The privacy apocalypse is only meaningful if pervasive surveilance is one-sided. If it's publically (and trivially) accessible, then the resulting balance of blackmail should cut down on the pernicious effects.
One of the main points of this uber-famous book is that large organizations are intrinsically incapable of creative thought. They can equip and support brilliant, creative individuals, but the those individuals are not interchangeable parts; while the individuals could carry out their work with any random source of funding, the organization behind them could not reproduce their results with any random individuals.
When Cyberkinetics was a lab at Brown University, I design an amplifier array for the wireless implant mentioned in the article. The medical possibilities for the research are really pretty interesting, especially once the next generation probe is done. The trouble is that the medical possibilities are icing, and the cake is a control system for the exoskeleton of the soldier of the future... that's right, another fine DARPA technology.
When MS starts coding most of its product using exploited laborers in war zones, they'll approach the level of evil long since attained by the international diamond cartel./. gets up in arms very easily about a monopoly in something near and dear to its heart (operating systems), but tends to forget that the operating system market is completely irrelevant to the vast bulk of humanity. MS may well be evil, but they're trivially evil; they don't suppress or inflate world commodity prices, they don't deliberately kill anyone or provide direct backing for anyone who does, and they don't undermine systems of common property law in the way that international cartels in minerals, oil, and agriculture do. In summary: Slashdotters, keep your sense of scale!
Ontario's government abdicates management of highway 407 to one those aforementioned greedy corporations, which employs untility-like, estimation-based billing methods because checking actual usage rates is expensive. This greedy corporation then raises rates and restricts access, which leads to the conclusion that the government should not be trusted to manage infrastructure.
Um... could that be revised to 'The government can't be trusted to privatise infrastructure'?
Right on. Before heading to Mars, though, might it not make sense to build some space infrastructure? A waypoint at L2, an LEO station large enough to be useful for constructing further spacecraft in orbit, or any other such project would be less flashy, but perhaps more enduring in its influence.
You're right, of course. I'd have been better off stating 'Republican Party leadership', rather than treating the party as a monolithic entity; also, I should have treated other characteristic policy stances as political trade-offs to retain support for the leadership, conspiratorial 'tactics'.
One thing worth noting though- when those Republican leaders are themselves uniformly recruited from business management, it seems to me that it gets harder to argue that they're merely confused.
If you don't like the parties, don't just keep complying. If the Libertarian wing of the Republican party (or better yet, the Culturally Conservative wing too) can be convinced that their organization's leadership represents the plain-and-simple Profiteering wing of the Republican party, then intra-party politics could actually get interesting.
That will, as an above poster notes, mean actually talking to people and organizing events, but it may be the best means of restoring some spectrum of choice to the American ballot.
"It's been a rollercoaster ride over 4 decades, a carefully orchestrated whole-cloth infiltration of all levels of Federal and State government, a project that has seen the cooperation of intervening Democratic administrations, no less, and until now, no one ever noticed.. "
You left out the systematic undermining of the constitutional separation of powers, the co-option of the media into the ruling elite, and widespread voting irregularities, but other than that, it's a pretty good summary. I'm also hardly the first one to mention it (see http://www.michaelmoore.com or http://www.deanforamerica.com).
If you assume that there was ever any substance to the 'smaller government' rhetoric, then this administration has been a great betrayal of Republican ideals.
If, however, you view the singular goal of the Republican party as the expropriation of taxpayer wealth for the enrichment of the entrenched industrial elite, and all of the cultural conservatism and libertarian rhetoric as tactics to achieve this goal, then this has been the most successful Republican administration ever.
i) Write a physical letter to all of your representitives in congress to berate/laud them (as appropriate) for their votes on this bill. ii) Join the ACLU. iii) Convince your employer to destroy all non-essential records of employee or customer transactions. iv) vote, and convince all of your friends to vote, in the next federal election cycle. v) If all else fails, vote with your feet. Canada is close by.
