"Early microwaves were pretty damned expensive and the controls were a lot more complex that today's, since the controls were all analog and mechanical."
Started using microwave ovens at work and home in '70-71. Controls were brain-dead simple: insert food, close door, turn timer dial. When bell sounds, remove food. Some were complicated, tho - had to push a start button after turning the timer dial. Complex? Sheesh.
"I still feel that people could make that decision themselves if they all decided to and really worked toward it."
In a somewhat different vein I've believed that for years, dim hope though it is. On seeing the famous scene in Network I flashed on 50 million people stopping what they were doing, standing up, walking outside and converging on their local seats of government....
Yeah, whatever, I'm older. Happens if you live long enough. Can't claim it's the best bargain going, it's just the one I have. Inertia, habit, curiosity, hope. Pick two, on a bad day, three on a good one.
Wait one. 1. He didn't say he refuses to use modern tools. He says he is learning among other things what clean code looks like by making it so. Thus he learns the criteria and what the modern tools are likely doing under the hood [my conclusion]. 2. Doing code by hand does not automatically guarantee inefficient or badly laid out code. Such hours he spends are spent learning. Will you argue that's a bad thing to do? 3a. "Rolling his own functions" does re-implement existing code. That it be poorly done is not guaranteed. 3b. By rolling his own functions he might eliminate one or more bugs which is new and worthwhile. It is of course possible that new bugs are introduced. 3c. Nowhere does he say he refuses to use standard APIs. (IIRC, a standard API can use a custom routine or library. Please forgive me if my memory is way off, but isn't this not uncommon, and done by declaration along with the includes or thereabouts?)
"If anything, selfish motivations are better...." Because also they can be easily transparent, thus easier of trust.
The summary asks, "So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?" My immediate response is, "Yes."
For instance, Internet access implies electricity; if there's extra, then likely refrigeration, thus insulin and vaccines; if enough refrigeration, then cold beer, too.
In my experience trying to divide some things into either-or is often not a fruitful path. Often one gets a badminton game of opinion rather than useful argument arriving at better view.
The full article is a very good read; very instructive as to what can be done through all the obstacles especially when much of the effort is basically off the books. They did an amazing job of it.
It's one of the ironies of the times that those who could benefit the most from reading things such as this are the very ones almost guaranteed not to read them, everyone from hasty ignorant AC's to people at the top of the power game.
But AC (#44622843), DaveAtFraud, and a few others have gotten the point. (Sorry if I missed somebody; not the intent. Illustration, not credits at movie's end.)
"Troops are stationed in friendly countries simply because they are within striking distance of unfriendly countries." is the nut of it.
In the main, I think that it's likely past time to bring the bulk of our European forces back, but I'm not a military planner, just someone who's been curious about the situation, nothing more.
Historically, for the length of the Cold War, everyone's eyes were on the Fulda Gap. The calculus was always the same: The Gap, territory for time, attrition, 30 days. Thirty days for Europe to hold until US could get the bulk of their armor and all the rest in place. (It was ironic in a way that after the fall of the Wall, when ex-Soviet planners were much more free for a while to speak with their Western counterparts, that we learned they'd spent more time thinking about defending than adventuring.)
Unless one thinks that, given the spate of comments coming out of Putin's Russia for instance, we again have to consider the Gap as a real possibility.
I got into thinking more on this simply because during the Fifties, living outside of Augsburg, my Dad would get a phone call or a driver with holstered.45 would appear at the door, and he'd be gone for four days to a week. These were not, so far as I or my mother knew, planned exercises. (Parents talk, children listen and compare notes.) A few times we stayed home from school and waited with a packed suitcase. So I got a bit more interested in later years about some of this.
So, anyway, time to come home. Drones, strategic strikes, reaction forces, airlift, and pre-positioned stores should likely handle the rest, this amateur thinks.
It would take little, the addition of a few words, changing a few lines, to afford email at least the same protections as traditional mail.
Also, heretofore although email was sent and often stored, particularly while in transit, as plain-text, it was always private in the practical sense because it took a particular human to stop, find, and read a particular email. That is, until some human went out of their way to read your email it was private. Now, as you point out, it never can be private. All of it, always available, although it still takes a human or machine to seek it out and read it.
