I have to ask the same question I always ask when Brin comments on contemporary society: are he and I living in the same country?
Maybe it's just the memory of being beat up as a kid, many times, for being what one tormentor called a "walking dictionary"; or knowing people who have been subject to, or threatened with, violence (by the state or by private citizens) because of their personal lifestyle choices; or knowing that both Presidental front-runners describe themselves not just as Christians but as "born-again" Christians; but I just don't see a love of diversity and eccentricity in the mainstream of our culture. I think we covered that point here pretty well in the post-Columbine "Hellmouth" threads.
Yes, there's a certain amount of "geek chic", but there's a simple reason for that. The mainstream is somewhat enamored of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs because they're filthy rich, plain and simple.
Everything is taken in graphically, just as our minds tend to work.
Funny - my mind tends to work verbally, especailly when I'm making commands or requests. My mind thinks "remove all the object files", and rm *.o is closer to that than any GUI sequence I can think of.
All other things being equal, a CLI is better when you want to ask the machine to do something. A GUI is better when you want to do something yourself and use the machine to replace a manual tool such as a paintbrush. Problem is, CLIs are too cryptic. Maybe we need a more natural-language CLI - I've got it! In addition to the Doom-like or Quake-like GUIs that have been suggested, we need a Zork-like CLI!
GET ALL OBJECT FILES. DELETE THEM.
I see no object files here!
GO TO./OBJ
~tms/obj This is the object file directory. Messy bunches of ones and zeros are all over the floor.
EXAMINE
You see: - an object file named xyz.o - an object file named foobar.o
I did get the warm-and-fuzzies when the 12 year old girl said: This is UNIX... I KNOW THIS!
Not as good as the bit in Wayne's World 2, though:
Garth: Hey, that's a Unix book. [I do believe it was a copy of Steven's Unix Network Programming.] Garthette: Yeah. Garth: Cool...[They smile shyly at each other.]
Their code had a complete disregard for the processor underneath
Usually it's more important to have regard for the next person to have to deal with your code than to have regard for the processor. ("Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.") Of course, it's a regretable truth that there's plenty of code out there that takes no regard for either the CPU or the next hacker in line.
For the places where we must take into account the strains on the poor CPU, surround the code with skulls and crossbones and warnings that heavy magic lies within, and document the best you can. It's not unreasonable to take 20 lines of comments to explain 5 lines of heavy bit-twiddling magic.
How many people do you know that were literally thinking of leaving the computer industry alltogether?
Not leaving altogether, but I figure that if the job market stays good, my stocks don't bottom out, and I exercise some finanical discipline, I should be able to pay off my house in four or five years; after that I hope to do computer stuff part-time and leave more time for writing and music, maybe open up my own dojo. I love hacking and don't think I'll ever stop, but hacking for other people, under their rules and schedules, I could do without.
I'm probably already pulling down the average on work hours; when I was a full-time direct employee I tried to avoid overtime as much as possible, and now that I'm a contractor I usually work 35-40 hours a week, almost never more.
I also want to strongly agree about point made elsewhere in the thread about what really constitutes work hours. When I was suddenly thrust into the role of technical lead on a firewall project about three years back, for about a two month period I was thinking about network security at most every waking moment; but I never had more than 60 hours on the time sheet.
In case anyone doesn't know, that's not our hemos...note the "." at the end of the username.
Troll, troll, go away, find a better way to play. Like, in heavy traffic.
(BTW, couldn't impersonation victims could sue these trolls for damage to reputation? Subpoena the webserver logs, then the ISP logs, to track 'em down. Probably won't be able to get much money out of it, since anyone with a job would find better ways to spend their time than trolling, but hunting trolls could be a fine recreational activity. (Anyone want to take odds on a "Mr Slippery" (no dot) or some other impersonator popping up now that I've made this suggestion?))
I say "Um... cherry, please". Is my choice random? Well, yes, to some extent. It is random to you since you cannot predict it. It is still a choice? Sure is.