Ordinary people can admit that they were wrong, that they've changed their minds, and that their attitudes now better fit the facts. It is a particularly scary trait of the current administration, and the military-industrial-media complex that plays the alga to its fungus in the lichen of the State, that it can't change its mind. If it's right now, it was always right, and if that's not how you remember things, well, just ask Time Magazine...
What we've seen with previous ages is a new production paradigm that gives consumers things they want and keeps many of them employed producing them, as in subsitance farming/home production -> mass production & distribution -> ? The present trouble is that question mark, as production is trending away (at least on high-margin items) from mass-produced identical goods toward... what? Your guess is as good as mine, and probably better than most manufacturers'- which might have something to do with why O'Reilly suggests cultivating new industries, and proposes his candidate for the '?' (individually customized products).
Oh, and if you want to see some FUD, lose your job and realize that no-one else wants to hire you to do anything that you want to do. That's FUD.
Trouble is, all producers and servers are not employed equally, and over time all incentives point to an increase in the fraction of jobs that suck. If labor in an industry is expensive (e.g. high-end manufacturing), that industry has a strong incentive to seek out ways to reduce its employment, leaving the displaced workers to seek lower-paying opportunities. These lower paying opportunities will tend to push the lowest rung on the employment ladder ever lower, as demand for existing services saturates and entrepeneurs seek to create new ones, often by accepting money to do for people things they previously did themselves. As the list of things that consumers must do themselves shrinks, the growth will tend to be in the direction of jobs that previously no-one could be convinced to take.
In short, without growth in high-end manufacturing industries, median standard of living will drop. So take your investment money and give it to someone who intends to make and sell something novel, rather than to an existing, mature industry. And then go out and adopt products based on new technologies and risky ideas, rather than buying more low-margin, established stuff.
Independent of any moral or social dimensions, the evolutionary analogy applies poorly to a capitalist system, particularly one that permits monopolies and cartels to arise. Once an entity has secured its place as the only choice in a market, its 'fitness' no longer matters within that market, and its influence in society will diminish only as people learn to live with less of its product (i.e. the market shrinks). This process at work is more akin to the collapse of a black hole (after which the hole is all-consuming and unstoppable, but slowly evaporates) than to a thriving dynamic equilibrium.
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Studies of physi/psych/olgy in space only matter if we're going to send people in to space, in which case we'll want to study their physi/psych/ology... it's a circular argument.
Many composite materials have certainly come from the aerospace sector. How many of them required putting a person into orbit to synthesize?
See Mike L Roy above re velcro and tang.
What sort of zeitgeist does it demonstrate that the US elects to burn billions of dollars and the lives of real people for no tangible purpose?
With as much money as was spent on hubble, would they have figured out an automated deployment scheme if manned flights were unavailable? What other applications might such controls technology have had? Might it be more valuable than logs of ant farm behavior in space?
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Name three (3) significant scientific discoveries made through any manned space flight program.
Depends what you want to do. If you're looking for autonomous, self-contained agents, Si-C interfaces will be far to large and cumbersome to meet your mobility needs. If, alternatively, you want a sessile colony of living front-ends to an electronic circuit, synthetic ion channels might be useful as an interface.
The subject of the interview mixes his metaphors pretty badly. He seems to have (or at least to express) little idea that his color analogy only describes the baseband: it's got to _do_ something to encode information. And then all the familiar noise analogies apply.
I'm usually a pretty satisfied Salon reader, but they sure dropped the ball on this one.
Re:why not construct this
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Plus also he's got a missile shield to build, an occupation to run, a war to fight, another war to threaten to fight, a host of other countries to extend 'aid' to in exchange for complacency about those wars, multi-hundred-billion dollar 'tax breaks' (né 'kickbacks') to his campaign contributors... he's simply swamped!
