It's great people put the time into making legacy code in obsolete languages like Fortran, Basic and Hebrew run on modern systems. Or is it? Is the coming total breakdown in Israel and Palestine due to the legacy code each insists on running in their heads, and running their societies on? Despite the great faults remaining in English-languaged territories, ever since the North won the war for civility we've gotten along pretty well within the cohort. The evidence from the field would seem to be that English-coded cultural wares just run better, with fewer crashes and breakdowns (tho some excuse must be made for North Ireland to carry this argument)?
Is _your_ language Y2k ready? Or would you rather be speaking in tongues? Babel was not an advance. You can write good code in a bad language; but it's _much_ harder.
The notion of info overload is empty. Information density is fractal, and scales across the ranges of our senses and concerns - there is always more than we could ever take in. Consider an ancestor in a tropical rain forest - great density of information there. All wilderness contains a great density of info - look at the culture of the Australian aboriginals, their song lines, even in the desert. Consider the information density on the streets of NY or London today - not much different (or different in its fractal distribution) than that in those same cities 300 years ago, or ancient Rome - and on a scale approaching natural wilderness. If anything perhaps our cities are a bit less info dense now, more simplified by modern streamlining of life, style, option and opportunity.
The only place where information density differs from normal ranges for the human species over its development is in certain suburban tracts, where the uniformity of housing, landscaping and occupants presents a sterilization where those factors of wildness present in both deep countryside and deep city have been partially eliminated. For these info-deprived citizens, we pipe the weak signals of our media. But the richest media presentation only approximates the density a wilderness has for a species involved in survival there, and the lack of pertinence to survival of much mediated info can only be partially compensated for by a BFG.
So: Was it their PDAs? Or were they raised in the steriler reaches of suburbia, with schooling that focused on far simpler questions than are involved in prioritizing among the richness of a full city or country life? Did their parents always drive them around rather than sending them off on their own to learn exploration - and the consequent opportunities and dangers? Were they raised to believe that all answers are in some book, or computer, or PDA, so that physical presence in the world, attention to its details across its fractal ranges, is destraction from the primary task of looking up these answers?
Information overload? Sit in a mountain meadow in spring and tell me about overload! Information is delicious, and comfortable, and precious... there's never too much, the doors of perception have evolved wonderful filters to assure our minds are not over-illuminated (and given us wonderful internal and external means to adjust those filters).
What would help is a trademark certifying that the manufacturer of a certain piece of equipment uses no technologies in its products that contribute to the closing off of technological avenues. Thus, if Intel works to enable the destruction of our commons, AMD or Transmeta would have a reason to take the open road, because by earning Open Society Certification (note: get Soros to okay use of trademark and contribute funding) they'd get to label all their products as compliant, and tens of millions of us will do our best to buy (and spec our companies to buy) nothing else.
There are experiments going back 30 years showing that an infant of a few weeks old is able to make faces - stick out its tongue for instance - in response to seeing its mother make those faces. Which shows that the mirroring is inborn, since this is an infant which has never seen its own face to understand how it corresponds to its mothers.
There are many candidate explanations for autism. A book of some interest is _Thinking in Pictures_ by an autistic woman who has designed the majority of the cattle enclosures currently used in the US. She says her autism prevents her from thinking primarily in language, but that her vivid thought in pictures allows her to see how an environment will look and feel to the cattle, thus her great success in her field. This is not an example of impaired empathy, but of enhanced.
However, she has a lot of trouble with speech tonality, which is how we communicate a lot about our emotive states - she will picture movies that express a certain feeling, and then try to speak with the patterns used by people in those scenes, which she can envision vividly.
The sort of autism she experiences would match with the research showing that we have two major, semi-independant modes of working memory: verbal and visuo-spatial. Her verbal ability is impaired (although she can speak quite well by translating out of pictures).
Recently reread one of Heinlein's most perfectly-paced kid's books. Child sold in slave market on distant world to beggar who turns out to be more than that, escapes to join traders-on-spaceships-based-society, ends up among upper class on Earth. The thing that excited me on first reading (at about 10), and which I think explains much of the power of sci-fi, is the Margaret Mead-based anthropologist who is along for the ride with the traders, and who befriends and briefs the kid.
