The SF novel _How Like A God_ by Brenda Clough had this guy named Gilgamesh living in the middle of a Ruskie nuke testing desert because he didn't want to be around people.
Years back, I wrote a SF story using this gimmick. I called it "mental telephony."
Coming soon to a spy-shop near you: Cochlear implants are a mature technology. This allows one to "hear" putting both ends of the conversation well inside the current state of the art.
I figure this would be very useful when running covert ops. If the hookups can be hidden, you could run teams of agents through airports unnoticed. Nowadys, you got the men in black talking into their cufflinks with telltale coiled wires snaking up to their ears.
Even if you can't conceil the gear, you can still run teams of ninja types in paramilitary situations.
Back in my youth, IBM had a permanent law suit going against the Feds on anti-trust charges. This is where the Nazgul learned their chops. IBM is no stranger to perpetual legal cold war. However, I don't think Microsoft is.
If this funding of SCO's (IMO spurious) case is actionable, then IBM is an ideal belligerant. I believe IBM, et al. will not only win the SCO case, but win their counter-suits. Damages could easily bancrupt SCO, and after those funds are expended I'd like to see if Microsoft could chip in the difference. Or be compelled to do so by a court.
If it is not, perhaps the creative juices of the Open Source community could be redirected toward devising a class-action law suit against a Redmond Washington corporation who has knowingly distributed a complex of products which is easily compromised via computer virus. If Big Tobacco could be shaken down a decade ago, why not Microsoft? We don't *have* to wait for the DOJ do we?
Weren't these guys the folks who back in the '70s maintained this doomsday clock that was ticking toward midnight? Every time anybody did something that might make the Ruskies grumpy. Like deploying Pershing missiles or proposing anti-ballistic missile programs, they'd get their nickers in a knot and turn the clock forward a few minutes toward doomsday. Every time some Democrat did something stupid (Jimmy Carter's penchant) they'd turn it back a few seconds.
Science has uncertainties at the boundaries of what's known, and it provides stupid outputs when given stupid inputs. This is how the propagandist in a white lab coat deceives you.
The big Nuclear Winter scare came about when some lefty PhDs did a ONE DIMENSIONAL model of the atmosphere and tweaked the parameters until they got a favorable doomsday scenario. The lefties got their propaganda win and everybody got scared, and when someone with bigger computers, better models, and more accurate input data debunked the Nuclear Winter fraud, the press had gone on to the next chicken little.
Bottom line is that you'll find propagandists misrepresenting science on both political sides. Skepticism is appropriate in any case.
One way to maintain peace is to make sure that even the most highly motivated dullard realizes that violent confrontation will result in his inglorious death.
This is complicated by the martyr-factor, which General Blackjack Pershing (of WW1 fame) addressed by capturing 20 Islamic insurgents (this was in the Philippines before the term terrorist was invented). He then shot 18 of them with pork-fat coated bullets and released the other two to carry the tale.
This isn't feasible in a day of 24x7 cable news coverage and touchy-feely instant polling, but we can publish video of a flea-bitten dictator getting the once-over by a latex gloved medical tech.
rumor i heard was that the Philosophy department was mad that this uppity Mathematician was talking about celestial bodies and trying to usurp their top slot on the academic ladder and they sicced the church at Galileo to knock him down a peg.
also heard Galileo's models were less accurate than Ptolemaic models used by the Vatican observatory (he assumed circular, not elliptical orbits). so he had this theory that didn't fit the evidence as well as the Ptolemaics' and the papists rejected it for that reason (among others).
happily, Galileo taught the church a valuable lesson in biblical hermeneutics: that of phenomenological language. the narrative describes phenomena and not underlying mechanisms. thus, when the weatherman says sun-rise, we know he's speaking phenomologically and not asserting geocentricity.
mod me down for being off topic. mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa maxima.
I'm not all that sure this is a guaranteed recipe for the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The rich will spend money and try to get the best deal. In so doing, wealth flows to some poor locale. The idea of moving to the next 3rd-world hell-hole only works until all the hell-holes are stuffed full of dollars. (Maybe there's an infinite supply of 3rd world hell-holes, I don't know.)
