is what I'd sell my right to vote for. That should be enough money to buy the government of my country back. I'd have far more ability to kick Washington's ass with that kind of resources than with one vote and sharply worded letters to Congressmen and newspaper editorials.
For years I've wanted an asshole button you can use to disable the cars of the kewl boyz with the neato undercarriage fluorescents and spinny hubcaps who cut you off in traffic. You yell, "Asshole!" and hit the button, and a powerful EMP zaps their pimped ride and turns it into a chamber where they can take a time-out and consider their asshole driving and its corrosive effect on the social fabric and general decline of courtesy on our nation's roadways.
China is brushing the U.S. back. At the moment they feel themselves encircled by the United States and its allies. The recent rapprochement between America and India enhanced that impression.
Their first and most important foreign policy objective is to retake Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party has staked since its whole legitimacy to rule on that promise ever since the whole actual communist thing was quietly retired. So, before they do anything else, they have to prove to the Chinese people that they are the only ones who can reunite the entire motherland and shake off 150+ years of foreign domination and humiliation.
They would also then like to rise to superpower prominence and achieve hegemony. See their massive investments in Africa and South America.
Hegemony comes later, of course, but the obstacle to both those goals is the United States.
So, they've been acquiring Russian Alphas and shore-to-ship missiles and amphibious landing craft and everything they'd need to prevent a repeat of 10 years ago. That is, the mainland started firing missiles across the straits of Taiwan to scare Chen Shui-bian and the Taiwanese nationalists who want to declare formal independence. The U.S. sent a carrier battlegroup to sail up and down the Straits to tell them that was a no-no; and that one battlegroup, a small portion of our navy, could have sunk the entire Chinese navy in 15 minutes. The Chinese were humiliated, and have been working to get even since then.
In addition to the military preparations, though, they have also been scaling up in espionage, economic weapons (read: massive dollar reserves), anti-satellite weaponry, and even cyber-warfare. You might recall reading in the past six months about the Chinese staging a cyber-assault on the Pentagon, or the successful test of an anti-satellite weapon on one of its own obsolete satellites. You might also be aware of how the value of the U.S. dollar is sliding right now, and can probably imagine what would happen if China suddenly started dumping its hard currency reserves of U.S. dollars; Heck, they could send the dollar into a tailspin if they just decided to stop buying the U.S. govt. bonds the Bush administration has been printing like handbills to finance the disaster in Iraq.
So, they're playing a long game on all the important levels, and it's about the scariest thing imaginable and it's right around the corner. And the United States government has its head so far up its own ass about Iraq and Iran and whatever enemy AIPAC thinks we need to fight, that it will be completely surprised when China does make its move.
The ability to hop onto wifi to place a call is interesting, but the coverage is too haphazard for effective cellphone use. The notion of using wifi nodes to substitute for cell towers does suggest possibilities for a massively multi-nodal communication system (many orders of magnitude larger than what the internet currently contains) to carry both voice and data. Wifi nodes aren't individually powerful enough to impinge on any spectra regulation, and the government wouldn't dare try without incurring the wrath of salespeople and PHBs everywhere. But blanketed thickly enough, there's no reason your packet request couldn't hop from wifi node to wifi node without ever touching one cell tower or one inch of POTS.
Naturally there are privacy and security issues. Wifi communications are notoriously prone to eavesdropping. But given what AT&T, the other telecoms, and government are up to these days it's pretty safe to say that the "official" networks of copper/fiber optic and cell towers are no safer.
Network math says that something on the order of 6 hops (the famous "six degrees of separation") will connect any two nodes in a given network, regardless of how many nodes are in the network. So it should be possible to cut the dickhead cell companies, big fiber, and government largely out of the loop because your single point of failure, a.k.a. the carriers, are reduced in importance to equal that of every other node.
Highly recommend it. It exists in Europe and Japan, and it's great. You travel from city center to city center, so there's no additional time/cost of taking a taxi or other conveyance way out into the farm fields. Second, security is not insane. Third, you get to see the country you're travelling through. Fourth, et al, you can get up and walk around, go to the dining car, bar, observation car, etc.
But the additional reasons are that jet travel is adding greatly to global warming (see other/. article about reformulating jet fuel) and U.S. airports are already at capacity with delays growing dramatically.
So building out a high-speed regional rail system with dedicated track a la the TGV in France or Shinkansen in Japan would take a lot of load off the air system. You would still need to fly coast-to-coast, but New York to Chicago by rail would give you a comparable travel time when you factor in the additional time for check-in and baggage claim and travel to/from the airport.
Contribute $25 to his campaign. That's the language that politicians hear and understand. If Dodd's fundraising sees a boost from his actions here, perhaps the rest of the field of worthless, spineless Democrats will take notice and maybe we'll get some action.
