Did you perchance miss the bit where humans took over the earth? Or the bit where we've near-on exterminated all the more inconvenient other species? Did you miss the part where humans have no significant predators left in countries where intelligence is valued? Or the promise from intelligently-designed space flight of off-world colonies that mean even a planetbuster or a global plague wouldn't kill us all?
Methinks you didn't really give enough thought to that one.
Vote with your feet. Move out. Go somewhere with at least less censorship, preferably none. Or, worst case, if you can't afford to move, refuse to work with any sort of censored computers. Then watch their economy go to the dogs from the brain drain. That should make the message pretty clear.
Of all the other jobs out there, the Kid turns to prostitution?
Whoring or begging are the only options when there's no jobs going for which you qualify, and whoring pays more.
Why not farming, or carpentry, or the priesthood, or the military or any one of a million other jobs?
We're already assuming the kid works at a sweatshop. And taking as a reasonable assumption that they aren't literally enslaved and chained to their work, they chose the sweatshop as preferable to the available alternatives. Which means: the other jobs are either not available, or worse.
You cannot legislate wealth into a nation by banning low pay. You cannot magic up the money to school kids, by kicking them out of the jobs they're living by.
You need to grok: wealth is not zero sum. It is created and destroyed. Third-world countries have had plenty of time to work themselves toward riches; they stay that way because the parasites outnumber the host. Parasites such as corrupt officials, preachers of superstition, tax-and-wasters, or just plain thugs with machine guns.
To rob the rich and feed the poor is an attempt to equalize the water in a sieve and a pail - the only equality is at zero.
Scenario one: Megacorp starts a factory in some semicivilized dump of a country where corruption, communism, civil war, superstition, race hatred, or other BS have destroyed most of the value and driven the best and brightest out. Some scraggy kid gets a job at that factory, working eye-wateringly long hours for a pittance. Kid lives, saves, starts her own business, working up from scratch. Her and other kids like her change the political climate such that the crap burdening her nation can be pushed back and the light of free trade let in. Kid retires on share dividends at age 50, and moves to Malibu.
Scenario two: Whiny well-fed reds back home guilt the megacorp into abandoning the country altogether, and campagn successfully to get child employment outlawed. Starving kid turns to whoring, dies of AIDS at age 14.
Compare and contrast. These are both realistic scenarios.
You're confusing "corporate power" with government power. Without government force, corporations are powerless.
The error is not that corporations are big, or faceless, or under-regulated - hell, it's the opposite. It's that the government has the political option to perfectly constitutionally stomp all over your natural rights.
Politicians will always be able to be bought, or persuaded to stand as the figurehead for whatever mob has the current limelight. The constitution is there to limit how much mess they can make. Unfortunately the constitution was written before the theory of rational rights and their difference from spurious entitlements was fully worked out, hence there are holes in it you could fly a medium sized gas-giant planet through.
The proper derivation of rights is: rights are those minimal restrictions that turn unstable anarchy into stable freedom.
You have the right to not be forced, or threatened, or defrauded, or stolen from.
You have a right to enter into mutually binding contracts.
You have the right to unequivocally own property, including yourself, and do with it as you will provided no-one else's rights are infringed.
You have no other rights or entitlements, period. Anything else is either a corollary of the above, or spurious.
Rights always involve protection, by force if necessary. The sole proper function of government is to protect rights by acting as an arbiter of force. That means courts, police, army - or perhaps even only the rules bounding the proper behavior of the above. When the government does anything more than this ever, it must break rights to do so.
In particular in this case, the government has set itself up as a provider of coercive monopolies - "intellectual property", a restriction on how you can use your real physical property. How? Because the constitution lets it.
And what about the corporations who're egging this on? They aren't capitalists. They're cronies. But in a system which allows cronies to rig the rules and turn the law into their enforcer, that's the only way to survive. If they'd taken a principled stand against monopolies, someone else would have patented their market out from under them.
