Yes, the Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund are a bunch of hardcore animal-loving animal enablers giving aid and comfort to our animal enemies. It's like, whose side are they on anyway?
Kind of by definition, yes - the money was spent on code which was then (L)GPL licenced, so yes, it was a permanent donation to the software commons. Is any part of that in dispute?
"Even 20 years later, her remarks are likely to cause uproar. They are all the more explosive as she admitted that what she said was quite different from the West’s public pronouncements and official Nato communiqués. She told Mr Gorbachev that he should pay no attention to these.
“We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.” "
And yet - it is still the language in which most desktop software and games are written to this day, and this doesn't show the signs of changing. Not only that, but some of the biggest and most prominent FOSS projects - Firefox, OpenOffice, KDE - are written in it.
Ever wondered why?
Completely coincidentally, the set of software (both FOSS and commercial) written in C++ seems to overlap closely with the set of software for which large and prominent security flaws are discovered every month.
I think the difference is a key addendum to shade the idea. Do what you believe is right, within reason.
But isn't by definition reason a method of becoming personally convinced of what is right?
If your idea of what is right is to blow something up because "God" told you to do so, that's no longer within the realm of reason.
Why is it not?
As far as I follow the jihadist argument, it is in fact very straightforward and perfectly rational:
1. Faithful (Islamic) society is being screwed up by bad influences (ie, weapons, pornography, invasion, capitalist greed) 2. These influences come primarily from the non-Islamic Christian West, with which Islam has been in a cultural war for centuries. 3. If left unchecked, the decay of civilization will prove fatal not just for Islamic society but for the planet and humanity as a whole 4. Therefore the corruption of society must be resisted with all means necessary 5. It is permissible to use violence against one's enemies 6. When engaged in an existential struggle for the very soul of humanity, it is permissible to go beyond the bounds of ordinary warfare 7. Since so-called 'civilians' in corrupt societies are morally and practically just as much part of the machine which is destroying civilisation (by their votes and finance) as their militaries, it is permissible to make no distinction between military and the civilians who harbour and support them. 8. In a total war, there is a positive moral duty to employ every effective tactic which is permissible. 9. Giving one's life in battle for one's family and culture, when there is no other option, is an honourable duty. 10. Suicide attacks merely take giving one's life in battle to the logical extreme.They call for extreme discipline and bravery and are much less morally cowardly than killing one's enemies by a distance by technology. They allow the poor and oppressed to strike back against their rich and powerful oppressors. 11.... QED, kaboom!
All these steps are in themselves reasonable and logical, though we may disagree with them. The main points where the West and Islamic jihadists disagree are 1 (many in the West would agree that civilisation faces grave existential threats but disagree that it's Western philosophies which are the cause) and 7 (attacking civilian collaborators of a hated and powerful regime is permissible - though the West isn't 100% clear on this either).
The problem is that, if violence in fact works, violence is a reasonable choice. Now if you want to say that 'it's reasonable but it's not ethical', then we would agree.
What does Randall want to do? Start the next megapixel war?
I imagine he'd want, as I do, to have a TV format in 2010 that actually uses all the pixels we had back in 2004. And also be able to plug an arbitrary video output source, such as a TV tuner, into any arbitrary screen such as a computer monitor, and forget all this nonsense about incompatible types of screens. Something as simple as a screen shouldn't be any kind of 'apples vs kumquats' comparison, it should just be a very basic size and resolution vs size and resolution compare.
As opposed to having computers in 2010 degrade their resolution so they can plug into HDMI screens with less pixels than we used to have five years ago, while that downgrade is sold as an increase in the chocolate ration.
It's not like the United States military actually has any physical power other than what all your allegedly 'private' military contractors and arms manufacturers continue to sell them under the guise of "defending the average citizen's freedom to shooty shoot shoot stuff go bang yeehaw".
And yet strangely I don't see that bastion of private free-market libertarian principles, the NRA, protesting against thse actual guys who literally give your government the power to point literal guns at your head.
There was a day, not all that long ago, where you could go to an unclaimed area, and say "this is mine, thanks."
