While we're on the topic... I don't doubt that some sensible telecommuting is going on, BUT....
Telecommuting isn't being used mainly to save on transportation or infrastructure costs.
Transport is borne by the worker, but the authority to telecommute is with the worker's management.
Telecommuters also tend to have their own desks, cubes or offices at the company workplace.
"Telecommuting" is mostly a code word for the subtle authorization of management, salesmen and programmers to take time off at home while still getting paid.
This is laziness and thievery, but since they are expensive and privileged labor, few have the position or gumption to call them those names.
Note well how call centers are filled with people who must commute every workday to do a job that is structurally well suited to working at home over the telephone.
But that's not telecommuting as currently practiced -- that's for privileged types and not for the sweatshop laborers no matter how heavily the system revolves around pure telephony.
Exception-That-Tests-Rule:
I do know somebody personally who successfully telecommuted while being on the bottom of the corporate totem pole.
But the same impetus to allow a telecommuting employee like that, was part and parcel of cutting all kinds of costs, such as in-office management, rules for work (yes, I asked for the rules and regulations for employees and was basically laughed at for my trouble), and also abiding by federal and state regulation of their medically-oriented business.
She was eventually fired for not following the unknown rules, and the last we heard, the state was all over the company anyway for noncompliance.
Work-from-home schemes are rife; they are always scams when advertised remotely, or half-scams when advertised by a local office; and the popular perception of telecommuting is equally out-of-touch with reality (the AT&T commercials being fine indicia of that).
I am at a loss to envision how real telecommuting can become as pervasive as it needs to be, given all the work that could be done at home and isn't yet, as well as all the work that will need to be done outside of the continued downsizing of workplaces.
I assume that fuel-turbine electric hybrids are the best option.
They use existing fuels, thus use existing stations and timeframes for refueling.
They should have tightly-controlled combustion through a small turbine, thus increasing efficiency as well as decreasing pollution.
But I don't expect them to have the acceleration of the usual car engine.
The dual hybrids (I am just making up terms here) -- that use electric for in-town or slow driving and also internal-combustion for high-speed or highway driving -- show some promise.
However, the dual-drive systems strike me as particularly complicated engineering and thus the result can only be expensive and/or problematic.
On the plus side, if you can get this to work well and within budget, then it has good appeal to consumer needs -- power and efficiency (not at the same time).
Pure electric cars are trash.
Ranges are too short (R2D2 is also short, but I digress) and recharges are too long.
Perhaps if we started using space-program style nuclear batteries, then I'd see the applicability of purely electric cars.
But there's no chance of a nuclear battery in individual cars; the public won't stand for it (for some good reasons -- accidents, proliferation and expense).
It was somewhat encouraging to have seen California take the legislative route to enforce transportation change.
At least it reflected some public will over corporate misbehavior (i.e. the lack of suitable options when you go to buy a car, because the auto companies simply haven't invested in making them).
But this has failed and corporate America has won again.
And the more SUVs that show up on the road only mean the more and more women will get frightened by the overshadowing while they drive, thus increasing SUV sales as some sort of defensive move.
Gas-mileage averages will continue to drop.
Except for niche markets, electrics will continue to be a joke product.
Democracy = Tyranny of Majority
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 1
Hardly surprising, despite the obvious biases of poll results coming out of the People's Socialist Hegemony of California.
In general, the opinion poll seems to be the sole authority that American courts need nowadays to judge that laws are "Constitutional".
Once the will of the people was broken the Constitution became a dead document, and laws only faced the test of popular opinion.
This strikes me as significantly so from the 1970s onward due to individual financial hardships in America, but you could chose any number of other points like 1913 (Federal Reserve and the income tax) and 1933 (socialism and rumblings of a military coup).
Those who assert the Const is a living document point out that the Const has a mechanism for change called Amendment.
But that requires that inconvenient Const Convention thing, and other such trappings of law and public procedure.
Since it is far easier, quicker and -- more significantly -- sneakier to just ignore things in the Const, it is done the easy, quick and sneaky way.
The sneaky way is particularly important part of the affair due to well-armed types like Ted Nugent hanging around saying:
"The guys who wrote [the Constitution] were light years ahead of anyone today, and they meant what they said -- now leave the document alone, or there's going to be trouble."
And people actually have the nerve to wonder why there is widespread lack of respect for the law.
Unless I'm completely off my sodding nut, the Establishment (what we SubGeniuses call the Conspiracy) loves such expressions of contempt for all the defusing of political energy that they accomplish.
That, and voter turnouts dropping even further.
Let the public be angry but helpless-feeling little wankers, cooped up in their homes and workplaces, while the real work of world hegemony gets done by the elite (no, not the 1337).
Oh, here's another little outlet for all that outrage -- a Flash game called "Kick the Politico Up the Arse".
I propose that things like this be called inrages -- designed to keep the outrage firmly up your own backside.
Anyone who started out their intellectual life reading Omni ought to be feeling a very pronounced deja vu when encountering this kind of stuff.
This dream of home redesign has had more than enough merit since the 1930s.
Yet, in America and Europe, homes look pretty much as they have always looked for the last several hundred years.
There are important differences (internal power, plumbing, water-protection) from the original design.
Plastics have taken over some of the functions of wood and stone.
Glass and filters have replaced openings, weaves, nets and animal skins.
But overall the aim is the same: a wood- or steel-framed cave, lined with a combination of wood and stone.
The redesigns of homes almost always involve labor-saving devices that look hip, mod, and snazzy, but avoid the real economics of the issue.
Original designs are expensive and mostly illegal.
Wiring or re-wiring for modern "needs" is expensive.
New materials may not be reliable or durable.
And -- as always -- the needs of the contractor conflict with the needs of the homeowner; a door that is put in fast simply doesn't last for decades.
What I am trying (poorly) to say that these things are pipe dreams and cannot come true even in limited ways.
You may as well postulate personal aircraft, which neglects the impossible relaxation of regulation and miraculous availability of fuel.
The hip, mod and snazzy things (like pervasive and central controls of house functions) are for the rare and wealthy to exploit.
The rest of us must make do with the wooden caves that have been around for decades to centuries.
Even when a cause for innovation strikes -- say, a factory in converted into housing -- the entire affair is firmly put under traditional rules.
The home of the future has always been here, but apart from the whole us, in small sections of the population.
You can wire up your own home now for centralized controls; but even with such accessability, very, very few have done so.
In short, trying to construct or modify such a home in places like Toledo, Ohio is either impossible or the very definition of the word "rarity".
The tones of the/. article implied that the "article" in question was fictional (at least in part); this I knew, thus I didn't read it. But Wehrner-ian (sp?) space proposals are familiar to me, and they were heavily on the side of manned space exploration, and colonization in a way.
The article itself is irrelevent in one sense; why bother speculating on a space program that didn't happen? In another sense, the article is particularly important just by existing, to demonstrate that Human space programs have lost their vision (perhaps from the very outset).
I haven't read Baxter's Voyager, and I don't intend to. The strength of the 1st sense (speculating on what didn't happen) is too strong for me. And I have been eating the meat and potatoes of the 2nd sense for so long that I am bilious; every time I read about another malfing probe, the bile rises just a little bit higher.
While we are under the umbrella meta-topic of manned space exploration, I am dead set against a manned Mars mission. This is so, because of the way Apollo was run -- the long shot: Earth to the Moon. Those stupid fscking arsehole bastiches will try to run to Mars as another Long Shot: from the Earth, without the marked benefits of a Lunar manufacturing post. Now, there will be a little use of the ISS, but it will be largely for a PR show, to show the public that the ISS isn't just useless. The design of the manned Mars mission will assume a Long Shot otherwise. The LS is a sickness that pervades NASA's thinking, and I hope that that hasn't infected the world's few other space programs.
Conquered space?
Man hasn't conquered 5h1t.
The current reliance on remote controls for anything out of LEO (low Earth orbit) means that we are completely at the mercy of accidents and unforeseen events.
The list of those is long; the latest accident occurred only a few days ago and cost us a comet probe.
Bye-bye to several hundred million dollars.
And this is all at the cost of lacking not only general vision, but also economic vision.
A manned space program will cost more money to startup, but will save money in the long run since the most flexible robots will always be on the scene:
humans.
When something breaks, skilled people with tools, equipment, parts and materials can show up and fix the goddamn problem.
Nearly the only voice calling for this is my own, as I have never seen any such sentiment in news media, and in Internet fora only with rarity.
(Latinize "forums" == sound snooty)
The overwhelming sentiments in news media (which infect Internet fora like the stink of the Matrix did to the Agent) are for unmanned space exploration.
"Manned missions cost too much"they constantly whine, while we lose probe after probe to the sloppiest engineering this side of your first birdhouse.
