Second that. Darwinia is one of a handful of games I've bought specifically to run under Linux in the last six years (also: Jedi Outcast, Starscape) and which I love to bits and consider a good investment.
It's just beautiful. With the exception of a few wrinkles, like the gesture system (nice idea, but far harder to use than just clicking buttons), it's darn near perfect.
"Libertarians in no way forget the value that society has contributed to their own success, and they absolutely believe in providing benefit to society. They just don't recognize government as the agency that should be allowed to determine how those societal benefits are distributed."
And yet libertarians believe in contracts, right?
And that people or groups who own assets such as land, water, utilities, fire departments, hospitals, militaries, roads, security services, should be allowed to put whatever conditions they like on the contracts which they make with the users of those contracts, who may be in a position of complete dependence on those providers?
What is a "government" except an organisation which owns a number of community assets, and what is "law" except a contract willing entered into by residents of the area that the government covers?
If you don't like the conditions placed on your Internet service by your ISP's user contract, you're perfectly welcome to unplug yourself from their Net uplink, not pay their fees, and not use their services.
If you don't like the conditions placed on your residence in a country by that country's laws, you're perfectly welcome to leave that country, not pay their taxes, and not use their services.
Hey, it's not my fault that you don't possess the means yourself to either be an ISP or be a country. Someone else got there first and laid the cables, or placed a flag in the ground. Tough. Now they own the assets and you need to contract with them for service. Bonus, in a country they also happen to be your neighbours.
You get exactly the same situation whether you're dealing with a government or a corporation in a libertarian paradise. EXCEPT, that a democratic socialist leaning government is more like a user-owned corporation, in that YOU GET TO VOTE in the employee and stockholders meeting about the policies. You get MORE freedom about the contents of what goes into those user contracts we call 'laws', in an 'evil government' than a 'heroic corporation'.
Enjoy your libertarian paradise - you've already got it.
"(To my QA guys:) Maybe the fact that we're not available for your "quick yes/no" questions means we're in the middle of some work."
Yes, and?
Just because you're working doesn't mean other people in your organisation aren't too. You're aware that you're all on the same team, right? That work is not a competitive Quake deathmatch? That helping out a colleague isn't an automatic loss for you?
Just because *you're* working doesn't mean you should get the automatic right to hold up someone *else's* work by denying them a simple yes/no answer, which might cost you two minutes of interrupted attention but the lack of which might cost *them* hours to days of work, or cause a server to be broken "because they can't afford to hassle the developers/network team" and so they try to do something themselves without the information they need.
The question should be "what is the right balance of isolation vs interruption", because when development teams get isolated from their support and operations colleagues (you know, the ones with all the "annoying questions") they end up losing touch with the reality of what's making their products break. And then all that isolated, focused work ends up becoming pointless anyway if it's not solving the problems which are relevant to the organisation right now.
Tools like IM which can help you answer quick questions without the full-on distraction of a phone call or a desk visit can be a huge win here for everyone.
(Posting quasi-relevant comment here because I can't post and moderate in the X.org thread)
"I don't want to be kept in this consumer-lifestyle-prison. I don't want to take things from society that I haven't been directly involved in creating. Not one single damned thing. I look around this office, and every object I see is covered in the invisible hand prints of thousands of people who don't give a shit, and I hate it so much that it makes me want to smash it all to bits."
I understand what you're saying, I think, because I feel this way too -- but I think there are two separate issues which are intertwined here and need to be pulled apart.
1. I don't believe it's intrinsically degrading for humans to live in community, to share effort and tools and cooperate. There is a school of thought, from the Transcendentalists on, through Freud and Satre, and to some extent Rand, which believes that *any* kind of cooperation between individuals is 'selling out' to a nebulous 'society' and that self-actualisation is at odds with group conformity. I believe this idea of 'heroic individualism' has often, since the Beat Poets of the 1950s, become dangerously confused with true freedom -- dangerous because it is self-defeating. One can see this 'me against the gray masses' ethic entrenched in popular culture such as the Punk and Grunge music movements, The Matrix. It blurs anarchism and existentialism into a kind of generic unfocused rage against a soul-destroying machine, but never resolves into specific focused organisational efforts. It poses as rebellion but is effortlessly subverted by the corporate commercial octopus because it is in fact animated by the same spirit that drives capitalism itself: the so-called need to differentiate the self from the mob. It is a fake revolution that solves nothing, but feels good and makes snappy youth marketing.
See the book 'The Rebel Sell' for a good takedown of this mindset.
2. Money is a bad way of solving a worse problem, which is that people often seem unmotivated to work on problems of value to the group (which is to say, problems vital to their own personal self-interest but on a long-term horizon). It is a bad solution because as you correctly observe, money distorts the true value of things, it subverts a person's natural intuition about reality. With the rise of global speculation, our money systems are becoming unhinged and increasingly separated from actual reality, judging a sort of casino / popularity contest. When markets crash, as they periodically do, it becomes obvious how disconnected from reality they are -- but then we forget and trust them again.
Compartmentalisation, disconnection, and outsourcing of work are not *in themselves* bad, I think. They enable us to work on huge tasks such as building space stations and the Internet that are beyond any one person's capacity. But when 'can I make money doing this' becomes the *primary* driver of people's work rather than 'is this the best use of my skills and time and the best thing I can be doing for the planet' -- then yes, we have a problem, and the work we are doing is probably contributing the the world's pain rather than fixing it.
