A common shtick in third-rate science fiction is that when the crisis hits, the civilian government is busy pretending there's no problem, when the military heroes save the day. Like a lot of other people posting here, I'm not used to endorsing the military strong-arming anyone, but in this case, I'm relieved to see someone with some authority actually taking the problem seriously.
We've got about 58 days left before we run out of assignable IPv4 addresses. IPv6 has been ready-to-go for years, except for the ISPs, which are dragging their feet. Yes, I know about Comcast's beta testing -- I signed up to beta test dual-stacking over a year ago. They should have been rolling this out years ago, not running a tiny beta test at a glacial pace at the last moment.
I'm not sure how serious a problem suddenly running out of assignable IPv4 blocks will be for the global economy. It's certainly going to be a serious problem for IT. Continued expansion of the Internet, and services based upon it, depends upon IP addresses being available. A lot of us remember the comic overreaction to the Y2K problem -- in this case, there seems to be a comic underreaction.
The D-Link DIR-615 has IPv6 support. I've been using it for IPv4 and IPv6 for almost a year. The current price on Amazon for the D-Link DIR-615 is $23.99.
I bought one at Office Depot for $50. It was the cheapest router they had.
I've got my own list of criticisms of Moore -- his sloppiness sometimes undermines the causes he supports -- but it's surprising how often he's criticized for claiming things he didn't claim.
This particular criticism is particularly blatant, as you say, given that he spends much of the movie tearing down the conventional explanations for high rates of gun violence in the US, and doesn't come to a definite conclusion, except for the animated sequence that argues that there's a strong historical association in the US between gun violence and racist paranoia.
And yet it's clear to me that America does not understand that, nor similar things like public opinion (here or abroad). They are in fact approaching it as though it were superstition--as though these patdowns and screenings were an offering to The God of Public Opinion to say "Look, we're competent! Don't stop flying!"
I have to object that I've never heard anyone, with the exception of TSA and DHS spokespersons, describe airport security as anything but an absurdity. Everyone I've ever heard speak on the subject, from whichever political leaning, those spokespersons aside, has pointed out the absurdity.
But that's just it. The story is that the 9/11 terrorists commandeered the plane with smuggled box cutters. Adam Savage had a couple of razor blades in his pocket while going through an embarrassing and inconvenient screening that supposedly checks for just that sort of item, but it wasn't detected. The rules do not serve the purpose they claim to serve. The question is what, if any, purpose they do serve.
I'm getting the impression that this describes a somewhat extreme case of the general pattern in IT jobs: most of the work is routinized and dull, but you occasionally need people who actually know the technology in some depth. So, you hire someone overqualified to do 90% of what they do, because it doesn't make sense to hire two people, and have the more qualified person sit there doing nothing.
In fact, I believe that's a general pattern in many fields of work, not just IT.
I've spent the last several years studying IT, and whatever I was studying, I'd imagine how I'd set up the systems and network for an NGO. I expect most IT professionals like to daydream about what they'd do, given the chance to set things up from scratch.
The questions the poster asked were so general, they suggest the poster was not a professional. Job #1: hire a professional. Then, do some homework, so you can work with the professional.
"The cloud": two syllables, nine characters. "Farming shit out to some website": nine syllables, thirty-two characters.
Efficiency!
It bugs me when people on tech sites say that "the cloud" is a ridiculous new idea that won't work, given that it's an expression for a set of practices that have been in use in industry for over a decade.
I spend a fair amount of time reading. I'd guess that half the books I start, I don't finish, for one reason or another. A few of the books I finish, I reread. It's much the same with games.
When I've had more free time, I've spent more time playing computer games. I don't think the proportions of finished and unfinished changed.
This topic seems like an excuse for people to recite their complaints about how [ [ kids | games ] aren't what they used to be | life is more hectic than it used to be ], but I really don't think there's a story here.
The previous poster was talking about the common criticism of Marxism which is that everyone seems to receive the same income (or at least some guaranteed minimum income), whether or not they feel like working, and that this system is unsustainable. What is your response to that charge?