Yes, indeed we have the Bill of Rights and Article 10, for instance, and few places have those things enumerated therein in such fashion, given elsewhere in their constitutions, or specified at all, especially to the degree given.
However, the question before us is not so much what is written but what is observed; of what is observed, to what is protected. Please see:
Btw, your assertion of "completely absent" is not necessarily well-supported by fact. (For whatever odd reason I ended up reading the bulk of Sweden's constitution a few days ago; it was interesting, some bits relevant here.) Anyway, a perusal of privacies delineated and protected as spelled out and as observed, particularly parts of Europe, Scandinavia, and Iceland is illuminating.
Sorry 'bout that. I was lucky enough to be born in late Forties; Dad was in the Army so we were lower middle class and managed well enough. Money was tight but there was enough food, adequate clothes, decent shelter on and off post. We got a TV in '55, I think it was. Hopalong Cassidy, Princess SummerFallWinterSpring, Captain Midnight, Mr. Wizard, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog. Cap guns, kites; a bicycle was a big thing, a baseball glove, a crystal radio. Dave Garroway and Ed Murrow, Tonto and Gunsmoke.
For years every month or so the sirens would go off and you'd crouch underneath your desk waiting for the all clear. Some places you could hear and even see the B-47s and B-52s taking off, sometimes an F-94C, F101, later, others, go zooming past the school on the way to somewhere.
On post or off, in a small town or in a newer house along a stretch of road leading from the city, always plenty of room to run around after school and in summer, just don't bother the grown-ups and come home for supper when called.
There were plenty of problems, all you had to do was watch the national news and read the paper. But when young the problems are doubly distant; it was a good time to be growing up for the most part.
I think that my generation was the last to have a childhood as such; in later years, if in the country it was still close for a while. This has saddened me greatly the past several decades. Offering sympathy to the younger ones is lame; we could see it happening, later, and there wasn't squat to be done about it. No, I can't feel your pain, only see the results.
Oh, we didn't forget the lessons of the Cold War here in the U.S.; we just brought home the ones that have helped the power elite cement themselves in place even more firmly than before.
Speak it, man. That last para - that's some bogue shit, the ethanol scam. Even is ethanol is desired, getting it from corn is inefficient, except for the makers and land rapers.
(For those unaware, take a walk through a modern cornfield. There's not much soil left, it's mostly just dead dirt. No crop rotation, no inter-cropping, no fallow time. Coupled with factory plowing instead of contour, there's problems with runoff sedimentation of waterways and upper aquifer contamination with all manner of bad stuff.)
Yes, thank you; I was aware of those things. I had no intention of springing surprises on anyone or misrepresenting what's what; I simply pointed out that an easy-to-use solution for watching Netflix existed and has worked nicely for me since last Fall, and figured folks could see what the deal was. I've been trying to point out the Eric Hoover's solution for some time because it works. For me it's less hassle than using a Windows vm just to watch a movie.
I'm glad to see others tackling the issue of Silverlight and related stuff. (Somewhere I had links from last summer when Eric and another fellow were working to get their fix effective and stable; it was interesting to me to try to follow some of what they had to do.)
I want to try Pipelight but haven't gotten to it yet. I hope when I do it won't mess me up with the Netflix folks seeing two installs on one machine or whatever. It looks quite interesting; from the description I read and what you've posted it sounds a nifty and clean way of going about things.
Thanks again for your informative and helpful posts. I know more than I started with and that's a good thing.
This, basically. Mind over matter, and all that. [grin]
Upload, edit (be very careful), discard, download the needful as, um, needed. You'd walk and talk as normal, as you are, but have, one would hope, real-time comms with the extra storage. Even if the extra storage would be flesh - cell or DNA encoding - one would still likely want inorganic backup.
If we don't set ourselves severely back by our own misadventure, or suffer what the Universe might throw at us as it has in the past, then it's not a question of if but when we begin to manufacture ourselves, with whatever blends of organic and inorganic prove useful, desirable, and practical.
