I believe the term is "collective UNconscious", a reference to the common dream-space of human minds that includes such things as archetypes. I doubt it can be applied to something that is merely cultural.
I gotta say that cute icons make a difference. I hate the crappy ones that most software use. Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20 * 20 pixels (or whatever) takes a certain kind of talent.
I remember the happy mac startup icon from 1984... when the Mac was happy, *I* was happy. When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.
How do *I* plan to handle critical infrastructure? *I* don't. I expect that people who have an interest will contribute to the process. This is not about one person, or one group's ideas winning out over everyone else. This is about finding a balance through exposing as much information and considering as many options as possible. Your expectation that there should be one and only one road towards progress tells me you think everyone thinks in terms of Utopian ideals. That is exactly the problem.
As for socialism in Canada and other "socialist" states (I am Canadian), you missed my point: a bureacratic process is ineffective because it excludes many points of view in order to achieve "efficiency". That is, in order to simplify complex issues, we will just ignore all the stuff we assume is unimportant. Like people's opinions and stories and concerns. I suppose governments are in theory more responsible, I would say they are still too far removed from the details of the issues to be able to understand what they are doing.
Then again, maybe it *is* good to concentrate power in the hands of a cynical elite who have little or no contact with the people that depend on their choices, in a social environment that rewards sociopaths and ridicules philosophers.
Anyhow, my main point is that socialism as it is practiced is largely authoritarian and unresponsive to public needs. Much like capitalism.
Forget about Top-Down socialism
on
TiVo++ from India
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I am convinced that socialist goals are valid: why NOT organize social activities so that you build up social "wellness" in balance with a development of capital?
The two classic problems, as I see them come from BOTH sides... Capital is mis-defined, and Social planning for the "Common Good" makes no sense when it is being carried out by a priveleged class of managers.
So , redefine Capital as EVERYTHING you need to produce: ie, traditional capital + the bioinfrastructure we need for life on earth. How can you produce in a vacuum (literally). If you were on the ISS you would take into account the effect your activities were having on your life support system, so why not Here On Earth?
As for Socialism, it has mostly been a lie. Most of what passes for "Socialism" is just an extension of the Capitalist Welfare State. Ie: let's have social programs run by bureacracy and private corporations. Meh. How are you going to guarantee the effectiveness of such programs if their MAIN stakeholders are SYSTEMATICALLY EXCLUDED from developing vision, mission, policy, and decision-making? How? You aren't.
So, I would call the direction I am heading as Libertarian Socialism or just plain Anarchism. A social "order" based around ecological and democratic principles. A diminishing of hierarchy, and an activist-lead process.
I don't have illusions about this happening any time soon. It is a movement, not a destination. Anarchists should NOT be utopians, or discordians, or terrorists. This is too serious for that kind of kid stuff.
Code means code. As in "secret code". As in, a layer of abstraction beyond the machine (assembly), or several layers of abstraction (higher level language). "Coding" a physical circuit is pushing the definition too far. It is not an abstraction, it is an artifact. You are actually building a physical system. Code was meant to allow a physical system to mimic another physical system.
I am fully aware the roots of modern Hackerdom lie in wiring complex switches for model trains at MIT (those wacky geeks who started to find other things to do with circuit analysis once phones and mainframes entered their realm). But wiring is not coding: I would say the work of wiring a circuit is more like being a machine-language translator... the "coding" part was coming up with the circuit diagram.
Hey man, I loved the QWERTY keyboard so much, I named my cat after it. She is a grey and white cat, and very friendly. And she'll punk your ergo-friendly Dvorak hamster in a second.
Okay, so tell me: what is the difference between a Taoist and an enlightened Machiavellian?
Does it matter if someone consistently does something altruistic for selfish or selfless reasons? The outcome is the same.
If you really want to get into the motives, then why not just say that acting in the best interest of the commons is itself "selfish" because it is a safer strategy for a better outcome. Sure, you can play the short-term selfish game and come out ahead (maybe), but you will be surrounded by people who resent your success. The lesson in competition is not "improve performance" but rather "sabotage your competition".
Altruism is the reverse: by supporting your "competition" (called "complimentors" in the newspeak) you may risk losing an advantage (as in the prisoner's dilemma) in the short term, but by employing simple strategies like "tit-for-tat" in an environment that is biased towards altruism will eventually lead to maximal outcomes for the population taken as a whole (the "rising tide floats all boats" analogy, here properly applied, for once). It really is inevitable, because the feedback of the "game" allows the participants to learn what will work best for them.
