IT has to screw around with stuff to make it work, that's what they (we) get paid for. If all we ever had to do was click on an install button and have everything work perfectly from there, what would be the purpose of an IT department at all? Off-the-shelf software and hardware can never be made to work perfectly for everyone's requirements. IT folks are paid to get non-unique components to work for unique requirements.
Yes.
And this is ad-hoc fixing and configuration management is, in fact, programming, though software developers tend to sneer and look down their C++ noses at 'mere' IT as if it were a nasty swamp inhabited by sub-human monkeys. Our wonderful application/webservice works perfectly, so managing the configuration and integration and data must be a user issue! And users are dumb, so they don't need programming languages, they'd just hurt themselves. Give 'em a half-baked GUI with some flying animations instead. And sysadmins are just slightly less dumb users, so don't let them have real languages either.
This is madness.
Part of the problem of IT complexity management is that we do not have decent programming tools for managing systems composed of aggregations of hardware and software in the large. We don't even have decent theoretical abstractions. 'Objects' was the best we got, but unlike functional programming or relational databases, there is no consistent mathematical foundation to OOP (not even a self-consistent definition of the phrase between OOP 'experts'!), so objects are still not consistent between systems. There is no site-wide equivalent to the 'source code repository', and there needs to be.
But more and more, even 'classical' application and webn programming is becoming about stringing together modules and servers from different vendors, and then writing the appropriate glue to work around their lack of appropriate interfaces and abstractions for the task at hand. So eventually application developers are going to be in the same tarpit that Windows sysadmins have been wading through for years. Congratulations. Welcome to our nightmare, guys. Maybe now you can help us get out?
We need sensible glue languages for IT, and we need sensible enterprise-wide data structures. The tools we have at the moment are insanely ancient and decrepit, but the new ones - object oriented whizzybangs - are even worse. At least filesystems and 7-bit-ASCII control files work, can be backed up, version-controlled (to a point), edited and restored.
But we should be so much further along by now, that it's sad.
However when you take Apple out of the picture (despite this being filed under Apple for some reason) no-one can think of a kind word for the Adobe wonder child. Oh how flash isn't open, only works on Adobe approved systems, Firefox runs on more systems etc etc....you can't have it both ways people.
I think the sentiment at play is something like:
I detest your Flash, but I will defend to the death your ability to run it.
The moral of this story: if you create an honest creation to use, rather than to sell - assuming it's a creation which is beneficial to all and not something which helps the wielder while harming others (like say a weapon or a secret process which only gives your business 'competitive advantage' in a zero-sum market) - then you will lose nothing by not patenting or copyrighting it but will in fact gain hugely, as your creation will be distributed widely, make the world more efficient, spark new and better ideas, and you'll benefit personalyl from living in that improved world.
But much of our social infrastructure views creativity as something you do primarily to sell to others, or get advantage over others. And as long as we think in that way, we'll always be threatened by creativity happening elsewhere, and therefore will seek to control and stamp out creativity in others - and view copying as a form of theft.
The world benefits from you letting them know the secret of this new wonder metal.
Or, more precisely, from not letting them know the secret, since that's what patents boil down to in practice. People theoretically 'know the secret', but they are forbidden from practicing it under pain of having men with suits and guns have stern conversations with them in concrete rooms.
So patents are actually about deliberately slowing the improvement of the world until they expire, and deliberately using that regulated vacuum of innovation to create commercial profit - in the absence of what the market would normally do, which is to tell everyone, copy the useful innovation, and imemdiately put it to work creating instant value for everyone. Use value, not exchange value - but our market system values exchange value far more than it does use value.
(How much do stay-at-home parents contribute to the national GDP? How much value do they create in reality?)
But hopefully the commercial entity which filed the patent in the first place, will then plow some of its profits back into creating new useful arts and techniques sometime in the future. And sometimes they even do! It's an economic miracle!
"However, I think we can all agree now that GPL V3 was a good idea because it would prevent our current situation of half-open devices."
