FTR, I was accused of blowing it up with an explosive rifle target. In the deep woods. In a hunting area. With a legal, registered gun. Sound like a five year bid to you?
Well - did you?
I mean, if you did blow up a portaloo with explosives, no matter where, that's something just a bit different to not divulging IP addresses, isn't it?
Free software _is_ about freedom, and about the balance between users and programmers.
I'd say the word 'balance' is a misconception. Free software is about users BEING programmers. In the Free Software vision the two are overlapping rather than competing classes, and that's why it works.
This is why I find software systems which prevent users from being first-class programmers (like the iPad) abhorrent, because it creates a false division of classes - which of course will lead to competition between the two and a need to 'balance' the needs of one against the needs of the other.
But in reality - or in a system that works - they're the same people.
Music and Movies are consumable products. You get it, you consume it. Maybe you watch it or listen to it more than once, but it's the rare consumer that uses the media as the means to an end.
Meh war is war eh? Whats with all the "we must sugar coat war". It is what it is.
And thus was born the doctrine of 'total war', which is the black cauldron out of which Godwin arose, as well as Lenin and Qutb and Vietnam and MAD and Rwanda and other nice things in the 20th century.
When you've already decided 1) that when you fight, you fight hard and dirty and make no distinction between soldiers and civilians, plus 2) that you're facing a sneaky trans-national enemy who is actively subverting your class/race/culture and 'traditional' means won't work, it's very easy (especially in the middle of an actual war) to slide into to 3) deciding that the answer lies in taking out that group of people, civilian or not, by any means necessary.
And while 'attacking the hearts of the people supporting...' rather than 'attacking the neatly lined up uniforms of the army of...' is obviously a lot more direct and apparently effective, it can take a culture into some very dark places that later generations may describe as 'wtf going on hth'.
'Limited war' is an oxymoron, but 'total war' is a cliff with atrocity cactus below.
Interesting. I suspect I'd do really poorly in the military for that reason - I've never been able to cope well with memorising arbitrary lists. My brain just isn't large enough. Understanding the rules underneath lists is a much simpler 'cheat' and that's what I ended up doing in school.
How do people manage to cope with all those endless lists? Like the management books with their 'X habits of successful Ys' and 'Z steps to Q'. How do you know which list to apply when? It'd drive me crazy.
I would think by now that our society had moved past the base point of science is evil and technology is amoral.
Actually, before WWI most people thought that science was always a net positive.
Then came the trenches, chlorine gas, and Zeppelins raining bombs.
And suddenly people started to realise that 'science' isn't necessarily humanity's friend and that it needs to be watched over by ethics. More, that it might very well be a net negative if the evil uses of an invention were significantly more influential than the good.
It's a contradiction in terms to say 'science is strictly non-moral, but scientific knowledge is always an absolute good'. That's inconsistent. If scientific knowledge can be used equally for good or bad, then that knowledge itself is neither good nor bad, and accumulating more of something which can equally help or hurt us cannot be our primary aim.
At the very least, one could say in such a world that 'it is not necessarily immoral to acquire more scientific knowledge', but neither is it moral. But you can't say 'it's a moral imperative to acquire more knowledge'. If knowledge is not in itself good, then no, possessing more of it isn't in itself good either. It IS a moral imperative to use what we have sensibly, and that includes refusing some applications - and some methods of acquiring data (like, say, live human trials of weapons).
But even beyond this, it's evident to those who've been studying such things (such as systems theorists and ecologists) that technology, if not science, isn't an ethical blank slate- all technology has a shape ('affordances' in the terminology of interface design) which influences the kind of society it creates. 'We create our machines - our machines create us'. Specific technologies can be centralising or decentralising, for instance, and these effects are NOT value-neutral (if you consider the shape of social organisations to be value-ful, which I do).
People on this forum, who believe in the social implications of technologies like Linux and the 'end to end' principle of TCP/IP, for instance, ought to understand this.
