Is there any posibility we could send the entire slashdot editorial board to a class called "Thermodynamics 101"?
I nominate the entire DOE Handbooks, not only for the/. editors but for the most part of/.ers overall, myself included. DOE-HDBK-1012/1-92 will cover Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, and Fluid Flow. The math and science DOE Handbooks are a great free, downloadable resource. The basics of Physics, Chemistry, Electricity, Materials science, Reactor science and attendant math are all covered.
The DOE Handbooks are a rich resource that cover every aspect of implementing and running an organization. The books cover disputes, roundtables, the list is very nearly all encompassing.
Nothing speaks to independence like your own in house nuclear reactor and the DOE Handbooks guide you through nearly every step of the way.
A recent segment of Nova dealt with this and can be watched online.
What bugged me was that at the intro to the episode the narrator, a bad comic if I've ever seen one and an anchor dragging down a once good program, spoke of the work as the greatest work since creation. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was then flashed on the screen showing the 'Creator's' hand outstreached to the reaching hand of his creation, Adam. IMO it stank of lip service to the American fundamentalist neoconservatives.
what you're saying is that if Microsoft, Sun, etc didn't have lawyers, they'd be engaged in actual armed combat with each other?
Hi, my post was prefaced as loose conjecture. The post amounts to a few points taken from a notebook given over to a study I hope, time permitting, to undertake.
The general course of the notes goes to the relationship between war and trade, and, further, ritualized war/contest. Loosely, in answer to your question, if commerce incorporates the territorial imperative and equally primitive drives sublimated from open warfare, then, in my terms, commerce is war and the handmaiden to evolutionary drive.
Example, the historian Fernand Braudel notes in one of his work that the term robber baron, now used to refer to a 19th century captain of industry, originally refered to robbers who seized by force strategic mountain passes in the Alps between the mediterranean and northwestern europe. Robbers, once in control of a pass, built castles and imposed an arbitrary tariff on traders taking goods to and fro. Wealth garnered by force perhaps led them to see themselves as Barons. It's not a stretch to see commerce as contest, and to see contest as an abstraction of war.
Britan from, more or less, the time of Drake profitted from piracy, and, the British Empire, at it's zenith, was enforced by 'gunboat diplomacy' and the machine gun. Yet, in part, the object of Empire building was increased trade and access to raw/rare materials.
As I posted, only ~15% of combatants are effective. It's further interesting to note among feral rutting males mortal wounds are rare. Usually a show of force is sufficient for the combatants to size oneanother up and break off with the weaker male giving way. (As an aside OTOH try taking the young of a feral, predatory mother.) I'm suggesting our genetic makeup might have given us pause to find something like trade as preferable to war, but to carry with it the impetus, strategy and tactics of war.
I simply hold that where commerce and war become intermingled by implementing convention, protocol, law and litigation, there, lawyers are the new warrior class.
Even law has violent beginnings. Trial by Ordeal was as brutal as Hammurabi's law of an eye for an eye. And even though we've managed to reach protocols of goverance like
Robert's Rules of Order, it's instructive to remember that the rows of seats separating the governing party from the opposition in Britan and Canada are two and one half sword lenghts apart.
Lastly, (aren't you sorry you asked:)) I'm interested in knowing if ritualized combat in the form of litigation promotes more reckless and predatory attitudes than would mortal combat.
James Lovelock the framer of the Gaia theory ("...a class of scientific models of the geo-biosphere in which life as a whole fosters and maintains suitable conditions for itself by helping to create an environment on Earth suitable for its continuity...")
"Lovelock was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that "Only nuclear power can now halt global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of mankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions."
As an environmentalist, though not a proponent of Dr. Lovelock's Gaia theory, I endorse the development of nuclear power. Further, I think, environmenatlist should step up, admit their error in attacking nuclear power, and, actively push a nuclear power agenda.
My ex wife is a very successful barrister. She's a brilliant, talented woman. Through her I came to know the various subcultures of the legal world. One of the recurring analogies among the lawyers I've known is that they are hired guns. They are the new warrior class.
During WWII a combat soldier, I can't recall his name or rank, noted that among his comrades only a few (~15%) actively engaged in combat and were responsible for most of the damage done to the enemy. Recently on the Discovery channel a U.S. Army Lt.Col. was shown trying to instill a 'killer instinct' in his troops. The show referred to the earlier WWII report that only a few combat soldiers did the actual wounding/killing. The Lt. Col. on the Discovery show said it was like having 85% of librarians illiterate.
Following WWII tribes in New Gunea were introduced to rugby. The tribes took to wearing war gear to the rugby games and rugby substituted for tribal warfare.
