Another senile scientist weighs in with drivel
on
Forecasting Doomsday
·
· Score: 1
Within fifty years, nanotech will make all of this utterly irrelevant.
Even if it doesn't - in fact, BECAUSE it didn't, if that's what happens - destroying most of human civilization will be a positive thing.
This, of course, is exactly what Lovelock is promoting - just like Ehrlich did with his "Population Bomb" book back in the 70's. Ehrlich recommended reducing the world's several billion population back to 500 million. Then he explicitly excluded an possible solutions such as sending people into space or whatever. In other words, he was implicitly advocating the genocide of nearly two and a half billion people. Why? Because a couple hundred million might be starving by the year 2000.
What's wrong with this picture?
Lovelock is doing the same. He YEARNS for a collapsed human civilization, which is why he is advocating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Unfortunately for him, we Transhumans have our OWN self-fulfilling prophecy which is consideraly more potent than his. We will eliminate the human condition, and thus eliminate human problems, including any negative environmental effects by human technology.
By the way, the Gaia Hypothesis was so much mystical horseshit anyway.
It's the new ones everybody can't wait to see! Well, you're right, of course, they won't be really "new", since they'll be the result of the same poor design, spaghetti code, and useless "features" Windows has always had and always will have.
I've repeatedly said that Microsoft will NEVER have a secure system, or one even approaching that ideal, while Gates is in charge of the company. The company culture created and sustained by his presence simply won't allow it. Their focus is on marketing pointless features and eye candy - not advancing the state of the art in operating systems. Always has been, always will be. Not to mention using questionably legal contracts with suppliers and distributors to enforce their hold on the market. Not to mention fighting for the technology lock-in of their users. Not to mention their total disinterest in allowing their users to retain any rights to the use of their own systems.
We have a "faith-based" government now - so Symantec has to follow suit. They obviously believe the Bush staffer that said people who live in reality aren't the real movers and shakers of the world. You can only "move and shake" (or is that "shake and bake"?) if you lie well.
Look at these authors Leroy and Frey - fraud sells, baby! Fraud sells!
Look at Brangelina! For a year there was no relationship, and now she's pregnant! That's REAL "shake and bake!"
I've used Kerio Personal Firewall (free to home users) for the last several years with no problems. I used version 2.1.5 which is less intrusive than the latest versions which tend to have too many features that are nagging.
You can get the last freeware version 2.1.5 here
I've read Lanier's crap many times. He has no respect for anybody else's ideas either, or he wouldn't put forth the lame arguments he does. He is full of himself because a lot of people have told him he's smart. So he disses a lot of very smart people like K. Eric Drexler who ARE respectful of competing ideas.
"Respect for others" is a two-way street. I've seen little of it in my life and none of it directed at me. Your attacks on me, implying I'm too young to have a clue and the like, are nothing more than the same couched in bullshit righteousness.
Stuff it where the sun don't shine, I'm not impressed.
If somebody submits a story that generates a lot of personal discussion about the submitter, split the story into "on topic" and "on submitter" sections, and let people post in the appropriate section.
In fact, who cares one way or the other? If I see a story I want to read, and I hit the first page of posts only to find it's all bullshit, I'll either spot-check a couple other pages to see if there's anything else to read, or I'll move on.
I don't spend all day on/. like some morons. I've got better things to do, too. So this whole discussion is a waste of time. Bye. I'm moving on to something else right now.
He's what I call a "Geek Moron" - a brilliant person in his technical field with no fucking clue in any other matter. The IT industry is full of these people.
As for being a teenager, I'm 57 years old. Intelligence is no measure of rationality. You'll learn that as YOU get older.
"The wild card is the core nature of software. If someone can figure out a way to get rid of brittleness, then the scenario I sketched becomes possible, or even normative. (Don't believe every computer scientist who claims to already know how to get rid of brittleness. It's a hard problem that perversely yields a lot of promising partial results that are ultimately useless, fooling many researchers.)"
Conceptual processing IS that way. And yes, it IS hard.
The rest of his article is not worth discussing, and can be summed up with his phrase (which is correct): Software sucks.
Gates' "Foundation" is a stock laundering scheme to allow him to control other corporations through the investments of the Foundation and to make him look good to offset his convicted monopolist status.
If you look at the Federal philanthropy rules, the Foundation is required to spend at least 3% of its assets. It barely does. A couple years ago, when the Gates's were donating another $3 billion, it was around 1.18% IIRC and the article I read said they'd have to pump up the issuance to meet Fed regulations.
If you look at those "huge" sums given to charity listed on their Web site, almost everything over one million dollars is usually handed out OVER MULTIPLE YEARS - sometimes over ten years or more - meaning the impact on the Foundation's income is negligible.
Do the math - they have nearly $30 billion in assets, and they hand out maybe a billion a year. Do you think with those assets, they can't get at least ten percent return on their investments?
