I skimmed the front page, and misread the title to this story as "Updating the Integrated Space Pen". Intrigued at what those ambitious scamps at the Fisher Space Pen company might be up to, I skimmed the summary for links and misread the address of the linked website as "thefacepalm.com". I still have no idea what the story is actually about, but I thought I'd chip in my contribution anyway.
All in all, the start of a perfect Slashdot Sunday for me...
I often find people don't seem to understand when talking about countries like Pakistan or Egypt that the military, police and intelligence services aren't just bureaucracies within the government. They are institutions that have a life of their own, a life that is parallel to the civilian government. And when push comes to shove, the nominal subservience of the security services to civilian authority goes out the window.
And here in the US, people are already crossing the line from respecting and honoring the men and women who serve this country in uniform to revering the military as an institution, and that we should never do.
The myth, by the way, was never just about killer machines per se. It was about unintended consequences, like the myth of King Midas or of Pandora's Box. The killer robot trope came down to us by way of legends of the Golem, which often come with a not-so-subtle warning about hubris.
It was only when the golem legend was translated into sci-fi that it became laughably implausible -- at least until recently. So many bad stories recycled this bit of mythological lumber for its scare value, and peopled the story with cardboard characters. In the old golem stories the creature is created by good and wise men, who can't always contain the consequences of their well-intentioned actions.
This is not some new-fangled "gee I don't know how to design a 'computerized' user interface" thing. Poorly thought out and over-elaborate controls are embedded deep within GM design culture, and have been for at least fifty years if not longer.
As proof I present the heat controls which I remember totally ruining my Mom's otherwise awesome '68 Skylark Sport Coupe for her.
To call for heat or air conditioning, you frob the thumb wheel until you think the bar graph is indicating the temperature you might want. The problem, as you'll see if you look at the worm gear mechanism inside, is that in order to give enough mechanical advantage to work the cables with a thumbwheel, the wheel has to turn maybe five full revolutions to move through the entire range. On top of that, you manipulate the wheel through the exposed arc that sits above the panel, which means you can move it at most about 45 degrees with a swipe of your thumb, or 8 swipes to get a full 360 revolution, or forty swipes to go from max heat to max AC. All the while you were supposed to be watching the bar graph instead of the road. Many's the time I heard my sainted mother swearing under her breath as she tried to get a little heat or AC out of the damned thing.
If I recall, one "helpful" feature of the bar graph was that it turned blue when going from heat to AC and orange when going the other way. This is another very GM touch. When I was in college I had a friend who had an Oldsmobile from the same era with a bar graph speedo that turned red when it exceeded 100MPH. You can imagine how safe *that* feature was in the hands of a young male driver.
Well, if you look at the initial failures if the M16 and F35 as black boxes, this seems like a reasonable analogy. On the other hand if you open up the black boxes to see what actually happened, the analogy falls apart.
The M16 rifle's initial failure was due to deploying it with different ammunition than it was designed for. The ammunition used powder that was incompatible. Also, soldiers were told (incorrectly) that the M16 was self-cleaning. If the F35 were failing for an analogous reasons, those reasons would be something like using the wrong jet fuel and telling crews to skip normal maintenance.
If you open up the the F35 failure box, you see something different. You see difficulties getting all the critical features working on the most complex weapons system ever devised. You also see a program that is by design too bit to fail or even scale back much. A program whose cancellation would be the single largest economic and technical failure in military procurement history. From an engineering standpoint this is all "here be dragons" territory. We're off the map, and that means estimates of when we will get where we intend to go are mere speculation.
So this isn't like the M16, in which the introduction of a demonstrably sound design was bungled. We're talking about committing the defense of a nation to a weapon that has never successfully demonstrated the capabilities it needs to have. We're even retiring critical, proven weapon systems in order to make way for this thing. When have we ever done anything like that before?
Man, I would *SO* buy one of those. In fact I'd buy one for every kid I know, as well as one for myself, especially if it used those awesome new strontium aluminate paints.
