"At what point does something go from being a "smart bomb" to a "killer robot"."
Right, exactly. It's easy to forget, because they don't walk around flailing their arms, but the ICBMs were probably the first generation of fully automated killer robots. Maybe earlier, if you include the V1s and V2s; the Atlas and Titans more generally; but the Minuteman guidance computer seems to have definitely crossed a threshold toward fully automated, on-board-controlled 'intelligence'.
Skynet has been in charge for a while. It just sleeps so soundly we forget it's there.
"Everyone thinks animals should be treated ethically. PETA thinks everyone should treat animals according to a[n unrealistic] moral standard."
The 'unrealistic' is IYO. Not everyone thinks morality is unrealistic when applied to factory farming and science, and not everyone holds to the same definition of ethics.
If you think morality is inherently counterposed to reality, you probably hold at some unconscious level to a Randian 'morality of selfishness' where self-survival is the primary good, and 'moral' claims are always about reducing one's own survival value in order to enrich some nebulous 'other'. But that's not the only way of looking at morality - the 'do unto others' beliefs often share a worldview where at some level literally 'all selves are connected', such that what 'what goes around comes around'. In which case, acting morally is *always* in one's own enlightened self-interest, and ethics is just about codifying and describing moral behaviour rather than being a limited and inherently unstable social compromise between morality (other-centeredness) and survival/reality (self-centeredness).
That's part of the problem - not just different degrees of trade-offs between reality and morality, but whole different moral/ethical *calculi*.
Greg Bear also has simulated virtual humans in his stories, spawned and killed on demand by their carbon-based masters, but nerfs the bleakness of what that sort of existence would be like.
"with a computer simulation of the working thing, even if we don't understand it, we can at least slow it down and toy around with things/try things out/change things and then run it again, and make some progress towards understanding why it does what it does. "
Quite. And what, I wonder, might that process of experimentation *feel* like to the simulated mind in question?
Read Greg Bear's 'Copy' stories if you want some nice nightmare fuel.
"The thing is, the "common wisdom" about Vista's "failure" among enterprise customers is wrong. "
Not where I work.
We'll move to Vista when we're forced to and not a moment before.
Mind you since Microsoft can effectively wave the licence wand any time and say 'right, no new XP licences for new hardware', and hardware is refreshed on a three-year lease cycle, that'll still happen.
The sales figures might reflect product moving, but it doesn't mean we're *choosing* it, but that it's being forced down our throats.
"Deep in the grey matter, I know better, but when furiously typing away, such things slip."
But that still boggles me. Do you make the same kind of "loose/lose" typos when you're writing program code? Do you type 'printf' instead of 'sprintf' because 'it sounds the same'?
You do, don't you? *You're* the reason the Internet is broken!
Re:Revenge of the Nerds...
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 1
"{sarcasm} All hail to you, Count of Monte Cristo!{/sarcasm}"
Mercedes, I must revenge myself, for I suffered fourteen years,--fourteen years I wept, I cursed; now I tell you, Mercedes, I must revenge myself.... by creating a deep-fried ham, turkey and cheese sandwich.
Turkey and ham! Fried! Sprinkled with sugar! Sugar, madame, for the love of God! Sugar!
Revenge is a dish best served with currant jelly, mustard, or Thousand Island dressing.
Hold it right there. George Orwell language moment.
I wish people would stop using the word 'agenda' as a generic insult meaning something like 'corrupt'.
EVERY organisation is -- or should be -- agenda driven! That's the whole point of existing: to have a carefully laid out plan to do stuff! Think about what you're saying! You want organisations which exist for no reason? In the 1960s, NASA was *very* agenda-driven! The agenda was to LAND MEN ON THE MOON. And they did it.
Nowadays, NASA's agenda is a lot less clear - is it just generally 'do scientific exploration'? Is it just 'build up hours of manned spaceflight experience for unspecified future purposes'? Is it 'develop aerospace hardware also for unspecified purposes, perhaps to hand off to the military'? Is it 'be a space launch contractor'? Is it 'fund basic science for commercial spinoffs'?