I'll just offer a short answer to this question.
The premise is that people fundamentally want to work, that most of what people do when they're not sleeping is a form of work, and people dislike their jobs because of poor conditions and their lack of real influence over the results of their labor (i.e., alienation).
Secondarily, people respond to social norms; ever feel uncomfortable taking a break around people who are working?
If there were some minimum income, there would doubtless be freeloaders, despite the foregoing; there are freeloaders now, but it's not that big a problem, given how productive the majority are.
There's a weird sort of proprietary software fan who always reacts with surprise when learning that some major corporation or government agency uses FLOSS. Even Microsoft uses FLOSS and Linux on some projects, though it doesn't much like to advertise that fact.
Neither was easier than the other to pass, they just required very different skills. I note that you "waffled" but he had to "structure" the ideas into a "well-formed English essay".
I certainly do.
I've recently started an entry-level job in IT, in a network operations center. The computer networks we monitor are quite different from each other, with a mix of Linux, Unix, and Windows servers; the networks of corporations and teams are even more complicated. I've found my co-workers to be generally knowledgeable about the technologies involved, though each of us has a particular forte, of course.
What has really stuck out is that there's a much wider divergence in my co-worker's abilities to explain what we're doing. Some are quite good at setting out context, and how particular details of technology and procedure fit into that context; others, when questioned, just explain technical details, neglecting context; and a few, when questioned, will just jump into fixing a problem, making no effort to explain what they are doing or why. The training documentation consists largely of lists of URLs for Web frontends to tools and archives of documentation, without a word of explanation what the tools are for or which of the thousands of linked documents are important to read. Many of those links are dead; most of the linked documents are just as poorly written.
In general, I've seen that an enormous amount of time is wasted by poor communication, in particular by the neglect of context. Data is a necessary condition for knowledge, but not a sufficient condition.
The liberal arts, for all the bad reputation they've gotten, are necessary and sorely under-appreciated by the tech community, because the liberal arts are supposed to teach the art of communication. In saying that, I must admit that there's good reason for the bad reputation of the liberal arts and the social sciences, as there certainly are a lot of students who coast through their coursework, on their way to careers as pointy-haired bosses. Part of the trouble there is the inflation in credentials; another part is the bizarre world of managerial culture. But in general, I think we'd be better off if more people took the liberal arts more seriously, and if more science and engineering students took more humanities courses, even if we had fewer liberal arts majors and more science and engineering courses for liberal arts majors.
We have people getting PhD's trying to extract minimal amounts of information out of images; there won't be any automated description writers for them for a few decades at least.
The video search engine Blinkx is based on extracting information from video in order to index it.
I remember when I was reading up on HTML and web development nearly a decade ago, there was a pretty clear imperative to do things like avoid frames and give alt text to images.
The underlying premise of SGML, from which HTML was derived, was that markup was supposed to describe the logical structure of a document, and it was up to the display device to determine how to distinguish the elements of that structure. One reason was that SGML was developed as a means to overcome the problem of proprietary binary document formats that became obsolete, meaning the loss of valuable information, and this was thinking in the long term. Another reason was that marking up only the logical structure, and leaving it to display devices to determine how to display a document, meant that display was for the user to determine; the needs of the visually impaired were frequently pointed out as an example.
Knowing that, I would actually get angry when I'd come across rants from graphic designers about how little control HTML gave them over document display. They weren't supposed to have any control, and their efforts to impose such control undermined the good principles underlying SGML and HTML.
I really wonder at the fundamental stupidity of the surprise that free markets tend towards monopoly.
Free market capitalism involves competition for profits. The point of gaining profits is to invest them in future production, for increased profits. A successful competitor wins a decisive advantage over the unsuccessful competitors. Competitors in a free market are competing to be monopolies, and the prize for winning a round of competition is the means to become a monopoly.
Professional team sports, with rules to enforce competitive equilibrium and a reset of standings each season, notoriously suffer from the problem that successful teams have more resources to recruit players and coaches than less successful teams. How much more the case would it be if successful teams got to claim the best players and staff from the losing teams at the end of each game?
