While I think it's great people want to get involved with the environment, stop and think about this like a computer scientist.
If carbon dioxide produces global warming, we will run into problems as the ratio of humans to trees changes. Soon we will have more humans than trees, which means more carbon dioxide than nature can re-absorb.
The only solution is for us to use less land, and have more trees on it, which requires we have fewer humans.
We're like an obese person on a sofa who can't stop spreading out over the whole thing. Soon there will be no sofa left, only fat. What then?
I've thought about this issue a lot, since becoming a co-sysop in 1985 and for the next ten years, moderating dial-up BBS communities, then a series of web-based communities ever since. I founded or co-founded three popular BBS systems, got to know the community thoroughly, and have about five thousand people (daily) visit the web-based communities I moderate.
In my experience, the solution is an unpopular one. We like invisible hand, quasi-anarchistic, external solutions. Make a rule, and let it do the hard work.
From what I have seen, this is the wrong direction. We don't need more rules. We need organic leadership that can tell the difference between a valuable minority opinion, and a troll or information saboteur.
Allowing the community to police itself means that a minority of the users who spend a majority of their time online, predominate. This group, which I call "loudmouths," tend to shout down opinions that vary with official community hive mind dogma.
Slashdot's system works OK if people know how to game it, e.g. making their posts spicy enough to get noticed and vague enough to not hit the hot buttons of the fanatics. But nothing substitutes for a good moderation team.
If you're really good, you'll have the smartest members of your community at the very top, making the difficult decisions ("is this a future Einstein, or a clever troll?"). They will then have a support network of people who do the more basic filtering for spam, stupidity, etc. This group will be both vertical in hierarchy, and lateral, in that they support each other and fill in for each other when they get busy.
Their role is not simply to prune out the bad, but to uplift the good and to make connections between ongoing threads. They are content-creators that set the tone for the forum by keeping the quality level high.
This, in my experience, is the only way to have a stable and thriving community.
I am far from paranoid of government, but if you give government a privilege, they will expand its role.
Today, removing Coreflood. Tomorrow? Other dangerous software, like BitTorrent or DC++
It's not paranoid to suggest that if you give a strong central authority a delegated power, they will expand their use of it to justify their salaries/funding.
There seems to be a lot of social status posturing over who is "educated," but I'll take the guy with his GED and practical experience over the graduates of third-tier liberal arts colleges, stadium-like state schools and community colleges whose main claim to fame is that they are "educated" even if they are incapable of basic business, social and intellectual function.
Wikipedia is awesome for paraphrasing collegiate and graduate textbooks, and mainstream culture.
But what about a non-mainstream culture, like death metal? Same thing happens as with gaming: they reject the credible sources and replace them with mainstream ones.
Here you have angry Wikipedians telling the net's oldest metal site that it is not a credible source.
Wikipedia is basically Google's way of ensuring that every search has a semi-accurate result, and it's destructive in that it standardizes knowledge without eliminating bias. This is why I avoid Wikipedia except for mainstream culture or paraphrased graduate school textbook content.
One silly recession, and everyone's going all budget cuts crazy. They're saving money so that we can have more big Wall Street firms making "profits" by selling financial instruments. The Chinese aren't fooled; they know our currency's about to crash and no amount of paper-shuffling will fix that. We're selling stuff to ourselves and calling it profit, just like in the dot-com boom, without "making" any new wealth.
In the meantime, the science programs we cut (to "save money") form the basis of our future. Our current economy is probably more of a transition than a permanent state. Anyone else think we're screwing up by spending so much time on shuffling paper around to earn money, and so little money on the technologies that could define our future?
You will be remembered by some for exceptional deeds, but even 500 years later, only the most exceptional of the exceptional get remembered. They are remembered only as names, a few books, paintings, symphonies or battles.
Does this make them immortal? Hell no. They are remembered as icons but not individuals. Nothing preserves the individual in its incarnate form. 500 years after your death, no one who knew you will be alive. You will exist only as a symbol.