I see this as a great "levelling" of rich and poor countries. The only way you can avoid the levelling is to create artificial barriers to international trade. But protectionism hasn't been very popular for the last half-century.
Since I'm a software engineer I don't like to hear a lot of talk about programming jobs going to 3rd-world locales. But I won't be able to DO anything about it, so I might as well enjoy my $49 DVD-player, look forward to my $149 DVD-recorder and tell my kids to pursue a less portable profession.
all along I figured the lawsuit was a ploy for the insiders to run up the stock price with a spurious lawsuit against IBM then dump it leaving the little guys to get screwed when the stock tanked upon news that their law suit was baseless. the fact that you couldn't see any evidence without an NDA should have been your first clue.
obviously, flavour is a word of the English language, and flavor is a word of the American language. We just have to warm up the nearest handy i18n software to facilitate communications between people of disparate languages such as these.
i've only rarely worked sundays. if you want to know why, read Exodus 20:10. when i've been pressed to work without extra pay, i showed up, but i spent most of my unpaid time chatting with coworkers. generally, those calling for mandatory overtime are idiots and they can be easily bamboozled with the appearance of work.
why work for idiots?
can you call a company that lets itself get screwed in this fashion, are they really a long-term viable employment source?
when the market was hot, getting an employer upgrade was easy. now it ain't, so, cut back spending, play the game until the warchest is full, then if you don't get a better gig, goto grad school. of course, the employer may go bancrupt and that solves the problem another way.
when programmers are taught to a computer language, we're taught to write. When everybody else is taught any other kinda language, they're taught to read. If I learn Russian, I'll read great literature.
Trouble is twofold. 1) we con't have a corpus of great computer code we can show folks howto read.
2) reading code is most often associated with Maintenance and maintenance programmers aren't highly regarded.
You know, there's no diversity of opinion on talk radio. I have the hardest time distinguishing between Rush Limbaugh and Diane Reams. And that Michael Savage sounds sooo much like Fresh Aire.
I'm not defending Clear Channel. Their music stations have really short play lists. And their play lists play follow-the-leader. I listen to classic rock. Now, how many tunes have the Doobie Brothers played in the last 25 years. Multiply that by the number of other bands over the decades and you have a universe of zillions of tunes. So, how come I hear the same lame tune today that i hated yesterday.
this sounds like a FUD attack against P2P. I think of the amount of spam that my ISP has to filter and then the spam that slips through. How much ISP bandwidth goes to spam?
i haven't seen any injet printer mint coins, have you? Maybe pieces of paper with ink smeared on them isn't a good idea nowadays.
one of the things i like about greenbacks is those little threads they put into the paper. Putting RFIDs into money-intended paper could work. A cocktail waitress could keep a transponder in something the size of a ring. Put a red/green led in it along with a teeny RF emitter. She picks up a wad of bills and the ring flashes red.
One of the things I like about British money is you can put down a handful of coins and it's real money. US coinage pretty much peters out after quarters. Pity the gold dollar coins never caught on. We could use a two-loony coin, too.
this kinda realtime adaptation to battlefield problems is one step in the borgish direction. the more that i see of our growing ability to collaborate the more it seems like the borg, but the less it bothers me. maybe not all group-minds are created equal.
bottom line is how our assimilation of Iraq turns out. if we're conquerors, that's one thing. if we're liberators, that's another thing.
1) i'm a wage slave. every week i need my paycheck to maintain my lifestyle and pay my debts. in this case, my employer controls my way of life. i must do everything i can do to maintain/advance my relationship with my employer.
2) i'm an employee. i live well below my means and save the surplus. if i lose my job, i can go months if not years without replacing it. i do everything i can to maintain/advance my financial integrity. bonus points for personal integrity, too.
Now, let's suppose my employer is brewing anthrax spores in the break room. What do I do?
#1, keep very quiet and make your boss think you're a true believer, too.
#2, remember those bonus points for personal integrity and call Inspector Friendly of the FBI.
Lots of people distort the relationship with employers because they have wrong ideas about employment. Your paycheck isn't a trust-fund disbursement (sorry Bertie Wooster), and it isn't an allowance from your dad, and it isn't a welfare check. It's an artifact of your relationship with your employer and your productivity on his behalf.
