Sorry, I'm a bit confused by your statements. I cought the sarcasm bit, but I don't see why the elimination of regulation would cause all of these things.
First off, huge amounts of radiation coming off of a consumer device like a microwave or phone is begging for a class action suit, in addition to criminal charges. We've been handling that sort of thing in non-electromagnetic forces for a long time.
As for broadcasting "fuck" a whole bunch via a huge antenna...no problem, if you own the spectrum you're using. If not...well, try renovating a few other people's houses with a steamshovel and see what happens.
As for the DRM issue, the issue at hand is fair use, which still has not been settled. If the restrictions are found to be in violation of fair use, or if we can pass laws clarifying what fair use should be, then those restrictions would be illegal. If they're not illegal, then what's the problem?
Perhaps I don't understand the argument behind your statements. The few I can think of that sound good would be: large corporations would arrange the sale of the FCC spectra to their advantage, unequal enforcement of interference restrictions, and that the gov't would just hand over large areas of the spectrum and leave the small stuff for sale.
I'll get to the "ClearChannel spend[ing] millions (billions?) buying the property" stuff in a moment.
First, because land can be bought and sold with few regulations, it will be available to anyone. It used to be that in order to own land you had to be royalty (or damn near). Having a government control something like land creates a tyranny. A "landed class." Those did exist.
And what happens? Since there were few who owned land, restrictions were made. Those who owned land could vote. Today, those who own radio waves can make political statements near elections (McCain-Feingold).
If you do not allow land to be bought and sold with money, it will be bought and sold with influence.
Resources are scarce. Not scarce as in "will we have to buy land so we have somewhere to sleep?" but scarce as in "not everyone can have as much land as they want and to do whatever they want with." The best way to get people to do something with something is to make it buy-able and sell-able. Just as people make better guesses when there's money on the table, people make better use of resources they've paid for and have the possibility of selling.
and when something is bought and sold you never have to justify it. When there is a central planning agency that allocates these things, you have to convince (and continue to convince, as you do not own it) the committee that you deserve it. That your purposes are just and pure. For puppies, and kittens.
Ownership doesn't vary with the fluttering of public mores. Or with backroom deals that give large corporations huge tracts for free (eminent domain abuse excepted...and look how big a deal that is compared to the HDTV band giveaway).
As for the huge tracts of land that are owned and underdeveloped...if there are so many people willing to move to one of these places, I'm certain they can find someone who's willing to sell a portion for the right price.
Okay, as for Clear Channel buying up even a large portion of the radio spectrum: if you auction it off, they never get the chance.
Here's how it works: quite a few people, organizations, and businesses will be interested in the radio frequencies. Some frequencies more than others, and some companies more than others. If you were to set the price per area at a low static price, of course one company would buy it all up, if they could get their foot in the door first. And if you set it to a huge static price, only the large companies could afford it.
But if instead you were to auction off all the bands, the price would be whatever people are willing to pay. Conservatively, the value of the radio waves is placed at around 1-2 trillion dollars. Clear Channel couldn't even get a loan for that amount.
If you make sure there's no chicanery in the auctioning, the market will take care of the situation.
And over time, as greater efficiencies in usage come along, it will become profitable to split the bands, sell off or sublet portions of them. When it's worth $1,000,000 to double the amount of usage in your spectrum, quite a few companies are willing to finance R&D.
Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes They got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway? Bunnies, bunnies It must be bunnies
We have a funny situation these days where the dominant verbage has its roots in liberalism and collectivism. I'm not sure what the dominant ideology is, maybe fascism.
The point is that the powers believe in neither liberalism nor socialism, but use the language of both to promote things. You said "fervently and mindlessly," and you got it right: they have absolutely no clue what some of the concepts they're espousing mean (or don't care), and they parrot the phrases over and over again.
Schizophrenia is thought to be exacerbated by isolation and social separation. There is an early stage where the person will start having "odd" thoughts and beliefs, and they will feel apart from others, and become increasingly exclusively involved in their own affairs.
And it goes downhill from there.
A big issue is making sure that your sister, your friend feels like they can trust you, talk to you. It will keep them from feeling so lonely.
When I had a bad episode several years ago, it wasn't until after I was on anti-psychotics that I realized how little I was talking to anyone else. Much of the destabilization was at night, alone in my apartment with the voices and thoughts. Things start to make sense that really shouldn't.
A major component of schizophrenia is belief. The person is unable to not believe what they believe. Watch The Caveman's Valentine which is a fabulous movie anyways. The schizophrenia in that movie is pretty accurate in that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, he continued to believe his crazy thoughts. Tried to tone it down sometimes because he knew it didn't look good, but nevertheless believed.
Having someone to talk to can help provide a focus point, and keep some of the beliefs from cementing.
The problem is balancing helping take medication with harassing her into taking her medicine.
When I was first diagnosed, my family would bug me all the time "did you take your medication", "it's time for your medication", "what do you mean you forgot? You take it every day!"
