What we miss often in this discussion, I think, is a focus on data rather than software (or process, or technology).
Data endures. Software, very often, does not. The data is important; the software, just a tool to get that data into the formats we want.
Software freedom is about the ability to take our data, to own our data, and migrate it from platform to platform, to avoid the onrushing digital dark age that threatens to destroy everything we know as the platforms cave under us. This applies both to the desktop and the 'cloud'. Data is life; to get and keep access to our data, we generally will need access to the knowledge and tools required to transform and preserve it. Anything that threatens this - copyrights, software patents, lock-in, proprietary undocumented formats, centralised services which don't allow data migration - threatens our knowledge, our society, our memories and ultimately all the things that make up our life.
It is very very dangerous for us to start depending on tools we either can't repair or are not legally permitted to repair. Somehow, this truth keeps getting forgotten, especially when it's in the interest of toolmakers to make tools incompatible, rapidly obsolete and to make reverse-engineering and passing on knowledge illegal.
Save data, save knowledge. Otherwise one day we'll want that data and knowledge and we won't have it, because we've paid someone to prevent us from needing to know it and they've enforced that by REQUIRING us not to know it.
But the reality is, people just want the best performing tool for the job and frankly the older I get the more I think so too. I had these fundamentalist ideas in late teen years, but then I faced the real world. Now I pick the right tool for the job, be it open source or closed.
That's fine short-term thinking. But what about the long term? Eventually the environment will change, and you'll want to pick a better product, but if proprietary products have edged open ones out of the market, you won't have that choice.
Always thinking just about 'performance' can lead you into traps. That's what 'fundamentalism' is a correction to: it points out that choosing an inferior solution WILL get you an inferior outcome.
I wish people could understand that it's not 'closed minded' to think about the future. The IT industry has the attention span of a gnat; anything more than three years away might as well be the year 30,000,000 to us. Forgive my fundamentalism, but it seems to me that always thinking only on the ultra-short-term margin is neither a healthy nor strategic (or even in the end, self-interested) way to live.
"He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines."
When you get rid of the growth path for technical resources, eventually you get a profound lack of availability of senior technical resources. At that point you have no choice but to push everything IT-related out to external vendors because you can't hire internal resources t
"Resources"?
You keep using that word as if it were something like canned meat.
You can leave your cell phone behind. Can you leave your arm at home?
Strange you should mention that, sir, we've just this month received a shipment of Cyb-Arm 2.0s. The shoulder mount unscrews and as you can see, you can replace the fingers with spanner, egg beater, vacuum cleaner, hedge trimmer, or chess set extensions.
Hardly anyone experiences life-threatening seizures nowadays, sir. And all those stories about 'zombie armnets' are totally overblown by the media.
That little candy-bar-sized transmitter clipped to your belt is actively broadcasting your location every single minute to a computer up to 40,000,000 cm away
40,000,000 centimeters? Is that something like 400 kilometers?
That's either a pretty big cell size, or a very small Internet.
Reccently I had a lay person rightly point out the danger of entering a root password everywhere for otherwise trivial administrative tasks (She had called me because she didn't want to enter the root password... just to download a update).
Er, are you referring to some operating system other than Ubuntu?
Because like OS X, Ubuntu doesn't ever ask for the root password when requesting privilege escalation. It asks for the *user* password, which is not root, and is the same one you type every time to log in. That's the wonder of sudo.
Not only that, a critter much like Dyna-Soar makes an appearance in the wonderful Apollo-era space thriller, Marooned. Those were the days... Apollo Applications Program, sigh.
Highly recommended just to see a young Gene Hackman as an astronaut gone space crazy.
The new plan uses new technologies as one of its foundations, investing in near-term flagship technology demonstrators.
Uh-oh. Anyone else just get serious Shuttle deja-vu?
Though Constellation looked like crap to me too, but... well... isn't 'flagship technology demonstration' what the Shuttle could be charitably described as? Turns out it wasn't a particularly good idea to both cut costs and focus on one vehicle, and make that vehicle use bleeding-edge technology which would rapidly become obsolete while still remaining fragile.
And NASA has done plenty of tech demos since Shuttle - it's just that they seem to keep somehow never turning into actual products.
Still, I guess anything's got to be better than Constellation... surely?