In other words: when fighting crony capitalism, realize that the error is the "crony" not the "capitalism". Work to limit the lawmakers' rights-breaking, instead of letting them pass the buck to the businessfolk they exploit.
To anyone who says OpenSource is a threat to capitalism, or is a form of socialism: RUBBISH! It is nothing of the sort.
I personally build programs for gain in the form of other programs, recognition, career prospects, and the actual utility of my programs (with whatever improvements others may chose to contribute). I gain enough that I can price my OpenSouce code at $0, and perhaps thereby defeat a competitor who's charging more.
THAT'S CAPITALISM, FOLKS!!
The better competitor wins. But a system where the worse competitor goes to the legislature and then the courts and gets the game rigged in its favor "for (the public good / the prevention of monopolies / the American Way /...)", that is NOT CAPITALISM. It's a form of socialism by legislative remote control. A denial of rights, and therefore always unconditionally wrong.
I can tell you right now what the router project could do with these: crash, pitifully.
Sheesh, floppies are unreliable enough with whopping big magnetic blobs and 1.44 megs per disk. I doubt you'd get one bit in ten back from any more tightly crammed in scheme.
Why not strip search everyone comming out of a store to protect us from theft? Or making everyone use chopsticks to eat on plane because a fork and knife can be used to kill.
Heck, it's not as if chopsticks are any safer. Ever watched "Buffy"?.
Why not just use HTML::Template? It should be a lot faster since it really doesn't have much more to do than plug in values and blat out the data. Unless Mason has some nifty other features that make this extra overhead worthwhile?
The solution looks pretty simple to me: orbit a bloody great net, going in the opposite direction. Sweep up all the cruft, and the momentum drops enough that the net de-orbits itself helpfully and burns up.
looks like it didn't so much die...
on
FASA Dies
·
· Score: 1
As technology rises towards a certain point, the measures necessary to make patterns-in-things act as though they were things themselves approach that of a "perfect" police state.
When everyone has computers, only a personal police escort peering over your shoulder (or that of your computer's manufacturer) 24/7 stops digital data being replicable. When everyone has nanotech, only said policeman would stop you creating perfect copies of anything.
Intellectual property is a fiction because it assumes one can own a pattern - or even a means-of-achieving-a-pattern. If I own a sandwich it is my sandwich and not yours, even were yours to be atom-for-atom identical. Trying to put that property into ideas is an exercsise in futility, and it can have only one end - because in a sufficiently advanced technology a mere decision is all that's required to initiate a data copy, only total control over thought can stop it. Yet where all thought is controlled, who creates ideas? So like all attempts to live out a contradiction, it's self defeating in the end.
To those who say "it's the only way to reward the idea's creator", I accuse you of lack of imagination. There is always the time when the idea makes the jump from private storage (in ones own head for example) to open dissemination, and at that point arbitrary contractual conditions can be imposed.
Trying to charge for a copy of anything must eventually become technically obsolete. Only the creation of new ideas will never be replaced.
When there's actual common behavior - your sorting example is good - then generic stuff saves code. But a classic beginner mistake is to build it before you need it. If you only have one thing to sort, or everything you work with gets sorted very differently, then writing a generic function and a "sortable" interface just makes your code more verbose, harder to read, and often less optimized.
In any programming language, in any style of coding, "don't waste your time putting in nifty shit you won't need" has always been a primary rule of sane coding. Or as Scotty put it "the more they over-think the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drains". Abstraction distraction is a beginner's mistake that you can make in any language. In fact one could argue that messy languages like C make this a worse problem - lack of harsh interface isolation makes it hard to add that stuff in later when you do need it, so one has to over-engineer somewhat in the beginning.
The important ting for real world programming seems to me to be that the programmer builds what is needed, when it's needed - so the program's language and design style help with smooth and easy rearrangement of code.
