I wasn't sarcastic about House of Lords, but rather about the way the GPP defends the fact they are (undeniably) undemocratic institution (regardless whether they are doing any actual harm or good).
In true democracy, there are no "populist" proposals. Either majority of people wants the proposal, and then it should be accepted, or majority doesn't want it, and then shouldn't. People can hear the expert opinion, but the final decision is theirs. If you don't like that, you don't like democracy, plain and simple.
I admit, I vigorously oppose anyone who doesn't want democracy, because I believe it's the best system (though there is also empirical evidence). Not just to date, I can't imagine it to be any fairer.
And frankly, I am allergic to that word "populist", because every time the government wants to shove something through our throats, it calls the opposition that way. Also, please do not confuse that with "populist politicians" - it is a valid term for someone who breaks promise that he will act on behalf of the majority.
And maybe, maybe, it is House of Lords who is actually being populistic (= acting in the interests of majority), because the proposals of government that GGP mentions may be disagreed with by many people.
Yes, silly us, why would we want a democracy, when a panel of experts can make all the decisions for us. No thanks, sir, I am from Czech republic, and we lived under such system for 40 years (the self-appointed body of "experts" being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Czechoslovakia).
Others said you have no clue, and were right. The workhorse for mainframe applications is z/OS, which is integrated with the mainframe hardware very well and can be more efficient than Linux. Simply, mainframe as a platform equals z/OS.
IBM is trying to sell Linux on mainframe (actually, the solution they are selling is a lot of Linuxes virtualized using z/VM, because z/VM hypervisor scales better than Linux) to customers who don't want to pay for z/OS (ie. don't run legacy applications), so they could sell them at least hardware. It has also an advantage of consolidation of servers, because centralized system will always be more efficient than distributed one due to physical laws. But this advantage is offset by huge prices of mainframe hardware.
I believe that AI will bring a new social revolution, a big conflict. If AI is invented, suddenly, most of the jobs will disappear. Those in power will not need other people to work for them. So it will probably create enormous unemployment, famines and maybe even genocide of people who will be cut from any resources and will be unable to fight for them in any way, because there will be nothing they are better at than robots.
Actually, this notion is a bit false. It was misinterpreted over the years. The original quote was "Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy", which meant, it's an encyclopedia, but not a primary vehicle to test democratic methods. But it didn't predicate for it _not_ to be democracy in any way.
In fact, I believe (and I am not alone) that unless Wikipedia doesn't accept more democratic decision-making processes, it will fail. There is really no third way - either you have democracy (rule of the majority), or you have some form of authoritative system (rule of minority).
This all of course doesn't mean that facts can be decided by democracy - the democratization of Wikipedia is concerned of governance (things like how to decide who has power, what articles should be accepted and things like that), not specific articles (like what should be in the specific article).
Under capitalism, if the owner doesn't respond to customer needs, you have to actually *wait* unless someone else comes along and makes a better offer. In the system I proposed, you can enforce a change immediately as you recognize it - you force your government to do something about it.
About government control. It depends on who controls the government. In true socialism, government would be controlled by the people, so the people (who are also consumers) could do the real choices. Nobody would make consumption choices for you - government would respond to needs of the people, so the choice would originate in you. Either way, I offered an alternative system where you would control the production with your money directly, as a consumer. I absolutely wouldn't mind if private entities would compete in such system - I wish them good luck however, because they would be less effective (because they want to make profit).
Oligarchy wasn't the inevitable result of socialism, because it wasn't socialism in the first place. Look - I don't care about terminology, but in Eastern Europe, there was no democracy, so you cannot make any conclusions from that with regards to my proposals, because my proposals assume democracy.
So what are you doing in fact, you use a different measurement for success in the real world (money) and in the world described by economics (economic profit). Then you model behavior of people based on those different definitions.
That's truly a correct way to describe the system!
Well, you have a wrong system - capitalism. In capitalism, if the owner makes money, he doesn't owe you anything. He doesn't have to invest back to infrastructure.
I think what you actually want is some form of socialism. For example, the network would be government owned, and people would decide, by voting, what to do it with it. It would work much like a corporation, but each person would have exactly one untransferable vote.
