Does anyone really believe that people are going hungry because of IP restrictions on 3D printers? I have nothing against open source or building cool stuff, but the idea that this stuff is practical for solving problems is just a fig leaf of respectability for people who like to play with very big toys.
Here is a group that is providing IP-free technology that is at the right scale (sub-industrial) and uses the right power source (animals, human muscle) to increase farming productivity where it is needed: http://www.tillersinternational.org/farming/tools.html
It's amazing how many scientists and mathematicians conveniently ignore Einsteins's speech on this matter. It's almost as if they sweep it under the rug because it's too uncomfortable to face the fact that all math and science are based on axiomatic "a priori" knowledge, basically it's faith.
It's true that science makes axiomatic assumptions, but only the ones that are necessary to do anything at all. Convenience and attractiveness are not criteria.
Start with the client's budget for the project, add 10%, and work backwards. The beauty of this system is that it does not depend on a troublesome time estimate.
Speaking of obfuscation, the article by the FSF drags Node.js and V8 into the discussion, even though they have nothing at all to do with the client-side javascript that the ostensible topic of the article.
Also, as the author mentions, it is possible via greasemonkey to do essentially what is wanted--modify the client-side javascript--so it seems like an ideological point rather than a practical one. The "obfuscation" of the javascript source is as much about reducing the bandwidth consumed by javascript as is it about hiding the source code from the People's Republic of GMail Users, so it would be silly to transmit the original source.
Of course, linking to the original source would help people write better GreaseMonkey scripts. Since I live in Michigan, which is being turned into a banana republic by its governor, you will pardon me if I throw up a little when you conflate freedom and convenience.
Watch the documentary Witch Hunt (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1196112/ , it is on netflix streaming) to see how incredibly destructive these kinds of claims about pedophilia can be, even if the facts in the accusation are completely absurd. (In another case not covered in the movie, very young students claimed that teachers used a system of underground tunnels to get to a secret dungeon, and this was accepted as fact.) Communities can very easily enter into a kind of mass hysteria and put innocent people in prison. Given the history of things that have happened to teachers in this country, the school policy is not unreasonable.
honestly these guys are full of shit. I come out of a family with a long tradition of strict religion but me and both my siblings are non religious. Sure this is only anecdotal evidence but the article also doesn't have the data 100% on its side. Their entire study is based on this sentence: "an individual’s predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics"
Maybe you should go ahead and look at the wikipedia page about Mendelian inheritance.
You could just as easily explain the relationship between college and income by social networking..the people who have the better jobs went to school with the rich people who are hiring, even without having gained any cognitive skills (or any other skills for that matter) in college. I thought that was the point of a BA.
. Kalamazoo happens to be one place that the governor feels is doing things right...
Ahh yes, let's think about how Kalamazoo is doing. Its biggest employer is Phizer, but it didn't used to be Phizer.
Your argument might be more convincing if you could spell the name of the company that you are talking about. Maybe not, since you didn't get the facts right, either. None of those small companies were independent; they were spinoffs created by people who lost their jobs in previous rounds of downsizing as the Upjohn facilities changed hands several times over the last 20 years. Pfizer did not consolidate anything into Kalamazoo. They pulled out everything but animal medicine. If any Michigan city has benefited from consolidation, it is Ann Arbor.
I am not agreeing with the o.p. or the governor, or making a statement for or against Pfizer. Just pointing out that you were making shit up.
It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
I think a lot of how you are treated depends on where you fall on the balance sheet. If you are at a consulting place or a software shop, then what you do is (likely) part of the revenue stream, and everybody appreciates that your talents are paying the bills. But if you are, say, a programmer at a bank or a network guy at a tuna fish cannery or something, you are overhead, i.e., a necessary evil. Maybe you save a lot of money for the company, and pay for yourself many times over, but you still aren't the guy bringing the money in the door...and the revenue producers are the people that the smart managers are looking to make happy.
My son is two, and I am already thinking of buying him one. He obviously takes an interest in mine. In many ways, a desktop is more practical, but I want him out in the living room with the rest of the family while he's figuring it out. He won't take it out of the house, though.