The only way I can imagine a free market with a level competitive playing field persisting is if there's a level of state intervention that would be more heavy-handed than a completely monolithic and centralized command economy. I would prefer a democratic socialism, in which the competition occurs between debaters proposing policies in a democratic theater.
Indeed. I also often think of the importance of anti-war college students in the US who were chatting directly with Serbian college students during that war, and the potential long-term importance of that.
While the crassly commercial applications of the Internet have grown exponentially, the projects for the commonweal that have been around since the beginning have steadily grown. It struck me that yesterday at work, I was listening to a presentation on a proprietary search engine; enterprise clients use it to store and index tens or hundreds of millions of documents. Wikipedia currently claims a bit under 3.5 million articles in English.
So, commercial enterprises are storing volumes of data that (apparently) dwarf Wikipedia. Yet how many people refer to Wikipedia daily? The steady, if slower, growth of a project such as Wikipedia has a much greater social impact than those larger, better-finance corporate enterprise projects.
I recently started a job at a company that uses the full range of Microsoft products on its desktops. The latest apps are attractive, easy to use, and after a day spent using them, I feel like the smiling members of my high school rally committee were beating me with bats all day.
We are using Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Sharepoint (as a Web site), Microsoft Sharepoint (as a standalone application), Microsoft Communicator, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Communicator, Internet Explorer, all in Windows 7, along with I don't know how many other major and minor applications. Each one has a button on the toolbar to launch one of the others. I've got Word embedded in Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer embedded in Word, Outlook trying to pass everything through OneNote to one of the Sharepoints (I forget which one), and in general, every damned application is trying to climb on top of every other application, while shouting, "Look at me! I'm the prettiest!"
Meanwhile, in a corner, there's PuTTY, where I'm logged in to a CentOS box, where maybe I can fix an actual problem.
Seriously, I don't think Linux should compete with Windows. I think Linux should just try to do things competently.
First, there's a misunderstanding about the fundamental nature of commodity production. Commodities have a dual nature: they have a use value, and they have an exchange value. Most economics spends most of its time discussing exchange value. Use value is based upon a commodity's value to human beings. It is based upon human desire, and the ability of humans to empathize with the desires of other humans. It takes a human being to recognize use value, either to produce or to consume -- this is "creativity," though many forms of creativity go under-appreciated. Improved technology multiplies the effect of creative input. You can have workers who makes sandwiches, because they can recognize a sandwich that other people would like to eat. You can have a sandwich-making machine, but it would have to be designed by a person who understands sandwiches, and it would have to be maintained by someone who can recognize whether the machine is making edible sandwiches.
So, automation can reduce the number of workers in a (particular) field, but that number can't go to zero, because then you're just multiplying nothing; you'd have no creativity, no recognition of use-value. If you created human-like AI that was creative, then you've got human-like AI that would have desires, would consume, would demand rewards. "Robot" is derived from the Russian word for slave, and a "slave" robot would be less effective than a "free labor" robot, for the same reasons as with humans. You could only truly replace humans with AI that is effectively human, and with similar rights as humans. That's a completely different science fiction scenario.
Second, there's a misunderstanding about the cyclical nature of economics. An economy is like an ecosystem. Before industrialization, most economic crises were crises of consumption: there were not enough resources to go around. Since industrialization, and the dominance of capitalism, most economic crises are of consumption: there's more being produced than being consumed, which inhibits production. This "self-corrects," albeit at the cost of considerable human suffering and loss.
So, if unemployment becomes high enough, the economy shuts down, and this would happen well before total unemployment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a small effort for staying in business for more than one more year.
Fallacy of the Broken Window FTL!
A common shtick in third-rate science fiction is that when the crisis hits, the civilian government is busy pretending there's no problem, when the military heroes save the day. Like a lot of other people posting here, I'm not used to endorsing the military strong-arming anyone, but in this case, I'm relieved to see someone with some authority actually taking the problem seriously.
