...yet we have the ailments that make some of us think of doing that.
If we hold life sacred, the _we_ will treat each other better and be better off. Holding the life of a thinking, feeling, person who want to live in good health to be the equal of that of a gastrocyst is demeaning to the former, and idolatrous to the extent that it sets up a thing, living as it is, to be the equal to a being.
...or something bigger than us, to simultaneously keep us grounded in something like reality and to enbiggen our spirits.
I can't prove this, this belief might be the result of decades of science fiction reading and a biased reading of the history of the Middle Kingdom, but cultures that interact with forces that don't care about their beliefs seem preferable to me to ones that believe they have it all figured-out and have all they need right there. Space, although its manned exploration will inevitably be a social affair, is not the sort of place that will forgive strong deviations from knowing where you are and what things are like. The feedback loop works better with some connection to a non--socially-constructed reality.
In the other direction, that of societies that are too interesting, I'm afraid that a society without an actual Outside will find its replacement in internal divisions, that without a Grand Project we'll end up in petty bickering (think of the value of unsuccessful escape plans to the P.O.W.s who are kept busy by them, and believe that they're putting one over on their jailers). As long as we can honestly say, "If we can put a Man on the Moon, why can't we....?" we'll have broader horizons than if the immediate retort is, "No we can't."
Of course, maybe I just want all the he-men and strong-chinned monosyllabically-named inventor-heroes to clear off for months at a time (and die in larger numbers) so that more {Robert Crumb}-like men like me can have their women.
Finally, here's some "Lear" on the subject of the importance of non-necessities, at least as a bitter, spoilt, old, men sees it:
O, reason not the need: our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm.
...is important: it's now setting a precedent for future carry-overs of property[-holder] rights that often made sense under scarcity into a set of conditions where they are unnecessary and will enforce unneeded scarcity.
Why? It's _fun_ to have stuff when other people don't. It's _fun_ to have authority over other people, even (usually) at the cost of other people having it over you. And it's easy to believe that That's the Way Things Are (God's Will, the operation of the Holy Market).
Well....I say it's spinach, and to hell with it.
Ken Macleod and Iain M. Banks...
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 1
...have played pretty well with this---Banks, in particular, has any AI _not_ endowed with some human-like biases and desires _immediately_ opting for a sort of nirvana.
How do you think the evolution of the law is conditioned by the evolution of the ways of breaking it? How _can_ a "property right" be claimed inviolable be when it's so easily and undetectably violated---do you think we'll adjust our concepts of property, or retain them at the cost of living under constant potential surveillance?
Do you feel that the enforcing power must be able to claim some sort of moral authority in order for a law to work, or will the utilitarian calculus of risk/benefit be enough to make the legal system work? This is related to the first question because my own answer is, "No," and I'm afraid that the enforcement of laws that don't seem to make sense to enough people will undermine the authority of the government to enforce the laws which it must for a decent society to work ("Against murder, theft, fornication, and blasphemy," as a Christian Reconstructionist once told me, to emphasise that it's hard to find agreement on what that set is....)
Joss Whedon writes or approves some snappy dialogue, and appears to have a firm enough moral sense to create plots that work decently because things of significance (love, honour, power, rabbits) are portrayed as being expensive; I'd say he's one of the best people working in television today.
That doesn't mean he's good, though. The average level of television writing is at about the level of a high school black-out skit. I'm not the snob I'd like to be, I watch a fair amount of TV...but for a few years I didn't, and I remember how _bad_ it all looked until I had been fully drawn into it again.
Honestly, the first time I saw the "Buffy,..." movie I thought, "Why are Donald Sutherland's lines better than everyone else's?"
I'm nowhere near fully literate in Japanese, but my guess is that this would be great. Once you've started writing a character (especially from within a limited list like the 2000-kanji list in Japan) the universe of possible completions is much smaller than the full list; add adaptive frequency tabling and this looks pretty damn cool for it.
Then again, I've never used _any_ form of completion with drawing Chinese chraacters (there's the simple vertical list you get when converting from kana to kanji), so even just a monospaced list would be a win...and I'd be slow in that event anyway.
Strong, but variegated sense of place, good stretches of characterisation, extremely inventive imagination, but there's a monotony of tone here---there are maybe a couple of bright spots, but there's an unremitting sense of general awfulness and hopelessness that the ending in fact makes complete sense.
If you can make 0.1gee, you get really relativistic within thirty years. We're really talking about three generations ship-time to get anywhere.
Exceptions eternal absolute none.
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...to quote the Good Doctor---in this case, the powerful will always try to cloak what they do, at least if we avoid the sort of fascism/Klingonry in which you _gloat_in_public_ over how much you're screwing everyone else. That is, no matter what the restrictions are, the powerful will buy their ways out of them, or what's a heaven for (that is, what's the point of being a powerful bastard if you can't enjoy things not available to other people)?