No, we can't.
Open software is open software. It does not come with any promise that you have hardware that you can retask as you please.
Right, and (sigh) because of the existence of this viewpoint, now I understand why Richard Stallman was always so careful to distinguish Free Software from merely Open Source.
Freedom, in the Free Software sense, is about the positive rights of the user - it starts by asking 'what can the user do to change their system?' under the assumption that the user being able to change their system is a good and right and creative thing which adds value to everyone. Obviously, from this mindset, restricting the hardware, while it may not technically be a 'software' issue, is very much antithetical to the spirit of user freedom and will result (as a byproduct) in loss of creativity and utility to the whole economy. Because Free Software assumes that the users are the drivers of innovation, not vendors, and that ultimately the creation of all software must devolve from a market base to voluntary user-led projects, at all point pushing creativity and control to the edges.
Open Source, on the other hand, focuses purely and narrowly on a specific technical issue - the availability of software source code - and refuses to look at hardware. Because it comes from a different viewpoint, which sees the user desire for freedom and the vendor's desire for control as something more like counterbalanced forces, both of which contribute but neither of which should dominate the exchange. And while it does honestly value openness, it tends to be more 'pragmatic' and sympathetic to the idea that value, creativity and innovation really comes from the vendors, operating under commercial competition, and so tends to give vendors more slack when they want to restrict things on the grounds that 'well they do need to make money, and we don't want to become fanatical extremists about this 'user freedom' thing. We still need vendors to make choices for us and we'll partner with them.'
The difference is more than a mere subtlety. While both groups are talking about software, they tend to agree. But on issues like hardware and the rise of cloud systems, the Open Source people are more likely to become irritated with even raising the issue of freedom - until they've been bitten by an actual threat. They walk right into the BitKeepers and Facebooks and GIFs and H.264s and Apple App Stores of the world and don't notice the potential for exploitation until it actually happens. This is because of their pragmatic 'loose consensus and working code' attitude - while the Free Software people, being philosophers and lawyers, seem fluffier but are are a bit more imaginative and proactive in their sensing of potential threats and exploits, having run through these scenarios in their minds.
It does take both types to get things done, but we really should be paying more attention to the (sigh) Stallmans of the world, because despite his bad personal habits, he really is right.
So what did you do to protect the environment in this case? Well, the ship was towed outside the environment. Into another environment. No no no, it was towed beyond the environment. It's not in the environment. But from one environment to another environment. No it's not in an environment. It's beyond the environment. It's been towed beyond the environment. Well what's out there? Nothing's out there! But there must be something out there! There is nothing out there. All there is is sea, and birds, and fish. And? And 20,000 tons of crude oil. And what else? And a fire. And anything else? And the part of the ship that the front fell off.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Indeed. It's interesting that that was pretty much Russell T Davies' approach to Doctor Who plots, especially in the final season: just crank the sturm und drang into overdrive without too much care for logical sense.
The Master isn't a big enough villain? Bring on the Timelords! The End of Time ITSELF! only it isn't but never mind. Louder! Bigger! Faster! More! Then reset it all and move on.
So: one drop of Red Matter kills a planet? Great, that's intense! But for the finale we need MORE intensity! So use the whole lot! Don't care about the size of the explosion or logical sense. Just more, more, more of everything but the heroes escape because they're heroes.
It's a consistent artistic philosophy, in the sense of not caring about consistency at all, but a little goes a very long way. I'm intrigued though why two major 2000s pop-culture writers both adopted the same stance at the same time. Something about our cultural zeitgeist? A sort of deliberate postmodern/'slipstream' aesthetic, deliberately discarding reason in favour of bigness?
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
Just remember to check your junk mail otherwise you'll have trouble getting the Babel Fish from the vending machine.
How would you feel if Google lied about doing this intentionally and they were ACTUALLY gathering the information for various entities...how about, say, the US Government??