That's an excellent point, to which I'd add the observation that those who support radical free trade are almost always one of three parties, 1) The heads of industry cherry-picking Adam Smith to justify their ridiculous bonuses, 2) Academics and their students who have never had to deal with the consequences of the ideology of free trade, or 3) Those suffering from double-think.
Most of those with whom we trade and outsource industries are in the same boat we are. That is, they worry about their productive capacity being sent overseas, and all the other issues too. But then there are those like China who are doing what they're doing with a definite agenda in mind. They are not buying U.S. debt because they think it's because it's a good investment or because it's a factor in their financial models, but because they intend to dump all of it on the eve of an invasion of Taiwan. They see, and probably rightfully so, the United States as the chief obstacle to the forceful repatriation of Taiwan to the Motherland and the final proof of the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to lead China to glory. So if they can hobble or otherwise persuade the U.S. military to not intervene, they will have radically increased their chances to achieve hegemony.
So, it's fine to argue radical free trade if everyone's playing the same game, but there are some things that trump pure profit motive, and those who are making decisions according to those rules will severely inhibit America's and Europe's well-being.
Blogging has a tertiary effect at best
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Blogging might influence dunderhead journalists who are too lazy to do any first-hand research or reporting to write a story, which might cause John Q. Public to write a letter to a politician, who might modify his behavior because of it.
But mostly it's masturbation. The schlubs at the blogs, for example, really think they're DOING SOMETHING. But at the end of the day they're just whining. If they're really lucky some politician might pretend to care, but politicians cater to those who have money and those who can deliver votes. That's it, and that's all.
It's no coincidence that most American politics revolve around the interests of corporations, the interests of powerful lobbies like AIPAC, and the interests of SEIU (the last and only effective union in America). If you're AIPAC, for example, and can deliver both money and votes, you're golden. They represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, but they vote and give money in lockstep. So hey presto! we're invading Iraq, even though the vast majority of Americans can't even point to that country on a map; They're also on the verge of pushing our government to attack Iran, though the vast majority of American voters want out of the first mess they created in Iraq.
So in reality, blogs are irrelevant. Are and always will be.
The key to results in democratic systems is to be able to execute swiftly and with near-unanimity. If, for example, Slashdot readers were able to initiate and execute a general strike to oppose, say, abuse at the USPTO, or the passage of the DMCA, you better believe the powers-that-be would sit up and take notice if their electronic trading systems handling billions of dollars went down. If you think about it, the sort of people who read Slashdot control the computer networks that are the nervous system of our modern world. They hold all the cards and could compel many changes in our world if they worked together.
But they don't, because Slashdot is really just a blog for geeks who post or vent and think they've done their bit. They take no actual action beyond that.
Less chance for catastrophic failure. There was a guy in Paris at the turn of the 20th century (1900) who used to party hop in a personal dirigible. Sounds so awesome it's hard to imagine why it didn't catch on, or why it might not catch on in the future. I'd rather have folks flying overhead in those than airplanes that can smash into buildings; a dirigible would just bounce off, no harm no foul.
My knowledge of current Internet architecture is not deep (sadly), but I know that right now AT&T and a couple others provide backbones that carry a lot of traffic. However, with the burgeoning number of 80211 nodes isn't there some possibility that the original decentralized design could elaborate to the point where your packets could route around what is essentially 'damage' to the larger network? If I can request files from a node that is three wifi hops away, what do I care if AT&T's backbone is 'damage' that prevents the transmission of video content?
One big blow job for Rubin. A subscription model is the savior for the music industry? Uh, no. They've tried that at least a dozen times in the past 15 years, and it goes nowhere because music fans like to feel like they own what they pay for, not rent or license it. This guy's going to push Columbia and the other majors to re-orient their collective corporate models to a subscription model, and it will all collapse. Or, only a couple or none will and it will collapse in more colorful ways.
The music industry is ailing partly because their content sucks. But it is fundamentally ailing because it produces something that can be copied infinitely with little or no guilt. The music industry came about to market and distribute music. Now they are not needed to perform those roles, and so no longer need to exist.
The music will all be free, and the revenue for artists will come from concerts and merchandising. That won't go away because concerts and merchandising are physical quantities whose relative scarcity can be controlled. If labels survive at all it will be as specialized advertising or PR firms who serve at the whim of artists.
I've been thinking about this issue since the Napster days, and it seems to me that there will be two general results from this technological shift.
The first is that the advertising model for mass media will die, as will the pay-per-view/listen model. Product placement will try to perpetuate it for a while, but digital signals are easily manipulated to cut them out. The hackers of the world are just way too fast with workarounds. In their place we'll probably see the shows/music/movies given away for free and freely traded, with merchandising making up the bulk of revenues. There will be cheap knock-offs from China, but physical goods are more easily policed.
The second result will arise while the first is working itself out. That is, since today's content providers are punishing consumers for wanting their products, or making it more bother than it's worth, more and more consumers will switch from being passive audiences to creators of varying degrees, or to more active hobbies.