That's THREE BILLION more bucks under Gates control PER YEAR. And he hands out less than half.
Obviously the people who DO get money from the Foundation are benefiting, and presumably that's a good thing for them - but it's not done because Gates is a fucking philanthropist.
It's a stock-laundering and PR scheme - nothing more. Anybody who believes differently is a moron.
The optical media hardware industry can't get CURRENT DVD media to work reliably in all CURRENT drives. Go to any of the major DVD recording Web sites and see how many people have insane problems trying to find media to work with their drives. How are they going to get this one to work?
If you can measure the failure rate, it's too high. And DVD media are a nightmare to get working reliably. Only buy top-of-the-line Taiyo Yuden media and DVD drives made in Japan. Nobody else - meaning the Taiwanese - can get it to work reliably.
Call me when there are HD drives on the market and media that work together RELIABLY.
Given that the product is intended to be a public-facing one on their Web site, the CIO had better have some clue that the people under him have some clue. If the people under him have no clue how it works, how they can judge its effectiveness - and therefore its impact on their marketing? Obviously they didn't.
Obviously, nobody at Wal-Mart has a clue - big surprise - like everybody already knows Wal-Mart is clueless.
Mod your remark redundant again.
Re:Recommend Everyone Read This Guy's Comment
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 1
I think you missed his point - Kinsella IS a Libertarian. He may well be wrong about what percentage of socialists oppose the patent system, but he's quite well aware of how most socialists believe in state power.
As an aside to this, why is it that everytime I post a comment to Slashdot using Firefox running on Mandriva 2006 Linux, my Shorewall firewall says/. is running a port scan attack on my system?
And as a further aside, why is it that everytime I try to save a Web page to a file folder on Mandriva Linux 2006 using Firefox, that Firefox pops up the right-click context menu, then after I click on the save item, and the save dialog comes up, it pops up the right=click context menu AGAIN on top of the save dialog - and it won't go away unless I cancel the dialog and then try again?
Or sometimes I try to save a Web page to a directory to which I have full permissions, and Firefox says the page cannot be saved "due to an unknown error", and recommends I save the page elsewhere? This appears to be some sort of MIME-type handling issue, but I can't be sure.
Firefox is beginning to have as many bugs and problems as IE 5. If this shit keeps up, I'm going to switch back to Opera, which is now free as well.
READ MY LIPS, FIREFOX DEVELOPERS! FIX THE FUCKING BUGS *BEFORE* YOU ADD ANY MORE SO-CALLED FEATURES!
Another complaint - the moronic Mandriva MenuDrake. Click on the Menu Editor from the Start button, go through the whole process of modifying the menu, save the result. Now see that NOTHING has been updated! I had to go in as root and modify the "System Menu" to get a change to take effect. Supposedly Mandriva has changed the menu handling to merge menus from several sources in the system. Obviously this is working like shit...
Is EVERYBODY in the IT industry - commercial AND open source - a complete fucking MORON?
Trying to match user preferences based on matching text strings!
How stupid can you get?
Everybody else matches on previous customer preferences. You click on an item, they check everybody else's purchases of that item, and then see what else everybody else bought, and recommend the same to you. That makes some sense. It uses humans as the matching algorithm.
Trying to match "black" with "chocolate" is just fucking stupid.
Computers do NOT do conceptual processing. Until they do, this sort of thing is braindead.
Steven Kinsella's comment (which is in the Business Week comments about the article) follows - should be required reading:
Nickname: Stephan Kinsella Review: As a practicing patent attorney, I've observed that both proponents and opponents of the patent system use unprincipled, flawed, utilitarian (wealth-maximization) reasoning to support their position. The primarily principled opponents of patents are anti-industrialist, anti-private-property socialists. The solution is to realize that there is a non-socialist, pro-property rights, principled case against patents, as I have laid out in my article Against Intellectual Property, available at Mises.org http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf> . Date reviewed: Jan 3, 2006 8:54 PM
Recommend Everyone Read This Guy's Comment
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And his article referenced therein.
Nickname: Stephan Kinsella Review: As a practicing patent attorney, I've observed that both proponents and opponents of the patent system use unprincipled, flawed, utilitarian (wealth-maximization) reasoning to support their position. The primarily principled opponents of patents are anti-industrialist, anti-private-property socialists. The solution is to realize that there is a non-socialist, pro-property rights, principled case against patents, as I have laid out in my article Against Intellectual Property, available at Mises.org http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf> . Date reviewed: Jan 3, 2006 8:54 PM
"Even if you do the worst possible thing -- put one 4.3 GB tar.gz file onto a DVD -- a single bad sector will only make 50% of the data unusable on the average."
That depends on the software you use to try to recover the data - my experience in this regard is not good. I DO have tools for that sort of thing, but most people wouldn't.
