...then write bugs, drag your heels, code in forth and J2EE and Ada (all on the same project), drop down into assembler to preemptively hyper optimize bubble-sort, stack-allocate fixed length arrays to hold dynamic input (nobody needs more than ten characters to type a password!), misuse threads with time-loops instead of mutexes, and build everything you think you might need (indirected for several unnecessary layers of genericity) before you pay attention to coding any of the actual algorithm.
The Man can make you sit at a workstation and type, but he can't make you think. Or stop you from thinking.
I actually think it's a good thing that unix-ish commands have wierd names.
For a beginner learning unix, there's a conceptual hurdle they have to jump: that commands are not "commands" at all, but specific named programs which can be used as tools.
Lack this understanding, and you're confused and trying to second-guess a nonexistent "designer". Gain it, and you can start to ask the right questions. Not "how do I get help" but "what program displays the help documentation", for example. Or, if one program isn't adequate for a task, might there be another which could do it better?
In that regard it actually helps that unix programs have idiosyncratic names. "grep" is grep, it's not some generic "search", and it's probably not the only tool on the system useful for "searching".
Wikipedia gets around this by attempting to be a "impartial snapshot of people's opinions". That is, display both consensus and unusual/crank opinions, without ridicule, but marked accordingly.
So for example the "NASA faked the moon landings" folks get a page, which details their arguments fairly, but also details the counter-arguments. The conensus moon landings page links to the hoax page as an "alternative view".
It's a desperate attempt to hang onto profits despite their product becoming a commodity.
They're trying to push the market uphill, by charging heavily for something that was cheap to make (the cartriges), and sooner or later the market will rebound. At which point the profit margins will fall out the bottom of the printer industry, all but the big few will go bust, and innovation will slow to a trickle.
Of course, if it hadn't been for the patent system totally distorting the market, they could never have pulled this stunt to begin with -- but had that happened, you would probably still be using dot-matrix.
...they are fed up with being chewed up and spat out by knowledgeable tech companies. Thus they hope Autozone consists of a bunch of grease-monkeys and box-pushers, easily scared by technological jargon.
"Biological agents mutate and get stronger through the standard darwinian evolutionary processes" -- wrong. The evolutionary incentive is for germs to get better at spreading, but weaker in symptoms. The reason being (1) superbugs kill off the susceptible, forcing rapid evolution of immunity (2) the kill rate can outrun the infection rate, and "burn out" the disease's spread (3) people actively quarantine a scary disease.
That's why, evolutionarily speaking, SARS has been a flop while the common cold continues to thrive.
- Government tests of evil mass-population-control backdoors built into car lock software (you can't stop it with tinfoil, if it needs radio to work! Bwahahahah!)
- Some silly bugger intentionally flooding the car-lock frequencies with pseudo codes, perhaps as a form of "dictionary password attack" to steal cars, perhaps as just a prank.
...when their engine craps out on the freeway, or their car starts honking and flashing lights, startling all the other drivers. When they can't get the car started in an emergency. When it strands people in inclement weather, or in the middle of the desert. When a bug in the code sets it off without warning, or locks up and refuses to recognise a good test.
Maybe when those damn idiot legislators see the death toll, they'll learn that it takes a human to make a judgement call.
I mean, an OS on a CD is the ideal natural form of the whole "one OS media per machine" approach. Put the CD in any machine you please, but it'll only be in one at a time. The natural use supports rather than fights the whole single-machine-license thang. And it's convenient enough, most people wouldn't see this as a "bug".
On the one hand I support open source and think it's far more sensible than "security by obscurity". But on the other hand, governments getting the shaft sounds like an excellent thing, long past due, well earned and much to be encouraged. Oh me oh my, the dilemma!
Although I think it would fit more as an answer to "what new businesses could start, because the tech is functionally better, and opens up opporunities that were impossible before";-P
Unlike emails which are store-and-forward with forgeable headers, though, it should be comparatively easy to blacklist IP phone spammers. Or just refuse the call because their caller ID comes up as "Mr Jaroslaw Strzelecki" and you don't have any buddies further away than Seattle.
Folks are saying "BitTorrent is no more anonymous than HTTP". True. But HTTP was also used a lot for distributing MP3s, back in the day. The lawyers were faced by the "whack-a-mile" problem: take down one, and the traffic shifts to another.
Still nowadays nobody uses HTTP to post pirated stuff. Why? Not lawyers, bandwidth. Get even remotely popular and your upload line will wedge solid. Not so with BT.
In effect BT, like HTTP, is more anonymous than any of the other file sharing systems: there's no centralized controlling entity, and not everybody is interconnected. Only those downloading a specific file actually interconnect.
