Don't think: Bones with a tricorder in hand saying "he's dead, Jim". Do think: Al Capone gritting his teeth and snarling "That no-good punk is dead. Dead, ya hear me?".
The movie industry hates DVD for the same reason it hates unadulterated CD: the pirates have cracked it so thoroughly that the studios might as well post the disk images on mininova themselves.
The point about GPL violations is that you're simultaneously evading copyright and wielding it.
If there were no copyright at all, that would be more or less identical to everything being GPL: do as you please, but you can't stop others doing likewise. GPL is a use of copyright to subvert the effects of copyright.
If you break GPL, you're - taking code that's free (behaves as if there were no copyright) - making it unfree (asserting your own, undeserved copyright)
That is why it's not hypocritical to simultaneously be against copyright, and against GPL violations. the same principle applies: software should be free.
I don't think Google is dumb enough to fish for the tech-phobic market. That's a small, shrinking, non-replenished, stingy and quickly saturated market which probably can't be sold to using the name "google", since they don't know a search engine from a rotary engine.
Yes, this was a stunt and a Rube Goldberg machine, but so was the Wright Flyer. What this has basically shown is that a wingsuit/engine combo can maintain controlled level flight with no airplane or other "exoskeleton". Could this become a new "normal" mode of flight? It strikes me as both infinitely cooler than flying cars, and far safer for third parties.
Questions worth looking into - how to redesign a bird suit for efficient level flight - how to increase engine burn time and optimize fuel use - how to avoid stalls when attempting to ascend - can a suit/engine combo be made that can take off from the ground?
"Wikipedia does seem to be having a problem getting the old donators to continue. Why is that?" - they do? I hadn't noticed, not that I was looking hard. At a wild guess, it's because they've spent up their donation budget the last time around. That's happened to me before. Anyway, it would only be a problem if they ran short of donors, and they don't seem to be doing so.
Off topic a tad:
On your use of "altruism": I don't like Rand's alteration of that word. I'd rather alter it by stripping the deontological slant and making it mean "helping others as a matter of personal preference". Rand was way too much of a cynic, since IMO most people's actual altruistic actions are motivated by preference, not by obligation. (Possible exception: throwing money at charity in order to buy off guilt. That's a form of nonaction by delegation. I still think people mostly act from preference.)
Also, I'm not sure the happy feeling of helping could be classed as profit. I'd say profit is specifically the gain in subjective utility of a thing exchanged. Happiness isn't being exchanged, it's more like a convenient side effect. (As can be seen by the fact you could get the same happiness out of a quid-pro-quo transaction, or from lazing about watching clouds.) Yeah I know I'm splitting hairs, but still. Exchanges and gifts are genuinely different.
I suspect that in this you're mistaken. People can and do contribute charitably if they see the need - and, as far as educational charity goes, Wiki's where it's at.
I also think that Wikipedia does not have a hope of going commercial, for any variant thereof. Basically their stock-in-trade is the casual drive-by good Samaritan. If they went pay-to-subscribe, that would vanish utterly. Compare Britannica's site - they charge, and they provide a service by aggregating the world's most authoritative sources. If the users had to write Britannica's content, they'd laugh and refuse. "I'm paying you, why should I do the work?". Wikipedia could carry topical ads, but I don't put much faith in ads as a business model. Adblocking is going to make them unsaleable inside two years. And, any dilution of content quality, such as pay-to-post articles, and their creative-commons licensed data would simply be forked and rehosted.
I suppose the best thing for Wikipedia, beyond continued funding drives, would be if someone with BIG money could donate a "foundation" such that they'd be assured a money supply in perpetuity. Folks have done that for universities and libraries and such.
BTW, here's a charity with a clever idea I think it might appeal to your ancap philosphy (because it does to mine): http://www.modestneeds.org/ - it also fulfils your criteria of "where I can see them making a difference", because of the donor-directed way they allocate money.