Since the RIAA jihad began I woke up to the fact that their music is mostly crap, or that I've heard the good stuff so many times that I'm sick of it (thinking of the Pink Floyd I used to love). So I took up the guitar. I can't play that much, and I don't play that well, but I can do it well enough for my own enjoyment, and the satisfaction I get from it is greater by far than listening to the most amazing Waters solo ever was. That is, it scratches the itch to hear music. And I will never buy another CD, track from iTunes, or go to another concert for as long as I live. They've lost me as a customer for good, because I learned to be self-sufficient.
I also think of my grandparents, who grew up during the Great Depression before our media culture arose (they were also too poor to have radios). They have very little use for TV, because they just can't sit down and do nothing for that long. We always tried as kids to get them to sit down and watch Disney movies with us, and after 10 minutes they'd hop up and start doing chores or crafts; my grandfather would go out to his workshop and build furniture, and my grandmother would work in her garden. They grew up with different habits. So, if the media outlets make passive consumption too much of a bother, not a few people will wake up, realize that passive consumption is a waste of time, and form other habits to use their free time. Many of those habits will be a lot more productive and satisfying.
These are a better option since it operates on far simpler, and well-known principles.
Seems like it would be a lot less dangerous to occupants and those on the ground alike, since if you run into something you just bounce off, and if you lose altitude because of a leak or some such it won't happen catastrophically. If you can figure out a quick way to rapidly in/deflate to a semi-rigid structure for easier storage, you've got a promising possibility for personal air transport.
Besides, it's sort of been done already. There was a guy named Alberto Santos-Dumont who built his own personal dirigible and flew around Paris with it at the turn of the 20th century. There was a Nova show about it, I believe.
Chinese history stretches back long enough that it's problematic for anyone to say that China is definitively anything. The Chinese Communist Party talks a lot about historical claims to this or that, such as Taiwan or Tibet. They base all their propaganda on it. But they're claims with feet of clay, so to speak.
The historical claims are many and conflict. For instance, we could just as easily and with equal evidence and authority back Mongolia's claim to all the territory we currently describe as "China" on the world map. Genghis Khan did conquer Han kingdoms fair and square and totally subjugate them. So perhaps Beijing and mainland Han should quit their bellyaching and submit to Ulan Bator's rightful historical claim to primacy over the People's Republic.
Or we could, ironically enough, substantiate Tibet's claim to a huge chunk of territory currently ascribed to "China." They won and subjugated that fair and square, too.
Or we could argue pretty forcefully that "China" belongs to the Manchus, since they thoroughly conquered China and formed its last dynasty, the Qing. Much of what we in the West think of as Chinese hallmarks (topknots, qi paos, those vests and leggings men used to wear) are Manchu in origin.
Even Han areas themselves have been separate kingdoms at many times throughout history, including the period of time when the South was a kingdom ruled from Nanjing "South Capital," and the North a kingdom ruled from Beijing "North Capital."
So China is now and always has been a completely artificial amalgam held together by force of arms. And given Beijing's policies of forced sterilization, Han colonization, and ethnic cleansing it does not appear as though the minorities that find themselves within the border of "China" will be able to get away from it for a long time, if ever. It sucks, but that's the reality.
The parent poster brought up the diversity of those elements that constitute China as an argument against self-determination for the Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in China like Mongols and Uighurs. After all, if everyone in China can't understand what in the heck the people from the next province over are saying, then why should the Tibetans be so special as to get to have their own country? But really, in a back-handed way it points up how absurd is the notion of a unified China that Beijing is always going on about. "China" is so fractious that it makes the San Andreas look like the Rock of Gibraltar. One hard push like an economic or environmental collapse and "China" would dissolve into a bloody civil war with 15 sides.
As a last, tangential, and completely personal aside, it would be wonderfully novel and refreshing if people educated in China could ever come out with a comment or point of view that's not state-sanctioned. But seeing's how the official history books there can all be summed up with "5000 years of history blah blah blah some stuff happened blah blah blah and then glorious Communism came to the People," it's probably a forlorn hope.
That's what Karl Rove and Gonzales are trying to be for Bush and Cheney. I wish to god there was someone in the Democratic party with the balls to bring Rove, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and all the gang to justice. Letting these guys resign and skate away to enjoy the spoils of their crimes is just as deadly to our democracy as the crimes themselves, because our system of checks & balances and faith in the rule of law remain compromised. Impeach, try, and convict. That's the only way to begin to untangle the disaster they've visited on us and the world.
To those who call themselves Republicans and resist this idea, just imagine Hillary Clinton as president with all the powers Bush and Cheney have arrogated to themselves. It should give you screaming nightmares, because it sure does me.
Instead of killing off biofilms, it would be much more interesting to teach them to calcify their protein matrices either within a mold or by guided deposition to form structures useful to humans. Hello, organic technology. How cool would it be to open a pan of biofilm, pour a couple gallons of milk on it, and grow yourself a new laptop?