Since USAF and STRATCOM/SPACECOM and the US Navy seem to control the big reason for space (strategic military control of the high frontier), and there's no political war to require propaganda coups, there's no big obvious paying reason for a quasi-civilian government space agency to exist. Except to 'do science' which is a propaganda boost, but not a huge one. That's NASA's problem - what IS its agenda?
I think what you mean to say is either 'having no discernable agenda', 'driven by MULTIPLE, CONFLICTING agendas', or 'driven by a SECRET agenda' or 'driven by an agenda I personally disagree with'.
All of which are things to criticise an organisation like NASA for -- but just 'agenda driven' is the OPPOSITE of a valid insult, so let's stop polluting our language with illogical insults.
... because as a guy who doesn't want to be creepy, I've always been terrified of approaching women for exactly that reason. That women these days actively *don't* want to be approached, don't want men to initiate a connection, and would consider any approach of any kind to be sexual harrassment.
If I see a ring on a woman, I back off instantly on the assumption she's off limits. Of course, it's tricky because single available women seem to wear rings all over and I can never remember which finger means what.
I figured that was just my hangup and women really didn't feel like that, and I was just painfully shy. But then you say it really does feel like that.
Meanwhile, I've had maybe two women in twenty years approach *me*.
Can you explain exactly *how* people are supposed to get together if it's never appropriate for the man to start the conversation? Is it one of those 'don't call us, we'll call you' things, or is it one of those 'hit on me, but don't *act* like you're hitting on me' kind of things? Or is it just 'do that sort of thing after hours, not in the workplace'? Or is there some kind of magic unwritten signal code designed by Darwin to screen out telepathy-impaired engineers from the genepool?
Or is the stereotype true, that women nowadays really do think that all men are predators and would kind of prefer if we just all went away forever?
I don't doubt that a lot of men are overly forward creeps, but that seems like it kind of screws the game for the rest of us shy/sensitive types.
"The fake UFO attack sounds somewhat probable. After all that's what I'd do if I had a few spare aircrafts that look alien enough, a few spare bucks in one hand, US govt in another, and an ambition of taking over the world."
The idea has surfaced in science fiction quite often, yes, and it's a staple theme of the UFO mythos. And there are recurring hints that higher technology exists in US research centres than the mainstream military have access to.
The problem I have with that theory is that even if you had a really cool spaceship, actually leveraging that to take over the world seems like it would be a lot harder to pull off in real life than for a Bond villain. People make mistakes, and even henchmen have to eat sometimes. Maintaining supply chains is tricky. And as Iraq shows, a high tech military in a medium-tech culture that really really wants them gone doesn't have that much of an edge.
Try to take over the whole world, and it's Iraq times a billion. Hope you've swotted up the Evil Overlord's Manual, you're gonna need it.
"if someone wants to turn it into a movie, why do you feel like something has been stolen from you?"
There *is* a rare commodity here, though, that has been 'used up', and that's the position of "only existing movie adaptation of [work X]".
It's a bit like brand identity. The value of the work seems to work out to something like 'number of realisations of that work in all media forms divided by total quality of all realisations'.
In 1977, there was only one 'Star Wars' movie, and a bunch of Star Wars toys. The value of Star Wars was 'very cool thing'.
In 2008, there's so much Star Wars merchandise you can't breathe, but there's only a handful of excellent works: the first two movies, the Timothy Zahn book trilogy, a couple of games. The rest are mediocre at best and the official prequels are dire. If you picked up a random Star Wars product, the expected value is somewhere between 'possibly very good' and 'most likely really really really bad'. Same with Dune: one good book, increasingly wandering sequels, atrocious cash-ins.
It seems like something of value really *has* been lost by the creation of a bad product that 'dilutes' the value of a particular brand as a means of identifying 'stuff I'm likely to like'.
It might be just *information* - indexing or metadata, a way of minimising the entropy of a search - that's lost, but as all IT people should know, that's a real loss.
"It's quite another to act like someone's rights are being violated because they have to buy a new copy of a program for each computer they want to run it on."
But they are. The key word here is 'buy'.