Howsabout this. A second, sudo-like command. Lets call it "root". You use it like sudo, but rather than actually doing anything, it just basically logs the user, working dir and command line in a to-do list. Admin staff can browse the log via a web UI, edit each command line in a text box, check each item for "do it" or "don't", and press "go". So if I do "root chown bsmith:staff myfile; root cp myfile ~bsmith", then root will see lines like:
Why not parachutes? I'm guessing, but I'd guess control. A VTOL rocket in the Delta Clipper mold can park itself inside a one-and-a-half diameter chalk circle. A 'chute can probably be guaranteed to hit the right county. They're a recovery mechanism best suited to big government projects that can afford to recover astronauts from large amorphous targets such as deserts, oceans etc. Not suited to eg: intercontinental commuters landing at a spaceport with a schedule to keep.
Plus, even a VTOL design can use 'chutes to drop most of its speed, before using retro-rockets to coast in for a controlled landing.
You have that completely back-assward. Linux is easy to customize therefore it has many distros. The demands of different functions do conflict. A realtime recording studio OS isn't going to be well-suited to run on a LAMP server-farm. A server-tuned OS is going to have crap 3d game performance. Each use implies at least a different kernel build, perhaps a whole tuned userland as well - a custom distro, in other words. It's precisely because Linux is not merely configurable, but rebuildable, that multiple distros become a practical necessity.
"Sometimes I think people are a little too connected and socially technological these days." - Stuff and nonsense.
The problem isn't too much information or too much connectivity. The problem is rude people who impose their gadgets on others. This isn't something that calls for special technological manners. The principles can be generalized quite easily from the stuff your mamma taught you when you were five - like, don't talk loudly in a public area, and don't ignore the people you're with.
The irony is that most trends actually get assimilated in some way, if not in the way originally intended. For example, many people are using "object databases" - they're using hibernate, which turns humble mysql or postgres into a beautifully featureful object DB.
"Why should we expect that any new miracle cure offered by the pharmaceutical industry will offer us a simple, side-effect-free solution to over-eating?" - why shouldn't it?
Note that dieting is hardly free from side-effects! There are long and short term risks to health even without "overdosing" and going anorexic. Even more so from fad diets. My friend got gout from doing the low-carb diet; that's incurable. Similar disclaimers apply to excercise. When they say "consult your doctor first", they mean it!
Basically all the ascetic forms of self-improvement are blunt tools that rely upon facilities which exist as accidents of evolution. There's no reason to assume that medical science can't improve upon them!
Suppose that magic pill X and ascetic self-denial Y (excercise, refusing food, etc) have identical health-promoting effect. That's quite plausible, given sufficiently knowledgable science. Why do people constantly hate on X and praise Y? The only functional difference is that X is pleasant and Y isn't. Thus I conclude, what we have here is no more and no less than the old puritan idea that pleasure is sinful and pain is holy. It's not the fat or the fructose you hate, it's the burger.
It could be terrorism. The deliberate indirection of [violence against the innocent => psych => 3rd party effect] is the definition of terrorism. Some of the harsher sorts of "protest" and nearly all violent direct action are caught under that definition.
Suppose that I am expending bandwidth broadening my movie taste by dowloading legal out-of-copyright movies and you're browsing/b/ on 4chan. Why is your internet activity "serious" while mine gets throttled?
Could it be that you are in fact expressing a purely personal bias as if it were some sort of universal judgement?
"But this could also be a chicken and egg type argument" - exactly. Like I said it's an everyone thing. Folks take different stances. Tame it with taught morals, or with laws, or with self-discipline. Blame it on subculture scapegoats, or on plebeian crassness (which is what's implied by "media crassness"). Divert it into harmless outlets. Hide it behind self-deprecating irony. Treat it as an illness and medicate. Adopt it as a persona and revel in it. Throughout each, the belief context remains the same. "Men are Mr Hyde, now what do you do?"