'If'? You think they aren't already?
It's entirely possible that the US intelligence community is extremely dumb, but if they're not, they will have been having quiet little talks with all the big industry players since about 2001. Put packet-level access points in ISP interconnects, sure, but why go to all the trouble of refining primary packet streams when you could get pre-filtered datasets for free?
Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MSN are all in the business of collecting data and mining it. The intelligence boys are in the business of getting data collected and mined. It seems like it would be a logical and large customer for data services.
Google doesn't cooperate with the Feds, you say. Ok. But doesn't the PATRIOT Act require companies to lie about any deals they may sign?
At least, that's exactly what I would do if I were a high-level spook. But then I have a nasty sneaky suspicious mind, which spies don't.
I'd also be having quiet words with Blackberry. Nice Canadian company, used by most large businesses, and all that email data gets routed through its servers. Of course it's all encrypted and not even the NSA has backdoor keys, right? But they have a good enough security clearance to be used by Obama, so, maybe they signed some deals too? Nah, would never happen.
Would be a data-collection strategy worth pursuing if I were dot gov, is what I'm saying. And that's why I don't use Gmail.
I say spread out into space. If we only have a few thousand people per rock (think rings of Jupiter and Saturn), a terrorist can only wipe out a few thousand people. Spreading anything throughout the entire solar system is impractical - most of it will fall into the sun/a gas giant and the rest will break up on collision at over a kilometer per second. Delivery mechanisms like missiles can be detected and shot down with lasers (that takes care of thermonuclear war destroying everything as well).
But what about the much cheaper approach of biological weapons? Or even just trade embargoes?
Unless it's led by fanatic isolationists, human presence in space is always going to be part of a strongly linked web of travel and trade, and any social, biological or economic disaster is likely to spread to all of them just like wars and plagues have always spread throughout Earth empires.
Wouldn't the analogy of 'the color cycling stopping' imply that there are three detectable states of the shirt: red, blue, and indeterminate?
Is that actually the case? Can you take a measurement of a quantum system at any time and determine that it is, in fact, indeterminate? Or does taking that measurement always cause its state to be determined?
Instead they used Bliss' symbols as a sort of rebus: One kid who wanted to go as a vampire on halloween pointed to the signs for "dark", "man", "blood", "mouth" etc.
And that's why George Orwell was wrong about Newspeak in 1984. Human intelligence always finds a way to creatively extend any broken symbol-system into a true language, and that's a good thing.
It's also why I'm very frustrated by the current trend in GUIs away from generativity and towards locked-down task-based interfaces. Icons in themselves aren't necessarily brain-damaging, but if you don't let people mix and combine them, then they become something much less than a language when they could be so much more.
The existence of two separate father-son presidencies in 150 years suggests that perhaps nothing much has changed in terms of the concentration of political power over that time.
"Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."
Some time later...
"I'm afraid you will find that it is you who are mistaken... about a great many things. Vader never told you what really happened on Tattoine.."
"He told me enough. He told me... too much actually... uh... Midichlorians... younglings... something about sandpeople? And Leia's my sister? Look, whatever dark family secret you're hiding, I'm sure I've already figured it out."
"Oh no, it was not Shmi's death at the hands of Sandpeople which drove him to the dark side. It was finding out that *I* am Senator Palpatine!"
"Grandma?????"
"All the better to eat you with! Muhahaha! And your little dog too!"
"..."
"Wait, that came out weird. But seriously, kid, welcome to the family. Oh, and Ben Kenobi really is your uncle. That one, we DON'T talk about."
Sure you become more vulnerable to cascade effects, but you also get plenty of benefits like significantly increased liquidity.
Explain how stock trading liquidity is a benefit in and of itself - to human society and the Earth's biosphere - rather than as a benefit only to those wanting to extract wealth from the markets due to volatility.
Remember that extracting wealth from the markets and transferring it from one account to another is not the same thing as 'profit', because it reduces the wealth available to actual productive investment - the corporate processes which do not and cannot change any faster than the time it takes to gear-up a factory or harvest a crop.