Heh. I think it's really funny that medicare is considered "mandatory spending", while defense - one of the few legitimate duties of government - is considered discretionary.
Conversely, I think it's really funny that funding an expensive, aggressive military posture that angers and provokes the rest of the world (and is mostly useless against a determined low-tech enemy) is considered adequate 'defense' while funding public domestic healthcare - which is not only the first line of defense against biological terrorism, but also pays off hugely as a hedge against natural disasters and epidemics while boosting the productivity of the economy - isn't.
Different spectacles, different views of what the problem is.
Oh, and you're preventing me from owning a sportscar, because you didn't give me one.
Certainly. Selective denial of access to resources - rather than the creation of wealth - is the true foundation of capitalism. You can't sell someone something they already have, so it's in your interest as a would-be supplier to make sure they can't get what they want except through you.
It's a happy accident that the physics of physical objects supports this business model cheaply, but there are often more effective ways - like threatening to take away what people already have.
If you invented a way to clone a Ferrari tomorrow, so everyone could have one for free? It'd be made illegal the day after, with serious men with guns appearing to make sure nobody got free stuff without 'earning' it.
Banks don't create money, remember. They create debt. Debt is a fancy word for servitude: take out a loan and now you're working for someone else.
Likewise, drug companies aren't in the business of making people healthy, and health insurers aren't in the business of paying out on claims. They're in the business of taking as much money and giving as little as possible as they can get away with. That's perfectly rational business thinking: maximising profit, minimising costs.
The problem is that rational business thinking is not necessarily the best way to do things in the world if what you care about is not making money, but providing access to resources.
But speculating along the lines of 'why don't we do what's good for everyone instead of what' benefits just us' is socialism and therefore unthinkable.
Imagine the price of platinum being no greater than the price of steel. Imagine the price of steel dropping so much that it is in the noise of the transportation costs (we're almost there!). Not everyone can own a private island.. but maybe one day everyone can own an island in space (Gerard O'Neil would concur). The seduction of progress from the ultimate frontier.. it's so alluring that it's not surprising there are some among us who see it as a hedonistic luxury, but most of our modern amenities seem that way to the rest of the world. Are they right?
I don't think space is going to be anything like "hedonistic luxury". In fact, I think if O'Neills get built at all, they'll probably turn into worse slums than those on Earth.
This is an environment where the utility corporation can charge for the oxygen you breathe, so if you stop working you die, and it would take a lifetime's savings just to buy a ticket home to Earth - and even if you could win the Millionaire jackpot, your bones would be trashed and you wouldn't survive down there. The ultimate company town with indentured slavery built in. What's going to stop them?
There might be asteroids full of diamond-crusted platinum out there - but not so much water, oxygen and biomass. Which do you think is more important to life?
My brother works with the poor in Brazil, and I've seen Rio favelas first-hand. There may be sewerage problems, but people there typically have satellite TV to watch the football. And lots of cellphones.
People have jobs. They party hard. It's not all crazy gunfights and despair.
It's really pretty darn cyberpunk. And beautiful in a strange way. Even the crime is just applied capitalism.
An excellent movie (and TV series) about the nature of everyday life in a modern Brazilian slum is City of Men (sequel of sorts to City of God, about the rise of the slums/gangs in the 1970s).
Services? Revenus streams? These people have -nothing- to sell. If they did it would get stolen fast.
Actually I'm not sure that's true. In Mike Davis' Planet of Slums, he makes the case that one of the *worst* features of modern slums is that the very poor rent living space to the desperately poor at exorbitant rates. And the lower down you are, the more you pay for less.
Slums are hardly socialist utopias. People who live there are all being good little capitalists, hustling to stake out their position in the Ownership Society, and it's making the problem worse. Collective action would be a lot more efficient - but if you're at the bottom getting stepped on by even your neighbours, who are you going to trust?
In a proper libertarian society, government does not have a monopoly on force. Each Citizen has a small monopoly on force, distributing the force across the system.
I've played that game! It's called Quake Deathmatch.
>To clarify for other readers who might now have been misled by your incorrect statements, an anarchist believes there should be no government (leaving people to be entirely self-organising, and thus allowing private armies and thus, in all probability, the ultimate rule of whoever has the biggest private army), while a libertarian believes in small government, with individual rights and property ownership, and an enforcement system, but government retains a monopoly on force in order to enforce individual liberties.