Whenever I had a bad day, or was just thinking about something, it was a "sign that I hadn't been taking the medication."
After a while, you wonder whom the medication is for? Maybe a sedative for the folks would work out in everyone's best interest.
With alcoholics, after they sober up for a little while they start having family problems. Of course, they've always had them. The alcoholic's problem enabled the family to ignore their own, concentrating on his/hers. When that problem is no longer there, there is a noted tendency for the family to constantly harp on the problem as a tool in every family fight. After a while, the alcoholic starts wondering that, as long as he's getting blamed for it still, he might as well have a drink now and then....
If there've been troubles due to a mental disorder, there's usually some of that there. Don't be fooled by how concerned/relieved people seem by the diagnosis. Watch to make sure that they don't use the diagnosis as an excuse. With daughters it's often an excuse to remove their freedom of choice. I've seen it happen more than a few times.
These are all reasons why people stop taking the medication. Also, they just stop feeling like themselves. Bipolars, such as myself, are well known for getting off medication because they "just don't feel right."
In addition, don't let the doctors bullshit you: some of the medications have side effects. Most of them do. Besides the physical ones, there's the mental ones. Every bipolar I know of has complained about the medication reducing their creativity, and whether or not it's in their head it does seem to be an effect.
Many of the anti-psychotic agents these days are far more gentle than before (the older medications were bad shit), but they're still known to change people a bit.
What I'm saying is that people have very good reasons for mistrusting or disliking the medication. It is important to take it, but don't let the medication be your reasons for interacting. Don't let it be a sword hanging over your relationship.
You didn't want to use the tool because it was a "pain to type"?!
Boilerplate code, near cut-and-paste code, and highly verbose code produce greater errors, and induce programmer fatigue.
In addition, they make the code harder to understand at first glance.
That's quite important. Much is made of how unreadable Perl can be, but sitting down and trying to figure out the logic and nuances behind a bit of C code is often much, much worse. This is because the C is usually more verbose to do the same thing.
I'm not saying SPARK is worse than Perl, I am just discussing why "verbose code" can be a bad thing.
Another thing: if you ever want to change the code, add on things, etc. -- which, as we all know, happens routinely -- then the less verbose your code, the more flexible it will be.
Not really much worse or more error-prone than having to rewrite several hundred lines of code to tweak something.
With these tools there needs to be an emphasis on getting as much information as possible from the code itself. Sometimes, that isn't possible. And sometimes it is.
It's not the probability of two random sets of 2GB date having the same md5 signature, it's the probability of one md5 signature being the same as another md5 signature. See Birthday Paradox for more information.
The good news is that that means the probability is much lower.
The following is a rather naive calculation, but it will do.
MD5 produces a 128 bit signature, with 128 meaningful bits (ie no parity checks or anything). By pigeonhole principle, this means that any data input larger than 7 bytes must have collisions.
So, given a dataset of 2GB (ie ~8^2,000,000,000 different values), for any given MD5 value there are ~8^1,999,999,993 values that would give it. This is a lot, but you'd still have to search around 8^7 (~2 million) values in order to get a collision.
It would take a long time.
And that's assuming that you weren't trying to introduce some sort of attack.
So, with an MD5 it's extremely unlikely (8^-7) that you'd hit a collision, and it's ungodly unlikely that you'd be able to construct a malicious collision.
What really makes you realize what an authoritarian and censored world we live in is the type of things that you see on Freenet. How differently people speak when they have no fear of retribution in any manner.
Consider blogs: once your friends and family learn about it, what you say is usually a bit more constrained. Unfortunately, not in the way of "meaningful" but more in the way of "unrevealing" and/or "unoffensive."
I was on Freenet for a while, and it was very refreshing to see what all was spoken about. It's not THAT different from the web, it's just the atmosphere.
And the willingness to use copyrighted material for things. Personal pages with images that would get C&D orders on the web.
Until there is a "fair" alternative, meaning it's accepted as fair to the majority of open-minded and reasonable people, we will continue to see a well-defined, concerted effort to make music available for free.
See, that's exactly the problem. When there are real, honest-to-god market forces and competition, there's no talk of "fair." But here we are.
In my opinion, unless we correct the total lack of competition amongst music publishers, we have lost: only earnest bargaining between buyers and sellers can produce a price everyone is happy with. We'll be dealing with edicts of the court, philosophies of fair price/markup, political campaigns, etc, etc.
"Free (speech) not therefore better" is something I'd take issue with. The property of liberty is far more important than the price you pay for the software. The actual freedom to modify, redistribute, incorporate into your own work, and treat software as speech.
The comparison here would not be "buy cars vs walk for free" or "buy/rent houses vs live in the park." I think a good comparison would be "Freedom vs. Slavery."
So, if you value Freedom, you go for Free, and you may have to pay for it.