Alfie Kohn's 'Punished by Rewards' is an interesting look at the problem of distorted incentives and how doing things for reward rather than love can actually *disincentivise* people.
3. We need to realise that 'I was just making money' fails the Nuremburg defense in the same way as 'I was just following orders'. But 'I will go live on my own in the woods' is not a solution either. We need alternative ways of organising society based on love, trust and intrinsic motivation. I'm serious. Moving to such a system will be a huge shift, it will take much time, work and pain, and will have to be done while the loveless, money-driven economy is crashing about our ears, but it will have to happen or we will all die.
The root of my big disappointment with the prequels is that there is actually a great story there, but Lucas sadly couldn't figure out a way to tell it coherently. It was a hard story to pull off, admittedly. On the other hand, looking at a broken story is often more inspiring than seeing a perfect one: it gives you that 'hey, I could do this better!' feeling which is often the key to creating a new work.
One of the things I would do if I were trying to tell the prequel arc would be to give the Sith a motivation, made their evil seductive. Sidious and Vader should not be merely trying to hate and destroy, they should have a grand vision for a better galaxy which they are willing to sacrifice everything they love for. Anakin's 'I must turn to the dark side to save Padme' moment just didn't ring true to me; love doesn't work like that. His speech in Episode II about needing to rule the galaxy for its own good was better. That should have been developed further and made the dramatic spine of the trilogy.
What we needed to see, and didn't get, was a plausible arc about how a crusading individual, while motivated from the best of intentions, can lose sight of their destiny even as they think they're fulfilling it. The Vader we saw at the start of Episode IV should have been someone who still basically believed that the Empire was achieving something important and worthwhile, until he is startled into reevaluating his life by discovering his son; but the Vader we see at the start of Episode III doesn't seem like he could become that person. He's *already* lost and broken, on the verge of suicide; instead, he should have been full of pain but also pride, something to give him a reason to keep blowing up planets for the greater good.
The original trilogy had simple, clear motivations propelling them forward: save the princess, become a Jedi, rescue my friends. Anakin needed a similar simple yet double-edged motivation right from the first movie, constantly challenging him with the Dark Side: 'save others because they need saving' vs 'control others because they need controlling'. And we didn't get that.
But maybe someone will be inspired by a failed trilogy to write that story in a different universe, and do it right.
" But then again morale has always been a tricky thing to judge. People used to think bombing cities would erode morale - but the effect is quite the opposite. Proven in World War 2, Vietnam, Korea and Iraq 1 with the "scuds". Bombing civilians only makes them angry, not "demoralized"."
One of the problems I have with widespread deployment of ground combat robots is that it truly and literally 'depersonalises' the force using those robots in the eyes of not only the adversary, but of civilians witnessing the combat.
When you're dealing with urban warfare / counterinsurgency situations, it seems like the *last* thing you want is for uncommitted bystanders to start seeing you as a bunch of soulless machine-operators killing their flesh-and-blood friends and relatives. At a stroke, you've then lost even the tenuous moral credibility you get from having actual people shooting and dying in the combat zone.
Of course, you're most of the way there already by being suited up like Darth Vader and calling in airstrikes, so this battle should have been fought decades back - but increasing reliance on robots will not help win hearts and minds.
When you're just trying to kill a bunch of people, okay, sure, robots ftw. But if you're trying to make them think you're human... not so much.
My read when I first heard of the resolution of the Civil War plotline is that the 'Tony Stark is a jerk' effect is entirely deliberate, and that it's all quietly part of an ongoing mega-event that will culminate in a 'Civil War II' when SHIELD's approach is demonstrated to be unworkable. Probably the new Captain America will lead the charge.
Notice that DC continued from Infinite Crisis through 52 and now 'Final Crisis'. Be very surprised if Marvel's not running on the same kind of big-picture timeline.
I think historically there have been periods (such as the early-mid 20th century) when Science was *very* popular. Look at old issues of Popular Mechanics, for instance, and you'll get an idea of the Science! Fever gripping America in the 1930s-1960s.
This seemed to change in the 1970s. The problem, I think, is that basic science research, despite an initial flood of change, has hit a wall of diminishing returns. Becoming informed about atoms and rockets was useful to people because it seemed like that research would be very quickly streamed into technologies which would immediately impact life in a big way.
But things like manned space exploration and high-energy particle physics today frankly *just aren't producing interesting results* unless you're willing to accept 'tweaked one tiny decimal point on the end of a huge string of digits, thus revalidating an existing theory that gives us no new implications' as 'interesting'. Most mainstream physicists seem to believe that no matter what the LHC discovers, we're *not* just around the corner from time travel, warp drive, limitless fusion energy, or any of the, well, useful things that could conceivably come from this research. Back in the 30s to 60s, it seemed *plausible* that an antigravity warp drive *could* one day be built, maybe tomorrow. But not now. Now it's all 'no, Science tells us We Can't Ever Do That And You're Stupid For Thinking We Ever Could'.
So, no surprise that nobody cares about space and physics any longer. For all practical purposes, it's a dead end. And that hurts. We were sold domed cities on Mars and jetpacks as part of boosting the Space Age (tm). It was, basically, a lie. A little white lie 'for the good of Science', but people remember that sort of thing.