Remember the TOS episode where warfare had become virtual and those areas marked as 'hit' had to have it's citizenry report for euthanasia. In real combat losses are not that great in terms of the overall number of combatants. It may be because only a limited number of people are able and willing to kill or be killed. In a world overpopulated with 6 billion the amount of homicidal acts are not that great.
Now with money substitutable for anything, the inclination to combat among individuals and corporate tribes, can be translated into litigation. The amount of litigation might be an index to our willingness to 'kill' oneanother, the more so when money substitutes for one's own blood.
Lawyers are the new esquired warriors. What a horse and armour were to knights and warring lords, a law degree is to the corporate world.
The question arises if, in an evolutionary context, the litiguous 'mortal/capital' combat effects a beneficial path.
One of my favourite authors G. Bateson spoke to... "adversarial systems are notoriously subject to irrelevant determinism. The relative 'strength' of the adversaries is likely to rule the decision regardless of the relative strength of their arguments."
Trade is the most effective cultural hybridisation driver.
It's a moot point. One that would be fun to explore.
cheers
Violence is the Ultimate Virus
on
Homer Becomes Omar
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· Score: 3, Interesting
War throughout history has been one of the most effective disseminators of culture. The most pussiant example may be the conquests of Alexander and the subsequent spreading of Hellenic culture. Alexander, a student of Aristotle, (interestingly neither seems to have had much, if anything to say about the other) spread Hellenic culture and, likely, instigated the trade that would come to travel the Silk Road. The Silk Road is the first broadband link between east and west.
The recent violence of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war has had an immense impact on the psyche of both peoples. This will translate into a deeper knowledge of each other and, hopefully, more understanding.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Knowledge of one's enemies transmutes to some extent in a sharing of cultures. Violence, as the ultimate virus, might be seen as injecting plasmids into each sides cultural DNA.
Breaking habits and protocols is a very good habit to get into. Habit in any venue is about unflinching acceptance of a set of presuppositons.
Gregory Bateson in his book Mind and Nature deals with examining one's presuppositions. Under minning one's presuppositions is, in one way, what the study of epistemology, as it pertains to theories of knowledge vs the methodology of science, is about.
Creative, or, if you prefer, inventive work is, in large part, about testing the presuppositions underpinning a theory or protocol, and, where possibly profitable, collapsing the presuppositions that underpin our habits and protocols, if for no other reason then to see what happens next.
I tagged you some time ago for a few reasons, mostly good, but, also because your posts are usually, in fact, seemingly, always modded 5.
Your posts are seeming always modded 5 but never with a qualifier. To the best of my knowledge your posts are the only posts modded without a qualifier. Why is that?
Seriously, what does Africa need? The developed world has bee shoveling money into Africa for decades. In return we seem to get twisted dictators like Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe.
Arbitrarily take ~350 BCE as a base. Assume that the works of Euclid are the benchmark for the slow growth in rational development. Africa boarded on the ancient Greek world. The exposure to Euclid et al didn't show much of a return. The dark continent remained dark. Why? Really, I don't know. I just hear over and over and over... send more money... give us more money and in return we get another crazed dictator. Nelson Mendala is the exception.
Why can't African states bootstrap?
My few contacts with Africans, white and black, seem to uniformly suggest that the majority of Africans are tribal primitives. Again, why?
Myself and my family are generous and have given as well as we can to many causes, but I'm now no longer sympathetic to the plight of Africans. The plea for yet more money is just a background whine.
Japan also fails many of these tests... and yet they're one of the biggest economies.
I've studied Japanese history, both as to culture and economics. I've also done considerable business with Japan and as a consequence had the opportunity to travel in Japan. Having the above to go on I can give only a loose analogy in answer to your post.
First I think it's instructional to come to know Tokugawa Japan, and, as an added bonus, Tokugawa Ieyasu is an intriguing character. At first glance it might seem Tokugawa Japan would suggest by way of it's hierarchical, caste rigidity to lend weight in favour of your post, but I'd like to draw an analogy between the warring factions that predate the Tokugawa Shogunate. Japan, I think, has much in common with the preindustrial tribal factions of western europe, and, by way of a long reach, with Protestanism.
The Roman Empire failed, for many reasons, to dominate northern Europe, with the exception of Britain. I think it was the strifeful nature of warrior culture where the idea of a king was more akin to an agreed upon battle leader whose 'kingship' lasted only as long as the war. This allowed the northern european tribes to withstand Rome's onslaught. This same reluctance to bow to one kingly overlord is exemplified in Protestant refusal to bow to the Roman Catholic Church and, by way of M Luther to see it as the right of each individual to read from the Bible their own truth.
Generally, I suspect there's an underlying like current in Japan's culture to allow for pluralism. It's useful to remember that the Emperor worship of Japan as an ancient practise is in large part a fiction. I don't want to go any further afield so, as it stands, this is my best short reply to your post.
