Yup - I once went to Japan to help get something set up, and I was expecting to see the legendary Japanese work ethic. What I observed were people spending a lot of time at work looking busy, but tasks that should take 15-20 minutes would take all morning (and they had the discretion to do it whatever way they were accustomed to - the task wasn't exacting though perhaps they went ahead and over-engineered it anyway).
I've seen the same thing at work. Managers look for people who are busy, and one of the first thing co-workers tried to teach me is to "pace myself."
"Vendors should provide a simple and standard way that lets us get our OS on any PC out there. Others are welcome to come up with vendor-specific hacks or negotiate with every vendor out there as they wish. You see, we're a monopoly so they come to us and we tell them what to do, and good luck competing with that..."
Yup - crank up the engines. We're talking about multi-billion-dollar investments the same way we'd talk about maybe taking the car in the garage to the shop for a $1000 tune-up.
The shuttles are a distraction. They're a dead end. We already know we can do it. Let's do something we haven't already done.
Doing something you can already do is fine if there is some kind of demand for it. We know how to make apples, but people still want to buy them so people still do it. On the other hand, people aren't willing to pay the cost of a shuttle mission just to put a satellite in orbit when there are much cheaper ways to do it (it only happened in the past either because of below-cost pricing or because of political requirements). There isn't much else people are even looking to do in space right now (that they're willing to pay for - lots of people will come up with stuff to do if it is "free" - and most of that stuff can be done cheaper without the shuttle).
People get really emotional about this stuff, but the shuttles don't actually DO that much. They've marvels of technology but they solve a problem that nobody has - getting a few people into LEO for a few days. On the article's comment page there was somebody taking about losing access to the 99.9999...% of the universe beyond our atmosphere. The reality is that the shuttle gives us access to a very small fraction of volume of space compared to what we already have inside our atmosphere - it isn't like you can just take the shuttle over to Alpha Centauri.
I think the transformation you suggest will eventually happen - eventually we'll have unemployment of 90% and there will be little choice. However, there are many things in the world that are still scarce, and everything is finite - even the number of electrons in the universe. The army of robots serving society only works if the size of society is limited by resources. Otherwise, if everybody can just sit around doing what they want, then they'll probably end up wanting to have a fair number of kids.
I think the ironies you speak of exist, but not quite to the degree that you suggest. Just because we can launch an ICBM doesn't mean that we'll be able to colonize Mars anytime soon.
How do you know that? What technology was used to calibrate the prospector-grade GPS, and how do you know that it is accurate over hundreds of kilometers (no drift/etc). Measuring relative distance over small areas is much different from measuring it over very long distances. In fact, with the earth being a non-inertial frame I wonder what the scale of relativistic effects on length are.
How do you measure distance to a meter with surveying when the ground moves a good portion of that due to tides alone? How about techtonic drift.
I mean, these are long distances through the mantle, and even if you had a ruler and a tunnel to run it through you'd have to deal with huge amounts of sag.
Sure, it can be done, but you could probably argue endlessly about systematic error. The only way I could see it working is if you somehow sent photos alongside the neutrinos so that you could measure the relative speed.
I've actually started to wonder if the solution to government monitoring is to just open source it.
Imagine tons of cameras posting GUIDs for faces and plate numbers with timestamps and locations all over the web, and uploading them to centralized databases that ANYBODY can see. Suddenly NOBODY has privacy. You could pull up a photo of every person who ever walked into CIA headquarters, or find the home address of every judge in the country. When somebody commits a crime the press and the victim's family can probably figure out who it was at around the same time as the police. When somebody is arrested during a protest the identity of the protestors and the police are known to all.
Taboos will change since all those things people claim to dispise but do anyway would just be open for all to see.
Maybe privacy is just something fundamentally incompatible with the information age. Maybe what we need to do is at least level the playing fields.
Actually, if they ever enforce speeding with 100% accuracy, perhaps we'll see an end to the ridiculous speed limits on roads. The current system is accepted only because everybody is allowed to violate it with near impunity.
I don't have issues with patents and IP on such things, but they should be limited to more reasonable lengths, and what I don't approve of is some of the tactics that have been used legally against farmers who likely didn't actually want the GMOs on their land.