We've got about 58 days left before we run out of assignable IPv4 addresses. IPv6 has been ready-to-go for years, except for the ISPs, which are dragging their feet. Yes, I know about Comcast's beta testing -- I signed up to beta test dual-stacking over a year ago. They should have been rolling this out years ago, not running a tiny beta test at a glacial pace at the last moment.
I'm not sure how serious a problem suddenly running out of assignable IPv4 blocks will be for the global economy. It's certainly going to be a serious problem for IT. Continued expansion of the Internet, and services based upon it, depends upon IP addresses being available. A lot of us remember the comic overreaction to the Y2K problem -- in this case, there seems to be a comic underreaction.
The D-Link DIR-615 has IPv6 support. I've been using it for IPv4 and IPv6 for almost a year. The current price on Amazon for the D-Link DIR-615 is $23.99.
I bought one at Office Depot for $50. It was the cheapest router they had.
I've got my own list of criticisms of Moore -- his sloppiness sometimes undermines the causes he supports -- but it's surprising how often he's criticized for claiming things he didn't claim.
This particular criticism is particularly blatant, as you say, given that he spends much of the movie tearing down the conventional explanations for high rates of gun violence in the US, and doesn't come to a definite conclusion, except for the animated sequence that argues that there's a strong historical association in the US between gun violence and racist paranoia.
Which is pretty nice. Unfortunately, HE's DNS doesn't support DNSSEC yet.
This really should be said more often.
And yet it's clear to me that America does not understand that, nor similar things like public opinion (here or abroad). They are in fact approaching it as though it were superstition--as though these patdowns and screenings were an offering to The God of Public Opinion to say "Look, we're competent! Don't stop flying!"
I have to object that I've never heard anyone, with the exception of TSA and DHS spokespersons, describe airport security as anything but an absurdity. Everyone I've ever heard speak on the subject, from whichever political leaning, those spokespersons aside, has pointed out the absurdity.
But that's just it. The story is that the 9/11 terrorists commandeered the plane with smuggled box cutters. Adam Savage had a couple of razor blades in his pocket while going through an embarrassing and inconvenient screening that supposedly checks for just that sort of item, but it wasn't detected. The rules do not serve the purpose they claim to serve. The question is what, if any, purpose they do serve.
I'm getting the impression that this describes a somewhat extreme case of the general pattern in IT jobs: most of the work is routinized and dull, but you occasionally need people who actually know the technology in some depth. So, you hire someone overqualified to do 90% of what they do, because it doesn't make sense to hire two people, and have the more qualified person sit there doing nothing.
In fact, I believe that's a general pattern in many fields of work, not just IT.
I've spent the last several years studying IT, and whatever I was studying, I'd imagine how I'd set up the systems and network for an NGO. I expect most IT professionals like to daydream about what they'd do, given the chance to set things up from scratch.
The questions the poster asked were so general, they suggest the poster was not a professional. Job #1: hire a professional. Then, do some homework, so you can work with the professional.
"The cloud": two syllables, nine characters.
"Farming shit out to some website": nine syllables, thirty-two characters.
Efficiency!
It bugs me when people on tech sites say that "the cloud" is a ridiculous new idea that won't work, given that it's an expression for a set of practices that have been in use in industry for over a decade.
I spend a fair amount of time reading. I'd guess that half the books I start, I don't finish, for one reason or another. A few of the books I finish, I reread. It's much the same with games.
When I've had more free time, I've spent more time playing computer games. I don't think the proportions of finished and unfinished changed.
This topic seems like an excuse for people to recite their complaints about how [ [ kids | games ] aren't what they used to be | life is more hectic than it used to be ], but I really don't think there's a story here.
The previous poster was talking about the common criticism of Marxism which is that everyone seems to receive the same income (or at least some guaranteed minimum income), whether or not they feel like working, and that this system is unsustainable. What is your response to that charge?
I'll just offer a short answer to this question.
The premise is that people fundamentally want to work, that most of what people do when they're not sleeping is a form of work, and people dislike their jobs because of poor conditions and their lack of real influence over the results of their labor (i.e., alienation).