I'll probably just put a keyboard banger on it. When he's older, I will set it up with linux at runlevel 3...if he wants to figure out how to play games on it or download pr0n, he'll have to figure out how to get X going first...
Putting aside the logistical and legal considerations, I'm a little troubled by the idea that decisions about which music might survive the coming apocalypse are in the hands of a Duncan-Donuts-eatin' yuppie lawyer who is saving "the good stuff". A thousand years hence when the DVD and mp3 formats are rediscovered, do we want our recorded musical legacy to be classic rock? His repeated use of "band" suggests that this guy is a little too rock-o-centric...I hate the idea that we would lose Glenn Gould, Public Enemy, Bob Wills or, God forbid, Duke Ellington, to make a little more room for Van Halen's Sammy Hagar years. The whole idea that this guy's collection will somehow survive is absurd, of course, but if he believes it, he shouldn't be editing the playlist.
Just because the herbicide doesn't work doesn't mean that the government isn't going to spray it on crops, and just because the crops have been sprayed with poison doesn't mean the growers aren't going to harvest it and sell it. And just because it's full of poison doesn't mean that users aren't going to smoke it. Something like this happened with the herbicide paraquat in Mexico in the 80s or early 90s.
It seems to me that I go into great detail. For example, in the third paragraph of this latest essay I explain the connection between the two senses of "hack." That's a substantial point, and new too, as far as I know. At least, it was news to me when I realized it.
I just can't bring myself to agree that three sentences is "detail." Now
this I accept as a meditation on how a single word can have multivalent yet overlapping meanings. It was news in 1851.
hackers get in trouble because authorities don't understand one of their biggest motives (curiosity); that young hackers deliberately fake eccentricities; that copy protection mechanisms, because they're mechanisms, tend to attract rather than deter hackers; that new technology often isn't developed by the people who are supposed to be developing it; that the kind of attitude that existed during the Manhattan Project is hard to imagine existing in Germany at that time; etc, etc.
These aren't ideas, they're drive-bys. Sure, there are the seeds of ideas in here, but if you can't bother to think them out, why should the reader? Isn't that why you're writing?
Without getting into specifics of every item you list, I question the freshness and uniqueness of those insights. For example, I can't believe you can't admit that stuff like "new technology often isn't developed by the people who are supposed to be developing it" is a very old chestnut indeed...you could have grabbed that one from just about any science fiction movie I've ever seen.
Furthermore, when I read something like...France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines it is difficult for me accept as thoughtful or well-reasoned anything that is built on such an extreme overgeneralization. In those cases, I think the idea is both undeveloped and weak.
So what I'm left to consider is the big idea that organized the essay, something like: hackers have a special (elite) mode of thinking about systems in general and systems of authority in particular. So I used the word "l33t" (not "great", but that's a quibble) because it's a dumbed-down-sounding version of elite that scanned better. Yeah, I oversimplified your point for dramatic effect...I think you know a thing or two about that.
I admit that part of the "hackers are l33t" stuff was a reaction to the summary on the slashdot homepage, which you didn't have control over. I also admit that I'm just a middle-aged crank who reflexively criticizes other people's writing. It's my good bad attitude.
By now, I should know better than to read the Paul Graham essays when they're posted on slashdot, but I can't help myself. I think it's my sick obsession with lisp.
Now that I've read a few in the space of a few weeks, I think I'm able to pin down what bothers me. Graham is really good at a certain rhetorical style: he talks at length about a topic that really isn't the topic at hand, until you start to wonder if you're really reading the essay that you thought you were reading, and suddenly the focus shifts to the target. "Maori customs are really a metaphor/synedoche for the perl philosophy!" or whatever. The change is so dizzying (because it is unexpected but not completly random) and such changes come so fast that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate the correctness of Graham's assertions or the depth of what he's saying. It's like a cheesy magic show...the magician distracts you by waving the wand around, so that you don't see that he's actually pulling the rabbit out of his sleeve, rather than out of the hat. To his credit, I think Graham does this trick really well, and it's hard to do.