IP rights are what encourage investment into these technologies in the first place. The trick is finding the right balance. Giving an "Apple" some exclusivity to reward them for innovating is one thing, but giving them a patent on the "smartphone" for 20 years is ridiculous.
Why do people eat to much and not exercise enough? Apparently people had no trouble with this 100 years ago. So, are you suggesting that the psychological makeup of humans has changed in 100 years, or perhaps there is a deeper cause?
Hmm, makes you wonder with such half-lives if half our modern problems with diabetes are the result of improved transportation and refrigeration.
When everything you eat is already half-rotten chances are that these kinds of RNAs might be gone. When your food is frozen from an hour after death until 20 minutes before it is on your dinner plate then that doesn't happen so much.
Selective breeding over generations is genetic modification, and it's been going on for the past four millennia. Did you mean "recombinant genetic modification"?
The phrase "genetically modified" means genetically engineered. No one uses the term to mean selective breeding.
Uh, selective breeding is engineering.:)
However, everybody knows what you meant. The parent's point is that the only difference between modern and ancient techniques for food modification is the speed with which it happens. That in itself does have some level of impact I'll grant, but then again our ability to detect disease is also greatly increased - for all we know half the problems with eating modern foods is that ancient farmers selectively bred foods that kill you over time and had no way to tell this was happening since there weren't epidemiologists around.
However, I'm not sure that this kind of discovery has huge implications for genetic manipulation of foods. Apparently perfectly ordinary foods are messing with your gene expression in both good and bad ways, and likely modified organisms do the same, both in good and bad ways. In fact, one would think that genetic manipulation would be the easiest way to eliminate the bad micro RNAs and increase the good ones, once we understand how it all works.
Loopholes are simply the result of a lousy judicial system.
The problem is that the law has become a game. Whether an action harms society is not important - only whether you can successfully argue that it isn't covered by the law.
I know somebody who teaches ethics and he says that lawyers are the worst students. They'll come up with scenarios and ask for a "ruling" on whether it is ethical. Then they'll tweak some aspect of the scenario and repeat the question, with the goal of optimizing the scenario to the most outrageous thing likely to be judged ethical. Ok, so lying to a prospective client to get their business is clearly unethical, but how about just telling them anecdotal examples of the 1% of people who benefited from hiring a lawyer in their situation, and not mentioning the 99% who simply wasted their money when doing so? What if I get somebody else to do the lying for me? And so on...
The results of such a system are predictable - a nation governed by laws that can be hundreds of pages long, which everybody and their uncle then ignores the intent of, producing legal briefs thousands of pages long in the process.
I've even seen this stuff on FOSS projects - somebody breaks some rule governing commits (you name it - QA, coding style, etc), and gets called on it. Then a 100 message flamewar erupts over whether the particular activity does or does not violate some complicated interpretation of the rules, and 300 new rules are proposed to take the place of one. Successful projects resist this, usually by having a benevolent dictator or somebody kick the person out with a one-line reason so that the rest fall into line. That works OK since ultimately even benevolent dictators have limited power in FOSS (forking and competition), but it doesn't work well for government (at least not in the long term).
I support the concept of libraries. However, I do agree that in the modern age they could be consolidated tremendously with technology. There is no reason to have stacks of books that need to be sorted every day when you could just download them. I'm sure for the cost of maintaining the local libraries a state could just buy an e-book reader for every citizen...
Yup, which is why I'm in favor of making Tivoization of hardware illegal in the first place. Just require that hardware that contains cryptographic keys provide a copy to the owner of all keys embedded devices, and any paired keys for asymmetric crypto. Also require that hardware vendors provide a mechanism for the owner to replace this key with one that they choose.
This still prevents viruses/etc from infecting the device since they wouldn't know the key, but the owner can install their own software on it. Each device would probably need a unique key for this to provide any security.
As it should. I want to be able to build grub, not have to install some ancient copy of it provided by my BIOS vendor, or whatever.
Just give users the ability to install their own keys and everything is fine. Secure boot is a great idea - but secure FROM the OWNER of the machine is not.
This isn't about helping out competitors. This is about using monopoly market share on an OS to force hardware vendors to configure their hardware in a manner that prevents competitors from gaining a foothold. This ought to be illegal.