Or, it could be a cooperative. Each customer would have decision making capacity depending on how much money he is paying. That way, the money spent would be controlled.
But no, no, you actually don't want this. Because you are afraid of the word "socialism". There was something in the Eastern Europe that was bad and used called itself that way. Nevermind it doesn't have anything in common with the two above strategies, and was just another sort of oligarchy.
I am writing this on half year old Acer Extensa 5220. It had "Linux" preinstalled on it, but I was disappointed with it a bit. I have Ubuntu, and the sleeping and modem doesn't work. The graphic card (Intel) started to work about a month ago (probably with the Ubuntu upgrade). I am not sure about the wi-fi. The other hardware works fine, but this is no difference with HP laptop I bought to my brother 3 years ago. So, it's nice to hear Acer is more serious about it, but I remain skeptical. If my notebook starts working though, I will be their customer in the future.
I agree with this assessment, but disagree with the sentiment. I am from Czech Republic, a former Soviet satellite. Your comfort was at a price of much greater unjustice for others, people from Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. Please, fight your fights with government yourself (we also have our problems with our government), do not ask others to suffer so you could have comfort.
(I've played with an eclipse plugin that does this, although I didn't find it particularly helpful for me). That's probably why it was modded as funny. Seriously, imagine writing a program in one language and then debugging it in another. You would have to understand all the parts twice. If anything, this approach is a hindrance.
In other words, make an iterated prisoner dilemma game (where the optimal solution is cooperation) from a classic prisoner dilemma game (where optimal solution is to betray).
There is a problem in this thinking. The sudo prompt is only expected to appear in certain situations (such as clicking on administrator mode button in certain dialogs), not randomly when browsing the web. AFAIK, on Vista it can appear anytime application asks for it (but I am not Vista user).
Really? Both the methods you mention are worse than keyboard or mouse. Voice recognition is slower than keyboard (just try to write C code via speech or try to navigate a document via speech). Motion capture, I am not sure what you mean, but if you mean something like Wiimote, it has been tried on light pens and proven that hand hurts a lot more from prolonged usage of such devices than from using a mouse.
So, are you saying that in the future, people will prefer 3 inch screens and crappy keyboards of mobile devices to large monitors and comfortable keyboards of desktop computers? I don't think so.
I don't think so. Palm PDAs had touch screen even before multitouch was invented. I think the relevant technology needed for touch screen was the large graphic LCD display, and those didn't started to appear until 1990s.
Actually, REXX is very successful on IBM mainframe z/OS and z/VM operating system and from what I have heard, it was also used on OS/2. I don't know Amiga that well, but I doubt your claim.
OT - Firefox 3 was regression for me
on
Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I am sorry for offtopic post, but Firefox was a bit of regression for me. The new page info doesn't contain outgoing links. I haven't used it much in fact, but few days ago I needed to paste few links into wget and found that out.
Yes, I know they are planning an extension for that, but I wanted to use it now (I have Ubuntu) and I would like to note - try to find extension using google which will list links on page.;-) I installed the web developer toolbar in the end, but it's not very nice to copy it from there and it comes with a lot of other stuff I don't really need.
Why is there such movement in OSS lately that thinks that removal of features will be an improvement for users? It's strikingly similar to Wikipedia's deletionist movement. Organization of features/information, not removal, is the key.
I disagree. You are saying that either quality doesn't matter for the user, or he wants to be tricked.
If the code quality improves quality of the product, it's a good thing. Maybe not all factors that make code "high quality" do this, but some of them do. So it's not irrelevant to users.
Are you sure it will help? It would only be easy if the ring n would have read-only access to ring n-1. But the applications need to share data, so ring n-1 sometimes needs write access to ring n. So this simple idea would quickly turn into privilege maintenance nightmare.
No. Your definition of socialism is wrong. Originally, it was a fight for power of working class against the bourgeoisie. Norway and such are socialist because working class has significant power there through the means of democracy. Without democracy, working class would have no power, and then the government wouldn't act in their interest. So there is no such thing as "authoritarian socialism", by definition (the fact that China is called People's republic doesn't make it so). Also, there are and were many societies where government has significant control over the market, and they are not considered to be socialist at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't sarcastic about House of Lords, but rather about the way the GPP defends the fact they are (undeniably) undemocratic institution (regardless whether they are doing any actual harm or good).