Regarding the afterlife, I think it's time we stop the reductionist bigotry. We can't prove that an afterlife exists or not. We do know this universe is very efficient in the conservation of patterns, that these may exist outside of time, and that these tend to involve a micro::macro mirroring. These are suggestive things.
To paraphrase X-files, "I want to believe," but most days, I'm just another physicalist here on planet earth hoping for the best neurotransmitter function a corned beef sandwich, two cups of coffee and a little hope can provide.
Get the kids Apple ][s so they can learn good programming:
* Use RAM and disk sparingly * Integrate BASIC with assembly * Write simple drivers and disk routines * Learn telecommunications from the bit level * Learn how spaghetti code sucks the life out of you
Logo, BASIC and assembly provide all the fun a kid needs. Well, maybe not all... but a good start to learning CS from the ground up.
In light of Wikileaks, I've been reconsidering this.
Back in the 1980s when finding internet access or time on a machine faster than 1mhz was a huge achievement, "information wants to be free" meant "let us use your networks for non-commercial purposes that help them grow."
From hacking came a lot of good things. Better programming; increased security; cutting through the academic and business horse shit that locked technology into repetitive, categorical, and rather boring uses. From it also came some adventure and fun.
But now, hacking is more of an academic art than anything else. Research known exploits and run a fuzzer until you find an injection or overflow waiting to happen, then ta-da! You win. As a result, I don't think "information wants to be free" applies to hacking when you can make one phone call with your credit card and have fast internet access, and another phone call to get a computer 10,000 times faster than anything we had in the 1980s.
File sharing, while I love the idea of it, takes piracy from an elite who further the technology, and instead makes it an everyday way for much of America to steal its content. Many people are computer-literate now, and they're going online not to find rare and technical information, but to download movies, games and music. That's a different use entirely.
Wikileaks also strikes me as a case of "hackers" (if copying stuff to a thumb drive counts as "hacking") going too far in the wrong direction. Ultimately the exposure of diplomatic networks will increase instability and make the United States more inclined to be fascist, not the reverse. In addition, those who worked with the United States toward good causes are already feeling the hurt. "Information wants to be free" doesn't mean "and you can ignore the consequences."
Consider these cases:
1. I post 1.4gb of credit card numbers online in the ideal that it will destroy the financial system and create world anarcho-socialism.
2. You write a novel; it takes you two years. I post it online in Kindle, Nook and Sony reader formats.
3. You take out $20m in loans to make a movie or a video game, and you spend five years of your life on the project, hoping that you can leverage this into a career. I post your game or movie online before it is released.
We'll never know how sales are affected because we will never know if the people downloading would have bought it anyway, but what's really lost is the newness of the material. If your neighbor reads the newspaper, figures out which are the good stories, and then tells you about them while you're fishing, what incentive do you have to buy the newspaper?
We -- the hackers of today -- need to think long and hard about this. By destroying the ability of others to profit from their work, we may be sabotaging the very people we sought to empower all those years ago.
Just $0.02, or probably worth a lot less in this recession.
Their purchasing determines what is profitable on the internet.
Their attention span determines the type of information that will be profitable.
You, the old school user, are maybe 1% of the net. You are irrelevant except as a niche market.
They are comfortable with TV, "rides" and planned, advertising-funded adventures in alternate realities to distract from their depressing existences as corporate serfs.
They (or rather, what they will buy) will determine the content of the internet. Not you.
What do they like?
* Television * Fast food * Coca-Cola * Movies like X-Men * Disco * Corn dogs
That is your future, internet. You are only ruled by the nerds at night.
I then use Perl scripts to convert text markup to RTF for publisher documents.
I do this so I have minimal interface getting in the way of the work process. It's almost as good as handwriting (using an m600 with Florida Blue ink) but it's easier to revise this way.
As far as I know, there are no single genes for general traits like height, intelligence, race, etc. Claiming that one exists is a new form of logical fallacy, named after one of the most egregious abusers:
We censored the information about our censorship, therefore we do not censor.
