Against all my instincts, I find myself for the right of governments to filter, as long as they are 'legitimate' governments.
That is, the 'people' can hear the arguments and throw them out, if they don't want the filtering.
Optimally, the production models would change so that no-one produced trash and education levels so that no-one consumed it. I'm mainly talking about TV which is a push medium and which may be dying anyway.
I'm 60 this year and I have seen a step by step decline sold as 'freedom' and 'free trade', code words for 'we're making a lot of money with this' don't take away that 'right'.
But you're quite correct to criticise, I don't have anything like a complete answer and it pains me to end up on the 'wrong' side.
I lived in France for 20 years, also a supporter of this, I wish we did in UK. In France, it meant that the continuous diet of brainless, braindead violent programmes and 'rich people behaving nauseously' (Beverly Hills xxxxxx) were present, but in limited quantity, There were and are a lot of local cops shows, Julie Lescaut, for example, more connected with the indigenous culture.
Finally, I have family in the West Indies and when the island switched from BBC to US channels (anecdotally, but many people said it) violence increased.
I know I'll get a lot of hate for posting this, but there is a category of cultural toxic waste and it does modify behaviour, however much we wish it didn't.
I have helped establish two computer drop-ins in the east end (the poor bit) of London using 'old' computers re-installed with Ubuntu (that's the one every seemed to like). In both cases the computer are often over five years old, but for browsing, a little bit of office work or homework and some games, they do just fine. One of the drop-ins has been problem free for two years (though I shouldn't say that aloud, should I?)
My neighbours change computers because they see the adverts on TV, because versions of Windows change, requiring more hardware and (unnecessarily) because they fill their systems with junk and malware by clicking on everything (oh my computer is really slow!). Norton doesn't help the 'user experience' either.
But, for example, they confuse 'slow' with 'broken' or 'old' and buy into the slick consumer dream. PC world with it's huge variety of sharp practices doesn't help either, because it's in their interest to encourage this particular confusion.
So I doubt that this will help, assuming that they do it (they haven't done anything on the petition site before, shame, we would have liked to see the underpants too).
So if Gordon (who is a an ex TV journalist, in spite of his belief in his own enormous intellect) says is going to knock us up a few pages with an out of date copy of Dreammweaver, we shouldn't take this too seriously, right now.
Apart from all (clearly voiced) civil liberties objections, the thing that strikes me about this is that UK government is now clearly married to big business and divorced from the citizen.
We see the rest of this in the feeble oversight of banking, the continuation of what (the watchdog has called) complex monopolies in the retail sector and the privatisation (with abnormal levels of profit) of utilities such as water. We no longer have new parks, instead we have 'leisure/retail' destinations.
At least it's clear now and we can go our own too, whilst there's still a small window of opportunity.
Yes agree, but happily I have a (mainly) web based project: http://www.hughbarnard.org/content/alternative-currency-software and use Selenium: http://seleniumhq.org/. I also export the tests to Perl to give me a large, very ugly (I don't publish it currently) monolithic regression test. When someone finds something broken, I fix it and add another test for that...
I bit the bullet about two years ago and sat down and wrote a user manual, it needs restructuring now though. I use Perltidy: http://perltidy.sourceforge.net/ to automate some degree of developer documentation.
I think my point is that, even for small projects, it helps to set up a little bit of organisation and use of tools, takes some of the pain away.
I'm both a green-supporter, leftish libertarian and (actually) a supporter of anything that will break the mould in decaying world of political 'brands'. Thus, I look with some favour on Pirate Party etc. etc.
But (you heard that coming, right?) there isn't a complete programme, a problem also for many green parties. Do you intend to do serious policy research and formulation and evolve a complete coherent position that would enable you to govern? When?
Absolutely correct. I'm nearly 60 but this also means that I can remember the 60s (vaguely, if you know all those jokes) when we were 'allowed' (with guitars, sometimes) into public space.
The current UK trend is to deny youth any use of public space (we've just locked a churchyard because of the occasional bit of trouble), remove benches and exert social control on all gathering youth. Where are these guys and gals supposed to go? Oh, I know, to McDonalds or some place where they spend money, that's OK.
We badly need to get back to a mixture of tolerance, being less fearful and, on the other side making kids aware of how to use and co-exist in public space (we managed, with on/off brushes with the police) with the 'olds'. All this repression is idiotic, ineffective and counterproductive (because it alienates rather than teaches).