The One Thing I most regret in my twenty years of bumming code is the time I worked for a bunch of Nazis. (7/9ths of the company's name was Rapist. I kid you not.) Had I had more personal integrity I would have left them much earlier.
i heard Eric Raymond was at Penguicon this last weekend, a sorta linux/fannish gathering at which, no doubt many amusing trinkets were available for sale on blankets. the pyrotechnics folks always had the coolest blinkies and phasers.
how far does your economic argument go past ad hominem? could you elaborate how the dot.com bubble invalidates ESR's magic caldron?
i don't think that shrink-wrapped software's up-front payment and ongoing maintenance expenses is in any way related to the dot.com bubble. that supports Ellison's premise.
the economic potential of Software Guys to make money from end-users to adapting source to their immediate needs isn't a slam-dunk, but I don't think it's correlated to the dot.com bubble.
"Ah. I'd like to have an argument, please." http://www.duke.edu/~pms5/humor/argument .html
Add an obligatory plug to Eric Raymond's economic analysis of the software biz in The Magic Cauldron.
Very few companies can take any software product and configure it into the Right Answer without having to pay some Software Guy to do it. When companies fund Software Guys to morph an open source solution into Their Solution, the funded Software Guys get the money to pay off their mortgage or remodel their kitchen.
Shrink-wrapped software may be moribund.
Companies pay Mr. Ellison for His Software Guys at a significant mark-up. This business model requires some kinda lock-in on Mr. Ellison's part, or an ignorant consumer who doesn't know where to shop for Software Guys.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Mr. Richard Clarke make all our computers secure and safe after Y2K? That was his job after all.
Yeah, this is flame bait, who needs karma.
She'd be a great slashdot interview.
And if either she and/or her interviewer are ever in Grand Rapids, I'll buy their favorite beverage.
The SF novel _How Like A God_ by Brenda Clough had this guy named Gilgamesh living in the middle of a Ruskie nuke testing desert because he didn't want to be around people.
Years back, I wrote a SF story using this gimmick. I called it "mental telephony."
Coming soon to a spy-shop near you: Cochlear implants are a mature technology. This allows one to "hear" putting both ends of the conversation well inside the current state of the art.
I figure this would be very useful when running covert ops. If the hookups can be hidden, you could run teams of agents through airports unnoticed. Nowadys, you got the men in black talking into their cufflinks with telltale coiled wires snaking up to their ears.
Even if you can't conceil the gear, you can still run teams of ninja types in paramilitary situations.
Hack value, eh?
What would it take to cut a zvue-sized hole in the front of a humidor and run wires it to a mini-itx inside?
Or is this painfully obvious? Has someone who Really Knows done something a lot better already?
Back in my youth, IBM had a permanent law suit going against the Feds on anti-trust charges. This is where the Nazgul learned their chops. IBM is no stranger to perpetual legal cold war. However, I don't think Microsoft is.
If this funding of SCO's (IMO spurious) case is actionable, then IBM is an ideal belligerant. I believe IBM, et al. will not only win the SCO case, but win their counter-suits. Damages could easily bancrupt SCO, and after those funds are expended I'd like to see if Microsoft could chip in the difference. Or be compelled to do so by a court.
If it is not, perhaps the creative juices of the Open Source community could be redirected toward devising a class-action law suit against a Redmond Washington corporation who has knowingly distributed a complex of products which is easily compromised via computer virus. If Big Tobacco could be shaken down a decade ago, why not Microsoft? We don't *have* to wait for the DOJ do we?
call me anal-retentive.
I think that the expression "for free" is bad writing. Linux is "freely" available, it is "free" and you can get it "for nothing."
But to say you can get it "for free" is just bad English. I've got this ruler right here. Now, hold out your wrist...
Weren't these guys the folks who back in the '70s maintained this doomsday clock that was ticking toward midnight? Every time anybody did something that might make the Ruskies grumpy. Like deploying Pershing missiles or proposing anti-ballistic missile programs, they'd get their nickers in a knot and turn the clock forward a few minutes toward doomsday. Every time some Democrat did something stupid (Jimmy Carter's penchant) they'd turn it back a few seconds.