O'Neill is spinning in his grave (incidentally creating artificial gravity within his innards), and Sagan's death relieved Mr. Biiiillllions of the sheer embarrassment, from this travesty we call a technological civilization.
Myself, I'm betting on the Other World... no longer just the Third World, but those Asiatic societies that we have stuck up our noses at for the last 2 generations.
Even though India really needs clean water and reliable power, they may yet -- perhaps in partnership with China -- put Mankind In Space for real and permanently.
They are not overburdened with concern for Human life to the point that they are entirely risk averse.
Strangely, as individuals enough Americans DO accept risk.
There are many who would throw down their XBox controllers and run at top speed to sign up for the next launch of the riskiest launch mechanism, yet the prevailing morass of institutional controls just ensure that politicians, administrators, unionists, and even lawyers and accountants dictate how space missions are organized.
This is all done instead of putting the Right Stuff in charge; even Goldin was a bad bet, he being much more Administrator than Astronaut.
Where have the heroes gone?
Even stripping away the mythical wrappings, there were still men and women (i.e. those women who were allowed to make a difference) who would boldly go.
The actual conquering of space is just the right thing to do, since
(1) It's Empty: there are no natives to murder and displace;
(2) It's Profitable: the return on sensible investment can be enormous; and
(3) It's Necessary: as civilization keeps expanding, the mix of resources and environment of the planet will overload -- it must seek energy and materials from Sol and the Belt.
The article claimed that the city's CTO will make N.O. a "city of the future".
This is clearly ironic since N'awlins has no future at all.
Louisiana's protective coastline around New Orleans loses 35 square miles every year from constraining the Mississippi River from dropping a silt load over the entire delta.
When the next hurricane actually hits the Big Easy -- the last couple have come close -- the storm swell will top the levees, will utterly drown the city, will kill tens of thousands of people (as projected), and $50 billion will disappear from the US economy from the catastrophe.
So, who cares what OS is running on those servers?
Run Windows XT and Oracle DB using excess licenses from California.
They'll be under water anyways, and everybody can write off the loss of software that was useless to begin with.
On that note, right now the Louisiana state government should be swapping out servers in New Orleans, putting their older, crappy hardware in place for the write-off.
W00t!
My lady Sarah had a kind of peculiar request for a solid gold ring with the "language of Mordor" written on it, or something like that.
She also got me a ring herself; she didn't tell me where she got it.
It felt funny when I put it on, but that feeling went away soon.
Lately, I have started to become slightly transparent; I have taken to wearing dark robes, and now have a horse named Firethorn.
Excuse me, I have to ride off in search of a certain wizard, to help put Sarah on the trail.
I consider all the commentary here good, given my intent to absorb anecdotal information. But what about the macro-issue behind bubbles in the first place? Why bother targeting one particular event, like a Clinton (spit) speech, or a judge's ruling, when the real cause has to do with the nature of a bubble?
An investment bubble must burst; the skin is under too much tension... too little skin encloses too much volume. Any event -- from pinpricks to thermobaric explosions -- can pierce the thing. Uh-oh, Greenspan was spotted scowling on the street outside the exchange... AAAAHHHH, sell, sell, SELL! Anything can trigger the retreat from such outrageous (and unsustainable) investment in piddling enterprises.
I knew the market was horrendously inflated back in 1997. But what I didn't know was when such a metastability would pop. This very thing, the uncertainty of destruction, is what drives further investment, as people buy on the rising curve before the peak is reached. It is the terror of capitalism; we have known about it since the 1600s; and it still happens with as disturbing a regularity as Ponzi schemes happen nowadays.
The next bubble is already expanding visibly. It is wireless... phones and Internet. All kinds of infrastructure is being built to support this, and most of it seems unsustainable and will just end up abandoned or more likely flipped quickly through a series of asset sellouts (just like the Iridium system would be if the price tag weren't so large).
Simple. Wander out and tell your mailman or gas-meter reader all about it. Any earth-shattering discovery can be used for terrorism... and anything discovered like that (i.e. done by an American) is instantly suspicious -- I mean, if you're not at work, then you should be inside your home watching HBO or playing EverQuest like a good little boy. Your mailman or reader will report your info via TIPS, where it will be packaged up with all the other thousands of bits of info for just that shift alone, by low-level government employees. It will be archived for later retrieval once the FBI, CIA and NSA get the $13 billion (yearly) in funding that will be required to parse all that data.
It's the easiest thing to do other than carving out a dolmen and burying it in Northern Ireland. In fact, using TIPS should make it last longer.
Revolution within the company, yeah right.
Whatever such thing occurs can't hold out for long against the irrepressible and destructive looting of a company by the accountants and lawyers that run them whenever more common heads grow sleepy (which is often).
I recall a bit of HP when some founder-return butt-kicking occurred.
How long did that last?
AOL is so out of touch with its customers' needs -- much like many American corporations -- that they actually needed to form some silly task force to study an obvious customer-irritation problem.
AOL has a legendary lack of concern for its subscribers... I mean, how can any ISP survive that kicks its subs offline actively?
But it does survive, and they know that this means they can do whatever they want to their subs, and when too many subs get pissed off at once, the business model implodes.
Highly metastable.
AOL's business model is just one step away from the American Ultimate Business Plan.
The AUBP says to collect money from customers, deliver nothing, capitalize on the delay and reluctance of the customer base to get their money back, and finally charge for the disconnect.
So, perhaps AOL will act to restrain popup ads.
Big deal.
Soon enough they will ramp up the ads, through some other route, and the situation will be back to the same old customer irritation.
How about recording sites you visit?
You can bury that in the next version's EULA; after the uproar, you can then offer "opt out"; and after another while, quietly change opt-outs to opt-ins.
Maybe we should just stop expecting AOL to be a data pipe for ourselves, and like newspapers, the pipe is for the advertisers and for our subscription dollar we can only skim off a part of that pipe for ourselves.
Look, for revenue, AOL has advertisers and subs.
The subs can leave at any time; but they have signed contracts with advertisers.
The pressure to pay attention to the contracted money is just fscking enormous.
Well, duuuh.
What do people actually think that Hotmail, Mail, Excite, Go or other accounts are for?
If you get on the Internet, you go through an ISP, which provides an email account, sometimes up to 5.
That's where you get your real mail.
For public exposure (signing on to news sites, etc.) email, get a Hotmail account, and just let it fill up with junk.
I see it as getting a benefit from the Microsoft tax.
Here's my strategy.
My ISP:
1 email account; personal use (friends and associates).
Mail(.com):
identifying myself in public commentary... forums like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and Fsckedcompany; sending rebuttals to online news journalists; and mailing webmasters/programmers about their sites/programs.
Hotmail:
more spam-prone exposures, like logins to pr0n sites, yowza.
Go and Excite:
miscellaneous uses that I haven't thought of yet.
Thus, my ISP email is utterly clean of spam.
My Mail(.com) account gets a couple pieces of spam a week, with some replies from journalists, webmasters and programmers; I logon to Mail(.com) once a week to delete some spam and find some replies.
My Hotmail account is a windswept and dusty wasteland of spam, getting 2-6 pieces of spam a day, and has some notices from the sites I subscribe to; I logon to Hotmail every 1 to 4 weeks to delete essentially everything, which is dozens of spam mails.
The Go and Excite accounts are still being evaluated for their usefulness; I just login once a month to keep 'em active.
So, thank you Microsoft for providing me a spam filter.
Go ahead and even sell the list of your Hotmail clients... you will just be using your own bandwidth to fill up your own hard disks.
Suckers.
You just betcha we need more of a concept of "commons" in this increasingly hellish post-industrial capitalism.
Transportation is a fine example.
There must be either public trans of marked effectiveness, or some sort of Common Automotive Engine that can be afforded... or the current trend towards too-expensive cars will drive (pun) hordes of people into poverty.
How many times in the last several years have I heard mechanics lament how unmaintainable cars are becoming?
How much more climb can we have in auto prices... EPA restrictions... insurance requirements?
If cars become too expensive in general to buy, maintain, insure and put into compliance with pollution controls, then a whole bunch of people will simply be walking.
And there's a crisis that is as certainly in the making as the upcoming water wars in the American West.
There needs to be a "commons" in transportation in America.
Either it can be bus/trolley/train systems, or cars will have to be opened up for affordability.
And this is just one common thing that a wealthy nation should afford its citizenry.
I read articles like that one on BBC News, and thus know that space programs are always in serious jeopardy from misdirection and emotional decisions.
The word "manufacturing" wasn't used even once in the article, and only the main-picture caption had the word "industry".
The main picture doesn't even show any equipment that can be identified as for manufacturing -- it just looks like a mission base.
Manufacturing -- the activity of a real economy -- must be the main point of sustainable space development.
Anything else is the masturbatory fantasy of the academic class.
