I don't see why we need DNS any more. Who types URLs in these days? The search engines can find your content and serve it up via IP address.
And tomorrow they can send your visitors to a completely unrelated website based entirely on their company whims or some SEO or worm's search-gaming scam of the week. That's, um, awesome.
So? Art teachers or students don't have a right to make a political statement? How Hitlerian of you.
Arguaby Hitler was one art student who should have stayed out of politics, but that's usually considered just as bad form for rookie time travellers as assassinating him.
We passed laws decades against our intelligence services assassinating people.
You passed some little laws? Awwww. That's so cute! You're so cute when you vote! Who's a wonderful little citizen? You! Yes you are! You've got the moral right to self-government and everything! You've got representation in the House! And you're learning civics! You're so smart!
But don't bother Daddy right now, okay? He's gotta go to his office and kill some foreign citizens on foreign soil without a declaration of war. It's grown-up business. You wouldn't understand. Oh, and tell Mommy to order up some more napalm, okay? And we need to get the waterboard looked at.
Hee hee hee. Laws. They're so angelic at this age.
In an OO language you'd recognise that algebra defines actions upon an object, and so you'd simply implement algebra the interface against a Matrix class, and define the Matrix specific implementations of algebraic actions there. Then anything that is a matrix, is a matrix, and anything that is a matrix, can have algebraic actions performed upon it.
While I can't speak for Haskell's implementation of alebra, I'd have to say that mathematically, an algebra is far more than just a definition of "actions upon an object" in the OO sense. An algebra also defines the results of those actions, while in OO, an interface only defines the type signature of those actions. So you can happily define your interface as "supports-add-and-subtract" without defining that "x - x must equal zero". This is only half of an algebra - if that.
And really, isn't this the core problem with our Internet security crisis at the moment? We have all these OO systems implementing whole rafts of interface inheritance hierarchies, yet very few of those interfaces actually guarantee that the method calls will have correct behaviour in all cases. Just that the right class/type of objects are passed in and out (and sometimes not even that). But those types are defined both too strictly and too loosely; we generally don't have a way of saying at the language level "X is a pointer guaranteed to be within memory address range Y and Z", or "W is an XML file that conforms to schemas S1, S2, S2..." or "L1 is a list for which the following list L2 of properties relative to other list L3 is true..."
Personally I think we'll only move forward in language define when we switch from "types as calling signatures of methods which do who knows what" to "types as strong guarantees of results of operations". But I don't see any languages actually working on that. Some of the work on "contracts", maybe, but how many languages that have contracts make this the fundamental design feature?
And just like Australia, the cheater's pool will become a lawless hellhole, where might makes right, as biker gangsters fight for supremacy in the irradiated wastelands.
Australia does have *some* other places than Canberra's Parliament House, you know.
That specific question dpends on who has the gun and what they want to do with it.
Really? The primary intended use for a gun is something other than killing things? All the gun safety lessons about "Never point a gun at something you don't want dead" are flat wrong?
Sure, the wielder of deadly force's reasons for wanting things dead (and which things) may vary, but as the old quote goes, we've already established what the device is, we're now merely haggling over the price.
Rare earths are going to get MUCH more rare in our lifetimes.
No problem, the free market will always find a rational way to subsitute resources. For instance, if freshly mined platinum becomes rare, then the street price of er, 'involuntarily recovered platinum' from slightly used cybernetics will rise to compensate...
I stand by my original statement: I can't think of any time you'd want to run multiple instances of an application on a smartphone
So you'd never want to work with multiple documents of any kind? Have two ebooks or web pages open (a manual and a novel, say), and flip between them? You never do two remotely similar tasks of any kind?
I can't understand the poverty of imagination that leads to the conclusion that "nobody will ever need more than one instance of an application".
This was the entire purpose of the object-oriented desktop in the 1990s, remember: that it wouldn't need to matter what "application" you were in, you'd just have "documents" and switch between them at will. We seem to have gone 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
The once concern is a gamma ray burst enveloping the start system, eradicating all life. If we manage to leave the system prior to that happening, humanity could potentially survive indefinitely.