***
I thought it was interesting that democracies are the ones asking most frequently. It's possible that's because non-democratic states already know via other means. It's also possible that democracies are less stable.
***
Another thought is that this is only one view of the situation. If the USA asked for censorship information 4,287 times and that enabled them to catch pedophiles/terrorists/enslavers 4,214 times, we're all doing pretty well by that outcome.
To be a profound political thinker or leader? Harder.
So if you can't turn off the TV long enough to find some reputable sources, I'm very sorry for you, but I have no need to follow you in your error.
If your coders are in a theater troop in their spare time, they shouldn't be allowed to write mission-critical code, because actors shouldn't be allowed to do that.
You wouldn't do so well in a political science class making logical fallacies like that. Hobbies are clearly different than vocations, don't you think?
If your paycheck says "make jokes", then anything you do that isn't a joke should be ignored.
If your paycheck says "entertainer," I'm going to go to the professionals instead for political information.
Would you take political opinions from Britney Spears?
I am an unabashed Jean-Louis Gassee fan, having used Macs back in the 1980s and at the time wondered why they didn't allow me to use expansion cards like an Apple//, or even expand the memory (early 128K/512K Macs made that rather difficult!).
When BeOS came out, I was fairly thrilled at the idea, but had no idea how to get my hands on a Be box. A few years later, I got to see BeOS on an Intel box.
I was at first somewhat nonplussed, because this was a 160mhz 486dx2 style nightmare machine... but the BeOS made the thing haul ass. I have no other way to describe it; windows were snappy, file operations slow, but everything else not only ran quickly but synchronized well between different tasks.
History may well have delivered us the wrong "hero," and screwed one of the real heroes, because BeOS was amazing -- and light years ahead of Windows NT, and alternate universes ahead of MacOS 7, which you could freeze by holding down the mouse button.
I don't want actors writing mission critical code for our spacecraft, and by the same token, we the voters shouldn't get our opinions from people who are paid to make us laugh, not make us see truth.
If you want to know what's wrong with democracy in America, it's that a huge mass of useful idiots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot) are voting wherever their emotional impulses lead them, at the behest of a few privileged media elites.
As a hacker, you learn this quickly: you'll have access to data with which you can do very bad things.
The archetypal example is hacking into a hospital. You can change patient records; do you? There are real-world consequences for editing or releasing certain types of information.
Assange leaked information that caused real-world consequences. Big consequences, like death and torture, not small consequences like Microsoft missing out on seven bucks because you pirated Windows 2000.
If our government idly tolerated Assange leaking information that could endanger American servicepeople worldwide, I'd never work with our government on anything ever again.
Others feel this way, also. As a result, Assange and Bradley Manning will need to face some punishment severe enough that it warns others from leaking privileged information.
I don't have a problem with this. If you decide to walk on the grey hat side of life, you need to be responsible with what you find. And if you don't and end up in a ditch, or an Australian jail (most likely Assange's next destination), them's the breaks.
Slashdot Mirror
While I think it's great people want to get involved with the environment, stop and think about this like a computer scientist.
If carbon dioxide produces global warming, we will run into problems as the ratio of humans to trees changes. Soon we will have more humans than trees, which means more carbon dioxide than nature can re-absorb.
The only solution is for us to use less land, and have more trees on it, which requires we have fewer humans.
We're like an obese person on a sofa who can't stop spreading out over the whole thing. Soon there will be no sofa left, only fat. What then?
I've thought about this issue a lot, since becoming a co-sysop in 1985 and for the next ten years, moderating dial-up BBS communities, then a series of web-based communities ever since. I founded or co-founded three popular BBS systems, got to know the community thoroughly, and have about five thousand people (daily) visit the web-based communities I moderate.
In my experience, the solution is an unpopular one. We like invisible hand, quasi-anarchistic, external solutions. Make a rule, and let it do the hard work.