Where 'unclaimed' often meant 'inhabited by people who were perfectly happy being there, thanks, and would rather you went politely back where you came from, but since you had firearms and they didn't, they ended up bleeding in a ghetto and stitching together explosive suicide vests in order to make a philosophical point about the transgressive intersubjectivity of the multutude versus the hegemonic oppression of the proletariat'.
You don't need to know your workstation's IP address -- you need to know it's hostname and how to use DNS.
Oh if only that were true.
But no. For example, we're doing a transition at the moment from Novell to Windows, and during the interim period we have to use raw IP addresses to connect to some servers because there are two parallel DNS systems running on separate VLANs and no, the NOC team won't give you hardware port access to see both at once and...
Of course IPv6 will magically make all of these real-life situations just go away forever, and we'll never need to memorise an IP address ever again, let alone a 16 hex digit one! And there will be free magic ponies made of chocolate coming out of every wall socket and it will be AWESOME FOREVER.
This should be looked at no differently than causing unused speakers in my house to play radio advertisements when I want them turned off.
I fully agree.
On a completely unrelated note, I just had this wonderful idea for a new marketing technique involving cruising the streets with unmarked vans and short-range radio transmitters...
Silly, you don't get the peanuts (for protein replacement) at the chemist, you get them at the pub, as well as the cheese sandwich (to save the microscopic space fleet) and the beer (to cushion the shock of the matter transference beam). The Babel Fish you have to get yourself from the Vogon hold, and your towel, well you just better know where that is at all times, is all.
Journeying to another solar system would be more analogous to Christopher Columbus going to Ferdinand and saying "I'm taking my sailing ships to Pluto tomorrow, I'll be back in a week."
Or like Lawrence Oates saying "I am just going outside and may be some time."
The kind of planetary economic bubble required to launch a manned interstellar mission with any expectation of commercial return before the end of the universe would be very interesting to observe - from a safe distance - as it collapsed.
There is no gap between stars. By the time you get close to exiting our solar system, you will already be closer to a neighboring star then you will be to Sol.
Obligatory William Gibson
on
Stuxnet Worms On
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Someone had reprogrammed the DNA synthesizer, he said. The thing was there for the overnight construction of just the right macromolecule. With its in-built computer and its custom software. Expensive, Sandii. But not as expensive as you turned out to be for Hosaka. I hope you got a good price from Maas. The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn't face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you. So Moenner died, along with other Hosaka researchers. Including Hiroshi. Chedanne suffered permanent brain damage. Hiroshi hadn't worried about contamination. The proteins he punched for were harmless. So the synthesizer hummed to itself all night long building a virus to the specifications of Maas Biolabs GmbH. Maas. Small, fast, ruthless -- All Edge.
New Rose Hotel, 1981.
Wonder if we'll ever find out what Stuxnet did in 2010, and if it did what its designers hoped.
Cheerfully ignore comments stating that scripts for changing configuration files can screw up production. Hobbyists stating such manure apparently don't know you should run unit and integration tests before deploying any change whatsoever in a production environment. Nowadays any half professional organisation can afford multiple test environments to minimise production failures caused by untested software.
I'm curious. How exactly do you run a 'unit and integration test' on a Cisco router or an Active Directory server?
Are there such things as test harness frameworks for LDAP, DNS, DHCP, TFTP, SSH, WiFi, Cisco IOS, PXE boot, MSI, SCCM, SQL Server, Windows Registry, user profile, Group Policy, VMWare ESX vSphere, and the enterprise tape backup system of your choice? How precisely do you replicate the server-to-screen configuration and physical cable patch information for a 2,000 PC and 200 server campus into a representative 'test environment'? Can it be done in a single product with text serialisation to a unified version control database for all those changes?
Cause if there exists such a product I want to know about it!
this attitude smacks of the "People should just get down and code what they need," thing. No, not really. Not everyone should have to learn that skill, and you could well be excluding people you want by requiring it.
Right. Not only that, there's a Zen thing here: NOT writing a single line of code that you don't have to is a fundamental programmer's virtue. It saves effort (which is what automation is about in the first place, right?) and it ensures correctness. There is nothing to be gained by repeating work already done by another, and a lot of potential bugs to be introduced.
So the first thing a programmer should look to do is to avoid writing as much code as possible. The programmer's besetting sin, pride, may tempt you to 'just hack up something yourself, it's not that hard' but that can easily be a trap. Do it once, do it right, don't do it again, and if someone else has already done it once and done it right then for goodness sakes DON'T TRY TO DO IT YOURSELF.