Heinlein was into cultural hacking, which builds on the knowledge from anthropology that there are many ways to structure cultural norms, that these have much to do with the fit of a culture to its particular ecological and economic niches (which are much the same thing), and also have much to do with the mythology of the culture. He saw that one of our present powers was to consciously create both our cultural norms and mythologies, and that these efforts are closely akin to our conscious creation of technologies (which is not to say they are wide open: not every cultural norm or myth will work equally well, just as not every techological idea will). Stranger in a Strange Land is a footnote to Citizen of the Galaxy.
As for the claim that he went from radical socialist to radical libertarian - this is just nonsense. He was always consistent with an anarcho-syndicalist position, which has elements resembling both (which generally pisses the pure proponents of both off), and closely resembles the open source community (hmm).
For some years, when certain environmental hucksters were sending out reams of processed forest with 'urgent surveys' to return with my pledge in order to save those same forests, I was returning them with no cash enclosed by a promise, "Send me the results of this survey - which I doubt you actually ever compile - and I'll happily send you $100." They never took me up.
As Bush the Elder faced his impending defeat, the Republical National Committee sent me a particularly large reply envelope, which I filled with pennies and cardboard reinforcement.
<p>A month later a certificate arrived naming me to a special Republican national advisory committee. Guess they were touched by my sincere expression of support.
I like your whole post except for "Star Office... with its excellent Office interoperability." Like there's gotta be some simple way to import a comma-delimited file into the spreadsheet? Like on any real spreadsheet? Well, it's not on the menus, it's not in the help system (which sucks). I shudda rebooted to Windows and used a real program... but wait, Applix handles it the way any user of real programs would expect... now if only Applix weren't peculiar in its other functions.
This is what I wasted a half-hour on earlier tonight. Look, I keep going to Star when I need to do something that would be simple with Lotus or MS or WP/Quattro - and every time it wastes 20 minutes or a half hour and I just swear at the damn thing. I keep forgetting it flat out sucks. There is no Linux desktop suite that's even up to the low standards of MS Office. Maybe IBM will have Lotus address that? Lotus's stuff is far better than MS's anyhow, more intuitive, more capable, cleaner interfaces. Come-on IBM, spend part of that billion on a Lotus port.
Your typical not-for-profit isn't looking for a single workstation for the typist, it's looking for a local network and an Internet connection. Now, you could set this up on *nix or Windows, but the Windows setup will require a lot more sysadmin work to keep it going - at least if your servers are on Windows. If you got, say, VA Linux to provide an out-of-the-box charity server (say, Apache+PHP, MySQL, Sendmail, Samba, Proftpd, IPchains firewall, masquerading, print server), this could be set up and walked away from for 6 months at a time, and will keep running fine (I know, I've done it many times). Windows doesn't do that.
You don't need charities to teach people to run Office. Temp agencies do that for free, just to get more workers. Why use charity money when the private sector covers this? What you need charities for is to teach people to organize, and what you need for that is good networking, in every sense of the word, and the OS of networking is *nix.
If broadband truly happens, certainly Kodak will be sure that we can transmit live pictures of the grandkid to old folks. Which means the borders will open for all sorts of smuggled signals. If you think there won't be Napster-equivalents-on-steroids in terms of 'file sharing' you vastly under-rate the criminal class.
... which would be silly to do since it's precisely the criminal class that's in control of the corporations that are stealing our commons. And that's the stupid criminals mostly. Friends of mine recently left television work after 20 successful years because they realized that there was no one in the industry who really had a spark of joy about what they were doing, let alone inspiration, or being people you'd want to know well.
As we know from our music videos, the way to have true fun is to go fully criminal, to go outside of the corporate spheres where you're as much a crime victim as perpetrator, to the outsider sphere where its much more fun to perpetrate. And the more the stupid criminals in the corporations achieve legal prohibitions, the more the markets open for the real dope.