Secondarily, people respond to social norms; ever feel uncomfortable taking a break around people who are working?
If there were some minimum income, there would doubtless be freeloaders, despite the foregoing; there are freeloaders now, but it's not that big a problem, given how productive the majority are.
I left out part of the quote I was directly responding to.
I note that you "waffled" but he had to "structure" the ideas into a "well-formed English essay". Don't you wish more engineers had that ability?
That was probably obvious, but I hate it when I introduce errors through mistakes during revision.
There's a weird sort of proprietary software fan who always reacts with surprise when learning that some major corporation or government agency uses FLOSS. Even Microsoft uses FLOSS and Linux on some projects, though it doesn't much like to advertise that fact.
Neither was easier than the other to pass, they just required very different skills. I note that you "waffled" but he had to "structure" the ideas into a "well-formed English essay".
I certainly do.
I've recently started an entry-level job in IT, in a network operations center. The computer networks we monitor are quite different from each other, with a mix of Linux, Unix, and Windows servers; the networks of corporations and teams are even more complicated. I've found my co-workers to be generally knowledgeable about the technologies involved, though each of us has a particular forte, of course.
What has really stuck out is that there's a much wider divergence in my co-worker's abilities to explain what we're doing. Some are quite good at setting out context, and how particular details of technology and procedure fit into that context; others, when questioned, just explain technical details, neglecting context; and a few, when questioned, will just jump into fixing a problem, making no effort to explain what they are doing or why. The training documentation consists largely of lists of URLs for Web frontends to tools and archives of documentation, without a word of explanation what the tools are for or which of the thousands of linked documents are important to read. Many of those links are dead; most of the linked documents are just as poorly written.
In general, I've seen that an enormous amount of time is wasted by poor communication, in particular by the neglect of context. Data is a necessary condition for knowledge, but not a sufficient condition.
The liberal arts, for all the bad reputation they've gotten, are necessary and sorely under-appreciated by the tech community, because the liberal arts are supposed to teach the art of communication. In saying that, I must admit that there's good reason for the bad reputation of the liberal arts and the social sciences, as there certainly are a lot of students who coast through their coursework, on their way to careers as pointy-haired bosses. Part of the trouble there is the inflation in credentials; another part is the bizarre world of managerial culture. But in general, I think we'd be better off if more people took the liberal arts more seriously, and if more science and engineering students took more humanities courses, even if we had fewer liberal arts majors and more science and engineering courses for liberal arts majors.
I was guessing that the point of the exercise was that there was some flaw with the givens -- a reductio ad absurdum.
We have people getting PhD's trying to extract minimal amounts of information out of images; there won't be any automated description writers for them for a few decades at least.
The video search engine Blinkx is based on extracting information from video in order to index it.
I remember when I was reading up on HTML and web development nearly a decade ago, there was a pretty clear imperative to do things like avoid frames and give alt text to images.
The underlying premise of SGML, from which HTML was derived, was that markup was supposed to describe the logical structure of a document, and it was up to the display device to determine how to distinguish the elements of that structure. One reason was that SGML was developed as a means to overcome the problem of proprietary binary document formats that became obsolete, meaning the loss of valuable information, and this was thinking in the long term. Another reason was that marking up only the logical structure, and leaving it to display devices to determine how to display a document, meant that display was for the user to determine; the needs of the visually impaired were frequently pointed out as an example.
Knowing that, I would actually get angry when I'd come across rants from graphic designers about how little control HTML gave them over document display. They weren't supposed to have any control, and their efforts to impose such control undermined the good principles underlying SGML and HTML.
I really wonder at the fundamental stupidity of the surprise that free markets tend towards monopoly.
Free market capitalism involves competition for profits. The point of gaining profits is to invest them in future production, for increased profits. A successful competitor wins a decisive advantage over the unsuccessful competitors. Competitors in a free market are competing to be monopolies, and the prize for winning a round of competition is the means to become a monopoly.