Isn't that a minarchist rather than a true libertarian?
If you've agreed to any kind of governmental monopoly on force you're already a statist - the rest is just haggling over the fine print of the contract.
My big problem with anything on the anarchist/anarcho-capitalist/minarchist/libertarian end of the spectrum is that that apparently tiny loophole of 'to enforce individual liberties' seems to encompass within it the entirety of violent and abusive behaviours. If you allow deadly force to protect 'private property' you get rent, and rent is just a word for private taxation, and if you allow deadly force to protect abstract forms of property such as rent and copyright... congratulations, you've just reinvented feudalism and censorship.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch".
Actually that would be capitalism. The lamb gets just as much representation as he has capital and no more.
Democracy would be two *lambs* and a wolf voting on what to have for lunch. Good luck making the decision stick.
It seems to be the persistent fear of the middle and upper classes that "the masses" are composed entirely of dangerous (yet ignorant) predators, and therefore democracy needs to be moderated so that the "right" decisions get made regardless of how many people object.
A moment's reflection on the reality of the food chain ought to suggest that predators aren't usually the most numerous species.
On the other hand, the devil is in the details, and one would think that a company such as Microsoft that has been owning the software market for decades now would know how to implement a randomizing algorithm correctly.
15 slides for 20 seconds... this sounds like an unbranded knockoff of Pecha Kucha, which has 20 slides at 20 seconds.
I know the PK crowd is haunted by architects and designers and artisty Mac-using types... and maybe they're a bit tight with control of it... but why not just join/run PK events in your area, or create more? Why does the world need two names/brands for what's the same idea?
Slashdot Mirror
I only read Slashdot for the articles, honest.
++.
What we miss often in this discussion, I think, is a focus on data rather than software (or process, or technology).
Data endures. Software, very often, does not. The data is important; the software, just a tool to get that data into the formats we want.
Software freedom is about the ability to take our data, to own our data, and migrate it from platform to platform, to avoid the onrushing digital dark age that threatens to destroy everything we know as the platforms cave under us. This applies both to the desktop and the 'cloud'. Data is life; to get and keep access to our data, we generally will need access to the knowledge and tools required to transform and preserve it. Anything that threatens this - copyrights, software patents, lock-in, proprietary undocumented formats, centralised services which don't allow data migration - threatens our knowledge, our society, our memories and ultimately all the things that make up our life.
It is very very dangerous for us to start depending on tools we either can't repair or are not legally permitted to repair. Somehow, this truth keeps getting forgotten, especially when it's in the interest of toolmakers to make tools incompatible, rapidly obsolete and to make reverse-engineering and passing on knowledge illegal.
Save data, save knowledge. Otherwise one day we'll want that data and knowledge and we won't have it, because we've paid someone to prevent us from needing to know it and they've enforced that by REQUIRING us not to know it.
But the reality is, people just want the best performing tool for the job and frankly the older I get the more I think so too. I had these fundamentalist ideas in late teen years, but then I faced the real world. Now I pick the right tool for the job, be it open source or closed.
That's fine short-term thinking. But what about the long term? Eventually the environment will change, and you'll want to pick a better product, but if proprietary products have edged open ones out of the market, you won't have that choice.
Always thinking just about 'performance' can lead you into traps. That's what 'fundamentalism' is a correction to: it points out that choosing an inferior solution WILL get you an inferior outcome.
I wish people could understand that it's not 'closed minded' to think about the future. The IT industry has the attention span of a gnat; anything more than three years away might as well be the year 30,000,000 to us. Forgive my fundamentalism, but it seems to me that always thinking only on the ultra-short-term margin is neither a healthy nor strategic (or even in the end, self-interested) way to live.
"He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines."
When you get rid of the growth path for technical resources, eventually you get a profound lack of availability of senior technical resources. At that point you have no choice but to push everything IT-related out to external vendors because you can't hire internal resources t
"Resources"?
You keep using that word as if it were something like canned meat.
Wouldn't you rather call them "people"?
You can leave your cell phone behind. Can you leave your arm at home?