But I see little to indicate that other car manufacturers have more trustworthy cultures. In a world where an automotive engineer will sell his soul for a nickel on a car that retails for over twenty-thousand dollars (in the words of a close friend who is an automotive engineer), you can't trust a car company not to kick the can down the road so they can make their quarterly profit projections.
Nor should we have to trust them. There needs to be someone else, someone for whom the immediate effect on the company's bottom line is not paramount, keeping watch over the company's safety practices.
You don't get to count the Clipper Chip as something bad the government did. It didn't happen because people didn't want it to happen, which is how government *is supposed to work*.
Oh, and as someone who lived in the 1960s, I can attest that AM and FM radio didn't stop being a vital part of our communication system in 1960. It was irreplaceable up until around 1995 or so, and still vital up until a few years ago. And what has replaced AM and FM radio? The Internet.
I started using the Internet back when it was the ARPANet. I'm probably one of the few people alive who remember what a "TIP" was. Now who paid for ARPANet? Here's a hint:the final "A" in ARPA stands for "Agency". For a long time the backbone of the Internet was NSFNet, run by the National Science Foundation, which, despite its name, is NOT a private foundation. Now here's the part that's going to be astonishing for someone whose concept of what the House of Representatives can accomplish is shaped by the last four or five Congresses. Back in 1992 a committee of the House of Representatives held hearings which resulted in legislation opening up this nationally managed network to commercial traffic. This created the Internet as we know it today.
Think about that. The *House* held a hearing that identified an opportunity to do something useful, and actually produced legislation accomplishing that thing and transformed the world, for better or worse, but mostly for the better. So what happened in the intervening 20 years? Well, people elected Congressmen whose ideology claimed that government can't do anything productive, and (surprise) the House stopped accomplishing anything useful.
Oh, and the poster's argument still stands. That smartphone you've replaced your FM radio with is using regulated airways.
But Sterling got rich as a personal injury lawyer, and then mega-rich as a slum lord. He's the one man in America *everybody* can despise. Ballmer has actually found a situation where he can step in and people will heave a sign of relief.
Well, I don't mean just immortally functioning on a biological level. I mean immortally conscious, growing, and ceaselessly me. I don't think that's physically possible. Aside from the heat death of the universe, I don't think the human brain's capacity for accumulating experience is unlimited. As for those who favor downloading our consciousness into computers (which are presumably expandable), that violates the "ceaselessly me" criterion. I don't think endless existence as a robotic consciousness will be anything like human existence.
Oh, I know I'm boring to certain people, viz. boring people. Or at least people I find boring. The kind of people who rush through a museum exhibition to get to the gift shop.
You have a whole planet you've barely explored. I guarantee that there are more places you could go and more things you could see than you'll ever get to in a lifetime.
I'll bet there are places within ten miles of where you live that could amaze you, if you were suitably prepared to be amazed. Unfortunately most people could go for a walk in the woods and not see trees, just green blobs on sticks. Well of course if you're so ignorant you can't even name the tree, you won't see how amazing that tree is, and how it connects to other plants and animals. How much could you really expect to get out of visiting an alien planet if you aren't interesting in exploring *this* one in person?
And as for alien cultures, what about those immigrant neighborhoods people are always griping about, the ones where the residents are "too lazy to learn English"? There's an alien culture right there for the exploration, practically on your doorstep. You could spend a few weeks learning a few foreign phrases and see whether you can navigate that Haitian neighborhood, or order dinner in Chinatown using Mandarin. If that doesn't strike you as an adventure, if it sounds like it's just too much trouble, what makes you think you'll find civilizations on *other* planets worth the bother?
The only people who'd really get much out of travel to an alien planet are the kind of people form whom *this* planet remains an inexhaustible source of fascination and adventure.
Well I can accept FTL and wormhole travel so I can enjoy a good story. But just because I can imagine such things, it doesn't mean I think they exist. In fact the reason I can accept FTL travel in a science fiction story is that I'm not imagining it too hard. If I tried harder, I'd end up bringing in Special Relativity. Then I wouldn't be accepting FTL or wormholes (which have their own paradox-generating aspects) as plausible within the story.