Historically China has demonstrated some of the large characteristics of state building. The ancient kingdoms of China constructed effective waterways that linked the various areas of what we know as mainland China. The Great Wall of China is another example of state implemented grand scale construction. Of course the The Three Gorges Dam is another example. Having noted these examples I can't see China succeeding as an industrialized state. I see it as a paper tiger destined to burn up. It will be another collapse like that of the USSR.
I've undertaken to read John Kay's book Culture and Prosperity. The book has become almost mandatory reading, and, other than finding his narrative construction grating, so far I can see why it's become such a widely read and hearlded book. I strongly recommend it to Open Source advocates who want a more lucid framework within which to understand and foster the Open Source business model.
Pertainent to this thread he lists characteristics common to the most enduring successful market economies versus the perennial failures. As follows successful modern states...
are cooler by climate
democracy
relatively high environmental standards
freedom of expression
gender equality
health
height (go figure)
honesty
egalitariansim
literacy
openness
materialism (most poor country's citizens wish for money above all else)
population growth (slower in wealthy countries)
propery rights
religion (protestant christian countries show better)
tolerance
China fails many of these tests and I don't believe their broadcasted slow but sure movement toward more open egalitarian government.
Hi, no offense taken. If I had to sum up the makeup of an intelligence operative I'd say s/he avoids anything suggestive of transparency and accountability like the plague, and, knows, when things go wrong, when and for how long to hide in the broom closet. Careers are subject to the same politics in any field.
'.. one of the first members of the United States government openly to predict the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union--and, by extension, statist communism--as far back as the late '70s, as political historian Richard Gid Powers reminds readers in a lengthy introduction (comprising approximately one-fifth of Secrecy's total length). Had we spent less time trying to gather secret information about the Soviets and more time openly discussing rather easily interpretable data, Sen. Moynihan argues, we might have been far less paranoid about the supposed Red menace. The problem, he writes, lies in the essential nature of government secrecy: "Departments and agencies hoard information, and the government becomes a kind of market. Secrets become organizational assets, never to be shared save in exchange for another organization's assets.... The system costs can be enormous. In the void created by absent or withheld information, decisions are either made poorly or not at all."'
As noted, I related schoolboy gossip, but, curious to see if there's anything to substantiate my yarn, I ran a search and came up with a story from Camp X, a spy school run in Canada during WWII. The anecdotal evidence is that Ian Fleming couldn't go through with an order to kill a man in cold blood.
I went to school with one of the decendent relatives of William Stephenson, better known as Intrepid. Mr. Stephenson was said to have fired Ian Fleming from spy school. The gossip I heard suggested Ian Fleming was undisciplined and perhaps not the brightest light.
Through my family I've direct contact with people who have served in military intelligence. I know a few CSIS people and, I had the luck to spend ~14 hours locked in conversation with one of the architects of CSIS (he'd started out as a Polish citizen in WWII, was trained by what we came to know as the KGB, then he jumped ship to British Intelligence and finally came to Canada). He was an intelligent, insightful man but certainly far from a James Bond kind of a guy. His most telling trait, share by everyone I`ve met in the intelligence community, was a belief that things that needed to get done were best done covertly. I`ve been told that the best intelligence agents are inconspicuous. From everything I know I`d go with the "Danger Man" sort with the accent more on "The Prisoner".
The Russians in the Cold War were infamous for simply walking up to someone in the know at a cocktail party and innocuously asking pointed questions about sensitive material; the person being questioned might well be caught off guard by the social setting and laid back approach.
The only person I've known like a James Bond character was a Montreal vice cop who was an interpol agent, a martial arts expert and liked to review each violent episode he had lived through, but he wasn't anything like the intelligence people I've known. I doubt there are many, if any, James Bond types. There was a British sargent who, in the aftermath of WWII, was tasked with the assissination of deemed war criminals unlikely to be brought to justice. I saw him interviewed on the Discovery Channel. He was retired to a farm, spoke very unemotionaly about some of his excutions and showed a strong liking for Russian rifles as the then best assissination weapons. In the alternative, not to long ago, I met a British intelligence trained guy and while sharing a drink I brought up the subject of best gun for the job ( a 25 cal. in my opinion ). He dismissed the whole notion saying no one uses guns anymore. Theres a pin prick in your bottle of aftershave. You cut yourself shaving. Three months later you're dead.
No, this isn't an ispirational post. The story seems to focus on the horizontal and imply we, jointly and severally, are incapable of hierarchical priorization.
Metabracketing is now old hat. I first came accross it in G. Bateson's book Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. I've taken the idea to be one of understanding the presuppositions of any proposition and to understand the context any proposition is set in.
In terms of 'Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is." I don't see a problem. The article seems to impy that a surfiet of information is a deluge overwhelming workers, but, in any given work situation a worker can be defined as someone, hopefully, fully conversant with the task at hand. If a worker is fully conversant with the task then it's likely that, prior to the information age, a worker was equally deluged with information it terms of our capacity to hold and operate on any given body of information.