Assuming that quantum effects are negligable, it's entirely possible that if I had full knowledge and understanding of how your brain works I could explain your "random" choice as the influence of many subtle factors. It's sort of like Linux's/dev/random: while the "entropy pool" comes from environmental influences that are subtle and complex beyond my ability to track, it's all deterministic.
It may also be that quantum effects on the microscopic level are magnified by the brain's nonlinearity and do play a role, leading to genuine non-determinism. Either way, the atoms in our brains behave the same way as atoms everywhere else; everything is influenced by, and connected to, its surroundings. Our brains are not some special conspiracy of atoms seeking to oppose the influence of the rest of the cosmos.
Consider a guy caught for shoplifting. He serves his, say, year in jail. You look at him after a year, and he is not reformed at all. Do you advocate keeping in jail until he reforms? Life sentence for shoplifting?
Given the uncertainity of determining guilt, or determining reformation, the minor nature of the crime, the deterrent nature of incarceration, the high cost of jailing people, and the possibility of reformation from sources outside of prison, giving the state the power to hold him indefintely is a greater evil than the possibility of recitivism.
Was he "accountable" for his actions? The question seems irrelevent, and possibly meaningless.
No, not at all. The answer would determine whether he should go to jail, or to a mental hospital.
I did address this: "(except as his mental state may impact his rehabilitation or lack thereof)" Institutions for the "criminally insane" are for people with problems for which we have some understanding and treatment, whereas jails are for people with problems we find more diffuse and harder or impossible to treat.
For example, let's say that he has a brain tumor which affects his brain. If you consider him accountable for his actions, he should go to jail and serve his term. If he is NOT accountable, he should be free to go as soon as an operation removes the tumor and he is certified as psychologically normal.
So he doesn't have a brain tumor. Maybe he's got a less obvious physical or biochemical defect. Maybe he was abused as a child. Maybe he "fell in with the wrong crowd" in his youth because he lived in a bad neighborhood. Whatever made him the way he is, he had no control over it, any more than I had control over the genetic and environmental causes that made me what I am today (for good or ill).
As you're using it here, "accountability" is just a value judgement, partly based on the degree to which we understand human behavior and the things that influence it. Saying someone is or isn't accountable doesn't change what they did or what they will do.
I cannot measure the exact position and momentum of a particle at the same time. This doesn't mean that it doesn't have a position and a momentum.
Heisenberg tells us we can't measure them, but Bell (IIRC) tells us that they really don't have (in the sense I think you mean) a position and a momentum -there are no hidden variables.
Randomness is a very important component and is part of free will.
If it's random, then there is not choice involved.
The basic problem with free will (or absence of it) is accountability. Essentially, if there is no free will, then humans cannot be held accountable for their behavior (with all the nasty concepts for the concepts of justice, effort, etc.)
Sorry, but the physical universe is not bound by our notions of ethics, justice, and accountability. The fact that you find a conclusion about physical reality morally unpalatable doesn't mean that it's false; it means that you need to consider changing your ethical system.
"Your Honor, I killed this guy because that's what I am and what I do -- I cannot change this. I submit that there is no justice in punishing me: I cannot be changed".
Ideas of "punishment" and "justice" miss the mark. A killer is a threat to others, therefore we cage him. If we can rehabilitate him such that he is no longer a threat, then we can release him. The question of whether he is "accountable" is not meaningful (except as his mental state may impact his rehabilitation or lack thereof); the question we should ask is "What will we do?" (Many ethical problems become much clearer when looked at this way; rather than labelling things "good" and "evil", "right" and "wrong", just ask "What will I do?")
This has been on my mind lately - I helped send a mentally ill man to prison just a few days ago, because he was stalking my housemate. (A Zenarchist as a witness for the state - whadda hoot. But it made for less trouble than dealing him myself.) Was he "accountable" for his actions? The question seems irrelevent, and possibly meaningless. The fact was that he was a threat; the goal was to remove the threat, not to punish his action.
It's all atoms and molecules. There's no magic here.
The fact that it's all atoms and molecules does not preclude it from also being magic.