The other aspect is that even the areas of science that *are* still generating accelerating results - like biology and computing - are generating so much uncorrelated data spread among so many institutions, that no one person any longer is *allowed* to have access to all of it. It's expensive to do cutting-edge research, now, both in time and lab money, and because it's so specialised, the results won't ever be able to be communicated outside of field-specific jargon - so even if you do win big (and like showbiz, it's a gamble), *nobody outside a tiny clique will ever know* what it was you did. And so increasingly, like dreaming of being an astronaut, dreaming of being a 'scientist' is something that smart people realise is as inaccessible and futile. So, being smart, they readjust their dreams to exclude Science and to include things that society *will* give them the opportunity to do, and be rewarded for.
We don't have a 'popular science culture', in other words, because the practice of science is increasingly not 'popular' but governmental/corporate. There's no room left for being a Tom Swift.
Except possibly in computing, which is why individual personal interest in science still persists in the O'Reilly Make / Slashdot crowd.
"And you'll identify these e-mail servers how? By hostname?"
Yes, by DNS hostname. It's not mil-spec perfect (nothing is), but it will be 1,000 times better than the not-even-trying SMTP swamp we have now. DNS works just fine, and doesn't get spoofed, for *finding* mail. It will work for *authorising* servers.
You can layer encryption/signing over the top, if you really want a few more nines. But if people are constantly breaking in and scrawling their name over your stuff, you might as well just lock the door before you start installing autofire machineguns.
Seriously, what the heck is taking simple, obvious measures like reverse-MX (SPF) so long to get used? Do people *want* SMTP to keep sucking?
"In the end, although a totally secure option should exist, an insecure option should also exist that is controlled by policy rather than technology, and that ultimately means laws."
No, it means fixing the huge, obvious holes in your security before you start handwringing about how your Yale lock won't stop Al Quaeda, and how that means you need to call in the National Guard.
NOBODY needs unauthenticated SMTP sending, except people who need to fraudulently claim their DNS domain of origin as something other than what it is (ie, spammers).
Just get over it and accept that anonymity of mail routing is as silly as wanting anonymous HTTP connections, and can be fixed right now.
"You are talking about a quantitative rather than qualitative difference."
No. The huge difference between space and ocean exploration is that there is no life in space that we have so far encountered.
Zero biosphere. Not just 'not much'. None at all. That means no exploitable resources (except raw rock and photons, both of which are already abundant and cheaper on Earth). Unless you've suddenly got a *very* expensive and saleable use for city-sized ingots of magnesium and nickel-iron? But you can't eat metal, not even gold. You can build ships in space out of space metal, maybe. But what are you going to put *in* them? And why burn very expensive space labour on building huge metal hulks that can't go anywhere interesting? All the fun happens in biospheres. There just aren't any in space.
Plus, it costs *more* to drop even pure space gold down the gravity well, than any
Nothing to go there for, nothing to find when we get there, nothing to sell to finance the travel. No tobacco, no furs, no spices. No corn, no potatoes, no spices, no turkeys, no raccoons. No Aztecs. No Cherokee. No oxygen, even.
Space is a zero. The big empty. The nothing. The nowhere. Less interesting than a hole in the ground.
Why do you want to go, again? For what we *might* find, should it turn out the best of our science and all our automated surveys are completely wrong?
Sending people into space *hoping* desperately against all odds to find life 'somewhere' is like Columbus planning a voyage premised not on Earth being round, but that it was actually *flat* and he'd fall off the Great Waterfall into a land of magical pixie dinosaurs. It's conceivable, yes, that we might find some exotic exo-bug on Mars that might be worth billions in commercial investment... conceivable, but not terribly likely, and goes against the trend of the last fifty years of serious space science. Who'd fund a voyage on that premise?
Why not just seal yourself up into a can and bury yourself in the Grand Canyon? You'll experience a far richer biosphere and be able to do a lot more real science there.
"I'm definitely in the inclusionist's camp... The one time I corrected wikipedia was the removal of some disguised claims to perpetual motion. The information had a few web page citations backing it up. I followed the links, because what they were saying intrigued me, and ended up at some crackpot's website. So I deleted that information."
See, you're actually a deletionist. You're *exactly* the kind of person who deletes articles I'm *very* interested in keeping. Please stop. You're making Wikipedia worse by doing this.
One of my hobbies is tracking the world of fringe science: claimed perpetual motion, free energy, antigravity devices. There's some *very* interesting stuff there, for the most part ignored and scoffed at and downright crusaded against by the mainstream science community. And yes, it's a world inhabited by a lot of strange people, kooks and fringers and frauds: BUT, like parapsychology and UFOlogy and cold fusion, it has some stuff which is very important to document and could lead to the next huge scientific breakthrough. At the very least this is a cultural history of the underside of science; it's conceivable that it could lead to more.
I don't care about Star Trek information (I can find that elsewhere), but the fringe science stuff is of enormous value. Please do NOT delete this. Mark it as 'probably wrong' by all means, tag it as 'citation needed', write scathing reviews about it on the Discussion page so that people know you're a Defender of True Science, but don't just vanish it into the memory hole. Honestly *describe* what the fringe theories are, who promotes them, when they appeared, and so on.
"Another prediction is that either Carmack (with more funding) or Bezos will join this. They both speak about developing a rocket for use on earth, but their work will be of better use on the moon. In fact, I believe that one of these 2 will hook up with Musk to do the Google prize."
2008: The Large Hadron Collider is powered up.
2009: Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, and Richard Branson announce the merging of Armadillo, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic into the 'Union Aerospace Company'.
2010: The LHC detects the Higgs Boson, as well as anomalous results suggesting the existence of wormhole formation.
2012: Mark Shuttleworth is the first UAC astronaut to land on the moon at Copernicus Crater. The landing site is named 'Zenlike Zulu'.