I'd like to believe that I could be immortal. I want to be immortal. Now that I have kids, I want *them* to be immortal even more than I want to be immortal myself. But just because I want something to be possible, doesn't mean the universe has to make it possible. Even if I want it really, really bad.
I don't think this makes me closed minded; if you could show me these things are possible I'd gladly believe. In fact I'll go further: my willingness to believe things I wish would happen are impossible makes me more open-minded than someone who refuses to accept the overwhelming preponderance of evidence.
For some people "open mindedness" means giving wishful thinking equal standing with evidence. This is especially true of science denying movements. Well, I don't accord wishful thinking much credibility. It doesn't mean I don't wish, I just don't expect those wishes to come true.
The FCC isn't a body that regulates according to enduring principles of openness, access and competition. It's run by political appointees. It's mission statement notwithstanding, FCC priorities ultimately reflect the political agenda of commissioners, the people who appointed the commissioners, and the people who will be employing those commissioners after they complete their five year term.
Sure, there are guys who work for the FCC who are like the park rangers; the guys with the loop antennas looking for pirate radio stations or administering the ham radio exam. But we're talking about setting policy here; it's not like "going after park rangers", it's more like "going after the Secretary of the Interior." Sally Jewell has very different priorities at Interior than did James Watt under Reagan. You can like one without liking the other.
Likewise you can think that Reed Hundt, who was commisioner in 1994, was hero, or perhaps you think he was a meddling socialist. Chances are no matter what you thought of Hundt, you think the *opposite* of Tom Wheeler, the current commissioner.
The problem is that there are laws that you have broken, there are so many.
True.
The other day I was in the forest in the middle of no-where and I peed. That is enough of a crime to really ruin my life, years in prison as a sex offender then put on a list that limits freedoms
Not so true.
Anyplace *I've* lived nobody gets prosecuted for peeing in the woods. In some states public urination is classed as misdemeanor disorderly conduct or even public lewdness, but only "under circumstances which the person should know will likely cause affront or alarm".
This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's paranoia over what the stupid people will do if they find out. If you're in the middle of a forest with a full bladder, find a tree and after a few furtive glances around, go ahead and pee. And if they want to put you on the sex offender registry, invite them to add all the boy scouts (and many of the girl scouts for that matter) on the registry with you.
But I really don't see any other solution to this other than to treat the idea that you must be guilty of something because the cops investigated you as contemptibly stupid. What's the alternative, to take that idea seriously? After all, hiding the fact that you, personally, happened to get swept up into some investigation is only going to *confirm* the suspicions of people who automatically think "where there's smoke, there's fire."
The best option is not to act as if it's something to be ashamed of, realizing of course this is not a perfect world -- specifically in that it contains stupid, credulous people who jump to conclusions. Well, if you end up having to deal with those people, as you sometimes do, they'll find a way to be a problem no matter what you do.
No, I'd advise young people to adopt "screw the idiots" earlier than *I* did.
Like Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." I'd like to see less taking stupidity seriously. Do that and stupidity starts to get airs above its station.h
Those "idiots" might not hire you, vote for you, etc. When your life is ruined due to an investigation you will sing a different tune.
I don't think so, but I'm on the downhill side of middle age, and that makes a difference. They can't ruin my life because I've lived approximately 2/3 of it already, and I don't intend to spend the time I have left worrying about what idiots think. I can work around them.
Would I *want* them to know? No. Would I *care*. Not really. Would some people think, "where there's smoke, there's fire?" Sure. Screw them, they're idiots.
I think the best policy is ultimately to get everything out in the open. The worst case is when surveillance is secret so people think it hardly ever happens, and then it comes out that you were under surveillance. At least when it all comes out, it becomes pretty clear there's smoke around a lot of innocent people.
Slashdot Mirror
I skimmed the front page, and misread the title to this story as "Updating the Integrated Space Pen". Intrigued at what those ambitious scamps at the Fisher Space Pen company might be up to, I skimmed the summary for links and misread the address of the linked website as "thefacepalm.com". I still have no idea what the story is actually about, but I thought I'd chip in my contribution anyway.