"male nudity equates with homosexuality" - I'd say it's the other way around. The huge bias against male homosexuality (when compared with the smaller bias against lesbianism) is due to the same cultural deprecation of men and masculinity. Compare the greek system of pederasty, homosexual adult-on-teenager mentoring. That culture lauded the male, and homosexual love was praised for keeping maleness undiluted.
If anything I'd say that current harsh attitudes towards men are what has led to this present extreme taboo on pedophilia. The idea is that men are animalistic, selfish, coercive, sexually driven and liars who will say, do and pretend anything to talk their target into sex. Therefore, a male can't be trusted around children, the archetype of vulnerable innocence. Therefore also, a male-on-child relationship is built on lies and intended purely to lead to sex. There's even a word for it, "grooming". (A male-on-adult relationship is assumed to be the same - as witness the suspicion in a woman's face when a male stranger approaches to talk - but our present culture no longer regards grown women as innocents, so they must sink or swim.)
As is usual with sexist bias, both men and women hold this belief. It's not a feminist thing, it's an everyone thing, and it's way, way older than feminism. It was already solidly established in the Victorian era - their ideal of the gentleman is plainly an attempt to restrain Mr Hyde with an ascetic moral code.
There should be a 2 1/2 amendment: asymmetry between government and civilian being damaging to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and wear effective armor shall not be infringed.
What's wrong with Wikipedia restricting people from turning a really good idea into a vehicle for furthering agendas, trolling and outright libel?
Nothing. All I was saying is that collaborative (ie: democratic) methods of restriction lead to issue war and a biased consensus. Wiki is proposing an algorithmic restriction (no anon or newly created accounts). I agree with their design - it won't introduce groupthink or POV.
I think we're already approaching an asymptote in desktop UI. Future interfaces will be faster, smoother, have live raytraced shadows and hardware transparency and blah, but they'll be basically the same windows and mouse thingy as they have been for the last decade and a half. The big shift won't be better general UI, it will be a trend away from general UI and towards a profusion of single-task small devices with custom UI. Example, ipod. Another example, satnav units for cars.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't think: Bones with a tricorder in hand saying "he's dead, Jim". Do think: Al Capone gritting his teeth and snarling "That no-good punk is dead. Dead, ya hear me?".
The movie industry hates DVD for the same reason it hates unadulterated CD: the pirates have cracked it so thoroughly that the studios might as well post the disk images on mininova themselves.
...C++ is doing it via first evolving into Java 1.0.
The point about GPL violations is that you're simultaneously evading copyright and wielding it.
If there were no copyright at all, that would be more or less identical to everything being GPL: do as you please, but you can't stop others doing likewise. GPL is a use of copyright to subvert the effects of copyright.
If you break GPL, you're
- taking code that's free (behaves as if there were no copyright)
- making it unfree (asserting your own, undeserved copyright)
That is why it's not hypocritical to simultaneously be against copyright, and against GPL violations. the same principle applies: software should be free.
I don't think Google is dumb enough to fish for the tech-phobic market. That's a small, shrinking, non-replenished, stingy and quickly saturated market which probably can't be sold to using the name "google", since they don't know a search engine from a rotary engine.
Yes, this was a stunt and a Rube Goldberg machine, but so was the Wright Flyer. What this has basically shown is that a wingsuit/engine combo can maintain controlled level flight with no airplane or other "exoskeleton". Could this become a new "normal" mode of flight? It strikes me as both infinitely cooler than flying cars, and far safer for third parties.
Questions worth looking into
- how to redesign a bird suit for efficient level flight
- how to increase engine burn time and optimize fuel use
- how to avoid stalls when attempting to ascend
- can a suit/engine combo be made that can take off from the ground?
"Wikipedia does seem to be having a problem getting the old donators to continue. Why is that?" - they do? I hadn't noticed, not that I was looking hard. At a wild guess, it's because they've spent up their donation budget the last time around. That's happened to me before. Anyway, it would only be a problem if they ran short of donors, and they don't seem to be doing so.