The whole schmeer gets a tad creepy but we'll likely have to deal with it. Better to think ahead a bit, hash some of this out, start looking at a few of the larger legal, social, and psychic issues as we may now see them (mindful that our present systems themselves may well change), than to be caught flat-footed as we have with most technologies to date. This one may be a bit further off but in most ways is far more sweeping than atomic energy, bio-weapons or errors, or genetically modified whatevers. I'll leave aside for now grey-goo discussion for those more able.
For starters, young'uns ought to wait 'til they're growed to use psycho-active shit. That's a no-brainer, but it takes some raising to make it happen.
Dude makes a point or three; if you don't agree, argue on point and merits.
Whether you agree or don't, whether he's right or wrong, there's one good take-away: read. Especially read history. If you don't know where we've been (we: us humans) it's more difficult to get a good picture of where and why we are where we are; if you don't know where we've been it can make more difficult the choosing of where to go. It's kinda like map reading; if somebody else has already found a blind alley then it's one you don't have to find and discard on your own - but you have to learn how to read the map.
Thing is, that's stuff those critters do the same way all the time because that's all that's needed.
I think it has to do with humans being much more open-ended. We have many more possibilities of what we might do with what we find at hand, let alone what we might contrive to aid the doing of something. Some things are simpler - we used to pick something edible and ate it; then we poked a hole in the ground and planted a seed or slip; then we built machines to poke the holes and plant the seeds. But even such a simple progression took a lot of time, mistakes, trial and error, making choices from competing workable solutions, all the while within a milieu of various economic and social ideas and implementations that allowed or impeded the work.
Even so, some things are built in fairly well; throwing and catching, for instance. It's learned, true, but the mechanism for the calculation itself is inherent and pretty nifty in its own right.
But even simpler critters make mistakes. I and several others once saw a cat trip over its front feet. A couple of us laughed. Cat shat on my pillow, and into another's boot.
"I just don't get why so many people are so negative or consider it to be some kind of dream to want to try and improve the world in any way."
Far easier to carp than contribute.
For those unable to do much of the latter, going negative boosts their estimation of self.
Especially for the young, snark is seen as what the cool kids do.
Some just like to try to inflict hurt. They get off on it.
If there is ever any rational, useful basis, it involves each one's definition of "improve the world" but that would require an attempt at discussion, not what amounts to a reflex of put-down.
I was also hasty and careless; I just searched on "k-dash" and it turns out that it's a clothing line from guess who, and other things, so the term is already in use. With slight variations it's all over the place. Time to cap the pen for a bit.
Great! Another one, thanks. I've been posting info about Compholio since last year every time Netflix on Linux comes up and it's been like talking to a brick wall.
Finally! a fellow traveler. Sheesh, I was beginning to think I was the only one watching Netflix on Linux desktop since last year, the way so many keep moaning and groaning about 'no Netflix on Linux' around here. I haven't had the audio prob, for which I'm glad.
Re you sig - Heinlein, I think it was, long ago suggested that for every law added, two must be removed, until the number of laws got down to some unspecified manageable number - essentially that one be able to walk out the door with a fair expectation that he knew what would get him arrested. Hell, just the tax code printed out would take up several pallets.
The only advantage to the body of current law as written is that if the authorities want to get you, there's some law that'll let them do so.
Objections noted, and if they're important to you, they're quite good ones. But if one just wants to watch via Netflix, for many the solution is available and it works, at least on some distros.
I do not dismiss the bit about Wine; I use it (Codeweavers; the yearly payment helps support Wine, which many do find useful even if impure.) for example, to play Civ V, and despite the occasional crash, at this stage in my life I'm just not gonna get too bent out of shape to carp. Doesn't mean I would not like to see more native Linux stuff, only that meanwhile I'll use what lets me use some of the things I want. Or I could even use Windows for main OS if some Windows-only program were that important to my needs, but I prefer not to.
Slashdot Mirror
"Early microwaves were pretty damned expensive and the controls were a lot more complex that today's, since the controls were all analog and mechanical."
I have no idea where you got that, unless you're thinking of something like the Radarange from late Forties.
http://www.eatmedaily.com/2010/04/natural-history-of-the-kitchen-the-microwave/
Started using microwave ovens at work and home in '70-71. Controls were brain-dead simple: insert food, close door, turn timer dial. When bell sounds, remove food. Some were complicated, tho - had to push a start button after turning the timer dial. Complex? Sheesh.
