own inability to come to terms with life in a civilized society, where we can't simply hit a woman over the head with a club and drag her back to our cave.
So I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the tech industry has this problem. It doesn't mean that it's true of every member of that industry. If we want to change that image, we need to make such attitudes unacceptable, and stop creating a "hostile work environment" for women in the industry, where they feel the need to hide their gender online, etc. Unfortunately, on the anonymous internet, policing the utterances of the more troglodytic males seems pretty much impossible.
At some companies, the guy who screws up has to buy donuts or cake for everyone. At Microsoft, it means that at the next few monthly meetings, Waggener Edstrom will have to supply the chairs for Steve to throw.
Superman had to abandon his Earth-based Fortress of Solitude, which was starting to melt due to global warming, not to mention all the annoying scientific expeditions coming by to drill for ice cores. He figured he'd try Saturn's north pole for a change. The commute's a bit longer, but there's less traffic.
Maybe you missed this comment by "Rev ED", given in a screenshot in Kathy's blog post:
If you didn't have legs, you would leave a trail like a garden slug.
If you didn't have a cunt, we would have a open season on you with high bag limits.
(That was apparently from the blog Unclebobism, which I see has now been suspended for violating terms of service.)
If you don't think these comments and many of the others are misogynistic, you need to examine your own attitudes.
How long before Slashdot trolls like SPAGHETTICODER (a.k.a. 1073236) are recognised for the terrorists they are, and end up with their friends in Guantanamo Bay?
Seriously, if you turn every little thing into terrorism, the word becomes meaningless, and when the real terrorists blow up a nuclear bomb in your home city and kill you and everyone you know, you'll be able to thank all the time they wasted on overzealously prosecuting misdemeanors under laws originally created for truly dangerous enemies of the state. Try to keep things in perspective. You don't call house burglars terrorists, do you?
(In case you think I'm overreacting, where I'm coming from is that in Moorestown NJ recently, a 16-year old was arrested at school and charged with making a terrorist threat. So maybe he threatened to blow up the school, I dunno, it wasn't made public. The problem with that is that using the same word for it as the people who killed thousands of people using planes as missiles is ludicrous, insane. It's a kid with a frickin' disciplinary problem. Let's keep things in perspective, shall we?)
I agree that artificial can "potentially" be better. But we're a long way from realizing that potential for most things having to do with living biological entities. "Whatever crap evolution tacked together" (over billions of years, mind you) includes a lot of stuff we don't fully understand. So at the moment, the bias that artificial is better doesn't usually make sense, at least when the intelligences doing the design are us. (Now advanced *alien* artificial blood, that's good stuff!;)
Anyone who's assuming that the artificial stuff we can create right now is automatically better than the biological equivalents, is failing to acknowledge how little we really understand about how we work, and how sophisticated our biological systems really are. Perhaps I should have said that they're in denial about the sophistication of their biological nature.
Are you looking for something like Plesk or cPanel? There don't seem to be great open source alternatives, since UI is not a strength of most non-commercially-backed open source apps. You might look at VirtualMin.
Biology is amazing and cool in general. It's just that many humans haven't come to terms with the fact that they are biological creatures. Notice how the GP references artificial blood as though this would somehow be an intrinsically better solution than natural biological blood. This is just an anti-biology prejudice that comes from denying one's human and animal nature.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the reason I'm bothering to even respond is it would be great to see someone address these sorts of issues seriously. But post-scarcity ideas have been around a long time, and the "best" answers I've ever seen are the simple hand-waving ones - technology will solve all the problems. I think that's a copout which relegates these ideas to the realm of fantasy.
Perhaps, if your utopia is only going to consist of self-selecting people who've all agreed not to compete in (allegedly) unproductive ways, there'd be some limited chance of success - as there are with communes today - but that's likely to imply (a) limits on scalability and (b) if you really succeed, external competition. I look forward to the robot wars!