I'm quite happy for no one to know exactly how many linux users are out there, because having the opposition (MS) not know exactly where you are or how many keeps them guessing. Meanwhile, the cold, hard facts continue to drive linux adoption in the background (it's free, secure, fast, light, stable, extensible, open, etc). Most geeks understand those advantages, and influence the tech policies where they work. Which in turn influences the pointy hairs who don't really understand tech but take what the geeks say on faith, lest they appear foolish. Which in turn trickles down to the receptionist being given a new computer that runs the same old app she's ever used running on top of linux.
The way it is now, MS can only say to itself, "Charlie's in the bushes. We don't know exactly where or how many of them there are, but it feels like they're growing stronger and more numerous." In other words, for linux it's a one-front war, whereas for MS it's a thousand-front war.
I've been skimming these TFAs on Slashdot for close to 10 years now and conclude that we can expect a meta-comment that will try to categorize all subsequent comments.
Ha! I out-meta-commented you, so neener-neener!:-)
Congress won't enforce the law. The Executive branch won't police itself. The Judicial branch rules citizens can't sue because the details are classified by the Executive branch. It's a perfect, closed system. No one in the government is accountable to us anymore.
The government no longer answers to the citizens, according the the system we set up to run it. It's a very short, swift step from where we are to where ordinary citizens disappear in the night (non-Muslims, that is). We won't know exactly when that moment arrives, because we won't be told, because no one in the government obeys or enforces the law anymore.
Let's assume for a moment that you're not someone who buries his head in the sand, saying 'As long as I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care what the government does to others?' Let's assume that your response to crisis is not to hop in your SUV, drive down to the mall, and go shopping. And let's further assume that you're a red-blooded, patriotic American who really cares about freedom and the rule of law, and about protecting the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
But not because the candidates themselves had anything to do with choice of OS. Rather, most campaign operations themselves run on the cheap, cheap, cheap. The large numbers campaigns spend that we hear about on the news go to TV and paying the campaign managers and Beltway consultants (often that's a two-fer: the campaign managers draw a salary and then they have a political consultancy they 'hire' to produce the TV commercials. They win both ways.).
So for everything else, including the OS for the campaign, it's the cheapest option. For Democrats, who mostly run at a fundraising disadvantage, OSS is a perfect answer to an increasingly critical campaign component. For Republicans, however, and Republican Lites like Hillary, they're much likelier to have campaign managers with corporate buddies who offer to sell them a Windows license. It's like Steve Forbes spending thousands of dollars to install french doors on his campaign tent in Iowa--completely unnecessary but a corporate buddy thought it would be cool and they had money to burn.
Economics are one consideration
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Politics and regulations are another. NYC is a patchwork quilt of NY state legislators, city councilmen, district leaders, party bosses, community boards, and vested interests like the Teamsters and others. You need powerful and savvy developer backing to align them in your favor.
And history says that the cost/benefit ratio has to be hugely on your side. It took the city more than 50 years of gridlock, economic stagnation, and incredible frustration before they were able to overcome the opposition of the omnibus lobby (horse-drawn doubledecker buses) and build the subway. NYC politicians don't understand the concept of common good, so you have to grease the palm of every little two-bit hustler to get your way.
So while it's a nice idea to have urban agriculture, and it makes a lot of sense on a lot of levels, it would take a lot to make it a reality.
That said, it would be excellent to have a regulatory environment to make this idea possible. I attended a presentation on aquaculture on Governor's Island by a professor at Brooklyn College last year. He grew scads of tilapia and salmon in big PVC garbage bins in the basement of his lab and couldn't sell it even at cost because of aforementioned politics and regulations. But he certainly proved that one guy with four climate-controlled bins in a basement can grow and give away so much fish that the entire faculty of Brooklyn College can't even bear to look at tilapia or salmon anymore.
Every time the issue of internet censorship comes up on/., I think of the experiments they've done sending quantumly-entangled particles across some distance X, trapping them locally, and then pinging them to communicate faster than the speed of light. Would it be possible to create a network of quantumly-entangled particles that don't subsequently rely on optical fiber to transmit information, and which can't be blocked, jammed, surveilled, or otherwise censored?
The arms race toward quantum encryption would then be almost totally irrelevant, because there would be no discernible signal to encrypt/decrypt, just a quantumly entangled particle in a basement talking to another quantumly entangled particle in another basement somewhere else.
And if you could separate infinitely variant states from a particle and dish them out to whomever requests an entangled state, then it seems like you could theoretically create a massively interconnected panopticon where each node is directly connected to every other node. Hey presto, instantaneous communication with no possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks, no possibility of back-tracing packets. Total anonymity, total security from big brother.
How nodes discover each other in the first place is another question, but IANAP (physicist) nor IANANE (network engineer).
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is what I'd sell my right to vote for. That should be enough money to buy the government of my country back. I'd have far more ability to kick Washington's ass with that kind of resources than with one vote and sharply worded letters to Congressmen and newspaper editorials.