Off topic a tad:
On your use of "altruism": I don't like Rand's alteration of that word. I'd rather alter it by stripping the deontological slant and making it mean "helping others as a matter of personal preference". Rand was way too much of a cynic, since IMO most people's actual altruistic actions are motivated by preference, not by obligation. (Possible exception: throwing money at charity in order to buy off guilt. That's a form of nonaction by delegation. I still think people mostly act from preference.)
Also, I'm not sure the happy feeling of helping could be classed as profit. I'd say profit is specifically the gain in subjective utility of a thing exchanged. Happiness isn't being exchanged, it's more like a convenient side effect. (As can be seen by the fact you could get the same happiness out of a quid-pro-quo transaction, or from lazing about watching clouds.) Yeah I know I'm splitting hairs, but still. Exchanges and gifts are genuinely different.
I suspect that in this you're mistaken. People can and do contribute charitably if they see the need - and, as far as educational charity goes, Wiki's where it's at.
I also think that Wikipedia does not have a hope of going commercial, for any variant thereof. Basically their stock-in-trade is the casual drive-by good Samaritan. If they went pay-to-subscribe, that would vanish utterly. Compare Britannica's site - they charge, and they provide a service by aggregating the world's most authoritative sources. If the users had to write Britannica's content, they'd laugh and refuse. "I'm paying you, why should I do the work?". Wikipedia could carry topical ads, but I don't put much faith in ads as a business model. Adblocking is going to make them unsaleable inside two years. And, any dilution of content quality, such as pay-to-post articles, and their creative-commons licensed data would simply be forked and rehosted.
I suppose the best thing for Wikipedia, beyond continued funding drives, would be if someone with BIG money could donate a "foundation" such that they'd be assured a money supply in perpetuity. Folks have done that for universities and libraries and such.
BTW, here's a charity with a clever idea I think it might appeal to your ancap philosphy (because it does to mine): http://www.modestneeds.org/ - it also fulfils your criteria of "where I can see them making a difference", because of the donor-directed way they allocate money.
Dude, I just have to say, having read this thread, I am in awe. If only you were hiring in England!
Why not parachutes? I'm guessing, but I'd guess control. A VTOL rocket in the Delta Clipper mold can park itself inside a one-and-a-half diameter chalk circle. A 'chute can probably be guaranteed to hit the right county. They're a recovery mechanism best suited to big government projects that can afford to recover astronauts from large amorphous targets such as deserts, oceans etc. Not suited to eg: intercontinental commuters landing at a spaceport with a schedule to keep.
Plus, even a VTOL design can use 'chutes to drop most of its speed, before using retro-rockets to coast in for a controlled landing.
You have that completely back-assward. Linux is easy to customize therefore it has many distros. The demands of different functions do conflict. A realtime recording studio OS isn't going to be well-suited to run on a LAMP server-farm. A server-tuned OS is going to have crap 3d game performance. Each use implies at least a different kernel build, perhaps a whole tuned userland as well - a custom distro, in other words. It's precisely because Linux is not merely configurable, but rebuildable, that multiple distros become a practical necessity.
"Sometimes I think people are a little too connected and socially technological these days." - Stuff and nonsense.
The problem isn't too much information or too much connectivity. The problem is rude people who impose their gadgets on others. This isn't something that calls for special technological manners. The principles can be generalized quite easily from the stuff your mamma taught you when you were five - like, don't talk loudly in a public area, and don't ignore the people you're with.
The irony is that most trends actually get assimilated in some way, if not in the way originally intended. For example, many people are using "object databases" - they're using hibernate, which turns humble mysql or postgres into a beautifully featureful object DB.
"Why should we expect that any new miracle cure offered by the pharmaceutical industry will offer us a simple, side-effect-free solution to over-eating?" - why shouldn't it?