Since at the fastest speeds we have currently available - the Voyager probes - it will take on the order of 50,000 years to get to the nearest star, I'm not convinced that we have the capability to escape anything going wrong with Sol at all. If it blows up, we're toast, game over. Colonies or no colonies.
I mean, unless we can invent Warp Drive FTL physics, which would change the interstellar game completely. Which is why all except the hardest of hard SF scenarios just assume that we have FTL. Because the reality of space as we know it now, with the best science we have, is that we simply can't get to anywhere out there on timescales of less than millennia.
I understand that this conclusion is Not What We Want To Hear, since we grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars fantasies of near-instant interstellar travel. And really that dream is all about reliving the last 500 years of the Age of Colonisation. But the universe is not a contractually bound to fulful our wishful historic fantasies. There doesn't actually have to be a new New World out there, no matter how much we want to be Christopher Columbus II.
I have a feeling that even a ruined Earth is still way more hospitable than Mars, let alone other places.
But not more hospitable than a developed city on Mars or elsewhere.
And why are you going to be able to develop that city on Mars where it's hard to do, yet not on Earth where it's easy to do?
The problem is that Space is really really really really inhospitable. Even compared to the most unthinkable total-disaster scenario on Earth. Some of the moons of Jupiter get multi-Sievert/day of ionising radiation; a single Sv will make you very sick, several will kill you. This is orders of magnitude greater than, say, Hiroshima after the bomb.
Plus, on Earth even after a plague, you get oxygen and water for free just with a bit of decontamination, like running it through a solar still. In space? You have to melt the ice with a nuclear reactor yourself, if you're lucky enough to have ice to start with. And uranium to fuel your reactor. Odds are you'll be importing your uranium from Earth anyway, because that's where we already have the infrastructure to do it.
But people would rather live where the economic opportunities are rather than the plentiful hunting grounds of Africa.
And the economic opportunities are going to be where the people are, which is still going to be Earth.
The thing is, we can turn a lot of the harsh parts of space into comfortable space for us.
But we don't actually know that we can do that at all. The only times we've tried on Earth to build a closed-cycle biosphere, we've failed. And at the end of the day, we're going to find it a lot easier and cheaper to build lots and lots of partially closed environments on Earth, than a single fully closed environment in space. So Earth wins yet again.
Colonising space is a nice dream, really it is. And for the purposes of scientific exploration, sure. But the numbers for abandoning Earth in favour of space simply don't stack up. Earth's always going to be the best real-estate in this solar system, unless something really unimaginable - alien intervention verging on magic, for instance - happens.
NASA's funding for 1993-2202 was more than enough for them to show incredible advances in a wide range of areas. So where are those advancements?
1. REDACTED 2. Missiles 3. REDACTED attached to missiles 4. Spy satellites 5. REDACTED attached to spy satellites. 6. REDACTED attached to spy satellites attached to missiles. 7. REDACTED attached to spy satellites attached to missiles, with wings 8. REDACTED attached to spy satellites attached to missiles, with wings, but on the Internet. 9. Spy satellites, but in High Definition, and on the Internet.
Wait, you wanted civilian technological breakthroughs from the US space program?
Bingo. You've said it all. Mr. ongelovigehond appears ready to give up, roll over and die at the first sign of adversity.
"Oh, my home has been made slightly uncomfortable by (fire, flood, war, famine, global warming, giant asteroid, invasion of yucky viruses from Andromeda - any or all of these) so I'll just survive it all like we have for 10,000 years."
Fixed.
Fire, flood, war, famine, global warming, giant asteroid and Andromedan viruses combined are never going to render Earth less habitable than Mars.
There simply isn't any actual sensible reason to go into space in order to survive catastrophe. Go to space to explore, certainly. But there's no conceivable disaster - short of a solar supernova which would also melt the rest of Sol system - that could make Earth harder to live on than any of the other planets out there.
Take the moons of Jupiter - please! Io gets 36 Sieverts of radiation a day, for and Europa gets 5. One Sievert is fatal to humans. Attempt no landing there, indeed. There's no way even a full-scale nuclear war on Earth could compare with this.
