The cynics amongst us would say the Americans wanting to apply the protocol to poor countries is a method to try to keep the poor countries poor and under the American thumb. The US doesn't suffer easily - a bit like a petulant child.
I think your cynicism is misplaced. I think the *real* reason that the US Gov. is so opposed to Kyoto lies within the voucher provisions. Under Kyoto, any country that produces less greenhouse gas than permitted by the treaty is permitted to sell the credits to those countries that are producing more. The reasoning behind this is that they will get a boost to their economy which depends upon non-greenhouse technologies. As their economies grow, they will of course begin to produce more greenhouse contributing emissions, but they will also have a strong incentive to keep those emissions limited.
The side affect of this is that "developing" nations will also get a certain amount of anonymity in the face of the primarily US controlled World Bank, International Development Bank, and the various regional banks. Freedom is something that the American Government always means to be freedom for itself to subjigate others in the name of our empire.
Again, your cynicism is not unfounded, just a little off target...;-)
I think that this guy had a loss of perspective too. He described the fact that he left MS because there focus had shifted in recent years. How long had he worked there? 18 months...
I smell something fishy about this guy. Why would his first post be about how it might be collected ina book some day?
OK, now that you've trotted out a nice piece of jingoist realist tripe, by what possible standard is the US interest *not* served by Kyoto? Do you think it is some other country's gulf coast that will be swallowed? Do you think that nationalist rhetoric like yours is going to protect the US from increases in the intensity of global weather patterns?
Signing the Kyoto accords is in the nation's best interest; it is not in the best interest of certain groups that are very close to the whitehouse. Groups that were closely involved with energy policy meetings that our vice president have keep secret in direct violation of legal orders from congress.
And, to top it off, this very regime has announced through the office of the Pentagon that global warming presents a greater security threat to the United States than global terrorism.
The macho survival of the fittest, screw the rest, idea has been well debunked by scientists. Often times, survival has as much to do with cooperation as it does with competition.
You're right, I should have referenced Simon. I thought that might be too obscure and was aiming for something that was a click away -- the link I tried to include discusses Simon's work, and I thought this would be an indirect pointer to the truly interested.
I didn't intend my comment to be a criticism so much as an excuse to bring up Simon. He seems to be woefully under-read by some of those, i.e. computer programmers, to whom his work should be most directly relevant. In any case, I don't particularly feel that he is overly esoteric. It can take a bit to grok the importance of his ideas, but he writes fairly well and expresses himself clearly.
Ericsson, K. A., Chase, W. G., & Faloon, S. (1980). Acquisition of a memory skill. Science, 208, 1181-1182.
There is also no reason to believe that CBS would wait for months to break this story, as just a few months later they hastily broke another anti-Administration story that turned out to be false.
I find it a telling sign of the times that even in an intelligent and informed posting like yours, the news is labeled as anti-Administration and the presumed corollary pro-Administration. Propoganda is an insidious force.
Keep in mind that those robot employees won't mind working around the clock and don't take sick days. As was mentioned in the article, one robot can easily replace 3 - 4 people in most fields. Even at minimum wage, a $10k robot would pay for itself in a few months.
My initial reaction is to say that minimum wage workers are still cheaper; sick days are no concern because they just call up another person on the pay roll and tell them they have to work that day. But, I think you have a valid point. I think that 3-4 works is very low, though. Having worked in fast-food in my younger days, I can say that without a doubt one robot could replace the whole crew. The whole process is already arranged as an assembly line and could be easily changed to a conveyor belt style bot. I think that $10,000 is a very low figure for any industrial robot, especially a sophisticated assembly line set-up, but the economies of scale may help there. The question is, how much will the salaries of the maintanence staff change these totals around? Interesting questions...
Oh Jesus Christ! Comparing any of those bugs and security flaws to this one is ridiculous! For god's sake, this is a security flaw that allows execution of arbitrary code after viewing a goddamn MIDI file!!! You can compare notes on security flaws, but get some perspective on their severity!