In a human social context, you would hope that that learning would move from the purely intellectual to the personal. If you can learn to do good for selfish reasons, it might occur to you that doing good has value in and of itself.
Three words: Red Mars Trilogy. K.S.R. dealt with all the terraforming issues in detail... I was actually surprised at how deep he went into eco tech.
In any case, it would take more than ants, and a helluva lot longer than a few decades to change the environment on Mars into one we could use.
Not sure about the issue of radiation... there may be a way to have a thick atmosphere that shields the surface enough. I don't think normal radiation within the solar system is really that bad, it's the solar storms that getchya.
One other note: just because the polar caps aren't made of dry ice, doesn't mean there isn't a significant amount of CO2 and carbon locked into the regolith, and in the water itself. But yeah, there are much better gases for terraforming if you want to "Greenhouse" a bit. CFCs for example.
I was really impressed by that game. It was one of the few games from the 80s that really captured my attention (and money). Ah, the memories.
What I *can't* understand is why they chose Pac-Man for the Smithsonian... why not Ms. Pac Man? I think it was a better game, personally. And it is the #1 collectible arcade machine in the world.
Not only does time not continue backwards infinitely (this would require the "steady-state" concept to be true), but if string-theory is anywhere near the mark, time itself is GRANULAR. So it is NOT continuous... it just sort of smoothes out at larger scales.
Which is what I have thought for a while: our human experience of the universe is grossly distorted by the fact that we experience time, space, and matter at a great distance of scale, so that everything looks smooth and regular, when it is actually frothy and discontinuous at the "bottom".
Cosmologists have been aware of the ACCELERATION of universal expansion for a few years now. I remember seeing an interview with the group that first stumbled across this, and they seemed pretty bewildered, because it was NOT the answer they were looking for: the sign of good physics, I think. Whether the universe is in a "late expansionary phase", or whether this is something that persists over the "life" of the universe, it is still pretty strong evidence that we live in an open "saddle" universe, not a flat one or a closed one.
Which is actually good news, I think. Sure, heat death may be a bummer for all of us mortals, but there is the potential that life/consciousness could arise which requires only energy to maintain and grow itself... then an open universe is a good thing. This is because the universe will continue to expand, the temperature will continue to drop (approaching 0 Kelvin, but NEVER reaching it), and the amount of information the universe can hold will continue to grow.
This means, that if we have an open universe with "energy beings" in it near the end (remember, this is a LOOONG time off), those beings could take advantage of the increase in data capacity. I know it sounds weird, but it conforms to both physics and information theory.
Just trying to show how everything falling apart may not be such a bad way to go, after all. Plus, instead of thinking of the cosmos as an expanding-contracting "ball", we can think of it as a "firecracker" whose embers fly apart and dim, leaving only a cloud of smoke.
I've already lost a MOBO to these leaky capacitors. It really pissed me off, since it wasn't even a year old. And yes, it was an Abit board. I will never cheap out again.
I have an old Pet CPM that is pretty messed up. I want to find resources on turning it into a terminal... even if I have to totally gut it. Anyone got any leads?
Re:DICTIONARY.COM RULES!
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 1
I agree. Slashdot is messed up. My lame attempt at humour doesn't deserve it. If I could, I'd mod MYSELF down a point as Overrated. I got all these Mod points just begging to get used... sigh.
Re:DICTIONARY.COM RULES!
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Practice. Meh. No double word score for me.:(
DICTIONARY.COM RULES!
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 1
I use dictionary.com all the time. I love randomly typing in words like "audacious" or "syllogistic" (...my favourite def'n EVER!!: "Of, relating to, resembling, or consisting of a syllogism or syllogisms." BUHAHAHAH!)
Learning the exact meaning of a word, it's variants, and it's etymology really helps me get a grip on nuances in language. A lot of the time I'll get a little surprise when I look up a word, ESPECIALLY when I think I already know what it means. It's also good prectice for SCRABBLE.
Congratulations! You have been correctly indoctrinated into the North American Liberal Intelligensia(TM)! This involves accepting that institutions should concentrate power in the hands of the Better People on behalf of the Average Person, because (of course! why question it?) the Average Person is incapable of understanding anything or contributing to governance in any meaningful way. In fact, they just get in the way, always taking about injustice and how tough it is. Whiners.