The influence of publichers over content is not an entirely bad thing, as Kling points out. However, the substantial influence that publishers have over content can be and is abused, especially due to the incentive for publishers to steer the content market toward material it can cheaply, easily publish. This seems more intuitive in music than in writing, but I think it applies in both arenas: crap is easy to find, so if you can popularize crap, you don't have to invest in cultivating relationships with producers, you can just find some hack to fill out the formula and pass the savings on to the customer. The trouble is that rather than charge extra for the good stuff to offset the extra cost of development and promotion, many publishers offer uniform pricing and choose not to distribute material requiring a harder sell.
Kling manages to miss that that last sentence is what the CC aims to address. If that undercuts publishers, they have no one to blame but themselves.
I bought over 180 CDs between the years in guestion. I'm pretty sure nefarious price fixing cost me more than $20. All I had to do was overpay for every music purchase I've made to date due to an oligopoly's illegal collusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Q: Who watches the watchers?
A: Everyone.
The privacy apocalypse is only meaningful if pervasive surveilance is one-sided. If it's publically (and trivially) accessible, then the resulting balance of blackmail should cut down on the pernicious effects.
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-m ain.html
One of the main points of this uber-famous book is that large organizations are intrinsically incapable of creative thought. They can equip and support brilliant, creative individuals, but the those individuals are not interchangeable parts; while the individuals could carry out their work with any random source of funding, the organization behind them could not reproduce their results with any random individuals.
When Cyberkinetics was a lab at Brown University, I design an amplifier array for the wireless implant mentioned in the article. The medical possibilities for the research are really pretty interesting, especially once the next generation probe is done. The trouble is that the medical possibilities are icing, and the cake is a control system for the exoskeleton of the soldier of the future... that's right, another fine DARPA technology.
That's right.
Nobody's going to revive the draft.
Just like nobody's going support Patriot II.
I mean, this is America. That can't happen here
So, to sum up:
Ontario's government abdicates management of highway 407 to one those aforementioned greedy corporations, which employs untility-like, estimation-based billing methods because checking actual usage rates is expensive. This greedy corporation then raises rates and restricts access, which leads to the conclusion that the government should not be trusted to manage infrastructure.
Um... could that be revised to 'The government can't be trusted to privatise infrastructure'?
Right on. Before heading to Mars, though, might it not make sense to build some space infrastructure? A waypoint at L2, an LEO station large enough to be useful for constructing further spacecraft in orbit, or any other such project would be less flashy, but perhaps more enduring in its influence.
You're right, of course. I'd have been better off stating 'Republican Party leadership', rather than treating the party as a monolithic entity; also, I should have treated other characteristic policy stances as political trade-offs to retain support for the leadership, conspiratorial 'tactics'.
One thing worth noting though- when those Republican leaders are themselves uniformly recruited from business management, it seems to me that it gets harder to argue that they're merely confused.
If you don't like the parties, don't just keep complying. If the Libertarian wing of the Republican party (or better yet, the Culturally Conservative wing too) can be convinced that their organization's leadership represents the plain-and-simple Profiteering wing of the Republican party, then intra-party politics could actually get interesting.
That will, as an above poster notes, mean actually talking to people and organizing events, but it may be the best means of restoring some spectrum of choice to the American ballot.
"It's been a rollercoaster ride over 4 decades, a carefully orchestrated whole-cloth infiltration of all levels of Federal and State government, a project that has seen the cooperation of intervening Democratic administrations, no less, and until now, no one ever noticed.. "
You left out the systematic undermining of the constitutional separation of powers, the co-option of the media into the ruling elite, and widespread voting irregularities, but other than that, it's a pretty good summary. I'm also hardly the first one to mention it (see http://www.michaelmoore.com or http://www.deanforamerica.com).
If you assume that there was ever any substance to the 'smaller government' rhetoric, then this administration has been a great betrayal of Republican ideals.