Beethoven's Ode to Joy or Hendrix's Bold As Love are no less magical for being "only" atmospheric vibrations. A rainbow is no less magical for being produced by the refraction of electromagnetic vibrations - produced by the fusion of hydrogen to helium 93 million miles away - through millions of water droplets suspended in air. (Mayhaps it's even more magic when understood this way.) The touch of a lovely woman is no less magic for being sense data processed though axons and dendrites and neurotransmitters.
What is magic is not so much these things themselves, but our subjective experience of them. Magic is what you feel. Perhaps we can describe that experience, that feeling, as atoms moving around our brains; but to describe and predict is not necessarily the same as to understand. In a fundamental way we cannot understand other people's subjective experience - and it's questionable to what extent we can understand our own.
And free will vs. determinism? The question is based on false premises, that there's some hard separation between "you" and "the universe". Let me recommend Raymond Smullyan's essay "Is God a Taoist?", in his book The Tao is Silent (also collected in The Mind's I, mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
a) I thought Mystery Men was very much along the lines of The Tick and retained the same tongue-in-cheek-but-lovable satire of the Tick comics. That movie turned out pretty good.
Agreed. Most of the characters in Mystery Men would have fit right into the Tick universe.
ObTickQuote: "Life is a big wild craxy tossed salad, but you don't ear it, no sir! You live it! Isn't it great?"
(Why, yes, I do have a calligraphic button reading "SPOOON!" hanging in my car, why do you ask?)
This can't happen with Windows? Horseshit. The first hypothesis that came to mind when I heard about this DDoS attack was a Back Orifice module installed all over the place.
Anyone with a thimble-full of common sense knows I'm not implying their going to come and physically assault you. Not in this day and age.
Of course not. Megacorps just buy enough influence in the government to have the police come and threaten you unless you comply with their wishes. No need for corporate execs to get their hands dirty.
But Ford doesn't sell computers, software, or network connectivity, so how do your examples apply?
Because Katz claims that "Companies like Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Apple ought to be particularly mortified that they didn't think of it first." I can't speak about the benefits at any of these specific companies (I have done work for IBM and HP, but not as a direct employee), but there are companies in that sector who did think of the benefits of PCs and net access for employees a while ago. Indeed, before The Septemeber That Never Ended, you pretty much got net access either though your school or your job; very few private ISPs existed.
Ford's action could be an interesting step forward, but it's not as radical as Mr. Katz makes it out to be.
Some clients take forever to allocate resources (like a PC and a phone) to consultants.
Computer-related benefits have been around in the high-tech world for a while. When I worked at Trusted Information Systems from 1993 to 1996, they had a matching-funds program for computer purchases, and employees could get dial-up shell access to e-mail, USENET, and ftp. When Digex made me a job offer a few years back, one of their benefits was an ISDN connection (this was pre-DSL) to my house.
So this isn't quite as new or radical as Katz makes it out to be.
Blatantly false! The honour belongs to Clément Ader's Éole, which flew as far back as 1890, in France.
The Wrights made the first sustained, powered, and controlled flight. Yes, there were many pioneers before them who laid the foundations of their work, but the Wrights crossed the threshold into "real" flight.
And because of all the failed attempts before them, it was years after their first flight before the world recognized that the age of the airplane was upon us.
(3) follows from (1) and (2). Which premise do you disagree with?
I find the first premise, about library content being governed by local community standards, to be lacking any justification or rigor. Some of the greatest anti-censorship battles have been against local governemnts attempting to censor what their citizens can read, see, or hear.
I also find your unstated assumption that filtering allows local standards to be imposed on the net to be incorrect - local communities do not develop the block lists in an open democratic process, they are produced in private by profit-seeking companies. Perhaps this is because an attempt to develop an open and democratic list would quickly demonstrate the impossibility of effective and accurate automatic censorship
So for the 150th time, if the majority of people want it that way, what's the big deal?
Sorry, but "majority rules" is no excuse for taking away people's rights. (Who said that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch?)
Re:Most people are brainwashed to this stuff too.
on
Politics Follows Code
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· Score: 2
You have no right to copy someone else's work if they don't want you to.
Not true. If I publish something, you have fair use legal rights to copy it.