There might exist value-and-ethics-free technology - but most examples we have are not. They all push things in a certain direction. It's easy to argue that science also doesn't exist in an ethical vacuum, either, as it's usually derived from or closely aligned with technological implementations with specific social shapes.
tl;dr: Be careful about what you ascribe value-neutrality to. It's probably less neutral than you think.
Url omitted from previous post: Federation of American Scientists, who were and are extremely vocal about the ethics of weapons science.
Re:And for further reading
on
How To Grow a Head
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Science doesn't think anything. It's a process.
And therein lies a problem. An unthinking process is not something you want to have any kind of authority in the world whatsoever that's not checked and triple-checked by a guardian with thought and ethics. Otherwise it's going to stop all over you, guaranteed.
You wouldn't run 'rm -rf *' as root, would you? Neither should you start an amoral process called 'science' and let it do whatever it wants. You should query at every point 'is this pursuit or organisation working for humanity, or against it?'
Plenty of scientists can be assumed to have chosen morality over science. You don't hear about them because they didn't do anything.
No, I think the statement you're looking for is 'You've heard quite a bit about some of them because, for instance, they were extremely outspoken against what they considered to be science becoming abusive and destructive for exactly the reasons mentioned above.'
All scientific progress can be put to ends both good and ill, there is therefore nothing ethical or unethical about science fact, only the actions of men.
Not quite correct either. There is plenty of scientific knowledge, for example, what happens when a live human encounters poison gas, anthrax, radiation, or a landmine, which can't really be either gained ethically, or used ethically. Unless you define 'ethical' as 'causing pain and suffering to someone the current political regime dislikes.'
Some knowledge is only really useful for causing suffering. Some scientific 'progress' is progress in the art of maiming and killing. It's usually blandly called 'defense research'.
Some knowledge looks like it might be dual-use for hurting or helping, but turns out in practice that the side effects outweigh the benefits. That's the sort of knowledge which an ethics check would have prevented.
This is why 'wealth' isn't (or shouldn't be) measured in anything so abstract as 'money' but in actual indexes of commodities and societies.
How many children are born and not dying in infancy? That's wealth. How many people are educated? That's wealth. How well maintained is your infrastructure? That's wealth. How healthy is your population? That's wealth. How many crops do you have? That's wealth. How resilient is your ecosystem? That's wealth. How many murders aren't happening in your cities? That's wealth.
What's your GDP? Dunno, who cares? It's not measuring wealth except at several removes, and it might actually be measuring active destruction of wealth if you're counting money being transferred from the majority of the population to a minority in your transactions.
Indexing the dollar against a basket of actual life-supporting commodities and social/ecological indexes would be a good start toward a stable monetary system that relates money to wealth.
The value of gold is that it is relatively rare, cannot be manufactured, and is finite. A gold standard isn't about gold being inherently valuable - it's about governments being able to issue more wealth than they have available to back it.
s/governments/banks. Governments haven't directly created money for a long time now. They issue bonds instead, which is just what private organisations can do. It's just that large and stable governments tend to have better credit ratings.
Also last time I checked, gold was very much manufactured through an exotic and little-understood process called 'mining'.
Of course it makes perfect sense to measure the economic growth of a civilisation through a metal dug out of the earth by poorly paid labourers on the other side of the earth. Because if we can't get any more of that magic mineral, all humans and all computers and machines will naturally fall over and die, owing to that we eat gold and put gold on our crops and in our petrol tanks.
Data flow machines did catch on. They're just invisible. Inside the Pentium Pro/II/III and later machines is a data flow engine. That's part of how superscalar machines work. But, again, it wasn't necessary to export that painful paradigm to the programmer-visible level.
Are you sure dataflow actually is painful? I think it might be actually a more natural end-user programming paradigm than imperative code, especially in the age of the Web when the problem space is all about linking and transforming data from multiple sources.
It makes me sad that we invented these wonderfully elegant dataflow machines then spent lots of designer-hours making them invisible so that programmers could continue to use C... and then reinvent the dataflow paradigm, slowly and painfully, in userspace on top of C.