Remember also that every trade on the market which is not directly linked to the true value of a stock actively destroys information because it introduces noise into the market, polluting the use of that stock's trading symbol as a measure of real wealth (rather than imaginary fantasy wealth).
Explain clearly how, despite the information-destroying nature of speculation, nevertheless 'providing liquidity' to enable this destruction of information is still a significant human benefit.
That's simple to answer. The faster trader gets the good deals. We could put a delay in, but what would be the point? If a trade can complete in milliseconds, then why not do it? These fast mass behavior effects of the market help weed out traders with bad programs (especially variations of "do what everyone else is doing").
I don't think you mean 'good' in the sense of 'producing value for the whole system'.
The faster trader gets the locally optimised deals, yes. But as the Prisoner's Dilemma shows, the path to hell is paved with local optimisations.
Is building better handbaskets the best we can aspire to as a species? Or are we capable of applying intelligence to planetary problems before it's too late?
And when I say 'production', I really mean 'production directly linked to human wellbeing'.
If $500 buys both an iPod for a middle-class American and a year's wheat for an African village, there's no contest in my mind which is actually worth more: that which satisfies the lower Maslov hierarchy needs for more people first. I think most people would agree with this (to a point; there might be debates over exactly which needs are essentials and which are luxuries, and when ti comes to things like religion, these disputes often end up in wars. So it's not trivial, but neither is it completely unintuitive. We should solve the simplest cases first.)
But does our market system value the lives of the African villages above one person's gee whiz' feeling of unboxing an iPod?
I submit that it doesn't - and that because of that, it's obvious that market valuation is a horribly, hideously broken measure of human wealth and investment. And we should treat markets value with all due skepticism. It's a noisy indicator of true value at best and at worst an outright perverse incentive.
No, but there is meaningful data to be generated about the supply, demand, and liquidity of their stock on the millisecond scale.
I think you forget the stock is an asset itself governed by market forces, apart of and independent from the company itself.
No, I don't forget that - I directly criticise it. My claim is that treating valuations of stock as assets in themselves - rather than as representing actual wealth, ie, production - is not only worthless but is cause of feedback noise in the system it purports to measure.
Basically I'm criticising 'market forces' as being unrelated to actual wealth. What the trading public thinks an actual, literal, physical asset is worth is completely unrelated to what it's actually worth. Actual worth is actual production: wheat, water, meat, oxygen, houses, iPods. Everything else is noise.
That people want to entertain nonsense, self-referential, gossip-driven valuations of real weath is fine - until the point where the nonsense starts becoming the driver to the process of investment rather than a sideshow. Then it moves from being pointless to being actively harmful.
The average American's retirement also relies on all this "gambling".
The amount and frequency of trading of stocks should be on roughly the same order of magnitude as the practical ability of the corporate entity to reallocate its real capital.
Does it cost half a trillion dollars and take ten years to build a new refinery? Then you really shouldn't be juggling investments in that refinery more than, say, once a year at best. Because it doesn't matter how fast you trade, that refinery's not going to get built any faster. Physics doesn't work like that.
Want to speculate on the wheat harvest? Update your position once a month, maybe, which would give you some sensible weather/climate data to work with. Do it any faster, and you're not reacting to real information, but noise, and you're making the system worse.
Slashdot Mirror
IT has to screw around with stuff to make it work, that's what they (we) get paid for. If all we ever had to do was click on an install button and have everything work perfectly from there, what would be the purpose of an IT department at all? Off-the-shelf software and hardware can never be made to work perfectly for everyone's requirements. IT folks are paid to get non-unique components to work for unique requirements.
Yes.