Science has uncertainties at the boundaries of what's known, and it provides stupid outputs when given stupid inputs. This is how the propagandist in a white lab coat deceives you.
The big Nuclear Winter scare came about when some lefty PhDs did a ONE DIMENSIONAL model of the atmosphere and tweaked the parameters until they got a favorable doomsday scenario. The lefties got their propaganda win and everybody got scared, and when someone with bigger computers, better models, and more accurate input data debunked the Nuclear Winter fraud, the press had gone on to the next chicken little.
Bottom line is that you'll find propagandists misrepresenting science on both political sides. Skepticism is appropriate in any case.
One way to maintain peace is to make sure that even the most highly motivated dullard realizes that violent confrontation will result in his inglorious death.
This is complicated by the martyr-factor, which General Blackjack Pershing (of WW1 fame) addressed by capturing 20 Islamic insurgents (this was in the Philippines before the term terrorist was invented). He then shot 18 of them with pork-fat coated bullets and released the other two to carry the tale.
This isn't feasible in a day of 24x7 cable news coverage and touchy-feely instant polling, but we can publish video of a flea-bitten dictator getting the once-over by a latex gloved medical tech.
rumor i heard was that the Philosophy department was mad that this uppity Mathematician was talking about celestial bodies and trying to usurp their top slot on the academic ladder and they sicced the church at Galileo to knock him down a peg.
also heard Galileo's models were less accurate than Ptolemaic models used by the Vatican observatory (he assumed circular, not elliptical orbits). so he had this theory that didn't fit the evidence as well as the Ptolemaics' and the papists rejected it for that reason (among others).
happily, Galileo taught the church a valuable lesson in biblical hermeneutics: that of phenomenological language. the narrative describes phenomena and not underlying mechanisms. thus, when the weatherman says sun-rise, we know he's speaking phenomologically and not asserting geocentricity.
mod me down for being off topic. mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa maxima.
I'm not all that sure this is a guaranteed recipe for the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The rich will spend money and try to get the best deal. In so doing, wealth flows to some poor locale. The idea of moving to the next 3rd-world hell-hole only works until all the hell-holes are stuffed full of dollars. (Maybe there's an infinite supply of 3rd world hell-holes, I don't know.)
I see this as a great "levelling" of rich and poor countries. The only way you can avoid the levelling is to create artificial barriers to international trade. But protectionism hasn't been very popular for the last half-century.
Since I'm a software engineer I don't like to hear a lot of talk about programming jobs going to 3rd-world locales. But I won't be able to DO anything about it, so I might as well enjoy my $49 DVD-player, look forward to my $149 DVD-recorder and tell my kids to pursue a less portable profession.
all along I figured the lawsuit was a ploy for the insiders to run up the stock price with a spurious lawsuit against IBM then dump it leaving the little guys to get screwed when the stock tanked upon news that their law suit was baseless. the fact that you couldn't see any evidence without an NDA should have been your first clue.
obviously, flavour is a word of the English language, and flavor is a word of the American language. We just have to warm up the nearest handy i18n software to facilitate communications between people of disparate languages such as these.
how come this guy is only a moralist when he's not running for national office?
Has Ron Toms at Trebuchet.com been awarded a NASA contract?
i've only rarely worked sundays. if you want to know why, read Exodus 20:10. when i've been pressed to work without extra pay, i showed up, but i spent most of my unpaid time chatting with coworkers. generally, those calling for mandatory overtime are idiots and they can be easily bamboozled with the appearance of work.
why work for idiots?
can you call a company that lets itself get screwed in this fashion, are they really a long-term viable employment source?
when the market was hot, getting an employer upgrade was easy. now it ain't, so, cut back spending, play the game until the warchest is full, then if you don't get a better gig, goto grad school. of course, the employer may go bancrupt and that solves the problem another way.
when programmers are taught to a computer language, we're taught to write. When everybody else is taught any other kinda language, they're taught to read. If I learn Russian, I'll read great literature.
Trouble is twofold.
1) we con't have a corpus of great computer code we can show folks howto read.
2) reading code is most often associated with Maintenance and maintenance programmers aren't highly regarded.
call it NIH.