The academics (as unwitting dupes of the aerospace contractors) are clearly unfit for directing space programs, given their propensity for spending billions to get some kilograms of rock and megabytes of data back.
As far as a space program is concerned, academics should be used as skilled labor, not managers.
Well, what will these non-academic managers aim for?
The Moon is an ideal site for space manufacturing.
There's enough gravity to hold things down and keep Human bones from decaying too much -- while also being light enough to make it 22 times easier to deliver a load of material to LEO (low Earth orbit) than from Earth.
There's plenty of solar power -- for heat and electricity -- due to no clouds, and no weather either to disrupt activity.
The regolith is a fine powder that itself is a very useful ore, being oxygen, silicon, aluminum, magnesium, calcium, iron and then other trace elements.
Scoop it up into foundries; melt it with your free solar energy; then use whatever extraction techniques are required to obtain materials.
The vacuum even at the surface of the Moon (note that within ~30 feet of the surface, there is a dim but measurable "atmosphere" of sorts involving dust influenced by static charges) is finer than usually obtained on Earth in labs.
Imports from Earth will be the qualitative counterpart (people, parts, volatiles) to the quantitative exports (aluminum, oxygen, steel) from the Moon.
(Note the exports are for building Earth's orbital facilities.)
The only things making the Moon a real problem for manufacturing are the hostilities of vacuum and radiation toward lifeforms.
There is basically an inverted paradigm, where on Earth you live freely but undergo constraints in work environments, but the Moon requires constrained living methods while the work environment is everywhere.
If only Earth-based manufacturing problems were so simple.
Do we really want to throw more billions of dollars at socially-inept types to spend, to get JUST some rock and data in return?
Why not spend the billions making an industry that returns products and investment margin, and then those academic types can charter themselves flights, housing and equipment.
They can go out and do all the science they want while a real economy churns away at their backs, making it sustainably possible for them to do it in the first place.
Necessities before luxuries, folks.
This kind of thing should have been identified long ago. Not knowing that, I'm sure that it was, for some reasons.
1, NASA uses all kinds of math to plot orbits and trajectories. If you look at the math long enough, it can only naturally occur to you to find "paths" through space for various criteria: fuel, time, locations. Unfortunately, the question most implied by default is "What is the minimum time path?", since Mission Control is not a generational job.
2, NASA already knows about certain types of paths that are unconventional. One particular one that I recall has a spacecraft whipped at the moon; the craft has a close encounter with the Moon (pun: the Moon is grey); it ends up making a relatively huge ellipse away from the Earth-Moon system; and finally the craft comes back to Luna and makes a puny insertion burn to orbit. Total fuel cost is lower than just doing the Apollo route; but you traded time and Lunar inertia for it.
The "interplanetary superhighways" thing is the usual type of innovation that in retrospect was a no-brainer. If I had spent time plotting orbits and trajectories for various spacecraft, I would have seen that set of solutions soon enough. But will the politics and optimizations of spacecraft launches and travel allow these solutions to be used, much less become more public? For example, just think on how cheap in fuel terms it will be to send out probes on solar sails; with fuel being free and stored off-craft, more cheapness arises in the double-increase of spacecraft mass, getting more done for the money. (I say double-increase due to no main propulsion, which opens mass for instruments, and "infinite" fuel, which means you can make the craft about as heavy as you want (limited by sail size, 'course).) Sail-driven craft will take a bit of time to get where they are going in the Outer System; instead, we chose what are essentially launched and boosted billard balls for those jobs.
Of course, for the purposes of this diatribe I am assuming that the term "malicious hacking" will be used against many hackers that are caught. If you break into any government computer, then you will be charged with malicious hacking.
Ah, more of the same application of practical justice. The violent, poor, young and essentially weak have the best chance of being imprisoned. The use of violence is touted as justification for all of that internment, and the public goes along with it even though scads of poor, young and weak folk are caught up in the net.
Now, malicious hackers are being added to this social targeting zone. They qualify as young and weak (nerdy, loner).
Meanwhile, corporate executives and directors are walking away from the ruins of the companies whose demises they specifically engineered. The economic damage is even more obvious than before, when I started noticing the corporate scams of the 1970s and beyond. The damage done is far in excess of anything done while hacking, individually or collectively. But the criminals in these company-crashing cases are enormously wealthy and as such are untouchable -- after all, the justice system is designed to attack the poor.
There is even a common feeling -- deluded and immensely ignorant, if not outrightly stupid -- that since no violence was done, no serious crime occurred in these corporate scams. We find the President mouthing off about doubling prison terms, which is pretty funny since little if any prison time is seen by these corporate criminals. (He might as well have quintupled the prison times for every Three-Eyed Wahoojibber Beast that is caught.) And even if imprisoned, they have millions stashed away for resuming their high living after they come out of their country-club (remember, they are not violent criminals) prisons. And -- oh yes, sarcasm time has arrived -- doubling a prison time from 18 months to 36 is really going to reform those hidden millionaires.
Life imprisonment for malicious hackers! -- while Ken Lay and his ilk fly across America in chartered jets looking for more economies to destroy. If you don't see that America has no sense of priorities, then you just aren't looking.
Look, this is an old argument that has the informational gene for immortality -- it just won't die, but it should (or at least hibernate until truly new data shows up).
The Earth radiates like a small star in the radio region, from our civilization's emissions. Yet we don't hear a peep of anything like that out of the rest of the universe, and there's no obvious evidence of stellar engineering to be seen either. Where are other forms of intelligent, information-exchanging, perhaps macro-engineering life? Well, it could be they aren't macro-engineers, or that they don't pass information like we expect them to.
But it could also be that there isn't any other life at all, or just low-level forms that we won't be talking to.
We only have one assured point of data to answer the Life question, and that's not good enough. One point doesn't "trend"; it has an infinite number of slopes; you can fit any curve to it. You can hardly expect to win your case for universal life without evidence of detecting anything outside of the Earth. Even other planets in the same system show no evidence of engineering or biochemical activity, and we've been looking at them for decades with some pretty good instruments.
We must keep looking, sure, but the evidence is pretty well on the side of a lifeless galaxy. Be scientists for once, and ditch that superstitious need for alien races and galactic empires. The facts are overwhelmingly against alien life, and until we expand our methods of searching, that's how we must judge it if we are to pay any due respect to logic.
On the hope side of things, our methods and assumptions can change with more data. For instance, it was taken for granted (although well-enough thought out) that if aliens existed, biochemistries between two such races would almost always be dissimilar. One race might settle on carbon, oxygen and sunlight, and another on silicon, hydrogen and geothermal energy. But recent theories and observations suggest that cosmic gas clouds harbor molecules that can start biochemistry upon planets. Since such clouds are large, it could be that this seeding process could produce similar biochemisty across different star systems. Hence, across the lightyears, biochemically-similar lifeforms might be able to arise if the seeding process has the potential we theorize. So the basic philosophy about alien differences has changed... perhaps our philosophy about the SETI will also change.
Myself, personally, I figure we will need Jodie Foster {tm} to take up radio astronomy before we get the signals we are looking for.
Firstly, civilization has a long history of leveraging military and overall safety powers into the civil arena. Hence, all laws that are touted as being against "terrorists" and for "public safety" will be used to screw the average man out of as much money and liberty as possible.
Secondly, if you want to keep your civil rights (the most basic one being: the right to be left alone), then move out of the city. (I mean any city, not just The City -- London's nickname.) The crowding, greed, fear and loathing within urban areas have worked to destroy not only civil rights, but the attitude that we should even have said rights. Search and seizure should be quintessentially restricted, but if you ask any city cop, anything can be taken away for any reason, and they only approve. The real liberies that are expanding are within the ruling and enforcement classes. The old American patriot Ethan Allen is alleged to have said "the gods of the valleys are not the gods of the mountains", alluding to the concerns of cities and towns over the rural folk, and the mismatch thereby.
Thirdly, Britain has learned nothing from Orwell's characterizations (among others) and they are headed strongly for all the democratized tyranny that they can imagine. If the people of Britain don't revolt first, by 2025 you will have to get almost a dozen offcials to authorize your presence in London. Britain will effectively have an internal visa.
I'd done the Tetris thing in the 286 heyday, and considered myself too much into it. However, I'm sure there were people with greater levels of addiction. I mean, I only got to the point where I saw blocks descending in my mind's eye as I drifted off to sleep at night. There must have been people whose minds played Tetris like this during daylight hours.
I upgraded my needs for Tetris-ing to the Blockout game, which I consider to be the 3D version of Tetris. 3D blocks appear on the screen in wireframe; they drop away from you into a pit, and you can spin them +/- on each x, y and z axis. (In practice, I only use one vector of spin, since the spin rate is so fast, and it avoids confusion of which way to spin the cubes.) The blocks opaque as they settle in the pit, and of course the pit tends to fill up towards you.