...in the early years of the 21st century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a queeglumph with a high-definition trinary kinotentacle receiver might scrutinise the contestants and actors on 'Galactic Idol', 'Project Launchpad', 'Temporarily Mislocated' or 'Battlestar Dimensiona'.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with half-amused eyes, and slowly and surely teleported a bowl of popzapf, their remote controls and a refreshing Glurtlefloop (tm) from the stasis chamber...
And that's exactly why I reserve the right to dislike the iPod, iPhone or iPad, on the grounds that I want a _computer_, not a passive propaganda consumption device which disallows the user from programming it.
The nice thing to me about Flash (other than it Just Working on Linux) is that with Flashblock I can stop it from doing anything annoying until I want it.
HTML5 video? Not so much. It runs automatically in my face.
I guess when HTML5 becomes popular there'll be a 'VideoTagBlock', but for now I find it a usability lose, not a win.
I dunno about any button issue, but a couple of versions back they pulled the very nice update widget from the system tray, and replaced it with a horrible Apple-style distracting popup and a 'notification area' which is a usability nightmare (big black popup every time my network status changes, for instance, which hovers for about 30 seconds right over my eyespace but is not clickable to say 'yes I know stop bugging me').
Lots of people flagged these 'upgrades' as bugs, explicitly requesting reinstatement of the old, working, behaviour, but Mark himself came on the bug system to say 'no, we're doing it my way'.
Slashdot Mirror
FTR, I was accused of blowing it up with an explosive rifle target. In the deep woods. In a hunting area. With a legal, registered gun. Sound like a five year bid to you?
Well - did you?
I mean, if you did blow up a portaloo with explosives, no matter where, that's something just a bit different to not divulging IP addresses, isn't it?
Oh, man... the irony
Not so much irony as steel jacket-y.
Free software _is_ about freedom, and about the balance between users and programmers.
I'd say the word 'balance' is a misconception. Free software is about users BEING programmers. In the Free Software vision the two are overlapping rather than competing classes, and that's why it works.
This is why I find software systems which prevent users from being first-class programmers (like the iPad) abhorrent, because it creates a false division of classes - which of course will lead to competition between the two and a need to 'balance' the needs of one against the needs of the other.
But in reality - or in a system that works - they're the same people.
Music and Movies are consumable products. You get it, you consume it. Maybe you watch it or listen to it more than once, but it's the rare consumer that uses the media as the means to an end.
So no consumers do remixing or DJing?
I guess not legally.
Hi Sarah! Running for President in 2012?
Meh war is war eh? Whats with all the "we must sugar coat war". It is what it is.
And thus was born the doctrine of 'total war', which is the black cauldron out of which Godwin arose, as well as Lenin and Qutb and Vietnam and MAD and Rwanda and other nice things in the 20th century.
When you've already decided 1) that when you fight, you fight hard and dirty and make no distinction between soldiers and civilians, plus 2) that you're facing a sneaky trans-national enemy who is actively subverting your class/race/culture and 'traditional' means won't work, it's very easy (especially in the middle of an actual war) to slide into to 3) deciding that the answer lies in taking out that group of people, civilian or not, by any means necessary.
And while 'attacking the hearts of the people supporting...' rather than 'attacking the neatly lined up uniforms of the army of...' is obviously a lot more direct and apparently effective, it can take a culture into some very dark places that later generations may describe as 'wtf going on hth'.
'Limited war' is an oxymoron, but 'total war' is a cliff with atrocity cactus below.
Interesting. I suspect I'd do really poorly in the military for that reason - I've never been able to cope well with memorising arbitrary lists. My brain just isn't large enough. Understanding the rules underneath lists is a much simpler 'cheat' and that's what I ended up doing in school.
How do people manage to cope with all those endless lists? Like the management books with their 'X habits of successful Ys' and 'Z steps to Q'. How do you know which list to apply when? It'd drive me crazy.
Heh, Twitter feeds really are the new .sigs, aren't they?