Brings to mind the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison. There was a galaxy wide chain of fast-food joints that were totally robotic. But, they all featured the sounds of kitchen activity and people preparing food and chatting. After all, if a fast food joint imposed some new "security measure" where you got your food on a tray at the drive in instead of from a window, you would have no way of knowing whether there was a person on the intercom or a dog-brain.
That being said, I doubt that people will get replaced any time soon. People are dirt cheap. Where are you going to find a robotic system that is as cheap to run as a team of minimum wage workers?
Not just Powell's!! Portland has the most used book stores per capita in the US! And our public transportation is great, so you can actaully get between them easily and cheaply.
And, lest it is over looked in the discussion, don't forget that PGE Park is in big trouble because it hasn't been able to draw the attendance necesarry to pay its creditors. That and Portland Family Entertainment, the people who have the exclusive vending liscense for the park, still owes the city multi hundreds of thousands of dollars for their vending contract.
How anybody thinks that Portland can support a pro baseball team is beyond me.
So what would happen if American's moved to India, protested for jobs under India Affirmative Action, and then requested US salaries since they are still US citizens working for a US company?
They get robbed at knife point in a Delhi allyway?
You've made some very interesting, compelling, and frightening points about the intersections between 1984 the book and 2003 the social construct. I've not seen an answer, however, to the question you have asked here at the beginning of the discussion. Namely, what compels the drive for this kind of control?
I think that this is not really a question that can be answered as such, it is a phenomonon that can be only be described positively. Specifically, the recognition that the basic underlying feature of the creep of totalitariansim is the agrandizement of power. The few in power try to coalesce their influence and control. There is no real 'why' behind this as it is the nature of the thing, power, itself.
Basically, what I am saying is that power should not be viewed as an absolute thing any more than material wealth (another expression of the political power under discussion). Power is relative, a person/entity has power compared to another person/entity weilding the same class of power. What's more is that the expression of the type of power under discussion relies in precisely the act of gaining more. There is no use of the type of power expressed by contemporary wealth/politcal power/control other than gaining more.
The most important part of what I am saying here lies in the alternatives to this agrandization. If you accept my premeses above, than it is obvious that any use of the type of power under question results in direct and exact replication of the circumpstances being discussed (the growth of totalitariansim and the aggrandization of power).
Start your own company and pay other people pennies!
That's definately the best way to make the world a better place and get the most out of life: do unto others 'cause they've done unto you. And definitely, positively, always allow others to keep doing unto others as they have done unto you. Remeber, thinking that anything better is possible is the worst of the thought crimes!
How foolish of me! Sitting in a small artificially lit, artifically aired (AC), enclosed box, typing TPS reports into a box shooting a constant stream of electrons straight into my brain could be fun! Why am I so worried abou the fact that the fat guy who comes around and yells at me every day is getting rich off of the pennies he pays me? I should just relax and enjoy it!
I'd think that we'd be tripping over new life forms every time we looked anywhere intently or anywhere we hadn't gone before.
Not just the oceans, either. Biologists are only able to identify something on the order of 70% of the fish sold in markets near the mouth of the Amazon.
Re:Orwell's vision was true!
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 5, Informative
AAAAHHHH!!!! It's happening here too!! When my sister read Animal Farm in school they told her the same thing; read the book as an historical allegory. Be warned!! Avoid this reading at all costs!! The book (and 1984 too) will lose all art and relevance if you do such!
Yes, they were inspired by Orwell's dissillusionment with Stalinist SSR, but they were not strict allegories! They dealt with the nature of political power and the tools of oppression and control. They were inspired (nearly) as much by what he saw in Franco's Spain as by Stalist USSR.
Reading these two novels as strict historical allegory does them a tremendous disservice.
I was in the middle of typing an inspired and insightful response when my office got hit with a power outage...so I now offer you the special reader's digest condensed version:
blah...blah....blah...lack of Jeffersonian revolutions (every 20 years by his book) in USA has led to tremendous wealth inertia (those that are wealthy will tend to stay wealthy, those that are poor will tend to stay poor)...blah....blah...blah...
...blah...blah...blah...