In true democracy, there are no "populist" proposals. Either majority of people wants the proposal, and then it should be accepted, or majority doesn't want it, and then shouldn't. People can hear the expert opinion, but the final decision is theirs. If you don't like that, you don't like democracy, plain and simple.
I admit, I vigorously oppose anyone who doesn't
want democracy, because I believe it's the best system (though there is also empirical evidence). Not just to date, I can't imagine it to be any fairer.
And frankly, I am allergic to that word "populist", because every time the government wants to shove something through our throats, it calls the opposition that way. Also, please do not confuse that with "populist politicians" - it is a valid term for someone who breaks promise that he will act on behalf of the majority.
And maybe, maybe, it is House of Lords who is actually being populistic (= acting in the interests of majority), because the proposals of government that GGP mentions may be disagreed with by many people.
Yes, silly us, why would we want a democracy, when a panel of experts can make all the decisions for us. No thanks, sir, I am from Czech republic, and we lived under such system for 40 years (the self-appointed body of "experts" being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Czechoslovakia).
Others said you have no clue, and were right. The workhorse for mainframe applications is z/OS, which is integrated with the mainframe hardware very well and can be more efficient than Linux. Simply, mainframe as a platform equals z/OS.
IBM is trying to sell Linux on mainframe (actually, the solution they are selling is a lot of Linuxes virtualized using z/VM, because z/VM hypervisor scales better than Linux) to customers who don't want to pay for z/OS (ie. don't run legacy applications), so they could sell them at least hardware. It has also an advantage of consolidation of servers, because centralized system will always be more efficient than distributed one due to physical laws. But this advantage is offset by huge prices of mainframe hardware.
I believe that AI will bring a new social revolution, a big conflict. If AI is invented, suddenly, most of the jobs will disappear. Those in power will not need other people to work for them. So it will probably create enormous unemployment, famines and maybe even genocide of people who will be cut from any resources and will be unable to fight for them in any way, because there will be nothing they are better at than robots.
.. really saved my day. I mean, this is really dangerous, collective decision-making by _all_ the people!
Actually, this notion is a bit false. It was misinterpreted over the years. The original quote was "Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy", which meant, it's an encyclopedia, but not a primary vehicle to test democratic methods. But it didn't predicate for it _not_ to be democracy in any way.
In fact, I believe (and I am not alone) that unless Wikipedia doesn't accept more democratic decision-making processes, it will fail. There is really no third way - either you have democracy (rule of the majority), or you have some form of authoritative system (rule of minority).
This all of course doesn't mean that facts can be decided by democracy - the democratization of Wikipedia is concerned of governance (things like how to decide who has power, what articles should be accepted and things like that), not specific articles (like what should be in the specific article).
Well, I think you don't get it.
Under capitalism, if the owner doesn't respond to customer needs, you have to actually *wait* unless someone else comes along and makes a better offer. In the system I proposed, you can enforce a change immediately as you recognize it - you force your government to do something about it.
About government control. It depends on who controls the government. In true socialism, government would be controlled by the people, so the people (who are also consumers) could do the real choices. Nobody would make consumption choices for you - government would respond to needs of the people, so the choice would originate in you. Either way, I offered an alternative system where you would control the production with your money directly, as a consumer. I absolutely wouldn't mind if private entities would compete in such system - I wish them good luck however, because they would be less effective (because they want to make profit).
Oligarchy wasn't the inevitable result of socialism, because it wasn't socialism in the first place. Look - I don't care about terminology, but in Eastern Europe, there was no democracy, so you cannot make any conclusions from that with regards to my proposals, because my proposals assume democracy.
So what are you doing in fact, you use a different measurement for success in the real world (money) and in the world described by economics (economic profit). Then you model behavior of people based on those different definitions.
That's truly a correct way to describe the system!
Well, you have a wrong system - capitalism. In capitalism, if the owner makes money, he doesn't owe you anything. He doesn't have to invest back to infrastructure.
I think what you actually want is some form of socialism. For example, the network would be government owned, and people would decide, by voting, what to do it with it. It would work much like a corporation, but each person would have exactly one untransferable vote.