The value of a worker is h/er/is abililty to cull the immediatley pertainent information. Culling information implies a vertical, as well as a horizontal perspective and the ability to oversee the job in terms like a metabracketing process. Goes to one of my favourite quotes: "Concentration without elimination." T.S. Eliot one of the 4 Quartets.
Crying about information overload is just an excuse for inability.
Since I tend to muck about in philosophy, history and epistemology I'll go with perhaps the most ancient riddle.
Epimenides was a Cretan who made one immortal statement: "All Cretans are liars."
"The Epimenides paradox is a problem in logic. This problem is named after the Cretan philosopher Epimenides of Knossos (flourished circa 600 BC), who stated , "Cretans, always liars". There is no single statement of the problem; a typical variation is given in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach (page 17), by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
"Microsoft will provide technical expertise, training and other security resources to Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which is tasked with fighting cybercrime in the country"
Microsoft security resources and 419 email scammers go together.
Try, try, try to separate them
It's an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion
Love and marriage, 419 scammers and MS security
Go together like a horse and carriage...
Living in a metropolitan core pays dividends. Not far from my place there's a few square blocks lined with many beautiful women who can tell how much they will love you just by the amount of money you have in your pocket. It's just a matter of adding up the numbers and denominations and figuring how long and how badly you want to be loved. Weird science but guys drive by in droves wanting that loving.
Working with a Real Estate Litigation Appraisal firm I came to a fair understanding of Externalities. Appraisal theory also incorporates the idea of linkages. A linkage in valuation theory might be ingress to a property off a well traveled road. There was a body of work that valued properties by way of externalities and linkages. It's a simple, fun idea to play with and lends itself to a 'back of the envelope' approach.
Playing with these ideas without strict adherence to orthodoxy, it's fun to bring in the idea of Punctuated Equlibrium as put forth by the late S. Gould and Niles Eldredge. "It has been summarized by Gould (1980, pp. 183-4) as follows:
"Large, stable central populations exert a strong homogenizing influence [on the gene pool]. New and favorable mutations are diluted by the sheer bulk of the population through which they must spread....But [in] small, peripherally isolated groups [that] are cut off from their parental stock... selective pressures are usually intense because peripheries mark the edge of ecological tolerance for ancestral forms. Favorable variations spread quickly...
"What should the fossil record include if most evolution occurs by speciation in peripheral isolates?... In any local area inhabited by ancestors, a descendant species should appear suddenly by migration from a peripheral region in which it evolved. In the peripheral region itself, we might find direct evidence of speciation, but such good fortune would be rare indeed because the event occurs so rapidly in such a small population." 'An unstated supposition is that, through competition, the descendant species eliminates the ancestral species.'
It may be that we'll see a relatively high sudden spike in OSS use as these effects play out.
Closed Source advocates rightly fear the direction Mass. is taking. A multiplier effect will come into play with the adoption of Open Standards.
Government employees will be exposed to Open Standards formats and likely Open Source software. This will have a spinoff effect in the buying decisions of some govt employees.
Likely, govt contractors, seeking uniformity with their potential employers, will adopt Open Standards in submission of their bids. Again, this will have a multiplier like effect in terms of employess and business associates.
Closed Source advocates are fighting to keep the stopper in genie's bottle.If she gets out the outcome is more likely to be a closed source nightmare.
In Canada there is, if IIRC, a principle of government that requires govt agencies to use the most widely available, least expensive format for it's citizens to interact with govt. There may even be some case law on this. Is it possible legal action could be launched in a effort to force govts to adopt the most open, least expensive venue?
The word nagali is from a west coast first nations' language but I can't recall which one. I read it in hard copy when I was studying the mating and territory habits of the cats (usually about 20 sq miles to a cat with one male's territory cut through by 2 to 3 females. Cougars when matting have sex up to 60 times a day! Oh to be a big cat. The area I met most cats in was a large coastal area that had one male, a female with a nearly grown kitten and two other females.
They're beautiful killers able to bring down full grown elk usually by severing the vertebrae near the top of the neck. Martial arts teaches that any break above C4 is fatal. It's interesting cats have the same knowledge.
I live on the west coast, (Vancouver, B.C.). I've done alot of what might be termed extreme wilderness hiking. I hike in winter where there are few, if any trails. I carry a k-bar as a utility, but otherwise no weapons. I always have a rugged SLR (Pentax MX is the best wilderness camera I've used).
I've hiked in areas with cougars, ( nagali is the indian word it means Lord of the Forest ). I've been tracked by cats. They're big kitties and like all cats they're curious. I've woken in winter and exited my tent to find paw prints up along side the perimeter of the tent, the cat having walked quietly all around the tent. I've backtracked to find a fresh kill twenty minutes back from where I had been and had not noticed a cat ( they smell like big wet dogs ).