So, hurrah for the self-serving, privileged, elitist upper-middle-class! If you feel bad about the way things are going, just move into a gated community and buy a new Benz.
(I find this as anti-democratic an attitude as "one person can't do anything... that's why I don't vote". Either you are for MORE democracy or less, and most people I talk to are for less. And you seem to be, too.)
I think they were outside the core, but inside the containment vessel. Not that I know tons about nuke power plant architecture. But the movie showed them being exposed to steam which I assumed was moving through pipes in the reactor core.
When I was hanging out in Montreal, I found out that PCP is all the rage with the street punks. That and "mescaline", which is actually another form of PCP, not mescaline at all. All I can say is: don't do it. You'll act a complete fool and miss any chance you might have had to get some action. Imagine the sloppiest, most in-need-of-babysitting drunk you can imagine. Like that.
I have no idea how accurate the movie was, but in K-19, the reactor techs who made repairs inside the reactor area were shown to be puking and showing signs of hemorrhage within 10 minutes. Are we talking on the order of 1000 rad here? Anyone know of any data on the exposure of the rest of the crew?
Maybe they can use this principle for security, too... have some "Rain Man"-type sit in a chair and monitor the composite sounds of the internet, scanning for a particular pattern.
I wonder what the sound of a DDOS would be? A waterfall? Maybe a port scan would be a rising set of tones? And some cop in a LOLITA chat room would sound like (what else?) the theme from Jaws.
The whole point of NASA engaging in this is *not* to "win over" those who believe in the conspiracy theory, it is to make sure that people have the information they need to make up their minds for themselves. It would be negligent of NASA to let the "debate" continue without their best effort to explain what they believe the facts to be. Whether or not the hoax "experts" can turn NASA's information and arguments against them is beside the point: not even trying is a worse sin than being misunderstood.
Besides, how can someone on SLASHDOT, of all places, argue against the free sharing of information? NASA should make its case as strongly and definitively as possible so that their voice will be heard, and people will be better-equipped to refute these lame arguments. What happens then is up to the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the term is "collective UNconscious", a reference to the common dream-space of human minds that includes such things as archetypes. I doubt it can be applied to something that is merely cultural.
I gotta say that cute icons make a difference. I hate the crappy ones that most software use. Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20 * 20 pixels (or whatever) takes a certain kind of talent.
I remember the happy mac startup icon from 1984... when the Mac was happy, *I* was happy. When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.
How do *I* plan to handle critical infrastructure? *I* don't. I expect that people who have an interest will contribute to the process. This is not about one person, or one group's ideas winning out over everyone else. This is about finding a balance through exposing as much information and considering as many options as possible. Your expectation that there should be one and only one road towards progress tells me you think everyone thinks in terms of Utopian ideals. That is exactly the problem.
As for socialism in Canada and other "socialist" states (I am Canadian), you missed my point: a bureacratic process is ineffective because it excludes many points of view in order to achieve "efficiency". That is, in order to simplify complex issues, we will just ignore all the stuff we assume is unimportant. Like people's opinions and stories and concerns. I suppose governments are in theory more responsible, I would say they are still too far removed from the details of the issues to be able to understand what they are doing.
Then again, maybe it *is* good to concentrate power in the hands of a cynical elite who have little or no contact with the people that depend on their choices, in a social environment that rewards sociopaths and ridicules philosophers.
Anyhow, my main point is that socialism as it is practiced is largely authoritarian and unresponsive to public needs. Much like capitalism.
I am convinced that socialist goals are valid: why NOT organize social activities so that you build up social "wellness" in balance with a development of capital?
The two classic problems, as I see them come from BOTH sides... Capital is mis-defined, and Social planning for the "Common Good" makes no sense when it is being carried out by a priveleged class of managers.
So , redefine Capital as EVERYTHING you need to produce: ie, traditional capital + the bioinfrastructure we need for life on earth. How can you produce in a vacuum (literally). If you were on the ISS you would take into account the effect your activities were having on your life support system, so why not Here On Earth?
As for Socialism, it has mostly been a lie. Most of what passes for "Socialism" is just an extension of the Capitalist Welfare State. Ie: let's have social programs run by bureacracy and private corporations. Meh. How are you going to guarantee the effectiveness of such programs if their MAIN stakeholders are SYSTEMATICALLY EXCLUDED from developing vision, mission, policy, and decision-making? How? You aren't.