Also keep in mind that digital gear means that it will soon be cheaper to produce equivalent-quality TV or movies by about a factor of 10. Add to that the greater creativity crews will have when they aren't so beholden to money to do their work, and we're not talking about a revolution, maybe, but a vast openning for a much more creative, more openly outlaw scene.
However, as a means of defense of last resort, we should form an informal programmers' union. Do you know how long the corporations can stay up if the core of their IT staff stays away from work for a few weeks? I'm not talking about cracking, just a wide outbreak of the Big Blue Flu. We should cultivate this prospect, in case the corperpetrations really go too far and we need to take the Jeffersonian step of tearing them down and starting again.
EMF has been dropping passenger planes, maybe
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EMP Artillery Shells
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At level >= 3 I read 5 comments. The first four are of the "isn't this just like Slashdot to spotlight an article favoring the underdog" ilk. This sort of teenage self-consciousness, "Oh, my gawd, I'm being too trendy and I know it and I can be cooler than that by displaying my self-awareness," approach -- why is it earning so many moderation points in so many of the topics in the last few months?
The fifth highly-moderated comment is substantial: that what's bad engineering design for this point in time may actually provide a better platform on which to build high clock speed chips a year or two out. The commentor doesn't show why AMD's currently superior chips can't gain similar speed -- but at least begins a proper challenge to the paper under discussion's very credible technical analysis of why the Intel chips currently look bad.
Historically, no on stays at the top forever; some 'underdog' always wins. Most underdogs lose, badly. But anyone who's claimed "Intel/the Roman Emperor/the British Empire/IBM/the Nazis/CBS/Rock n Roll is just too big, smart and powerful to ever yield top position" through what, afterwards, will appear shear idiocy has been wrong. We're not only surrounded by idiocy, it infiltrates us as individuals.
But could we tone it down in our moderation, where it's now become typical/. crap to award points to whoever says "This is typical/. crap" in the most typical,/. crap way?
W. is s'posed to be against trial lawyers - the one profession to solidly support the Dems. So how do we package the debate as "Keeping lawyers out of the technology sector" rather than "Protecting intellectual property"? That is, how to spin this as "protecting innovators from the lawyers," instead of as "providing lawyers for the 'innovators' to protect them from the hordes"?
The compromise inherent in this spin might be to also have to allow Microsoft to be saved from the law - but then Microsoft's projections are down today while Red Hat, Cisco, 3com and Adobe are up - so the market alone may be sufficient to deal Redmond its deserts....
Here's a proposal that'll upset folk who don't want to be branded as collaborators, yet might be well worth doing:
How about an open-source, absolutely minimal censorware? Something that blocks an absolute minimum of sites while complying with the law. If the law's going to be there (1) libraries should prefer something free to the current idiot products at any cost and (2) most librarians favor maximal free speech too.
If the software needs to keep lists of truly offending sites (Russian child slavery or whatever), it could even let the librarians build such lists themselves, both locally and collaboratively (with local librarians being able to weight the input of individual librarians elsewhere (Kansas Librarians: -1 "If they don't like it in Kansas, keep that channel open here!")).
You're right, I see no hope that someone sociopathic enough to hijack a mail server and send a million spams will come out of prison and behave any better. The guy should be shortened.
Violent criminals on the other hand were often performing in a fit of passion, and after a few years to cool off, will come out and behave.
As all of us who've made a practice of transferring domains from NSI on renewal know, NSI's systems don't even realize that's happenned, and they send out scarey last chance to renew notices - despite that the root servers properly show the new registrar. Now, they could be doing that on purpose (some idiots must pay), or it could just be that they never figured out how to make their databases relational and why would they want to when after all some idiots will pay.
Well, if their systems don't fully reflect that your domain has been renewed elsewhere, why should you expect them to reflect that your domain has expired? Like, they should pay a programmer to connect these things? (Isn't the whole problem when outfits like NSI connect too many things and violate our privacy or something?)
Wouldn't it be a better legal case if you caught them later selling a domain name at a premium that they previously hadn't released in a timely way? That would show that they were really clever, which would surprise some of us. Still, when the attorneys get done with them, some idiots will pay. The judge just won't believe that guys who can run such fancy computers would be so innocently stupid. The judge won't understand they can barely run their computers.