The interesting thing is that if you look at it this way, programming and system administration aren't so far apart after all. Both are now about - or should be - putting together modules already written by others. And both should be about using the best, most powerful tools and languages to describe the task at hand and how to construct it out of those prewritten modules.
The difference is that programmers are given those tools and sysadmins aren't, and that programmers look down on sysadmins as feeble-minded fools who can't code - and sysadmins look down on programmers as pampered prima donnas who think writing an application means they own the whole network.
In Windows? Not a problem. The GUI keeps you from screwing things up. You can still make a bad entry or whatever, but you can't go and break the entire server.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the command line, or that it should go away. However the idea that everything should be CLI based is silly.
Not really, that all depends how you define 'CLI'.
There's absolutely no reason, for instance, why there can't be a CLI created which has an exact 1:1 correspondence to the dialogs presented and actions accepted by any arbitrary GUI interface. Such a CLI would provide exactly the same guarantees of correctness that the GUI does, but it would be scriptable and allow repeatable provably correct configurations.
MMC was baby steps toward this, PowerShell I think is a further step. Eventually Microsoft may come back full circle to having a GUI/CLI hybrid which is actually useful.
One could argue that they're well ahead of Unix in this regard, since KDE and GNOME have been chasing the old-school GUI world where there's no exact CLI equivalent of many GUI tools.
If a process that is simple in the GUI is complex in the CLI then your system has a design fault.
+++. This.
A GUI, when you think about it, is actually nothing but a language. It's a language in which the syntactic elements are clicks, selects, pulldowns, etc (and mostly higher-level abstractions like 'this field is assigned this value, this action is taken') - and yet for some reason we never bother to export this interface language as something another machine can interact with. We usually never even export it as a standardised ASCII serialisation. I don't understand why this is. At some point in programming history post the 1970s, we decided that 'user interfaces' should always and only be for humans, not for other machines to consume. And that gave us the bitmapped windowed graphics terminal - but that is also a dead end. Progress in computing comes from automation, not manualisation. We should be moving away from forcing the user to interact needlessly with every system they want to use - the user should interact not with your program, but with their own agent, which then does all the interaction with other systems.
We've actually forcibly de-powered the user by removing all language-like features from graphical interfaces. It's a really disturbing trend, akin to the development of 'Newspeak' in Orwell's 1984. We're trying to make it impossible to 'say the wrong thing' to a computer, but that's impossible without reducing all human-computer communication to trivial babytalk. And babytalk which can't be stored and repeated, at that. It all has to be live and graphical and icon-based, but that turns its back on 6,000 years of linguistic development. Not smart at all.
What we should have done is defined a simple 'operation interface language' which can then be rendered without further embellishment in a GUI or a CLI, and that is a fully Turing-complete declarative language which lets the human say anything which can be humanly said to a computer (which is a lot) regardless of a priori 'correctness'. Let the human describe their problem or the operation they want to perform in any arbitrary terms that make sense for the task they're performing, and then let intermediate systems translate this into system-specific jargon.
'Click on icon X in window Y' should be replaced by 'send message X to object Y', for instance. Didn't we invent OOP in order to enable exactly this sort of human-computer interaction? And yet we're not using it.
It just makes me want to cry. All this 'progress', and we're not managing to integrate even the lessons of the last 30 years, we just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over. How is this intelligence?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund are a bunch of hardcore animal-loving animal enablers giving aid and comfort to our animal enemies. It's like, whose side are they on anyway?
As we begin to run lower on a given resource it becomes increasingly more viable to recycle it or look for alternatives.
Quite so. Supply and demand will sort everything out perfectly, as a famous 1973 documentary film explained.
You're a Rorshach test on fire. You're a day-glo pterodactyl. You're a heart-shaped box of strings and wire and one bad-ass f*ing fractal.
If you're married to a piece of office productivity software then perhaps you have bigger personal issues to deal with...
Do you think all that money was a donation?
Kind of by definition, yes - the money was spent on code which was then (L)GPL licenced, so yes, it was a permanent donation to the software commons. Is any part of that in dispute?