Interesting that you mention dehumanization. One of the things to remember is that today we live in far larger cities than the Germans of then did, and we know fewer of the people we interact with. People around us are perceived as anonymous actors.
The other thing to remember is that people dislike one class of person "getting away with" something they can't, or just breaking the law in general.
As you said, it's easier to pass laws and violate the rights of people you've dehumanized, so consider: whom are we told to dislike as lawbreakers?
Quick list off the top of my head:
Speeders
Drunk drivers
Child-support delinquents
Drug users
Drug dealers
Child abusers
Consider all the laws that have been passed against this anonymous group of people. Now consider what protests regarding the violation of their civil rights are usually met with: "they're guilty. They can't avoid that."
Being able to automatically catch more bad guys will probably lead to more "bad guy" crimes. More people dehumanized, and "unpersoned."
So, ask yourself: if you got 20 people in a room and took one of the above criminals and said their rights were being violated, how many of them do you think you could get to protest? Yes, some categories are easier than others.
But several of these categories of people could arguably be doing nothing "wrong." Speeding isn't dangerous, deviating more than 5 MPH from the average speed of traffic is. Ask an actuary. Drug dealers aren't killing people, it's the turf wars and the surrounding problems. Quite a few high school dealers are pretty innocuous. Child-support delinquency isn't cut-and-dry, it's case-by-case. Drug users aren't hurting anyone but themselves.
But it's far easier to dehumanize an entire class of people.
There's one big difference between the vending machines, the everpresent Nike swoosh and writing an essay about why free is stealing.
The latter is a written commitment to a belief. Even if you're just doing it for a grade, it has a profoundly influencing effect. For more information, read Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion. This is a similar technique to what was used by communist China on American POW's during the Korean war. It was amazingly effective.
The basic principle is that people wish to be consistent with their commitments. This, conjoined with the effect that people tend to infer belief in written argument, even when they themselves wrote it without belief. This is part of where we get that "you wrote a pro-gay rights letter? Are you gay?" happening.
You get someone to write a position paper for a measly reward (grade in a class), and you make sure that the one that is well written and well thought-out wins. Oh, and make sure that most of the time that paper supports your position. Then you take the winner's paper and you publicize it as best you can: commitments are more binding when they are public.
People start believing it.
This is why companies so often do those "write a testimonial, you might win a prize" contests: the act of writing the testimonial increases sales for that person and the people they influence.
Well, internet streaming stations pay a "physical duplication" royalty, rather than a broadcast royalty.
So, if you're paying to duplicate it, isn't it legal to duplicate it? I think the term for making someone pay for something they can't have is called "fraud."
Of course, a crime such as fraud is meaningless when tried against the government. Of course, the DMCA (which set up a lot of these provisions) was approved by voice vote, so we have no clue who voted for or against.
Science had a problem with dogmatic beliefs and peer pressure a long time before corporate interests got involved.
A very famous case would be egyptian hieroglyphics. The leading scientist said that the glyphs were pictograms, and that was that. Going against what he said meant you were a quack.
Years later, after he'd fallen out of favor, research began again, and revealed that the glyphs were phonetic.
The worst example I know of would be that of Werner, an early geologist, who was extremely influential. A very talented lecturist, writer, and debater. And he was full of crap. He set back geology about 50 years (not that long in geological time, but quite a while in geologist time).
These days, where science isn't confounded by corporate interests, it's government interference. If you say some things the government doesn't like (opiates don't make you a child molester, cannabis has no link with homicidal rages, etc), you will lose government funding. If you disprove a colleague, he may lose his funding and/or embarass him. If he was politically influential, you might kiss your own funding goodbye.
Several of the journals toe certain party lines, and they're flat out not interested in anything iconoclastic.
Here's one for you: you'd think that the wild claims of the great effect of acupuncture would've drawn scientists like flies hoping to study it and figure out at least if it worked.
Of course, it didn't work that way. If you studied acupuncture's effects at all you'd better have a negative result or you would forever be banished to studying fringe science, which in turn hurts your credibility. Yes, what you work on determines your credibility, not your method (though it can as well).
Recently some study has been made, but it's been slow and painful.
All that technology to serve the end of having fewer people be needed to risk their lives.
First we stopped the draft, now we reduce the size of the military while maintaining its power. I think it's improvement.
We do not have the choice to reduce the capability of our military. Political realities, historical realities, and so on. We do have the choice to have fewer casualties on our side.
As a side note, we also have the choice to limit deployment of our military, but that's another part of the question.
As a programmer, I find it very comforting to know that we will no longer have the need for huge bilge teams who die like rats when the ship goes down. It's using men like machines, and killing them off like they're worth as much as a fly.
Maybe one day we will cease needing and wanting men to serve as the machine of war. Maybe even we'll dismantle the machine entirely. Until then, I'll find comfort in the fact that our troops that die in our wars today choose to be there and feel that they are doing the right thing. And I'll take comfort in the fact that their lives will be worth more through the benefit of machines.
until it is super easy for me to get an item without going to the store (now now now!!!) people will prefer to drive. I'd even accept 2 days, but it seems it takes weeks for packages.