The only solution I can see is to eliminate power differentials; this is probably impossible. However, this doesn't eliminate pursuing a "harm reduction" policy. To my mind, the most obvious course is putting a floor on how powerless or abject you _can_ get, and increasing the likelihood of turnovers in societal power.
For example, we will never be able to guaranty that innocent people won't be imprisoned, but if we do guaranty that anyone, no matter how much we might hate them[sic], has the right to vote and to publish their grievances, and not to be killed, then we are all a bit safer from the government. If we put in a firm anti-lynching policy, we are safer from The People; if there is some kind of basic sustenance floor to the economy, we are less open to coercion (don't bother telling me it's not 'really') by our bosses.
If one party is always in power, they will treat members of others badly. If there are fairly regular changeovers, every party has an interest in seeing that the losers are not treated too badly. Similarly, if Mr Ashcroft could be convinced that the guns and cameras he wants will eventually be aimed at _him_....well, he might get off on it, unfortunately---he already believes himself to be living in a Universal Dictatorship, where you're always under observation and your only right is to freely choose to agree with the Boss or go to a very bad prison forever.
Sorry; well, to pop the stack: if a _reasonably_ _rational_ Attorney General were to believe that that powerful white men like him were eventually subject to frequent random stops in his neighbourhood, racial profiling there wouldn't be an issue (this is why the "racial" element is so nasty---it cuts off the feedback loop by assuring some people that it will never happen to _them_).
"Private property is a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society, wherever its necessities shall require it, even to its last farthing."
That's right folks, Bmn Franklin, communist libertarian. He also liked sex and alcohol too.
I'm more worried about humans becoming indistinguishable from robots simply because the former have become uniform and predictable; if you've ever heard people re-enact a TV commercial without seeming to realise they are, or tried having a political argument with the rank-and-file of _any_ politcal party, you'll know what I mean.
It sat badly with me; I'd say that if you wish to make "a film about genius and madness" (as Howard has said) without showing much of the true nature of the particular [un]fortunate vessel therefor, then don't bother giving the character the same name as a real and moderately public person.
That is to say, don't capitalise on the "true story" boost the story gets while you simultaneously try to distance yourself from the true story.
Really; the acting was worse too (the actors were probably tired of yet another go 'round, or mostly had done "Dr Who"'s and assumed that that was how bad you were supposed to be on camera).
If I'd seen it first, I think I would have stayed away from the series in all of its forms (as it was, I heard bootleg BBC tapes first, and still [coincidentally, of course] think they're best).
I'm irritated at the lack of auto-javadoc'ers---particularly,
something to generate a stupid version of the
@param's and exception documentation from the method definition.
I've tried a few systems, but they haven't worked well; what I started doing (whilst still employed) was to create an emacs routine that would both create the stub and the javadoc....
With the exception of an addictive drug whose withdrawal symptoms never go away at all will inevitably lead to death (none such exist, though a nicotine/barbiturate hybrid would come close), or a medicine needed to stave off AIDS or Magog egg development, no luxury one might lack can possibly become as "paramount" as food and water when there isn't enough. If you think not, I think you're thinking about a different species.
If you can accept that (and if you can't, fast for five days and get back to me, we can compare notes), I think you can accept the qualitative difference between a world in which minimal human needs are relatively sure to be met (regardless of how much a loser or lazy slob you are---"lazy" can mean "feverishly doing work no-one else cares about", and this decade's loser may be the next's visionary) and one in which any sane person must at root be concerned about how bad things can get.
(Oh, please drink water for those five days; this is illustrative of another principle: Most games work better if the losers don't die.)
No European I've met is at root as bugfuck crazy as all but the richest Americans I've met. Maybe that's why they're sane enough not to care about their public figures' religious beliefs, not go to church much themselves, and (finally) have got a bit sane about (at least some) drugs...I'd trade a little loss of ambition for that; these are goods which are worth they're price on the market, and I think more oof my countrymen would agree with this if the bargain were shewn accurately and regularly....
Jerome Tucille claimed that no-one ever found out much about Galambos' views because the latter's primary tenet was that it was morally wrong to distribute intellectual property for free, and no-one had paid him for the rest of them.
Slashdot Mirror
...yet we have the ailments that make some of us think of doing that.
If we hold life sacred, the _we_ will treat each other better and be better off. Holding the life of a thinking, feeling, person who want to live in good health to be the equal of that of a gastrocyst is demeaning to the former, and idolatrous to the extent that it sets up a thing, living as it is, to be the equal to a being.