And resource failure on Earth? No, we've still got all the resources right here; it's just that we're using them. If we tried recycling rather than just tossing stuff into landfills, we'd suddenly get all those minerals back.
Manned space exploration really isn't a solution to anything except the political problem of "what do I do with these converted ICBM launchers while I'm waiting for WW3?"
We NEED to spread out, so that a single epidemic, or a catastrophic event doesn't wipe us out!
There's a slight problem with this theory. Space colonies aren't going to be initially self-supporting, so they'll require constant resupply and dependency on Earth. Even once they do achieve economic self-sufficiency, a web of shipping links are still going to remain across the solar system for tourism and export reasons. So the act of spreading out itself will create a space shipping infrastructure which will neatly carry epidemics or wars to all the different outposts. Same problem as with one planet, just magnified.
And seriously, nothing short of Sol going nova (which no appreciable space colonisation program is going to survive either) or some kind of not-yet-invented black hole weapon which could literally erase the planet will ever make Earth less habitable than Mars. Nuclear war, climate change, plague and asteroid impact combined aren't going to make space a more inviting prospect than, say, Antarctica or the Australian outback.
If human survivability were really the goal, then a much better return for investment would be funding the development of small sealed greenhouses on Earth that could be deployed to desert regions. Once we can do that at will, then we can try moving that technology to space, where it's much harder. But it doesn't seem likely that we'll ever be in the position of having a dead Earth and living space colonies. 'Cause we could always just drop a colony-pod on the radioactive post-nuclear ruins of New York (or crawl back out from the mineshafts), and voila, Earth is back in business.
If they are unable to examine, update, modify, and build the software themselves there is no real difference between open source or closed source software.
This I think is an important point. The FOSS movement has so far only partially succeeded; it's created a body of software which has removed the legal barriers on user-led development, but hasn't yet removed the technical barriers. In my opinion, desktop and especially GUI software development is still unnecessarily uncumbered by under-powered languages and over-complicated development frameworks which strictly separate 'userland' from 'developerland'.
What happened, I believe, was we shifted from 'intelligence augmentation' to the 'information appliance' model.
The original 'intelligence augmentation' vision in the 1960s of dynamic interactive systems like NLS/Augment and Smalltalk and Xanadu was that users ought to be able to make small, safe customisations to their environment and then share them with other users, incrementally building a collaborative computing system that accelerates the process of thought and evolves with the users' needs. We've never yet arrived at a system that does that in a coherent manner - Hypercard came close but was abandoned, the Web nearly did it, but we quickly removed the HTML editor components from the second generation of Web browsers in favour of turning it into the Web 2.0 idea of 'TV with a buy button'.
Instead we settled for the Apple 'information appliance' model that rose with the Macintosh, and has now reached its zenith with the iPad and Web 2.0: 'TV with a buy button'. A simple, comfortable 'desktop' built out of premade 'information appliances' model built out of monolithic single-purpose 'applications' that can't be safely (or even legally) modified by the user, and create a strict division of labour between 'user' and 'developer'. It forces computing back into the old familiar model of factories and consumers, which is all wrong for the information age, but an easy fit with our old dying economic framework, easy for investors to fund. So we keep buying and funding more of it.
Sadly, I'm not sure that many of today's developers even understand what has been lost by the abandonment of the old intelligence augmentation dream. I think RMS, being an old Lisp Machine hacker, is one of the few that still remember those early days, where AI seemed just around the corner, and that's where he's coming from. Emacs tries to live that dream, it's why it's programmable; but even Linux isn't really the equivalent of an integrated, extensible, fully programmable operating system. Wikipedia is the closest approach towards this idea on the Web so far.
The first problem to solve, I think, is to make it safe for users to modify their environment and share their modifications - while rejecting harmful ones and reverting mistakes easily. That means Wiki-like fine-grained version control of everything built into the very lowest level of the OS, and absolutely (provably) safe sandboxing of shared code. But I don't know who's even working towards this.
I think it's bad business sense to basically allow the creation of a competitor
And here we come to root of the problem: the competitive capitalist economic model is fundamentally incoherent and unsustainable, because successful competition is based on denying competitors the ability to compete. And thereby freedom destroys itself, celebrating its victory as it does so.