Ah, dreams of my youth, when did you wither away?
For me, about the same time I found out that Margaret Thatcher didn't want the Berlin Wall to come down.
"Even 20 years later, her remarks are likely to cause uproar. They are all the more explosive as she admitted that what she said was quite different from the West’s public pronouncements and official Nato communiqués. She told Mr Gorbachev that he should pay no attention to these.
“We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.” "
Mrs Thatcher - TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!
Are some things secret that shouldn't be? Absolutely. Are some things secret for a reason? Also absolutely.
Are some of those things the same things? Also also absolutely.
And yet - it is still the language in which most desktop software and games are written to this day, and this doesn't show the signs of changing. Not only that, but some of the biggest and most prominent FOSS projects - Firefox, OpenOffice, KDE - are written in it.
Ever wondered why?
Completely coincidentally, the set of software (both FOSS and commercial) written in C++ seems to overlap closely with the set of software for which large and prominent security flaws are discovered every month.
Ever wonder why that is?
Vampire taps!
Aieee!
I think the difference is a key addendum to shade the idea. Do what you believe is right, within reason.
But isn't by definition reason a method of becoming personally convinced of what is right?
If your idea of what is right is to blow something up because "God" told you to do so, that's no longer within the realm of reason.
Why is it not?
As far as I follow the jihadist argument, it is in fact very straightforward and perfectly rational:
1. Faithful (Islamic) society is being screwed up by bad influences (ie, weapons, pornography, invasion, capitalist greed) ... QED, kaboom!
2. These influences come primarily from the non-Islamic Christian West, with which Islam has been in a cultural war for centuries.
3. If left unchecked, the decay of civilization will prove fatal not just for Islamic society but for the planet and humanity as a whole
4. Therefore the corruption of society must be resisted with all means necessary
5. It is permissible to use violence against one's enemies
6. When engaged in an existential struggle for the very soul of humanity, it is permissible to go beyond the bounds of ordinary warfare
7. Since so-called 'civilians' in corrupt societies are morally and practically just as much part of the machine which is destroying civilisation (by their votes and finance) as their militaries, it is permissible to make no distinction between military and the civilians who harbour and support them.
8. In a total war, there is a positive moral duty to employ every effective tactic which is permissible.
9. Giving one's life in battle for one's family and culture, when there is no other option, is an honourable duty.
10. Suicide attacks merely take giving one's life in battle to the logical extreme.They call for extreme discipline and bravery and are much less morally cowardly than killing one's enemies by a distance by technology. They allow the poor and oppressed to strike back against their rich and powerful oppressors.
11.
All these steps are in themselves reasonable and logical, though we may disagree with them. The main points where the West and Islamic jihadists disagree are 1 (many in the West would agree that civilisation faces grave existential threats but disagree that it's Western philosophies which are the cause) and 7 (attacking civilian collaborators of a hated and powerful regime is permissible - though the West isn't 100% clear on this either).
The problem is that, if violence in fact works, violence is a reasonable choice. Now if you want to say that 'it's reasonable but it's not ethical', then we would agree.
However at a gbps, you are really looking at being able to do just about everything someone wants to for any foreseeable future in realtime.
What about holographic video?
Ad that to a few dozen banner ads and we could spam up a gigabit link pretty fast.
What does Randall want to do? Start the next megapixel war?
I imagine he'd want, as I do, to have a TV format in 2010 that actually uses all the pixels we had back in 2004. And also be able to plug an arbitrary video output source, such as a TV tuner, into any arbitrary screen such as a computer monitor, and forget all this nonsense about incompatible types of screens. Something as simple as a screen shouldn't be any kind of 'apples vs kumquats' comparison, it should just be a very basic size and resolution vs size and resolution compare.
As opposed to having computers in 2010 degrade their resolution so they can plug into HDMI screens with less pixels than we used to have five years ago, while that downgrade is sold as an increase in the chocolate ration.
guess who ultimately has the right your land?
In practical terms? Boeing, Lockheed Martin, ArmaLite and Colt.
It's not like the United States military actually has any physical power other than what all your allegedly 'private' military contractors and arms manufacturers continue to sell them under the guise of "defending the average citizen's freedom to shooty shoot shoot stuff go bang yeehaw".