I'm fine with secure boot, but the computer owner should be able to change the keys it employs.
No, they need to get rid of having the transaction depend on tokens that leave the card.
Make the ATM card a smartcard with an embedded private key, and a display/keypad. You connect it to the ATM machine, and request a transaction. The ATM sends the request to the card for authentication. The card displays the amount on the display and requests a PIN. The user types the PIN into the card and then the card signs the transaction request, which can then be sent to the bank. This works online or offline, and for both ATM withdraws and credit card transactions. It can't be defeated without stealing both the card and capturing the PIN, which isn't going to be as easy if it is typed into the card directly.
The card can use near field or any number of technologies to connect. With adapters and maybe an acoustic modem it could work with PCs or phone transactions as well.
The concept of transactions being safeguarded by a big number that you give to every merchant you use is just fundamentally broken.
If they really just wanted manufacturers to commit to timely updates then they could have GPL3'd critical components of the OS. That has anti-tivoization provisions, which means that users would be more likely to end up with upgradable phones with or without vendor support.
Well, I'm fine with splitting up the cell companies if that is what you're proposing.
My solution would be that companies that provide cell phone service should not be permitted to own either towers or spectrum. Just standardize the protocols and have utilities run the towers and sell bandwidth to cell phone providers. You'd have multiple utilities in any given area, and no utility could cover more than so many square miles. Now no one company holds enough sway to control prices.
In any case, the original post said that none of the people complaining were actual customers, and when I spoke up as an actual customer the response was "well, don't complain.":)
Uh, who do you propose I give my money to? I want to give it to T-mobile, and the forces of monopolization are slowly getting rid of that option for me.
Natural monopolies are a perfectly valid place for government interference. If you don't want the government to dictate how you operate, then don't buy cell phone towers.
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Yup - I once went to Japan to help get something set up, and I was expecting to see the legendary Japanese work ethic. What I observed were people spending a lot of time at work looking busy, but tasks that should take 15-20 minutes would take all morning (and they had the discretion to do it whatever way they were accustomed to - the task wasn't exacting though perhaps they went ahead and over-engineered it anyway).
I've seen the same thing at work. Managers look for people who are busy, and one of the first thing co-workers tried to teach me is to "pace myself."
Well, more like:
"Vendors should provide a simple and standard way that lets us get our OS on any PC out there. Others are welcome to come up with vendor-specific hacks or negotiate with every vendor out there as they wish. You see, we're a monopoly so they come to us and we tell them what to do, and good luck competing with that..."
Yup - crank up the engines. We're talking about multi-billion-dollar investments the same way we'd talk about maybe taking the car in the garage to the shop for a $1000 tune-up.
The shuttles are a distraction. They're a dead end. We already know we can do it. Let's do something we haven't already done.
Doing something you can already do is fine if there is some kind of demand for it. We know how to make apples, but people still want to buy them so people still do it. On the other hand, people aren't willing to pay the cost of a shuttle mission just to put a satellite in orbit when there are much cheaper ways to do it (it only happened in the past either because of below-cost pricing or because of political requirements). There isn't much else people are even looking to do in space right now (that they're willing to pay for - lots of people will come up with stuff to do if it is "free" - and most of that stuff can be done cheaper without the shuttle).
People get really emotional about this stuff, but the shuttles don't actually DO that much. They've marvels of technology but they solve a problem that nobody has - getting a few people into LEO for a few days. On the article's comment page there was somebody taking about losing access to the 99.9999...% of the universe beyond our atmosphere. The reality is that the shuttle gives us access to a very small fraction of volume of space compared to what we already have inside our atmosphere - it isn't like you can just take the shuttle over to Alpha Centauri.
I think the transformation you suggest will eventually happen - eventually we'll have unemployment of 90% and there will be little choice. However, there are many things in the world that are still scarce, and everything is finite - even the number of electrons in the universe. The army of robots serving society only works if the size of society is limited by resources. Otherwise, if everybody can just sit around doing what they want, then they'll probably end up wanting to have a fair number of kids.
I think the ironies you speak of exist, but not quite to the degree that you suggest. Just because we can launch an ICBM doesn't mean that we'll be able to colonize Mars anytime soon.