You can talk with multitudes of wilderness pros and not meet one who has actually seen a big cat. They're next to invisible. I've meet 5. One lay a few feet from me in the dark outside the door of an 8 x 8 cabin an airborne colonel had flown into a wilderness area. When I open the door to go for wood ( the cabin had a small firebox ), the single candle that lit the cabin cast a long light out the door and onto the cat. I was carrying an axe. I dropped the axe, flew backwards into the cabin and slammed the door ( adrenelin can give you superpowers), while the cat tore out of the underbrush and sprinted into the treeline.
In my meetings with cats only once did I know I was approached as prey. Cougars don't see us as prey.
In the hundred or so years records have been kept there have only been a handfull of lethal attacks by big cats on the west coast. Interestingly nearly all have been on Vancouver Island. The theory goes that the thick sala underbrush allows the cats to get close. Almost all attacks have been by sick or old cats.
Wild animals met with knowledge and respect can usually be party to an incredible experince (my north american exceptions would be grizzilies, polar bears and wolverines, oh and skunks). I've gotten close up and personal with wolves (very rare experience, beautiful, beautiful animals) and countless bears (most black, one grizzily and her cub very very scary).
On the other hand there is near unanimous agreement that pound for pound a leopard is the most dangerous lethal killer on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
I nominate the entire DOE Handbooks, not only for the /. editors but for the most part of /.ers overall, myself included. DOE-HDBK-1012/1-92 will cover Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, and Fluid Flow. The math and science DOE Handbooks are a great free, downloadable resource. The basics of Physics, Chemistry, Electricity, Materials science, Reactor science and attendant math are all covered.
The DOE Handbooks are a rich resource that cover every aspect of implementing and running an organization. The books cover disputes, roundtables, the list is very nearly all encompassing.
Nothing speaks to independence like your own in house nuclear reactor and the DOE Handbooks guide you through nearly every step of the way.
What bugged me was that at the intro to the episode the narrator, a bad comic if I've ever seen one and an anchor dragging down a once good program, spoke of the work as the greatest work since creation. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was then flashed on the screen showing the 'Creator's' hand outstreached to the reaching hand of his creation, Adam. IMO it stank of lip service to the American fundamentalist neoconservatives.
Hi, my post was prefaced as loose conjecture. The post amounts to a few points taken from a notebook given over to a study I hope, time permitting, to undertake.
The general course of the notes goes to the relationship between war and trade, and, further, ritualized war/contest. Loosely, in answer to your question, if commerce incorporates the territorial imperative and equally primitive drives sublimated from open warfare, then, in my terms, commerce is war and the handmaiden to evolutionary drive.
Example, the historian Fernand Braudel notes in one of his work that the term robber baron, now used to refer to a 19th century captain of industry, originally refered to robbers who seized by force strategic mountain passes in the Alps between the mediterranean and northwestern europe. Robbers, once in control of a pass, built castles and imposed an arbitrary tariff on traders taking goods to and fro. Wealth garnered by force perhaps led them to see themselves as Barons. It's not a stretch to see commerce as contest, and to see contest as an abstraction of war.
Britan from, more or less, the time of Drake profitted from piracy, and, the British Empire, at it's zenith, was enforced by 'gunboat diplomacy' and the machine gun. Yet, in part, the object of Empire building was increased trade and access to raw/rare materials.
As I posted, only ~15% of combatants are effective. It's further interesting to note among feral rutting males mortal wounds are rare. Usually a show of force is sufficient for the combatants to size oneanother up and break off with the weaker male giving way. (As an aside OTOH try taking the young of a feral, predatory mother.) I'm suggesting our genetic makeup might have given us pause to find something like trade as preferable to war, but to carry with it the impetus, strategy and tactics of war.
I simply hold that where commerce and war become intermingled by implementing convention, protocol, law and litigation, there, lawyers are the new warrior class.
Even law has violent beginnings. Trial by Ordeal was as brutal as Hammurabi's law of an eye for an eye. And even though we've managed to reach protocols of goverance like Robert's Rules of Order, it's instructive to remember that the rows of seats separating the governing party from the opposition in Britan and Canada are two and one half sword lenghts apart.
Lastly, (aren't you sorry you asked :)) I'm interested in knowing if ritualized combat in the form of litigation promotes more reckless and predatory attitudes than would mortal combat.
cheers
"Lovelock was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that "Only nuclear power can now halt global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of mankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions."
As an environmentalist, though not a proponent of Dr. Lovelock's Gaia theory, I endorse the development of nuclear power. Further, I think, environmenatlist should step up, admit their error in attacking nuclear power, and, actively push a nuclear power agenda.