"I still feel that people could make that decision themselves if they all decided to and really worked toward it."
In a somewhat different vein I've believed that for years, dim hope though it is. On seeing the famous scene in Network I flashed on 50 million people stopping what they were doing, standing up, walking outside and converging on their local seats of government....
Yeah, whatever, I'm older. Happens if you live long enough. Can't claim it's the best bargain going, it's just the one I have. Inertia, habit, curiosity, hope. Pick two, on a bad day, three on a good one.
Wait one.
1. He didn't say he refuses to use modern tools. He says he is learning among other things what clean code looks like by making it so. Thus he learns the criteria and what the modern tools are likely doing under the hood [my conclusion].
2. Doing code by hand does not automatically guarantee inefficient or badly laid out code. Such hours he spends are spent learning. Will you argue that's a bad thing to do?
3a. "Rolling his own functions" does re-implement existing code. That it be poorly done is not guaranteed.
3b. By rolling his own functions he might eliminate one or more bugs which is new and worthwhile. It is of course possible that new bugs are introduced.
3c. Nowhere does he say he refuses to use standard APIs. (IIRC, a standard API can use a custom routine or library. Please forgive me if my memory is way off, but isn't this not uncommon, and done by declaration along with the includes or thereabouts?)
"If anything, selfish motivations are better...."
Because also they can be easily transparent, thus easier of trust.
The summary asks, "So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?"
My immediate response is, "Yes."
For instance, Internet access implies electricity; if there's extra, then likely refrigeration, thus insulin and vaccines; if enough refrigeration, then cold beer, too.
In my experience trying to divide some things into either-or is often not a fruitful path. Often one gets a badminton game of opinion rather than useful argument arriving at better view.
The full article is a very good read; very instructive as to what can be done through all the obstacles especially when much of the effort is basically off the books. They did an amazing job of it.
It's one of the ironies of the times that those who could benefit the most from reading things such as this are the very ones almost guaranteed not to read them, everyone from hasty ignorant AC's to people at the top of the power game.
But AC (#44622843), DaveAtFraud, and a few others have gotten the point. (Sorry if I missed somebody; not the intent. Illustration, not credits at movie's end.)
This.
"Troops are stationed in friendly countries simply because they are within striking distance of unfriendly countries." is the nut of it.
In the main, I think that it's likely past time to bring the bulk of our European forces back, but I'm not a military planner, just someone who's been curious about the situation, nothing more.
Historically, for the length of the Cold War, everyone's eyes were on the Fulda Gap. The calculus was always the same: The Gap, territory for time, attrition, 30 days. Thirty days for Europe to hold until US could get the bulk of their armor and all the rest in place. (It was ironic in a way that after the fall of the Wall, when ex-Soviet planners were much more free for a while to speak with their Western counterparts, that we learned they'd spent more time thinking about defending than adventuring.)
Unless one thinks that, given the spate of comments coming out of Putin's Russia for instance, we again have to consider the Gap as a real possibility.
I got into thinking more on this simply because during the Fifties, living outside of Augsburg, my Dad would get a phone call or a driver with holstered .45 would appear at the door, and he'd be gone for four days to a week. These were not, so far as I or my mother knew, planned exercises. (Parents talk, children listen and compare notes.) A few times we stayed home from school and waited with a packed suitcase. So I got a bit more interested in later years about some of this.
So, anyway, time to come home. Drones, strategic strikes, reaction forces, airlift, and pre-positioned stores should likely handle the rest, this amateur thinks.
Well said. Totally guesswork on my part of course but I believe you've arrived at the heart of it.
This.
It would take little, the addition of a few words, changing a few lines, to afford email at least the same protections as traditional mail.
Also, heretofore although email was sent and often stored, particularly while in transit, as plain-text, it was always private in the practical sense because it took a particular human to stop, find, and read a particular email. That is, until some human went out of their way to read your email it was private. Now, as you point out, it never can be private. All of it, always available, although it still takes a human or machine to seek it out and read it.