This actually ties into yesterdays 'slum' thread: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/27/231232/How-Slums-Can-Save-the-Planet . That is, there's currently a lot of formal and informal interest in city agriculture. I'm a proponent of replacing ornamentals in parks with some fruit/nut bearing trees and bushes. Also, for example. In my visit to Bangkok, I saw a fair amount of viable roof gardening too.
I'm not a vegetarian (though I eat less and less meat, partly because of eco concerns, partly because of the use of non-natural feeds) and I know this doesn't solve the 'meat' problem. You can keep chickens/bees on your roof, though.
But I see it as 'import substitution', some locally produced/non supermarket food for city dwellers and small but pleasant incremental changes in city landscapes and lifestyles until we arrive somewhere different.
I agree with many of the posters here that say most of the current slums are horrific. Also, I live in a poor part of London and have just returned from Bangkok where I visited and walked through some of their slums.
However, I believe the key word here is 'teach'. There are many things that I admire in Bangkok that I'd like to introduce to the East End. Good street food at an affordable price rather than look-alike hamburger chains (as part of the informal economy), re-use of anything reusable, (often) better levels of respect for property and people, ingenuity that doesn't exist in the gadget-heavy west. Yes, there are rats and open-sewers as well, but that doesn't invalidate the rest.
Walkability is also a big factor. I live near a canal but many of my female neighbours won't use the towpath because no-one else does, of course, this is a downward spiral, so I'm trying to get it to be a little more attractive, then more people walk it.
So this is the obvious solution to anthropogenic global warming, isn't it? And it'll use up those hard to maintain, easy to steal, weapon stockpiles. What are we waiting for?
1. I didn't tell a houseguest that my desktops are Ubuntu now (used to be XP) and they managed to login/surf without any help
2. Computer drop in for older people using Ubuntu, I had to tell one user where to find the word processor and I now have a one page 'manual',
everyone fairly happy
None of this is statistically significant, of course, but these users certainly aren't 'power' users. Actually there are two other points here:
3. You can arrange the desktop to look pretty much like XP, if you really really want (to quote the immortal Spice Girls)
4. Knowing a couple of desktops enables you to generalise, an important education theory win
That might be OK, if we had a few competent managers, but the ones we have in the UK have stepped straight out of Dilbert. Currently we have 'transformational' government. I've tried telling them that transformational isn't even a word.
Yes, so agree with this, I've been in IT about 35 years but I run, swim and do art (badly!) as well. My gripe with modern education (in the UK anyway) is that it seems to be about 'jobs' rather than 'human potential', which means a broader sweep of interests.
There's a great virtue (apart from the sheer fun) of a broad sweep, in that you can put things together and invent new things.
Even if it's not money that's flowing, help the community around the product by reporting issues, making suggestions and giving others a helping hand. This makes the software better and the community around it more sustainable and welcoming. In fewer words, don't just be a 'consumer'.
At the last patent, I just removed my account, a hard and confusing process that they will no doubt patent: 'process for trying to prevent a cognitively deranged customer from leaving the Amazon paradise of books'.
I think this is the only thing that they will understand, loss of business with linkage. However, non-techy society needs a clear education about how damaging this is to the whole human endeavour, a few people like me dumping their accounts isn't going to do it. So, spread the word...
First let me declare interest, I'm 59 and a fairly hard-core greenie (although my house is filled with computers, Negroponte: move bits not atoms!).
I run 2/3 three times a week, don't use a car, don't drink (that's important massive amounts of calories) and have an 'asian' style diet, steamed rice, steamed veg, veg curries, lots of fish and also porridge or oats (rather than sugary cereals) for breakfast. Fruit rather than sugary desserts.
But I'm not a food/exercise fascist, I eat ice-cream, burgers and chocolate from time to time and if I don't feel like it or feel ill, I don't run. Of course, being out of a car and running up and down the subway stairs provides a lot of extra aerobics too, cheaper that gym membership.
My weight stays steady at about 62-64kg, I weigh myself but I don't obsess, calorie count or distance count. Weight goes down if I eat 'more' veggie, which I do from time to time.