...the headline, which sounds like it's from an "Ultraman" episode. Sorry.
...this means I should pig out all my life, and stop eating just before I die, so I won't have any time to back-slide.
Wait!....
I can't prove this, this belief might be the result of decades of science fiction reading and a biased reading of the history of the Middle Kingdom, but cultures that interact with forces that don't care about their beliefs seem preferable to me to ones that believe they have it all figured-out and have all they need right there. Space, although its manned exploration will inevitably be a social affair, is not the sort of place that will forgive strong deviations from knowing where you are and what things are like. The feedback loop works better with some connection to a non--socially-constructed reality.
In the other direction, that of societies that are too interesting, I'm afraid that a society without an actual Outside will find its replacement in internal divisions, that without a Grand Project we'll end up in petty bickering (think of the value of unsuccessful escape plans to the P.O.W.s who are kept busy by them, and believe that they're putting one over on their jailers). As long as we can honestly say, "If we can put a Man on the Moon, why can't we....?" we'll have broader horizons than if the immediate retort is, "No we can't."
Of course, maybe I just want all the he-men and strong-chinned monosyllabically-named inventor-heroes to clear off for months at a time (and die in larger numbers) so that more {Robert Crumb}-like men like me can have their women.
Finally, here's some "Lear" on the subject of the importance of non-necessities, at least as a bitter, spoilt, old, men sees it:
...have sex, or as in "carry over rough terrain".
I could _watch_ a 98 lb girl all night...make up your own joke using the word "remote".
...is important: it's now setting a precedent for future carry-overs of property[-holder] rights that often made sense under scarcity into a set of conditions where they are unnecessary and will enforce unneeded scarcity.
Why? It's _fun_ to have stuff when other people don't. It's _fun_ to have authority over other people, even (usually) at the cost of other people having it over you. And it's easy to believe that That's the Way Things Are (God's Will, the operation of the Holy Market).
Well....I say it's spinach, and to hell with it.
...have played pretty well with this---Banks, in particular, has any AI _not_ endowed with some human-like biases and desires _immediately_ opting for a sort of nirvana.
How do you think the evolution of the law is conditioned by the evolution of the ways of breaking it? How _can_ a "property right" be claimed inviolable be when it's so easily and undetectably violated---do you think we'll adjust our concepts of property, or retain them at the cost of living under constant potential surveillance?
Do you feel that the enforcing power must be able to claim some sort of moral authority in order for a law to work, or will the utilitarian calculus of risk/benefit be enough to make the legal system work? This is related to the first question because my own answer is, "No," and I'm afraid that the enforcement of laws that don't seem to make sense to enough people will undermine the authority of the government to enforce the laws which it must for a decent society to work ("Against murder, theft, fornication, and blasphemy," as a Christian Reconstructionist once told me, to emphasise that it's hard to find agreement on what that set is....)
Joss Whedon writes or approves some snappy dialogue, and appears to have a firm enough moral sense to create plots that work decently because things of significance (love, honour, power, rabbits) are portrayed as being expensive; I'd say he's one of the best people working in television today.
That doesn't mean he's good, though. The average level of television writing is at about the level of a high school black-out skit. I'm not the snob I'd like to be, I watch a fair amount of TV...but for a few years I didn't, and I remember how _bad_ it all looked until I had been fully drawn into it again.
Honestly, the first time I saw the "Buffy,..." movie I thought, "Why are Donald Sutherland's lines better than everyone else's?"
I'm nowhere near fully literate in Japanese, but my guess is that this would be great. Once you've started writing a character (especially from within a limited list like the 2000-kanji list in Japan) the universe of possible completions is much smaller than the full list; add adaptive frequency tabling and this looks pretty damn cool for it.
Then again, I've never used _any_ form of completion with drawing Chinese chraacters (there's the simple vertical list you get when converting from kana to kanji), so even just a monospaced list would be a win...and I'd be slow in that event anyway.
Strong, but variegated sense of place, good stretches of characterisation, extremely inventive imagination, but there's a monotony of tone here---there are maybe a couple of bright spots, but there's an unremitting sense of general awfulness and hopelessness that the ending in fact makes complete sense.
1.) Don't heat the solder. heat the metal (with a small blowtorch). Maybe some acid flux first.
2.) Use caulk to seal the hose to the piping.
3.) Look around (larger Chinese groceries are good) for pre-formed metal trays, some of which have mtal lids that could be caulked shut.
It's morphogenetic fields at work! How simple you are, to think it can be reduced to well-known actors of limited range.
If you can make 0.1gee, you get really relativistic within thirty years. We're really talking about three generations ship-time to get anywhere.
