Instead, kill a million birds with one stone by replacing all career politicians by community delegates with strict 1-year tenures, rather like doing jury duty, requiring all laws to take 2 years to be voted in, and banning all access to government by external lobbies.
Then, stupid delegates wouldn't matter, nobody would have time to build up a power base which is the root of all corruption in politics, and there would be far fewer stupid laws passed because the absence of lobby power would mean that delegates would only create laws if the topic interested them and hence if they knew something about it from their previous occupation.
But hey, obviously that won't happen, so we're stuck with a totally assanine political system. Don't worry about it. Nanotech is just around the corner, and then everything will change.
You're starting from the wrong end entirely: good software documentation has almost nothing to do with word processing, it has to do with creating the tightest possible association between the software elements and the descriptive elements so that the descriptions are actually USEFUL and get USED. If you start from the basis that it's going to be word-processed and that it'll have headings x/y/z then I can guarantee you that you're about to create yet another total waste of time and effort which will just drain resource and return almost nothing of value other than to satisy the paper pushers. If I earned a penny for each fancy document that never gets looked at even once after release, my fortune would make Bill Gates look like a pauper. There has to be a reason for that, and there is: such "documentation" is worthless because (i) it's too verbose, (ii) not verbose enough, (iii) too technical, (iv) not technical enough, (v) not suited for its audience, (vi) not wanted by its audience, (vii) not integrated into the development tools, (viii) at the wrong level of granularity, (ix) static, and (x) always out of date. Not surprisingly, 99% of the time it's a worthless pile of junk. Sigh.... If you really must put time and money into documentation, at least try to do it in a useful way rather than in the "standard" way: hire a developer with a research bias and get him to create an integrated information system for your developers. A system that updates itself from source code automatically and which allows structured annotations to be added with zero hassle and with automatic version control hidden behind the scenes. Make sure access to it is just a mouse click or keystroke away and directly driven from within (or alongside) the programming medium, and provide commandline access to the infobase because power users will leave the capabilities of any other interface way behind. And make it a living, dynamic info system, because if you don't then it'll be a very dead one.
I cascade a DVD MPEG decoder board and two AWE64Gold cards in this way, and this permanent mix works just fine, without noise problems. Note though that it's not as flexible as wiring each output separately into its own mixer input. If you can afford it, buy an external musician's mixer (remembering that you need two channels for each sound card), but you'll really find it a pain not to have the online input-gain/output-volume controls that we take for granted on sound cards.
It certainly doesn't take much of an advance to make the regressives crawl out of the woodwork, does it.
Every powerful technology can be a power for bad as well as a power for good, and you can't create the enabling technology for one without doing so for the other. Saying "Stop because it's dangerous" is tantamount to saying "Stop technical advance". You cannot regulate these things in any universal way, or not for long, so if you want technical advance to continue then the only feasible strategy is to try to think of defenses in parallel with the research.
You think that the mentioned gene technology is dangerous? Hah. Go and read up about nanotech to discover what dangerous (and wonderfully powerful) means, then contrast giving everyone the 'flu with destroying the entire terran biosphere (a remote but non-zero possibility).
But short of perpetually waving the regressive's red flag, we have to forge ahead while defending ourselves as best we can. To stop our technical voyage of exploration would be suicide of the soul, and that would be much worse than suicide of the body.
I like that Moreton VPN router family -- I can think of various useful roles that could play in my systems as it stands, even without customizing its Linux. It has a lot of potential.
I wish I could remember the name of that fake documentary film about the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust... And I vaguely recall one that had something to do with exposing some failures in some sort of radioactive plant, and another I think about some space mission.
I was hoping that one of the spoilers would say something about the "project" part of the plot, which I assume is where the film gets its nerd interest?
"It's bad for me, therefore it should be banned" is a corrupt argument: it's the same one that Janet Reno is using to get governments to ban cryptography.
There are good arguments why spam is bad: mainly because the burden of cost is not on the sender and therefore there is no negative feedback mechanism to control it. Arguments that try to dictate what a person can or cannot receive are superfluous, and always unfair to someone or other.
If you want to control spam, find a way of passing the cost on to the originator. In this hugely dynamic free-ISP scene, blocking the output is a fool's game that doesn't cure the disease at all.