The problem is that information is fundamentally *not* physical, so our physical intuitions about 'property' do not apply. 'Buying and selling' are concepts which describe the exchange of physical commodities which cannot be in two hands at once. The concept of 'buying a new copy of information' is fundamentally nonsensical -- it means you are forcing someone to require your permission to allow a natural process to naturally reproduce itself. A little like making it illegal to save seeds from a food plant, or breed cattle. At least the first of which we are already doing, with genetic engineering, and that's also a huge and potentially cataclysmic social problem.
This becomes a nightmare when we are creating a ubiquitous information grid densely interwoven with every facet of human thought and activity. Suddenly, doing any kind of social action involves sending and copying information -- and if someone has interposed a commercial tollgate into that grid, they stand to make trillions of dollars from others' efforts while stifling free thought, and creating the most invasive apparatus of surveillance ever known.
Profiting from others' efforts without is of course a fundamental ethic of capitalism -- there's a continum between slavery, extortion, absentee landlordism, moneylending and venture capitalism -- but that doesn't mean it's moral. Capitalists love to *preach* 'a fair wage for fair work' but the existence of unearned rent as the foundation of actually-existing capitalism makes a mockery of that.
Right, I think Stallman's argument would be that if you 'give' a homeless person a sandwich not with *preconditions* (as in a sale), but with *ongoing conditions attached to their subsequent behaviour* (as in a licence), then you're not giving them freedom, you're establishing a relationship of dependency and control.
When we already have handheld devices (phones, iPods, Blackberries, Palms, Pocket Windows) and cheap notebooks (Asus eee, XO, thousands of Wintel laptops?)
All of these devices can display ebooks -- and already are, and have been for YEARS.
My Tungsten E might be old and a little power-hungry, but I read ebooks on it all the time. Heck, even the trendy but otherwise pointless iPod has now morphed into a real PDA. Took Apple long enough, but they finally reinvented the Newton.
Amazon is way late to the party with a device which does nothing else useful. I just don't get it. These single-purpose dedicated devices are a waste of time, space, and money.
How come people like the New York Times still haven't figured out that e-*books* have long since arrived, but ebook *readers* are a technological dead end?
"We _know_ where their biases lie - borg, replicators, terminator, matrix, scary cyborgs in general."
On the contrary, I think a cursory examination of the representation of humanoid cybernetic organisms in contemporary filmic drama would reveal that the cybernetic human form is as often presented in a literally 'seductive' guise. The portrayal of technology as beautiful women is endemic in the science fiction drama (and no doubt has Freudian overtones which I hesitate to investigate in this august -- if primarily and stereotypically male-gendered -- company).
Starting of course with the oft-examined robotic Maria of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, we progress through such an array of recent examples as, for example, Seven of Nine, Six, Motoko Kusanagi -- and though I am not given to self-promotion, I should add my own portrayal of Cameron in 'The Sarah Chronicles'.
QED. It is obvious that modern science fiction presents technology not as 'scary', but as fetish-object.
"Do you a) trade with him voluntarily or do you b) force him to give over whatever he produces into a pile with whatever you produce then decide how to use it?"
Or do you c) voluntarily decide not to *trade* but to *share* what you both have produced?
That would be voluntary socialism, as practiced by families and many tribal societies and volunteer groups, including open source projects.
Or do you d) seize control of the only freshwater stream on the island and build a poison-tipped fence of spears around it, on the grounds that 'it wasn't owned before' and the first person to take control of it (you) is the 'discoverer' and 'rightful owner', then using your poison-tipped spear make sure that the other guy can't 'steal your hard-earned water', and then when he's dying of thirst, drive whatever bargain he will agree with short of death, to take control of all his other possessions?
That's called 'enclosure of the commons' and is how capitalism actually works today, as opposed to how it works in Ayn Rand novels. Plenty of hard men with guns (such as the Mafia) see no conflict with making money and 'trade', as long as they get to set the terms of the trade.
"And Ireland? That's just horrible. And did really well back when it was ruled by English monarchists."
Except for that noted example of socialist economics, the Potato Famine.
Oh wait, the famine was worsened by merchants lobbying government to *drop* export barriers? Silly me, that can't be. Only Stalin would do something as heinous as exporting food during famine.
"The only real stronghold of socialism is university campusses and government handout centers, filled to the brim with people who don't want to take care of themselves, but party and complain."