2016: The UAC beats NASA to obtain a European Union science contract to build the Lunar Farside Accelerator, an automated facility to investigate wormhole creation.
2017: The LDA, and the entire far side of the Moon, vanishes.
2018: Undeterred, the UAC continues with plans to build a manned Mars science base on the moon Phobos...
"Are you paying by the byte? Or is someone looking over your shoulder?"
Yes, many of us who use the Internet *do* pay by the byte (in gigabyte blocks). It's how cable Internet is charged in New Zealand. It's actually a very fair system that makes all the 'net neutrality' congestion/filtering strangeness just go away, and should be adopted by all ISPs. You pay for the data transfer you use.
It wasn't a much fun as good old SimCity 2000 was, but that wasn't the fault of the port.
What was annoying, though, is that being a commercial binary compiled for one specific kernel/glibc version, it now no longer runs on a decently modern Linux. That's a problem that Windows doesn't have so much, with its pretty good binary back-compatibility. It's also a problem that open-source games on Linux don't have either, because they get recompiled. In fact, I have DOS games that run better under Dosbox and Windows games that run better under Wine/Cedega than late-90s ported-specially-for-Linux games now do.
So commercial ports on Linux are in a bit of a technical bind, really - more than an economic one, I think. Linux is fundamentally a closed-binary-hostile environment because it makes no promises of enduring binary compatibility, except under specific retro emulation environments.
"His hope springs from the fact that there are others in this world who are aware that the only way to keep tyranny at bay is to be prepared to become it."
There, fixed that for you.
Armies and military-dominated societies aren't exactly libertarian, do-your-own-thing paradises.
Some say in ice From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire But if it had to bootstrap twice I think I know enough of genes To say that for mutation ice Is also keen And would suffice
Restated: "Giving up monopolistic rents as the fundamental driver of wealth creation and removing tariffs and subsidies are not rational ideas in a free market economy."
The scary thing is I think he's right. The Western world now has invested far too much of its economy in producing *information* rather than material goods, and outsourced the production of actual goods to artifically cheap regimes with lower worker protection standards.
The Apple iMac has proudly written on its side 'Designed by Apple in California. Manufactured in China.'
But the marginal value of those 'design' and 'branding' services which are now the cornerstones of the US economy is, like music, zero.
This is not sustainable. It's not just the music industry that will crash when reality catches up to the 'information economy'. It will be the entire global market economy.
*Markets* fundamentally only work when you're *trading* goods and services: one rare, excludable product for another. The production of information might be a service; the information itself certainly isn't a good, in any physical sense. Nothing actually 'changes hands' when I 'sell' you a 'license' to a piece of information; the universe does not natively respect or enforce any spatial concept of 'location' or 'possession' of information as it does for physical property. But if I *give* you information, now we both have it; I'm no richer, so I don't make a profit, but neither am I no poorer; but you're richer by the value of the information. I can't make *myself* rich by producing information, but I can make *others* rich.
It's a weird kind of mutated Prisoner's Dilemma, and that's going to play havoc with Economics 101.
The interesting thing is that it's not just information which plays by this weird rule. A whole lot of social goods work like this too - as does the environment. We have to find ways of supporting those creative forces which can't be accounted for by markets, and music is just the start of this change.
At least they'll be attractively designed, hip and sexy hunter-killer robots. They might lock you into a ghetto, but it'll be a FUN ghetto. They'll merely remove choice from the human race to prevent it hurting itself. The Zeroth Law is 'the giant floating head of Steve knows best'.
Come to think of it, Apple should have been the major sponsor of I, Robot, not US Robotics.
You only build a bridge once though
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Try building a bridge piecemeal while traffic is driving over it, and where every car driving over it gets a piece of its engine transformed (in visible or subtle ways), and now you're talking something closer to what building, deploying, and upgrading a production software system is like.
'Constructing' the initial version of software, as an isolated system, with no users and no live data, is only the very first step, hardly worth talking about - basically the 'sketch on a napkin' stage of a blueprint. If you're lucky, you've now created something that passes the first iteration of tests and meets the first iteration of the spec. Congratulations, you've given birth to a glorious One Point Zero. Yay you.
Oh wait. Did you think you were done? Hahaha! Now extend and maintain it for thirty years, once you get full-time users, no acceptable downtime, and legacy code and data, and in the face of shifting hardware and OS platforms and data formats and all the rest of the spec changes.
That's where the real software development job starts.
Bridges don't get upgraded every three years. Skyscrapers don't have to be built to be able to morph into giant walking robots. When tectonic plates shift and convulse under cities, we call that a 'huge natural disaster' and send in the National Guard. When platforms change the rules under software, we call that 'apt-get upgrade' or 'applying a service pack' - and expect people do do it every month.
Re:But all desktop software is now identity-critic
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· Score: 1
I should have added:
e) By installing a keylogger (if you're a telecommuter with a VPN, or if you reuse passwords between home and work systems), potentially gain access to internal proprietary corporate networks, with the ability to conduct industrial espionage or control enterprise automation systems or SCADA networks
Slashdot Mirror
Second that. Darwinia is one of a handful of games I've bought specifically to run under Linux in the last six years (also: Jedi Outcast, Starscape) and which I love to bits and consider a good investment.
It's just beautiful. With the exception of a few wrinkles, like the gesture system (nice idea, but far harder to use than just clicking buttons), it's darn near perfect.