Isn't that how Great Britain screwed up their train system, having one outfit own the track while others ran the trains?
Re:Printing Press, Reformation || Web?
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The Renaissance
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To run the parallel:
First the Italian mercantile culture spawned high-art as well as trade, but the art stayed with the midaeval religious themes (blending in the rediscovered Roman antiquities). Then the printing press brought on the Reformation and Enlightenment, and the end of intensely religious themes (the Passion, the Virgin, martyrdom in general) as the center of visual and aural art.
Now the industrial revolution spawned pop-art as well as manufacture and trade, but the pop-art stayed on 18th and 19th century themes (family values, action-adventure quests, bringing civilization and political correctness to the 'inferior' cultures, progress through the conquest of nature). Then the Internet came and the dominant themes of our dominant arts changed to... what?
First, of course have many TLD's. Second, if some outfit wants to take.xxx or.kids and charge enough to police the damn thing for a certain level of consistency - why not? This isn't ICANN putting its rep on the line, but kids-registrar.net. It either builds a brand of the TLD, and charges accordingly, or it becomes as cheap and meaningless as.com,.org and.net. This is freedom - as in market. And if a site doesn't want to be caught in a "no.kids" filter, it's easy enough to have several domain names pointing to the same site - but the point is the advantage of being findable by someone who runs a ".kids only" filter. This increases freedom, increases quality, and the only folks who lose out are registrars who want top dollar for new TLD's without this significant value-added.
Let's say you had this drug that made people intensely productive at whatever. The trade-off is health eventually suffers and you don't have much of a life beyond the special focus the drug gives you. But meanwhile you do some very valuable work for the larger society.
Say you're Charlie Parker or Jerry Garcia, generating 'code' that truly improves a great number of lives - which is so much better than the code produced by those without your addiction that a sort of secondary addiction develops among those who use it. (I know someone with 6000 bebop albums - all stuff derived from Parker's innovations; we all know Jerry's kids.)
Granted, there's a great case to be made for the collective's steering some members towards that sort of productive addiction, and writing off the cost to the lives of the addicts in the same way we write off the costs of soldiers' lives in war (though we are no longer willing in the US to do the latter). There's a case to be made that much of our current success results from our developing an ecology of addictions, of specializations, of sacrifice of the individual to the task, in programming, on Wall St.... and that at best we seek a bit of balance in secondary addictions: to TV, the Web, sex, drink....
But is it possible to return to the sort of generalist brilliance that Ben Franklin, Thom Jefferson, Leo DaVinci had? Further, is the failure of the dot-coms precisely because we lack enough of that, of the sort of mind which can really advance into new frontiers, rather than just running out the line of an established addictive strategy (Websites that want to be TV, music that wants to be whatever retro thing)? Consider: there was a common projection that good programming would not be tied to cities - you can live anywhere and log in. But the good Web stuff comes from San Francisco, New York, Boston... that about ends the list. Why? Is it because lives are richer on the ground there, that more people, despite the prevalence of addiction there as everywhere, have more real ties to wider varieties of the arts and their communities, and more diverse friends and associates? Addiction in the rural and suburban wasteland tends to be more complete - the job competing only with a homelife so sterile that which Presidential candidate will educate your kid seems like a real question, and long hours at the office start to look like the emotionally less unattractive course.
This is also the basis of the "Humbucking" guitar pickup that Gibson has made at least since the mid 1950's. Which is probably where the Dead got the idea for applying it to microphones (which they handled by rigging two microphones together out of phase before each singer - but whether it's in one casing or not doesn't have much to do with the concept - the Gibson design is two pickups out of phase in a single casing).
Seems to me like you could handle Gore's request by (1) providing an OS with proper ownership permissions so the kids can't install software such as alternate browsers and (2) making available browsers with enableable security features where the administrator (parent) can restrict nonprivileged users (children) from accessing any site that the parent hasn't directly given them permission for. Forget filtering the bad stuff - that's an impossible project. Just let the parents lock their browsers (and newsreaders) to sites they've specifically approved - filter for stuff known to be good. Sure, this makes them have to look over the kid's shoulder when the kid wants to go to new sites. They ought to.