Yes, not having to go to the store would be cause for less driving.
I was referring to a system whereby you could be at the store, make a choice, pay for your item and it would be there when you got home.
I think that private transportation will remain the norm. The emphasis on ownership, of your transportation being your property, is very strong in the US.
One of the other problems with mass transportation is that we seem to have "mass transportation = government operated" embedded in our minds. This is a real problem in car-oriented places, as people who don't use mass transit don't want to pay for it, and gov't operation somehow seems to lead to collective payment/subsidy.
Maybe if we had some sort of efficient delivery method for packages, faster than the mail. So you could go shopping and your purchase would be home before/as you got back. Maybe then there wouldn't be such an emphasis on private transportation.
cities rising vertically instead of horizontally via suburban sprawl, leading to afforable housing for all.
First off, vertical growth is, in many ways, worse than horizontal. Transportation costs, for one. Safety factors, for another. In addition, there is a lack of individuation in vertical cities, though there are ways to reduce this problem, but keep in mind that you will still have the poor in the crappy parts and the rich in the nice ones. Floorspace costs more the higher you go (increased building costs, increased maintenance costs, increased utility costs, etc, etc, etc), so you would see a real "underclass."
Also, suburban sprawl is a good thing. Read The Unheavenly City for a better discussion, but consider: lower property values result in people being able to afford a house that previously could not. New land built enabled people to build larger houses that previously could not afford them. There is an increase in wealth on every front. The reason we see more sprawl these days is for the simple fact that more people own houses than ever before, and more people live in our cities than ever before.
Suburban sprawl results in afforadable housing for all, and if we'll stop funding the armed gangs that turn the lower-income districts into war zones, you'd see those improve.
We need to remove the idea of "deserving" a domain name. We need to remove the idea of "leasing" a domain name. In other words, we need property rights for DNS entries.
I believe that we should auction off the entire DNS spectrum permanently. Then, you have a property transfer fee, and let people split up their property as they like.
So, for example, you could buy.bax through.baz, and anything in that range would go to your DNS servers. If someone wanted to buy and you wanted to sell, you could sell off.bax-.baxe (so.baxalicious and.baxbeat would be in that range), while retaining.baxf-.baz (.baxforth,.bayarea, etc).
Since the queries for those ranges would be directed to your DNS servers, you could make arrangements to sublet, just like now (so someone could lease iliveinthe.bayarea, just like now, if they either felt your TLD was worth it, or didn't want to buy their own).
When Unicode became viable, you could auction off the new addresses, hence creating a profit motive for them to get it going.
All these new TLDs would reduce the worth of any one TLD, and it would make domain squatting very unprofitable.
It would also remove the concentration of power around ICANN. TLDs would become valuable based on the community, not based on edicts of "appropriateness."
And we would still be able to do things like.email: the group that wants to do it could just buy.email from whomever owned it. Or use another TLD.
And it wouldn't eliminate.org, themed TLDs, or even the possibility of co-op TLDs. As you can do whatever you want with your TLD, you could say "I will only sublet/subsell to Linux-oriented sites," or the same for non-profit. You enforce it, not ICANN.
As for co-op TLDs, you could establish a co-op with a charter, and use the pooled money to buy a TLD (or TLD range). You could do this in order to establish free-for-everyone domains, free-for-a-particular-theme, etc, etc, etc. In that way, this would establish something that does not currently exist: the ability to create a completely free area under a TLD.
No US interference, no UN bickering, no ICANN edicts.
Yes, there are a few unresolved issues, like international trademark (possible solution: lawsuits have to take place in the owner of the TLD's country). But I really think this would be the best way.
One argument is that the internet can more easily spread information such as the means and methods of dissent, the reasons of dissent, and the communications of dissent.
ie it can be a medium for subversion.
However, thinking back I have yet to find a subversive (sabotage, etc) group that has not either a) finished up things with tanks, or b) set up a worse dictatorship.
One of the problems with subversion is that it most often re-uses the existing power structure. You get a situation where the people at the top have been replaced, but they're still using kangaroo courts, extrajudicial executions, and intimidation whenever they run into trouble.
A good measure of how just a government is how it acts when its desires are frustrated. The only way to make that better is to get rid of the existing means of power.
The "ends do not justify the means" often comes to bite revolutions in the ass.
I was always interested in the fact that Heinlein's worlds were separate. That people hardly ever communicated between them because of the time delay. Instead, planets tended to be populated by like-minded people.
I think that colonization will ultimately be the value of space.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I'm a bit confused by your statements. I cought the sarcasm bit, but I don't see why the elimination of regulation would cause all of these things.
First off, huge amounts of radiation coming off of a consumer device like a microwave or phone is begging for a class action suit, in addition to criminal charges. We've been handling that sort of thing in non-electromagnetic forces for a long time.