How do you know that? What technology was used to calibrate the prospector-grade GPS, and how do you know that it is accurate over hundreds of kilometers (no drift/etc). Measuring relative distance over small areas is much different from measuring it over very long distances. In fact, with the earth being a non-inertial frame I wonder what the scale of relativistic effects on length are.
How do you measure distance to a meter with surveying when the ground moves a good portion of that due to tides alone? How about techtonic drift.
I mean, these are long distances through the mantle, and even if you had a ruler and a tunnel to run it through you'd have to deal with huge amounts of sag.
Sure, it can be done, but you could probably argue endlessly about systematic error. The only way I could see it working is if you somehow sent photos alongside the neutrinos so that you could measure the relative speed.
I've actually started to wonder if the solution to government monitoring is to just open source it.
Imagine tons of cameras posting GUIDs for faces and plate numbers with timestamps and locations all over the web, and uploading them to centralized databases that ANYBODY can see. Suddenly NOBODY has privacy. You could pull up a photo of every person who ever walked into CIA headquarters, or find the home address of every judge in the country. When somebody commits a crime the press and the victim's family can probably figure out who it was at around the same time as the police. When somebody is arrested during a protest the identity of the protestors and the police are known to all.
Taboos will change since all those things people claim to dispise but do anyway would just be open for all to see.
Maybe privacy is just something fundamentally incompatible with the information age. Maybe what we need to do is at least level the playing fields.
Actually, if they ever enforce speeding with 100% accuracy, perhaps we'll see an end to the ridiculous speed limits on roads. The current system is accepted only because everybody is allowed to violate it with near impunity.
I don't have issues with patents and IP on such things, but they should be limited to more reasonable lengths, and what I don't approve of is some of the tactics that have been used legally against farmers who likely didn't actually want the GMOs on their land.
IP rights are what encourage investment into these technologies in the first place. The trick is finding the right balance. Giving an "Apple" some exclusivity to reward them for innovating is one thing, but giving them a patent on the "smartphone" for 20 years is ridiculous.
Why do people eat to much and not exercise enough? Apparently people had no trouble with this 100 years ago. So, are you suggesting that the psychological makeup of humans has changed in 100 years, or perhaps there is a deeper cause?
Hmm, makes you wonder with such half-lives if half our modern problems with diabetes are the result of improved transportation and refrigeration.
When everything you eat is already half-rotten chances are that these kinds of RNAs might be gone. When your food is frozen from an hour after death until 20 minutes before it is on your dinner plate then that doesn't happen so much.
Selective breeding over generations is genetic modification, and it's been going on for the past four millennia. Did you mean " recombinant genetic modification"?
The phrase "genetically modified" means genetically engineered. No one uses the term to mean selective breeding.
Uh, selective breeding is engineering. :)
However, everybody knows what you meant. The parent's point is that the only difference between modern and ancient techniques for food modification is the speed with which it happens. That in itself does have some level of impact I'll grant, but then again our ability to detect disease is also greatly increased - for all we know half the problems with eating modern foods is that ancient farmers selectively bred foods that kill you over time and had no way to tell this was happening since there weren't epidemiologists around.
However, I'm not sure that this kind of discovery has huge implications for genetic manipulation of foods. Apparently perfectly ordinary foods are messing with your gene expression in both good and bad ways, and likely modified organisms do the same, both in good and bad ways. In fact, one would think that genetic manipulation would be the easiest way to eliminate the bad micro RNAs and increase the good ones, once we understand how it all works.
Loopholes are simply the result of a lousy judicial system.
The problem is that the law has become a game. Whether an action harms society is not important - only whether you can successfully argue that it isn't covered by the law.
I know somebody who teaches ethics and he says that lawyers are the worst students. They'll come up with scenarios and ask for a "ruling" on whether it is ethical. Then they'll tweak some aspect of the scenario and repeat the question, with the goal of optimizing the scenario to the most outrageous thing likely to be judged ethical. Ok, so lying to a prospective client to get their business is clearly unethical, but how about just telling them anecdotal examples of the 1% of people who benefited from hiring a lawyer in their situation, and not mentioning the 99% who simply wasted their money when doing so? What if I get somebody else to do the lying for me? And so on...