"Libertarians in no way forget the value that society has contributed to their own success, and they absolutely believe in providing benefit to society. They just don't recognize government as the agency that should be allowed to determine how those societal benefits are distributed."
And yet libertarians believe in contracts, right?
And that people or groups who own assets such as land, water, utilities, fire departments, hospitals, militaries, roads, security services, should be allowed to put whatever conditions they like on the contracts which they make with the users of those contracts, who may be in a position of complete dependence on those providers?
What is a "government" except an organisation which owns a number of community assets, and what is "law" except a contract willing entered into by residents of the area that the government covers?
If you don't like the conditions placed on your Internet service by your ISP's user contract, you're perfectly welcome to unplug yourself from their Net uplink, not pay their fees, and not use their services.
If you don't like the conditions placed on your residence in a country by that country's laws, you're perfectly welcome to leave that country, not pay their taxes, and not use their services.
Hey, it's not my fault that you don't possess the means yourself to either be an ISP or be a country. Someone else got there first and laid the cables, or placed a flag in the ground. Tough. Now they own the assets and you need to contract with them for service. Bonus, in a country they also happen to be your neighbours.
You get exactly the same situation whether you're dealing with a government or a corporation in a libertarian paradise. EXCEPT, that a democratic socialist leaning government is more like a user-owned corporation, in that YOU GET TO VOTE in the employee and stockholders meeting about the policies. You get MORE freedom about the contents of what goes into those user contracts we call 'laws', in an 'evil government' than a 'heroic corporation'.
Enjoy your libertarian paradise - you've already got it.
"(To my QA guys:) Maybe the fact that we're not available for your "quick yes/no" questions means we're in the middle of some work."
Yes, and?
Just because you're working doesn't mean other people in your organisation aren't too. You're aware that you're all on the same team, right? That work is not a competitive Quake deathmatch? That helping out a colleague isn't an automatic loss for you?
Just because *you're* working doesn't mean you should get the automatic right to hold up someone *else's* work by denying them a simple yes/no answer, which might cost you two minutes of interrupted attention but the lack of which might cost *them* hours to days of work, or cause a server to be broken "because they can't afford to hassle the developers/network team" and so they try to do something themselves without the information they need.
The question should be "what is the right balance of isolation vs interruption", because when development teams get isolated from their support and operations colleagues (you know, the ones with all the "annoying questions") they end up losing touch with the reality of what's making their products break. And then all that isolated, focused work ends up becoming pointless anyway if it's not solving the problems which are relevant to the organisation right now.
Tools like IM which can help you answer quick questions without the full-on distraction of a phone call or a desk visit can be a huge win here for everyone.
Word.
(Posting quasi-relevant comment here because I can't post and moderate in the X.org thread)
"I don't want to be kept in this consumer-lifestyle-prison. I don't want to take things from society that I haven't been directly involved in creating. Not one single damned thing. I look around this office, and every object I see is covered in the invisible hand prints of thousands of people who don't give a shit, and I hate it so much that it makes me want to smash it all to bits."
I understand what you're saying, I think, because I feel this way too -- but I think there are two separate issues which are intertwined here and need to be pulled apart.
1. I don't believe it's intrinsically degrading for humans to live in community, to share effort and tools and cooperate. There is a school of thought, from the Transcendentalists on, through Freud and Satre, and to some extent Rand, which believes that *any* kind of cooperation between individuals is 'selling out' to a nebulous 'society' and that self-actualisation is at odds with group conformity. I believe this idea of 'heroic individualism' has often, since the Beat Poets of the 1950s, become dangerously confused with true freedom -- dangerous because it is self-defeating. One can see this 'me against the gray masses' ethic entrenched in popular culture such as the Punk and Grunge music movements, The Matrix. It blurs anarchism and existentialism into a kind of generic unfocused rage against a soul-destroying machine, but never resolves into specific focused organisational efforts. It poses as rebellion but is effortlessly subverted by the corporate commercial octopus because it is in fact animated by the same spirit that drives capitalism itself: the so-called need to differentiate the self from the mob. It is a fake revolution that solves nothing, but feels good and makes snappy youth marketing.
See the book 'The Rebel Sell' for a good takedown of this mindset.
2. Money is a bad way of solving a worse problem, which is that people often seem unmotivated to work on problems of value to the group (which is to say, problems vital to their own personal self-interest but on a long-term horizon). It is a bad solution because as you correctly observe, money distorts the true value of things, it subverts a person's natural intuition about reality. With the rise of global speculation, our money systems are becoming unhinged and increasingly separated from actual reality, judging a sort of casino / popularity contest. When markets crash, as they periodically do, it becomes obvious how disconnected from reality they are -- but then we forget and trust them again.
Compartmentalisation, disconnection, and outsourcing of work are not *in themselves* bad, I think. They enable us to work on huge tasks such as building space stations and the Internet that are beyond any one person's capacity. But when 'can I make money doing this' becomes the *primary* driver of people's work rather than 'is this the best use of my skills and time and the best thing I can be doing for the planet' -- then yes, we have a problem, and the work we are doing is probably contributing the the world's pain rather than fixing it.
Alfie Kohn's 'Punished by Rewards' is an interesting look at the problem of distorted incentives and how doing things for reward rather than love can actually *disincentivise* people.
3. We need to realise that 'I was just making money' fails the Nuremburg defense in the same way as 'I was just following orders'. But 'I will go live on my own in the woods' is not a solution either. We need alternative ways of organising society based on love, trust and intrinsic motivation. I'm serious. Moving to such a system will be a huge shift, it will take much time, work and pain, and will have to be done while the loveless, money-driven economy is crashing about our ears, but it will have to happen or we will all die.