That's just one aspect of presentations, and I agree it's a very basic one. But if the point is to communicate complex information, you need more than the tricks used to sell iPhones. The problem of information absorption, which TFA deals with, isn't really arising with an iPhone presentation, because there's precious little real information to absorb.
The problem is, learning about some new phone doesn't exactly require much intellectual effort on the part of the audience. I really don't think that's the sort of thing that this study is referring to.
If you want your project to succeed, I'd recommend applying some critical thought. The story in question is a fantasy, and I hinted at some of the reasons why. A much more likely scenario is that the utopia and dystopia would evolve towards a similar balance, with some different details, for the kinds of reasons I mentioned. Blaming humanity's ills on the system in use (e.g. capitalist, socialist) is just scapegoating that avoids the real problem, which is human nature.
Maybe read some sociobiology - for a popular intro, you could try The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. Do you think that the availability of a standard number of credits for everyone is somehow going to stop sexual competition? To put it crudely, who'll get the hot chicks in your utopia? On what basis will people compete? Are you sure that control of resources will have nothing to do with it, and if so, why?
I'm sure it's an interesting read to someone who hasn't encountered the ideas before. But that's a separate question from whether it's relevant to the Amazon Mechanical Turk process, and my point is just that its relevance is not all that great, since even very early on it strays beyond the realm of what's currently possible in order to set up its initial dystopia.
The contrasting utopia, btw, is quite childishly impractical, even ignoring the requirement of incredibly advanced technology, including highly intelligent robots. A better story would have explored the possible problems: what are the effects of the human competitive spirit in such a scenario? Would some people, having the freedom to create, use their creations as leverage to gain access to more resources than are available to everyone else? To what extent would that devalue the basic credits that everyone gets, turning people who live on only those credits into the equivalent of welfare recipients (albeit wealthier ones relative to those living in terrafoam)? Etc.
The U.S. government has a history of overzealous prosecution in hacker cases, particularly ones in which the hacker exposes incompetence within the government. Why should a UK citizen be subject to U.S. capriciousness in this regard, especially considering that he didn't commit the "crime" on U.S. soil?
Worse, the U.S. apparently cares far more about punishment than rehabilitation, particularly in cases like this, where I presume they feel that since they're not competent to protect their own systems, they have to scare off those with the ability to compromise them. So McKinnon, having done no real damage (despite the bogus claim of $700K) is going to have to pay for the U.S. government's incompetence and vindictiveness.
For the record, I live in the U.S. and I'm speaking from first-hand experience.
I don't think open source advocates would claim "release everything, and no-one will criticize it". Criticism is crucial to open source (and everything else), since that's how the good stuff is separated from the bad. Someone who doesn't want to ever receive any criticism should simply avoid doing anything and interacting with other people.
One pragmatic argument for releasing your code is then you'll find out how good and useful it really is, compared to the competition, beyond just what your own little team thinks. It's code review with the world as the reviewer. Not for those with delusions of grandeur, or for the faint of heart.
One advantage over Scheme is ease of integration with C/C++, both due to the lightweight implementation, and the lack of full continuations. Also, a syntax that doesn't scare your average programmer.
A stripped-down Scheme which offered a one-shot alternative to Scheme continuations, more like Lua's coroutines, might help. To compete with Lua, it would also need to be implemented as a bytecode interpreter. Existing Schemes like MzScheme and Guile are relatively heavyweight. TinyScheme isn't bytecode-based, afaik. SIOD is outdated and messy. So, Lua can be a pretty rational choice, although I'd definitely go for Scheme if I wanted a more full-fledged language.
Huh. That sounds a bit potty to me.
In any case, the paper in question was also published in Physical Review Letters, Mar 9. So even by your definition, it's published.
He made the "paper" available on the internet, which qualifies as publishing even if not in a peer-reviewed sense. Our terminology haven't really caught up to the internet yet. For example, calling a paper a "preprint" doesn't necessarily make sense if it isn't going to ever be published in a traditional form.