My ex wife is a very successful barrister. She's a brilliant, talented woman. Through her I came to know the various subcultures of the legal world. One of the recurring analogies among the lawyers I've known is that they are hired guns. They are the new warrior class.
During WWII a combat soldier, I can't recall his name or rank, noted that among his comrades only a few (~15%) actively engaged in combat and were responsible for most of the damage done to the enemy. Recently on the Discovery channel a U.S. Army Lt.Col. was shown trying to instill a 'killer instinct' in his troops. The show referred to the earlier WWII report that only a few combat soldiers did the actual wounding/killing. The Lt. Col. on the Discovery show said it was like having 85% of librarians illiterate.
Following WWII tribes in New Gunea were introduced to rugby. The tribes took to wearing war gear to the rugby games and rugby substituted for tribal warfare.
Remember the TOS episode where warfare had become virtual and those areas marked as 'hit' had to have it's citizenry report for euthanasia. In real combat losses are not that great in terms of the overall number of combatants. It may be because only a limited number of people are able and willing to kill or be killed. In a world overpopulated with 6 billion the amount of homicidal acts are not that great.
Now with money substitutable for anything, the inclination to combat among individuals and corporate tribes, can be translated into litigation. The amount of litigation might be an index to our willingness to 'kill' oneanother, the more so when money substitutes for one's own blood.
Lawyers are the new esquired warriors. What a horse and armour were to knights and warring lords, a law degree is to the corporate world.
The question arises if, in an evolutionary context, the litiguous 'mortal/capital' combat effects a beneficial path.
One of my favourite authors G. Bateson spoke to... "adversarial systems are notoriously subject to irrelevant determinism. The relative 'strength' of the adversaries is likely to rule the decision regardless of the relative strength of their arguments."
It's a moot point. One that would be fun to explore.
cheers
The recent violence of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war has had an immense impact on the psyche of both peoples. This will translate into a deeper knowledge of each other and, hopefully, more understanding.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Knowledge of one's enemies transmutes to some extent in a sharing of cultures. Violence, as the ultimate virus, might be seen as injecting plasmids into each sides cultural DNA.
Gregory Bateson in his book Mind and Nature deals with examining one's presuppositions. Under minning one's presuppositions is, in one way, what the study of epistemology, as it pertains to theories of knowledge vs the methodology of science, is about.
Creative, or, if you prefer, inventive work is, in large part, about testing the presuppositions underpinning a theory or protocol, and, where possibly profitable, collapsing the presuppositions that underpin our habits and protocols, if for no other reason then to see what happens next.
Your posts are seeming always modded 5 but never with a qualifier. To the best of my knowledge your posts are the only posts modded without a qualifier. Why is that?
Arbitrarily take ~350 BCE as a base. Assume that the works of Euclid are the benchmark for the slow growth in rational development. Africa boarded on the ancient Greek world. The exposure to Euclid et al didn't show much of a return. The dark continent remained dark. Why? Really, I don't know. I just hear over and over and over... send more money... give us more money and in return we get another crazed dictator. Nelson Mendala is the exception.
Why can't African states bootstrap?
My few contacts with Africans, white and black, seem to uniformly suggest that the majority of Africans are tribal primitives. Again, why?
Myself and my family are generous and have given as well as we can to many causes, but I'm now no longer sympathetic to the plight of Africans. The plea for yet more money is just a background whine.
Cisco's Internetworking Technology Handbook is a bit dated but a great base resource downloadable in pdf.
Pair the above with IBM's TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview, and round things off by downloading Bable: A Glossary of Computer Oriented Abbreviations and Acronyms since you'll be in acrynom hell.
Probably few /.ers need the above but they've given me a good overview and reference.
For What it's Worth :)
I've studied Japanese history, both as to culture and economics. I've also done considerable business with Japan and as a consequence had the opportunity to travel in Japan. Having the above to go on I can give only a loose analogy in answer to your post.
First I think it's instructional to come to know Tokugawa Japan, and, as an added bonus, Tokugawa Ieyasu is an intriguing character. At first glance it might seem Tokugawa Japan would suggest by way of it's hierarchical, caste rigidity to lend weight in favour of your post, but I'd like to draw an analogy between the warring factions that predate the Tokugawa Shogunate. Japan, I think, has much in common with the preindustrial tribal factions of western europe, and, by way of a long reach, with Protestanism.
The Roman Empire failed, for many reasons, to dominate northern Europe, with the exception of Britain. I think it was the strifeful nature of warrior culture where the idea of a king was more akin to an agreed upon battle leader whose 'kingship' lasted only as long as the war. This allowed the northern european tribes to withstand Rome's onslaught. This same reluctance to bow to one kingly overlord is exemplified in Protestant refusal to bow to the Roman Catholic Church and, by way of M Luther to see it as the right of each individual to read from the Bible their own truth.