I certainly don't play Blockout as much as I did at first, and I never play Tetris anymore. Rarely, I fire up Balltris -- it is like Tetris but uses groups of balls; the groups fall into a pit, and when they make touching patterns (each level of difficulty increments the number of same-colored balls that must be touching), they disappear and the balls cascade and collapse quite intriguingly. I also play Snood, which is like Bubble Trouble; it's kind of like a table pool type of Tetris.
But the Tetris, Balltris, Blockout and Snood types of games illustrate the remarkable gulf of difference between gamers. I can't stand the Doom and Everquest type of games; my thing is the blipping of colored bits of light into patterns, producing results, but under increasing difficulty until my dexterity and hand-eye coordination fail me. And they are over within 5 minutes, whereas Doom etc. can go on for hours and hours. The textually-graphic game Dungeons of Moria was as much as I could stand.
I recall playing Tetris and entering something I called the zone -- the place where you were one with the blocks, the rate of fall, and the clicking of the keys to spin, drop and fit each one as it appeared and hurtled downward. It may be that my understanding of sartori and various Zen statements developed from that feeling of the zone. Tetris as Zen training? Stranger things have happened.
I knew the Freedom/ISS/whatever station was an enormous mistake to begin with. It had no meaningful mission for the costs involved. The quantity of saliva that flowed from aerospace contractors was just obscene. At least $8 billion was announced as spent, while nary a kilogram had yet made it to orbit.
The ISS is another example showing how NASA's budget is the most efficient launch system ever devised to send money far and away.
The politics involved in space developments like that are essentially just panderings to taxpayer emotions. If we went around building dams and highways with as much illogic as that approach, we'd tend to be driving in mud when crossing the country. More of civil engineering's discipline and unsexy methods of work need to be applied to space construction, if we expect the things we build to last for generations.
Gerard O'Neill's various works on the economics of space development have fallen on deaf ears and dull minds for many years. He appeared before a Congressional committee on these matters, but he may as well just have done a show with sock puppets for all the good it did. I challenge NASA to crack open some of his work and dare them to adopt more of an economic approach. For all my criticism of the practice of Western capitalism, I support the solid core in its philosophy that says spending must return value.
Using that measure, what can the ISS return to us? I suspect the profit on that investment was already taken by contractors and NASA lifers. It is for this reason that I supported killing off the Superconducting Supercollider, and the ISS's bloated future should die the same death.
Does our civilization have the gumption to conduct space development not as a boondoggle but as a sound exercise in profitable infrastructure? Why do we respond to silly pulpit-pounding by demogouges, starting projects that are just expansions on the theme of "our country can pee farther than yours"? (Considering how much was pissed away in space programs, the urinary analogy is apt.) What would be the public response to a president that got on TV and pounded his table, saying "we will put solar-power satellites in orbit and really show the Euro-Sino-Slavic bloc a thing or two about cheap energy"?
Hey, this has sparked an idea! Check it: sell everything in America and close up shop, fire all your lazy, fat, overpaid American employees, and then dash to China to start the entrepreneurial Gold Rush!
Oh, wait, this is already being done.
And if everyone is doing it, it must be a good investment. The dotcoms clearly showed that. Praise Jesus that the investment industry found out that mathematical models of animal-herd movements produced the largest returns when applied to stock markets.
Due to my latest invention, a Psycho-Temporal Radio Receiver, I can now reveal the private thoughts of a future internationalist businessman: "Hey, it looks like sales in America have really taken a dive. Why is that? They should be able to buy our Chinese stuff... $8.50 per hour should be enough income if both parents work 60+ hours a week. Those fat, lazy bastards! Hoo boy I'm glad we don't pay taxes in America anymore."
Okay, okay, sarcasm off. But if I hear one more next-big-opportunity story, I'm gonna barf.
A "high-tech economy" is just a nebulous thing out there in the world, and we're not supposed to think about how it comes about.
The capitalist class only knows how to make stuff, to sell stuff, to keep all the proceeds, and to slough off all the expenses of the enterprise upon the public.
When you spend your time privatizing profits while socializing your expenses, you are waaaaaay too busy to deal with irrelevant items like:
"Gee, who will buy our stuff, the guys we laid off in America, or the guys we underpay in China?"
Having so stated my assumption, now I just gotta respond to your points under its perverse and wicked influence:
access to energy
Yes, this is pretty essential -- to production, of course (who cares what the customer does with the damned thing after the sale is made?).
I wonder if local generation in China is being explored? -- it's an idea being toyed with in America.
fair judicial system
What the hell does that matter?
Your factory is setup with Chinese "partners" who will inevitably be a part of whatever local government and "law enforcement" that exists.
If shoes and clothing can be produced by a class of people with no recourse to "fair" judgment, then so can many other things that are produced by assembly line.
clean water
What the hell does that matter?
People filter water in America; just filter in what you need in China.
Whatever the workers drink is their own problem.
enough food for its people
What the hell does that matter?
There will be plenty more Chinese coming in from the rural areas to get the chance to work in your factory for money, which they imagine will help lift them out of poverty and possible starvation.
It won't, of course, but people have always shown hope in that regard since the Industrial Revolution.
uncorrupt governance
This is probably a factor, but a minor one at that.
Bribery is just another line item in your budget.
After all, this the standard way that the oil business is conducted.
educated people
What the hell does that matter?
Your cheap labor is ideal for Taylorist work arrangements.
And any cheap labor that you feel the need to educate for specific reasons (hey we need an electrical engineer for this factory), simply can be educated and returned to China at a cheaper cost than hiring a First World skilled person.
Education is highly overrated; craftsman skills themselves have been long obsoleted by factories.
freedom of expression
Ju-dasPriest, where do you get these silly ideas anyway?
The shoes and clothes you are now wearing have in all probability been produced by people who do without hope, disposable income, fresh air, nourishing food, and job security.
Freedom of expression is just another opportunity for the workers to make trouble for the capitalist class that owns the methods of manufacture.
Since it is not only unnecessary but harmful to the process of maximizing profits, it must be absent.
(Thank you for your attention.
I had as good a time responding to your posting as I can ever have with my clothes on.)
First off, let's get one thing straight.
There has never been an appropriate physical casting of the Batman character, from Adam West to the modern Batman movies.
(Michael Keaton? Val Kilmer? -- oh, give me a fscking break.
Adam West did the job better than they did.)
Batman's comics over the last 8 years (including the seminal work "The Dark Knight Returns" (TDKR)) amply demonstrates the lack in our movies.
Someone close to Arnie's stature is needed, although they would need to be less brawny and more limber, since Batman's a noted martial artist.
I mention Arnie since, not only is he of a55-kicking size, but he seems to act out high-society roles well enough.
If only we had a white Wesley Snipes, eh? -- his fitness, appearance and demeanor are well suited to the Batman role.
As for Superman's casting... physically this was well enough done by Christopher Reeves.
But that was then.
Modern portrayals of Superman and Clark Kent make the character a larger man -- a commanding presence by most standards.
Even if Mr. Reeves wasn't disabled, he couldn't fulfill the role anymore; his over-characterization of a simpering, milquetoast Clark Kent is also no longer required.
In my opinion, Hollywood would have to find someone who could fit the physical description of Superman in the "Kingdom Come" comics.
Arnie could do it.
Vin Diesel isn't tall enough; and frankly his facial features more befit a street punk than a yuppie superhero.
The Rock? -- puh-leeze... he needs to prove he can handle a dramatic role (heyyy, stop laughing).
The movie has great promise (which I'll explain) and it has enough material to work from.
Pitting Batman against Superman has already been done, not only in several instances throughout their comics series, but primarily in TDKR.
At least, there's always some sort of a low-level leadership struggle going on, as illustrated by many Justice League comics.
If the movie is to be in any way loyal to the fan base, it must seize the potential inherent in the strife between the characters.
It'll have to demonstrate the low-level leadership struggles, and if outright hostilities commence, then the philosophical generators of the characters will have to be as follows....
Superman is portrayed as having immense, godlike power while well controlled by a good heart.
His approach is a typical, mythical Americanism:
use overwhelming force and do not compromise basic principles.
He values life over anything else and is willing to die for it.
He lives two lives, in harmony.
Batman is the dark side of Americana (Superman's shadow in more ways than one):
the hard, intellectually driven need for skill, order, justice and outright revenge.
He's constantly under tension between his public (socialite) and private (crusader) personas.
And like Superman, he also values life over anything else and is willing to die for it.
Superman's overwhelming force and good nature can always be countered by Batman's calculating application of knowledge and technology.
The comics bring up this theme time and time again.
This theme's fertile ground for good storytelling -- the question is, will the movie be cultivated there?