As long as the Artemis project continues to focus on the shuttle, they don't have any significant hope of meeting its low-cost objectives, or even of getting into space at all because of shuttle politics.
Only the alternative reusable launchers (still on the drawing board) offer the kind of cost and independence that a project of this kind requires. For now, that is. After nanotech, all the rules change.
But people like Janet Reno are trying to make the world more like China.
And you're encouraging it by saying that our token "democracies" are not as bad as China. Of course they're not. Yet. And we don't want to be heading in that direction either.
Don't worry about it. Nanotech isn't too many decades away from giving us total control over materials and dropping the main added-value cost of manufactured goods to near zero. When that does finally happen, the Moon will become just another tourist trap.
If the impact has been delayed by one minute owing to a stronger de-orbiting burn than planned, doesn't this mean that the satellite won't land in the intended crater after all, and that therefore the likelihood of releasing water vapour from a cold crater is now greatly reduced?
> Automata that behave like humans in one way or another have existed hundreds of years
Not in human culture, they haven't. It takes a large amount of public interplay before an idea germinates and becomes a cultural meme -- most ideas just wither and die without trace except in the minds of researchers. In the area we're discussing, there is one huge big ZERO of cultural heritage to draw upon as a basis for value judgements that have any applicability.
> I don't see why you can't accept someone's current perception of automaton-human interaction to be valid, just because we have seen so little of it and it is not something society has got used to
I can't accept it because apples aren't oranges, and the fact that you haven't seen many apples but have seen lots of oranges doesn't entitle you to judge apples to be bad oranges. You have to get used to apples before you can validly say whether they are good or not.
Every single one of your arguments is laced with the desire to impose your current judgements on a new state of affairs, and there is no arguing with that, so I won't, because you won't entertain the notion that your previously acquired views might not apply.
The closed mindsets of universal moralists are legion, and it's no surprise to find their perpetual arguing against the open-minded position of making no a-priori judgements even here. If you had been in control, there would be no free Internet because it dismisses most pre-Internet values as irrelevant. Sheesh, I'm glad you're not in control.
but the interaction of automata with humans is something that can and has to be judged within a human's value system as well.
Human can and will judge anything and everything, of course, but that doesn't mean that the judgement is valid. In this case it's not valid, because there is no cultural context in the automaton+human universe against which a system of values can be built.
Judging something out of context is only for the brain-dead, just like judging that an apple is a very poor quality orange. Not having such a context available is not a valid excuse for applying a previous inappropriate context in its place. The logical approach is to let a new context develop naturally over time, lead where it may.
But with 95% of humans happy to follow "moral leaders" like sheep, we're in for a field day of a-priori moralistic universalism, especially when nanotech begins to change the rules built up over millenia.
Perversion exists only in a cultural context. There is no cultural context for "where this is going", because automata that behave like humans have never existed before.
Consequently, any value judgements that head-in-the-sand universal moralists might want to make as such developments unfold are just complete unmitigated rubbish.
The term "viral" carries so many negative connotations that it's highly unlikely that a joint and insightful understanding of GPL vs. BSD can be reached as long as people continue accusing each other of it.
Sorry, but in so technical a project, pressure is not a valid excuse for ignoring technical issues.
It's precisely that sort of muddled thinking that places managers above engineers in our society, as if somehow their "ability" to ignore facts were a positive thing instead of an ineptitude.
Whether they be in Morton Thiokol, in NASA, in MacDonalds or in the Whitehouse, managers that override solid technical advice for social, political or economic reasons are basically inept, not skilled, and the less impact they have on the rest of us the better. People shouldn't have to die to hammer this lesson home.
it would be good to know the names of the Morton Thiokol managers that repeatedly overrode Roger Boisjoly's detailed technical presentations on the flaws in the O-rings and decided to launch Challanger despite overwhelming reasons not to do so. In a sane world, those managers would be criminals.
Those same paper pushers are now probably making equally clueless judgements in other major corporations. Should we not be told their names so that we can stay clear of their next disaster?
Slashdot Mirror
Then, stupid delegates wouldn't matter, nobody would have time to build up a power base which is the root of all corruption in politics, and there would be far fewer stupid laws passed because the absence of lobby power would mean that delegates would only create laws if the topic interested them and hence if they knew something about it from their previous occupation.
But hey, obviously that won't happen, so we're stuck with a totally assanine political system. Don't worry about it. Nanotech is just around the corner, and then everything will change.