The root of my big disappointment with the prequels is that there is actually a great story there, but Lucas sadly couldn't figure out a way to tell it coherently. It was a hard story to pull off, admittedly. On the other hand, looking at a broken story is often more inspiring than seeing a perfect one: it gives you that 'hey, I could do this better!' feeling which is often the key to creating a new work.
One of the things I would do if I were trying to tell the prequel arc would be to give the Sith a motivation, made their evil seductive. Sidious and Vader should not be merely trying to hate and destroy, they should have a grand vision for a better galaxy which they are willing to sacrifice everything they love for. Anakin's 'I must turn to the dark side to save Padme' moment just didn't ring true to me; love doesn't work like that. His speech in Episode II about needing to rule the galaxy for its own good was better. That should have been developed further and made the dramatic spine of the trilogy.
What we needed to see, and didn't get, was a plausible arc about how a crusading individual, while motivated from the best of intentions, can lose sight of their destiny even as they think they're fulfilling it. The Vader we saw at the start of Episode IV should have been someone who still basically believed that the Empire was achieving something important and worthwhile, until he is startled into reevaluating his life by discovering his son; but the Vader we see at the start of Episode III doesn't seem like he could become that person. He's *already* lost and broken, on the verge of suicide; instead, he should have been full of pain but also pride, something to give him a reason to keep blowing up planets for the greater good.
The original trilogy had simple, clear motivations propelling them forward: save the princess, become a Jedi, rescue my friends. Anakin needed a similar simple yet double-edged motivation right from the first movie, constantly challenging him with the Dark Side: 'save others because they need saving' vs 'control others because they need controlling'. And we didn't get that.
But maybe someone will be inspired by a failed trilogy to write that story in a different universe, and do it right.
" But then again morale has always been a tricky thing to judge. People used to think bombing cities would erode morale - but the effect is quite the opposite. Proven in World War 2, Vietnam, Korea and Iraq 1 with the "scuds". Bombing civilians only makes them angry, not "demoralized"."
One of the problems I have with widespread deployment of ground combat robots is that it truly and literally 'depersonalises' the force using those robots in the eyes of not only the adversary, but of civilians witnessing the combat.
When you're dealing with urban warfare / counterinsurgency situations, it seems like the *last* thing you want is for uncommitted bystanders to start seeing you as a bunch of soulless machine-operators killing their flesh-and-blood friends and relatives. At a stroke, you've then lost even the tenuous moral credibility you get from having actual people shooting and dying in the combat zone.
Of course, you're most of the way there already by being suited up like Darth Vader and calling in airstrikes, so this battle should have been fought decades back - but increasing reliance on robots will not help win hearts and minds.
When you're just trying to kill a bunch of people, okay, sure, robots ftw. But if you're trying to make them think you're human... not so much.
My read when I first heard of the resolution of the Civil War plotline is that the 'Tony Stark is a jerk' effect is entirely deliberate, and that it's all quietly part of an ongoing mega-event that will culminate in a 'Civil War II' when SHIELD's approach is demonstrated to be unworkable. Probably the new Captain America will lead the charge.
Notice that DC continued from Infinite Crisis through 52 and now 'Final Crisis'. Be very surprised if Marvel's not running on the same kind of big-picture timeline.
I think historically there have been periods (such as the early-mid 20th century) when Science was *very* popular. Look at old issues of Popular Mechanics, for instance, and you'll get an idea of the Science! Fever gripping America in the 1930s-1960s.
This seemed to change in the 1970s. The problem, I think, is that basic science research, despite an initial flood of change, has hit a wall of diminishing returns. Becoming informed about atoms and rockets was useful to people because it seemed like that research would be very quickly streamed into technologies which would immediately impact life in a big way.
But things like manned space exploration and high-energy particle physics today frankly *just aren't producing interesting results* unless you're willing to accept 'tweaked one tiny decimal point on the end of a huge string of digits, thus revalidating an existing theory that gives us no new implications' as 'interesting'. Most mainstream physicists seem to believe that no matter what the LHC discovers, we're *not* just around the corner from time travel, warp drive, limitless fusion energy, or any of the, well, useful things that could conceivably come from this research. Back in the 30s to 60s, it seemed *plausible* that an antigravity warp drive *could* one day be built, maybe tomorrow. But not now. Now it's all 'no, Science tells us We Can't Ever Do That And You're Stupid For Thinking We Ever Could'.
So, no surprise that nobody cares about space and physics any longer. For all practical purposes, it's a dead end. And that hurts. We were sold domed cities on Mars and jetpacks as part of boosting the Space Age (tm). It was, basically, a lie. A little white lie 'for the good of Science', but people remember that sort of thing.
The other aspect is that even the areas of science that *are* still generating accelerating results - like biology and computing - are generating so much uncorrelated data spread among so many institutions, that no one person any longer is *allowed* to have access to all of it. It's expensive to do cutting-edge research, now, both in time and lab money, and because it's so specialised, the results won't ever be able to be communicated outside of field-specific jargon - so even if you do win big (and like showbiz, it's a gamble), *nobody outside a tiny clique will ever know* what it was you did. And so increasingly, like dreaming of being an astronaut, dreaming of being a 'scientist' is something that smart people realise is as inaccessible and futile. So, being smart, they readjust their dreams to exclude Science and to include things that society *will* give them the opportunity to do, and be rewarded for.