For years I've wanted an asshole button you can use to disable the cars of the kewl boyz with the neato undercarriage fluorescents and spinny hubcaps who cut you off in traffic. You yell, "Asshole!" and hit the button, and a powerful EMP zaps their pimped ride and turns it into a chamber where they can take a time-out and consider their asshole driving and its corrosive effect on the social fabric and general decline of courtesy on our nation's roadways.
China is brushing the U.S. back. At the moment they feel themselves encircled by the United States and its allies. The recent rapprochement between America and India enhanced that impression.
Their first and most important foreign policy objective is to retake Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party has staked since its whole legitimacy to rule on that promise ever since the whole actual communist thing was quietly retired. So, before they do anything else, they have to prove to the Chinese people that they are the only ones who can reunite the entire motherland and shake off 150+ years of foreign domination and humiliation.
They would also then like to rise to superpower prominence and achieve hegemony. See their massive investments in Africa and South America.
Hegemony comes later, of course, but the obstacle to both those goals is the United States.
So, they've been acquiring Russian Alphas and shore-to-ship missiles and amphibious landing craft and everything they'd need to prevent a repeat of 10 years ago. That is, the mainland started firing missiles across the straits of Taiwan to scare Chen Shui-bian and the Taiwanese nationalists who want to declare formal independence. The U.S. sent a carrier battlegroup to sail up and down the Straits to tell them that was a no-no; and that one battlegroup, a small portion of our navy, could have sunk the entire Chinese navy in 15 minutes. The Chinese were humiliated, and have been working to get even since then.
In addition to the military preparations, though, they have also been scaling up in espionage, economic weapons (read: massive dollar reserves), anti-satellite weaponry, and even cyber-warfare. You might recall reading in the past six months about the Chinese staging a cyber-assault on the Pentagon, or the successful test of an anti-satellite weapon on one of its own obsolete satellites. You might also be aware of how the value of the U.S. dollar is sliding right now, and can probably imagine what would happen if China suddenly started dumping its hard currency reserves of U.S. dollars; Heck, they could send the dollar into a tailspin if they just decided to stop buying the U.S. govt. bonds the Bush administration has been printing like handbills to finance the disaster in Iraq.
So, they're playing a long game on all the important levels, and it's about the scariest thing imaginable and it's right around the corner. And the United States government has its head so far up its own ass about Iraq and Iran and whatever enemy AIPAC thinks we need to fight, that it will be completely surprised when China does make its move.
The ability to hop onto wifi to place a call is interesting, but the coverage is too haphazard for effective cellphone use. The notion of using wifi nodes to substitute for cell towers does suggest possibilities for a massively multi-nodal communication system (many orders of magnitude larger than what the internet currently contains) to carry both voice and data. Wifi nodes aren't individually powerful enough to impinge on any spectra regulation, and the government wouldn't dare try without incurring the wrath of salespeople and PHBs everywhere. But blanketed thickly enough, there's no reason your packet request couldn't hop from wifi node to wifi node without ever touching one cell tower or one inch of POTS.
Naturally there are privacy and security issues. Wifi communications are notoriously prone to eavesdropping. But given what AT&T, the other telecoms, and government are up to these days it's pretty safe to say that the "official" networks of copper/fiber optic and cell towers are no safer.
Network math says that something on the order of 6 hops (the famous "six degrees of separation") will connect any two nodes in a given network, regardless of how many nodes are in the network. So it should be possible to cut the dickhead cell companies, big fiber, and government largely out of the loop because your single point of failure, a.k.a. the carriers, are reduced in importance to equal that of every other node.
Highly recommend it. It exists in Europe and Japan, and it's great. You travel from city center to city center, so there's no additional time/cost of taking a taxi or other conveyance way out into the farm fields. Second, security is not insane. Third, you get to see the country you're travelling through. Fourth, et al, you can get up and walk around, go to the dining car, bar, observation car, etc.
/. article about reformulating jet fuel) and U.S. airports are already at capacity with delays growing dramatically.
But the additional reasons are that jet travel is adding greatly to global warming (see other
So building out a high-speed regional rail system with dedicated track a la the TGV in France or Shinkansen in Japan would take a lot of load off the air system. You would still need to fly coast-to-coast, but New York to Chicago by rail would give you a comparable travel time when you factor in the additional time for check-in and baggage claim and travel to/from the airport.
Contribute $25 to his campaign. That's the language that politicians hear and understand. If Dodd's fundraising sees a boost from his actions here, perhaps the rest of the field of worthless, spineless Democrats will take notice and maybe we'll get some action.
That's an excellent point, to which I'd add the observation that those who support radical free trade are almost always one of three parties, 1) The heads of industry cherry-picking Adam Smith to justify their ridiculous bonuses, 2) Academics and their students who have never had to deal with the consequences of the ideology of free trade, or 3) Those suffering from double-think.