So my point about this is that it's a whole sustained unspectacular program and healthy way of life that does it. I was heavy in my mid forties, all this sorted it, gently and keeps it sorted.
Yes agree...I took the taste test in a large UK organisation that does broadcasting, three web projects. First small group, boss + traditional focus, result, something quite difficult delivered in a seven week deadline,
Second two, scrum, bigger projects, lots of random pressure for features during a sprint, no documentation, extremely difficult to add anyone to team because everything was on unreadable post it notes. Result sprawling, unfocused and expensive projects.
To declare interest, I'm old enough to have suffered under waterfall and that doesn't do it in the modern world either, but bad agile is actually a lot worse because it's unmanaged and undocumented.
So, we're driven by our unreasoning worship of numbers to throw away viable stuff that used a lot of resources and energy to produce. Some of the resources are non-renewables so the value can't really be captured by numbers either.
I live in a poor borough in London. I'm currently trying to Linux-install and re-use computers that are pushed into planned obsolescence by Windows product cycles. These computers are 'good' usually for another 5 years. I was born in the 50s, after the WW2 and our culture has a different (and to my mind, saner) attitude to repairing stuff, too.
There were always rumours about something based on this flying around, near London, in the late 1950s. I remember our neighbours calling us into the garden to watch something that, by then, was distinguishable in deep detail.
Well, the winners write history, that's one sure thing. But the industrial revolution wasn't exactly an unconditional blessing, then or now.
Secondly, none of those thing were choices then and they are not now. They're usually candy-wrapped economic coercion in a state that Guy Debord calls Augmented Survival: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/2.htm.
So, it's preferable to go down this road to deliver universal plenty, but given our unreasoned, current economic orthodoxies, that's
unlikely to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Against all my instincts, I find myself for the right of governments to filter, as long as they are 'legitimate' governments.
That is, the 'people' can hear the arguments and throw them out, if they don't want the filtering.
Optimally, the production models would change so that no-one produced trash and education levels so that no-one consumed it. I'm mainly talking about TV which is a push medium and which may be dying anyway.
I'm 60 this year and I have seen a step by step decline sold as 'freedom' and 'free trade', code words for 'we're making a lot of money with this' don't take away that 'right'.
But you're quite correct to criticise, I don't have anything like a complete answer and it pains me to end up on the 'wrong' side.
Certain countries, including Australia support the Cultural Exception
I lived in France for 20 years, also a supporter of this, I wish we did in UK. In France, it meant that the continuous diet of brainless, braindead violent programmes and 'rich people behaving nauseously' (Beverly Hills xxxxxx) were present, but in limited quantity, There were and are a lot of local cops shows, Julie Lescaut, for example, more connected with the indigenous culture.
Finally, I have family in the West Indies and when the island switched from BBC to US channels (anecdotally, but many people said it) violence increased.
I know I'll get a lot of hate for posting this, but there is a category of cultural toxic waste and it does modify behaviour, however much we wish it didn't.
I have helped establish two computer drop-ins in the east end (the poor bit) of London using 'old' computers re-installed with Ubuntu (that's the one every seemed to like). In both cases the computer are often over five years old, but for browsing, a little bit of office work or homework and some games, they do just fine. One of the drop-ins has been problem free for two years (though I shouldn't say that aloud, should I?)
My neighbours change computers because they see the adverts on TV, because versions of Windows change, requiring more hardware and (unnecessarily) because they fill their systems with junk and malware by clicking on everything (oh my computer is really slow!). Norton doesn't help the 'user experience' either.
But, for example, they confuse 'slow' with 'broken' or 'old' and buy into the slick consumer dream. PC world with it's huge variety of sharp practices doesn't help either, because it's in their interest to encourage this particular confusion.
So I doubt that this will help, assuming that they do it (they haven't done anything on the petition site before, shame, we would have liked to see the underpants too).
And these announcements are coming thick and fast.
Also, UK government's record on successful system implementation is very expensive and patchy (to say the least): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/591645.stm That's the best link I can find quickly, doesn't include failure at the Student Load system: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/19/student_loan_fail/, Child Protection Agency: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3235394.stm and the monstrous Hational Health System: http://www.silicon.com/management/cio-insights/2004/07/27/5bn-nhs-it-failure-warning-39122638/
So if Gordon (who is a an ex TV journalist, in spite of his belief in his own enormous intellect) says is going to knock us up a few pages with an out of date copy of Dreammweaver, we shouldn't take this too seriously, right now.