(Sorry for the length; I didn't realize that I had this much to say when I began typing.)
Slashdot Mirror
While we're on the topic ... I don't doubt that some sensible telecommuting is going on, BUT ....
Telecommuting isn't being used mainly to save on transportation or infrastructure costs. Transport is borne by the worker, but the authority to telecommute is with the worker's management. Telecommuters also tend to have their own desks, cubes or offices at the company workplace.
"Telecommuting" is mostly a code word for the subtle authorization of management, salesmen and programmers to take time off at home while still getting paid. This is laziness and thievery, but since they are expensive and privileged labor, few have the position or gumption to call them those names.
Note well how call centers are filled with people who must commute every workday to do a job that is structurally well suited to working at home over the telephone. But that's not telecommuting as currently practiced -- that's for privileged types and not for the sweatshop laborers no matter how heavily the system revolves around pure telephony.
Exception-That-Tests-Rule: I do know somebody personally who successfully telecommuted while being on the bottom of the corporate totem pole. But the same impetus to allow a telecommuting employee like that, was part and parcel of cutting all kinds of costs, such as in-office management, rules for work (yes, I asked for the rules and regulations for employees and was basically laughed at for my trouble), and also abiding by federal and state regulation of their medically-oriented business. She was eventually fired for not following the unknown rules, and the last we heard, the state was all over the company anyway for noncompliance.
Work-from-home schemes are rife; they are always scams when advertised remotely, or half-scams when advertised by a local office; and the popular perception of telecommuting is equally out-of-touch with reality (the AT&T commercials being fine indicia of that). I am at a loss to envision how real telecommuting can become as pervasive as it needs to be, given all the work that could be done at home and isn't yet, as well as all the work that will need to be done outside of the continued downsizing of workplaces.
I assume that fuel-turbine electric hybrids are the best option. They use existing fuels, thus use existing stations and timeframes for refueling. They should have tightly-controlled combustion through a small turbine, thus increasing efficiency as well as decreasing pollution. But I don't expect them to have the acceleration of the usual car engine.
The dual hybrids (I am just making up terms here) -- that use electric for in-town or slow driving and also internal-combustion for high-speed or highway driving -- show some promise. However, the dual-drive systems strike me as particularly complicated engineering and thus the result can only be expensive and/or problematic. On the plus side, if you can get this to work well and within budget, then it has good appeal to consumer needs -- power and efficiency (not at the same time).
Pure electric cars are trash. Ranges are too short (R2D2 is also short, but I digress) and recharges are too long. Perhaps if we started using space-program style nuclear batteries, then I'd see the applicability of purely electric cars. But there's no chance of a nuclear battery in individual cars; the public won't stand for it (for some good reasons -- accidents, proliferation and expense).
It was somewhat encouraging to have seen California take the legislative route to enforce transportation change. At least it reflected some public will over corporate misbehavior (i.e. the lack of suitable options when you go to buy a car, because the auto companies simply haven't invested in making them). But this has failed and corporate America has won again. And the more SUVs that show up on the road only mean the more and more women will get frightened by the overshadowing while they drive, thus increasing SUV sales as some sort of defensive move. Gas-mileage averages will continue to drop. Except for niche markets, electrics will continue to be a joke product.
Hardly surprising, despite the obvious biases of poll results coming out of the People's Socialist Hegemony of California. In general, the opinion poll seems to be the sole authority that American courts need nowadays to judge that laws are "Constitutional". Once the will of the people was broken the Constitution became a dead document, and laws only faced the test of popular opinion. This strikes me as significantly so from the 1970s onward due to individual financial hardships in America, but you could chose any number of other points like 1913 (Federal Reserve and the income tax) and 1933 (socialism and rumblings of a military coup).
Those who assert the Const is a living document point out that the Const has a mechanism for change called Amendment. But that requires that inconvenient Const Convention thing, and other such trappings of law and public procedure. Since it is far easier, quicker and -- more significantly -- sneakier to just ignore things in the Const, it is done the easy, quick and sneaky way. The sneaky way is particularly important part of the affair due to well-armed types like Ted Nugent hanging around saying: "The guys who wrote [the Constitution] were light years ahead of anyone today, and they meant what they said -- now leave the document alone, or there's going to be trouble."
And people actually have the nerve to wonder why there is widespread lack of respect for the law.
Unless I'm completely off my sodding nut, the Establishment (what we SubGeniuses call the Conspiracy) loves such expressions of contempt for all the defusing of political energy that they accomplish. That, and voter turnouts dropping even further. Let the public be angry but helpless-feeling little wankers, cooped up in their homes and workplaces, while the real work of world hegemony gets done by the elite (no, not the 1337). Oh, here's another little outlet for all that outrage -- a Flash game called "Kick the Politico Up the Arse". I propose that things like this be called inrages -- designed to keep the outrage firmly up your own backside.
Anyone who started out their intellectual life reading Omni ought to be feeling a very pronounced deja vu when encountering this kind of stuff.
This dream of home redesign has had more than enough merit since the 1930s. Yet, in America and Europe, homes look pretty much as they have always looked for the last several hundred years. There are important differences (internal power, plumbing, water-protection) from the original design. Plastics have taken over some of the functions of wood and stone. Glass and filters have replaced openings, weaves, nets and animal skins. But overall the aim is the same: a wood- or steel-framed cave, lined with a combination of wood and stone.
The redesigns of homes almost always involve labor-saving devices that look hip, mod, and snazzy, but avoid the real economics of the issue. Original designs are expensive and mostly illegal. Wiring or re-wiring for modern "needs" is expensive. New materials may not be reliable or durable. And -- as always -- the needs of the contractor conflict with the needs of the homeowner; a door that is put in fast simply doesn't last for decades.
What I am trying (poorly) to say that these things are pipe dreams and cannot come true even in limited ways. You may as well postulate personal aircraft, which neglects the impossible relaxation of regulation and miraculous availability of fuel. The hip, mod and snazzy things (like pervasive and central controls of house functions) are for the rare and wealthy to exploit. The rest of us must make do with the wooden caves that have been around for decades to centuries. Even when a cause for innovation strikes -- say, a factory in converted into housing -- the entire affair is firmly put under traditional rules.
The home of the future has always been here, but apart from the whole us, in small sections of the population. You can wire up your own home now for centralized controls; but even with such accessability, very, very few have done so. In short, trying to construct or modify such a home in places like Toledo, Ohio is either impossible or the very definition of the word "rarity".
The tones of the /. article implied that the "article" in question was fictional (at least in part); this I knew, thus I didn't read it. But Wehrner-ian (sp?) space proposals are familiar to me, and they were heavily on the side of manned space exploration, and colonization in a way.
The article itself is irrelevent in one sense; why bother speculating on a space program that didn't happen? In another sense, the article is particularly important just by existing, to demonstrate that Human space programs have lost their vision (perhaps from the very outset).
I haven't read Baxter's Voyager, and I don't intend to. The strength of the 1st sense (speculating on what didn't happen) is too strong for me. And I have been eating the meat and potatoes of the 2nd sense for so long that I am bilious; every time I read about another malfing probe, the bile rises just a little bit higher.
While we are under the umbrella meta-topic of manned space exploration, I am dead set against a manned Mars mission. This is so, because of the way Apollo was run -- the long shot: Earth to the Moon. Those stupid fscking arsehole bastiches will try to run to Mars as another Long Shot: from the Earth, without the marked benefits of a Lunar manufacturing post. Now, there will be a little use of the ISS, but it will be largely for a PR show, to show the public that the ISS isn't just useless. The design of the manned Mars mission will assume a Long Shot otherwise. The LS is a sickness that pervades NASA's thinking, and I hope that that hasn't infected the world's few other space programs.
Conquered space? Man hasn't conquered 5h1t. The current reliance on remote controls for anything out of LEO (low Earth orbit) means that we are completely at the mercy of accidents and unforeseen events. The list of those is long; the latest accident occurred only a few days ago and cost us a comet probe. Bye-bye to several hundred million dollars.
... no longer just the Third World, but those Asiatic societies that we have stuck up our noses at for the last 2 generations.
Even though India really needs clean water and reliable power, they may yet -- perhaps in partnership with China -- put Mankind In Space for real and permanently.
They are not overburdened with concern for Human life to the point that they are entirely risk averse.
Strangely, as individuals enough Americans DO accept risk.
There are many who would throw down their XBox controllers and run at top speed to sign up for the next launch of the riskiest launch mechanism, yet the prevailing morass of institutional controls just ensure that politicians, administrators, unionists, and even lawyers and accountants dictate how space missions are organized.
This is all done instead of putting the Right Stuff in charge; even Goldin was a bad bet, he being much more Administrator than Astronaut.