As for broadcasting "fuck" a whole bunch via a huge antenna...no problem, if you own the spectrum you're using. If not...well, try renovating a few other people's houses with a steamshovel and see what happens.
As for the DRM issue, the issue at hand is fair use, which still has not been settled. If the restrictions are found to be in violation of fair use, or if we can pass laws clarifying what fair use should be, then those restrictions would be illegal. If they're not illegal, then what's the problem?
Perhaps I don't understand the argument behind your statements. The few I can think of that sound good would be: large corporations would arrange the sale of the FCC spectra to their advantage, unequal enforcement of interference restrictions, and that the gov't would just hand over large areas of the spectrum and leave the small stuff for sale.
Or is there a better argument?
I'll get to the "ClearChannel spend[ing] millions (billions?) buying the property" stuff in a moment.
First, because land can be bought and sold with few regulations, it will be available to anyone. It used to be that in order to own land you had to be royalty (or damn near). Having a government control something like land creates a tyranny. A "landed class." Those did exist.
And what happens? Since there were few who owned land, restrictions were made. Those who owned land could vote. Today, those who own radio waves can make political statements near elections (McCain-Feingold).
If you do not allow land to be bought and sold with money, it will be bought and sold with influence.
Resources are scarce. Not scarce as in "will we have to buy land so we have somewhere to sleep?" but scarce as in "not everyone can have as much land as they want and to do whatever they want with." The best way to get people to do something with something is to make it buy-able and sell-able. Just as people make better guesses when there's money on the table, people make better use of resources they've paid for and have the possibility of selling.
and when something is bought and sold you never have to justify it. When there is a central planning agency that allocates these things, you have to convince (and continue to convince, as you do not own it) the committee that you deserve it. That your purposes are just and pure. For puppies, and kittens.
Ownership doesn't vary with the fluttering of public mores. Or with backroom deals that give large corporations huge tracts for free (eminent domain abuse excepted...and look how big a deal that is compared to the HDTV band giveaway).
As for the huge tracts of land that are owned and underdeveloped...if there are so many people willing to move to one of these places, I'm certain they can find someone who's willing to sell a portion for the right price.
Okay, as for Clear Channel buying up even a large portion of the radio spectrum: if you auction it off, they never get the chance.
Here's how it works: quite a few people, organizations, and businesses will be interested in the radio frequencies. Some frequencies more than others, and some companies more than others. If you were to set the price per area at a low static price, of course one company would buy it all up, if they could get their foot in the door first. And if you set it to a huge static price, only the large companies could afford it.
But if instead you were to auction off all the bands, the price would be whatever people are willing to pay. Conservatively, the value of the radio waves is placed at around 1-2 trillion dollars. Clear Channel couldn't even get a loan for that amount.
If you make sure there's no chicanery in the auctioning, the market will take care of the situation.
And over time, as greater efficiencies in usage come along, it will become profitable to split the bands, sell off or sublet portions of them. When it's worth $1,000,000 to double the amount of usage in your spectrum, quite a few companies are willing to finance R&D.
Just something to think about.
Stick with bears. Bunnies are just...terrifying.
We have a funny situation these days where the dominant verbage has its roots in liberalism and collectivism. I'm not sure what the dominant ideology is, maybe fascism.
The point is that the powers believe in neither liberalism nor socialism, but use the language of both to promote things. You said "fervently and mindlessly," and you got it right: they have absolutely no clue what some of the concepts they're espousing mean (or don't care), and they parrot the phrases over and over again.
Schizophrenia is thought to be exacerbated by isolation and social separation. There is an early stage where the person will start having "odd" thoughts and beliefs, and they will feel apart from others, and become increasingly exclusively involved in their own affairs.
And it goes downhill from there.
A big issue is making sure that your sister, your friend feels like they can trust you, talk to you. It will keep them from feeling so lonely.
When I had a bad episode several years ago, it wasn't until after I was on anti-psychotics that I realized how little I was talking to anyone else. Much of the destabilization was at night, alone in my apartment with the voices and thoughts. Things start to make sense that really shouldn't.
A major component of schizophrenia is belief. The person is unable to not believe what they believe. Watch The Caveman's Valentine which is a fabulous movie anyways. The schizophrenia in that movie is pretty accurate in that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, he continued to believe his crazy thoughts. Tried to tone it down sometimes because he knew it didn't look good, but nevertheless believed.
Having someone to talk to can help provide a focus point, and keep some of the beliefs from cementing.
The problem is balancing helping take medication with harassing her into taking her medicine.
When I was first diagnosed, my family would bug me all the time "did you take your medication", "it's time for your medication", "what do you mean you forgot? You take it every day!"
Whenever I had a bad day, or was just thinking about something, it was a "sign that I hadn't been taking the medication."
After a while, you wonder whom the medication is for? Maybe a sedative for the folks would work out in everyone's best interest.