And this is ad-hoc fixing and configuration management is, in fact, programming, though software developers tend to sneer and look down their C++ noses at 'mere' IT as if it were a nasty swamp inhabited by sub-human monkeys. Our wonderful application/webservice works perfectly, so managing the configuration and integration and data must be a user issue! And users are dumb, so they don't need programming languages, they'd just hurt themselves. Give 'em a half-baked GUI with some flying animations instead. And sysadmins are just slightly less dumb users, so don't let them have real languages either.
This is madness.
Part of the problem of IT complexity management is that we do not have decent programming tools for managing systems composed of aggregations of hardware and software in the large. We don't even have decent theoretical abstractions. 'Objects' was the best we got, but unlike functional programming or relational databases, there is no consistent mathematical foundation to OOP (not even a self-consistent definition of the phrase between OOP 'experts'!), so objects are still not consistent between systems. There is no site-wide equivalent to the 'source code repository', and there needs to be.
But more and more, even 'classical' application and webn programming is becoming about stringing together modules and servers from different vendors, and then writing the appropriate glue to work around their lack of appropriate interfaces and abstractions for the task at hand. So eventually application developers are going to be in the same tarpit that Windows sysadmins have been wading through for years. Congratulations. Welcome to our nightmare, guys. Maybe now you can help us get out?
We need sensible glue languages for IT, and we need sensible enterprise-wide data structures. The tools we have at the moment are insanely ancient and decrepit, but the new ones - object oriented whizzybangs - are even worse. At least filesystems and 7-bit-ASCII control files work, can be backed up, version-controlled (to a point), edited and restored.
But we should be so much further along by now, that it's sad.
However when you take Apple out of the picture (despite this being filed under Apple for some reason) no-one can think of a kind word for the Adobe wonder child. Oh how flash isn't open, only works on Adobe approved systems, Firefox runs on more systems etc etc....you can't have it both ways people.
I think the sentiment at play is something like:
I detest your Flash, but I will defend to the death your ability to run it.
The moral of this story: if you create an honest creation to use, rather than to sell - assuming it's a creation which is beneficial to all and not something which helps the wielder while harming others (like say a weapon or a secret process which only gives your business 'competitive advantage' in a zero-sum market) - then you will lose nothing by not patenting or copyrighting it but will in fact gain hugely, as your creation will be distributed widely, make the world more efficient, spark new and better ideas, and you'll benefit personalyl from living in that improved world.
But much of our social infrastructure views creativity as something you do primarily to sell to others, or get advantage over others. And as long as we think in that way, we'll always be threatened by creativity happening elsewhere, and therefore will seek to control and stamp out creativity in others - and view copying as a form of theft.
The world benefits from you letting them know the secret of this new wonder metal.
Or, more precisely, from not letting them know the secret, since that's what patents boil down to in practice. People theoretically 'know the secret', but they are forbidden from practicing it under pain of having men with suits and guns have stern conversations with them in concrete rooms.
So patents are actually about deliberately slowing the improvement of the world until they expire, and deliberately using that regulated vacuum of innovation to create commercial profit - in the absence of what the market would normally do, which is to tell everyone, copy the useful innovation, and imemdiately put it to work creating instant value for everyone. Use value, not exchange value - but our market system values exchange value far more than it does use value.
(How much do stay-at-home parents contribute to the national GDP? How much value do they create in reality?)
But hopefully the commercial entity which filed the patent in the first place, will then plow some of its profits back into creating new useful arts and techniques sometime in the future. And sometimes they even do! It's an economic miracle!
Sure, who cares about steel; steel is weak. What is steel compared to the synthetic flesh that wields it?
Well, eg, it is harder to poke pointy metal things into. *Splork*.
"However, I think we can all agree now that GPL V3 was a good idea because it would prevent our current situation of half-open devices."
No, we can't.
Open software is open software. It does not come with any promise that you have hardware that you can retask as you please.
Right, and (sigh) because of the existence of this viewpoint, now I understand why Richard Stallman was always so careful to distinguish Free Software from merely Open Source.