Apart from all (clearly voiced) civil liberties objections, the thing that strikes me about this is that UK government is now clearly married to big business and divorced from the citizen.
We see the rest of this in the feeble oversight of banking, the continuation of what (the watchdog has called) complex monopolies in the retail sector and the privatisation (with abnormal levels of profit) of utilities such as water. We no longer have new parks, instead we have 'leisure/retail' destinations.
At least it's clear now and we can go our own too, whilst there's still a small window of opportunity.
Yes agree, but happily I have a (mainly) web based project: http://www.hughbarnard.org/content/alternative-currency-software and use Selenium: http://seleniumhq.org/. I also export the tests to Perl to give me a large, very ugly (I don't publish it currently) monolithic regression test. When someone finds something broken, I fix it and add another test for that...
I bit the bullet about two years ago and sat down and wrote a user manual, it needs restructuring now though. I use Perltidy: http://perltidy.sourceforge.net/ to automate some degree of developer documentation.
I think my point is that, even for small projects, it helps to set up a little bit of organisation and use of tools, takes some of the pain away.
I'm both a green-supporter, leftish libertarian and (actually) a supporter of anything that will break the mould in decaying world of political 'brands'. Thus, I look with some favour on Pirate Party etc. etc.
But (you heard that coming, right?) there isn't a complete programme, a problem also for many green parties. Do you intend to do serious policy research and formulation and evolve a complete coherent position that would enable you to govern? When?
Absolutely correct. I'm nearly 60 but this also means that I can remember the 60s (vaguely, if you know all those jokes) when we were 'allowed' (with guitars, sometimes) into public space.
The current UK trend is to deny youth any use of public space (we've just locked a churchyard because of the occasional bit of trouble), remove benches and exert social control on all gathering youth. Where are these guys and gals supposed to go? Oh, I know, to McDonalds or some place where they spend money, that's OK.
We badly need to get back to a mixture of tolerance, being less fearful and, on the other side making kids aware of how to use and co-exist in public space (we managed, with on/off brushes with the police) with the 'olds'. All this repression is idiotic, ineffective and counterproductive (because it alienates rather than teaches).
This actually ties into yesterdays 'slum' thread: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/27/231232/How-Slums-Can-Save-the-Planet . That is, there's currently a lot of formal and informal interest in city agriculture. I'm a proponent of replacing ornamentals in parks with some fruit/nut bearing trees and bushes. Also, for example. In my visit to Bangkok, I saw a fair amount of viable roof gardening too.
I'm not a vegetarian (though I eat less and less meat, partly because of eco concerns, partly because of the use of non-natural feeds) and I know this doesn't solve the 'meat' problem. You can keep chickens/bees on your roof, though.
But I see it as 'import substitution', some locally produced/non supermarket food for city dwellers and small but pleasant incremental changes in city landscapes and lifestyles until we arrive somewhere different.
I agree with many of the posters here that say most of the current slums are horrific. Also, I live in a poor part of London and have just returned from Bangkok where I visited and walked through some of their slums.
However, I believe the key word here is 'teach'. There are many things that I admire in Bangkok that I'd like to introduce to the East End. Good street food at an affordable price rather than look-alike hamburger chains (as part of the informal economy), re-use of anything reusable, (often) better levels of respect for property and people, ingenuity that doesn't exist in the gadget-heavy west. Yes, there are rats and open-sewers as well, but that doesn't invalidate the rest.
Walkability is also a big factor. I live near a canal but many of my female neighbours won't use the towpath because no-one else does, of course, this is a downward spiral, so I'm trying to get it to be a little more attractive, then more people walk it.
So this is the obvious solution to anthropogenic global warming, isn't it? And it'll use up those hard to maintain, easy to steal, weapon stockpiles. What are we waiting for?