Good luck with your future economic prospects, laissez-faire Western world. It was nice knowing you for the last 500 years, except for the slavery and exploitation and stuff. But hey, competition is awesome, amiright?
you buy s/w from me. if it does what you want from it, why bother?
Because what if it does what I want, and also what I don't want? And what if I have no way of verifying whether it does only and always what I want, under all circumstances, including the company making it being bought out or any other cause not under my direct control?
That's the situation we have right now with software security and privacy, and it's worth not trivialising or downplaying.
Of course. That's why there are laws AGAINST PHONETAPPING
Aww, you still think laws apply to the government. How sweet. Here, have some secret preemptive unitary-executive remote-control drone assassinations. They're against Certified Evildoers (tm)!
Actual Evildoers(tm) may be smaller than depicted on packaging. Evil(tm) may be posthumously inferred. Cyber-weapons may be deployed against US citizens without prior notice. Do not taunt Happy Fun Drone.
the 'global financial crisis' was caused directly by massive fraud and profiteering. is there any incentive for cloud companies to create massive quantities of products that are completely worthless and sell them to sucker investors?
Um, is that a trick question?
If you're selling something - whether it's investment, insurance, public key certificates or data backup - where the other buyer can't directly measure the quality of the product, of course there's incentive for fraud.
Here, just upload your data to Dev Null Industries quad-cached completely tamperproof server. No, your data isn't encrypted. No, you can't have it back all at once. No, we won't peek, honest, and of course we'd never sell your spreadsheets to your competitors. Seriously. Would this stock photo of a face lie to you?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why we need DNS any more. Who types URLs in these days? The search engines can find your content and serve it up via IP address.
And tomorrow they can send your visitors to a completely unrelated website based entirely on their company whims or some SEO or worm's search-gaming scam of the week. That's, um, awesome.
That list couldn't exist, obviously.
Yes it can. No it can't. Yes it can. No it can't. Yes it can. No it can't. STACK OVERFLOW.
So? Art teachers or students don't have a right to make a political statement? How Hitlerian of you.
Arguaby Hitler was one art student who should have stayed out of politics, but that's usually considered just as bad form for rookie time travellers as assassinating him.
We passed laws decades against our intelligence services assassinating people.
You passed some little laws? Awwww. That's so cute! You're so cute when you vote! Who's a wonderful little citizen? You! Yes you are! You've got the moral right to self-government and everything! You've got representation in the House! And you're learning civics! You're so smart!
But don't bother Daddy right now, okay? He's gotta go to his office and kill some foreign citizens on foreign soil without a declaration of war. It's grown-up business. You wouldn't understand. Oh, and tell Mommy to order up some more napalm, okay? And we need to get the waterboard looked at.
Hee hee hee. Laws. They're so angelic at this age.
Typo: "language define" -> "language development"
In an OO language you'd recognise that algebra defines actions upon an object, and so you'd simply implement algebra the interface against a Matrix class, and define the Matrix specific implementations of algebraic actions there. Then anything that is a matrix, is a matrix, and anything that is a matrix, can have algebraic actions performed upon it.
While I can't speak for Haskell's implementation of alebra, I'd have to say that mathematically, an algebra is far more than just a definition of "actions upon an object" in the OO sense. An algebra also defines the results of those actions, while in OO, an interface only defines the type signature of those actions. So you can happily define your interface as "supports-add-and-subtract" without defining that "x - x must equal zero". This is only half of an algebra - if that.
And really, isn't this the core problem with our Internet security crisis at the moment? We have all these OO systems implementing whole rafts of interface inheritance hierarchies, yet very few of those interfaces actually guarantee that the method calls will have correct behaviour in all cases. Just that the right class/type of objects are passed in and out (and sometimes not even that). But those types are defined both too strictly and too loosely; we generally don't have a way of saying at the language level "X is a pointer guaranteed to be within memory address range Y and Z", or "W is an XML file that conforms to schemas S1, S2, S2..." or "L1 is a list for which the following list L2 of properties relative to other list L3 is true..."