Slashdot Mirror
It's great people put the time into making legacy code in obsolete languages like Fortran, Basic and Hebrew run on modern systems. Or is it? Is the coming total breakdown in Israel and Palestine due to the legacy code each insists on running in their heads, and running their societies on? Despite the great faults remaining in English-languaged territories, ever since the North won the war for civility we've gotten along pretty well within the cohort. The evidence from the field would seem to be that English-coded cultural wares just run better, with fewer crashes and breakdowns (tho some excuse must be made for North Ireland to carry this argument)?
Is _your_ language Y2k ready? Or would you rather be speaking in tongues? Babel was not an advance. You can write good code in a bad language; but it's _much_ harder.
The notion of info overload is empty. Information density is fractal, and scales across the ranges of our senses and concerns - there is always more than we could ever take in. Consider an ancestor in a tropical rain forest - great density of information there. All wilderness contains a great density of info - look at the culture of the Australian aboriginals, their song lines, even in the desert. Consider the information density on the streets of NY or London today - not much different (or different in its fractal distribution) than that in those same cities 300 years ago, or ancient Rome - and on a scale approaching natural wilderness. If anything perhaps our cities are a bit less info dense now, more simplified by modern streamlining of life, style, option and opportunity.
... there's never too much, the doors of perception have evolved wonderful filters to assure our minds are not over-illuminated (and given us wonderful internal and external means to adjust those filters).
The only place where information density differs from normal ranges for the human species over its development is in certain suburban tracts, where the uniformity of housing, landscaping and occupants presents a sterilization where those factors of wildness present in both deep countryside and deep city have been partially eliminated. For these info-deprived citizens, we pipe the weak signals of our media. But the richest media presentation only approximates the density a wilderness has for a species involved in survival there, and the lack of pertinence to survival of much mediated info can only be partially compensated for by a BFG.
So: Was it their PDAs? Or were they raised in the steriler reaches of suburbia, with schooling that focused on far simpler questions than are involved in prioritizing among the richness of a full city or country life? Did their parents always drive them around rather than sending them off on their own to learn exploration - and the consequent opportunities and dangers? Were they raised to believe that all answers are in some book, or computer, or PDA, so that physical presence in the world, attention to its details across its fractal ranges, is destraction from the primary task of looking up these answers?
Information overload? Sit in a mountain meadow in spring and tell me about overload! Information is delicious, and comfortable, and precious
What would help is a trademark certifying that the manufacturer of a certain piece of equipment uses no technologies in its products that contribute to the closing off of technological avenues. Thus, if Intel works to enable the destruction of our commons, AMD or Transmeta would have a reason to take the open road, because by earning Open Society Certification (note: get Soros to okay use of trademark and contribute funding) they'd get to label all their products as compliant, and tens of millions of us will do our best to buy (and spec our companies to buy) nothing else.
There are experiments going back 30 years showing that an infant of a few weeks old is able to make faces - stick out its tongue for instance - in response to seeing its mother make those faces. Which shows that the mirroring is inborn, since this is an infant which has never seen its own face to understand how it corresponds to its mothers.
There are many candidate explanations for autism. A book of some interest is _Thinking in Pictures_ by an autistic woman who has designed the majority of the cattle enclosures currently used in the US. She says her autism prevents her from thinking primarily in language, but that her vivid thought in pictures allows her to see how an environment will look and feel to the cattle, thus her great success in her field. This is not an example of impaired empathy, but of enhanced.
However, she has a lot of trouble with speech tonality, which is how we communicate a lot about our emotive states - she will picture movies that express a certain feeling, and then try to speak with the patterns used by people in those scenes, which she can envision vividly.
The sort of autism she experiences would match with the research showing that we have two major, semi-independant modes of working memory: verbal and visuo-spatial. Her verbal ability is impaired (although she can speak quite well by translating out of pictures).
Recently reread one of Heinlein's most perfectly-paced kid's books. Child sold in slave market on distant world to beggar who turns out to be more than that, escapes to join traders-on-spaceships-based-society, ends up among upper class on Earth. The thing that excited me on first reading (at about 10), and which I think explains much of the power of sci-fi, is the Margaret Mead-based anthropologist who is along for the ride with the traders, and who befriends and briefs the kid.