"If you take a look at VoIP, it promises to eliminate revenue altogether"
No, it promises to eliminate waste.
Consider these five questions:
- What else could people and businesses spend the money on, that they used to waste on phone bills?
- What totally new things could people and businesses do with infinite free phone time, that they could not have done when phones cost money?
- What new businesses could start, because the lowered cost margins suddenly make their plans profit-viable?
- What new businesses could start, because the tech is functionally better, and opens up opporunities that were impossible before?
- What new innovation could now happen in the arena of phones and phone-like technologies, that was previously impossible, because the technology was expensive to own and inaccessible to learn?
That new innovation will improve efficiency yet again, and the cycle goes around.
How can we possibly keep people in work if cars make all those horse salesmen, stablers, saddlers, buggy makers, blacksmiths etc obsolete! It will be a job holocaust! Nobody will be working except the car drivers!
Fool, learn the lesson of history, what's being destroyed is inefficient jobs. Not only will the new tech create replacement jobs directly, but indirectly through efficiency gains (money not wasted on one thing can be additionally spent upon another) and through enabling whole new types of job.
All protectionists and luddites should have learned by now that their ideas are pure crap. So they should shut up.
I've got to ask: Given that you are of the opinion (or so I have distilled from our talk) that a government based on a written constitution is pretty much civic masturbation, what's your alternative suggestion? I'm not asking this out of any desire to trade political barbs or start a flame war, I'm honestly curious. In the words of Homer Simpson: Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Interesting question, and hard to answer.
Part of the problem is the assumption people often make in this topic, that rules or structure could be designed such that they will control the government's rapacity. To understand why that will fail, ask yourself the question: "when was the government founded?". I assume your answer was some time in the past. Wrong answer! The government is founded continuously in the ongoing present. Only now affects now. Hence, all constitutions, all structures, are ephemeral.
Please don't assume I'm being defeatist here. To the contrary this is a particularly liberating point of view. Because government is created continuously, it can be uncreated or altered instantaneously in an individual, and in mere hours or days across a whole society.
So, I find myself in a position that ceases to be "revolutionary" or even "political", and becomes almost "religious" - to remove government, which I consider an unnecessary impediment, I must merely persuade people to change their minds.
Libertarians often try to propagandize the virtues of less government, but they're still "thinking within the system". They believe they are "fighting" against a "thing". Ironically, this is the same mistake as Bush's "war on terrorism": reifying an action. I think that persuading people to "oppose" the government is premature, and misleading. A far more important concept to spread is the ephemerality of government.
What people understand they can change, eventually they shall.
Flawed or not, it's still the law of the land. Don't like it? Go ahead and try to change it.
Why? It's just some stuff some guys made up. I don't believe in it. That was my point, in my previous post.
Self defence is a natural right; I'd consider a law purporting to grant it to me as insolent, if I considered it at all.
I won't even address the rest of your post. It is so naive that I had to doublecheck to see if you were indeed the same person who made the eloquent point in the original post.
Yup, all my opinions, and I don't consider them naive.
The analogy breaks down. The second amendment is flawed for a number of reasons, but the most fundamental is: it's the wrong approach entirely.
To arm yourself against the government is as silly as arming your right hand against your left. If your left hand is hitting you, just stop doing it. Government is a "mime's glass wall", it exists solely because of the actions and beliefs of the only real agents, human individuals. It's unhelpful and unneccessary, but it's wanted. Were that to change, if enough people simply ceased believing in it, it would no longer exist.
...which basically spawned all the rights that were formalized in the USA's written one.
Unfortunately, both constitutions appear to be worth not much more than the paper they're written on. In the UK, the current socialist government is engaged in tearing up the "ancient rights of Englishmen", due to a complete incomprehension of their purpose -- and in the USA... well, PATRIOT act, need I say more.
Ask the government to protect you: ask the fox to guard the hen house.
Create a constitution: require the fox to promise on his honor to be good -- said promise to be enforced by the fox, at his sole discretion, upon himself.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone would fudge refusals and pocket the cash.
Scumbags would use billions of zombied PCs to send themselves mails, aggregate and pocket the cash. Or to spam you gratis.
There are transaction costs for generating, checking, and accumulating digital cash. Your paypal bills would be huge.
Everybody hates micropayments.
It's a dumb idea and it simply isn't gonna happen.