The thing is, I can appreciate cheesy-magic-show writing, but at some point, I would like to take away an actual idea from what I'm reading. And what are Graham's ideas? Lisp is really l33t! Hackers are really l33t! Graham's ideas are really that simple; they're not refinements or unexpected corrollaries of ideas that were first trotted out ten or twenty years ago. After a few essays, it becomes apparent that all of these ideas really reduce to I, Paul Graham, am really l33t because I like this l33t stuff! I don't fault Graham in the slightest for thinking this, or even about writing it, but since I'm not Paul Graham, it's not a very interesting idea to me.
I'm a big fan of your work. Your prose style has always reminded me of V/Lot 49 era Pynchon, which always left me wanting more. In fact, other than subject matter, your writing has always seemed a lot more like "serious" fiction than scifi to me. Who are some of the writers outside of scifi who have influenced your writing?
I totally agree (from the opposite camp), and I voted for Nader for exactly that reason. I hated the fact that Gore didn't try to distinguish himself from Bush, and I think the main reason Howard Dean got so much support early on is because Nader made Dean's leftier stance possible.
As much as I hate Bush, I truly believe there won't be too much difference between a Kerry presidency and a second Bush presidency, other than any Supreme Court nominations (which isn't trivial.) The war was a huge, huge fuckup, but the damage is already done. The next President, whoever he is, will spend four years digging us out. I don't really think one can dig better or faster than the other. I guess it's possible a Bush administration will get us into another bad war, but I think they learned their lesson, even if they don't admit it publically.
Of course, there's still that Supreme Court thing, and I don't want the rest of the world to think that Bush has the imprimatur of the American people, so I'll vote for Kerry rather than Cobb...just this once.
It's not quite the same, but "scripting debugging" and unit testing are close enough to accomplish the same ends. What is looking comparing variables in a debugger to expected values? Unit testing is basically just automating that process.
"I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and if you'll forgive the autohornblowing, I think you'll be interested in my piece in our latest issue. It argues, with a lot of new data, that the entertainment industry is shifting from an era of hit-driven economics to one of niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve."
Gosh, remember when Wired was the next big thing, and stuff like "autohornblowing" didn't seem as pretentious as hell? Back in the day, it was possible to believe that there was a secret society of geeks talking this way, but now we are the secret society of geeks right here on slashdot and you don't really see this kind of precious, self-conscious diction.
Oh, you're autohornblowing, alright, but not in the sense that you mean....
I googled for the Tytler article after I wrote the first reply to this post, and found this, which suggests Tytler didn't write it, and that there's not such thing as "The decline and fall of the Athenian republic". I'm not claiming that snopes.com is authoritative, or right, but it's interesting that I have a semi-recollection that's consistent with snopes.
It's also interesting that the passage was widely quoted by the right...in the context of the snopes article, it sounds like it's an argument against a welfare state...now that I think about it, I seem to remember it being more about tax cuts than spending, but maybe I'm just making this up.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with the point, only saying that there's something a little funny going on...I think someone read the same thing I did, worked it into a bigger argument, and attributed it to Tytler.
I know I've seen the first paragraph somewhere before, and I've never read Tytler It was some curmudgeon like Gore Vidal or Bertrand Russell. Does this ring a bell for anyone? (I'm not saying anybody lifted anything, it just makes me want to read both essays again.I don't remember the author crediting anyone, but I hardly remember anything at my advanced age)
I was going to mod this interesting--it is interesting--but I think you underestimate human ingenuity and human stupidity at the same time. Do you really think that if the zombie boxes that are sending out spam now move to certificate-based email, that all of those users are going to secure their certificates and set up their systems so that they need to unlock the certificate with a passphrase? I think that you're right, in theory, but I don't think it will pan out in the real world.
Putting aside the merits of the movie (which I haven't seen) I think it speaks to the incredible lameness of Kerry as a candidate that he needs a boost from this movie or anything else. Bush was caught torturing people for fsck's sake! Any idiot picked off the street should be pounding Bush in the polls, and yet somehow Kerry is on the run.