From what I have seen, this is the wrong direction. We don't need more rules. We need organic leadership that can tell the difference between a valuable minority opinion, and a troll or information saboteur.
Allowing the community to police itself means that a minority of the users who spend a majority of their time online, predominate. This group, which I call "loudmouths," tend to shout down opinions that vary with official community hive mind dogma.
Slashdot's system works OK if people know how to game it, e.g. making their posts spicy enough to get noticed and vague enough to not hit the hot buttons of the fanatics. But nothing substitutes for a good moderation team.
If you're really good, you'll have the smartest members of your community at the very top, making the difficult decisions ("is this a future Einstein, or a clever troll?"). They will then have a support network of people who do the more basic filtering for spam, stupidity, etc. This group will be both vertical in hierarchy, and lateral, in that they support each other and fill in for each other when they get busy.
Their role is not simply to prune out the bad, but to uplift the good and to make connections between ongoing threads. They are content-creators that set the tone for the forum by keeping the quality level high.
This, in my experience, is the only way to have a stable and thriving community.
I am far from paranoid of government, but if you give government a privilege, they will expand its role.
Today, removing Coreflood. Tomorrow? Other dangerous software, like BitTorrent or DC++
It's not paranoid to suggest that if you give a strong central authority a delegated power, they will expand their use of it to justify their salaries/funding.
"Educated" =/= "intelligent"
There seems to be a lot of social status posturing over who is "educated," but I'll take the guy with his GED and practical experience over the graduates of third-tier liberal arts colleges, stadium-like state schools and community colleges whose main claim to fame is that they are "educated" even if they are incapable of basic business, social and intellectual function.
There's no one to surrender to under water.
Wikipedia is awesome for paraphrasing collegiate and graduate textbooks, and mainstream culture.
But what about a non-mainstream culture, like death metal? Same thing happens as with gaming: they reject the credible sources and replace them with mainstream ones.
ANUS vs Wikipedia
Here you have angry Wikipedians telling the net's oldest metal site that it is not a credible source.
Wikipedia is basically Google's way of ensuring that every search has a semi-accurate result, and it's destructive in that it standardizes knowledge without eliminating bias. This is why I avoid Wikipedia except for mainstream culture or paraphrased graduate school textbook content.
Not notable.
One silly recession, and everyone's going all budget cuts crazy. They're saving money so that we can have more big Wall Street firms making "profits" by selling financial instruments. The Chinese aren't fooled; they know our currency's about to crash and no amount of paper-shuffling will fix that. We're selling stuff to ourselves and calling it profit, just like in the dot-com boom, without "making" any new wealth.
In the meantime, the science programs we cut (to "save money") form the basis of our future. Our current economy is probably more of a transition than a permanent state. Anyone else think we're screwing up by spending so much time on shuffling paper around to earn money, and so little money on the technologies that could define our future?
You will be remembered by some for exceptional deeds, but even 500 years later, only the most exceptional of the exceptional get remembered. They are remembered only as names, a few books, paintings, symphonies or battles.
Does this make them immortal? Hell no. They are remembered as icons but not individuals. Nothing preserves the individual in its incarnate form. 500 years after your death, no one who knew you will be alive. You will exist only as a symbol.
Regarding the afterlife, I think it's time we stop the reductionist bigotry. We can't prove that an afterlife exists or not. We do know this universe is very efficient in the conservation of patterns, that these may exist outside of time, and that these tend to involve a micro::macro mirroring. These are suggestive things.
To paraphrase X-files, "I want to believe," but most days, I'm just another physicalist here on planet earth hoping for the best neurotransmitter function a corned beef sandwich, two cups of coffee and a little hope can provide.
So now they're insulting everyone of Slavic (eastern European except Hungary, Slovenia and Czech republic) heritage.
Get the kids Apple ][s so they can learn good programming:
* Use RAM and disk sparingly
* Integrate BASIC with assembly
* Write simple drivers and disk routines
* Learn telecommunications from the bit level
* Learn how spaghetti code sucks the life out of you
Logo, BASIC and assembly provide all the fun a kid needs. Well, maybe not all... but a good start to learning CS from the ground up.