Yes, indeed we have the Bill of Rights and Article 10, for instance, and few places have those things enumerated therein in such fashion, given elsewhere in their constitutions, or specified at all, especially to the degree given.
However, the question before us is not so much what is written but what is observed; of what is observed, to what is protected. Please see:
http://www.freeexistence.org/freedom.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Meta-Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indices_of_Freedom
Btw, your assertion of "completely absent" is not necessarily well-supported by fact. (For whatever odd reason I ended up reading the bulk of Sweden's constitution a few days ago; it was interesting, some bits relevant here.) Anyway, a perusal of privacies delineated and protected as spelled out and as observed, particularly parts of Europe, Scandinavia, and Iceland is illuminating.
Only improvement to graphic would be replacing the iris with a map of the U.S. or the world....
Along those lines, you may find this interesting:
http://www.freeexistence.org/freedom.shtml
It gives an interactive tool for ordering freedoms that you choose and presents the results.
Sorry 'bout that. I was lucky enough to be born in late Forties; Dad was in the Army so we were lower middle class and managed well enough. Money was tight but there was enough food, adequate clothes, decent shelter on and off post. We got a TV in '55, I think it was. Hopalong Cassidy, Princess SummerFallWinterSpring, Captain Midnight, Mr. Wizard, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog. Cap guns, kites; a bicycle was a big thing, a baseball glove, a crystal radio. Dave Garroway and Ed Murrow, Tonto and Gunsmoke.
For years every month or so the sirens would go off and you'd crouch underneath your desk waiting for the all clear. Some places you could hear and even see the B-47s and B-52s taking off, sometimes an F-94C, F101, later, others, go zooming past the school on the way to somewhere.
On post or off, in a small town or in a newer house along a stretch of road leading from the city, always plenty of room to run around after school and in summer, just don't bother the grown-ups and come home for supper when called.
There were plenty of problems, all you had to do was watch the national news and read the paper. But when young the problems are doubly distant; it was a good time to be growing up for the most part.
I think that my generation was the last to have a childhood as such; in later years, if in the country it was still close for a while. This has saddened me greatly the past several decades. Offering sympathy to the younger ones is lame; we could see it happening, later, and there wasn't squat to be done about it. No, I can't feel your pain, only see the results.
Oh, we didn't forget the lessons of the Cold War here in the U.S.; we just brought home the ones that have helped the power elite cement themselves in place even more firmly than before.
Like the sig, btw.
Speak it, man. That last para - that's some bogue shit, the ethanol scam. Even is ethanol is desired, getting it from corn is inefficient, except for the makers and land rapers.
(For those unaware, take a walk through a modern cornfield. There's not much soil left, it's mostly just dead dirt. No crop rotation, no inter-cropping, no fallow time. Coupled with factory plowing instead of contour, there's problems with runoff sedimentation of waterways and upper aquifer contamination with all manner of bad stuff.)
Yes, thank you; I was aware of those things. I had no intention of springing surprises on anyone or misrepresenting what's what; I simply pointed out that an easy-to-use solution for watching Netflix existed and has worked nicely for me since last Fall, and figured folks could see what the deal was. I've been trying to point out the Eric Hoover's solution for some time because it works. For me it's less hassle than using a Windows vm just to watch a movie.
I'm glad to see others tackling the issue of Silverlight and related stuff. (Somewhere I had links from last summer when Eric and another fellow were working to get their fix effective and stable; it was interesting to me to try to follow some of what they had to do.)
I want to try Pipelight but haven't gotten to it yet. I hope when I do it won't mess me up with the Netflix folks seeing two installs on one machine or whatever. It looks quite interesting; from the description I read and what you've posted it sounds a nifty and clean way of going about things.
Thanks again for your informative and helpful posts. I know more than I started with and that's a good thing.
This, basically. Mind over matter, and all that. [grin]
Upload, edit (be very careful), discard, download the needful as, um, needed. You'd walk and talk as normal, as you are, but have, one would hope, real-time comms with the extra storage. Even if the extra storage would be flesh - cell or DNA encoding - one would still likely want inorganic backup.