And this is all at the cost of lacking not only general vision, but also economic vision. A manned space program will cost more money to startup, but will save money in the long run since the most flexible robots will always be on the scene: humans. When something breaks, skilled people with tools, equipment, parts and materials can show up and fix the goddamn problem.
Nearly the only voice calling for this is my own, as I have never seen any such sentiment in news media, and in Internet fora only with rarity. (Latinize "forums" == sound snooty) The overwhelming sentiments in news media (which infect Internet fora like the stink of the Matrix did to the Agent) are for unmanned space exploration. "Manned missions cost too much"they constantly whine, while we lose probe after probe to the sloppiest engineering this side of your first birdhouse. O'Neill is spinning in his grave (incidentally creating artificial gravity within his innards), and Sagan's death relieved Mr. Biiiillllions of the sheer embarrassment, from this travesty we call a technological civilization.
Myself, I'm betting on the Other World
Where have the heroes gone? Even stripping away the mythical wrappings, there were still men and women (i.e. those women who were allowed to make a difference) who would boldly go. The actual conquering of space is just the right thing to do, since (1) It's Empty: there are no natives to murder and displace; (2) It's Profitable: the return on sensible investment can be enormous; and (3) It's Necessary: as civilization keeps expanding, the mix of resources and environment of the planet will overload -- it must seek energy and materials from Sol and the Belt.
The article claimed that the city's CTO will make N.O. a "city of the future". This is clearly ironic since N'awlins has no future at all. Louisiana's protective coastline around New Orleans loses 35 square miles every year from constraining the Mississippi River from dropping a silt load over the entire delta. When the next hurricane actually hits the Big Easy -- the last couple have come close -- the storm swell will top the levees, will utterly drown the city, will kill tens of thousands of people (as projected), and $50 billion will disappear from the US economy from the catastrophe.
So, who cares what OS is running on those servers? Run Windows XT and Oracle DB using excess licenses from California. They'll be under water anyways, and everybody can write off the loss of software that was useless to begin with. On that note, right now the Louisiana state government should be swapping out servers in New Orleans, putting their older, crappy hardware in place for the write-off. W00t!
My lady Sarah had a kind of peculiar request for a solid gold ring with the "language of Mordor" written on it, or something like that. She also got me a ring herself; she didn't tell me where she got it. It felt funny when I put it on, but that feeling went away soon. Lately, I have started to become slightly transparent; I have taken to wearing dark robes, and now have a horse named Firethorn. Excuse me, I have to ride off in search of a certain wizard, to help put Sarah on the trail.
I consider all the commentary here good, given my intent to absorb anecdotal information. But what about the macro-issue behind bubbles in the first place? Why bother targeting one particular event, like a Clinton (spit) speech, or a judge's ruling, when the real cause has to do with the nature of a bubble?
... too little skin encloses too much volume. Any event -- from pinpricks to thermobaric explosions -- can pierce the thing. Uh-oh, Greenspan was spotted scowling on the street outside the exchange ... AAAAHHHH, sell, sell, SELL! Anything can trigger the retreat from such outrageous (and unsustainable) investment in piddling enterprises.
... phones and Internet. All kinds of infrastructure is being built to support this, and most of it seems unsustainable and will just end up abandoned or more likely flipped quickly through a series of asset sellouts (just like the Iridium system would be if the price tag weren't so large).
An investment bubble must burst; the skin is under too much tension
I knew the market was horrendously inflated back in 1997. But what I didn't know was when such a metastability would pop. This very thing, the uncertainty of destruction, is what drives further investment, as people buy on the rising curve before the peak is reached. It is the terror of capitalism; we have known about it since the 1600s; and it still happens with as disturbing a regularity as Ponzi schemes happen nowadays.
The next bubble is already expanding visibly. It is wireless
Simple. Wander out and tell your mailman or gas-meter reader all about it. Any earth-shattering discovery can be used for terrorism ... and anything discovered like that (i.e. done by an American) is instantly suspicious -- I mean, if you're not at work, then you should be inside your home watching HBO or playing EverQuest like a good little boy. Your mailman or reader will report your info via TIPS, where it will be packaged up with all the other thousands of bits of info for just that shift alone, by low-level government employees. It will be archived for later retrieval once the FBI, CIA and NSA get the $13 billion (yearly) in funding that will be required to parse all that data.
It's the easiest thing to do other than carving out a dolmen and burying it in Northern Ireland. In fact, using TIPS should make it last longer.
Revolution within the company, yeah right. Whatever such thing occurs can't hold out for long against the irrepressible and destructive looting of a company by the accountants and lawyers that run them whenever more common heads grow sleepy (which is often). I recall a bit of HP when some founder-return butt-kicking occurred. How long did that last?
... I mean, how can any ISP survive that kicks its subs offline actively?
But it does survive, and they know that this means they can do whatever they want to their subs, and when too many subs get pissed off at once, the business model implodes.
Highly metastable.
AOL is so out of touch with its customers' needs -- much like many American corporations -- that they actually needed to form some silly task force to study an obvious customer-irritation problem. AOL has a legendary lack of concern for its subscribers
AOL's business model is just one step away from the American Ultimate Business Plan. The AUBP says to collect money from customers, deliver nothing, capitalize on the delay and reluctance of the customer base to get their money back, and finally charge for the disconnect.
So, perhaps AOL will act to restrain popup ads. Big deal. Soon enough they will ramp up the ads, through some other route, and the situation will be back to the same old customer irritation. How about recording sites you visit? You can bury that in the next version's EULA; after the uproar, you can then offer "opt out"; and after another while, quietly change opt-outs to opt-ins.
Maybe we should just stop expecting AOL to be a data pipe for ourselves, and like newspapers, the pipe is for the advertisers and for our subscription dollar we can only skim off a part of that pipe for ourselves. Look, for revenue, AOL has advertisers and subs. The subs can leave at any time; but they have signed contracts with advertisers. The pressure to pay attention to the contracted money is just fscking enormous.
Well, duuuh. What do people actually think that Hotmail, Mail, Excite, Go or other accounts are for? If you get on the Internet, you go through an ISP, which provides an email account, sometimes up to 5. That's where you get your real mail. For public exposure (signing on to news sites, etc.) email, get a Hotmail account, and just let it fill up with junk. I see it as getting a benefit from the Microsoft tax.
... forums like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and Fsckedcompany; sending rebuttals to online news journalists; and mailing webmasters/programmers about their sites/programs.
Hotmail:
more spam-prone exposures, like logins to pr0n sites, yowza.
Go and Excite:
miscellaneous uses that I haven't thought of yet.
... you will just be using your own bandwidth to fill up your own hard disks.
Suckers.
Here's my strategy. My ISP: 1 email account; personal use (friends and associates). Mail(.com): identifying myself in public commentary
Thus, my ISP email is utterly clean of spam. My Mail(.com) account gets a couple pieces of spam a week, with some replies from journalists, webmasters and programmers; I logon to Mail(.com) once a week to delete some spam and find some replies. My Hotmail account is a windswept and dusty wasteland of spam, getting 2-6 pieces of spam a day, and has some notices from the sites I subscribe to; I logon to Hotmail every 1 to 4 weeks to delete essentially everything, which is dozens of spam mails. The Go and Excite accounts are still being evaluated for their usefulness; I just login once a month to keep 'em active.
So, thank you Microsoft for providing me a spam filter. Go ahead and even sell the list of your Hotmail clients
You just betcha we need more of a concept of "commons" in this increasingly hellish post-industrial capitalism.
... or the current trend towards too-expensive cars will drive (pun) hordes of people into poverty.
How many times in the last several years have I heard mechanics lament how unmaintainable cars are becoming?
How much more climb can we have in auto prices ... EPA restrictions ... insurance requirements?
If cars become too expensive in general to buy, maintain, insure and put into compliance with pollution controls, then a whole bunch of people will simply be walking.
And there's a crisis that is as certainly in the making as the upcoming water wars in the American West.
Transportation is a fine example. There must be either public trans of marked effectiveness, or some sort of Common Automotive Engine that can be afforded
There needs to be a "commons" in transportation in America. Either it can be bus/trolley/train systems, or cars will have to be opened up for affordability. And this is just one common thing that a wealthy nation should afford its citizenry.
I read articles like that one on BBC News, and thus know that space programs are always in serious jeopardy from misdirection and emotional decisions.
The word "manufacturing" wasn't used even once in the article, and only the main-picture caption had the word "industry". The main picture doesn't even show any equipment that can be identified as for manufacturing -- it just looks like a mission base.
Manufacturing -- the activity of a real economy -- must be the main point of sustainable space development. Anything else is the masturbatory fantasy of the academic class. The academics (as unwitting dupes of the aerospace contractors) are clearly unfit for directing space programs, given their propensity for spending billions to get some kilograms of rock and megabytes of data back. As far as a space program is concerned, academics should be used as skilled labor, not managers.