Freedom, in the Free Software sense, is about the positive rights of the user - it starts by asking 'what can the user do to change their system?' under the assumption that the user being able to change their system is a good and right and creative thing which adds value to everyone. Obviously, from this mindset, restricting the hardware, while it may not technically be a 'software' issue, is very much antithetical to the spirit of user freedom and will result (as a byproduct) in loss of creativity and utility to the whole economy. Because Free Software assumes that the users are the drivers of innovation, not vendors, and that ultimately the creation of all software must devolve from a market base to voluntary user-led projects, at all point pushing creativity and control to the edges.
Open Source, on the other hand, focuses purely and narrowly on a specific technical issue - the availability of software source code - and refuses to look at hardware. Because it comes from a different viewpoint, which sees the user desire for freedom and the vendor's desire for control as something more like counterbalanced forces, both of which contribute but neither of which should dominate the exchange. And while it does honestly value openness, it tends to be more 'pragmatic' and sympathetic to the idea that value, creativity and innovation really comes from the vendors, operating under commercial competition, and so tends to give vendors more slack when they want to restrict things on the grounds that 'well they do need to make money, and we don't want to become fanatical extremists about this 'user freedom' thing. We still need vendors to make choices for us and we'll partner with them.'
The difference is more than a mere subtlety. While both groups are talking about software, they tend to agree. But on issues like hardware and the rise of cloud systems, the Open Source people are more likely to become irritated with even raising the issue of freedom - until they've been bitten by an actual threat. They walk right into the BitKeepers and Facebooks and GIFs and H.264s and Apple App Stores of the world and don't notice the potential for exploitation until it actually happens. This is because of their pragmatic 'loose consensus and working code' attitude - while the Free Software people, being philosophers and lawyers, seem fluffier but are are a bit more imaginative and proactive in their sensing of potential threats and exploits, having run through these scenarios in their minds.
It does take both types to get things done, but we really should be paying more attention to the (sigh) Stallmans of the world, because despite his bad personal habits, he really is right.
Our neighbours are showing their true colours.
So what did you do to protect the environment in this case?
Well, the ship was towed outside the environment.
Into another environment.
No no no, it was towed beyond the environment. It's not in the environment.
But from one environment to another environment.
No it's not in an environment. It's beyond the environment. It's been towed beyond the environment.
Well what's out there?
Nothing's out there!
But there must be something out there!
There is nothing out there. All there is is sea, and birds, and fish.
And?
And 20,000 tons of crude oil.
And what else?
And a fire.
And anything else?
And the part of the ship that the front fell off.
Ah John Clarke, we love you.
Indeed. It's interesting that that was pretty much Russell T Davies' approach to Doctor Who plots, especially in the final season: just crank the sturm und drang into overdrive without too much care for logical sense.
The Master isn't a big enough villain? Bring on the Timelords! The End of Time ITSELF! only it isn't but never mind. Louder! Bigger! Faster! More! Then reset it all and move on.
So: one drop of Red Matter kills a planet? Great, that's intense! But for the finale we need MORE intensity! So use the whole lot! Don't care about the size of the explosion or logical sense. Just more, more, more of everything but the heroes escape because they're heroes.
It's a consistent artistic philosophy, in the sense of not caring about consistency at all, but a little goes a very long way. I'm intrigued though why two major 2000s pop-culture writers both adopted the same stance at the same time. Something about our cultural zeitgeist? A sort of deliberate postmodern/'slipstream' aesthetic, deliberately discarding reason in favour of bigness?
Just remember to check your junk mail otherwise you'll have trouble getting the Babel Fish from the vending machine.
How would you feel if Google lied about doing this intentionally and they were ACTUALLY gathering the information for various entities...how about, say, the US Government??
'If'? You think they aren't already?
It's entirely possible that the US intelligence community is extremely dumb, but if they're not, they will have been having quiet little talks with all the big industry players since about 2001. Put packet-level access points in ISP interconnects, sure, but why go to all the trouble of refining primary packet streams when you could get pre-filtered datasets for free?
Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MSN are all in the business of collecting data and mining it. The intelligence boys are in the business of getting data collected and mined. It seems like it would be a logical and large customer for data services.
Google doesn't cooperate with the Feds, you say. Ok. But doesn't the PATRIOT Act require companies to lie about any deals they may sign?
At least, that's exactly what I would do if I were a high-level spook. But then I have a nasty sneaky suspicious mind, which spies don't.
I'd also be having quiet words with Blackberry. Nice Canadian company, used by most large businesses, and all that email data gets routed through its servers. Of course it's all encrypted and not even the NSA has backdoor keys, right? But they have a good enough security clearance to be used by Obama, so, maybe they signed some deals too? Nah, would never happen.
Would be a data-collection strategy worth pursuing if I were dot gov, is what I'm saying. And that's why I don't use Gmail.
I say spread out into space. If we only have a few thousand people per rock (think rings of Jupiter and Saturn), a terrorist can only wipe out a few thousand people. Spreading anything throughout the entire solar system is impractical - most of it will fall into the sun/a gas giant and the rest will break up on collision at over a kilometer per second. Delivery mechanisms like missiles can be detected and shot down with lasers (that takes care of thermonuclear war destroying everything as well).
But what about the much cheaper approach of biological weapons? Or even just trade embargoes?
Unless it's led by fanatic isolationists, human presence in space is always going to be part of a strongly linked web of travel and trade, and any social, biological or economic disaster is likely to spread to all of them just like wars and plagues have always spread throughout Earth empires.
Wouldn't the analogy of 'the color cycling stopping' imply that there are three detectable states of the shirt: red, blue, and indeterminate?
Is that actually the case? Can you take a measurement of a quantum system at any time and determine that it is, in fact, indeterminate? Or does taking that measurement always cause its state to be determined?
Jane understands it just fine.
Just don't interrupt her when she's moving the ship.
"Comrade, you will sell me your oil. Remember what happened to your predecessor?"
"Yes, a deorbiting Mir toilet seat fell on him. Completely freak accident.... oh... I see... "
Instead they used Bliss' symbols as a sort of rebus: One kid who wanted to go as a vampire on halloween pointed to the signs for "dark", "man", "blood", "mouth" etc.
And that's why George Orwell was wrong about Newspeak in 1984. Human intelligence always finds a way to creatively extend any broken symbol-system into a true language, and that's a good thing.
It's also why I'm very frustrated by the current trend in GUIs away from generativity and towards locked-down task-based interfaces. Icons in themselves aren't necessarily brain-damaging, but if you don't let people mix and combine them, then they become something much less than a language when they could be so much more.
Inventing the word "skupplenap" for your new invention isn't nearly as likely as naming it something that has some amount of meaning.
And yet you're writing this on a blog called Slashdot, while you Google...
The existence of two separate father-son presidencies in 150 years suggests that perhaps nothing much has changed in terms of the concentration of political power over that time.
New boss class, old boss class, same boss class?
There's no such thing as a reasonable absolutist.
"Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."
Some time later...
"I'm afraid you will find that it is you who are mistaken... about a great many things. Vader never told you what really happened on Tattoine.."
"He told me enough. He told me... too much actually... uh... Midichlorians... younglings... something about sandpeople? And Leia's my sister? Look, whatever dark family secret you're hiding, I'm sure I've already figured it out."
"Oh no, it was not Shmi's death at the hands of Sandpeople which drove him to the dark side. It was finding out that *I* am Senator Palpatine!"
"Grandma?????"
"All the better to eat you with! Muhahaha! And your little dog too!"
"..."
"Wait, that came out weird. But seriously, kid, welcome to the family. Oh, and Ben Kenobi really is your uncle. That one, we DON'T talk about."
Fear the Libertarians! If they get their way, the government will leave you alone! Oh, the Horror!
It's not the government we fear - it's the people who have the guns. Being private contractors makes Xe/Blackwater suddenly nice guys?