Personally I think we'll only move forward in language define when we switch from "types as calling signatures of methods which do who knows what" to "types as strong guarantees of results of operations". But I don't see any languages actually working on that. Some of the work on "contracts", maybe, but how many languages that have contracts make this the fundamental design feature?
Want a tip on how to defeat it? Watch the Terminator movies.
So, start by teaching the drone Spanish catch-phrases.
And just like Australia, the cheater's pool will become a lawless hellhole, where might makes right, as biker gangsters fight for supremacy in the irradiated wastelands.
Australia does have *some* other places than Canberra's Parliament House, you know.
Well, you requested a citation, you have received one.
(facepun)
Darn, highly-referenced academics must be in real trouble when they get behind the wheel.
Please state the primary intended use for a gun.
That specific question dpends on who has the gun and what they want to do with it.
Really? The primary intended use for a gun is something other than killing things? All the gun safety lessons about "Never point a gun at something you don't want dead" are flat wrong?
Sure, the wielder of deadly force's reasons for wanting things dead (and which things) may vary, but as the old quote goes, we've already established what the device is, we're now merely haggling over the price.
Rare earths are going to get MUCH more rare in our lifetimes.
No problem, the free market will always find a rational way to subsitute resources. For instance, if freshly mined platinum becomes rare, then the street price of er, 'involuntarily recovered platinum' from slightly used cybernetics will rise to compensate...
However I don't see any way that restricting the ability to copy that knowledge somehow helps disseminate it.
Poverty is prosperity!
Ignorance is strength!
Copying is theft!
Four disks good, two disks bad.
I stand by my original statement: I can't think of any time you'd want to run multiple instances of an application on a smartphone
So you'd never want to work with multiple documents of any kind? Have two ebooks or web pages open (a manual and a novel, say), and flip between them? You never do two remotely similar tasks of any kind?
I can't understand the poverty of imagination that leads to the conclusion that "nobody will ever need more than one instance of an application".
This was the entire purpose of the object-oriented desktop in the 1990s, remember: that it wouldn't need to matter what "application" you were in, you'd just have "documents" and switch between them at will. We seem to have gone 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
By your logic I should employ myself and write myself checks and make myself a millionaire!
Sure! It worked for Zuckerberg, didn't it?
The once concern is a gamma ray burst enveloping the start system, eradicating all life. If we manage to leave the system prior to that happening, humanity could potentially survive indefinitely.
Since at the fastest speeds we have currently available - the Voyager probes - it will take on the order of 50,000 years to get to the nearest star, I'm not convinced that we have the capability to escape anything going wrong with Sol at all. If it blows up, we're toast, game over. Colonies or no colonies.
I mean, unless we can invent Warp Drive FTL physics, which would change the interstellar game completely. Which is why all except the hardest of hard SF scenarios just assume that we have FTL. Because the reality of space as we know it now, with the best science we have, is that we simply can't get to anywhere out there on timescales of less than millennia.
I understand that this conclusion is Not What We Want To Hear, since we grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars fantasies of near-instant interstellar travel. And really that dream is all about reliving the last 500 years of the Age of Colonisation. But the universe is not a contractually bound to fulful our wishful historic fantasies. There doesn't actually have to be a new New World out there, no matter how much we want to be Christopher Columbus II.
I have a feeling that even a ruined Earth is still way more hospitable than Mars, let alone other places.
But not more hospitable than a developed city on Mars or elsewhere.
And why are you going to be able to develop that city on Mars where it's hard to do, yet not on Earth where it's easy to do?
The problem is that Space is really really really really inhospitable. Even compared to the most unthinkable total-disaster scenario on Earth. Some of the moons of Jupiter get multi-Sievert/day of ionising radiation; a single Sv will make you very sick, several will kill you. This is orders of magnitude greater than, say, Hiroshima after the bomb.
Plus, on Earth even after a plague, you get oxygen and water for free just with a bit of decontamination, like running it through a solar still. In space? You have to melt the ice with a nuclear reactor yourself, if you're lucky enough to have ice to start with. And uranium to fuel your reactor. Odds are you'll be importing your uranium from Earth anyway, because that's where we already have the infrastructure to do it.