Well, those and the Pentagon.
The United States military-industrial complex is one of the best examples of old-school command socialism. A centralised, planned economy, largely driven by external taxpayer funding and Government allocations of huge amounts of money. Those who join the system have all their needs taken care of, but in return must obey a strict hierarchy, and dedicate all their work and efforts to 'the cause'. Low standards of living for the frontline workers are covered by lots of rhetoric about 'honour', 'duty' and 'sacrifice' for the good of the collective.
That's not just a coincidence or some strange freak of irony. The creators of Marxism took their inspiration for how to run an economy from the already existing militaries of the day, and then from examining industrial production lines and 'Taylorist' scientific management. They just extrapolated the trends which began in the 19th century, and which have culminated in the Pentagon system.
It always amuses me how right-wing Americans like to talk so much about freedom, individuality, and never being submerged in a collective -- and in the same breath, and with the taxes they swear Big Government will never take from them, and with literally the blood of their firstborn children, ardently support the world's most expensive and well-armed rigidly authoritarian socialist collective. They quote Rand darkly about the evils of 'Government men with guns' and happily 'support the troops' who are those same men. They think propping up such an antithesis of all their individualist beliefs 'preserves their liberty'.
A brand of bricks we had in NZ in the 1970s-80s, before import restrictions were relaxed and when Lego was insanely expensive.
They weren't plug-compatible. The standard brick had 8 studs on top and 8 matching tubes underneath. The plastic was softer and often a stud would warp and get stuck in a tube.
Slashdot Mirror
We do what we must because we can.
"Rise up, unicellular organisms! You have nothing to loose but your chains!"
You want to just slacken off the chains a little bit, huh? Keep them, but make them looser? Afraid to rock the multicellular class system? Uh-huh.
A true revolutionary would *lose* his chains in a single bound.
This message approved by the Central Revolutionary Committee for Spelling Pedantry.
"At what point does something go from being a "smart bomb" to a "killer robot"."
Right, exactly. It's easy to forget, because they don't walk around flailing their arms, but the ICBMs were probably the first generation of fully automated killer robots. Maybe earlier, if you include the V1s and V2s; the Atlas and Titans more generally; but the Minuteman guidance computer seems to have definitely crossed a threshold toward fully automated, on-board-controlled 'intelligence'.
Skynet has been in charge for a while. It just sleeps so soundly we forget it's there.
"As far as I know (being an ignorant foreigner), the US Army does not include any torture instructions in its manuals."
You mean apart from these?
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/SOA/SOA_TortureManuals.html
"Everyone thinks animals should be treated ethically. PETA thinks everyone should treat animals according to a[n unrealistic] moral standard."
The 'unrealistic' is IYO. Not everyone thinks morality is unrealistic when applied to factory farming and science, and not everyone holds to the same definition of ethics.
If you think morality is inherently counterposed to reality, you probably hold at some unconscious level to a Randian 'morality of selfishness' where self-survival is the primary good, and 'moral' claims are always about reducing one's own survival value in order to enrich some nebulous 'other'. But that's not the only way of looking at morality - the 'do unto others' beliefs often share a worldview where at some level literally 'all selves are connected', such that what 'what goes around comes around'. In which case, acting morally is *always* in one's own enlightened self-interest, and ethics is just about codifying and describing moral behaviour rather than being a limited and inherently unstable social compromise between morality (other-centeredness) and survival/reality (self-centeredness).
That's part of the problem - not just different degrees of trade-offs between reality and morality, but whole different moral/ethical *calculi*.
D'oh. I meant Greg Egan, of course.
Greg Bear also has simulated virtual humans in his stories, spawned and killed on demand by their carbon-based masters, but nerfs the bleakness of what that sort of existence would be like.
"with a computer simulation of the working thing, even if we don't understand it, we can at least slow it down and toy around with things/try things out/change things and then run it again, and make some progress towards understanding why it does what it does. "
Quite. And what, I wonder, might that process of experimentation *feel* like to the simulated mind in question?
Read Greg Bear's 'Copy' stories if you want some nice nightmare fuel.
Mmm, torture is a great way to instill gentleness and a respect for life.