All in all, the start of a perfect Slashdot Sunday for me...
I often find people don't seem to understand when talking about countries like Pakistan or Egypt that the military, police and intelligence services aren't just bureaucracies within the government. They are institutions that have a life of their own, a life that is parallel to the civilian government. And when push comes to shove, the nominal subservience of the security services to civilian authority goes out the window.
And here in the US, people are already crossing the line from respecting and honoring the men and women who serve this country in uniform to revering the military as an institution, and that we should never do.
The myth, by the way, was never just about killer machines per se. It was about unintended consequences, like the myth of King Midas or of Pandora's Box. The killer robot trope came down to us by way of legends of the Golem, which often come with a not-so-subtle warning about hubris.
It was only when the golem legend was translated into sci-fi that it became laughably implausible -- at least until recently. So many bad stories recycled this bit of mythological lumber for its scare value, and peopled the story with cardboard characters. In the old golem stories the creature is created by good and wise men, who can't always contain the consequences of their well-intentioned actions.
This is not some new-fangled "gee I don't know how to design a 'computerized' user interface" thing. Poorly thought out and over-elaborate controls are embedded deep within GM design culture, and have been for at least fifty years if not longer.
As proof I present the heat controls which I remember totally ruining my Mom's otherwise awesome '68 Skylark Sport Coupe for her.
To call for heat or air conditioning, you frob the thumb wheel until you think the bar graph is indicating the temperature you might want. The problem, as you'll see if you look at the worm gear mechanism inside, is that in order to give enough mechanical advantage to work the cables with a thumbwheel, the wheel has to turn maybe five full revolutions to move through the entire range. On top of that, you manipulate the wheel through the exposed arc that sits above the panel, which means you can move it at most about 45 degrees with a swipe of your thumb, or 8 swipes to get a full 360 revolution, or forty swipes to go from max heat to max AC. All the while you were supposed to be watching the bar graph instead of the road. Many's the time I heard my sainted mother swearing under her breath as she tried to get a little heat or AC out of the damned thing.
If I recall, one "helpful" feature of the bar graph was that it turned blue when going from heat to AC and orange when going the other way. This is another very GM touch. When I was in college I had a friend who had an Oldsmobile from the same era with a bar graph speedo that turned red when it exceeded 100MPH. You can imagine how safe *that* feature was in the hands of a young male driver.
Well, if you look at the initial failures if the M16 and F35 as black boxes, this seems like a reasonable analogy. On the other hand if you open up the black boxes to see what actually happened, the analogy falls apart.
The M16 rifle's initial failure was due to deploying it with different ammunition than it was designed for. The ammunition used powder that was incompatible. Also, soldiers were told (incorrectly) that the M16 was self-cleaning. If the F35 were failing for an analogous reasons, those reasons would be something like using the wrong jet fuel and telling crews to skip normal maintenance.
If you open up the the F35 failure box, you see something different. You see difficulties getting all the critical features working on the most complex weapons system ever devised. You also see a program that is by design too bit to fail or even scale back much. A program whose cancellation would be the single largest economic and technical failure in military procurement history. From an engineering standpoint this is all "here be dragons" territory. We're off the map, and that means estimates of when we will get where we intend to go are mere speculation.
So this isn't like the M16, in which the introduction of a demonstrably sound design was bungled. We're talking about committing the defense of a nation to a weapon that has never successfully demonstrated the capabilities it needs to have. We're even retiring critical, proven weapon systems in order to make way for this thing. When have we ever done anything like that before?
Will the Madame Curie set glow in the dark?
Man, I would *SO* buy one of those. In fact I'd buy one for every kid I know, as well as one for myself, especially if it used those awesome new strontium aluminate paints.
But I see little to indicate that other car manufacturers have more trustworthy cultures. In a world where an automotive engineer will sell his soul for a nickel on a car that retails for over twenty-thousand dollars (in the words of a close friend who is an automotive engineer), you can't trust a car company not to kick the can down the road so they can make their quarterly profit projections.