Say that I write, record, and distribute a song that you like. You have every legal right to sing it yourself (though if you're getting paid to do so, you're supposed to give me a cut through BMI or ASCAP), or to burn a mix CD with the song on it for your personal use. Certainly no one can stop you from memorizing it, thus making a copy based in your synapses. I can't say "I don't want Geek Boy to be allowed to copy this!" and expect the government to enforce that.
(Note that I am speaking purely of rights under existing copyright law, not ethical rights I believe you have.)
There is a clear difference between you choosing not to tell me your SSN, and the state requiring that I pass a background check before you are permitted to tell me your SSN.
For people who develop web sites and preview them on IE5 through our DSL lines, we're just not going to remember about things like alt tags or dealing with people who don't support frames.
Preview with Lynx! Also try loading in your regular browser with style sheets turned off to ensure that non-CSS browsers don't get horrid color schemes or illegible fonts or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's just the memory of being beat up as a kid, many times, for being what one tormentor called a "walking dictionary"; or knowing people who have been subject to, or threatened with, violence (by the state or by private citizens) because of their personal lifestyle choices; or knowing that both Presidental front-runners describe themselves not just as Christians but as "born-again" Christians; but I just don't see a love of diversity and eccentricity in the mainstream of our culture. I think we covered that point here pretty well in the post-Columbine "Hellmouth" threads.
Yes, there's a certain amount of "geek chic", but there's a simple reason for that. The mainstream is somewhat enamored of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs because they're filthy rich, plain and simple.
All other things being equal, a CLI is better when you want to ask the machine to do something. A GUI is better when you want to do something yourself and use the machine to replace a manual tool such as a paintbrush. Problem is, CLIs are too cryptic. Maybe we need a more natural-language CLI - I've got it! In addition to the Doom-like or Quake-like GUIs that have been suggested, we need a Zork-like CLI!
GET ALL OBJECT FILES. DELETE THEM.
I see no object files here!
GO TO ./OBJ
~tms/obj
This is the object file directory. Messy bunches of ones and zeros are all over the floor.
EXAMINE
You see:
- an object file named xyz.o
- an object file named foobar.o
GET ALL OBJECT FILES. DELETE THEM.
Done.
Garth: Hey, that's a Unix book. [I do believe it was a copy of Steven's Unix Network Programming.]
Garthette: Yeah.
Garth: Cool...[They smile shyly at each other.]
For the places where we must take into account the strains on the poor CPU, surround the code with skulls and crossbones and warnings that heavy magic lies within, and document the best you can. It's not unreasonable to take 20 lines of comments to explain 5 lines of heavy bit-twiddling magic.
I'm probably already pulling down the average on work hours; when I was a full-time direct employee I tried to avoid overtime as much as possible, and now that I'm a contractor I usually work 35-40 hours a week, almost never more.
I also want to strongly agree about point made elsewhere in the thread about what really constitutes work hours. When I was suddenly thrust into the role of technical lead on a firewall project about three years back, for about a two month period I was thinking about network security at most every waking moment; but I never had more than 60 hours on the time sheet.
Ha-ha - well done!
Troll, troll, go away, find a better way to play. Like, in heavy traffic.
(BTW, couldn't impersonation victims could sue these trolls for damage to reputation? Subpoena the webserver logs, then the ISP logs, to track 'em down. Probably won't be able to get much money out of it, since anyone with a job would find better ways to spend their time than trolling, but hunting trolls could be a fine recreational activity. (Anyone want to take odds on a "Mr Slippery" (no dot) or some other impersonator popping up now that I've made this suggestion?))
It may also be that quantum effects on the microscopic level are magnified by the brain's nonlinearity and do play a role, leading to genuine non-determinism. Either way, the atoms in our brains behave the same way as atoms everywhere else; everything is influenced by, and connected to, its surroundings. Our brains are not some special conspiracy of atoms seeking to oppose the influence of the rest of the cosmos.
