Wiki wins because what moderation it has is post-facto and as easy to undo as the change it reverts. Moderation is also comparatively difficult, requiring one to manually edit the wiki-syntax of the page. So, a culture of responsible editing emerges.
Preemptive, unaccountable, vote based moderation will lead to a groupthink culture like Slashdot can often be, where unpopular ideas get voted into oblivion rather than being challenged with logic.
Think of it as the difference between political and discursive approaches.
Space colonization is the only reason for humans to go into space. It's a species instinct thing. Gotta expand to keep replicating, gotta reduce the danger of "all eggs in one basket". Congress will not prevent it. Econuts will not prevemnt it. It shall happen.
You can "do research" with robots - if it hasn't already been so mined out for utility that you're flying schoolkids' projects as "space science". But only real live people can colonize.
...if you ran the same "shred" approach against ye olde linux you would be able to determine identical MD5 segments, and so learn partially the sysv code. That might be treated as sneakily releasing code.
Seeks storms aren't inevitable doing stuff in parrallel. The Kernel's quite capable of handling a modest amount of simultaneous disk accessing. It's only doing too much at once in parralel that leads to "thrashing".
Perhaps a solution would be the equivalent to "make -j", where you can tune how many simultaneous things to run. In fact "make" is a good model for this whole approach, since the control mechanism will also need to do dependency-blocking.
Other refinements that occur to me:
- Things could be marked as "light", "medium", or "heavy", and the "weight" of simultaneous running processes kept constant.
- The control process could be adaptive, tracking the "load average" and altering the "weight" of individual processes to seek a best aggregate run time.
Heh, ignore the mods, they're mostly socialists, for some daft reason.
Anyway, it's really not necessary to get the government out of space exploration (although I'd love to, but that's cause I'm a libertarian anarchist and I'd love to fire the lot of them). So long as the government can be kept from preventing private commercial space development, then the future already looks good. X-prize, Scaled Composites, etc.
Don't waste ire on NASA, instead ignore, bypass, and supercede (my anarchist motto, heh).
Bureaucracy is not the only problem. Private organisations can be bureaucratic, too. The real problem seems to me to be one of perverse incentives.
1) NASA appears to lack a intentional mission. It's de-facto publically assumed mission is something along lines of "do space stuff". But it has few real "space stuff" goals, because it has no (profit) incentive to go there. Shuttle "science experiments" are ludicrous. The ISS does nothing and goes nowhere, expensively.
In reality, as evidenced by all the politicians' attitudes to NASA (even during their condolence speeches), its real mission is: national self-congratulation, international self-promotion, congressional pork, and a vague continuance of the "sense of progress" of the moon landing years.
Naturally the above is not conducive to good "space stuff".
2) NASA is funded, not invested in. Their budget isn't going away (unless, perversely, they demonstrate they can do more with less, which would lead to them being de-funded). The source of their money is politicians, not commercial profits. Actual success brings them no payback, and failure does them no harm. The incentives this gives are: pocket the budget, don't waste it on any actual space stuff, and beg continually for more funding.
3) For this funding, they are expcted to produce immediate bigness, not gradual affordable advancement. Thus their attitude to problem solution consists of "throwing money at it".
A good analogy here is the architechtural construction techniques of the Egyptian pharaohs. You can build quite big pyramids if you throw a fortune and an army of slaves at the job. But it doesn't scale, it doesn't advance the state of the art, and, crucially, it doesn't get any cheaper when you do it more often. It was the brick-and-mortar commercial construction industry that led via engineering advances to modern skyscraper construction.
When NASA complains of underfunding, it's analogous to the pharaonic architects complaining that their skyscraper plans are hobbled by the shortage of slaves.
"More than the average user"... if that's automated, it sounds like a recipe for a downward ratchet to zero. The calculated average can blip downward due to statistical randomness, but never rise, since the new maximum is capped at the previous average.
Die, you big government big brother panopticon loving technocratic commiefascist eugenicists! Diediediedie!
Damn me but I hate this sort of "you need a licence to breathe" mentality. Haven't these people heard of private property? Or minding their own sodding business? They're the same sort that propose "having-children licenses" - and you know they are just itching to stamp "denied" on the application forms (in triplicate, block capitals only please) of anyone they don't personally like. Such as anyone ho doesn't happily and with smiling countenance kowtow to their nazi "alles in ordnung" ideals.
I can see this tool becoming helpful for so much more than smashing SCO. Any situation where data comparison is useful, but the data itself must remain secret. All paranoid types (corporate or governmental) will love it. Lawyers could make much use of it.
And, given the dataset it generates, it could be extended to do other useful things such as detect redundant or cut-'n-pasted code, including bugs of the "pasted it in twice" sort.