So, I would call the direction I am heading as Libertarian Socialism or just plain Anarchism. A social "order" based around ecological and democratic principles. A diminishing of hierarchy, and an activist-lead process.
I don't have illusions about this happening any time soon. It is a movement, not a destination. Anarchists should NOT be utopians, or discordians, or terrorists. This is too serious for that kind of kid stuff.
Code means code. As in "secret code". As in, a layer of abstraction beyond the machine (assembly), or several layers of abstraction (higher level language). "Coding" a physical circuit is pushing the definition too far. It is not an abstraction, it is an artifact. You are actually building a physical system. Code was meant to allow a physical system to mimic another physical system.
I am fully aware the roots of modern Hackerdom lie in wiring complex switches for model trains at MIT (those wacky geeks who started to find other things to do with circuit analysis once phones and mainframes entered their realm). But wiring is not coding: I would say the work of wiring a circuit is more like being a machine-language translator... the "coding" part was coming up with the circuit diagram.
Hey man, I loved the QWERTY keyboard so much, I named my cat after it. She is a grey and white cat, and very friendly. And she'll punk your ergo-friendly Dvorak hamster in a second.
They do both, actually. CFCs are greenhouse gases AND ozone depleters. But there is no O3 to worry about wrecking on Mars.
Okay, so tell me: what is the difference between a Taoist and an enlightened Machiavellian?
Does it matter if someone consistently does something altruistic for selfish or selfless reasons? The outcome is the same.
If you really want to get into the motives, then why not just say that acting in the best interest of the commons is itself "selfish" because it is a safer strategy for a better outcome. Sure, you can play the short-term selfish game and come out ahead (maybe), but you will be surrounded by people who resent your success. The lesson in competition is not "improve performance" but rather "sabotage your competition".
Altruism is the reverse: by supporting your "competition" (called "complimentors" in the newspeak) you may risk losing an advantage (as in the prisoner's dilemma) in the short term, but by employing simple strategies like "tit-for-tat" in an environment that is biased towards altruism will eventually lead to maximal outcomes for the population taken as a whole (the "rising tide floats all boats" analogy, here properly applied, for once). It really is inevitable, because the feedback of the "game" allows the participants to learn what will work best for them.
In a human social context, you would hope that that learning would move from the purely intellectual to the personal. If you can learn to do good for selfish reasons, it might occur to you that doing good has value in and of itself.
Three words: Red Mars Trilogy. K.S.R. dealt with all the terraforming issues in detail... I was actually surprised at how deep he went into eco tech.
In any case, it would take more than ants, and a helluva lot longer than a few decades to change the environment on Mars into one we could use.
Not sure about the issue of radiation... there may be a way to have a thick atmosphere that shields the surface enough. I don't think normal radiation within the solar system is really that bad, it's the solar storms that getchya.
One other note: just because the polar caps aren't made of dry ice, doesn't mean there isn't a significant amount of CO2 and carbon locked into the regolith, and in the water itself. But yeah, there are much better gases for terraforming if you want to "Greenhouse" a bit. CFCs for example.
Heh heh. Silly troll. I'm Canadian.
And I think you should talk to all the Tomb Raider players out there about your homosexual theory...
I was really impressed by that game. It was one of the few games from the 80s that really captured my attention (and money). Ah, the memories.
What I *can't* understand is why they chose Pac-Man for the Smithsonian... why not Ms. Pac Man? I think it was a better game, personally. And it is the #1 collectible arcade machine in the world.
Not only does time not continue backwards infinitely (this would require the "steady-state" concept to be true), but if string-theory is anywhere near the mark, time itself is GRANULAR. So it is NOT continuous... it just sort of smoothes out at larger scales.
Which is what I have thought for a while: our human experience of the universe is grossly distorted by the fact that we experience time, space, and matter at a great distance of scale, so that everything looks smooth and regular, when it is actually frothy and discontinuous at the "bottom".
Cosmologists have been aware of the ACCELERATION of universal expansion for a few years now. I remember seeing an interview with the group that first stumbled across this, and they seemed pretty bewildered, because it was NOT the answer they were looking for: the sign of good physics, I think. Whether the universe is in a "late expansionary phase", or whether this is something that persists over the "life" of the universe, it is still pretty strong evidence that we live in an open "saddle" universe, not a flat one or a closed one.