Heinlein was into cultural hacking, which builds on the knowledge from anthropology that there are many ways to structure cultural norms, that these have much to do with the fit of a culture to its particular ecological and economic niches (which are much the same thing), and also have much to do with the mythology of the culture. He saw that one of our present powers was to consciously create both our cultural norms and mythologies, and that these efforts are closely akin to our conscious creation of technologies (which is not to say they are wide open: not every cultural norm or myth will work equally well, just as not every techological idea will). Stranger in a Strange Land is a footnote to Citizen of the Galaxy.
As for the claim that he went from radical socialist to radical libertarian - this is just nonsense. He was always consistent with an anarcho-syndicalist position, which has elements resembling both (which generally pisses the pure proponents of both off), and closely resembles the open source community (hmm).
So:
1. Who's offering a Transmeta pizza box?
2. Who's offering a cheap Transmeta motherboard for build-it-cheap-yourselfers?
3. Can we run Crusoe w/ Linux SMP?
For some years, when certain environmental hucksters were sending out reams of processed forest with 'urgent surveys' to return with my pledge in order to save those same forests, I was returning them with no cash enclosed by a promise, "Send me the results of this survey - which I doubt you actually ever compile - and I'll happily send you $100." They never took me up.
As Bush the Elder faced his impending defeat, the Republical National Committee sent me a particularly large reply envelope, which I filled with pennies and cardboard reinforcement.
<p>A month later a certificate arrived naming me to a special Republican national advisory committee. Guess they were touched by my sincere expression of support.
I like your whole post except for "Star Office ... with its excellent Office interoperability." Like there's gotta be some simple way to import a comma-delimited file into the spreadsheet? Like on any real spreadsheet? Well, it's not on the menus, it's not in the help system (which sucks). I shudda rebooted to Windows and used a real program ... but wait, Applix handles it the way any user of real programs would expect ... now if only Applix weren't peculiar in its other functions.
This is what I wasted a half-hour on earlier tonight. Look, I keep going to Star when I need to do something that would be simple with Lotus or MS or WP/Quattro - and every time it wastes 20 minutes or a half hour and I just swear at the damn thing. I keep forgetting it flat out sucks. There is no Linux desktop suite that's even up to the low standards of MS Office. Maybe IBM will have Lotus address that? Lotus's stuff is far better than MS's anyhow, more intuitive, more capable, cleaner interfaces. Come-on IBM, spend part of that billion on a Lotus port.
Your typical not-for-profit isn't looking for a single workstation for the typist, it's looking for a local network and an Internet connection. Now, you could set this up on *nix or Windows, but the Windows setup will require a lot more sysadmin work to keep it going - at least if your servers are on Windows. If you got, say, VA Linux to provide an out-of-the-box charity server (say, Apache+PHP, MySQL, Sendmail, Samba, Proftpd, IPchains firewall, masquerading, print server), this could be set up and walked away from for 6 months at a time, and will keep running fine (I know, I've done it many times). Windows doesn't do that.
You don't need charities to teach people to run Office. Temp agencies do that for free, just to get more workers. Why use charity money when the private sector covers this? What you need charities for is to teach people to organize, and what you need for that is good networking, in every sense of the word, and the OS of networking is *nix.
If broadband truly happens, certainly Kodak will be sure that we can transmit live pictures of the grandkid to old folks. Which means the borders will open for all sorts of smuggled signals. If you think there won't be Napster-equivalents-on-steroids in terms of 'file sharing' you vastly under-rate the criminal class.
... which would be silly to do since it's precisely the criminal class that's in control of the corporations that are stealing our commons. And that's the stupid criminals mostly. Friends of mine recently left television work after 20 successful years because they realized that there was no one in the industry who really had a spark of joy about what they were doing, let alone inspiration, or being people you'd want to know well.
As we know from our music videos, the way to have true fun is to go fully criminal, to go outside of the corporate spheres where you're as much a crime victim as perpetrator, to the outsider sphere where its much more fun to perpetrate. And the more the stupid criminals in the corporations achieve legal prohibitions, the more the markets open for the real dope.