Oh well, catch you next time this subject comes up, as it surely will!:-)
You are repeating one of the largest economic fallacies in existence. How many stocks bought are used to start companies? You can answer with percentages or raw numbers. The answer? Very few. Most investment comes in the form of speculative investment, that is; the NYSE. This is whay Adam Smith called the light foam that floats on top of the deep ocean of an economy. How is it that speculative investment has been mistaken for actual economic investment? I'm sorry, not 'mistaken', 'twisted into'.
As for the so-called "right to work" you are parroting, that is total bs. You have just spent a paragraph saying that CEOs have the right to employ workers because they employ workers...
Re:Like it or not, managers default to commercial
on
What is Open Source?
·
· Score: 1
I don't really see how your argument has anything to do with close-source vs. open-source, or even GPL vs. whatever. All you have argued is the merits of not handling source internally when you can just pay the programmers/maintainers to do it.
If your city council got the lion's share of your tax dollars, you might have free Wi-Fi, too.
Yea!!!...unless...you live in a poor area...or...the country
Actually, it is a very nice idea. Each locality can keep strict control over emigration and immigration to make sure that there is a nice balance of cash inflow and required civil services. Keep the poor out, and you don't have to pay anything for them. Of course, you also don't get the benefits of their labor, but you can just build your factory outside the city walls...and pay for infrastructure etc.
The greeks solved this problem (labor in the city states) with foreign slaves.
Contrary to how the tone of this message may appear, I actually favor a decreased federal beauracracy (beauracracies are, by their nature, self-perpetuating resource grabbing beasts). It does, however, have it's place and needs to stay strong.
I think that it is a mistake to treat this as an educational issue. After all, how many of the people who own and use un-authorized copies of software don't know what they are using? The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people simply couldn't care a rat's ass that they are using illicit copies. Just as people don't care about copying VHS cassettes and giving them to friends. The *know* vs. *care* distinction is important becuase you cannot instruct people to care. At most you can guilt-trip them, but that is rarely productive.
The incentives for free software (and open-source) will most likely come in the form of something much more material, such as an excape from obnoxious liscensing systems. This, by itself, is not enough to persuade more than a handful of people (humans have a remarkable propensity to put up with crap). But, if crappy software exists in an evironment where there exists perceived functionally equivalent alternatives, then people will more likely switch.
However, I'm hoping it's more something like the current drug compaigns.
That is the scariest part of this whole thing. The best case scenario for this proposal is a massively expensive dis-information and fear campaign like the current anti-pot commercials flooding the TV.
I believe that pricing structure is in place solely to make it prohibitively expensive to roll your own Mac with purchased service parts.
Actually, it is in place solely to keep Service Centers from taking broken parts, refurbing them, and putting them back into macs for sale. It is all part of the iron-fisted control that keeps up the reputation for reliability that has formed part of the Apple brand.
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I think your cynicism is misplaced. I think the *real* reason that the US Gov. is so opposed to Kyoto lies within the voucher provisions. Under Kyoto, any country that produces less greenhouse gas than permitted by the treaty is permitted to sell the credits to those countries that are producing more. The reasoning behind this is that they will get a boost to their economy which depends upon non-greenhouse technologies. As their economies grow, they will of course begin to produce more greenhouse contributing emissions, but they will also have a strong incentive to keep those emissions limited.
The side affect of this is that "developing" nations will also get a certain amount of anonymity in the face of the primarily US controlled World Bank, International Development Bank, and the various regional banks. Freedom is something that the American Government always means to be freedom for itself to subjigate others in the name of our empire.
Again, your cynicism is not unfounded, just a little off target... ;-)
I think that this guy had a loss of perspective too. He described the fact that he left MS because there focus had shifted in recent years. How long had he worked there? 18 months...
I smell something fishy about this guy. Why would his first post be about how it might be collected ina book some day?
OK, now that you've trotted out a nice piece of jingoist realist tripe, by what possible standard is the US interest *not* served by Kyoto? Do you think it is some other country's gulf coast that will be swallowed? Do you think that nationalist rhetoric like yours is going to protect the US from increases in the intensity of global weather patterns?
Signing the Kyoto accords is in the nation's best interest; it is not in the best interest of certain groups that are very close to the whitehouse. Groups that were closely involved with energy policy meetings that our vice president have keep secret in direct violation of legal orders from congress.