With alcoholics, after they sober up for a little while they start having family problems. Of course, they've always had them. The alcoholic's problem enabled the family to ignore their own, concentrating on his/hers. When that problem is no longer there, there is a noted tendency for the family to constantly harp on the problem as a tool in every family fight. After a while, the alcoholic starts wondering that, as long as he's getting blamed for it still, he might as well have a drink now and then....
If there've been troubles due to a mental disorder, there's usually some of that there. Don't be fooled by how concerned/relieved people seem by the diagnosis. Watch to make sure that they don't use the diagnosis as an excuse. With daughters it's often an excuse to remove their freedom of choice. I've seen it happen more than a few times.
These are all reasons why people stop taking the medication. Also, they just stop feeling like themselves. Bipolars, such as myself, are well known for getting off medication because they "just don't feel right."
In addition, don't let the doctors bullshit you: some of the medications have side effects. Most of them do. Besides the physical ones, there's the mental ones. Every bipolar I know of has complained about the medication reducing their creativity, and whether or not it's in their head it does seem to be an effect.
Many of the anti-psychotic agents these days are far more gentle than before (the older medications were bad shit), but they're still known to change people a bit.
What I'm saying is that people have very good reasons for mistrusting or disliking the medication. It is important to take it, but don't let the medication be your reasons for interacting. Don't let it be a sword hanging over your relationship.
You didn't want to use the tool because it was a "pain to type"?!
Boilerplate code, near cut-and-paste code, and highly verbose code produce greater errors, and induce programmer fatigue.
In addition, they make the code harder to understand at first glance.
That's quite important. Much is made of how unreadable Perl can be, but sitting down and trying to figure out the logic and nuances behind a bit of C code is often much, much worse. This is because the C is usually more verbose to do the same thing.
I'm not saying SPARK is worse than Perl, I am just discussing why "verbose code" can be a bad thing.
Another thing: if you ever want to change the code, add on things, etc. -- which, as we all know, happens routinely -- then the less verbose your code, the more flexible it will be.
Not really much worse or more error-prone than having to rewrite several hundred lines of code to tweak something.
With these tools there needs to be an emphasis on getting as much information as possible from the code itself. Sometimes, that isn't possible. And sometimes it is.
It's not the probability of two random sets of 2GB date having the same md5 signature, it's the probability of one md5 signature being the same as another md5 signature. See Birthday Paradox for more information.
The good news is that that means the probability is much lower.
The following is a rather naive calculation, but it will do.
MD5 produces a 128 bit signature, with 128 meaningful bits (ie no parity checks or anything). By pigeonhole principle, this means that any data input larger than 7 bytes must have collisions.
So, given a dataset of 2GB (ie ~8^2,000,000,000 different values), for any given MD5 value there are ~8^1,999,999,993 values that would give it. This is a lot, but you'd still have to search around 8^7 (~2 million) values in order to get a collision.
It would take a long time.
And that's assuming that you weren't trying to introduce some sort of attack.
So, with an MD5 it's extremely unlikely (8^-7) that you'd hit a collision, and it's ungodly unlikely that you'd be able to construct a malicious collision.
What really makes you realize what an authoritarian and censored world we live in is the type of things that you see on Freenet. How differently people speak when they have no fear of retribution in any manner.
Consider blogs: once your friends and family learn about it, what you say is usually a bit more constrained. Unfortunately, not in the way of "meaningful" but more in the way of "unrevealing" and/or "unoffensive."
I was on Freenet for a while, and it was very refreshing to see what all was spoken about. It's not THAT different from the web, it's just the atmosphere.
And the willingness to use copyrighted material for things. Personal pages with images that would get C&D orders on the web.
Until there is a "fair" alternative, meaning it's accepted as fair to the majority of open-minded and reasonable people, we will continue to see a well-defined, concerted effort to make music available for free.
See, that's exactly the problem. When there are real, honest-to-god market forces and competition, there's no talk of "fair." But here we are.
In my opinion, unless we correct the total lack of competition amongst music publishers, we have lost: only earnest bargaining between buyers and sellers can produce a price everyone is happy with. We'll be dealing with edicts of the court, philosophies of fair price/markup, political campaigns, etc, etc.
I just don't know if we'll ever see it.
"Free (beer) not therefore better" is true.
"Free (speech) not therefore better" is something I'd take issue with. The property of liberty is far more important than the price you pay for the software. The actual freedom to modify, redistribute, incorporate into your own work, and treat software as speech.
The comparison here would not be "buy cars vs walk for free" or "buy/rent houses vs live in the park." I think a good comparison would be "Freedom vs. Slavery."
So, if you value Freedom, you go for Free, and you may have to pay for it.
Interesting that you mention dehumanization. One of the things to remember is that today we live in far larger cities than the Germans of then did, and we know fewer of the people we interact with. People around us are perceived as anonymous actors.