Generally, I suspect there's an underlying like current in Japan's culture to allow for pluralism. It's useful to remember that the Emperor worship of Japan as an ancient practise is in large part a fiction. I don't want to go any further afield so, as it stands, this is my best short reply to your post.
now back to my book
cheers
I've undertaken to read John Kay's book Culture and Prosperity. The book has become almost mandatory reading, and, other than finding his narrative construction grating, so far I can see why it's become such a widely read and hearlded book. I strongly recommend it to Open Source advocates who want a more lucid framework within which to understand and foster the Open Source business model.
Pertainent to this thread he lists characteristics common to the most enduring successful market economies versus the perennial failures. As follows successful modern states...
are cooler by climate
democracy
relatively high environmental standards
freedom of expression
gender equality
health
height (go figure)
honesty
egalitariansim
literacy
openness
materialism (most poor country's citizens wish for money above all else)
population growth (slower in wealthy countries)
propery rights
religion (protestant christian countries show better)
tolerance
China fails many of these tests and I don't believe their broadcasted slow but sure movement toward more open egalitarian government.
As far as secrecy I go with the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY).
'.. one of the first members of the United States government openly to predict the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union--and, by extension, statist communism--as far back as the late '70s, as political historian Richard Gid Powers reminds readers in a lengthy introduction (comprising approximately one-fifth of Secrecy's total length). Had we spent less time trying to gather secret information about the Soviets and more time openly discussing rather easily interpretable data, Sen. Moynihan argues, we might have been far less paranoid about the supposed Red menace. The problem, he writes, lies in the essential nature of government secrecy: "Departments and agencies hoard information, and the government becomes a kind of market. Secrets become organizational assets, never to be shared save in exchange for another organization's assets.... The system costs can be enormous. In the void created by absent or withheld information, decisions are either made poorly or not at all."'
As noted, I related schoolboy gossip, but, curious to see if there's anything to substantiate my yarn, I ran a search and came up with a story from Camp X, a spy school run in Canada during WWII. The anecdotal evidence is that Ian Fleming couldn't go through with an order to kill a man in cold blood.
Through my family I've direct contact with people who have served in military intelligence. I know a few CSIS people and, I had the luck to spend ~14 hours locked in conversation with one of the architects of CSIS (he'd started out as a Polish citizen in WWII, was trained by what we came to know as the KGB, then he jumped ship to British Intelligence and finally came to Canada). He was an intelligent, insightful man but certainly far from a James Bond kind of a guy. His most telling trait, share by everyone I`ve met in the intelligence community, was a belief that things that needed to get done were best done covertly. I`ve been told that the best intelligence agents are inconspicuous. From everything I know I`d go with the "Danger Man" sort with the accent more on "The Prisoner".
The Russians in the Cold War were infamous for simply walking up to someone in the know at a cocktail party and innocuously asking pointed questions about sensitive material; the person being questioned might well be caught off guard by the social setting and laid back approach.
The only person I've known like a James Bond character was a Montreal vice cop who was an interpol agent, a martial arts expert and liked to review each violent episode he had lived through, but he wasn't anything like the intelligence people I've known. I doubt there are many, if any, James Bond types. There was a British sargent who, in the aftermath of WWII, was tasked with the assissination of deemed war criminals unlikely to be brought to justice. I saw him interviewed on the Discovery Channel. He was retired to a farm, spoke very unemotionaly about some of his excutions and showed a strong liking for Russian rifles as the then best assissination weapons. In the alternative, not to long ago, I met a British intelligence trained guy and while sharing a drink I brought up the subject of best gun for the job ( a 25 cal. in my opinion ). He dismissed the whole notion saying no one uses guns anymore. Theres a pin prick in your bottle of aftershave. You cut yourself shaving. Three months later you're dead.
cheers
Metabracketing is now old hat. I first came accross it in G. Bateson's book Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. I've taken the idea to be one of understanding the presuppositions of any proposition and to understand the context any proposition is set in.
In terms of 'Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is." I don't see a problem. The article seems to impy that a surfiet of information is a deluge overwhelming workers, but, in any given work situation a worker can be defined as someone, hopefully, fully conversant with the task at hand. If a worker is fully conversant with the task then it's likely that, prior to the information age, a worker was equally deluged with information it terms of our capacity to hold and operate on any given body of information.
The value of a worker is h/er/is abililty to cull the immediatley pertainent information. Culling information implies a vertical, as well as a horizontal perspective and the ability to oversee the job in terms like a metabracketing process. Goes to one of my favourite quotes: "Concentration without elimination." T.S. Eliot one of the 4 Quartets.
Crying about information overload is just an excuse for inability.
Epimenides was a Cretan who made one immortal statement: "All Cretans are liars."