I'm on the verge of going back to Nader. Or moving to Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone really believe that people are going hungry because of IP restrictions on 3D printers? I have nothing against open source or building cool stuff, but the idea that this stuff is practical for solving problems is just a fig leaf of respectability for people who like to play with very big toys.
Here is a group that is providing IP-free technology that is at the right scale (sub-industrial) and uses the right power source (animals, human muscle) to increase farming productivity where it is needed: http://www.tillersinternational.org/farming/tools.html
It's amazing how many scientists and mathematicians conveniently ignore Einsteins's speech on this matter. It's almost as if they sweep it under the rug because it's too uncomfortable to face the fact that all math and science are based on axiomatic "a priori" knowledge, basically it's faith.
It's true that science makes axiomatic assumptions, but only the ones that are necessary to do anything at all. Convenience and attractiveness are not criteria.
Start with the client's budget for the project, add 10%, and work backwards. The beauty of this system is that it does not depend on a troublesome time estimate.
Speaking of obfuscation, the article by the FSF drags Node.js and V8 into the discussion, even though they have nothing at all to do with the client-side javascript that the ostensible topic of the article.
Also, as the author mentions, it is possible via greasemonkey to do essentially what is wanted--modify the client-side javascript--so it seems like an ideological point rather than a practical one. The "obfuscation" of the javascript source is as much about reducing the bandwidth consumed by javascript as is it about hiding the source code from the People's Republic of GMail Users, so it would be silly to transmit the original source.
Of course, linking to the original source would help people write better GreaseMonkey scripts. Since I live in Michigan, which is being turned into a banana republic by its governor, you will pardon me if I throw up a little when you conflate freedom and convenience.
Watch the documentary Witch Hunt (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1196112/ , it is on netflix streaming) to see how incredibly destructive these kinds of claims about pedophilia can be, even if the facts in the accusation are completely absurd. (In another case not covered in the movie, very young students claimed that teachers used a system of underground tunnels to get to a secret dungeon, and this was accepted as fact.) Communities can very easily enter into a kind of mass hysteria and put innocent people in prison. Given the history of things that have happened to teachers in this country, the school policy is not unreasonable.
honestly these guys are full of shit. I come out of a family with a long tradition of strict religion but me and both my siblings are non religious. Sure this is only anecdotal evidence but the article also doesn't have the data 100% on its side. Their entire study is based on this sentence:
"an individual’s predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics"
Maybe you should go ahead and look at the wikipedia page about Mendelian inheritance.
With this approach you are traumatized later, when you receive your Diabetes II diagnosis.
You could just as easily explain the relationship between college and income by social networking..the people who have the better jobs went to school with the rich people who are hiring, even without having gained any cognitive skills (or any other skills for that matter) in college. I thought that was the point of a BA.
. Kalamazoo happens to be one place that the governor feels is doing things right...
Ahh yes, let's think about how Kalamazoo is doing. Its biggest employer is Phizer, but it didn't used to be Phizer.
Your argument might be more convincing if you could spell the name of the company that you are talking about. Maybe not, since you didn't get the facts right, either. None of those small companies were independent; they were spinoffs created by people who lost their jobs in previous rounds of downsizing as the Upjohn facilities changed hands several times over the last 20 years. Pfizer did not consolidate anything into Kalamazoo. They pulled out everything but animal medicine. If any Michigan city has benefited from consolidation, it is Ann Arbor.
I am not agreeing with the o.p. or the governor, or making a statement for or against Pfizer. Just pointing out that you were making shit up.
It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
I think a lot of how you are treated depends on where you fall on the balance sheet. If you are at a consulting place or a software shop, then what you do is (likely) part of the revenue stream, and everybody appreciates that your talents are paying the bills. But if you are, say, a programmer at a bank or a network guy at a tuna fish cannery or something, you are overhead, i.e., a necessary evil. Maybe you save a lot of money for the company, and pay for yourself many times over, but you still aren't the guy bringing the money in the door...and the revenue producers are the people that the smart managers are looking to make happy.
My son is two, and I am already thinking of buying him one. He obviously takes an interest in mine. In many ways, a desktop is more practical, but I want him out in the living room with the rest of the family while he's figuring it out. He won't take it out of the house, though.