Professional team sports, with rules to enforce competitive equilibrium and a reset of standings each season, notoriously suffer from the problem that successful teams have more resources to recruit players and coaches than less successful teams. How much more the case would it be if successful teams got to claim the best players and staff from the losing teams at the end of each game?
The only way I can imagine a free market with a level competitive playing field persisting is if there's a level of state intervention that would be more heavy-handed than a completely monolithic and centralized command economy. I would prefer a democratic socialism, in which the competition occurs between debaters proposing policies in a democratic theater.
Now that I think about it, the "gigantic social upheaval" might be a GoodThing(TM)...
What could possibly be good about eliminating scarcity? Universal prosperity would completely wreck our finely crafted social hierarchy!
Indeed. I also often think of the importance of anti-war college students in the US who were chatting directly with Serbian college students during that war, and the potential long-term importance of that.
While the crassly commercial applications of the Internet have grown exponentially, the projects for the commonweal that have been around since the beginning have steadily grown. It struck me that yesterday at work, I was listening to a presentation on a proprietary search engine; enterprise clients use it to store and index tens or hundreds of millions of documents. Wikipedia currently claims a bit under 3.5 million articles in English.
So, commercial enterprises are storing volumes of data that (apparently) dwarf Wikipedia. Yet how many people refer to Wikipedia daily? The steady, if slower, growth of a project such as Wikipedia has a much greater social impact than those larger, better-finance corporate enterprise projects.
I recently started a job at a company that uses the full range of Microsoft products on its desktops. The latest apps are attractive, easy to use, and after a day spent using them, I feel like the smiling members of my high school rally committee were beating me with bats all day.
We are using Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Sharepoint (as a Web site), Microsoft Sharepoint (as a standalone application), Microsoft Communicator, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Communicator, Internet Explorer, all in Windows 7, along with I don't know how many other major and minor applications. Each one has a button on the toolbar to launch one of the others. I've got Word embedded in Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer embedded in Word, Outlook trying to pass everything through OneNote to one of the Sharepoints (I forget which one), and in general, every damned application is trying to climb on top of every other application, while shouting, "Look at me! I'm the prettiest!"
Meanwhile, in a corner, there's PuTTY, where I'm logged in to a CentOS box, where maybe I can fix an actual problem.
Seriously, I don't think Linux should compete with Windows. I think Linux should just try to do things competently.
There are two fallacies in play here.
First, there's a misunderstanding about the fundamental nature of commodity production. Commodities have a dual nature: they have a use value, and they have an exchange value. Most economics spends most of its time discussing exchange value. Use value is based upon a commodity's value to human beings. It is based upon human desire, and the ability of humans to empathize with the desires of other humans. It takes a human being to recognize use value, either to produce or to consume -- this is "creativity," though many forms of creativity go under-appreciated. Improved technology multiplies the effect of creative input. You can have workers who makes sandwiches, because they can recognize a sandwich that other people would like to eat. You can have a sandwich-making machine, but it would have to be designed by a person who understands sandwiches, and it would have to be maintained by someone who can recognize whether the machine is making edible sandwiches.
So, automation can reduce the number of workers in a (particular) field, but that number can't go to zero, because then you're just multiplying nothing; you'd have no creativity, no recognition of use-value. If you created human-like AI that was creative, then you've got human-like AI that would have desires, would consume, would demand rewards. "Robot" is derived from the Russian word for slave, and a "slave" robot would be less effective than a "free labor" robot, for the same reasons as with humans. You could only truly replace humans with AI that is effectively human, and with similar rights as humans. That's a completely different science fiction scenario.
Second, there's a misunderstanding about the cyclical nature of economics. An economy is like an ecosystem. Before industrialization, most economic crises were crises of consumption: there were not enough resources to go around. Since industrialization, and the dominance of capitalism, most economic crises are of consumption: there's more being produced than being consumed, which inhibits production. This "self-corrects," albeit at the cost of considerable human suffering and loss.
So, if unemployment becomes high enough, the economy shuts down, and this would happen well before total unemployment.