Strange you should mention that, sir, we've just this month received a shipment of Cyb-Arm 2.0s. The shoulder mount unscrews and as you can see, you can replace the fingers with spanner, egg beater, vacuum cleaner, hedge trimmer, or chess set extensions.
Hardly anyone experiences life-threatening seizures nowadays, sir. And all those stories about 'zombie armnets' are totally overblown by the media.
That little candy-bar-sized transmitter clipped to your belt is actively broadcasting your location every single minute to a computer up to 40,000,000 cm away
40,000,000 centimeters? Is that something like 400 kilometers?
That's either a pretty big cell size, or a very small Internet.
Reccently I had a lay person rightly point out the danger of entering a root password everywhere for otherwise trivial administrative tasks (She had called me because she didn't want to enter the root password... just to download a update).
Er, are you referring to some operating system other than Ubuntu?
Because like OS X, Ubuntu doesn't ever ask for the root password when requesting privilege escalation. It asks for the *user* password, which is not root, and is the same one you type every time to log in. That's the wonder of sudo.
Confused as to what you think is going on.
As a technologist, I remediate all the architected solutionizations I administrate.
Dark, Irish and able to put you on the floor with one hit?
Some thing far more terminal, painful, and with extreme prejudice, and being Texas I think the residents are probably well equipped to handle it.
... forced attendance at a chili cook-off and have to eat it all?
From the article, these are suits against companies claiming patent protection on products when they don't in fact have it.
That's the opposite of claiming patent protection for something you don't have rights to, ie, patent trolling.
Not only that, a critter much like Dyna-Soar makes an appearance in the wonderful Apollo-era space thriller, Marooned. Those were the days... Apollo Applications Program, sigh.
Highly recommended just to see a young Gene Hackman as an astronaut gone space crazy.
The new plan uses new technologies as one of its foundations, investing in near-term flagship technology demonstrators.
Uh-oh. Anyone else just get serious Shuttle deja-vu?
Though Constellation looked like crap to me too, but... well... isn't 'flagship technology demonstration' what the Shuttle could be charitably described as? Turns out it wasn't a particularly good idea to both cut costs and focus on one vehicle, and make that vehicle use bleeding-edge technology which would rapidly become obsolete while still remaining fragile.
And NASA has done plenty of tech demos since Shuttle - it's just that they seem to keep somehow never turning into actual products.
Still, I guess anything's got to be better than Constellation... surely?
Heh. I think it's really funny that medicare is considered "mandatory spending", while defense - one of the few legitimate duties of government - is considered discretionary.
Conversely, I think it's really funny that funding an expensive, aggressive military posture that angers and provokes the rest of the world (and is mostly useless against a determined low-tech enemy) is considered adequate 'defense' while funding public domestic healthcare - which is not only the first line of defense against biological terrorism, but also pays off hugely as a hedge against natural disasters and epidemics while boosting the productivity of the economy - isn't.
Different spectacles, different views of what the problem is.
Oh, and you're preventing me from owning a sportscar, because you didn't give me one.
Certainly. Selective denial of access to resources - rather than the creation of wealth - is the true foundation of capitalism. You can't sell someone something they already have, so it's in your interest as a would-be supplier to make sure they can't get what they want except through you.
It's a happy accident that the physics of physical objects supports this business model cheaply, but there are often more effective ways - like threatening to take away what people already have.
If you invented a way to clone a Ferrari tomorrow, so everyone could have one for free? It'd be made illegal the day after, with serious men with guns appearing to make sure nobody got free stuff without 'earning' it.
Banks don't create money, remember. They create debt. Debt is a fancy word for servitude: take out a loan and now you're working for someone else.
Likewise, drug companies aren't in the business of making people healthy, and health insurers aren't in the business of paying out on claims. They're in the business of taking as much money and giving as little as possible as they can get away with. That's perfectly rational business thinking: maximising profit, minimising costs.
The problem is that rational business thinking is not necessarily the best way to do things in the world if what you care about is not making money, but providing access to resources.
But speculating along the lines of 'why don't we do what's good for everyone instead of what' benefits just us' is socialism and therefore unthinkable.
Imagine the price of platinum being no greater than the price of steel. Imagine the price of steel dropping so much that it is in the noise of the transportation costs (we're almost there!). Not everyone can own a private island.. but maybe one day everyone can own an island in space (Gerard O'Neil would concur). The seduction of progress from the ultimate frontier.. it's so alluring that it's not surprising there are some among us who see it as a hedonistic luxury, but most of our modern amenities seem that way to the rest of the world. Are they right?