The powers that be: You need strong government and law enforcement because most people are unruly vandals.
Anonymous: We believe in a more anarchistic world, and so we're going to vandalize things until disorder comes about.
Silent Majority: Guess the powers that be called that one right.
In light of Wikileaks, I've been reconsidering this.
Back in the 1980s when finding internet access or time on a machine faster than 1mhz was a huge achievement, "information wants to be free" meant "let us use your networks for non-commercial purposes that help them grow."
From hacking came a lot of good things. Better programming; increased security; cutting through the academic and business horse shit that locked technology into repetitive, categorical, and rather boring uses. From it also came some adventure and fun.
But now, hacking is more of an academic art than anything else. Research known exploits and run a fuzzer until you find an injection or overflow waiting to happen, then ta-da! You win. As a result, I don't think "information wants to be free" applies to hacking when you can make one phone call with your credit card and have fast internet access, and another phone call to get a computer 10,000 times faster than anything we had in the 1980s.
File sharing, while I love the idea of it, takes piracy from an elite who further the technology, and instead makes it an everyday way for much of America to steal its content. Many people are computer-literate now, and they're going online not to find rare and technical information, but to download movies, games and music. That's a different use entirely.
Wikileaks also strikes me as a case of "hackers" (if copying stuff to a thumb drive counts as "hacking") going too far in the wrong direction. Ultimately the exposure of diplomatic networks will increase instability and make the United States more inclined to be fascist, not the reverse. In addition, those who worked with the United States toward good causes are already feeling the hurt. "Information wants to be free" doesn't mean "and you can ignore the consequences."
Consider these cases:
1. I post 1.4gb of credit card numbers online in the ideal that it will destroy the financial system and create world anarcho-socialism.
2. You write a novel; it takes you two years. I post it online in Kindle, Nook and Sony reader formats.
3. You take out $20m in loans to make a movie or a video game, and you spend five years of your life on the project, hoping that you can leverage this into a career. I post your game or movie online before it is released.
We'll never know how sales are affected because we will never know if the people downloading would have bought it anyway, but what's really lost is the newness of the material. If your neighbor reads the newspaper, figures out which are the good stories, and then tells you about them while you're fishing, what incentive do you have to buy the newspaper?
We -- the hackers of today -- need to think long and hard about this. By destroying the ability of others to profit from their work, we may be sabotaging the very people we sought to empower all those years ago.
Just $0.02, or probably worth a lot less in this recession.
Now that is a Texas-size sexual fantasy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Sorry, internet: this is your new audience.
Their purchasing determines what is profitable on the internet.
Their attention span determines the type of information that will be profitable.
You, the old school user, are maybe 1% of the net. You are irrelevant except as a niche market.
They are comfortable with TV, "rides" and planned, advertising-funded adventures in alternate realities to distract from their depressing existences as corporate serfs.
They (or rather, what they will buy) will determine the content of the internet. Not you.
What do they like?
* Television
* Fast food
* Coca-Cola
* Movies like X-Men
* Disco
* Corn dogs
That is your future, internet. You are only ruled by the nerds at night.
In a normal business, you serve a client.
In government, the client is yourself, and you must "justify" that position with lots of public activity.
That activity does not need to be effective, it only needs to look effective. By definition, there's less risk in ineffective activity.
This is why government is often ineffective, and why both left and right wing parties want to streamline it.
I use EditPad Lite:
http://www.editpadlite.com/
I then use Perl scripts to convert text markup to RTF for publisher documents.
I do this so I have minimal interface getting in the way of the work process. It's almost as good as handwriting (using an m600 with Florida Blue ink) but it's easier to revise this way.
As far as I know, there are no single genes for general traits like height, intelligence, race, etc. Claiming that one exists is a new form of logical fallacy, named after one of the most egregious abusers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy
Now if we can just train our media to stop talking about "the height gene" or "the nine inch penis gene" we'll have it made.