If we don't set ourselves severely back by our own misadventure, or suffer what the Universe might throw at us as it has in the past, then it's not a question of if but when we begin to manufacture ourselves, with whatever blends of organic and inorganic prove useful, desirable, and practical.
The whole schmeer gets a tad creepy but we'll likely have to deal with it. Better to think ahead a bit, hash some of this out, start looking at a few of the larger legal, social, and psychic issues as we may now see them (mindful that our present systems themselves may well change), than to be caught flat-footed as we have with most technologies to date. This one may be a bit further off but in most ways is far more sweeping than atomic energy, bio-weapons or errors, or genetically modified whatevers. I'll leave aside for now grey-goo discussion for those more able.
For starters, young'uns ought to wait 'til they're growed to use psycho-active shit. That's a no-brainer, but it takes some raising to make it happen.
Dude makes a point or three; if you don't agree, argue on point and merits.
Whether you agree or don't, whether he's right or wrong, there's one good take-away: read. Especially read history. If you don't know where we've been (we: us humans) it's more difficult to get a good picture of where and why we are where we are; if you don't know where we've been it can make more difficult the choosing of where to go. It's kinda like map reading; if somebody else has already found a blind alley then it's one you don't have to find and discard on your own - but you have to learn how to read the map.
"Are we missing a gene or something?"
You raise good points.
Thing is, that's stuff those critters do the same way all the time because that's all that's needed.
I think it has to do with humans being much more open-ended. We have many more possibilities of what we might do with what we find at hand, let alone what we might contrive to aid the doing of something. Some things are simpler - we used to pick something edible and ate it; then we poked a hole in the ground and planted a seed or slip; then we built machines to poke the holes and plant the seeds. But even such a simple progression took a lot of time, mistakes, trial and error, making choices from competing workable solutions, all the while within a milieu of various economic and social ideas and implementations that allowed or impeded the work.
Even so, some things are built in fairly well; throwing and catching, for instance. It's learned, true, but the mechanism for the calculation itself is inherent and pretty nifty in its own right.
But even simpler critters make mistakes. I and several others once saw a cat trip over its front feet. A couple of us laughed. Cat shat on my pillow, and into another's boot.
"I just don't get why so many people are so negative or consider it to be some kind of dream to want to try and improve the world in any way."
Far easier to carp than contribute.
For those unable to do much of the latter, going negative boosts their estimation of self.
Especially for the young, snark is seen as what the cool kids do.
Some just like to try to inflict hurt. They get off on it.
If there is ever any rational, useful basis, it involves each one's definition of "improve the world" but that would require an attempt at discussion, not what amounts to a reflex of put-down.
Yeah, ouch.
I was also hasty and careless; I just searched on "k-dash" and it turns out that it's a clothing line from guess who, and other things, so the term is already in use. With slight variations it's all over the place. Time to cap the pen for a bit.
Great! Another one, thanks. I've been posting info about Compholio since last year every time Netflix on Linux comes up and it's been like talking to a brick wall.
No. It's much easier to install the Compholio wine patch via ppa or deb or rpm.
Finally! a fellow traveler. Sheesh, I was beginning to think I was the only one watching Netflix on Linux desktop since last year, the way so many keep moaning and groaning about 'no Netflix on Linux' around here. I haven't had the audio prob, for which I'm glad.
Re you sig - Heinlein, I think it was, long ago suggested that for every law added, two must be removed, until the number of laws got down to some unspecified manageable number - essentially that one be able to walk out the door with a fair expectation that he knew what would get him arrested. Hell, just the tax code printed out would take up several pallets.
The only advantage to the body of current law as written is that if the authorities want to get you, there's some law that'll let them do so.
Objections noted, and if they're important to you, they're quite good ones. But if one just wants to watch via Netflix, for many the solution is available and it works, at least on some distros.
I do not dismiss the bit about Wine; I use it (Codeweavers; the yearly payment helps support Wine, which many do find useful even if impure.) for example, to play Civ V, and despite the occasional crash, at this stage in my life I'm just not gonna get too bent out of shape to carp. Doesn't mean I would not like to see more native Linux stuff, only that meanwhile I'll use what lets me use some of the things I want. Or I could even use Windows for main OS if some Windows-only program were that important to my needs, but I prefer not to.