And, to top it off, this very regime has announced through the office of the Pentagon that global warming presents a greater security threat to the United States than global terrorism.
The macho survival of the fittest, screw the rest, idea has been well debunked by scientists. Often times, survival has as much to do with cooperation as it does with competition.
The best explanation of the difference between 'theory' and 'law' that I have heard is: Laws describe, theories explain.
I didn't intend my comment to be a criticism so much as an excuse to bring up Simon. He seems to be woefully under-read by some of those, i.e. computer programmers, to whom his work should be most directly relevant. In any case, I don't particularly feel that he is overly esoteric. It can take a bit to grok the importance of his ideas, but he writes fairly well and expresses himself clearly.
Fascinating! Thanks for the pointer.
You can also go straight to the source of above 100,000 and 10 year info: chech out Herbert A. Simon's Sciences of the Artificial.
I would put up a link to Amazon but I'm very unhappy with them right now.
I find it a telling sign of the times that even in an intelligent and informed posting like yours, the news is labeled as anti-Administration and the presumed corollary pro-Administration. Propoganda is an insidious force.
My initial reaction is to say that minimum wage workers are still cheaper; sick days are no concern because they just call up another person on the pay roll and tell them they have to work that day. But, I think you have a valid point. I think that 3-4 works is very low, though. Having worked in fast-food in my younger days, I can say that without a doubt one robot could replace the whole crew. The whole process is already arranged as an assembly line and could be easily changed to a conveyor belt style bot. I think that $10,000 is a very low figure for any industrial robot, especially a sophisticated assembly line set-up, but the economies of scale may help there. The question is, how much will the salaries of the maintanence staff change these totals around? Interesting questions...
Oh Jesus Christ! Comparing any of those bugs and security flaws to this one is ridiculous! For god's sake, this is a security flaw that allows execution of arbitrary code after viewing a goddamn MIDI file!!! You can compare notes on security flaws, but get some perspective on their severity!
Brings to mind the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison. There was a galaxy wide chain of fast-food joints that were totally robotic. But, they all featured the sounds of kitchen activity and people preparing food and chatting. After all, if a fast food joint imposed some new "security measure" where you got your food on a tray at the drive in instead of from a window, you would have no way of knowing whether there was a person on the intercom or a dog-brain.
That being said, I doubt that people will get replaced any time soon. People are dirt cheap. Where are you going to find a robotic system that is as cheap to run as a team of minimum wage workers?
Not just Powell's!! Portland has the most used book stores per capita in the US! And our public transportation is great, so you can actaully get between them easily and cheaply.
And, lest it is over looked in the discussion, don't forget that PGE Park is in big trouble because it hasn't been able to draw the attendance necesarry to pay its creditors. That and Portland Family Entertainment, the people who have the exclusive vending liscense for the park, still owes the city multi hundreds of thousands of dollars for their vending contract.
How anybody thinks that Portland can support a pro baseball team is beyond me.
They get robbed at knife point in a Delhi allyway?
You've made some very interesting, compelling, and frightening points about the intersections between 1984 the book and 2003 the social construct. I've not seen an answer, however, to the question you have asked here at the beginning of the discussion. Namely, what compels the drive for this kind of control?
I think that this is not really a question that can be answered as such, it is a phenomonon that can be only be described positively. Specifically, the recognition that the basic underlying feature of the creep of totalitariansim is the agrandizement of power. The few in power try to coalesce their influence and control. There is no real 'why' behind this as it is the nature of the thing, power, itself.
Basically, what I am saying is that power should not be viewed as an absolute thing any more than material wealth (another expression of the political power under discussion). Power is relative, a person/entity has power compared to another person/entity weilding the same class of power. What's more is that the expression of the type of power under discussion relies in precisely the act of gaining more. There is no use of the type of power expressed by contemporary wealth/politcal power/control other than gaining more.
The most important part of what I am saying here lies in the alternatives to this agrandization. If you accept my premeses above, than it is obvious that any use of the type of power under question results in direct and exact replication of the circumpstances being discussed (the growth of totalitariansim and the aggrandization of power).