Most of those with whom we trade and outsource industries are in the same boat we are. That is, they worry about their productive capacity being sent overseas, and all the other issues too. But then there are those like China who are doing what they're doing with a definite agenda in mind. They are not buying U.S. debt because they think it's because it's a good investment or because it's a factor in their financial models, but because they intend to dump all of it on the eve of an invasion of Taiwan. They see, and probably rightfully so, the United States as the chief obstacle to the forceful repatriation of Taiwan to the Motherland and the final proof of the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to lead China to glory. So if they can hobble or otherwise persuade the U.S. military to not intervene, they will have radically increased their chances to achieve hegemony.
So, it's fine to argue radical free trade if everyone's playing the same game, but there are some things that trump pure profit motive, and those who are making decisions according to those rules will severely inhibit America's and Europe's well-being.
Blogging might influence dunderhead journalists who are too lazy to do any first-hand research or reporting to write a story, which might cause John Q. Public to write a letter to a politician, who might modify his behavior because of it.
But mostly it's masturbation. The schlubs at the blogs, for example, really think they're DOING SOMETHING. But at the end of the day they're just whining. If they're really lucky some politician might pretend to care, but politicians cater to those who have money and those who can deliver votes. That's it, and that's all.
It's no coincidence that most American politics revolve around the interests of corporations, the interests of powerful lobbies like AIPAC, and the interests of SEIU (the last and only effective union in America). If you're AIPAC, for example, and can deliver both money and votes, you're golden. They represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, but they vote and give money in lockstep. So hey presto! we're invading Iraq, even though the vast majority of Americans can't even point to that country on a map; They're also on the verge of pushing our government to attack Iran, though the vast majority of American voters want out of the first mess they created in Iraq.
So in reality, blogs are irrelevant. Are and always will be.
The key to results in democratic systems is to be able to execute swiftly and with near-unanimity. If, for example, Slashdot readers were able to initiate and execute a general strike to oppose, say, abuse at the USPTO, or the passage of the DMCA, you better believe the powers-that-be would sit up and take notice if their electronic trading systems handling billions of dollars went down. If you think about it, the sort of people who read Slashdot control the computer networks that are the nervous system of our modern world. They hold all the cards and could compel many changes in our world if they worked together.
But they don't, because Slashdot is really just a blog for geeks who post or vent and think they've done their bit. They take no actual action beyond that.
If they did, just imagine the possibilities.
Chew, and digest.
Less chance for catastrophic failure. There was a guy in Paris at the turn of the 20th century (1900) who used to party hop in a personal dirigible. Sounds so awesome it's hard to imagine why it didn't catch on, or why it might not catch on in the future. I'd rather have folks flying overhead in those than airplanes that can smash into buildings; a dirigible would just bounce off, no harm no foul.
My knowledge of current Internet architecture is not deep (sadly), but I know that right now AT&T and a couple others provide backbones that carry a lot of traffic. However, with the burgeoning number of 80211 nodes isn't there some possibility that the original decentralized design could elaborate to the point where your packets could route around what is essentially 'damage' to the larger network? If I can request files from a node that is three wifi hops away, what do I care if AT&T's backbone is 'damage' that prevents the transmission of video content?
One big blow job for Rubin. A subscription model is the savior for the music industry? Uh, no. They've tried that at least a dozen times in the past 15 years, and it goes nowhere because music fans like to feel like they own what they pay for, not rent or license it. This guy's going to push Columbia and the other majors to re-orient their collective corporate models to a subscription model, and it will all collapse. Or, only a couple or none will and it will collapse in more colorful ways.
The music industry is ailing partly because their content sucks. But it is fundamentally ailing because it produces something that can be copied infinitely with little or no guilt. The music industry came about to market and distribute music. Now they are not needed to perform those roles, and so no longer need to exist.
The music will all be free, and the revenue for artists will come from concerts and merchandising. That won't go away because concerts and merchandising are physical quantities whose relative scarcity can be controlled. If labels survive at all it will be as specialized advertising or PR firms who serve at the whim of artists.
I've been thinking about this issue since the Napster days, and it seems to me that there will be two general results from this technological shift.
The first is that the advertising model for mass media will die, as will the pay-per-view/listen model. Product placement will try to perpetuate it for a while, but digital signals are easily manipulated to cut them out. The hackers of the world are just way too fast with workarounds. In their place we'll probably see the shows/music/movies given away for free and freely traded, with merchandising making up the bulk of revenues. There will be cheap knock-offs from China, but physical goods are more easily policed.
The second result will arise while the first is working itself out. That is, since today's content providers are punishing consumers for wanting their products, or making it more bother than it's worth, more and more consumers will switch from being passive audiences to creators of varying degrees, or to more active hobbies.