Given the uncertainity of determining guilt, or determining reformation, the minor nature of the crime, the deterrent nature of incarceration, the high cost of jailing people, and the possibility of reformation from sources outside of prison, giving the state the power to hold him indefintely is a greater evil than the possibility of recitivism. I did address this: "(except as his mental state may impact his rehabilitation or lack thereof)" Institutions for the "criminally insane" are for people with problems for which we have some understanding and treatment, whereas jails are for people with problems we find more diffuse and harder or impossible to treat. So he doesn't have a brain tumor. Maybe he's got a less obvious physical or biochemical defect. Maybe he was abused as a child. Maybe he "fell in with the wrong crowd" in his youth because he lived in a bad neighborhood. Whatever made him the way he is, he had no control over it, any more than I had control over the genetic and environmental causes that made me what I am today (for good or ill).As you're using it here, "accountability" is just a value judgement, partly based on the degree to which we understand human behavior and the things that influence it. Saying someone is or isn't accountable doesn't change what they did or what they will do.
This has been on my mind lately - I helped send a mentally ill man to prison just a few days ago, because he was stalking my housemate. (A Zenarchist as a witness for the state - whadda hoot. But it made for less trouble than dealing him myself.) Was he "accountable" for his actions? The question seems irrelevent, and possibly meaningless. The fact was that he was a threat; the goal was to remove the threat, not to punish his action.
Beethoven's Ode to Joy or Hendrix's Bold As Love are no less magical for being "only" atmospheric vibrations. A rainbow is no less magical for being produced by the refraction of electromagnetic vibrations - produced by the fusion of hydrogen to helium 93 million miles away - through millions of water droplets suspended in air. (Mayhaps it's even more magic when understood this way.) The touch of a lovely woman is no less magic for being sense data processed though axons and dendrites and neurotransmitters.
What is magic is not so much these things themselves, but our subjective experience of them. Magic is what you feel. Perhaps we can describe that experience, that feeling, as atoms moving around our brains; but to describe and predict is not necessarily the same as to understand. In a fundamental way we cannot understand other people's subjective experience - and it's questionable to what extent we can understand our own.
And free will vs. determinism? The question is based on false premises, that there's some hard separation between "you" and "the universe". Let me recommend Raymond Smullyan's essay "Is God a Taoist?", in his book The Tao is Silent (also collected in The Mind's I, mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
ObTickQuote: "Life is a big wild craxy tossed salad, but you don't ear it, no sir! You live it! Isn't it great?"
(Why, yes, I do have a calligraphic button reading "SPOOON!" hanging in my car, why do you ask?)
This can't happen with Windows? Horseshit. The first hypothesis that came to mind when I heard about this DDoS attack was a Back Orifice module installed all over the place.
Ford's action could be an interesting step forward, but it's not as radical as Mr. Katz makes it out to be.
Too true!Computer-related benefits have been around in the high-tech world for a while. When I worked at Trusted Information Systems from 1993 to 1996, they had a matching-funds program for computer purchases, and employees could get dial-up shell access to e-mail, USENET, and ftp. When Digex made me a job offer a few years back, one of their benefits was an ISDN connection (this was pre-DSL) to my house.
So this isn't quite as new or radical as Katz makes it out to be.
And because of all the failed attempts before them, it was years after their first flight before the world recognized that the age of the airplane was upon us.
I don't even want to talk about how far away from Eros I am right now.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
I also find your unstated assumption that filtering allows local standards to be imposed on the net to be incorrect - local communities do not develop the block lists in an open democratic process, they are produced in private by profit-seeking companies. Perhaps this is because an attempt to develop an open and democratic list would quickly demonstrate the impossibility of effective and accurate automatic censorship
Say that I write, record, and distribute a song that you like. You have every legal right to sing it yourself (though if you're getting paid to do so, you're supposed to give me a cut through BMI or ASCAP), or to burn a mix CD with the song on it for your personal use. Certainly no one can stop you from memorizing it, thus making a copy based in your synapses. I can't say "I don't want Geek Boy to be allowed to copy this!" and expect the government to enforce that.
(Note that I am speaking purely of rights under existing copyright law, not ethical rights I believe you have.)
There is a clear difference between you choosing not to tell me your SSN, and the state requiring that I pass a background check before you are permitted to tell me your SSN.