I've wondered about that myself. My theory is that the full-face helmet allows you to project any character you like onto Boba Fett, if you're so inclined. He's the ultimate Rorschach character. People like him because they get to create him themselves.
Just a theory -- I'm still mystified by it myself.
I wasn't taking a position on that point, but since you raise it: the reason the "tech industry" gets this reputation is that it is extremely male-dominated, much more so than many other fields today. I've seen severely misogynistic comments here on Slashdot, for example. I've never seen anything remotely similar directed against males. Amongst any given group of males, unfortunately, there are usually a surprising number who hold very negative attitudes towards women. My pop-psych take on this is that it's the same issue behind Islam's requirement that its women cover themselves in public: some men have difficulty dealing with their hard-wired desire for women, and use women as scapegoats for their own inability to come to terms with life in a civilized society, where we can't simply hit a woman over the head with a club and drag her back to our cave.
So I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the tech industry has this problem. It doesn't mean that it's true of every member of that industry. If we want to change that image, we need to make such attitudes unacceptable, and stop creating a "hostile work environment" for women in the industry, where they feel the need to hide their gender online, etc. Unfortunately, on the anonymous internet, policing the utterances of the more troglodytic males seems pretty much impossible.
At some companies, the guy who screws up has to buy donuts or cake for everyone. At Microsoft, it means that at the next few monthly meetings, Waggener Edstrom will have to supply the chairs for Steve to throw.
So is it rebellion against your father that makes you a jerk towards everyone else? You should rethink that too.
Superman had to abandon his Earth-based Fortress of Solitude, which was starting to melt due to global warming, not to mention all the annoying scientific expeditions coming by to drill for ice cores. He figured he'd try Saturn's north pole for a change. The commute's a bit longer, but there's less traffic.
If you don't think these comments and many of the others are misogynistic, you need to examine your own attitudes.
You gotta wonder about someone who doesn't like Ayn Rand yet appears obsessed with her sexuality... ;-P
How long before Slashdot trolls like SPAGHETTICODER (a.k.a. 1073236) are recognised for the terrorists they are, and end up with their friends in Guantanamo Bay?
Seriously, if you turn every little thing into terrorism, the word becomes meaningless, and when the real terrorists blow up a nuclear bomb in your home city and kill you and everyone you know, you'll be able to thank all the time they wasted on overzealously prosecuting misdemeanors under laws originally created for truly dangerous enemies of the state. Try to keep things in perspective. You don't call house burglars terrorists, do you?
(In case you think I'm overreacting, where I'm coming from is that in Moorestown NJ recently, a 16-year old was arrested at school and charged with making a terrorist threat. So maybe he threatened to blow up the school, I dunno, it wasn't made public. The problem with that is that using the same word for it as the people who killed thousands of people using planes as missiles is ludicrous, insane. It's a kid with a frickin' disciplinary problem. Let's keep things in perspective, shall we?)
I agree that artificial can "potentially" be better. But we're a long way from realizing that potential for most things having to do with living biological entities. "Whatever crap evolution tacked together" (over billions of years, mind you) includes a lot of stuff we don't fully understand. So at the moment, the bias that artificial is better doesn't usually make sense, at least when the intelligences doing the design are us. (Now advanced *alien* artificial blood, that's good stuff! ;)
Anyone who's assuming that the artificial stuff we can create right now is automatically better than the biological equivalents, is failing to acknowledge how little we really understand about how we work, and how sophisticated our biological systems really are. Perhaps I should have said that they're in denial about the sophistication of their biological nature.
Are you looking for something like Plesk or cPanel? There don't seem to be great open source alternatives, since UI is not a strength of most non-commercially-backed open source apps. You might look at VirtualMin.
Biology is amazing and cool in general. It's just that many humans haven't come to terms with the fact that they are biological creatures. Notice how the GP references artificial blood as though this would somehow be an intrinsically better solution than natural biological blood. This is just an anti-biology prejudice that comes from denying one's human and animal nature.