The results of such a system are predictable - a nation governed by laws that can be hundreds of pages long, which everybody and their uncle then ignores the intent of, producing legal briefs thousands of pages long in the process.
I've even seen this stuff on FOSS projects - somebody breaks some rule governing commits (you name it - QA, coding style, etc), and gets called on it. Then a 100 message flamewar erupts over whether the particular activity does or does not violate some complicated interpretation of the rules, and 300 new rules are proposed to take the place of one. Successful projects resist this, usually by having a benevolent dictator or somebody kick the person out with a one-line reason so that the rest fall into line. That works OK since ultimately even benevolent dictators have limited power in FOSS (forking and competition), but it doesn't work well for government (at least not in the long term).
I support the concept of libraries. However, I do agree that in the modern age they could be consolidated tremendously with technology. There is no reason to have stacks of books that need to be sorted every day when you could just download them. I'm sure for the cost of maintaining the local libraries a state could just buy an e-book reader for every citizen...
Yup. In fact if I want to borrow a library book I can already do it on epub and use the Adobe equivalents to scrub it and Calibre to convert to mobi.
If people could get this stuff working with audio doing it with text is pretty trivial.
Yup, which is why I'm in favor of making Tivoization of hardware illegal in the first place. Just require that hardware that contains cryptographic keys provide a copy to the owner of all keys embedded devices, and any paired keys for asymmetric crypto. Also require that hardware vendors provide a mechanism for the owner to replace this key with one that they choose.
This still prevents viruses/etc from infecting the device since they wouldn't know the key, but the owner can install their own software on it. Each device would probably need a unique key for this to provide any security.
And where can I get a copy of NTLDR legally without paying for a copy of windows?
As it should. I want to be able to build grub, not have to install some ancient copy of it provided by my BIOS vendor, or whatever.
Just give users the ability to install their own keys and everything is fine. Secure boot is a great idea - but secure FROM the OWNER of the machine is not.
This isn't about helping out competitors. This is about using monopoly market share on an OS to force hardware vendors to configure their hardware in a manner that prevents competitors from gaining a foothold. This ought to be illegal.
I'm fine with secure boot, but the computer owner should be able to change the keys it employs.
Great, so guess what the next requirement is going to be for a Win8 logo - that your hardware only be sold with Windows...
No, they need to get rid of having the transaction depend on tokens that leave the card.
Make the ATM card a smartcard with an embedded private key, and a display/keypad. You connect it to the ATM machine, and request a transaction. The ATM sends the request to the card for authentication. The card displays the amount on the display and requests a PIN. The user types the PIN into the card and then the card signs the transaction request, which can then be sent to the bank. This works online or offline, and for both ATM withdraws and credit card transactions. It can't be defeated without stealing both the card and capturing the PIN, which isn't going to be as easy if it is typed into the card directly.
The card can use near field or any number of technologies to connect. With adapters and maybe an acoustic modem it could work with PCs or phone transactions as well.
The concept of transactions being safeguarded by a big number that you give to every merchant you use is just fundamentally broken.
If they really just wanted manufacturers to commit to timely updates then they could have GPL3'd critical components of the OS. That has anti-tivoization provisions, which means that users would be more likely to end up with upgradable phones with or without vendor support.
I do like the service. How do I vote with my wallets for an option that the "free market" is about to get rid of?
Besides - a situation where there are only 3-4 companies in a given space is hardly a "free market."
Well, I'm fine with splitting up the cell companies if that is what you're proposing.
My solution would be that companies that provide cell phone service should not be permitted to own either towers or spectrum. Just standardize the protocols and have utilities run the towers and sell bandwidth to cell phone providers. You'd have multiple utilities in any given area, and no utility could cover more than so many square miles. Now no one company holds enough sway to control prices.
In any case, the original post said that none of the people complaining were actual customers, and when I spoke up as an actual customer the response was "well, don't complain." :)
Uh, who do you propose I give my money to? I want to give it to T-mobile, and the forces of monopolization are slowly getting rid of that option for me.
Natural monopolies are a perfectly valid place for government interference. If you don't want the government to dictate how you operate, then don't buy cell phone towers.