The other thing to remember is that people dislike one class of person "getting away with" something they can't, or just breaking the law in general.
As you said, it's easier to pass laws and violate the rights of people you've dehumanized, so consider: whom are we told to dislike as lawbreakers?
Quick list off the top of my head:
Consider all the laws that have been passed against this anonymous group of people. Now consider what protests regarding the violation of their civil rights are usually met with: "they're guilty. They can't avoid that."
Being able to automatically catch more bad guys will probably lead to more "bad guy" crimes. More people dehumanized, and "unpersoned."
So, ask yourself: if you got 20 people in a room and took one of the above criminals and said their rights were being violated, how many of them do you think you could get to protest? Yes, some categories are easier than others.
But several of these categories of people could arguably be doing nothing "wrong." Speeding isn't dangerous, deviating more than 5 MPH from the average speed of traffic is. Ask an actuary. Drug dealers aren't killing people, it's the turf wars and the surrounding problems. Quite a few high school dealers are pretty innocuous. Child-support delinquency isn't cut-and-dry, it's case-by-case. Drug users aren't hurting anyone but themselves.
But it's far easier to dehumanize an entire class of people.
Just something to think about.
Personally, I'm going for Muffley. Just to see the expression on people's faces.
Though Turgidson has an appeal as well.
I think Mandrake might not fly, though: "I'm installing Debian Mandrake!" "Oh for the love of god please NOOOOOOOO."
Mind you, I'm all in favor of this, but I couldn't help but think:
I can no longer sit back and allow [them] to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.
There's one big difference between the vending machines, the everpresent Nike swoosh and writing an essay about why free is stealing.
The latter is a written commitment to a belief. Even if you're just doing it for a grade, it has a profoundly influencing effect. For more information, read Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion. This is a similar technique to what was used by communist China on American POW's during the Korean war. It was amazingly effective.
The basic principle is that people wish to be consistent with their commitments. This, conjoined with the effect that people tend to infer belief in written argument, even when they themselves wrote it without belief. This is part of where we get that "you wrote a pro-gay rights letter? Are you gay?" happening.
You get someone to write a position paper for a measly reward (grade in a class), and you make sure that the one that is well written and well thought-out wins. Oh, and make sure that most of the time that paper supports your position. Then you take the winner's paper and you publicize it as best you can: commitments are more binding when they are public.
People start believing it.
This is why companies so often do those "write a testimonial, you might win a prize" contests: the act of writing the testimonial increases sales for that person and the people they influence.
Rather amazing.
Well, internet streaming stations pay a "physical duplication" royalty, rather than a broadcast royalty.
So, if you're paying to duplicate it, isn't it legal to duplicate it? I think the term for making someone pay for something they can't have is called "fraud."
Of course, a crime such as fraud is meaningless when tried against the government. Of course, the DMCA (which set up a lot of these provisions) was approved by voice vote, so we have no clue who voted for or against.
Mmmm...accountability.
Science had a problem with dogmatic beliefs and peer pressure a long time before corporate interests got involved.
A very famous case would be egyptian hieroglyphics. The leading scientist said that the glyphs were pictograms, and that was that. Going against what he said meant you were a quack.
Years later, after he'd fallen out of favor, research began again, and revealed that the glyphs were phonetic.
The worst example I know of would be that of Werner, an early geologist, who was extremely influential. A very talented lecturist, writer, and debater. And he was full of crap. He set back geology about 50 years (not that long in geological time, but quite a while in geologist time).
These days, where science isn't confounded by corporate interests, it's government interference. If you say some things the government doesn't like (opiates don't make you a child molester, cannabis has no link with homicidal rages, etc), you will lose government funding. If you disprove a colleague, he may lose his funding and/or embarass him. If he was politically influential, you might kiss your own funding goodbye.
Several of the journals toe certain party lines, and they're flat out not interested in anything iconoclastic.
Here's one for you: you'd think that the wild claims of the great effect of acupuncture would've drawn scientists like flies hoping to study it and figure out at least if it worked.
Of course, it didn't work that way. If you studied acupuncture's effects at all you'd better have a negative result or you would forever be banished to studying fringe science, which in turn hurts your credibility. Yes, what you work on determines your credibility, not your method (though it can as well).
Recently some study has been made, but it's been slow and painful.
All that technology to serve the end of having fewer people be needed to risk their lives.
First we stopped the draft, now we reduce the size of the military while maintaining its power. I think it's improvement.
We do not have the choice to reduce the capability of our military. Political realities, historical realities, and so on. We do have the choice to have fewer casualties on our side.
As a side note, we also have the choice to limit deployment of our military, but that's another part of the question.
As a programmer, I find it very comforting to know that we will no longer have the need for huge bilge teams who die like rats when the ship goes down. It's using men like machines, and killing them off like they're worth as much as a fly.