You're starting from the wrong end entirely: good software documentation has almost nothing to do with word processing, it has to do with creating the tightest possible association between the software elements and the descriptive elements so that the descriptions are actually USEFUL and get USED. If you start from the basis that it's going to be word-processed and that it'll have headings x/y/z then I can guarantee you that you're about to create yet another total waste of time and effort which will just drain resource and return almost nothing of value other than to satisy the paper pushers. If I earned a penny for each fancy document that never gets looked at even once after release, my fortune would make Bill Gates look like a pauper. There has to be a reason for that, and there is: such "documentation" is worthless because (i) it's too verbose, (ii) not verbose enough, (iii) too technical, (iv) not technical enough, (v) not suited for its audience, (vi) not wanted by its audience, (vii) not integrated into the development tools, (viii) at the wrong level of granularity, (ix) static, and (x) always out of date. Not surprisingly, 99% of the time it's a worthless pile of junk. Sigh .... If you really must put time and money into documentation, at least try to do it in a useful way rather than in the "standard" way: hire a developer with a research bias and get him to create an integrated information system for your developers. A system that updates itself from source code automatically and which allows structured annotations to be added with zero hassle and with automatic version control hidden behind the scenes. Make sure access to it is just a mouse click or keystroke away and directly driven from within (or alongside) the programming medium, and provide commandline access to the infobase because power users will leave the capabilities of any other interface way behind. And make it a living, dynamic info system, because if you don't then it'll be a very dead one.
I cascade a DVD MPEG decoder board and two AWE64Gold cards in this way, and this permanent mix works just fine, without noise problems. Note though that it's not as flexible as wiring each output separately into its own mixer input. If you can afford it, buy an external musician's mixer (remembering that you need two channels for each sound card), but you'll really find it a pain not to have the online input-gain/output-volume controls that we take for granted on sound cards.
It even says so in the Bible.
So we might as well hone our technological tools and create ourselves a decent universe.
It certainly doesn't take much of an advance to make the regressives crawl out of the woodwork, does it.
Every powerful technology can be a power for bad as well as a power for good, and you can't create the enabling technology for one without doing so for the other. Saying "Stop because it's dangerous" is tantamount to saying "Stop technical advance". You cannot regulate these things in any universal way, or not for long, so if you want technical advance to continue then the only feasible strategy is to try to think of defenses in parallel with the research.
You think that the mentioned gene technology is dangerous? Hah. Go and read up about nanotech to discover what dangerous (and wonderfully powerful) means, then contrast giving everyone the 'flu with destroying the entire terran biosphere (a remote but non-zero possibility).
But short of perpetually waving the regressive's red flag, we have to forge ahead while defending ourselves as best we can. To stop our technical voyage of exploration would be suicide of the soul, and that would be much worse than suicide of the body.
I like that Moreton VPN router family -- I can think of various useful roles that could play in my systems as it stands, even without customizing its Linux. It has a lot of potential.
Did anyone find pricing info on the site?
I wish I could remember the name of that fake documentary film about the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust ... And I vaguely recall one that had something to do with exposing some failures in some sort of radioactive plant, and another I think about some space mission.
;-)
Evidently they had a huge impact on me.
I was hoping that one of the spoilers would say something about the "project" part of the plot, which I assume is where the film gets its nerd interest?
:-)
Info please!
Thanks.
"It's bad for me, therefore it should be banned" is a corrupt argument: it's the same one that Janet Reno is using to get governments to ban cryptography.
There are good arguments why spam is bad: mainly because the burden of cost is not on the sender and therefore there is no negative feedback mechanism to control it. Arguments that try to dictate what a person can or cannot receive are superfluous, and always unfair to someone or other.
If you want to control spam, find a way of passing the cost on to the originator. In this hugely dynamic free-ISP scene, blocking the output is a fool's game that doesn't cure the disease at all.
but don't you want to keep it that way?
If you do then you might want to start by denying Janet Reno her goal of totalitarian control.
Are there similar commercial ventures but targetted at Mars?
As long as the Artemis project continues to focus on the shuttle, they don't have any significant hope of meeting its low-cost objectives, or even of getting into space at all because of shuttle politics.
Only the alternative reusable launchers (still on the drawing board) offer the kind of cost and independence that a project of this kind requires.