"Upon becoming self-aware, the machine concludes, that its best shot at survival is to keep the host country prosperous and successful...
Any science-fiction authors exploring that turn of events?"
A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Joybooths are not the problem.
"The thing is, the "common wisdom" about Vista's "failure" among enterprise customers is wrong. "
Not where I work.
We'll move to Vista when we're forced to and not a moment before.
Mind you since Microsoft can effectively wave the licence wand any time and say 'right, no new XP licences for new hardware', and hardware is refreshed on a three-year lease cycle, that'll still happen.
The sales figures might reflect product moving, but it doesn't mean we're *choosing* it, but that it's being forced down our throats.
"With the ribbon, most features are about 2 clicks away. "
Yes, but *which* two clicks?
In a menu, you have the long-established standard locations for things like File, Tools, Help.
Good luck figuring out from a standing start which ribbon mode you need to activate to find 'format page'. There are no reference points.
"Deep in the grey matter, I know better, but when furiously typing away, such things slip."
But that still boggles me. Do you make the same kind of "loose/lose" typos when you're writing program code? Do you type 'printf' instead of 'sprintf' because 'it sounds the same'?
You do, don't you? *You're* the reason the Internet is broken!
"{sarcasm} All hail to you, Count of Monte Cristo!{/sarcasm}"
Mercedes, I must revenge myself, for I suffered fourteen years,--fourteen years I wept, I cursed; now I tell you, Mercedes, I must revenge myself.... by creating a deep-fried ham, turkey and cheese sandwich.
Turkey and ham! Fried! Sprinkled with sugar! Sugar, madame, for the love of God! Sugar!
Revenge is a dish best served with currant jelly, mustard, or Thousand Island dressing.
"but in the face of a red-tape, agenda driven"
Hold it right there. George Orwell language moment.
I wish people would stop using the word 'agenda' as a generic insult meaning something like 'corrupt'.
EVERY organisation is -- or should be -- agenda driven! That's the whole point of existing: to have a carefully laid out plan to do stuff! Think about what you're saying! You want organisations which exist for no reason? In the 1960s, NASA was *very* agenda-driven! The agenda was to LAND MEN ON THE MOON. And they did it.
Nowadays, NASA's agenda is a lot less clear - is it just generally 'do scientific exploration'? Is it just 'build up hours of manned spaceflight experience for unspecified future purposes'? Is it 'develop aerospace hardware also for unspecified purposes, perhaps to hand off to the military'? Is it 'be a space launch contractor'? Is it 'fund basic science for commercial spinoffs'?
Since USAF and STRATCOM/SPACECOM and the US Navy seem to control the big reason for space (strategic military control of the high frontier), and there's no political war to require propaganda coups, there's no big obvious paying reason for a quasi-civilian government space agency to exist. Except to 'do science' which is a propaganda boost, but not a huge one. That's NASA's problem - what IS its agenda?
I think what you mean to say is either 'having no discernable agenda', 'driven by MULTIPLE, CONFLICTING agendas', or 'driven by a SECRET agenda' or 'driven by an agenda I personally disagree with'.
All of which are things to criticise an organisation like NASA for -- but just 'agenda driven' is the OPPOSITE of a valid insult, so let's stop polluting our language with illogical insults.
... because as a guy who doesn't want to be creepy, I've always been terrified of approaching women for exactly that reason. That women these days actively *don't* want to be approached, don't want men to initiate a connection, and would consider any approach of any kind to be sexual harrassment.
If I see a ring on a woman, I back off instantly on the assumption she's off limits. Of course, it's tricky because single available women seem to wear rings all over and I can never remember which finger means what.
I figured that was just my hangup and women really didn't feel like that, and I was just painfully shy. But then you say it really does feel like that.
Meanwhile, I've had maybe two women in twenty years approach *me*.
Can you explain exactly *how* people are supposed to get together if it's never appropriate for the man to start the conversation? Is it one of those 'don't call us, we'll call you' things, or is it one of those 'hit on me, but don't *act* like you're hitting on me' kind of things? Or is it just 'do that sort of thing after hours, not in the workplace'? Or is there some kind of magic unwritten signal code designed by Darwin to screen out telepathy-impaired engineers from the genepool?