Nor should we have to trust them. There needs to be someone else, someone for whom the immediate effect on the company's bottom line is not paramount, keeping watch over the company's safety practices.
"Limousine Liberals"? Really? That's the fantasy dystopia you're living in?
You don't get to count the Clipper Chip as something bad the government did. It didn't happen because people didn't want it to happen, which is how government *is supposed to work*.
Oh, and as someone who lived in the 1960s, I can attest that AM and FM radio didn't stop being a vital part of our communication system in 1960. It was irreplaceable up until around 1995 or so, and still vital up until a few years ago. And what has replaced AM and FM radio? The Internet.
I started using the Internet back when it was the ARPANet. I'm probably one of the few people alive who remember what a "TIP" was. Now who paid for ARPANet? Here's a hint:the final "A" in ARPA stands for "Agency". For a long time the backbone of the Internet was NSFNet, run by the National Science Foundation, which, despite its name, is NOT a private foundation. Now here's the part that's going to be astonishing for someone whose concept of what the House of Representatives can accomplish is shaped by the last four or five Congresses. Back in 1992 a committee of the House of Representatives held hearings which resulted in legislation opening up this nationally managed network to commercial traffic. This created the Internet as we know it today.
Think about that. The *House* held a hearing that identified an opportunity to do something useful, and actually produced legislation accomplishing that thing and transformed the world, for better or worse, but mostly for the better. So what happened in the intervening 20 years? Well, people elected Congressmen whose ideology claimed that government can't do anything productive, and (surprise) the House stopped accomplishing anything useful.
Oh, and the poster's argument still stands. That smartphone you've replaced your FM radio with is using regulated airways.
The F35 isn't operational yet. It wouldn't be able to compete with aircraft that actually work.
But Sterling got rich as a personal injury lawyer, and then mega-rich as a slum lord. He's the one man in America *everybody* can despise. Ballmer has actually found a situation where he can step in and people will heave a sign of relief.
Well played, sir. Well played.
Apparently you're under the delusion that just *liberals* don't like Sterling's opinions.
It worked amazingly well, but it still sucked.
Well, I don't mean just immortally functioning on a biological level. I mean immortally conscious, growing, and ceaselessly me. I don't think that's physically possible. Aside from the heat death of the universe, I don't think the human brain's capacity for accumulating experience is unlimited. As for those who favor downloading our consciousness into computers (which are presumably expandable), that violates the "ceaselessly me" criterion. I don't think endless existence as a robotic consciousness will be anything like human existence.
Oh, I know I'm boring to certain people, viz. boring people. Or at least people I find boring. The kind of people who rush through a museum exhibition to get to the gift shop.
You have a whole planet you've barely explored. I guarantee that there are more places you could go and more things you could see than you'll ever get to in a lifetime.
I'll bet there are places within ten miles of where you live that could amaze you, if you were suitably prepared to be amazed. Unfortunately most people could go for a walk in the woods and not see trees, just green blobs on sticks. Well of course if you're so ignorant you can't even name the tree, you won't see how amazing that tree is, and how it connects to other plants and animals. How much could you really expect to get out of visiting an alien planet if you aren't interesting in exploring *this* one in person?
And as for alien cultures, what about those immigrant neighborhoods people are always griping about, the ones where the residents are "too lazy to learn English"? There's an alien culture right there for the exploration, practically on your doorstep. You could spend a few weeks learning a few foreign phrases and see whether you can navigate that Haitian neighborhood, or order dinner in Chinatown using Mandarin. If that doesn't strike you as an adventure, if it sounds like it's just too much trouble, what makes you think you'll find civilizations on *other* planets worth the bother?
The only people who'd really get much out of travel to an alien planet are the kind of people form whom *this* planet remains an inexhaustible source of fascination and adventure.
Well I can accept FTL and wormhole travel so I can enjoy a good story. But just because I can imagine such things, it doesn't mean I think they exist. In fact the reason I can accept FTL travel in a science fiction story is that I'm not imagining it too hard. If I tried harder, I'd end up bringing in Special Relativity. Then I wouldn't be accepting FTL or wormholes (which have their own paradox-generating aspects) as plausible within the story.