Or, it could be a cooperative. Each customer would have decision making capacity depending on how much money he is paying. That way, the money spent would be controlled.
But no, no, you actually don't want this. Because you are afraid of the word "socialism". There was something in the Eastern Europe that was bad and used called itself that way. Nevermind it doesn't have anything in common with the two above strategies, and was just another sort of oligarchy.
Really? I am from Europe, and just have to wonder...
What about building the first Maglev between Washington and New York? What about San Francisco and Los Angeles? What about making it actually useful?
I am writing this on half year old Acer Extensa 5220. It had "Linux" preinstalled on it, but I was disappointed with it a bit. I have Ubuntu, and the sleeping and modem doesn't work. The graphic card (Intel) started to work about a month ago (probably with the Ubuntu upgrade). I am not sure about the wi-fi. The other hardware works fine, but this is no difference with HP laptop I bought to my brother 3 years ago. So, it's nice to hear Acer is more serious about it, but I remain skeptical. If my notebook starts working though, I will be their customer in the future.
I agree with this assessment, but disagree with the sentiment. I am from Czech Republic, a former Soviet satellite. Your comfort was at a price of much greater unjustice for others, people from Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. Please, fight your fights with government yourself (we also have our problems with our government), do not ask others to suffer so you could have comfort.
They don't spend that much money. They just invest it to make more.
In other words, make an iterated prisoner dilemma game (where the optimal solution is cooperation) from a classic prisoner dilemma game (where optimal solution is to betray).
There is a problem in this thinking. The sudo prompt is only expected to appear in certain situations (such as clicking on administrator mode button in certain dialogs), not randomly when browsing the web. AFAIK, on Vista it can appear anytime application asks for it (but I am not Vista user).
Really? Both the methods you mention are worse than keyboard or mouse. Voice recognition is slower than keyboard (just try to write C code via speech or try to navigate a document via speech). Motion capture, I am not sure what you mean, but if you mean something like Wiimote, it has been tried on light pens and proven that hand hurts a lot more from prolonged usage of such devices than from using a mouse.
So, are you saying that in the future, people will prefer 3 inch screens and crappy keyboards of mobile devices to large monitors and comfortable keyboards of desktop computers? I don't think so.
I don't think so. Palm PDAs had touch screen even before multitouch was invented. I think the relevant technology needed for touch screen was the large graphic LCD display, and those didn't started to appear until 1990s.
Actually, REXX is very successful on IBM mainframe z/OS and z/VM operating system and from what I have heard, it was also used on OS/2. I don't know Amiga that well, but I doubt your claim.
I am sorry for offtopic post, but Firefox was a bit of regression for me. The new page info doesn't contain outgoing links. I haven't used it much in fact, but few days ago I needed to paste few links into wget and found that out.
;-) I installed the web developer toolbar in the end, but it's not very nice to copy it from there and it comes with a lot of other stuff I don't really need.
Yes, I know they are planning an extension for that, but I wanted to use it now (I have Ubuntu) and I would like to note - try to find extension using google which will list links on page.
Why is there such movement in OSS lately that thinks that removal of features will be an improvement for users? It's strikingly similar to Wikipedia's deletionist movement. Organization of features/information, not removal, is the key.
I disagree. You are saying that either quality doesn't matter for the user, or he wants to be tricked.
If the code quality improves quality of the product, it's a good thing. Maybe not all factors that make code "high quality" do this, but some of them do. So it's not irrelevant to users.
Are you sure it will help? It would only be easy if the ring n would have read-only access to ring n-1. But the applications need to share data, so ring n-1 sometimes needs write access to ring n. So this simple idea would quickly turn into privilege maintenance nightmare.
And if you had a CD labeled "Toxic", you should be punished too.
No. Your definition of socialism is wrong. Originally, it was a fight for power of working class against the bourgeoisie. Norway and such are socialist because working class has significant power there through the means of democracy. Without democracy, working class would have no power, and then the government wouldn't act in their interest. So there is no such thing as "authoritarian socialism", by definition (the fact that China is called People's republic doesn't make it so). Also, there are and were many societies where government has significant control over the market, and they are not considered to be socialist at all.