That's definately the best way to make the world a better place and get the most out of life: do unto others 'cause they've done unto you. And definitely, positively, always allow others to keep doing unto others as they have done unto you. Remeber, thinking that anything better is possible is the worst of the thought crimes!
How foolish of me! Sitting in a small artificially lit, artifically aired (AC), enclosed box, typing TPS reports into a box shooting a constant stream of electrons straight into my brain could be fun! Why am I so worried abou the fact that the fat guy who comes around and yells at me every day is getting rich off of the pennies he pays me? I should just relax and enjoy it!
Hey dude, pass the Soma.
Not just the oceans, either. Biologists are only able to identify something on the order of 70% of the fish sold in markets near the mouth of the Amazon.
AAAAHHHH!!!! It's happening here too!! When my sister read Animal Farm in school they told her the same thing; read the book as an historical allegory. Be warned!! Avoid this reading at all costs!! The book (and 1984 too) will lose all art and relevance if you do such!
Yes, they were inspired by Orwell's dissillusionment with Stalinist SSR, but they were not strict allegories! They dealt with the nature of political power and the tools of oppression and control. They were inspired (nearly) as much by what he saw in Franco's Spain as by Stalist USSR.
Reading these two novels as strict historical allegory does them a tremendous disservice.
I was in the middle of typing an inspired and insightful response when my office got hit with a power outage...so I now offer you the special reader's digest condensed version:
blah...blah....blah...lack of Jeffersonian revolutions (every 20 years by his book) in USA has led to tremendous wealth inertia (those that are wealthy will tend to stay wealthy, those that are poor will tend to stay poor)...blah....blah...blah...
...blah...blah...blah...
Oh well, catch you next time this subject comes up, as it surely will! :-)
You are repeating one of the largest economic fallacies in existence. How many stocks bought are used to start companies? You can answer with percentages or raw numbers. The answer? Very few. Most investment comes in the form of speculative investment, that is; the NYSE. This is whay Adam Smith called the light foam that floats on top of the deep ocean of an economy. How is it that speculative investment has been mistaken for actual economic investment? I'm sorry, not 'mistaken', 'twisted into'.
As for the so-called "right to work" you are parroting, that is total bs. You have just spent a paragraph saying that CEOs have the right to employ workers because they employ workers...
I don't really see how your argument has anything to do with close-source vs. open-source, or even GPL vs. whatever. All you have argued is the merits of not handling source internally when you can just pay the programmers/maintainers to do it.
Yea!!! ...unless...you live in a poor area...or...the country
Actually, it is a very nice idea. Each locality can keep strict control over emigration and immigration to make sure that there is a nice balance of cash inflow and required civil services. Keep the poor out, and you don't have to pay anything for them. Of course, you also don't get the benefits of their labor, but you can just build your factory outside the city walls...and pay for infrastructure etc.
The greeks solved this problem (labor in the city states) with foreign slaves.
Contrary to how the tone of this message may appear, I actually favor a decreased federal beauracracy (beauracracies are, by their nature, self-perpetuating resource grabbing beasts). It does, however, have it's place and needs to stay strong.
I think that it is a mistake to treat this as an educational issue. After all, how many of the people who own and use un-authorized copies of software don't know what they are using? The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people simply couldn't care a rat's ass that they are using illicit copies. Just as people don't care about copying VHS cassettes and giving them to friends. The *know* vs. *care* distinction is important becuase you cannot instruct people to care. At most you can guilt-trip them, but that is rarely productive.
The incentives for free software (and open-source) will most likely come in the form of something much more material, such as an excape from obnoxious liscensing systems. This, by itself, is not enough to persuade more than a handful of people (humans have a remarkable propensity to put up with crap). But, if crappy software exists in an evironment where there exists perceived functionally equivalent alternatives, then people will more likely switch.
That is the scariest part of this whole thing. The best case scenario for this proposal is a massively expensive dis-information and fear campaign like the current anti-pot commercials flooding the TV.
Actually, it is in place solely to keep Service Centers from taking broken parts, refurbing them, and putting them back into macs for sale. It is all part of the iron-fisted control that keeps up the reputation for reliability that has formed part of the Apple brand.