Everything old is new again.
Unfortunately one person's 'respect for life' is another's 'nonsense and superstition'. Mutually Assured Destruction billed itself as 'rational'.
I would think by now that our society had moved past the base point of science is evil and technology is amoral.
Actually, before WWI most people thought that science was always a net positive.
Then came the trenches, chlorine gas, and Zeppelins raining bombs.
And suddenly people started to realise that 'science' isn't necessarily humanity's friend and that it needs to be watched over by ethics. More, that it might very well be a net negative if the evil uses of an invention were significantly more influential than the good.
It's a contradiction in terms to say 'science is strictly non-moral, but scientific knowledge is always an absolute good'. That's inconsistent. If scientific knowledge can be used equally for good or bad, then that knowledge itself is neither good nor bad, and accumulating more of something which can equally help or hurt us cannot be our primary aim.
At the very least, one could say in such a world that 'it is not necessarily immoral to acquire more scientific knowledge', but neither is it moral. But you can't say 'it's a moral imperative to acquire more knowledge'. If knowledge is not in itself good, then no, possessing more of it isn't in itself good either. It IS a moral imperative to use what we have sensibly, and that includes refusing some applications - and some methods of acquiring data (like, say, live human trials of weapons).
But even beyond this, it's evident to those who've been studying such things (such as systems theorists and ecologists) that technology, if not science, isn't an ethical blank slate- all technology has a shape ('affordances' in the terminology of interface design) which influences the kind of society it creates. 'We create our machines - our machines create us'. Specific technologies can be centralising or decentralising, for instance, and these effects are NOT value-neutral (if you consider the shape of social organisations to be value-ful, which I do).
People on this forum, who believe in the social implications of technologies like Linux and the 'end to end' principle of TCP/IP, for instance, ought to understand this.
There might exist value-and-ethics-free technology - but most examples we have are not. They all push things in a certain direction. It's easy to argue that science also doesn't exist in an ethical vacuum, either, as it's usually derived from or closely aligned with technological implementations with specific social shapes.
tl;dr: Be careful about what you ascribe value-neutrality to. It's probably less neutral than you think.
Url omitted from previous post: Federation of American Scientists, who were and are extremely vocal about the ethics of weapons science.
Science doesn't think anything. It's a process.
And therein lies a problem. An unthinking process is not something you want to have any kind of authority in the world whatsoever that's not checked and triple-checked by a guardian with thought and ethics. Otherwise it's going to stop all over you, guaranteed.
You wouldn't run 'rm -rf *' as root, would you? Neither should you start an amoral process called 'science' and let it do whatever it wants. You should query at every point 'is this pursuit or organisation working for humanity, or against it?'
Plenty of scientists can be assumed to have chosen morality over science. You don't hear about them because they didn't do anything.
No, I think the statement you're looking for is 'You've heard quite a bit about some of them because, for instance, they were extremely outspoken against what they considered to be science becoming abusive and destructive for exactly the reasons mentioned above.'
All scientific progress can be put to ends both good and ill, there is therefore nothing ethical or unethical about science fact, only the actions of men.
Not quite correct either. There is plenty of scientific knowledge, for example, what happens when a live human encounters poison gas, anthrax, radiation, or a landmine, which can't really be either gained ethically, or used ethically. Unless you define 'ethical' as 'causing pain and suffering to someone the current political regime dislikes.'
Some knowledge is only really useful for causing suffering. Some scientific 'progress' is progress in the art of maiming and killing. It's usually blandly called 'defense research'.
Some knowledge looks like it might be dual-use for hurting or helping, but turns out in practice that the side effects outweigh the benefits. That's the sort of knowledge which an ethics check would have prevented.
I guess Sid Meier wins all the X-Prizes.
This is why 'wealth' isn't (or shouldn't be) measured in anything so abstract as 'money' but in actual indexes of commodities and societies.
How many children are born and not dying in infancy? That's wealth.
How many people are educated? That's wealth.