If, however, you view the singular goal of the Republican party as the expropriation of taxpayer wealth for the enrichment of the entrenched industrial elite, and all of the cultural conservatism and libertarian rhetoric as tactics to achieve this goal, then this has been the most successful Republican administration ever.
i) Write a physical letter to all of your representitives in congress to berate/laud them (as appropriate) for their votes on this bill.
ii) Join the ACLU.
iii) Convince your employer to destroy all non-essential records of employee or customer transactions.
iv) vote, and convince all of your friends to vote, in the next federal election cycle.
v) If all else fails, vote with your feet. Canada is close by.
Ordinary people can admit that they were wrong, that they've changed their minds, and that their attitudes now better fit the facts. It is a particularly scary trait of the current administration, and the military-industrial-media complex that plays the alga to its fungus in the lichen of the State, that it can't change its mind. If it's right now, it was always right, and if that's not how you remember things, well, just ask Time Magazine...
GS4 Lackey 2:
GS4 Lackey 1: Novel!
GS4 Lackey 2: Non-obvious!
MSN.com server: belches
Oh, and if you want to see some FUD, lose your job and realize that no-one else wants to hire you to do anything that you want to do. That's FUD.
In short, without growth in high-end manufacturing industries, median standard of living will drop. So take your investment money and give it to someone who intends to make and sell something novel, rather than to an existing, mature industry. And then go out and adopt products based on new technologies and risky ideas, rather than buying more low-margin, established stuff.
Independent of any moral or social dimensions, the evolutionary analogy applies poorly to a capitalist system, particularly one that permits monopolies and cartels to arise. Once an entity has secured its place as the only choice in a market, its 'fitness' no longer matters within that market, and its influence in society will diminish only as people learn to live with less of its product (i.e. the market shrinks). This process at work is more akin to the collapse of a black hole (after which the hole is all-consuming and unstoppable, but slowly evaporates) than to a thriving dynamic equilibrium.
Many composite materials have certainly come from the aerospace sector. How many of them required putting a person into orbit to synthesize?
See Mike L Roy above re velcro and tang.
What sort of zeitgeist does it demonstrate that the US elects to burn billions of dollars and the lives of real people for no tangible purpose?
With as much money as was spent on hubble, would they have figured out an automated deployment scheme if manned flights were unavailable? What other applications might such controls technology have had? Might it be more valuable than logs of ant farm behavior in space?
Depends what you want to do. If you're looking for autonomous, self-contained agents, Si-C interfaces will be far to large and cumbersome to meet your mobility needs. If, alternatively, you want a sessile colony of living front-ends to an electronic circuit, synthetic ion channels might be useful as an interface.
The subject of the interview mixes his metaphors pretty badly. He seems to have (or at least to express) little idea that his color analogy only describes the baseband: it's got to _do_ something to encode information. And then all the familiar noise analogies apply.
I'm usually a pretty satisfied Salon reader, but they sure dropped the ball on this one.
Plus also he's got a missile shield to build, an occupation to run, a war to fight, another war to threaten to fight, a host of other countries to extend 'aid' to in exchange for complacency about those wars, multi-hundred-billion dollar 'tax breaks' (né 'kickbacks') to his campaign contributors... he's simply swamped!
The influence of publichers over content is not an entirely bad thing, as Kling points out. However, the substantial influence that publishers have over content can be and is abused, especially due to the incentive for publishers to steer the content market toward material it can cheaply, easily publish. This seems more intuitive in music than in writing, but I think it applies in both arenas: crap is easy to find, so if you can popularize crap, you don't have to invest in cultivating relationships with producers, you can just find some hack to fill out the formula and pass the savings on to the customer. The trouble is that rather than charge extra for the good stuff to offset the extra cost of development and promotion, many publishers offer uniform pricing and choose not to distribute material requiring a harder sell.
Kling manages to miss that that last sentence is what the CC aims to address. If that undercuts publishers, they have no one to blame but themselves.
I bought over 180 CDs between the years in guestion. I'm pretty sure nefarious price fixing cost me more than $20. All I had to do was overpay for every music purchase I've made to date due to an oligopoly's illegal collusion.
Pet store hamster wheels sell power to the grid!