We don't have a 'popular science culture', in other words, because the practice of science is increasingly not 'popular' but governmental/corporate. There's no room left for being a Tom Swift.
Except possibly in computing, which is why individual personal interest in science still persists in the O'Reilly Make / Slashdot crowd.
"And you'll identify these e-mail servers how? By hostname?"
Yes, by DNS hostname. It's not mil-spec perfect (nothing is), but it will be 1,000 times better than the not-even-trying SMTP swamp we have now. DNS works just fine, and doesn't get spoofed, for *finding* mail. It will work for *authorising* servers.
You can layer encryption/signing over the top, if you really want a few more nines. But if people are constantly breaking in and scrawling their name over your stuff, you might as well just lock the door before you start installing autofire machineguns.
Seriously, what the heck is taking simple, obvious measures like reverse-MX (SPF) so long to get used? Do people *want* SMTP to keep sucking?
"In the end, although a totally secure option should exist, an insecure option should also exist that is controlled by policy rather than technology, and that ultimately means laws."
No, it means fixing the huge, obvious holes in your security before you start handwringing about how your Yale lock won't stop Al Quaeda, and how that means you need to call in the National Guard.
NOBODY needs unauthenticated SMTP sending, except people who need to fraudulently claim their DNS domain of origin as something other than what it is (ie, spammers).
Just get over it and accept that anonymity of mail routing is as silly as wanting anonymous HTTP connections, and can be fixed right now.
"You are talking about a quantitative rather than qualitative difference."
No. The huge difference between space and ocean exploration is that there is no life in space that we have so far encountered.
Zero biosphere. Not just 'not much'. None at all. That means no exploitable resources (except raw rock and photons, both of which are already abundant and cheaper on Earth). Unless you've suddenly got a *very* expensive and saleable use for city-sized ingots of magnesium and nickel-iron? But you can't eat metal, not even gold. You can build ships in space out of space metal, maybe. But what are you going to put *in* them? And why burn very expensive space labour on building huge metal hulks that can't go anywhere interesting? All the fun happens in biospheres. There just aren't any in space.
Plus, it costs *more* to drop even pure space gold down the gravity well, than any
Nothing to go there for, nothing to find when we get there, nothing to sell to finance the travel. No tobacco, no furs, no spices. No corn, no potatoes, no spices, no turkeys, no raccoons. No Aztecs. No Cherokee. No oxygen, even.
Space is a zero. The big empty. The nothing. The nowhere. Less interesting than a hole in the ground.
Why do you want to go, again? For what we *might* find, should it turn out the best of our science and all our automated surveys are completely wrong?
Sending people into space *hoping* desperately against all odds to find life 'somewhere' is like Columbus planning a voyage premised not on Earth being round, but that it was actually *flat* and he'd fall off the Great Waterfall into a land of magical pixie dinosaurs. It's conceivable, yes, that we might find some exotic exo-bug on Mars that might be worth billions in commercial investment... conceivable, but not terribly likely, and goes against the trend of the last fifty years of serious space science. Who'd fund a voyage on that premise?
Why not just seal yourself up into a can and bury yourself in the Grand Canyon? You'll experience a far richer biosphere and be able to do a lot more real science there.
"but I'd be shocked if we haven't all accidentally sent debug code to production at some point or another."
Yep, even Cheyenne Mountain has done this.
"I'm definitely in the inclusionist's camp... The one time I corrected wikipedia was the removal of some disguised claims to perpetual motion. The information had a few web page citations backing it up. I followed the links, because what they were saying intrigued me, and ended up at some crackpot's website. So I deleted that information."
See, you're actually a deletionist. You're *exactly* the kind of person who deletes articles I'm *very* interested in keeping. Please stop. You're making Wikipedia worse by doing this.
One of my hobbies is tracking the world of fringe science: claimed perpetual motion, free energy, antigravity devices. There's some *very* interesting stuff there, for the most part ignored and scoffed at and downright crusaded against by the mainstream science community. And yes, it's a world inhabited by a lot of strange people, kooks and fringers and frauds: BUT, like parapsychology and UFOlogy and cold fusion, it has some stuff which is very important to document and could lead to the next huge scientific breakthrough. At the very least this is a cultural history of the underside of science; it's conceivable that it could lead to more.
I don't care about Star Trek information (I can find that elsewhere), but the fringe science stuff is of enormous value. Please do NOT delete this. Mark it as 'probably wrong' by all means, tag it as 'citation needed', write scathing reviews about it on the Discussion page so that people know you're a Defender of True Science, but don't just vanish it into the memory hole. Honestly *describe* what the fringe theories are, who promotes them, when they appeared, and so on.
This is important.
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1389&category=Environment
.JPG of 'alien' symbols for Ludovico Granchi in Rio, 1988: http://www.earthfiles.com/Images/news/T/TexasSymbols1988GranchiLo.jpg )
(The section about halfway down, the
This is the smoking gun. It's only a matter of time, folks, before the hyper-dimensional mice are dissecting our brains.
Watch the skies! And the cheese.
The rubber hits the road when you back the wrong buzzing horse off a running platform that's not on the right track, and have to ditch it.
I love business metaphors.
"Another prediction is that either Carmack (with more funding) or Bezos will join this. They both speak about developing a rocket for use on earth, but their work will be of better use on the moon. In fact, I believe that one of these 2 will hook up with Musk to do the Google prize."
2008: The Large Hadron Collider is powered up.