Note that dieting is hardly free from side-effects! There are long and short term risks to health even without "overdosing" and going anorexic. Even more so from fad diets. My friend got gout from doing the low-carb diet; that's incurable. Similar disclaimers apply to excercise. When they say "consult your doctor first", they mean it!
Basically all the ascetic forms of self-improvement are blunt tools that rely upon facilities which exist as accidents of evolution. There's no reason to assume that medical science can't improve upon them!
Suppose that magic pill X and ascetic self-denial Y (excercise, refusing food, etc) have identical health-promoting effect. That's quite plausible, given sufficiently knowledgable science. Why do people constantly hate on X and praise Y? The only functional difference is that X is pleasant and Y isn't. Thus I conclude, what we have here is no more and no less than the old puritan idea that pleasure is sinful and pain is holy. It's not the fat or the fructose you hate, it's the burger.
It could be terrorism. The deliberate indirection of [violence against the innocent => psych => 3rd party effect] is the definition of terrorism. Some of the harsher sorts of "protest" and nearly all violent direct action are caught under that definition.
News for nerds, digg mirror with threaded comments.
Suppose that I am expending bandwidth broadening my movie taste by dowloading legal out-of-copyright movies and you're browsing /b/ on 4chan. Why is your internet activity "serious" while mine gets throttled?
Could it be that you are in fact expressing a purely personal bias as if it were some sort of universal judgement?
"But this could also be a chicken and egg type argument" - exactly. Like I said it's an everyone thing. Folks take different stances. Tame it with taught morals, or with laws, or with self-discipline. Blame it on subculture scapegoats, or on plebeian crassness (which is what's implied by "media crassness"). Divert it into harmless outlets. Hide it behind self-deprecating irony. Treat it as an illness and medicate. Adopt it as a persona and revel in it. Throughout each, the belief context remains the same. "Men are Mr Hyde, now what do you do?"
"male nudity equates with homosexuality" - I'd say it's the other way around. The huge bias against male homosexuality (when compared with the smaller bias against lesbianism) is due to the same cultural deprecation of men and masculinity. Compare the greek system of pederasty, homosexual adult-on-teenager mentoring. That culture lauded the male, and homosexual love was praised for keeping maleness undiluted.
If anything I'd say that current harsh attitudes towards men are what has led to this present extreme taboo on pedophilia. The idea is that men are animalistic, selfish, coercive, sexually driven and liars who will say, do and pretend anything to talk their target into sex. Therefore, a male can't be trusted around children, the archetype of vulnerable innocence. Therefore also, a male-on-child relationship is built on lies and intended purely to lead to sex. There's even a word for it, "grooming". (A male-on-adult relationship is assumed to be the same - as witness the suspicion in a woman's face when a male stranger approaches to talk - but our present culture no longer regards grown women as innocents, so they must sink or swim.)
As is usual with sexist bias, both men and women hold this belief. It's not a feminist thing, it's an everyone thing, and it's way, way older than feminism. It was already solidly established in the Victorian era - their ideal of the gentleman is plainly an attempt to restrain Mr Hyde with an ascetic moral code.
There should be a 2 1/2 amendment: asymmetry between government and civilian being damaging to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and wear effective armor shall not be infringed.
...it steals petrol.
Brought to you by the "there is too such a thing as a free lunch, if they didn't see me nick it" department.
I think we're already approaching an asymptote in desktop UI. Future interfaces will be faster, smoother, have live raytraced shadows and hardware transparency and blah, but they'll be basically the same windows and mouse thingy as they have been for the last decade and a half. The big shift won't be better general UI, it will be a trend away from general UI and towards a profusion of single-task small devices with custom UI. Example, ipod. Another example, satnav units for cars.
Namely, groupthink, conformism, the silencing of heretics, and the promotion of biased agendas.
If there's two things Slash and Wiki have taught us, it's:
- collaborative creation is a success. Most people do good work. It's a positive-sum game.
- collaborative restriction is a failure. Most people wield their power to blindly advance their politics. It's a zero-sum game.