Also keep in mind that digital gear means that it will soon be cheaper to produce equivalent-quality TV or movies by about a factor of 10. Add to that the greater creativity crews will have when they aren't so beholden to money to do their work, and we're not talking about a revolution, maybe, but a vast openning for a much more creative, more openly outlaw scene.
However, as a means of defense of last resort, we should form an informal programmers' union. Do you know how long the corporations can stay up if the core of their IT staff stays away from work for a few weeks? I'm not talking about cracking, just a wide outbreak of the Big Blue Flu. We should cultivate this prospect, in case the corperpetrations really go too far and we need to take the Jeffersonian step of tearing them down and starting again.
See Swissair 111, TWA 800, and Electromagnetic Interference and THE FALL OF EGYPTAIR 990
The fifth highly-moderated comment is substantial: that what's bad engineering design for this point in time may actually provide a better platform on which to build high clock speed chips a year or two out. The commentor doesn't show why AMD's currently superior chips can't gain similar speed -- but at least begins a proper challenge to the paper under discussion's very credible technical analysis of why the Intel chips currently look bad.
Historically, no on stays at the top forever; some 'underdog' always wins. Most underdogs lose, badly. But anyone who's claimed "Intel/the Roman Emperor/the British Empire/IBM/the Nazis/CBS/Rock n Roll is just too big, smart and powerful to ever yield top position" through what, afterwards, will appear shear idiocy has been wrong. We're not only surrounded by idiocy, it infiltrates us as individuals.
But could we tone it down in our moderation, where it's now become typical /. crap to award points to whoever says "This is typical /. crap" in the most typical, /. crap way?
W. is s'posed to be against trial lawyers - the one profession to solidly support the Dems. So how do we package the debate as "Keeping lawyers out of the technology sector" rather than "Protecting intellectual property"? That is, how to spin this as "protecting innovators from the lawyers," instead of as "providing lawyers for the 'innovators' to protect them from the hordes"?
The compromise inherent in this spin might be to also have to allow Microsoft to be saved from the law - but then Microsoft's projections are down today while Red Hat, Cisco, 3com and Adobe are up - so the market alone may be sufficient to deal Redmond its deserts....
Here's a proposal that'll upset folk who don't want to be branded as collaborators, yet might be well worth doing:
How about an open-source, absolutely minimal censorware? Something that blocks an absolute minimum of sites while complying with the law. If the law's going to be there (1) libraries should prefer something free to the current idiot products at any cost and (2) most librarians favor maximal free speech too.
If the software needs to keep lists of truly offending sites (Russian child slavery or whatever), it could even let the librarians build such lists themselves, both locally and collaboratively (with local librarians being able to weight the input of individual librarians elsewhere (Kansas Librarians: -1 "If they don't like it in Kansas, keep that channel open here!")).
You're right, I see no hope that someone sociopathic enough to hijack a mail server and send a million spams will come out of prison and behave any better. The guy should be shortened.
Violent criminals on the other hand were often performing in a fit of passion, and after a few years to cool off, will come out and behave.
As all of us who've made a practice of transferring domains from NSI on renewal know, NSI's systems don't even realize that's happenned, and they send out scarey last chance to renew notices - despite that the root servers properly show the new registrar. Now, they could be doing that on purpose (some idiots must pay), or it could just be that they never figured out how to make their databases relational and why would they want to when after all some idiots will pay.
Well, if their systems don't fully reflect that your domain has been renewed elsewhere, why should you expect them to reflect that your domain has expired? Like, they should pay a programmer to connect these things? (Isn't the whole problem when outfits like NSI connect too many things and violate our privacy or something?)
Wouldn't it be a better legal case if you caught them later selling a domain name at a premium that they previously hadn't released in a timely way? That would show that they were really clever, which would surprise some of us. Still, when the attorneys get done with them, some idiots will pay. The judge just won't believe that guys who can run such fancy computers would be so innocently stupid. The judge won't understand they can barely run their computers.