...to quote the Good Doctor---in this case, the powerful will always try to cloak what they do, at least if we avoid the sort of fascism/Klingonry in which you _gloat_in_public_ over how much you're screwing everyone else. That is, no matter what the restrictions are, the powerful will buy their ways out of them, or what's a heaven for (that is, what's the point of being a powerful bastard if you can't enjoy things not available to other people)?
The only solution I can see is to eliminate power differentials; this is probably impossible. However, this doesn't eliminate pursuing a "harm reduction" policy. To my mind, the most obvious course is putting a floor on how powerless or abject you _can_ get, and increasing the likelihood of turnovers in societal power.
For example, we will never be able to guaranty that innocent people won't be imprisoned, but if we do guaranty that anyone, no matter how much we might hate them[sic], has the right to vote and to publish their grievances, and not to be killed, then we are all a bit safer from the government. If we put in a firm anti-lynching policy, we are safer from The People; if there is some kind of basic sustenance floor to the economy, we are less open to coercion (don't bother telling me it's not 'really') by our bosses.
If one party is always in power, they will treat members of others badly. If there are fairly regular changeovers, every party has an interest in seeing that the losers are not treated too badly. Similarly, if Mr Ashcroft could be convinced that the guns and cameras he wants will eventually be aimed at _him_....well, he might get off on it, unfortunately---he already believes himself to be living in a Universal Dictatorship, where you're always under observation and your only right is to freely choose to agree with the Boss or go to a very bad prison forever.
Sorry; well, to pop the stack: if a _reasonably_ _rational_ Attorney General were to believe that that powerful white men like him were eventually subject to frequent random stops in his neighbourhood, racial profiling there wouldn't be an issue (this is why the "racial" element is so nasty---it cuts off the feedback loop by assuring some people that it will never happen to _them_).
"Private property is a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society, wherever its necessities shall require it, even to its last farthing."
That's right folks, Bmn Franklin, communist libertarian. He also liked sex and alcohol too.
...to me, usually means, "I haven't thought of a way around it." This can be because there is none such, or because of a failure of imagination.
I'm more worried about humans becoming indistinguishable from robots simply because the former have become uniform and predictable; if you've ever heard people re-enact a TV commercial without seeming to realise they are, or tried having a political argument with the rank-and-file of _any_ politcal party, you'll know what I mean.
It sat badly with me; I'd say that if you wish to make "a film about genius and madness" (as Howard has said) without showing much of the true nature of the particular [un]fortunate vessel therefor, then don't bother giving the character the same name as a real and moderately public person.
That is to say, don't capitalise on the "true story" boost the story gets while you simultaneously try to distance yourself from the true story.
Really; the acting was worse too (the actors were probably tired of yet another go 'round, or mostly had done "Dr Who"'s and assumed that that was how bad you were supposed to be on camera).
If I'd seen it first, I think I would have stayed away from the series in all of its forms (as it was, I heard bootleg BBC tapes first, and still [coincidentally, of course] think they're best).
I'm irritated at the lack of auto-javadoc'ers---particularly,
something to generate a stupid version of the
@param's and exception documentation from the method definition.
I've tried a few systems, but they haven't worked well; what I started doing (whilst still employed) was to create an emacs routine that would both create the stub and the javadoc....
...I guess, but that's no guaranty.
With the exception of an addictive drug whose withdrawal symptoms never go away at all will inevitably lead to death (none such exist, though a nicotine/barbiturate hybrid would come close), or a medicine needed to stave off AIDS or Magog egg development, no luxury one might lack can possibly become as "paramount" as food and water when there isn't enough. If you think not, I think you're thinking about a different species.
If you can accept that (and if you can't, fast for five days and get back to me, we can compare notes), I think you can accept the qualitative difference between a world in which minimal human needs are relatively sure to be met (regardless of how much a loser or lazy slob you are---"lazy" can mean "feverishly doing work no-one else cares about", and this decade's loser may be the next's visionary) and one in which any sane person must at root be concerned about how bad things can get.
(Oh, please drink water for those five days; this is illustrative of another principle: Most games work better if the losers don't die.)
No European I've met is at root as bugfuck crazy as all but the richest Americans I've met. Maybe that's why they're sane enough not to care about their public figures' religious beliefs, not go to church much themselves, and (finally) have got a bit sane about (at least some) drugs...I'd trade a little loss of ambition for that; these are goods which are worth they're price on the market, and I think more oof my countrymen would agree with this if the bargain were shewn accurately and regularly....
Jerome Tucille claimed that no-one ever found out much about Galambos' views because the latter's primary tenet was that it was morally wrong to distribute intellectual property for free, and no-one had paid him for the rest of them.
Maybe what it needs to catch on is a large purchase while it's still not really worth its while, enough to make economies of scale operative.
My guess: a big government purchase, probably military