I'll probably just put a keyboard banger on it. When he's older, I will set it up with linux at runlevel 3...if he wants to figure out how to play games on it or download pr0n, he'll have to figure out how to get X going first...
Putting aside the logistical and legal considerations, I'm a little troubled by the idea that decisions about which music might survive the coming apocalypse are in the hands of a Duncan-Donuts-eatin' yuppie lawyer who is saving "the good stuff". A thousand years hence when the DVD and mp3 formats are rediscovered, do we want our recorded musical legacy to be classic rock? His repeated use of "band" suggests that this guy is a little too rock-o-centric...I hate the idea that we would lose Glenn Gould, Public Enemy, Bob Wills or, God forbid, Duke Ellington, to make a little more room for Van Halen's Sammy Hagar years. The whole idea that this guy's collection will somehow survive is absurd, of course, but if he believes it, he shouldn't be editing the playlist.
Just because the herbicide doesn't work doesn't mean that the government isn't going to spray it on crops, and just because the crops have been sprayed with poison doesn't mean the growers aren't going to harvest it and sell it. And just because it's full of poison doesn't mean that users aren't going to smoke it. Something like this happened with the herbicide paraquat in Mexico in the 80s or early 90s.
It seems to me that I go into great detail. For example, in the third paragraph of this latest essay I explain the connection between the two senses of "hack." That's a substantial point, and new too, as far as I know. At least, it was news to me when I realized it.
...France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines it is difficult for me accept as thoughtful or well-reasoned anything that is built on such an extreme overgeneralization. In those cases, I think the idea is both undeveloped and weak.
I just can't bring myself to agree that three sentences is "detail." Now this I accept as a meditation on how a single word can have multivalent yet overlapping meanings. It was news in 1851.
hackers get in trouble because authorities don't understand one of their biggest motives (curiosity); that young hackers deliberately fake eccentricities; that copy protection mechanisms, because they're mechanisms, tend to attract rather than deter hackers; that new technology often isn't developed by the people who are supposed to be developing it; that the kind of attitude that existed during the Manhattan Project is hard to imagine existing in Germany at that time; etc, etc.
These aren't ideas, they're drive-bys. Sure, there are the seeds of ideas in here, but if you can't bother to think them out, why should the reader? Isn't that why you're writing?
Without getting into specifics of every item you list, I question the freshness and uniqueness of those insights. For example, I can't believe you can't admit that stuff like "new technology often isn't developed by the people who are supposed to be developing it" is a very old chestnut indeed...you could have grabbed that one from just about any science fiction movie I've ever seen.
Furthermore, when I read something like
So what I'm left to consider is the big idea that organized the essay, something like: hackers have a special (elite) mode of thinking about systems in general and systems of authority in particular. So I used the word "l33t" (not "great", but that's a quibble) because it's a dumbed-down-sounding version of elite that scanned better. Yeah, I oversimplified your point for dramatic effect...I think you know a thing or two about that.
I admit that part of the "hackers are l33t" stuff was a reaction to the summary on the slashdot homepage, which you didn't have control over. I also admit that I'm just a middle-aged crank who reflexively criticizes other people's writing. It's my good bad attitude.
By now, I should know better than to read the Paul Graham essays when they're posted on slashdot, but I can't help myself. I think it's my sick obsession with lisp.
Now that I've read a few in the space of a few weeks, I think I'm able to pin down what bothers me. Graham is really good at a certain rhetorical style: he talks at length about a topic that really isn't the topic at hand, until you start to wonder if you're really reading the essay that you thought you were reading, and suddenly the focus shifts to the target. "Maori customs are really a metaphor/synedoche for the perl philosophy!" or whatever. The change is so dizzying (because it is unexpected but not completly random) and such changes come so fast that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate the correctness of Graham's assertions or the depth of what he's saying. It's like a cheesy magic show...the magician distracts you by waving the wand around, so that you don't see that he's actually pulling the rabbit out of his sleeve, rather than out of the hat. To his credit, I think Graham does this trick really well, and it's hard to do.