"The Epimenides paradox is a problem in logic. This problem is named after the Cretan philosopher Epimenides of Knossos (flourished circa 600 BC), who stated , "Cretans, always liars". There is no single statement of the problem; a typical variation is given in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach (page 17), by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Microsoft security resources and 419 email scammers go together.
Try, try, try to separate them
It's an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion
Love and marriage, 419 scammers and MS security ...
Go together like a horse and carriage
Living in a metropolitan core pays dividends. Not far from my place there's a few square blocks lined with many beautiful women who can tell how much they will love you just by the amount of money you have in your pocket. It's just a matter of adding up the numbers and denominations and figuring how long and how badly you want to be loved. Weird science but guys drive by in droves wanting that loving.
Working with a Real Estate Litigation Appraisal firm I came to a fair understanding of Externalities. Appraisal theory also incorporates the idea of linkages. A linkage in valuation theory might be ingress to a property off a well traveled road. There was a body of work that valued properties by way of externalities and linkages. It's a simple, fun idea to play with and lends itself to a 'back of the envelope' approach.
Playing with these ideas without strict adherence to orthodoxy, it's fun to bring in the idea of Punctuated Equlibrium as put forth by the late S. Gould and Niles Eldredge.
"It has been summarized by Gould (1980, pp. 183-4) as follows:
"Large, stable central populations exert a strong homogenizing influence [on the gene pool]. New and favorable mutations are diluted by the sheer bulk of the population through which they must spread....But [in] small, peripherally isolated groups [that] are cut off from their parental stock ... selective pressures are usually intense because peripheries mark the edge of ecological tolerance for ancestral forms. Favorable variations spread quickly...
"What should the fossil record include if most evolution occurs by speciation in peripheral isolates? ... In any local area inhabited by ancestors, a descendant species should appear suddenly by migration from a peripheral region in which it evolved. In the peripheral region itself, we might find direct evidence of speciation, but such good fortune would be rare indeed because the event occurs so rapidly in such a small population."
'An unstated supposition is that, through competition, the descendant species eliminates the ancestral species.'
It may be that we'll see a relatively high sudden spike in OSS use as these effects play out.
cheers
Government employees will be exposed to Open Standards formats and likely Open Source software. This will have a spinoff effect in the buying decisions of some govt employees.
Likely, govt contractors, seeking uniformity with their potential employers, will adopt Open Standards in submission of their bids. Again, this will have a multiplier like effect in terms of employess and business associates.
Closed Source advocates are fighting to keep the stopper in genie's bottle.If she gets out the outcome is more likely to be a closed source nightmare.
In Canada there is, if IIRC, a principle of government that requires govt agencies to use the most widely available, least expensive format for it's citizens to interact with govt. There may even be some case law on this. Is it possible legal action could be launched in a effort to force govts to adopt the most open, least expensive venue?
You got away lucky, it could have gone very bad.
They're beautiful killers able to bring down full grown elk usually by severing the vertebrae near the top of the neck. Martial arts teaches that any break above C4 is fatal. It's interesting cats have the same knowledge.
cheers
I've hiked in areas with cougars, ( nagali is the indian word it means Lord of the Forest ). I've been tracked by cats. They're big kitties and like all cats they're curious. I've woken in winter and exited my tent to find paw prints up along side the perimeter of the tent, the cat having walked quietly all around the tent. I've backtracked to find a fresh kill twenty minutes back from where I had been and had not noticed a cat ( they smell like big wet dogs ).
You can talk with multitudes of wilderness pros and not meet one who has actually seen a big cat. They're next to invisible. I've meet 5. One lay a few feet from me in the dark outside the door of an 8 x 8 cabin an airborne colonel had flown into a wilderness area. When I open the door to go for wood ( the cabin had a small firebox ), the single candle that lit the cabin cast a long light out the door and onto the cat. I was carrying an axe. I dropped the axe, flew backwards into the cabin and slammed the door ( adrenelin can give you superpowers), while the cat tore out of the underbrush and sprinted into the treeline.
In my meetings with cats only once did I know I was approached as prey. Cougars don't see us as prey.
In the hundred or so years records have been kept there have only been a handfull of lethal attacks by big cats on the west coast. Interestingly nearly all have been on Vancouver Island. The theory goes that the thick sala underbrush allows the cats to get close. Almost all attacks have been by sick or old cats.
Wild animals met with knowledge and respect can usually be party to an incredible experince (my north american exceptions would be grizzilies, polar bears and wolverines, oh and skunks). I've gotten close up and personal with wolves (very rare experience, beautiful, beautiful animals) and countless bears (most black, one grizzily and her cub very very scary).
On the other hand there is near unanimous agreement that pound for pound a leopard is the most dangerous lethal killer on the planet.