I don't think space is going to be anything like "hedonistic luxury". In fact, I think if O'Neills get built at all, they'll probably turn into worse slums than those on Earth.
This is an environment where the utility corporation can charge for the oxygen you breathe, so if you stop working you die, and it would take a lifetime's savings just to buy a ticket home to Earth - and even if you could win the Millionaire jackpot, your bones would be trashed and you wouldn't survive down there. The ultimate company town with indentured slavery built in. What's going to stop them?
There might be asteroids full of diamond-crusted platinum out there - but not so much water, oxygen and biomass. Which do you think is more important to life?
Agreed.
My brother works with the poor in Brazil, and I've seen Rio favelas first-hand. There may be sewerage problems, but people there typically have satellite TV to watch the football. And lots of cellphones.
People have jobs. They party hard. It's not all crazy gunfights and despair.
It's really pretty darn cyberpunk. And beautiful in a strange way. Even the crime is just applied capitalism.
My photos
My 2009 travel blog
An excellent movie (and TV series) about the nature of everyday life in a modern Brazilian slum is City of Men (sequel of sorts to City of God, about the rise of the slums/gangs in the 1970s).
Services? Revenus streams? These people have -nothing- to sell. If they did it would get stolen fast.
Actually I'm not sure that's true. In Mike Davis' Planet of Slums, he makes the case that one of the *worst* features of modern slums is that the very poor rent living space to the desperately poor at exorbitant rates. And the lower down you are, the more you pay for less.
Slums are hardly socialist utopias. People who live there are all being good little capitalists, hustling to stake out their position in the Ownership Society, and it's making the problem worse. Collective action would be a lot more efficient - but if you're at the bottom getting stepped on by even your neighbours, who are you going to trust?
In a proper libertarian society, government does not have a monopoly on force. Each Citizen has a small monopoly on force, distributing the force across the system.
I've played that game! It's called Quake Deathmatch.
>To clarify for other readers who might now have been misled by your incorrect statements, an anarchist believes there should be no government (leaving people to be entirely self-organising, and thus allowing private armies and thus, in all probability, the ultimate rule of whoever has the biggest private army), while a libertarian believes in small government, with individual rights and property ownership, and an enforcement system, but government retains a monopoly on force in order to enforce individual liberties.
Isn't that a minarchist rather than a true libertarian?
If you've agreed to any kind of governmental monopoly on force you're already a statist - the rest is just haggling over the fine print of the contract.
My big problem with anything on the anarchist/anarcho-capitalist/minarchist/libertarian end of the spectrum is that that apparently tiny loophole of 'to enforce individual liberties' seems to encompass within it the entirety of violent and abusive behaviours. If you allow deadly force to protect 'private property' you get rent, and rent is just a word for private taxation, and if you allow deadly force to protect abstract forms of property such as rent and copyright... congratulations, you've just reinvented feudalism and censorship.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch".
Actually that would be capitalism. The lamb gets just as much representation as he has capital and no more.
Democracy would be two *lambs* and a wolf voting on what to have for lunch. Good luck making the decision stick.
It seems to be the persistent fear of the middle and upper classes that "the masses" are composed entirely of dangerous (yet ignorant) predators, and therefore democracy needs to be moderated so that the "right" decisions get made regardless of how many people object.
A moment's reflection on the reality of the food chain ought to suggest that predators aren't usually the most numerous species.
On the other hand, the devil is in the details, and one would think that a company such as Microsoft that has been owning the software market for decades now would know how to implement a randomizing algorithm correctly.
Sure!
10 RANDOMIZE TIMER
20 PRINT INT(RND * 5)
30 GOTO 20
Lisp? That's like the anti-COBOL. Used *for* natural language processing, not so much natural language in its syntax.
15 slides for 20 seconds... this sounds like an unbranded knockoff of Pecha Kucha, which has 20 slides at 20 seconds.
I know the PK crowd is haunted by architects and designers and artisty Mac-using types... and maybe they're a bit tight with control of it... but why not just join/run PK events in your area, or create more? Why does the world need two names/brands for what's the same idea?