And yet strangely I don't see that bastion of private free-market libertarian principles, the NRA, protesting against thse actual guys who literally give your government the power to point literal guns at your head.
There was a day, not all that long ago, where you could go to an unclaimed area, and say "this is mine, thanks."
Where 'unclaimed' often meant 'inhabited by people who were perfectly happy being there, thanks, and would rather you went politely back where you came from, but since you had firearms and they didn't, they ended up bleeding in a ghetto and stitching together explosive suicide vests in order to make a philosophical point about the transgressive intersubjectivity of the multutude versus the hegemonic oppression of the proletariat'.
You don't need to know your workstation's IP address -- you need to know it's hostname and how to use DNS.
Oh if only that were true.
But no. For example, we're doing a transition at the moment from Novell to Windows, and during the interim period we have to use raw IP addresses to connect to some servers because there are two parallel DNS systems running on separate VLANs and no, the NOC team won't give you hardware port access to see both at once and...
Of course IPv6 will magically make all of these real-life situations just go away forever, and we'll never need to memorise an IP address ever again, let alone a 16 hex digit one! And there will be free magic ponies made of chocolate coming out of every wall socket and it will be AWESOME FOREVER.
This should be looked at no differently than causing unused speakers in my house to play radio advertisements when I want them turned off.
I fully agree.
On a completely unrelated note, I just had this wonderful idea for a new marketing technique involving cruising the streets with unmarked vans and short-range radio transmitters...
I've always wondered why there's a War on Drugs in your country yet stores are allowed to brazenly sell them on every corner...
Silly, you don't get the peanuts (for protein replacement) at the chemist, you get them at the pub, as well as the cheese sandwich (to save the microscopic space fleet) and the beer (to cushion the shock of the matter transference beam). The Babel Fish you have to get yourself from the Vogon hold, and your towel, well you just better know where that is at all times, is all.
Didn't they teach you anything at Galactic Sub-Etha Travel Journalism School?
Journeying to another solar system would be more analogous to Christopher Columbus going to Ferdinand and saying "I'm taking my sailing ships to Pluto tomorrow, I'll be back in a week."
Or like Lawrence Oates saying "I am just going outside and may be some time."
The kind of planetary economic bubble required to launch a manned interstellar mission with any expectation of commercial return before the end of the universe would be very interesting to observe - from a safe distance - as it collapsed.
As if any of us are making a hobby out of hooking up bark controlled shotguns to our dogs.
But you have to admit that would be seventeen different kinds of awesome.
There is no gap between stars. By the time you get close to exiting our solar system, you will already be closer to a neighboring star then you will be to Sol.
So you don't consider the termination shock of the heliosphere to be 'exiting our solar system' then?
Someone had reprogrammed the DNA synthesizer, he said. The thing was there for the overnight construction of just the right macromolecule. With its in-built computer and its custom software. Expensive, Sandii. But not as expensive as you turned out to be for Hosaka.
I hope you got a good price from Maas.
The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn't face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you.
So Moenner died, along with other Hosaka researchers. Including Hiroshi. Chedanne suffered permanent brain damage.
Hiroshi hadn't worried about contamination. The proteins he punched for were harmless. So the synthesizer hummed to itself all night long building a virus to the specifications of Maas Biolabs GmbH. Maas. Small, fast, ruthless -- All Edge.
New Rose Hotel, 1981.
Wonder if we'll ever find out what Stuxnet did in 2010, and if it did what its designers hoped.
Cheerfully ignore comments stating that scripts for changing configuration files can screw up production. Hobbyists stating such manure apparently don't know you should run unit and integration tests before deploying any change whatsoever in a production environment. Nowadays any half professional organisation can afford multiple test environments to minimise production failures caused by untested software.
I'm curious. How exactly do you run a 'unit and integration test' on a Cisco router or an Active Directory server?
Are there such things as test harness frameworks for LDAP, DNS, DHCP, TFTP, SSH, WiFi, Cisco IOS, PXE boot, MSI, SCCM, SQL Server, Windows Registry, user profile, Group Policy, VMWare ESX vSphere, and the enterprise tape backup system of your choice? How precisely do you replicate the server-to-screen configuration and physical cable patch information for a 2,000 PC and 200 server campus into a representative 'test environment'? Can it be done in a single product with text serialisation to a unified version control database for all those changes?