Sure but I was only talking about vessels that can reach Earth orbit. And you really would not want an atomic powered space vessel launching directly from Earth. The risk of widespread radioactive contamination upon an accident such as happened to the space shuttle would be enormous.
Nah. A "pebble bed" style reactor becomes inactive and safe when scattered about. The "pebbles" are heat and impact hardened and would survive an explosion intact. Contamination would be minimal, probably less riky than the shuttle's poisonous fuels.
Also, a nuke rocket is much less likely to blow up. No explosive fuels.
...is in who is static and vulnerable, and who is ephemeral and concealed. Spam is push so the user is the one at a disadvantage. RSS spam is pull - it would be trivial to DDOS the (immobile) source into a smoking blob of molten electronics. I can see no future for nonconsensual spammers in RSS.
On the other hand, there is a real future in RSS for genuine advertisers selling desirable product. People like informative, relevant, targetted adverts, especially in pull media (thus not having to put up with intrusive marketing databases). After all, what else is the typical opensource app's web site but informative, useful brochureware?
...that Europe isn't as "sold out" as the USA. It's just sold out to different people and for different reasons. Mainly it's sold out to political vested interests, rather than campaign contributors. Luckily one of the more influential groups (the socialists) seem to have gotten the message that this software-patent stuff is bad for their agenda. For once the commies are the good guys. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
"The Department of Defense wanted the Shuttle to carry a 40,000-pound payload in a 60-foot-long payload bay and, on some missions, launch and return to a West Coast launch site after a single polar orbit. Since the Earth's surface including the runway on which the Shuttle was to land would rotate during that orbit, the Shuttle would need to maneuver 1,100 miles to the east during re-entry. This cross-range requirement meant the Orbiter required large delta-shaped wings and a more robust thermal protection system to shield it from the heat of re-entry." -- CAIB report PDF, page 22
The wings aren't there to help it land at a designated place, they are there to allow it to land in the same place from which it launched - an operational requirement long ao shelved. Capsule landings can be accurate, they just can't glide cross-country. The destination has to be roughly under the flight path.
"It might be harmful if you do something stupid with it, therefore you mayn't do it at all" is not proper unixy design IMO.
Your scenario describes one stupid way of shooting yourself in the foot, but it's hardly a unique one. Other similar ones would be: uninstalling with --nodeps, overwriting an RPM with a "make install", overwriting libs with a newer version and "-ivh --force" so as to make new programs load whilst keeping older ones, etc etc.
Basically, it's a problem that won't bite newbies (becaue they use all RPMs with the GUI installer, if they install at all) and shouldn't ought to bite pros (because if they use it, they know what they've gotten themselves into).
Perhaps at most RPM should print a warning: "warning, package fred-1.x was not installed, but found/usr/lib/libfred.so.1.1 which satisfies requirements"
- it lets me search, and read the module descriptions (assuming the lazy sod module creator has written one).
- it lets me check what's out-of-date with a single command ("r"). It automatically keeps in sync with CPAN's module repository. It even updates itself live (install Bundle::CPAN; reload cpan).
- it doesn't merely install binaries, it runs the compile (so the result is guaranteed to work with my libs, or at least complain sensibly) and often asks for config options.
- it already does all the dependency stuff that RPM could do, and it does it cleaner and better and in pure perl. It detects actual dependencies rather than merely advertised ones. It can fetch the required modules and install them, without needing to ask.
- it does all this from a friendly unified command line app that I can run remotely over SSH on a co-lo server.
- it's in every install of perl (well, Perl-for-Windows is a special case, but that's nothing new).
I use Mandrake and it is So Bloody Annoying to be asked by RPM to install perl module RPMs that I already installed (or updated) via "perl -MCPAN -eshell".
Not that this is really this guy's problem, but if anyone from Mandrake is reading, please take note. Either there needs to be some magic added to RPM so it treats perl modules as installed RPMs - or else, the dependency checks need to be able to look for the presence of actual modules.
Having to use --nodeps is both annoying and dangerous.
...it turns all discussions fanatical, because one side or the other gets to enforce their opinion.
Politics divides people up into bosses, and serfs. You're appealing for more people to take the effort to become bosses. What you seem not to realise is that everyone-bossing-everyone is a worst case scenario. Taken to the extreme of Direct Democracy, everything not forbidden is compulsory, and the list changes daily with the agregate public whim. Bleh.
Each of these parasitic organisations consists of a yet-further encroachment upon "my business and nobody else's". Joining up as a member merely makes you part of the problem.
What we need is fewer bosses-by-force, less enforced opinions. Preferably none.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that proves you don't have to be smart or even hard working to become a rich businessman in the US
But it also proves you do have to be smart or at least ethical in order to stay rich. Random increase, selective decrease: the formula for evolution.