Maybe one day we will cease needing and wanting men to serve as the machine of war. Maybe even we'll dismantle the machine entirely. Until then, I'll find comfort in the fact that our troops that die in our wars today choose to be there and feel that they are doing the right thing. And I'll take comfort in the fact that their lives will be worth more through the benefit of machines.
With you 100%.
until it is super easy for me to get an item without going to the store (now now now!!!) people will prefer to drive. I'd even accept 2 days, but it seems it takes weeks for packages.
Yes, not having to go to the store would be cause for less driving.
I was referring to a system whereby you could be at the store, make a choice, pay for your item and it would be there when you got home.
I think that private transportation will remain the norm. The emphasis on ownership, of your transportation being your property, is very strong in the US.
One of the other problems with mass transportation is that we seem to have "mass transportation = government operated" embedded in our minds. This is a real problem in car-oriented places, as people who don't use mass transit don't want to pay for it, and gov't operation somehow seems to lead to collective payment/subsidy.
Maybe if we had some sort of efficient delivery method for packages, faster than the mail. So you could go shopping and your purchase would be home before/as you got back. Maybe then there wouldn't be such an emphasis on private transportation.
cities rising vertically instead of horizontally via suburban sprawl, leading to afforable housing for all.
First off, vertical growth is, in many ways, worse than horizontal. Transportation costs, for one. Safety factors, for another. In addition, there is a lack of individuation in vertical cities, though there are ways to reduce this problem, but keep in mind that you will still have the poor in the crappy parts and the rich in the nice ones. Floorspace costs more the higher you go (increased building costs, increased maintenance costs, increased utility costs, etc, etc, etc), so you would see a real "underclass."
Also, suburban sprawl is a good thing. Read The Unheavenly City for a better discussion, but consider: lower property values result in people being able to afford a house that previously could not. New land built enabled people to build larger houses that previously could not afford them. There is an increase in wealth on every front. The reason we see more sprawl these days is for the simple fact that more people own houses than ever before, and more people live in our cities than ever before.
Suburban sprawl results in afforadable housing for all, and if we'll stop funding the armed gangs that turn the lower-income districts into war zones, you'd see those improve.
We need to remove the idea of "deserving" a domain name. We need to remove the idea of "leasing" a domain name. In other words, we need property rights for DNS entries.
I believe that we should auction off the entire DNS spectrum permanently. Then, you have a property transfer fee, and let people split up their property as they like.
So, for example, you could buy .bax through .baz, and anything in that range would go to your DNS servers. If someone wanted to buy and you wanted to sell, you could sell off .bax-.baxe (so .baxalicious and .baxbeat would be in that range), while retaining .baxf-.baz (.baxforth, .bayarea, etc).
Since the queries for those ranges would be directed to your DNS servers, you could make arrangements to sublet, just like now (so someone could lease iliveinthe.bayarea, just like now, if they either felt your TLD was worth it, or didn't want to buy their own).
When Unicode became viable, you could auction off the new addresses, hence creating a profit motive for them to get it going.
All these new TLDs would reduce the worth of any one TLD, and it would make domain squatting very unprofitable.
It would also remove the concentration of power around ICANN. TLDs would become valuable based on the community, not based on edicts of "appropriateness."
And we would still be able to do things like .email: the group that wants to do it could just buy .email from whomever owned it. Or use another TLD.
And it wouldn't eliminate .org, themed TLDs, or even the possibility of co-op TLDs. As you can do whatever you want with your TLD, you could say "I will only sublet/subsell to Linux-oriented sites," or the same for non-profit. You enforce it, not ICANN.
As for co-op TLDs, you could establish a co-op with a charter, and use the pooled money to buy a TLD (or TLD range). You could do this in order to establish free-for-everyone domains, free-for-a-particular-theme, etc, etc, etc. In that way, this would establish something that does not currently exist: the ability to create a completely free area under a TLD.
No US interference, no UN bickering, no ICANN edicts.
Yes, there are a few unresolved issues, like international trademark (possible solution: lawsuits have to take place in the owner of the TLD's country). But I really think this would be the best way.
Nice post, KFG.
One argument is that the internet can more easily spread information such as the means and methods of dissent, the reasons of dissent, and the communications of dissent.
ie it can be a medium for subversion.
However, thinking back I have yet to find a subversive (sabotage, etc) group that has not either a) finished up things with tanks, or b) set up a worse dictatorship.
One of the problems with subversion is that it most often re-uses the existing power structure. You get a situation where the people at the top have been replaced, but they're still using kangaroo courts, extrajudicial executions, and intimidation whenever they run into trouble.
A good measure of how just a government is how it acts when its desires are frustrated. The only way to make that better is to get rid of the existing means of power.
The "ends do not justify the means" often comes to bite revolutions in the ass.
I was always interested in the fact that Heinlein's worlds were separate. That people hardly ever communicated between them because of the time delay. Instead, planets tended to be populated by like-minded people.
I think that colonization will ultimately be the value of space.