For now, that is. After nanotech, all the rules change.
But people like Janet Reno are trying to make the world more like China.
And you're encouraging it by saying that our token "democracies" are not as bad as China. Of course they're not. Yet. And we don't want to be heading in that direction either.
Don't worry about it. Nanotech isn't too many decades away from giving us total control over materials and dropping the main added-value cost of manufactured goods to near zero. When that does finally happen, the Moon will become just another tourist trap.
I have a much better idea than removing cryptographic software from the Internet. Simply remove Janet Reno from office.
63 million is peanuts. Bill Gates could pay for it out of petty cash, and vastly more is wasted away on completely worthless political campaigns.
Giving money to politicians and governments is *not* the way to improve life on Earth, but the way to destroy it.
If the impact has been delayed by one minute owing to a stronger de-orbiting burn than planned, doesn't this mean that the satellite won't land in the intended crater after all, and that therefore the likelihood of releasing water vapour from a cold crater is now greatly reduced?
> Automata that behave like humans in one way or another have existed hundreds of years
Not in human culture, they haven't. It takes a large amount of public interplay before an idea germinates and becomes a cultural meme -- most ideas just wither and die without trace except in the minds of researchers. In the area we're discussing, there is one huge big ZERO of cultural heritage to draw upon as a basis for value judgements that have any applicability.
> I don't see why you can't accept someone's current perception of automaton-human interaction to be valid, just because we have seen so little of it and it is not something society has got used to
I can't accept it because apples aren't oranges, and the fact that you haven't seen many apples but have seen lots of oranges doesn't entitle you to judge apples to be bad oranges. You have to get used to apples before you can validly say whether they are good or not.
Every single one of your arguments is laced with the desire to impose your current judgements on a new state of affairs, and there is no arguing with that, so I won't, because you won't entertain the notion that your previously acquired views might not apply.
The closed mindsets of universal moralists are legion, and it's no surprise to find their perpetual arguing against the open-minded position of making no a-priori judgements even here. If you had been in control, there would be no free Internet because it dismisses most pre-Internet values as irrelevant. Sheesh, I'm glad you're not in control.
but the interaction of automata with humans is something that can and has to be judged within a human's value system as well.
Human can and will judge anything and everything, of course, but that doesn't mean that the judgement is valid. In this case it's not valid, because there is no cultural context in the automaton+human universe against which a system of values can be built.
Judging something out of context is only for the brain-dead, just like judging that an apple is a very poor quality orange. Not having such a context available is not a valid excuse for applying a previous inappropriate context in its place. The logical approach is to let a new context develop naturally over time, lead where it may.
But with 95% of humans happy to follow "moral leaders" like sheep, we're in for a field day of a-priori moralistic universalism, especially when nanotech begins to change the rules built up over millenia.
Perversion exists only in a cultural context. There is no cultural context for "where this is going", because automata that behave like humans have never existed before.
Consequently, any value judgements that head-in-the-sand universal moralists might want to make as such developments unfold are just complete unmitigated rubbish.
Well, obviously you're partisan and you have an interest in maintaining the division, but I was trying not to be.
The term "viral" carries so many negative connotations that it's highly unlikely that a joint and insightful understanding of GPL vs. BSD can be reached as long as people continue accusing each other of it.
Drop viral. It doesn't help us move forward.
Sorry, but in so technical a project, pressure is not a valid excuse for ignoring technical issues.
It's precisely that sort of muddled thinking that places managers above engineers in our society, as if somehow their "ability" to ignore facts were a positive thing instead of an ineptitude.
Whether they be in Morton Thiokol, in NASA, in MacDonalds or in the Whitehouse, managers that override solid technical advice for social, political or economic reasons are basically inept, not skilled, and the less impact they have on the rest of us the better. People shouldn't have to die to hammer this lesson home.
Following on from the link given above,
http://onlineethics.org/moral/ boisjoly/RB-intro.html
it would be good to know the names of the Morton Thiokol managers that repeatedly overrode Roger Boisjoly's detailed technical presentations on the flaws in the O-rings and decided to launch Challanger despite overwhelming reasons not to do so. In a sane world, those managers would be criminals.
Those same paper pushers are now probably making equally clueless judgements in other major corporations. Should we not be told their names so that we can stay clear of their next disaster?