What this means in practise:
Modularity is good, tangle is bad. Otherwise, you can't change one thing without it cascading out into other breakages. OOP is pretty good for this.
Specific is good, generic is bad. Building generic stuff takes longer and makes for unreadable code - don't do it unless you need it.
Interfaces are good, inheritance is bad. Inheritance is basically a lazy way of gatting interface consistency, that ties it to implementation (the taxonomy you currently use). Also, polymorphism over types is good, since it is basically just "many types same interface" seen from the other side. Interfaces also allow regression testing, in order to prove that changed code works the same as the old stuff.
Scripting is good, compiling is bad. If you have a script, you always have the source code, edit-and-test is easier, and you can usually adapt it in place.
Doing one thing at a time is good, side effects are bad. Later you might want to split the behaviors up, and you'd run into code that depended on the side effects.
Similarly, physically grouping operation by purpose is good, grouping by operand is bad. You add features more often than you add abstractions. Smalltalk/Java style OOP is bad for this, but CLOS and Ada95 are still OOP yet built around "operations on types" not "types with operations".
Go look up "Extreme Programming" for what is IMO the best approach to real world software building.
Q: Why are coprorations trying to take away your control of your own hardware and software?
A: Because the government hands out monopolies that back up with legal force the pretence that information has scarcity (a property only of physical stuff). This has recently become technically infeasible, and will eventually become technically impossible sans a police state. The corps likely don't grok where this is headed, they just want the old days back thanklyouverymuch. And they most certainly don't grok that what they're in essence doing is living on corporate welfare.
Q: Why are corps so geared towards idiots?
A: Most people are idiots, or more accurately behave like idiots. Yeah, most of the world look like dumb sheep - because they are hiding and repressing their individuality and brains. Won't get you laid, won't get you in the boss's good graces, won't make you liked by all those folks out there who don't want the boat to be rocked. Heck, you could get used to it, so now you're the one who doesn't want the boat rocking, lest you have to look in the mirror.
All those people out there, they're living second hand lives. They're a market - for nostalgia, or free lunch fantasies, for feel-good secondhand heroics, for white picket fences and good ol' christian puritanism. The corps are just feeding where there's food, so to speak.
Q: Why are corps such damned cowards over unpopular speech?
A: The state of the law makes it impossible for them to be anything else. The bigger the corp, the bigger the target - and the bigger the example to be made. Your elected officials are just itching to lean on them. You don't like that? Then why did you vote them in?
Q: The biggie: where can you go to avoid all this crap?
What you need is a country where the law is freedom and rights. Rights, not entitlements - the protection of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not a blank check drawn against someone else's work. You need a country where it's considered uncool to be a sheep. Where there's democracy, but it's limited so your rights can't be taken away. You need... no such place exists.
But if you want the next best thing: a place that could become that, and is already headed in the right direction, well, you're already there. Welcome to the US of A.
...that the last thing a small, semi-recovering box-pushing company needs is a concerted and deeply angry public backlash, plus being "sent to coventry" by all those kind OpenSource folks who were co-authoring their new OS's underpinnings.
...is for a heavy-hitter to come out vocally in support, not just of open source, but of freedom. Taking a stand against that hard drive from hell proposal next story over would be a great start.
That and all the other "end to end" ideas rely on deliberately crippled tech, where the user is not given free run of their own property. People need to see that this necessarily harms all freedom as a consequence, since this kind of tricks have no chance without coercive legal backup. IBM is big enough to let people see so - and to refuse to play ball, giving freedom a competitive chance.
1)Bios-wipe the disk clean. Wipe it with a friggin' magnet, if it won't let ya do it through official channels.
2)Partition, install Linux
3)Put a minor hack in your FS that's designed to "escape out" any attept to embed magic disk instructions in files in a way they can't necessarily anticipate and try to trap.
Problem solved, and commercial PoliceStateWare becomes yet more unattractive for Joe Consumer next to free software.