...then write bugs, drag your heels, code in forth and J2EE and Ada (all on the same project), drop down into assembler to preemptively hyper optimize bubble-sort, stack-allocate fixed length arrays to hold dynamic input (nobody needs more than ten characters to type a password!), misuse threads with time-loops instead of mutexes, and build everything you think you might need (indirected for several unnecessary layers of genericity) before you pay attention to coding any of the actual algorithm.
The Man can make you sit at a workstation and type, but he can't make you think. Or stop you from thinking.
I actually think it's a good thing that unix-ish commands have wierd names.
For a beginner learning unix, there's a conceptual hurdle they have to jump: that commands are not "commands" at all, but specific named programs which can be used as tools.
Lack this understanding, and you're confused and trying to second-guess a nonexistent "designer". Gain it, and you can start to ask the right questions. Not "how do I get help" but "what program displays the help documentation", for example. Or, if one program isn't adequate for a task, might there be another which could do it better?
In that regard it actually helps that unix programs have idiosyncratic names. "grep" is grep, it's not some generic "search", and it's probably not the only tool on the system useful for "searching".
Wikipedia gets around this by attempting to be a "impartial snapshot of people's opinions". That is, display both consensus and unusual/crank opinions, without ridicule, but marked accordingly.
So for example the "NASA faked the moon landings" folks get a page, which details their arguments fairly, but also details the counter-arguments. The conensus moon landings page links to the hoax page as an "alternative view".
It's a desperate attempt to hang onto profits despite their product becoming a commodity.
They're trying to push the market uphill, by charging heavily for something that was cheap to make (the cartriges), and sooner or later the market will rebound. At which point the profit margins will fall out the bottom of the printer industry, all but the big few will go bust, and innovation will slow to a trickle.
Of course, if it hadn't been for the patent system totally distorting the market, they could never have pulled this stunt to begin with -- but had that happened, you would probably still be using dot-matrix.
I already watch all the movies I please on my nice clear LCD computer screen.
...they are fed up with being chewed up and spat out by knowledgeable tech companies. Thus they hope Autozone consists of a bunch of grease-monkeys and box-pushers, easily scared by technological jargon.
What's with this expert-worship in culture nowadays. Sheesh. As if it takes an expert to understand kids.
"Biological agents mutate and get stronger through the standard darwinian evolutionary processes" -- wrong. The evolutionary incentive is for germs to get better at spreading, but weaker in symptoms. The reason being (1) superbugs kill off the susceptible, forcing rapid evolution of immunity (2) the kill rate can outrun the infection rate, and "burn out" the disease's spread (3) people actively quarantine a scary disease.
That's why, evolutionarily speaking, SARS has been a flop while the common cold continues to thrive.
- EMP device (or similar radiofrequency weapon)
- Government tests of evil mass-population-control backdoors built into car lock software (you can't stop it with tinfoil, if it needs radio to work! Bwahahahah!)
- Some silly bugger intentionally flooding the car-lock frequencies with pseudo codes, perhaps as a form of "dictionary password attack" to steal cars, perhaps as just a prank.
For your rapid downloading pleasure: http://extropy.demon.co.uk/moewe1_2test02.mov.torr ent
My first torrent. I hope this works.
...when their engine craps out on the freeway, or their car starts honking and flashing lights, startling all the other drivers. When they can't get the car started in an emergency. When it strands people in inclement weather, or in the middle of the desert. When a bug in the code sets it off without warning, or locks up and refuses to recognise a good test.
Maybe when those damn idiot legislators see the death toll, they'll learn that it takes a human to make a judgement call.
As if the mafia can't modchip their scanners, or use older ones.
I mean, an OS on a CD is the ideal natural form of the whole "one OS media per machine" approach. Put the CD in any machine you please, but it'll only be in one at a time. The natural use supports rather than fights the whole single-machine-license thang. And it's convenient enough, most people wouldn't see this as a "bug".
But more than Napster, Gnutella, or any of the other central-server / uniform-network file sharing and searching apps.
On the one hand I support open source and think it's far more sensible than "security by obscurity". But on the other hand, governments getting the shaft sounds like an excellent thing, long past due, well earned and much to be encouraged. Oh me oh my, the dilemma!
Although I think it would fit more as an answer to "what new businesses could start, because the tech is functionally better, and opens up opporunities that were impossible before" ;-P
Unlike emails which are store-and-forward with forgeable headers, though, it should be comparatively easy to blacklist IP phone spammers. Or just refuse the call because their caller ID comes up as "Mr Jaroslaw Strzelecki" and you don't have any buddies further away than Seattle.
Folks are saying "BitTorrent is no more anonymous than HTTP". True. But HTTP was also used a lot for distributing MP3s, back in the day. The lawyers were faced by the "whack-a-mile" problem: take down one, and the traffic shifts to another.