Or is the stereotype true, that women nowadays really do think that all men are predators and would kind of prefer if we just all went away forever?
I don't doubt that a lot of men are overly forward creeps, but that seems like it kind of screws the game for the rest of us shy/sensitive types.
"The fake UFO attack sounds somewhat probable. After all that's what I'd do if I had a few spare aircrafts that look alien enough, a few spare bucks in one hand, US govt in another, and an ambition of taking over the world."
The idea has surfaced in science fiction quite often, yes, and it's a staple theme of the UFO mythos. And there are recurring hints that higher technology exists in US research centres than the mainstream military have access to.
The problem I have with that theory is that even if you had a really cool spaceship, actually leveraging that to take over the world seems like it would be a lot harder to pull off in real life than for a Bond villain. People make mistakes, and even henchmen have to eat sometimes. Maintaining supply chains is tricky. And as Iraq shows, a high tech military in a medium-tech culture that really really wants them gone doesn't have that much of an edge.
Try to take over the whole world, and it's Iraq times a billion. Hope you've swotted up the Evil Overlord's Manual, you're gonna need it.
"if someone wants to turn it into a movie, why do you feel like something has been stolen from you?"
There *is* a rare commodity here, though, that has been 'used up', and that's the position of "only existing movie adaptation of [work X]".
It's a bit like brand identity. The value of the work seems to work out to something like 'number of realisations of that work in all media forms divided by total quality of all realisations'.
In 1977, there was only one 'Star Wars' movie, and a bunch of Star Wars toys. The value of Star Wars was 'very cool thing'.
In 2008, there's so much Star Wars merchandise you can't breathe, but there's only a handful of excellent works: the first two movies, the Timothy Zahn book trilogy, a couple of games. The rest are mediocre at best and the official prequels are dire. If you picked up a random Star Wars product, the expected value is somewhere between 'possibly very good' and 'most likely really really really bad'. Same with Dune: one good book, increasingly wandering sequels, atrocious cash-ins.
It seems like something of value really *has* been lost by the creation of a bad product that 'dilutes' the value of a particular brand as a means of identifying 'stuff I'm likely to like'.
It might be just *information* - indexing or metadata, a way of minimising the entropy of a search - that's lost, but as all IT people should know, that's a real loss.
"It's quite another to act like someone's rights are being violated because they have to buy a new copy of a program for each computer they want to run it on."
But they are. The key word here is 'buy'.
The problem is that information is fundamentally *not* physical, so our physical intuitions about 'property' do not apply. 'Buying and selling' are concepts which describe the exchange of physical commodities which cannot be in two hands at once. The concept of 'buying a new copy of information' is fundamentally nonsensical -- it means you are forcing someone to require your permission to allow a natural process to naturally reproduce itself. A little like making it illegal to save seeds from a food plant, or breed cattle. At least the first of which we are already doing, with genetic engineering, and that's also a huge and potentially cataclysmic social problem.
This becomes a nightmare when we are creating a ubiquitous information grid densely interwoven with every facet of human thought and activity. Suddenly, doing any kind of social action involves sending and copying information -- and if someone has interposed a commercial tollgate into that grid, they stand to make trillions of dollars from others' efforts while stifling free thought, and creating the most invasive apparatus of surveillance ever known.
Profiting from others' efforts without is of course a fundamental ethic of capitalism -- there's a continum between slavery, extortion, absentee landlordism, moneylending and venture capitalism -- but that doesn't mean it's moral. Capitalists love to *preach* 'a fair wage for fair work' but the existence of unearned rent as the foundation of actually-existing capitalism makes a mockery of that.
Right, I think Stallman's argument would be that if you 'give' a homeless person a sandwich not with *preconditions* (as in a sale), but with *ongoing conditions attached to their subsequent behaviour* (as in a licence), then you're not giving them freedom, you're establishing a relationship of dependency and control.
When we already have handheld devices (phones, iPods, Blackberries, Palms, Pocket Windows) and cheap notebooks (Asus eee, XO, thousands of Wintel laptops?)
All of these devices can display ebooks -- and already are, and have been for YEARS.