The Ogg Vorbis team has "add in a compatible video codec" on their todo list. The 3IVX team should join forces with them, so as to make the Ogg meta-format invincible:-)
(Provided of course it meets the Ogg "guaranteed no patents" design goal)
the old cubicle system didn't allow for huge hookah-parties, thereby forcing employees/programmers to smoke out of their own small pieces, which didn't really get them that baked, just enough that they couldn't concentrate on anything anymore.
That would make them half-baked? That explains a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Hit a mouse with a hard disk, be arrested and fined for cruelty to the hard disk?
Did you perchance miss the bit where humans took over the earth? Or the bit where we've near-on exterminated all the more inconvenient other species? Did you miss the part where humans have no significant predators left in countries where intelligence is valued? Or the promise from intelligently-designed space flight of off-world colonies that mean even a planetbuster or a global plague wouldn't kill us all?
Methinks you didn't really give enough thought to that one.
Vote with your feet. Move out. Go somewhere with at least less censorship, preferably none. Or, worst case, if you can't afford to move, refuse to work with any sort of censored computers. Then watch their economy go to the dogs from the brain drain. That should make the message pretty clear.
You cannot legislate wealth into a nation by banning low pay. You cannot magic up the money to school kids, by kicking them out of the jobs they're living by.
You need to grok: wealth is not zero sum. It is created and destroyed. Third-world countries have had plenty of time to work themselves toward riches; they stay that way because the parasites outnumber the host. Parasites such as corrupt officials, preachers of superstition, tax-and-wasters, or just plain thugs with machine guns.
To rob the rich and feed the poor is an attempt to equalize the water in a sieve and a pail - the only equality is at zero.
Scenario one:
Megacorp starts a factory in some semicivilized dump of a country where corruption, communism, civil war, superstition, race hatred, or other BS have destroyed most of the value and driven the best and brightest out. Some scraggy kid gets a job at that factory, working eye-wateringly long hours for a pittance. Kid lives, saves, starts her own business, working up from scratch. Her and other kids like her change the political climate such that the crap burdening her nation can be pushed back and the light of free trade let in. Kid retires on share dividends at age 50, and moves to Malibu.
Scenario two:
Whiny well-fed reds back home guilt the megacorp into abandoning the country altogether, and campagn successfully to get child employment outlawed. Starving kid turns to whoring, dies of AIDS at age 14.
Compare and contrast. These are both realistic scenarios.
The error is not that corporations are big, or faceless, or under-regulated - hell, it's the opposite. It's that the government has the political option to perfectly constitutionally stomp all over your natural rights.
Politicians will always be able to be bought, or persuaded to stand as the figurehead for whatever mob has the current limelight. The constitution is there to limit how much mess they can make. Unfortunately the constitution was written before the theory of rational rights and their difference from spurious entitlements was fully worked out, hence there are holes in it you could fly a medium sized gas-giant planet through.
The proper derivation of rights is: rights are those minimal restrictions that turn unstable anarchy into stable freedom.
- You have the right to not be forced, or threatened, or defrauded, or stolen from.
- You have a right to enter into mutually binding contracts.
- You have the right to unequivocally own property, including yourself, and do with it as you will provided no-one else's rights are infringed.
- You have no other rights or entitlements, period. Anything else is either a corollary of the above, or spurious.
Rights always involve protection, by force if necessary. The sole proper function of government is to protect rights by acting as an arbiter of force. That means courts, police, army - or perhaps even only the rules bounding the proper behavior of the above. When the government does anything more than this ever, it must break rights to do so.In particular in this case, the government has set itself up as a provider of coercive monopolies - "intellectual property", a restriction on how you can use your real physical property. How? Because the constitution lets it.
And what about the corporations who're egging this on? They aren't capitalists. They're cronies. But in a system which allows cronies to rig the rules and turn the law into their enforcer, that's the only way to survive. If they'd taken a principled stand against monopolies, someone else would have patented their market out from under them.