Sure you become more vulnerable to cascade effects, but you also get plenty of benefits like significantly increased liquidity.
Explain how stock trading liquidity is a benefit in and of itself - to human society and the Earth's biosphere - rather than as a benefit only to those wanting to extract wealth from the markets due to volatility.
Remember that extracting wealth from the markets and transferring it from one account to another is not the same thing as 'profit', because it reduces the wealth available to actual productive investment - the corporate processes which do not and cannot change any faster than the time it takes to gear-up a factory or harvest a crop.
Remember also that every trade on the market which is not directly linked to the true value of a stock actively destroys information because it introduces noise into the market, polluting the use of that stock's trading symbol as a measure of real wealth (rather than imaginary fantasy wealth).
Explain clearly how, despite the information-destroying nature of speculation, nevertheless 'providing liquidity' to enable this destruction of information is still a significant human benefit.
Show all your work.
That's simple to answer. The faster trader gets the good deals. We could put a delay in, but what would be the point? If a trade can complete in milliseconds, then why not do it? These fast mass behavior effects of the market help weed out traders with bad programs (especially variations of "do what everyone else is doing").
I don't think you mean 'good' in the sense of 'producing value for the whole system'.
The faster trader gets the locally optimised deals, yes. But as the Prisoner's Dilemma shows, the path to hell is paved with local optimisations.
Is building better handbaskets the best we can aspire to as a species? Or are we capable of applying intelligence to planetary problems before it's too late?
And when I say 'production', I really mean 'production directly linked to human wellbeing'.
If $500 buys both an iPod for a middle-class American and a year's wheat for an African village, there's no contest in my mind which is actually worth more: that which satisfies the lower Maslov hierarchy needs for more people first. I think most people would agree with this (to a point; there might be debates over exactly which needs are essentials and which are luxuries, and when ti comes to things like religion, these disputes often end up in wars. So it's not trivial, but neither is it completely unintuitive. We should solve the simplest cases first.)
But does our market system value the lives of the African villages above one person's gee whiz' feeling of unboxing an iPod?
I submit that it doesn't - and that because of that, it's obvious that market valuation is a horribly, hideously broken measure of human wealth and investment. And we should treat markets value with all due skepticism. It's a noisy indicator of true value at best and at worst an outright perverse incentive.
No, but there is meaningful data to be generated about the supply, demand, and liquidity of their stock on the millisecond scale.
I think you forget the stock is an asset itself governed by market forces, apart of and independent from the company itself.
No, I don't forget that - I directly criticise it. My claim is that treating valuations of stock as assets in themselves - rather than as representing actual wealth, ie, production - is not only worthless but is cause of feedback noise in the system it purports to measure.
Basically I'm criticising 'market forces' as being unrelated to actual wealth. What the trading public thinks an actual, literal, physical asset is worth is completely unrelated to what it's actually worth. Actual worth is actual production: wheat, water, meat, oxygen, houses, iPods. Everything else is noise.
That people want to entertain nonsense, self-referential, gossip-driven valuations of real weath is fine - until the point where the nonsense starts becoming the driver to the process of investment rather than a sideshow. Then it moves from being pointless to being actively harmful.
The average American's retirement also relies on all this "gambling".
Yes, and that's a huge bug, not at all a feature.
In short, this is what I'm proposing:
The amount and frequency of trading of stocks should be on roughly the same order of magnitude as the practical ability of the corporate entity to reallocate its real capital.
Does it cost half a trillion dollars and take ten years to build a new refinery? Then you really shouldn't be juggling investments in that refinery more than, say, once a year at best. Because it doesn't matter how fast you trade, that refinery's not going to get built any faster. Physics doesn't work like that.
Want to speculate on the wheat harvest? Update your position once a month, maybe, which would give you some sensible weather/climate data to work with. Do it any faster, and you're not reacting to real information, but noise, and you're making the system worse.