Well, what will these non-academic managers aim for? The Moon is an ideal site for space manufacturing. There's enough gravity to hold things down and keep Human bones from decaying too much -- while also being light enough to make it 22 times easier to deliver a load of material to LEO (low Earth orbit) than from Earth. There's plenty of solar power -- for heat and electricity -- due to no clouds, and no weather either to disrupt activity. The regolith is a fine powder that itself is a very useful ore, being oxygen, silicon, aluminum, magnesium, calcium, iron and then other trace elements. Scoop it up into foundries; melt it with your free solar energy; then use whatever extraction techniques are required to obtain materials. The vacuum even at the surface of the Moon (note that within ~30 feet of the surface, there is a dim but measurable "atmosphere" of sorts involving dust influenced by static charges) is finer than usually obtained on Earth in labs. Imports from Earth will be the qualitative counterpart (people, parts, volatiles) to the quantitative exports (aluminum, oxygen, steel) from the Moon. (Note the exports are for building Earth's orbital facilities.)
The only things making the Moon a real problem for manufacturing are the hostilities of vacuum and radiation toward lifeforms. There is basically an inverted paradigm, where on Earth you live freely but undergo constraints in work environments, but the Moon requires constrained living methods while the work environment is everywhere. If only Earth-based manufacturing problems were so simple.
Do we really want to throw more billions of dollars at socially-inept types to spend, to get JUST some rock and data in return? Why not spend the billions making an industry that returns products and investment margin, and then those academic types can charter themselves flights, housing and equipment. They can go out and do all the science they want while a real economy churns away at their backs, making it sustainably possible for them to do it in the first place. Necessities before luxuries, folks.
This kind of thing should have been identified long ago. Not knowing that, I'm sure that it was, for some reasons.
1, NASA uses all kinds of math to plot orbits and trajectories. If you look at the math long enough, it can only naturally occur to you to find "paths" through space for various criteria: fuel, time, locations. Unfortunately, the question most implied by default is "What is the minimum time path?", since Mission Control is not a generational job.
2, NASA already knows about certain types of paths that are unconventional. One particular one that I recall has a spacecraft whipped at the moon; the craft has a close encounter with the Moon (pun: the Moon is grey); it ends up making a relatively huge ellipse away from the Earth-Moon system; and finally the craft comes back to Luna and makes a puny insertion burn to orbit. Total fuel cost is lower than just doing the Apollo route; but you traded time and Lunar inertia for it.
The "interplanetary superhighways" thing is the usual type of innovation that in retrospect was a no-brainer. If I had spent time plotting orbits and trajectories for various spacecraft, I would have seen that set of solutions soon enough. But will the politics and optimizations of spacecraft launches and travel allow these solutions to be used, much less become more public? For example, just think on how cheap in fuel terms it will be to send out probes on solar sails; with fuel being free and stored off-craft, more cheapness arises in the double-increase of spacecraft mass, getting more done for the money. (I say double-increase due to no main propulsion, which opens mass for instruments, and "infinite" fuel, which means you can make the craft about as heavy as you want (limited by sail size, 'course).) Sail-driven craft will take a bit of time to get where they are going in the Outer System; instead, we chose what are essentially launched and boosted billard balls for those jobs.
Of course, for the purposes of this diatribe I am assuming that the term "malicious hacking" will be used against many hackers that are caught. If you break into any government computer, then you will be charged with malicious hacking.
Ah, more of the same application of practical justice. The violent, poor, young and essentially weak have the best chance of being imprisoned. The use of violence is touted as justification for all of that internment, and the public goes along with it even though scads of poor, young and weak folk are caught up in the net.
Now, malicious hackers are being added to this social targeting zone. They qualify as young and weak (nerdy, loner).
Meanwhile, corporate executives and directors are walking away from the ruins of the companies whose demises they specifically engineered. The economic damage is even more obvious than before, when I started noticing the corporate scams of the 1970s and beyond. The damage done is far in excess of anything done while hacking, individually or collectively. But the criminals in these company-crashing cases are enormously wealthy and as such are untouchable -- after all, the justice system is designed to attack the poor.
There is even a common feeling -- deluded and immensely ignorant, if not outrightly stupid -- that since no violence was done, no serious crime occurred in these corporate scams. We find the President mouthing off about doubling prison terms, which is pretty funny since little if any prison time is seen by these corporate criminals. (He might as well have quintupled the prison times for every Three-Eyed Wahoojibber Beast that is caught.) And even if imprisoned, they have millions stashed away for resuming their high living after they come out of their country-club (remember, they are not violent criminals) prisons. And -- oh yes, sarcasm time has arrived -- doubling a prison time from 18 months to 36 is really going to reform those hidden millionaires.
Life imprisonment for malicious hackers! -- while Ken Lay and his ilk fly across America in chartered jets looking for more economies to destroy. If you don't see that America has no sense of priorities, then you just aren't looking.
Look, this is an old argument that has the informational gene for immortality -- it just won't die, but it should (or at least hibernate until truly new data shows up).
... perhaps our philosophy about the SETI will also change.
The Earth radiates like a small star in the radio region, from our civilization's emissions. Yet we don't hear a peep of anything like that out of the rest of the universe, and there's no obvious evidence of stellar engineering to be seen either. Where are other forms of intelligent, information-exchanging, perhaps macro-engineering life? Well, it could be they aren't macro-engineers, or that they don't pass information like we expect them to.
But it could also be that there isn't any other life at all, or just low-level forms that we won't be talking to.
We only have one assured point of data to answer the Life question, and that's not good enough. One point doesn't "trend"; it has an infinite number of slopes; you can fit any curve to it. You can hardly expect to win your case for universal life without evidence of detecting anything outside of the Earth. Even other planets in the same system show no evidence of engineering or biochemical activity, and we've been looking at them for decades with some pretty good instruments.
We must keep looking, sure, but the evidence is pretty well on the side of a lifeless galaxy. Be scientists for once, and ditch that superstitious need for alien races and galactic empires. The facts are overwhelmingly against alien life, and until we expand our methods of searching, that's how we must judge it if we are to pay any due respect to logic.
On the hope side of things, our methods and assumptions can change with more data. For instance, it was taken for granted (although well-enough thought out) that if aliens existed, biochemistries between two such races would almost always be dissimilar. One race might settle on carbon, oxygen and sunlight, and another on silicon, hydrogen and geothermal energy. But recent theories and observations suggest that cosmic gas clouds harbor molecules that can start biochemistry upon planets. Since such clouds are large, it could be that this seeding process could produce similar biochemisty across different star systems. Hence, across the lightyears, biochemically-similar lifeforms might be able to arise if the seeding process has the potential we theorize. So the basic philosophy about alien differences has changed
Myself, personally, I figure we will need Jodie Foster {tm} to take up radio astronomy before we get the signals we are looking for.
None of this is really surprising, is it?
Firstly, civilization has a long history of leveraging military and overall safety powers into the civil arena. Hence, all laws that are touted as being against "terrorists" and for "public safety" will be used to screw the average man out of as much money and liberty as possible.
Secondly, if you want to keep your civil rights (the most basic one being: the right to be left alone), then move out of the city. (I mean any city, not just The City -- London's nickname.) The crowding, greed, fear and loathing within urban areas have worked to destroy not only civil rights, but the attitude that we should even have said rights. Search and seizure should be quintessentially restricted, but if you ask any city cop, anything can be taken away for any reason, and they only approve. The real liberies that are expanding are within the ruling and enforcement classes. The old American patriot Ethan Allen is alleged to have said "the gods of the valleys are not the gods of the mountains", alluding to the concerns of cities and towns over the rural folk, and the mismatch thereby.
Thirdly, Britain has learned nothing from Orwell's characterizations (among others) and they are headed strongly for all the democratized tyranny that they can imagine. If the people of Britain don't revolt first, by 2025 you will have to get almost a dozen offcials to authorize your presence in London. Britain will effectively have an internal visa.
I'd done the Tetris thing in the 286 heyday, and considered myself too much into it. However, I'm sure there were people with greater levels of addiction. I mean, I only got to the point where I saw blocks descending in my mind's eye as I drifted off to sleep at night. There must have been people whose minds played Tetris like this during daylight hours.
I upgraded my needs for Tetris-ing to the Blockout game, which I consider to be the 3D version of Tetris. 3D blocks appear on the screen in wireframe; they drop away from you into a pit, and you can spin them +/- on each x, y and z axis. (In practice, I only use one vector of spin, since the spin rate is so fast, and it avoids confusion of which way to spin the cubes.) The blocks opaque as they settle in the pit, and of course the pit tends to fill up towards you.