Since the RIAA jihad began I woke up to the fact that their music is mostly crap, or that I've heard the good stuff so many times that I'm sick of it (thinking of the Pink Floyd I used to love). So I took up the guitar. I can't play that much, and I don't play that well, but I can do it well enough for my own enjoyment, and the satisfaction I get from it is greater by far than listening to the most amazing Waters solo ever was. That is, it scratches the itch to hear music. And I will never buy another CD, track from iTunes, or go to another concert for as long as I live. They've lost me as a customer for good, because I learned to be self-sufficient.
I also think of my grandparents, who grew up during the Great Depression before our media culture arose (they were also too poor to have radios). They have very little use for TV, because they just can't sit down and do nothing for that long. We always tried as kids to get them to sit down and watch Disney movies with us, and after 10 minutes they'd hop up and start doing chores or crafts; my grandfather would go out to his workshop and build furniture, and my grandmother would work in her garden. They grew up with different habits. So, if the media outlets make passive consumption too much of a bother, not a few people will wake up, realize that passive consumption is a waste of time, and form other habits to use their free time. Many of those habits will be a lot more productive and satisfying.
These are a better option since it operates on far simpler, and well-known principles.
Seems like it would be a lot less dangerous to occupants and those on the ground alike, since if you run into something you just bounce off, and if you lose altitude because of a leak or some such it won't happen catastrophically. If you can figure out a quick way to rapidly in/deflate to a semi-rigid structure for easier storage, you've got a promising possibility for personal air transport.
Besides, it's sort of been done already. There was a guy named Alberto Santos-Dumont who built his own personal dirigible and flew around Paris with it at the turn of the 20th century. There was a Nova show about it, I believe.
Chinese history stretches back long enough that it's problematic for anyone to say that China is definitively anything. The Chinese Communist Party talks a lot about historical claims to this or that, such as Taiwan or Tibet. They base all their propaganda on it. But they're claims with feet of clay, so to speak.
The historical claims are many and conflict. For instance, we could just as easily and with equal evidence and authority back Mongolia's claim to all the territory we currently describe as "China" on the world map. Genghis Khan did conquer Han kingdoms fair and square and totally subjugate them. So perhaps Beijing and mainland Han should quit their bellyaching and submit to Ulan Bator's rightful historical claim to primacy over the People's Republic.
Or we could, ironically enough, substantiate Tibet's claim to a huge chunk of territory currently ascribed to "China." They won and subjugated that fair and square, too.
Or we could argue pretty forcefully that "China" belongs to the Manchus, since they thoroughly conquered China and formed its last dynasty, the Qing. Much of what we in the West think of as Chinese hallmarks (topknots, qi paos, those vests and leggings men used to wear) are Manchu in origin.
Even Han areas themselves have been separate kingdoms at many times throughout history, including the period of time when the South was a kingdom ruled from Nanjing "South Capital," and the North a kingdom ruled from Beijing "North Capital."
So China is now and always has been a completely artificial amalgam held together by force of arms. And given Beijing's policies of forced sterilization, Han colonization, and ethnic cleansing it does not appear as though the minorities that find themselves within the border of "China" will be able to get away from it for a long time, if ever. It sucks, but that's the reality.
The parent poster brought up the diversity of those elements that constitute China as an argument against self-determination for the Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in China like Mongols and Uighurs. After all, if everyone in China can't understand what in the heck the people from the next province over are saying, then why should the Tibetans be so special as to get to have their own country? But really, in a back-handed way it points up how absurd is the notion of a unified China that Beijing is always going on about. "China" is so fractious that it makes the San Andreas look like the Rock of Gibraltar. One hard push like an economic or environmental collapse and "China" would dissolve into a bloody civil war with 15 sides.
As a last, tangential, and completely personal aside, it would be wonderfully novel and refreshing if people educated in China could ever come out with a comment or point of view that's not state-sanctioned. But seeing's how the official history books there can all be summed up with "5000 years of history blah blah blah some stuff happened blah blah blah and then glorious Communism came to the People," it's probably a forlorn hope.
That's what Karl Rove and Gonzales are trying to be for Bush and Cheney. I wish to god there was someone in the Democratic party with the balls to bring Rove, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and all the gang to justice. Letting these guys resign and skate away to enjoy the spoils of their crimes is just as deadly to our democracy as the crimes themselves, because our system of checks & balances and faith in the rule of law remain compromised. Impeach, try, and convict. That's the only way to begin to untangle the disaster they've visited on us and the world.
To those who call themselves Republicans and resist this idea, just imagine Hillary Clinton as president with all the powers Bush and Cheney have arrogated to themselves. It should give you screaming nightmares, because it sure does me.
Thanks for your post. It's one of the finest I've read in a long time.
Instead of killing off biofilms, it would be much more interesting to teach them to calcify their protein matrices either within a mold or by guided deposition to form structures useful to humans. Hello, organic technology. How cool would it be to open a pan of biofilm, pour a couple gallons of milk on it, and grow yourself a new laptop?
A million gamers yawned, and then were silenced.