Which is actually good news, I think. Sure, heat death may be a bummer for all of us mortals, but there is the potential that life/consciousness could arise which requires only energy to maintain and grow itself... then an open universe is a good thing. This is because the universe will continue to expand, the temperature will continue to drop (approaching 0 Kelvin, but NEVER reaching it), and the amount of information the universe can hold will continue to grow.
This means, that if we have an open universe with "energy beings" in it near the end (remember, this is a LOOONG time off), those beings could take advantage of the increase in data capacity. I know it sounds weird, but it conforms to both physics and information theory.
Just trying to show how everything falling apart may not be such a bad way to go, after all. Plus, instead of thinking of the cosmos as an expanding-contracting "ball", we can think of it as a "firecracker" whose embers fly apart and dim, leaving only a cloud of smoke.
I've already lost a MOBO to these leaky capacitors. It really pissed me off, since it wasn't even a year old. And yes, it was an Abit board. I will never cheap out again.
Sweet, thanks a ton.
I have an old Pet CPM that is pretty messed up. I want to find resources on turning it into a terminal... even if I have to totally gut it. Anyone got any leads?
I agree. Slashdot is messed up. My lame attempt at humour doesn't deserve it. If I could, I'd mod MYSELF down a point as Overrated. I got all these Mod points just begging to get used... sigh.
Practice. Meh. No double word score for me. :(
I use dictionary.com all the time. I love randomly typing in words like "audacious" or "syllogistic" (...my favourite def'n EVER!!: "Of, relating to, resembling, or consisting of a syllogism or syllogisms." BUHAHAHAH!)
Learning the exact meaning of a word, it's variants, and it's etymology really helps me get a grip on nuances in language. A lot of the time I'll get a little surprise when I look up a word, ESPECIALLY when I think I already know what it means. It's also good prectice for SCRABBLE.
Congratulations! You have been correctly indoctrinated into the North American Liberal Intelligensia(TM)! This involves accepting that institutions should concentrate power in the hands of the Better People on behalf of the Average Person, because (of course! why question it?) the Average Person is incapable of understanding anything or contributing to governance in any meaningful way. In fact, they just get in the way, always taking about injustice and how tough it is. Whiners.
So, hurrah for the self-serving, privileged, elitist upper-middle-class! If you feel bad about the way things are going, just move into a gated community and buy a new Benz.
(I find this as anti-democratic an attitude as "one person can't do anything... that's why I don't vote". Either you are for MORE democracy or less, and most people I talk to are for less. And you seem to be, too.)
I think they were outside the core, but inside the containment vessel. Not that I know tons about nuke power plant architecture. But the movie showed them being exposed to steam which I assumed was moving through pipes in the reactor core.
When I was hanging out in Montreal, I found out that PCP is all the rage with the street punks. That and "mescaline", which is actually another form of PCP, not mescaline at all. All I can say is: don't do it. You'll act a complete fool and miss any chance you might have had to get some action. Imagine the sloppiest, most in-need-of-babysitting drunk you can imagine. Like that.
I have no idea how accurate the movie was, but in K-19, the reactor techs who made repairs inside the reactor area were shown to be puking and showing signs of hemorrhage within 10 minutes. Are we talking on the order of 1000 rad here? Anyone know of any data on the exposure of the rest of the crew?
Maybe they can use this principle for security, too... have some "Rain Man"-type sit in a chair and monitor the composite sounds of the internet, scanning for a particular pattern.
I wonder what the sound of a DDOS would be? A waterfall? Maybe a port scan would be a rising set of tones? And some cop in a LOLITA chat room would sound like (what else?) the theme from Jaws.
The whole point of NASA engaging in this is *not* to "win over" those who believe in the conspiracy theory, it is to make sure that people have the information they need to make up their minds for themselves. It would be negligent of NASA to let the "debate" continue without their best effort to explain what they believe the facts to be. Whether or not the hoax "experts" can turn NASA's information and arguments against them is beside the point: not even trying is a worse sin than being misunderstood.
Besides, how can someone on SLASHDOT, of all places, argue against the free sharing of information? NASA should make its case as strongly and definitively as possible so that their voice will be heard, and people will be better-equipped to refute these lame arguments. What happens then is up to the rest of us.