You know, there's no diversity of opinion on talk radio. I have the hardest time distinguishing between Rush Limbaugh and Diane Reams. And that Michael Savage sounds sooo much like Fresh Aire.
I'm not defending Clear Channel. Their music stations have really short play lists. And their play lists play follow-the-leader. I listen to classic rock. Now, how many tunes have the Doobie Brothers played in the last 25 years. Multiply that by the number of other bands over the decades and you have a universe of zillions of tunes. So, how come I hear the same lame tune today that i hated yesterday.
this sounds like a FUD attack against P2P. I think of the amount of spam that my ISP has to filter and then the spam that slips through. How much ISP bandwidth goes to spam?
i haven't seen any injet printer mint coins, have you? Maybe pieces of paper with ink smeared on them isn't a good idea nowadays.
one of the things i like about greenbacks is those little threads they put into the paper. Putting RFIDs into money-intended paper could work. A cocktail waitress could keep a transponder in something the size of a ring. Put a red/green led in it along with a teeny RF emitter. She picks up a wad of bills and the ring flashes red.
One of the things I like about British money is you can put down a handful of coins and it's real money. US coinage pretty much peters out after quarters. Pity the gold dollar coins never caught on. We could use a two-loony coin, too.
resistance is futile.
this kinda realtime adaptation to battlefield problems is one step in the borgish direction. the more that i see of our growing ability to collaborate the more it seems like the borg, but the less it bothers me. maybe not all group-minds are created equal.
bottom line is how our assimilation of Iraq turns out. if we're conquerors, that's one thing. if we're liberators, that's another thing.
ok, let's consider two scenarios:
1) i'm a wage slave. every week i need my paycheck to maintain my lifestyle and pay my debts. in this case, my employer controls my way of life. i must do everything i can do to maintain/advance my relationship with my employer.
2) i'm an employee. i live well below my means and save the surplus. if i lose my job, i can go months if not years without replacing it. i do everything i can to maintain/advance my financial integrity. bonus points for personal integrity, too.
Now, let's suppose my employer is brewing anthrax spores in the break room. What do I do?
#1, keep very quiet and make your boss think you're a true believer, too.
#2, remember those bonus points for personal integrity and call Inspector Friendly of the FBI.
Lots of people distort the relationship with employers because they have wrong ideas about employment. Your paycheck isn't a trust-fund disbursement (sorry Bertie Wooster), and it isn't an allowance from your dad, and it isn't a welfare check. It's an artifact of your relationship with your employer and your productivity on his behalf.
The One Thing I most regret in my twenty years of bumming code is the time I worked for a bunch of Nazis. (7/9ths of the company's name was Rapist. I kid you not.) Had I had more personal integrity I would have left them much earlier.
could we maybe test this idea on some planet besides the one we're living on? how about doing this on the moon?
i heard Eric Raymond was at Penguicon this last weekend, a sorta linux/fannish gathering at which, no doubt many amusing trinkets were available for sale on blankets. the pyrotechnics folks always had the coolest blinkies and phasers.
t .html
how far does your economic argument go past ad hominem? could you elaborate how the dot.com bubble invalidates ESR's magic caldron?
i don't think that shrink-wrapped software's up-front payment and ongoing maintenance expenses is in any way related to the dot.com bubble. that supports Ellison's premise.
the economic potential of Software Guys to make money from end-users to adapting source to their immediate needs isn't a slam-dunk, but I don't think it's correlated to the dot.com bubble.
"Ah. I'd like to have an argument, please."
http://www.duke.edu/~pms5/humor/argumen
smiles and cheers,
steve
Add an obligatory plug to Eric Raymond's economic analysis of the software biz in The Magic Cauldron.
Very few companies can take any software product and configure it into the Right Answer without having to pay some Software Guy to do it. When companies fund Software Guys to morph an open source solution into Their Solution, the funded Software Guys get the money to pay off their mortgage or remodel their kitchen.
Shrink-wrapped software may be moribund.
Companies pay Mr. Ellison for His Software Guys at a significant mark-up. This business model requires some kinda lock-in on Mr. Ellison's part, or an ignorant consumer who doesn't know where to shop for Software Guys.
smiles and cheers,
steve poling
grand rapids, mi