In other words: when fighting crony capitalism, realize that the error is the "crony" not the "capitalism". Work to limit the lawmakers' rights-breaking, instead of letting them pass the buck to the businessfolk they exploit.
To anyone who says OpenSource is a threat to capitalism, or is a form of socialism: RUBBISH! It is nothing of the sort.
...)", that is NOT CAPITALISM. It's a form of socialism by legislative remote control. A denial of rights, and therefore always unconditionally wrong.
I personally build programs for gain in the form of other programs, recognition, career prospects, and the actual utility of my programs (with whatever improvements others may chose to contribute). I gain enough that I can price my OpenSouce code at $0, and perhaps thereby defeat a competitor who's charging more.
THAT'S CAPITALISM, FOLKS!!
The better competitor wins. But a system where the worse competitor goes to the legislature and then the courts and gets the game rigged in its favor "for (the public good / the prevention of monopolies / the American Way /
It was wrong when Netscape did it to M$.
It would be wrong if M$ did it to OpenSource.
..at least for outbount messages: use multicast UDP.
I can tell you right now what the router project could do with these: crash, pitifully.
Sheesh, floppies are unreliable enough with whopping big magnetic blobs and 1.44 megs per disk. I doubt you'd get one bit in ten back from any more tightly crammed in scheme.
Here's a one that will actually work.
/tmp/spam ] ; then
/tmp/spam
/tmp/spam
/tmp/spam ] ; then
/tmp/spam
/dev/null 'http://www.goto.com/d/search/?type=home&Keywo rds=bulk+email'
/tmp/spam/*
#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -d
mkdir -p
chmod a+rwxt
elif [ ! -w
exit 1
fi
cd
while [ -e LOCK ] ; do sleep 2 ; done
touch LOCK
chmod go= LOCK
wget -r -l 2 -nd -o logfile &>
rm -rf
Why not strip search everyone comming out of a store to protect us from theft? Or making everyone use chopsticks to eat on plane because a fork and knife can be used to kill.
Heck, it's not as if chopsticks are any safer. Ever watched "Buffy"?.
Why not just use HTML::Template? It should be a lot faster since it really doesn't have much more to do than plug in values and blat out the data. Unless Mason has some nifty other features that make this extra overhead worthwhile?
The solution looks pretty simple to me: orbit a bloody great net, going in the opposite direction. Sweep up all the cruft, and the momentum drops enough that the net de-orbits itself helpfully and burns up.
...as metastasize.
As technology rises towards a certain point, the measures necessary to make patterns-in-things act as though they were things themselves approach that of a "perfect" police state.
When everyone has computers, only a personal police escort peering over your shoulder (or that of your computer's manufacturer) 24/7 stops digital data being replicable. When everyone has nanotech, only said policeman would stop you creating perfect copies of anything.
Intellectual property is a fiction because it assumes one can own a pattern - or even a means-of-achieving-a-pattern. If I own a sandwich it is my sandwich and not yours, even were yours to be atom-for-atom identical. Trying to put that property into ideas is an exercsise in futility, and it can have only one end - because in a sufficiently advanced technology a mere decision is all that's required to initiate a data copy, only total control over thought can stop it. Yet where all thought is controlled, who creates ideas? So like all attempts to live out a contradiction, it's self defeating in the end.
To those who say "it's the only way to reward the idea's creator", I accuse you of lack of imagination. There is always the time when the idea makes the jump from private storage (in ones own head for example) to open dissemination, and at that point arbitrary contractual conditions can be imposed.
Trying to charge for a copy of anything must eventually become technically obsolete. Only the creation of new ideas will never be replaced.
"...don't do it unless you need it."
When there's actual common behavior - your sorting example is good - then generic stuff saves code. But a classic beginner mistake is to build it before you need it. If you only have one thing to sort, or everything you work with gets sorted very differently, then writing a generic function and a "sortable" interface just makes your code more verbose, harder to read, and often less optimized.