I'd like to believe that I could be immortal. I want to be immortal. Now that I have kids, I want *them* to be immortal even more than I want to be immortal myself. But just because I want something to be possible, doesn't mean the universe has to make it possible. Even if I want it really, really bad.
I don't think this makes me closed minded; if you could show me these things are possible I'd gladly believe. In fact I'll go further: my willingness to believe things I wish would happen are impossible makes me more open-minded than someone who refuses to accept the overwhelming preponderance of evidence.
For some people "open mindedness" means giving wishful thinking equal standing with evidence. This is especially true of science denying movements. Well, I don't accord wishful thinking much credibility. It doesn't mean I don't wish, I just don't expect those wishes to come true.
Sorry, you want the dismissive banter department. This is sarcasm.
The FCC isn't a body that regulates according to enduring principles of openness, access and competition. It's run by political appointees. It's mission statement notwithstanding, FCC priorities ultimately reflect the political agenda of commissioners, the people who appointed the commissioners, and the people who will be employing those commissioners after they complete their five year term.
Sure, there are guys who work for the FCC who are like the park rangers; the guys with the loop antennas looking for pirate radio stations or administering the ham radio exam. But we're talking about setting policy here; it's not like "going after park rangers", it's more like "going after the Secretary of the Interior." Sally Jewell has very different priorities at Interior than did James Watt under Reagan. You can like one without liking the other.
Likewise you can think that Reed Hundt, who was commisioner in 1994, was hero, or perhaps you think he was a meddling socialist. Chances are no matter what you thought of Hundt, you think the *opposite* of Tom Wheeler, the current commissioner.
The problem is that there are laws that you have broken, there are so many.
True.
The other day I was in the forest in the middle of no-where and I peed. That is enough of a crime to really ruin my life, years in prison as a sex offender then put on a list that limits freedoms
Not so true.
Anyplace *I've* lived nobody gets prosecuted for peeing in the woods. In some states public urination is classed as misdemeanor disorderly conduct or even public lewdness, but only "under circumstances which the person should know will likely cause affront or alarm".
This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's paranoia over what the stupid people will do if they find out. If you're in the middle of a forest with a full bladder, find a tree and after a few furtive glances around, go ahead and pee. And if they want to put you on the sex offender registry, invite them to add all the boy scouts (and many of the girl scouts for that matter) on the registry with you.
Well, as I said, not everyone's in my place.
But I really don't see any other solution to this other than to treat the idea that you must be guilty of something because the cops investigated you as contemptibly stupid. What's the alternative, to take that idea seriously? After all, hiding the fact that you, personally, happened to get swept up into some investigation is only going to *confirm* the suspicions of people who automatically think "where there's smoke, there's fire."
The best option is not to act as if it's something to be ashamed of, realizing of course this is not a perfect world -- specifically in that it contains stupid, credulous people who jump to conclusions. Well, if you end up having to deal with those people, as you sometimes do, they'll find a way to be a problem no matter what you do.
No, I'd advise young people to adopt "screw the idiots" earlier than *I* did.
Like Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." I'd like to see less taking stupidity seriously. Do that and stupidity starts to get airs above its station.h
Different hypothetical. The one where the surveillance turned up something.
Those "idiots" might not hire you, vote for you, etc. When your life is ruined due to an investigation you will sing a different tune.
I don't think so, but I'm on the downhill side of middle age, and that makes a difference. They can't ruin my life because I've lived approximately 2/3 of it already, and I don't intend to spend the time I have left worrying about what idiots think. I can work around them.
Would I *want* them to know? No. Would I *care*. Not really. Would some people think, "where there's smoke, there's fire?" Sure. Screw them, they're idiots.
I think the best policy is ultimately to get everything out in the open. The worst case is when surveillance is secret so people think it hardly ever happens, and then it comes out that you were under surveillance. At least when it all comes out, it becomes pretty clear there's smoke around a lot of innocent people.