Pretty nearly. Two recent experiments:
1. I didn't tell a houseguest that my desktops are Ubuntu now (used to be XP) and they managed to login/surf without any help
2. Computer drop in for older people using Ubuntu, I had to tell one user where to find the word processor and I now have a one page 'manual', everyone fairly happy
None of this is statistically significant, of course, but these users certainly aren't 'power' users. Actually there are two other points here:
3. You can arrange the desktop to look pretty much like XP, if you really really want (to quote the immortal Spice Girls)
4. Knowing a couple of desktops enables you to generalise, an important education theory win
That might be OK, if we had a few competent managers, but the ones we have in the UK have stepped straight out of Dilbert. Currently we have 'transformational' government. I've tried telling them that transformational isn't even a word.
Yes, so agree with this, I've been in IT about 35 years but I run, swim and do art (badly!) as well. My gripe with modern education (in the UK anyway) is that it seems to be about 'jobs' rather than 'human potential', which means a broader sweep of interests.
There's a great virtue (apart from the sheer fun) of a broad sweep, in that you can put things together and invent new things.
Even if it's not money that's flowing, help the community around the product by reporting issues, making suggestions and giving others a helping hand. This makes the software better and the community around it more sustainable and welcoming. In fewer words, don't just be a 'consumer'.
I'd just like to warn people from posting:
Scotty, I need more power!
style jokes here, I'm just quoting, not actually making the joke itself...
At the last patent, I just removed my account, a hard and confusing process that they will no doubt patent: 'process for trying to prevent a cognitively deranged customer from leaving the Amazon paradise of books'.
I think this is the only thing that they will understand, loss of business with linkage. However, non-techy society needs a clear education about how damaging this is to the whole human endeavour, a few people like me dumping their accounts isn't going to do it. So, spread the word...
First let me declare interest, I'm 59 and a fairly hard-core greenie (although my house is filled with computers, Negroponte: move bits not atoms!).
I run 2/3 three times a week, don't use a car, don't drink (that's important massive amounts of calories) and have an 'asian' style diet, steamed rice, steamed veg, veg curries, lots of fish and also porridge or oats (rather than sugary cereals) for breakfast. Fruit rather than sugary desserts.
But I'm not a food/exercise fascist, I eat ice-cream, burgers and chocolate from time to time and if I don't feel like it or feel ill, I don't run. Of course, being out of a car and running up and down the subway stairs provides a lot of extra aerobics too, cheaper that gym membership.
My weight stays steady at about 62-64kg, I weigh myself but I don't obsess, calorie count or distance count. Weight goes down if I eat 'more' veggie, which I do from time to time. So my point about this is that it's a whole sustained unspectacular program and healthy way of life that does it. I was heavy in my mid forties, all this sorted it, gently and keeps it sorted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story) anyone mention this yet? It is a 'waldo', sort of...
Yes agree...I took the taste test in a large UK organisation that does broadcasting, three web projects. First small group, boss + traditional focus, result, something quite difficult delivered in a seven week deadline,
Second two, scrum, bigger projects, lots of random pressure for features during a sprint, no documentation, extremely difficult to add anyone to team because everything was on unreadable post it notes. Result sprawling, unfocused and expensive projects.
To declare interest, I'm old enough to have suffered under waterfall and that doesn't do it in the modern world either, but bad agile is actually a lot worse because it's unmanaged and undocumented.
So, we're driven by our unreasoning worship of numbers to throw away viable stuff that used a lot of resources and energy to produce. Some of the resources are non-renewables so the value can't really be captured by numbers either.
I live in a poor borough in London. I'm currently trying to Linux-install and re-use computers that are pushed into planned obsolescence by Windows product cycles. These computers are 'good' usually for another 5 years. I was born in the 50s, after the WW2 and our culture has a different (and to my mind, saner) attitude to repairing stuff, too.
Actually, we Brits have been building the world's flying saucers since the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Bedstead
There were always rumours about something based on this flying around, near London, in the late 1950s. I remember our neighbours calling us into the garden to watch something that, by then, was distinguishable in deep detail.
H23N67, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more.
Well, the winners write history, that's one sure thing. But the industrial revolution wasn't exactly an unconditional blessing, then or now.
Secondly, none of those thing were choices then and they are not now. They're usually candy-wrapped economic coercion in a state that Guy Debord calls Augmented Survival: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/2.htm.
So, it's preferable to go down this road to deliver universal plenty, but given our unreasoned, current economic orthodoxies, that's unlikely to happen.
Quite right too. Mad scientists will probably clone the Moa and then the tree will be OK.
One cannot be too careful about these things, I've been thinking about growing spikes too.