Doh!
Wiki wins because what moderation it has is post-facto and as easy to undo as the change it reverts. Moderation is also comparatively difficult, requiring one to manually edit the wiki-syntax of the page. So, a culture of responsible editing emerges.
Preemptive, unaccountable, vote based moderation will lead to a groupthink culture like Slashdot can often be, where unpopular ideas get voted into oblivion rather than being challenged with logic.
Think of it as the difference between political and discursive approaches.
Space colonization is the only reason for humans to go into space. It's a species instinct thing. Gotta expand to keep replicating, gotta reduce the danger of "all eggs in one basket". Congress will not prevent it. Econuts will not prevemnt it. It shall happen.
You can "do research" with robots - if it hasn't already been so mined out for utility that you're flying schoolkids' projects as "space science". But only real live people can colonize.
Pretty desktop wallpaper! Me want higher resolution piccie!
Doh!
...if you ran the same "shred" approach against ye olde linux you would be able to determine identical MD5 segments, and so learn partially the sysv code. That might be treated as sneakily releasing code.
Seeks storms aren't inevitable doing stuff in parrallel. The Kernel's quite capable of handling a modest amount of simultaneous disk accessing. It's only doing too much at once in parralel that leads to "thrashing".
Perhaps a solution would be the equivalent to "make -j", where you can tune how many simultaneous things to run. In fact "make" is a good model for this whole approach, since the control mechanism will also need to do dependency-blocking.
Other refinements that occur to me:
- Things could be marked as "light", "medium", or "heavy", and the "weight" of simultaneous running processes kept constant.
- The control process could be adaptive, tracking the "load average" and altering the "weight" of individual processes to seek a best aggregate run time.
Heh, ignore the mods, they're mostly socialists, for some daft reason.
Anyway, it's really not necessary to get the government out of space exploration (although I'd love to, but that's cause I'm a libertarian anarchist and I'd love to fire the lot of them). So long as the government can be kept from preventing private commercial space development, then the future already looks good. X-prize, Scaled Composites, etc.
Don't waste ire on NASA, instead ignore, bypass, and supercede (my anarchist motto, heh).
Bureaucracy is not the only problem. Private organisations can be bureaucratic, too. The real problem seems to me to be one of perverse incentives.
1) NASA appears to lack a intentional mission. It's de-facto publically assumed mission is something along lines of "do space stuff". But it has few real "space stuff" goals, because it has no (profit) incentive to go there. Shuttle "science experiments" are ludicrous. The ISS does nothing and goes nowhere, expensively.
In reality, as evidenced by all the politicians' attitudes to NASA (even during their condolence speeches), its real mission is: national self-congratulation, international self-promotion, congressional pork, and a vague continuance of the "sense of progress" of the moon landing years.
Naturally the above is not conducive to good "space stuff".
2) NASA is funded, not invested in. Their budget isn't going away (unless, perversely, they demonstrate they can do more with less, which would lead to them being de-funded). The source of their money is politicians, not commercial profits. Actual success brings them no payback, and failure does them no harm. The incentives this gives are: pocket the budget, don't waste it on any actual space stuff, and beg continually for more funding.
3) For this funding, they are expcted to produce immediate bigness, not gradual affordable advancement. Thus their attitude to problem solution consists of "throwing money at it".
A good analogy here is the architechtural construction techniques of the Egyptian pharaohs. You can build quite big pyramids if you throw a fortune and an army of slaves at the job. But it doesn't scale, it doesn't advance the state of the art, and, crucially, it doesn't get any cheaper when you do it more often. It was the brick-and-mortar commercial construction industry that led via engineering advances to modern skyscraper construction.
When NASA complains of underfunding, it's analogous to the pharaonic architects complaining that their skyscraper plans are hobbled by the shortage of slaves.
Having an exoskeleton simplifies tattoo removal. You just need an extremely small piece of fine-grained sandpaper...
"More than the average user"... if that's automated, it sounds like a recipe for a downward ratchet to zero. The calculated average can blip downward due to statistical randomness, but never rise, since the new maximum is capped at the previous average.
Die, you big government big brother panopticon loving technocratic commiefascist eugenicists! Diediediedie!
Damn me but I hate this sort of "you need a licence to breathe" mentality. Haven't these people heard of private property? Or minding their own sodding business? They're the same sort that propose "having-children licenses" - and you know they are just itching to stamp "denied" on the application forms (in triplicate, block capitals only please) of anyone they don't personally like. Such as anyone ho doesn't happily and with smiling countenance kowtow to their nazi "alles in ordnung" ideals.
Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!
And stay dead.