But people would rather live where the economic opportunities are rather than the plentiful hunting grounds of Africa.
And the economic opportunities are going to be where the people are, which is still going to be Earth.
The thing is, we can turn a lot of the harsh parts of space into comfortable space for us.
But we don't actually know that we can do that at all. The only times we've tried on Earth to build a closed-cycle biosphere, we've failed. And at the end of the day, we're going to find it a lot easier and cheaper to build lots and lots of partially closed environments on Earth, than a single fully closed environment in space. So Earth wins yet again.
Colonising space is a nice dream, really it is. And for the purposes of scientific exploration, sure. But the numbers for abandoning Earth in favour of space simply don't stack up. Earth's always going to be the best real-estate in this solar system, unless something really unimaginable - alien intervention verging on magic, for instance - happens.
NASA's funding for 1993-2202 was more than enough for them to show incredible advances in a wide range of areas. So where are those advancements?
1. REDACTED
2. Missiles
3. REDACTED attached to missiles
4. Spy satellites
5. REDACTED attached to spy satellites.
6. REDACTED attached to spy satellites attached to missiles.
7. REDACTED attached to spy satellites attached to missiles, with wings
8. REDACTED attached to spy satellites attached to missiles, with wings, but on the Internet.
9. Spy satellites, but in High Definition, and on the Internet.
Wait, you wanted civilian technological breakthroughs from the US space program?
10. Being hit by REDACTED.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what they want for dinner.
Your understanding of relative ecosystem predator-prey ratios intrigues me and I would like to tour your wildlife reserve.
Bingo. You've said it all. Mr. ongelovigehond appears ready to give up, roll over and die at the first sign of adversity.
"Oh, my home has been made slightly uncomfortable by (fire, flood, war, famine, global warming, giant asteroid, invasion of yucky viruses from Andromeda - any or all of these) so I'll just survive it all like we have for 10,000 years."
Fixed.
Fire, flood, war, famine, global warming, giant asteroid and Andromedan viruses combined are never going to render Earth less habitable than Mars.
There simply isn't any actual sensible reason to go into space in order to survive catastrophe. Go to space to explore, certainly. But there's no conceivable disaster - short of a solar supernova which would also melt the rest of Sol system - that could make Earth harder to live on than any of the other planets out there.
Take the moons of Jupiter - please! Io gets 36 Sieverts of radiation a day, for and Europa gets 5. One Sievert is fatal to humans. Attempt no landing there, indeed. There's no way even a full-scale nuclear war on Earth could compare with this.
And resource failure on Earth? No, we've still got all the resources right here; it's just that we're using them. If we tried recycling rather than just tossing stuff into landfills, we'd suddenly get all those minerals back.
Manned space exploration really isn't a solution to anything except the political problem of "what do I do with these converted ICBM launchers while I'm waiting for WW3?"
We NEED to spread out, so that a single epidemic, or a catastrophic event doesn't wipe us out!
There's a slight problem with this theory. Space colonies aren't going to be initially self-supporting, so they'll require constant resupply and dependency on Earth. Even once they do achieve economic self-sufficiency, a web of shipping links are still going to remain across the solar system for tourism and export reasons. So the act of spreading out itself will create a space shipping infrastructure which will neatly carry epidemics or wars to all the different outposts. Same problem as with one planet, just magnified.
And seriously, nothing short of Sol going nova (which no appreciable space colonisation program is going to survive either) or some kind of not-yet-invented black hole weapon which could literally erase the planet will ever make Earth less habitable than Mars. Nuclear war, climate change, plague and asteroid impact combined aren't going to make space a more inviting prospect than, say, Antarctica or the Australian outback.
If human survivability were really the goal, then a much better return for investment would be funding the development of small sealed greenhouses on Earth that could be deployed to desert regions. Once we can do that at will, then we can try moving that technology to space, where it's much harder. But it doesn't seem likely that we'll ever be in the position of having a dead Earth and living space colonies. 'Cause we could always just drop a colony-pod on the radioactive post-nuclear ruins of New York (or crawl back out from the mineshafts), and voila, Earth is back in business.
If they are unable to examine, update, modify, and build the software themselves there is no real difference between open source or closed source software.