Isn't that how Great Britain screwed up their train system, having one outfit own the track while others ran the trains?
First the Italian mercantile culture spawned high-art as well as trade, but the art stayed with the midaeval religious themes (blending in the rediscovered Roman antiquities). Then the printing press brought on the Reformation and Enlightenment, and the end of intensely religious themes (the Passion, the Virgin, martyrdom in general) as the center of visual and aural art.
Now the industrial revolution spawned pop-art as well as manufacture and trade, but the pop-art stayed on 18th and 19th century themes (family values, action-adventure quests, bringing civilization and political correctness to the 'inferior' cultures, progress through the conquest of nature). Then the Internet came and the dominant themes of our dominant arts changed to ... what?
First, of course have many TLD's. Second, if some outfit wants to take .xxx or .kids and charge enough to police the damn thing for a certain level of consistency - why not? This isn't ICANN putting its rep on the line, but kids-registrar.net. It either builds a brand of the TLD, and charges accordingly, or it becomes as cheap and meaningless as .com, .org and .net. This is freedom - as in market. And if a site doesn't want to be caught in a "no .kids" filter, it's easy enough to have several domain names pointing to the same site - but the point is the advantage of being findable by someone who runs a ".kids only" filter. This increases freedom, increases quality, and the only folks who lose out are registrars who want top dollar for new TLD's without this significant value-added.
Let's say you had this drug that made people intensely productive at whatever. The trade-off is health eventually suffers and you don't have much of a life beyond the special focus the drug gives you. But meanwhile you do some very valuable work for the larger society.
... and that at best we seek a bit of balance in secondary addictions: to TV, the Web, sex, drink....
... that about ends the list. Why? Is it because lives are richer on the ground there, that more people, despite the prevalence of addiction there as everywhere, have more real ties to wider varieties of the arts and their communities, and more diverse friends and associates? Addiction in the rural and suburban wasteland tends to be more complete - the job competing only with a homelife so sterile that which Presidential candidate will educate your kid seems like a real question, and long hours at the office start to look like the emotionally less unattractive course.
Say you're Charlie Parker or Jerry Garcia, generating 'code' that truly improves a great number of lives - which is so much better than the code produced by those without your addiction that a sort of secondary addiction develops among those who use it. (I know someone with 6000 bebop albums - all stuff derived from Parker's innovations; we all know Jerry's kids.)
Granted, there's a great case to be made for the collective's steering some members towards that sort of productive addiction, and writing off the cost to the lives of the addicts in the same way we write off the costs of soldiers' lives in war (though we are no longer willing in the US to do the latter). There's a case to be made that much of our current success results from our developing an ecology of addictions, of specializations, of sacrifice of the individual to the task, in programming, on Wall St.
But is it possible to return to the sort of generalist brilliance that Ben Franklin, Thom Jefferson, Leo DaVinci had? Further, is the failure of the dot-coms precisely because we lack enough of that, of the sort of mind which can really advance into new frontiers, rather than just running out the line of an established addictive strategy (Websites that want to be TV, music that wants to be whatever retro thing)? Consider: there was a common projection that good programming would not be tied to cities - you can live anywhere and log in. But the good Web stuff comes from San Francisco, New York, Boston
This is also the basis of the "Humbucking" guitar pickup that Gibson has made at least since the mid 1950's. Which is probably where the Dead got the idea for applying it to microphones (which they handled by rigging two microphones together out of phase before each singer - but whether it's in one casing or not doesn't have much to do with the concept - the Gibson design is two pickups out of phase in a single casing).
Ramsey explains why Americans can't buy these terrorist tools. No shit.
Seems to me like you could handle Gore's request by (1) providing an OS with proper ownership permissions so the kids can't install software such as alternate browsers and (2) making available browsers with enableable security features where the administrator (parent) can restrict nonprivileged users (children) from accessing any site that the parent hasn't directly given them permission for. Forget filtering the bad stuff - that's an impossible project. Just let the parents lock their browsers (and newsreaders) to sites they've specifically approved - filter for stuff known to be good. Sure, this makes them have to look over the kid's shoulder when the kid wants to go to new sites. They ought to.