They went back to playing Wii tennis with their first girlfriend ever.
I'm quite happy for no one to know exactly how many linux users are out there, because having the opposition (MS) not know exactly where you are or how many keeps them guessing. Meanwhile, the cold, hard facts continue to drive linux adoption in the background (it's free, secure, fast, light, stable, extensible, open, etc). Most geeks understand those advantages, and influence the tech policies where they work. Which in turn influences the pointy hairs who don't really understand tech but take what the geeks say on faith, lest they appear foolish. Which in turn trickles down to the receptionist being given a new computer that runs the same old app she's ever used running on top of linux.
The way it is now, MS can only say to itself, "Charlie's in the bushes. We don't know exactly where or how many of them there are, but it feels like they're growing stronger and more numerous." In other words, for linux it's a one-front war, whereas for MS it's a thousand-front war.
I've been skimming these TFAs on Slashdot for close to 10 years now and conclude that we can expect a meta-comment that will try to categorize all subsequent comments.
:-)
Ha! I out-meta-commented you, so neener-neener!
Congress won't enforce the law. The Executive branch won't police itself. The Judicial branch rules citizens can't sue because the details are classified by the Executive branch. It's a perfect, closed system. No one in the government is accountable to us anymore.
The government no longer answers to the citizens, according the the system we set up to run it. It's a very short, swift step from where we are to where ordinary citizens disappear in the night (non-Muslims, that is). We won't know exactly when that moment arrives, because we won't be told, because no one in the government obeys or enforces the law anymore.
Let's assume for a moment that you're not someone who buries his head in the sand, saying 'As long as I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care what the government does to others?' Let's assume that your response to crisis is not to hop in your SUV, drive down to the mall, and go shopping. And let's further assume that you're a red-blooded, patriotic American who really cares about freedom and the rule of law, and about protecting the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
So ask yourself, what recourse do you have now?
is what grandkids are for. At least, that's what my grandparents told us.
But not because the candidates themselves had anything to do with choice of OS. Rather, most campaign operations themselves run on the cheap, cheap, cheap. The large numbers campaigns spend that we hear about on the news go to TV and paying the campaign managers and Beltway consultants (often that's a two-fer: the campaign managers draw a salary and then they have a political consultancy they 'hire' to produce the TV commercials. They win both ways.).
So for everything else, including the OS for the campaign, it's the cheapest option. For Democrats, who mostly run at a fundraising disadvantage, OSS is a perfect answer to an increasingly critical campaign component. For Republicans, however, and Republican Lites like Hillary, they're much likelier to have campaign managers with corporate buddies who offer to sell them a Windows license. It's like Steve Forbes spending thousands of dollars to install french doors on his campaign tent in Iowa--completely unnecessary but a corporate buddy thought it would be cool and they had money to burn.
Politics and regulations are another. NYC is a patchwork quilt of NY state legislators, city councilmen, district leaders, party bosses, community boards, and vested interests like the Teamsters and others. You need powerful and savvy developer backing to align them in your favor.
And history says that the cost/benefit ratio has to be hugely on your side. It took the city more than 50 years of gridlock, economic stagnation, and incredible frustration before they were able to overcome the opposition of the omnibus lobby (horse-drawn doubledecker buses) and build the subway. NYC politicians don't understand the concept of common good, so you have to grease the palm of every little two-bit hustler to get your way.
So while it's a nice idea to have urban agriculture, and it makes a lot of sense on a lot of levels, it would take a lot to make it a reality.
That said, it would be excellent to have a regulatory environment to make this idea possible. I attended a presentation on aquaculture on Governor's Island by a professor at Brooklyn College last year. He grew scads of tilapia and salmon in big PVC garbage bins in the basement of his lab and couldn't sell it even at cost because of aforementioned politics and regulations. But he certainly proved that one guy with four climate-controlled bins in a basement can grow and give away so much fish that the entire faculty of Brooklyn College can't even bear to look at tilapia or salmon anymore.
Every time the issue of internet censorship comes up on /., I think of the experiments they've done sending quantumly-entangled particles across some distance X, trapping them locally, and then pinging them to communicate faster than the speed of light. Would it be possible to create a network of quantumly-entangled particles that don't subsequently rely on optical fiber to transmit information, and which can't be blocked, jammed, surveilled, or otherwise censored?
The arms race toward quantum encryption would then be almost totally irrelevant, because there would be no discernible signal to encrypt/decrypt, just a quantumly entangled particle in a basement talking to another quantumly entangled particle in another basement somewhere else.
And if you could separate infinitely variant states from a particle and dish them out to whomever requests an entangled state, then it seems like you could theoretically create a massively interconnected panopticon where each node is directly connected to every other node. Hey presto, instantaneous communication with no possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks, no possibility of back-tracing packets. Total anonymity, total security from big brother.
How nodes discover each other in the first place is another question, but IANAP (physicist) nor IANANE (network engineer).