Still nowadays nobody uses HTTP to post pirated stuff. Why? Not lawyers, bandwidth. Get even remotely popular and your upload line will wedge solid. Not so with BT.
In effect BT, like HTTP, is more anonymous than any of the other file sharing systems: there's no centralized controlling entity, and not everybody is interconnected. Only those downloading a specific file actually interconnect.
"If you take a look at VoIP, it promises to eliminate revenue altogether"
No, it promises to eliminate waste.
Consider these five questions:
- What else could people and businesses spend the money on, that they used to waste on phone bills?
- What totally new things could people and businesses do with infinite free phone time, that they could not have done when phones cost money?
- What new businesses could start, because the lowered cost margins suddenly make their plans profit-viable?
- What new businesses could start, because the tech is functionally better, and opens up opporunities that were impossible before?
- What new innovation could now happen in the arena of phones and phone-like technologies, that was previously impossible, because the technology was expensive to own and inaccessible to learn?
That new innovation will improve efficiency yet again, and the cycle goes around.
How can we possibly keep people in work if cars make all those horse salesmen, stablers, saddlers, buggy makers, blacksmiths etc obsolete! It will be a job holocaust! Nobody will be working except the car drivers!
Fool, learn the lesson of history, what's being destroyed is inefficient jobs. Not only will the new tech create replacement jobs directly, but indirectly through efficiency gains (money not wasted on one thing can be additionally spent upon another) and through enabling whole new types of job.
All protectionists and luddites should have learned by now that their ideas are pure crap. So they should shut up.
You probably screwed up the CD burn, or bought a dud disk.
Try burning a new disk on a machine with a known good CD burner. And check the MD5 on the ISO image you downloaded.
I've got to ask: Given that you are of the opinion (or so I have distilled from our talk) that a government based on a written constitution is pretty much civic masturbation, what's your alternative suggestion? I'm not asking this out of any desire to trade political barbs or start a flame war, I'm honestly curious. In the words of Homer Simpson: Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Interesting question, and hard to answer.
Part of the problem is the assumption people often make in this topic, that rules or structure could be designed such that they will control the government's rapacity. To understand why that will fail, ask yourself the question: "when was the government founded?". I assume your answer was some time in the past. Wrong answer! The government is founded continuously in the ongoing present. Only now affects now. Hence, all constitutions, all structures, are ephemeral.
Please don't assume I'm being defeatist here. To the contrary this is a particularly liberating point of view. Because government is created continuously, it can be uncreated or altered instantaneously in an individual, and in mere hours or days across a whole society.
So, I find myself in a position that ceases to be "revolutionary" or even "political", and becomes almost "religious" - to remove government, which I consider an unnecessary impediment, I must merely persuade people to change their minds.
Libertarians often try to propagandize the virtues of less government, but they're still "thinking within the system". They believe they are "fighting" against a "thing". Ironically, this is the same mistake as Bush's "war on terrorism": reifying an action. I think that persuading people to "oppose" the government is premature, and misleading. A far more important concept to spread is the ephemerality of government.
What people understand they can change, eventually they shall.
Flawed or not, it's still the law of the land. Don't like it? Go ahead and try to change it.
Why? It's just some stuff some guys made up. I don't believe in it. That was my point, in my previous post.
Self defence is a natural right; I'd consider a law purporting to grant it to me as insolent, if I considered it at all.
I won't even address the rest of your post. It is so naive that I had to doublecheck to see if you were indeed the same person who made the eloquent point in the original post.
Yup, all my opinions, and I don't consider them naive.
The analogy breaks down. The second amendment is flawed for a number of reasons, but the most fundamental is: it's the wrong approach entirely.
To arm yourself against the government is as silly as arming your right hand against your left. If your left hand is hitting you, just stop doing it. Government is a "mime's glass wall", it exists solely because of the actions and beliefs of the only real agents, human individuals. It's unhelpful and unneccessary, but it's wanted. Were that to change, if enough people simply ceased believing in it, it would no longer exist.
...which basically spawned all the rights that were formalized in the USA's written one.
Unfortunately, both constitutions appear to be worth not much more than the paper they're written on. In the UK, the current socialist government is engaged in tearing up the "ancient rights of Englishmen", due to a complete incomprehension of their purpose -- and in the USA... well, PATRIOT act, need I say more.
Ask the government to protect you: ask the fox to guard the hen house.
Create a constitution: require the fox to promise on his honor to be good -- said promise to be enforced by the fox, at his sole discretion, upon himself.