Strikes me that they're walking right into the teeth of the trademark lawsuit from hell.
I can see this tool becoming helpful for so much more than smashing SCO. Any situation where data comparison is useful, but the data itself must remain secret. All paranoid types (corporate or governmental) will love it. Lawyers could make much use of it.
And, given the dataset it generates, it could be extended to do other useful things such as detect redundant or cut-'n-pasted code, including bugs of the "pasted it in twice" sort.
Sure but I was only talking about vessels that can reach Earth orbit. And you really would not want an atomic powered space vessel launching directly from Earth. The risk of widespread radioactive contamination upon an accident such as happened to the space shuttle would be enormous.
Nah. A "pebble bed" style reactor becomes inactive and safe when scattered about. The "pebbles" are heat and impact hardened and would survive an explosion intact. Contamination would be minimal, probably less riky than the shuttle's poisonous fuels.
Also, a nuke rocket is much less likely to blow up. No explosive fuels.
Put the reactor inside the rocket. Use it to heat the water directly.
1) You can launch from anyplace.
2) You can pick up fresh reaction mass pretty much anywhere, including far away from earth.
3) The two above mean that you could make landfall on places too uncivilized to have a laser, such as Mars, and then take off again.
4) Your nads aren't in the vicelike grip of whomever holds the "off" switch planetside.
...like an aeroplane, but a lot faster.
...is in who is static and vulnerable, and who is ephemeral and concealed. Spam is push so the user is the one at a disadvantage. RSS spam is pull - it would be trivial to DDOS the (immobile) source into a smoking blob of molten electronics. I can see no future for nonconsensual spammers in RSS.
On the other hand, there is a real future in RSS for genuine advertisers selling desirable product. People like informative, relevant, targetted adverts, especially in pull media (thus not having to put up with intrusive marketing databases). After all, what else is the typical opensource app's web site but informative, useful brochureware?
...that Europe isn't as "sold out" as the USA. It's just sold out to different people and for different reasons. Mainly it's sold out to political vested interests, rather than campaign contributors. Luckily one of the more influential groups (the socialists) seem to have gotten the message that this software-patent stuff is bad for their agenda. For once the commies are the good guys. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
"It might be harmful if you do something stupid with it, therefore you mayn't do it at all" is not proper unixy design IMO.
/usr/lib/libfred.so.1.1 which satisfies requirements"
Your scenario describes one stupid way of shooting yourself in the foot, but it's hardly a unique one. Other similar ones would be: uninstalling with --nodeps, overwriting an RPM with a "make install", overwriting libs with a newer version and "-ivh --force" so as to make new programs load whilst keeping older ones, etc etc.
Basically, it's a problem that won't bite newbies (becaue they use all RPMs with the GUI installer, if they install at all) and shouldn't ought to bite pros (because if they use it, they know what they've gotten themselves into).
Perhaps at most RPM should print a warning: "warning, package fred-1.x was not installed, but found
I like the CPAN shell interface.
- it lets me search, and read the module descriptions (assuming the lazy sod module creator has written one).
- it lets me check what's out-of-date with a single command ("r"). It automatically keeps in sync with CPAN's module repository. It even updates itself live (install Bundle::CPAN; reload cpan).
- it doesn't merely install binaries, it runs the compile (so the result is guaranteed to work with my libs, or at least complain sensibly) and often asks for config options.
- it already does all the dependency stuff that RPM could do, and it does it cleaner and better and in pure perl. It detects actual dependencies rather than merely advertised ones. It can fetch the required modules and install them, without needing to ask.
- it does all this from a friendly unified command line app that I can run remotely over SSH on a co-lo server.
- it's in every install of perl (well, Perl-for-Windows is a special case, but that's nothing new).
I use Mandrake and it is So Bloody Annoying to be asked by RPM to install perl module RPMs that I already installed (or updated) via "perl -MCPAN -eshell".
Not that this is really this guy's problem, but if anyone from Mandrake is reading, please take note. Either there needs to be some magic added to RPM so it treats perl modules as installed RPMs - or else, the dependency checks need to be able to look for the presence of actual modules.
Having to use --nodeps is both annoying and dangerous.
...it turns all discussions fanatical, because one side or the other gets to enforce their opinion.
Politics divides people up into bosses, and serfs. You're appealing for more people to take the effort to become bosses. What you seem not to realise is that everyone-bossing-everyone is a worst case scenario. Taken to the extreme of Direct Democracy, everything not forbidden is compulsory, and the list changes daily with the agregate public whim. Bleh.
Each of these parasitic organisations consists of a yet-further encroachment upon "my business and nobody else's". Joining up as a member merely makes you part of the problem.
What we need is fewer bosses-by-force, less enforced opinions. Preferably none.