2009: Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, and Richard Branson announce the merging of Armadillo, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic into the 'Union Aerospace Company'.
2010: The LHC detects the Higgs Boson, as well as anomalous results suggesting the existence of wormhole formation.
2012: Mark Shuttleworth is the first UAC astronaut to land on the moon at Copernicus Crater. The landing site is named 'Zenlike Zulu'.
2016: The UAC beats NASA to obtain a European Union science contract to build the Lunar Farside Accelerator, an automated facility to investigate wormhole creation.
2017: The LDA, and the entire far side of the Moon, vanishes.
2018: Undeterred, the UAC continues with plans to build a manned Mars science base on the moon Phobos...
"Are you paying by the byte? Or is someone looking over your shoulder?"
Yes, many of us who use the Internet *do* pay by the byte (in gigabyte blocks). It's how cable Internet is charged in New Zealand. It's actually a very fair system that makes all the 'net neutrality' congestion/filtering strangeness just go away, and should be adopted by all ISPs. You pay for the data transfer you use.
"History, like sausages, is a process whose benefits are better (more comfortably) enjoyed than understood."
Except for the pig.
It wasn't a much fun as good old SimCity 2000 was, but that wasn't the fault of the port.
What was annoying, though, is that being a commercial binary compiled for one specific kernel/glibc version, it now no longer runs on a decently modern Linux. That's a problem that Windows doesn't have so much, with its pretty good binary back-compatibility. It's also a problem that open-source games on Linux don't have either, because they get recompiled. In fact, I have DOS games that run better under Dosbox and Windows games that run better under Wine/Cedega than late-90s ported-specially-for-Linux games now do.
So commercial ports on Linux are in a bit of a technical bind, really - more than an economic one, I think. Linux is fundamentally a closed-binary-hostile environment because it makes no promises of enduring binary compatibility, except under specific retro emulation environments.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
It's basically just a matter of tweaking it and putting some real data in.
"His hope springs from the fact that there are others in this world who are aware that the only way to keep tyranny at bay is to be prepared to become it."
There, fixed that for you.
Armies and military-dominated societies aren't exactly libertarian, do-your-own-thing paradises.
Some say in ice
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire
But if it had to bootstrap twice
I think I know enough of genes
To say that for mutation ice
Is also keen
And would suffice
Restated: "Giving up monopolistic rents as the fundamental driver of wealth creation and removing tariffs and subsidies are not rational ideas in a free market economy."
The scary thing is I think he's right. The Western world now has invested far too much of its economy in producing *information* rather than material goods, and outsourced the production of actual goods to artifically cheap regimes with lower worker protection standards.
The Apple iMac has proudly written on its side 'Designed by Apple in California. Manufactured in China.'
But the marginal value of those 'design' and 'branding' services which are now the cornerstones of the US economy is, like music, zero.
This is not sustainable. It's not just the music industry that will crash when reality catches up to the 'information economy'. It will be the entire global market economy.
*Markets* fundamentally only work when you're *trading* goods and services: one rare, excludable product for another. The production of information might be a service; the information itself certainly isn't a good, in any physical sense. Nothing actually 'changes hands' when I 'sell' you a 'license' to a piece of information; the universe does not natively respect or enforce any spatial concept of 'location' or 'possession' of information as it does for physical property. But if I *give* you information, now we both have it; I'm no richer, so I don't make a profit, but neither am I no poorer; but you're richer by the value of the information. I can't make *myself* rich by producing information, but I can make *others* rich.
It's a weird kind of mutated Prisoner's Dilemma, and that's going to play havoc with Economics 101.
The interesting thing is that it's not just information which plays by this weird rule. A whole lot of social goods work like this too - as does the environment. We have to find ways of supporting those creative forces which can't be accounted for by markets, and music is just the start of this change.
We must love one another, or die.
At least they'll be attractively designed, hip and sexy hunter-killer robots. They might lock you into a ghetto, but it'll be a FUN ghetto. They'll merely remove choice from the human race to prevent it hurting itself. The Zeroth Law is 'the giant floating head of Steve knows best'.
Come to think of it, Apple should have been the major sponsor of I, Robot, not US Robotics.
Try building a bridge piecemeal while traffic is driving over it, and where every car driving over it gets a piece of its engine transformed (in visible or subtle ways), and now you're talking something closer to what building, deploying, and upgrading a production software system is like.
'Constructing' the initial version of software, as an isolated system, with no users and no live data, is only the very first step, hardly worth talking about - basically the 'sketch on a napkin' stage of a blueprint. If you're lucky, you've now created something that passes the first iteration of tests and meets the first iteration of the spec. Congratulations, you've given birth to a glorious One Point Zero. Yay you.
Oh wait. Did you think you were done? Hahaha! Now extend and maintain it for thirty years, once you get full-time users, no acceptable downtime, and legacy code and data, and in the face of shifting hardware and OS platforms and data formats and all the rest of the spec changes.
That's where the real software development job starts.
Bridges don't get upgraded every three years. Skyscrapers don't have to be built to be able to morph into giant walking robots. When tectonic plates shift and convulse under cities, we call that a 'huge natural disaster' and send in the National Guard. When platforms change the rules under software, we call that 'apt-get upgrade' or 'applying a service pack' - and expect people do do it every month.
I should have added:
e) By installing a keylogger (if you're a telecommuter with a VPN, or if you reuse passwords between home and work systems), potentially gain access to internal proprietary corporate networks, with the ability to conduct industrial espionage or control enterprise automation systems or SCADA networks