This I think is an important point. The FOSS movement has so far only partially succeeded; it's created a body of software which has removed the legal barriers on user-led development, but hasn't yet removed the technical barriers. In my opinion, desktop and especially GUI software development is still unnecessarily uncumbered by under-powered languages and over-complicated development frameworks which strictly separate 'userland' from 'developerland'.
What happened, I believe, was we shifted from 'intelligence augmentation' to the 'information appliance' model.
The original 'intelligence augmentation' vision in the 1960s of dynamic interactive systems like NLS/Augment and Smalltalk and Xanadu was that users ought to be able to make small, safe customisations to their environment and then share them with other users, incrementally building a collaborative computing system that accelerates the process of thought and evolves with the users' needs. We've never yet arrived at a system that does that in a coherent manner - Hypercard came close but was abandoned, the Web nearly did it, but we quickly removed the HTML editor components from the second generation of Web browsers in favour of turning it into the Web 2.0 idea of 'TV with a buy button'.
Instead we settled for the Apple 'information appliance' model that rose with the Macintosh, and has now reached its zenith with the iPad and Web 2.0: 'TV with a buy button'. A simple, comfortable 'desktop' built out of premade 'information appliances' model built out of monolithic single-purpose 'applications' that can't be safely (or even legally) modified by the user, and create a strict division of labour between 'user' and 'developer'. It forces computing back into the old familiar model of factories and consumers, which is all wrong for the information age, but an easy fit with our old dying economic framework, easy for investors to fund. So we keep buying and funding more of it.
Sadly, I'm not sure that many of today's developers even understand what has been lost by the abandonment of the old intelligence augmentation dream. I think RMS, being an old Lisp Machine hacker, is one of the few that still remember those early days, where AI seemed just around the corner, and that's where he's coming from. Emacs tries to live that dream, it's why it's programmable; but even Linux isn't really the equivalent of an integrated, extensible, fully programmable operating system. Wikipedia is the closest approach towards this idea on the Web so far.
The first problem to solve, I think, is to make it safe for users to modify their environment and share their modifications - while rejecting harmful ones and reverting mistakes easily. That means Wiki-like fine-grained version control of everything built into the very lowest level of the OS, and absolutely (provably) safe sandboxing of shared code. But I don't know who's even working towards this.
I think it's bad business sense to basically allow the creation of a competitor
And here we come to root of the problem: the competitive capitalist economic model is fundamentally incoherent and unsustainable, because successful competition is based on denying competitors the ability to compete. And thereby freedom destroys itself, celebrating its victory as it does so.
Good luck with your future economic prospects, laissez-faire Western world. It was nice knowing you for the last 500 years, except for the slavery and exploitation and stuff. But hey, competition is awesome, amiright?
you buy s/w from me. if it does what you want from it, why bother?
Because what if it does what I want, and also what I don't want? And what if I have no way of verifying whether it does only and always what I want, under all circumstances, including the company making it being bought out or any other cause not under my direct control?
That's the situation we have right now with software security and privacy, and it's worth not trivialising or downplaying.
Of course. That's why there are laws AGAINST PHONETAPPING
Aww, you still think laws apply to the government. How sweet. Here, have some secret preemptive unitary-executive remote-control drone assassinations. They're against Certified Evildoers (tm)!
Actual Evildoers(tm) may be smaller than depicted on packaging. Evil(tm) may be posthumously inferred. Cyber-weapons may be deployed against US citizens without prior notice. Do not taunt Happy Fun Drone.
the 'global financial crisis' was caused directly by massive fraud and profiteering. is there any incentive for cloud companies to create massive quantities of products that are completely worthless and sell them to sucker investors?
Um, is that a trick question?
If you're selling something - whether it's investment, insurance, public key certificates or data backup - where the other buyer can't directly measure the quality of the product, of course there's incentive for fraud.
Here, just upload your data to Dev Null Industries quad-cached completely tamperproof server. No, your data isn't encrypted. No, you can't have it back all at once. No, we won't peek, honest, and of course we'd never sell your spreadsheets to your competitors. Seriously. Would this stock photo of a face lie to you?