The important ting for real world programming seems to me to be that the programmer builds what is needed, when it's needed - so the program's language and design style help with smooth and easy rearrangement of code.
What this means in practise:
Go look up "Extreme Programming" for what is IMO the best approach to real world software building.
Q: Why are coprorations trying to take away your control of your own hardware and software?
... no such place exists.
A: Because the government hands out monopolies that back up with legal force the pretence that information has scarcity (a property only of physical stuff). This has recently become technically infeasible, and will eventually become technically impossible sans a police state. The corps likely don't grok where this is headed, they just want the old days back thanklyouverymuch. And they most certainly don't grok that what they're in essence doing is living on corporate welfare.
Q: Why are corps so geared towards idiots?
A: Most people are idiots, or more accurately behave like idiots. Yeah, most of the world look like dumb sheep - because they are hiding and repressing their individuality and brains. Won't get you laid, won't get you in the boss's good graces, won't make you liked by all those folks out there who don't want the boat to be rocked. Heck, you could get used to it, so now you're the one who doesn't want the boat rocking, lest you have to look in the mirror.
All those people out there, they're living second hand lives. They're a market - for nostalgia, or free lunch fantasies, for feel-good secondhand heroics, for white picket fences and good ol' christian puritanism. The corps are just feeding where there's food, so to speak.
Q: Why are corps such damned cowards over unpopular speech?
A: The state of the law makes it impossible for them to be anything else. The bigger the corp, the bigger the target - and the bigger the example to be made. Your elected officials are just itching to lean on them. You don't like that? Then why did you vote them in?
Q: The biggie: where can you go to avoid all this crap?
What you need is a country where the law is freedom and rights. Rights, not entitlements - the protection of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not a blank check drawn against someone else's work. You need a country where it's considered uncool to be a sheep. Where there's democracy, but it's limited so your rights can't be taken away. You need
But if you want the next best thing: a place that could become that, and is already headed in the right direction, well, you're already there. Welcome to the US of A.
Oh, and vote Libertarian next time, okay?
...that the last thing a small, semi-recovering box-pushing company needs is a concerted and deeply angry public backlash, plus being "sent to coventry" by all those kind OpenSource folks who were co-authoring their new OS's underpinnings.
...is for a heavy-hitter to come out vocally in support, not just of open source, but of freedom. Taking a stand against that hard drive from hell proposal next story over would be a great start.
That and all the other "end to end" ideas rely on deliberately crippled tech, where the user is not given free run of their own property. People need to see that this necessarily harms all freedom as a consequence, since this kind of tricks have no chance without coercive legal backup. IBM is big enough to let people see so - and to refuse to play ball, giving freedom a competitive chance.
1)Bios-wipe the disk clean. Wipe it with a friggin' magnet, if it won't let ya do it through official channels.
2)Partition, install Linux
3)Put a minor hack in your FS that's designed to "escape out" any attept to embed magic disk instructions in files in a way they can't necessarily anticipate and try to trap.
Problem solved, and commercial PoliceStateWare becomes yet more unattractive for Joe Consumer next to free software.
The Ogg Vorbis team has "add in a compatible video codec" on their todo list. The 3IVX team should join forces with them, so as to make the Ogg meta-format invincible :-)
(Provided of course it meets the Ogg "guaranteed no patents" design goal)
- high flying drone aircraft
- one of those ugly two-rotor drone mini-helicopter things
- telescopic lens on a nearby building
- parabolic mike on a nearby building
- phone taps
Bull, it just means they've upgraded enough in the interim, that they don't care.
Heck, they likely have tech that could count the dandruff flakes on your shirt, these days.
the old cubicle system didn't allow for huge hookah-parties, thereby forcing employees/programmers to smoke out of their own small pieces, which didn't really get them that baked, just enough that they couldn't concentrate on anything anymore.
That would make them half-baked? That explains a lot.