Cause if there exists such a product I want to know about it!
this attitude smacks of the "People should just get down and code what they need," thing. No, not really. Not everyone should have to learn that skill, and you could well be excluding people you want by requiring it.
Right. Not only that, there's a Zen thing here: NOT writing a single line of code that you don't have to is a fundamental programmer's virtue. It saves effort (which is what automation is about in the first place, right?) and it ensures correctness. There is nothing to be gained by repeating work already done by another, and a lot of potential bugs to be introduced.
So the first thing a programmer should look to do is to avoid writing as much code as possible. The programmer's besetting sin, pride, may tempt you to 'just hack up something yourself, it's not that hard' but that can easily be a trap. Do it once, do it right, don't do it again, and if someone else has already done it once and done it right then for goodness sakes DON'T TRY TO DO IT YOURSELF.
The interesting thing is that if you look at it this way, programming and system administration aren't so far apart after all. Both are now about - or should be - putting together modules already written by others. And both should be about using the best, most powerful tools and languages to describe the task at hand and how to construct it out of those prewritten modules.
The difference is that programmers are given those tools and sysadmins aren't, and that programmers look down on sysadmins as feeble-minded fools who can't code - and sysadmins look down on programmers as pampered prima donnas who think writing an application means they own the whole network.
In Windows? Not a problem. The GUI keeps you from screwing things up. You can still make a bad entry or whatever, but you can't go and break the entire server.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the command line, or that it should go away. However the idea that everything should be CLI based is silly.
Not really, that all depends how you define 'CLI'.
There's absolutely no reason, for instance, why there can't be a CLI created which has an exact 1:1 correspondence to the dialogs presented and actions accepted by any arbitrary GUI interface. Such a CLI would provide exactly the same guarantees of correctness that the GUI does, but it would be scriptable and allow repeatable provably correct configurations.
MMC was baby steps toward this, PowerShell I think is a further step. Eventually Microsoft may come back full circle to having a GUI/CLI hybrid which is actually useful.
One could argue that they're well ahead of Unix in this regard, since KDE and GNOME have been chasing the old-school GUI world where there's no exact CLI equivalent of many GUI tools.
If a process that is simple in the GUI is complex in the CLI then your system has a design fault.
+++. This.
A GUI, when you think about it, is actually nothing but a language. It's a language in which the syntactic elements are clicks, selects, pulldowns, etc (and mostly higher-level abstractions like 'this field is assigned this value, this action is taken') - and yet for some reason we never bother to export this interface language as something another machine can interact with. We usually never even export it as a standardised ASCII serialisation. I don't understand why this is. At some point in programming history post the 1970s, we decided that 'user interfaces' should always and only be for humans, not for other machines to consume. And that gave us the bitmapped windowed graphics terminal - but that is also a dead end. Progress in computing comes from automation, not manualisation. We should be moving away from forcing the user to interact needlessly with every system they want to use - the user should interact not with your program, but with their own agent, which then does all the interaction with other systems.
We've actually forcibly de-powered the user by removing all language-like features from graphical interfaces. It's a really disturbing trend, akin to the development of 'Newspeak' in Orwell's 1984. We're trying to make it impossible to 'say the wrong thing' to a computer, but that's impossible without reducing all human-computer communication to trivial babytalk. And babytalk which can't be stored and repeated, at that. It all has to be live and graphical and icon-based, but that turns its back on 6,000 years of linguistic development. Not smart at all.
What we should have done is defined a simple 'operation interface language' which can then be rendered without further embellishment in a GUI or a CLI, and that is a fully Turing-complete declarative language which lets the human say anything which can be humanly said to a computer (which is a lot) regardless of a priori 'correctness'. Let the human describe their problem or the operation they want to perform in any arbitrary terms that make sense for the task they're performing, and then let intermediate systems translate this into system-specific jargon.
'Click on icon X in window Y' should be replaced by 'send message X to object Y', for instance. Didn't we invent OOP in order to enable exactly this sort of human-computer interaction? And yet we're not using it.
It just makes me want to cry. All this 'progress', and we're not managing to integrate even the lessons of the last 30 years, we just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over. How is this intelligence?