How well maintained is your infrastructure? That's wealth.
How healthy is your population? That's wealth.
How many crops do you have? That's wealth.
How resilient is your ecosystem? That's wealth.
How many murders aren't happening in your cities? That's wealth.
What's your GDP? Dunno, who cares? It's not measuring wealth except at several removes, and it might actually be measuring active destruction of wealth if you're counting money being transferred from the majority of the population to a minority in your transactions.
Indexing the dollar against a basket of actual life-supporting commodities and social/ecological indexes would be a good start toward a stable monetary system that relates money to wealth.
The value of gold is that it is relatively rare, cannot be manufactured, and is finite. A gold standard isn't about gold being inherently valuable - it's about governments being able to issue more wealth than they have available to back it.
s/governments/banks. Governments haven't directly created money for a long time now. They issue bonds instead, which is just what private organisations can do. It's just that large and stable governments tend to have better credit ratings.
Also last time I checked, gold was very much manufactured through an exotic and little-understood process called 'mining'.
Of course it makes perfect sense to measure the economic growth of a civilisation through a metal dug out of the earth by poorly paid labourers on the other side of the earth. Because if we can't get any more of that magic mineral, all humans and all computers and machines will naturally fall over and die, owing to that we eat gold and put gold on our crops and in our petrol tanks.
Or wait, is that oil? I keep confusing those two.
Gold is no better money than cowrie shells, and modern society has rightly left that sort of archaism behind centuries ago.
That's what the Federal Reserve and the gold lobby WANT you to think! TRUE money requires cowie shells and always has!!!1!
No it isn't. You could teach an entire class about economic systems that didn't have a currency.
Economics without currency? That would be COMMUNISM!
All that is true... but it does also have a dark side.
Data flow machines did catch on. They're just invisible. Inside the Pentium Pro/II/III and later machines is a data flow engine. That's part of how superscalar machines work. But, again, it wasn't necessary to export that painful paradigm to the programmer-visible level.
Are you sure dataflow actually is painful? I think it might be actually a more natural end-user programming paradigm than imperative code, especially in the age of the Web when the problem space is all about linking and transforming data from multiple sources.
It makes me sad that we invented these wonderfully elegant dataflow machines then spent lots of designer-hours making them invisible so that programmers could continue to use C... and then reinvent the dataflow paradigm, slowly and painfully, in userspace on top of C.
...in the early years of the 21st century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a queeglumph with a high-definition trinary kinotentacle receiver might scrutinise the contestants and actors on 'Galactic Idol', 'Project Launchpad', 'Temporarily Mislocated' or 'Battlestar Dimensiona'.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with half-amused eyes, and slowly and surely teleported a bowl of popzapf, their remote controls and a refreshing Glurtlefloop (tm) from the stasis chamber...
Easy, I sacrifice the hostage, I mean queen.
Besides planets in reality are pretty crappy resources for any interstellar species
I dunno, there's a few resources on Earth that might lure aliens.
And that's exactly why I reserve the right to dislike the iPod, iPhone or iPad, on the grounds that I want a _computer_, not a passive propaganda consumption device which disallows the user from programming it.
The nice thing to me about Flash (other than it Just Working on Linux) is that with Flashblock I can stop it from doing anything annoying until I want it.
HTML5 video? Not so much. It runs automatically in my face.
I guess when HTML5 becomes popular there'll be a 'VideoTagBlock', but for now I find it a usability lose, not a win.
I dunno about any button issue, but a couple of versions back they pulled the very nice update widget from the system tray, and replaced it with a horrible Apple-style distracting popup and a 'notification area' which is a usability nightmare (big black popup every time my network status changes, for instance, which hovers for about 30 seconds right over my eyespace but is not clickable to say 'yes I know stop bugging me').
Lots of people flagged these 'upgrades' as bugs, explicitly requesting reinstatement of the old, working, behaviour, but Mark himself came on the bug system to say 'no, we're doing it my way'.
It's not an isolated incident. It's a pattern.