We censored the information about our censorship, therefore we do not censor.
***
I thought it was interesting that democracies are the ones asking most frequently. It's possible that's because non-democratic states already know via other means. It's also possible that democracies are less stable.
***
Another thought is that this is only one view of the situation. If the USA asked for censorship information 4,287 times and that enabled them to catch pedophiles/terrorists/enslavers 4,214 times, we're all doing pretty well by that outcome.
Yes, and next time I need a doctor, I'll be sure to see an amateur, as well.
Would you let Colbert, Stewart and/or Beck operate on you? Diagnose your medical problems? Write your compiler?
Politics is a specialized field just like the ones mentioned above.
I'm sorry if you can't be bothered to crack a book, or even do a little background research, but there's a reason we esteem some thinkers over others.
It's not that hard to be a funnyman.
To be a profound political thinker or leader? Harder.
So if you can't turn off the TV long enough to find some reputable sources, I'm very sorry for you, but I have no need to follow you in your error.
If your coders are in a theater troop in their spare time, they shouldn't be allowed to write mission-critical code, because actors shouldn't be allowed to do that.
You wouldn't do so well in a political science class making logical fallacies like that. Hobbies are clearly different than vocations, don't you think?
If your paycheck says "make jokes", then anything you do that isn't a joke should be ignored.
If your paycheck says "entertainer," I'm going to go to the professionals instead for political information.
Would you take political opinions from Britney Spears?
Umm... has the meaning of the "!!1!" meme been forgotten so soon? I guess it has been 25 years or so since its inception.
I am an unabashed Jean-Louis Gassee fan, having used Macs back in the 1980s and at the time wondered why they didn't allow me to use expansion cards like an Apple //, or even expand the memory (early 128K/512K Macs made that rather difficult!).
When BeOS came out, I was fairly thrilled at the idea, but had no idea how to get my hands on a Be box. A few years later, I got to see BeOS on an Intel box.
I was at first somewhat nonplussed, because this was a 160mhz 486dx2 style nightmare machine... but the BeOS made the thing haul ass. I have no other way to describe it; windows were snappy, file operations slow, but everything else not only ran quickly but synchronized well between different tasks.
History may well have delivered us the wrong "hero," and screwed one of the real heroes, because BeOS was amazing -- and light years ahead of Windows NT, and alternate universes ahead of MacOS 7, which you could freeze by holding down the mouse button.
from the i-fail-at-history dept.
Don't also fail at English:
Macworld Weekly has an interesting look at the history of OS X from it's early origins in 1985
Its = belonging to It
It's = contraction for "it is"
Knowing these rules can save your life!!1!
What do Beck, Stewart and Colbert have in common?
They're entertainers, not political scientists.
I don't want actors writing mission critical code for our spacecraft, and by the same token, we the voters shouldn't get our opinions from people who are paid to make us laugh, not make us see truth.
If you want to know what's wrong with democracy in America, it's that a huge mass of useful idiots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot) are voting wherever their emotional impulses lead them, at the behest of a few privileged media elites.
That's not politics, it's mob rule.
As a hacker, you learn this quickly: you'll have access to data with which you can do very bad things.
The archetypal example is hacking into a hospital. You can change patient records; do you? There are real-world consequences for editing or releasing certain types of information.
Assange leaked information that caused real-world consequences. Big consequences, like death and torture, not small consequences like Microsoft missing out on seven bucks because you pirated Windows 2000.
If our government idly tolerated Assange leaking information that could endanger American servicepeople worldwide, I'd never work with our government on anything ever again.
Others feel this way, also. As a result, Assange and Bradley Manning will need to face some punishment severe enough that it warns others from leaking privileged information.
I don't have a problem with this. If you decide to walk on the grey hat side of life, you need to be responsible with what you find. And if you don't and end up in a ditch, or an Australian jail (most likely Assange's next destination), them's the breaks.