I certainly don't play Blockout as much as I did at first, and I never play Tetris anymore. Rarely, I fire up Balltris -- it is like Tetris but uses groups of balls; the groups fall into a pit, and when they make touching patterns (each level of difficulty increments the number of same-colored balls that must be touching), they disappear and the balls cascade and collapse quite intriguingly. I also play Snood, which is like Bubble Trouble; it's kind of like a table pool type of Tetris.
But the Tetris, Balltris, Blockout and Snood types of games illustrate the remarkable gulf of difference between gamers. I can't stand the Doom and Everquest type of games; my thing is the blipping of colored bits of light into patterns, producing results, but under increasing difficulty until my dexterity and hand-eye coordination fail me. And they are over within 5 minutes, whereas Doom etc. can go on for hours and hours. The textually-graphic game Dungeons of Moria was as much as I could stand.
I recall playing Tetris and entering something I called the zone -- the place where you were one with the blocks, the rate of fall, and the clicking of the keys to spin, drop and fit each one as it appeared and hurtled downward. It may be that my understanding of sartori and various Zen statements developed from that feeling of the zone. Tetris as Zen training? Stranger things have happened.
... it might make your stronger.
Linux will probably benefit from the exercise.
Now, if we make a Linux server that will survive Slashdotting, then we've really got something.
I knew the Freedom/ISS/whatever station was an enormous mistake to begin with. It had no meaningful mission for the costs involved. The quantity of saliva that flowed from aerospace contractors was just obscene. At least $8 billion was announced as spent, while nary a kilogram had yet made it to orbit.
The ISS is another example showing how NASA's budget is the most efficient launch system ever devised to send money far and away.
The politics involved in space developments like that are essentially just panderings to taxpayer emotions. If we went around building dams and highways with as much illogic as that approach, we'd tend to be driving in mud when crossing the country. More of civil engineering's discipline and unsexy methods of work need to be applied to space construction, if we expect the things we build to last for generations.
Gerard O'Neill's various works on the economics of space development have fallen on deaf ears and dull minds for many years. He appeared before a Congressional committee on these matters, but he may as well just have done a show with sock puppets for all the good it did. I challenge NASA to crack open some of his work and dare them to adopt more of an economic approach. For all my criticism of the practice of Western capitalism, I support the solid core in its philosophy that says spending must return value.
Using that measure, what can the ISS return to us? I suspect the profit on that investment was already taken by contractors and NASA lifers. It is for this reason that I supported killing off the Superconducting Supercollider, and the ISS's bloated future should die the same death.
Does our civilization have the gumption to conduct space development not as a boondoggle but as a sound exercise in profitable infrastructure? Why do we respond to silly pulpit-pounding by demogouges, starting projects that are just expansions on the theme of "our country can pee farther than yours"? (Considering how much was pissed away in space programs, the urinary analogy is apt.) What would be the public response to a president that got on TV and pounded his table, saying "we will put solar-power satellites in orbit and really show the Euro-Sino-Slavic bloc a thing or two about cheap energy"?
Hey, this has sparked an idea! Check it: sell everything in America and close up shop, fire all your lazy, fat, overpaid American employees, and then dash to China to start the entrepreneurial Gold Rush!
... $8.50 per hour should be enough income if both parents work 60+ hours a week. Those fat, lazy bastards! Hoo boy I'm glad we don't pay taxes in America anymore."
Oh, wait, this is already being done.
And if everyone is doing it, it must be a good investment. The dotcoms clearly showed that. Praise Jesus that the investment industry found out that mathematical models of animal-herd movements produced the largest returns when applied to stock markets.
Due to my latest invention, a Psycho-Temporal Radio Receiver, I can now reveal the private thoughts of a future internationalist businessman: "Hey, it looks like sales in America have really taken a dive. Why is that? They should be able to buy our Chinese stuff
Okay, okay, sarcasm off. But if I hear one more next-big-opportunity story, I'm gonna barf.
A "high-tech economy" is just a nebulous thing out there in the world, and we're not supposed to think about how it comes about. The capitalist class only knows how to make stuff, to sell stuff, to keep all the proceeds, and to slough off all the expenses of the enterprise upon the public. When you spend your time privatizing profits while socializing your expenses, you are waaaaaay too busy to deal with irrelevant items like: "Gee, who will buy our stuff, the guys we laid off in America, or the guys we underpay in China?"
Having so stated my assumption, now I just gotta respond to your points under its perverse and wicked influence:
access to energy
Yes, this is pretty essential -- to production, of course (who cares what the customer does with the damned thing after the sale is made?). I wonder if local generation in China is being explored? -- it's an idea being toyed with in America.
fair judicial system
What the hell does that matter? Your factory is setup with Chinese "partners" who will inevitably be a part of whatever local government and "law enforcement" that exists. If shoes and clothing can be produced by a class of people with no recourse to "fair" judgment, then so can many other things that are produced by assembly line.
clean water
What the hell does that matter? People filter water in America; just filter in what you need in China. Whatever the workers drink is their own problem.
enough food for its people
What the hell does that matter? There will be plenty more Chinese coming in from the rural areas to get the chance to work in your factory for money, which they imagine will help lift them out of poverty and possible starvation. It won't, of course, but people have always shown hope in that regard since the Industrial Revolution.
uncorrupt governance
This is probably a factor, but a minor one at that. Bribery is just another line item in your budget. After all, this the standard way that the oil business is conducted.
educated people
What the hell does that matter? Your cheap labor is ideal for Taylorist work arrangements. And any cheap labor that you feel the need to educate for specific reasons (hey we need an electrical engineer for this factory), simply can be educated and returned to China at a cheaper cost than hiring a First World skilled person. Education is highly overrated; craftsman skills themselves have been long obsoleted by factories.
freedom of expression
Ju-das Priest, where do you get these silly ideas anyway? The shoes and clothes you are now wearing have in all probability been produced by people who do without hope, disposable income, fresh air, nourishing food, and job security. Freedom of expression is just another opportunity for the workers to make trouble for the capitalist class that owns the methods of manufacture. Since it is not only unnecessary but harmful to the process of maximizing profits, it must be absent.
(Thank you for your attention. I had as good a time responding to your posting as I can ever have with my clothes on.)
First off, let's get one thing straight. There has never been an appropriate physical casting of the Batman character, from Adam West to the modern Batman movies. (Michael Keaton? Val Kilmer? -- oh, give me a fscking break. Adam West did the job better than they did.) Batman's comics over the last 8 years (including the seminal work "The Dark Knight Returns" (TDKR)) amply demonstrates the lack in our movies. Someone close to Arnie's stature is needed, although they would need to be less brawny and more limber, since Batman's a noted martial artist. I mention Arnie since, not only is he of a55-kicking size, but he seems to act out high-society roles well enough. If only we had a white Wesley Snipes, eh? -- his fitness, appearance and demeanor are well suited to the Batman role.
... physically this was well enough done by Christopher Reeves.
But that was then.
Modern portrayals of Superman and Clark Kent make the character a larger man -- a commanding presence by most standards.
Even if Mr. Reeves wasn't disabled, he couldn't fulfill the role anymore; his over-characterization of a simpering, milquetoast Clark Kent is also no longer required.
In my opinion, Hollywood would have to find someone who could fit the physical description of Superman in the "Kingdom Come" comics.
Arnie could do it.
Vin Diesel isn't tall enough; and frankly his facial features more befit a street punk than a yuppie superhero.
The Rock? -- puh-leeze ... he needs to prove he can handle a dramatic role (heyyy, stop laughing).
....
As for Superman's casting
The movie has great promise (which I'll explain) and it has enough material to work from. Pitting Batman against Superman has already been done, not only in several instances throughout their comics series, but primarily in TDKR. At least, there's always some sort of a low-level leadership struggle going on, as illustrated by many Justice League comics.
If the movie is to be in any way loyal to the fan base, it must seize the potential inherent in the strife between the characters. It'll have to demonstrate the low-level leadership struggles, and if outright hostilities commence, then the philosophical generators of the characters will have to be as follows
Superman is portrayed as having immense, godlike power while well controlled by a good heart. His approach is a typical, mythical Americanism: use overwhelming force and do not compromise basic principles. He values life over anything else and is willing to die for it. He lives two lives, in harmony.
Batman is the dark side of Americana (Superman's shadow in more ways than one): the hard, intellectually driven need for skill, order, justice and outright revenge. He's constantly under tension between his public (socialite) and private (crusader) personas. And like Superman, he also values life over anything else and is willing to die for it.
Superman's overwhelming force and good nature can always be countered by Batman's calculating application of knowledge and technology. The comics bring up this theme time and time again. This theme's fertile ground for good storytelling -- the question is, will the movie be cultivated there?
(Sorry for the length; I didn't realize that I had this much to say when I began typing.)