The thing is, I can appreciate cheesy-magic-show writing, but at some point, I would like to take away an actual idea from what I'm reading. And what are Graham's ideas? Lisp is really l33t! Hackers are really l33t! Graham's ideas are really that simple; they're not refinements or unexpected corrollaries of ideas that were first trotted out ten or twenty years ago. After a few essays, it becomes apparent that all of these ideas really reduce to I, Paul Graham, am really l33t because I like this l33t stuff! I don't fault Graham in the slightest for thinking this, or even about writing it, but since I'm not Paul Graham, it's not a very interesting idea to me.
Citrix.
I'm a big fan of your work. Your prose style has always reminded me of V/Lot 49 era Pynchon, which always left me wanting more. In fact, other than subject matter, your writing has always seemed a lot more like "serious" fiction than scifi to me. Who are some of the writers outside of scifi who have influenced your writing?
I totally agree (from the opposite camp), and I voted for Nader for exactly that reason. I hated the fact that Gore didn't try to distinguish himself from Bush, and I think the main reason Howard Dean got so much support early on is because Nader made Dean's leftier stance possible.
As much as I hate Bush, I truly believe there won't be too much difference between a Kerry presidency and a second Bush presidency, other than any Supreme Court nominations (which isn't trivial.) The war was a huge, huge fuckup, but the damage is already done. The next President, whoever he is, will spend four years digging us out. I don't really think one can dig better or faster than the other. I guess it's possible a Bush administration will get us into another bad war, but I think they learned their lesson, even if they don't admit it publically.
Of course, there's still that Supreme Court thing, and I don't want the rest of the world to think that Bush has the imprimatur of the American people, so I'll vote for Kerry rather than Cobb...just this once.
It's not quite the same, but "scripting debugging" and unit testing are close enough to accomplish the same ends. What is looking comparing variables in a debugger to expected values? Unit testing is basically just automating that process.
"I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and if you'll forgive the autohornblowing, I think you'll be interested in my piece in our latest issue. It argues, with a lot of new data, that the entertainment industry is shifting from an era of hit-driven economics to one of niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve."
Gosh, remember when Wired was the next big thing, and stuff like "autohornblowing" didn't seem as pretentious as hell? Back in the day, it was possible to believe that there was a secret society of geeks talking this way, but now we are the secret society of geeks right here on slashdot and you don't really see this kind of precious, self-conscious diction.
Oh, you're autohornblowing, alright, but not in the sense that you mean....
I googled for the Tytler article after I wrote the first reply to this post, and found this, which suggests Tytler didn't write it, and that there's not such thing as "The decline and fall of the Athenian republic". I'm not claiming that snopes.com is authoritative, or right, but it's interesting that I have a semi-recollection that's consistent with snopes.
It's also interesting that the passage was widely quoted by the right...in the context of the snopes article, it sounds like it's an argument against a welfare state...now that I think about it, I seem to remember it being more about tax cuts than spending, but maybe I'm just making this up.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with the point, only saying that there's something a little funny going on...I think someone read the same thing I did, worked it into a bigger argument, and attributed it to Tytler.
I know I've seen the first paragraph somewhere before, and I've never read Tytler It was some curmudgeon like Gore Vidal or Bertrand Russell. Does this ring a bell for anyone? (I'm not saying anybody lifted anything, it just makes me want to read both essays again.I don't remember the author crediting anyone, but I hardly remember anything at my advanced age)
I was going to mod this interesting--it is interesting--but I think you underestimate human ingenuity and human stupidity at the same time. Do you really think that if the zombie boxes that are sending out spam now move to certificate-based email, that all of those users are going to secure their certificates and set up their systems so that they need to unlock the certificate with a passphrase? I think that you're right, in theory, but I don't think it will pan out in the real world.
Putting aside the merits of the movie (which I haven't seen) I think it speaks to the incredible lameness of Kerry as a candidate that he needs a boost from this movie or anything else. Bush was caught torturing people for fsck's sake! Any idiot picked off the street should be pounding Bush in the polls, and yet somehow Kerry is on the run.
I'm on the verge of going back to Nader. Or moving to Europe.