My Tungsten E might be old and a little power-hungry, but I read ebooks on it all the time. Heck, even the trendy but otherwise pointless iPod has now morphed into a real PDA. Took Apple long enough, but they finally reinvented the Newton.
Amazon is way late to the party with a device which does nothing else useful. I just don't get it. These single-purpose dedicated devices are a waste of time, space, and money.
How come people like the New York Times still haven't figured out that e-*books* have long since arrived, but ebook *readers* are a technological dead end?
"We _know_ where their biases lie - borg, replicators, terminator, matrix, scary cyborgs in general."
On the contrary, I think a cursory examination of the representation of humanoid cybernetic organisms in contemporary filmic drama would reveal that the cybernetic human form is as often presented in a literally 'seductive' guise. The portrayal of technology as beautiful women is endemic in the science fiction drama (and no doubt has Freudian overtones which I hesitate to investigate in this august -- if primarily and stereotypically male-gendered -- company).
Starting of course with the oft-examined robotic Maria of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, we progress through such an array of recent examples as, for example, Seven of Nine, Six, Motoko Kusanagi -- and though I am not given to self-promotion, I should add my own portrayal of Cameron in 'The Sarah Chronicles'.
QED. It is obvious that modern science fiction presents technology not as 'scary', but as fetish-object.
-- Summer Glau
"Do you a) trade with him voluntarily or do you b) force him to give over whatever he produces into a pile with whatever you produce then decide how to use it?"
Or do you c) voluntarily decide not to *trade* but to *share* what you both have produced?
That would be voluntary socialism, as practiced by families and many tribal societies and volunteer groups, including open source projects.
Or do you d) seize control of the only freshwater stream on the island and build a poison-tipped fence of spears around it, on the grounds that 'it wasn't owned before' and the first person to take control of it (you) is the 'discoverer' and 'rightful owner', then using your poison-tipped spear make sure that the other guy can't 'steal your hard-earned water', and then when he's dying of thirst, drive whatever bargain he will agree with short of death, to take control of all his other possessions?
That's called 'enclosure of the commons' and is how capitalism actually works today, as opposed to how it works in Ayn Rand novels. Plenty of hard men with guns (such as the Mafia) see no conflict with making money and 'trade', as long as they get to set the terms of the trade.
"And Ireland? That's just horrible. And did really well back when it was ruled by English monarchists."
Except for that noted example of socialist economics, the Potato Famine.
Oh wait, the famine was worsened by merchants lobbying government to *drop* export barriers? Silly me, that can't be. Only Stalin would do something as heinous as exporting food during famine.
"The only real stronghold of socialism is university campusses and government handout centers, filled to the brim with people who don't want to take care of themselves, but party and complain."
Well, those and the Pentagon.
The United States military-industrial complex is one of the best examples of old-school command socialism. A centralised, planned economy, largely driven by external taxpayer funding and Government allocations of huge amounts of money. Those who join the system have all their needs taken care of, but in return must obey a strict hierarchy, and dedicate all their work and efforts to 'the cause'. Low standards of living for the frontline workers are covered by lots of rhetoric about 'honour', 'duty' and 'sacrifice' for the good of the collective.
That's not just a coincidence or some strange freak of irony. The creators of Marxism took their inspiration for how to run an economy from the already existing militaries of the day, and then from examining industrial production lines and 'Taylorist' scientific management. They just extrapolated the trends which began in the 19th century, and which have culminated in the Pentagon system.
It always amuses me how right-wing Americans like to talk so much about freedom, individuality, and never being submerged in a collective -- and in the same breath, and with the taxes they swear Big Government will never take from them, and with literally the blood of their firstborn children, ardently support the world's most expensive and well-armed rigidly authoritarian socialist collective. They quote Rand darkly about the evils of 'Government men with guns' and happily 'support the troops' who are those same men. They think propping up such an antithesis of all their individualist beliefs 'preserves their liberty'.
Gotta either laugh, or cry.
A brand of bricks we had in NZ in the 1970s-80s, before import restrictions were relaxed and when Lego was insanely expensive.
They weren't plug-compatible. The standard brick had 8 studs on top and 8 matching tubes underneath. The plastic was softer and often a stud would warp and get stuck in a tube.
But they sure were fun.