As for tape drives, I've just been through an extensive discussion about them elsewhere in the threads - which ended when I cited at industry study that showed 30% of tape backups fail due to media corruption or drive failure or operator error. I also cited a study showing that the industry is moving to disk-to-disk and disk-to-disk-to-tape for local recovery and backup-to-archive operations. I have no objection to using tape for archival backup - meaning stuff that is merely being saved with no expectation of requiring it to be restored in order to continue to operate. But if you're backing up mission-critical data and you need to be sure of restoring it to get back in operation, disk-to-disk is the only way to go - it's faster and far more reliable and the expense is irrelevant compared to the costs of not being in operation. Further backup to tape for "last-ditch" restoration (if your building blows up) is also okay, but for that data, I'd recommend not to both archive and compress simultaneously - the risk is too high.
Compression and archiving at the same time should only be used for data that is strictly archival and not a mission-critical backup.
You people need to realize that the major problem with the IT industry is that, as Woody Allen once put it, "Nothing works and nobody cares". Much of what the industry produces is complicated and not reliable - that includes hardware and software. You simply cannot rely on somebody's promises that all this crap is going to work and work well together. Therefore it is imperative to keep it as simple as possible - disk to disk backups with no compression or archiving removes extra steps that can compromise reliability. It's that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Within fifty years, nanotech will make all of this utterly irrelevant.
Even if it doesn't - in fact, BECAUSE it didn't, if that's what happens - destroying most of human civilization will be a positive thing.
This, of course, is exactly what Lovelock is promoting - just like Ehrlich did with his "Population Bomb" book back in the 70's. Ehrlich recommended reducing the world's several billion population back to 500 million. Then he explicitly excluded an possible solutions such as sending people into space or whatever. In other words, he was implicitly advocating the genocide of nearly two and a half billion people. Why? Because a couple hundred million might be starving by the year 2000.
What's wrong with this picture?
Lovelock is doing the same. He YEARNS for a collapsed human civilization, which is why he is advocating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Unfortunately for him, we Transhumans have our OWN self-fulfilling prophecy which is consideraly more potent than his. We will eliminate the human condition, and thus eliminate human problems, including any negative environmental effects by human technology.
By the way, the Gaia Hypothesis was so much mystical horseshit anyway.
In Russia, gramnies blog YOU!
OR:
1) Start a blog.
2) ?????
3) PROFIT!!
Are there any other
I can't wait for the Ambassador to Iraq being detained as a terrorist suspect on arriving in Washington...
Any day now we'll hear the news.
That will make it clear how good the system is (insert sarcasm tag here)
It's the new ones everybody can't wait to see! Well, you're right, of course, they won't be really "new", since they'll be the result of the same poor design, spaghetti code, and useless "features" Windows has always had and always will have.
I've repeatedly said that Microsoft will NEVER have a secure system, or one even approaching that ideal, while Gates is in charge of the company. The company culture created and sustained by his presence simply won't allow it. Their focus is on marketing pointless features and eye candy - not advancing the state of the art in operating systems. Always has been, always will be. Not to mention using questionably legal contracts with suppliers and distributors to enforce their hold on the market. Not to mention fighting for the technology lock-in of their users. Not to mention their total disinterest in allowing their users to retain any rights to the use of their own systems.
A lot of my problems would be gone today.
Get with the program!
We have a "faith-based" government now - so Symantec has to follow suit. They obviously believe the Bush staffer that said people who live in reality aren't the real movers and shakers of the world. You can only "move and shake" (or is that "shake and bake"?) if you lie well.
Look at these authors Leroy and Frey - fraud sells, baby! Fraud sells!
Look at Brangelina! For a year there was no relationship, and now she's pregnant! That's REAL "shake and bake!"
I've used Kerio Personal Firewall (free to home users) for the last several years with no problems. I used version 2.1.5 which is less intrusive than the latest versions which tend to have too many features that are nagging. You can get the last freeware version 2.1.5 here
Null sheen, omae! AOL made the mistake of hooking up with Warner - you think at least one Western dragon wasn't involved in that blunder?
I have it from his chief hacker herself that Dunkelzahn was personally behind Schmidt at Google - and a certain German equivalent is behind Gates!
You know the word - never trust a dragon!
I think it's more "Psycho Circus"...
Look, let me explain it to you in simple terms.
I've read Lanier's crap many times. He has no respect for anybody else's ideas either, or he wouldn't put forth the lame arguments he does. He is full of himself because a lot of people have told him he's smart. So he disses a lot of very smart people like K. Eric Drexler who ARE respectful of competing ideas.
"Respect for others" is a two-way street. I've seen little of it in my life and none of it directed at me. Your attacks on me, implying I'm too young to have a clue and the like, are nothing more than the same couched in bullshit righteousness.
Stuff it where the sun don't shine, I'm not impressed.
That's the cost of 30-40 paperbacks, or 15-20 hardcovers.
Since the average American reads maybe one book a year, who's going to spend that kind of money to read that one book?
This is why readers have never taken off - too damn expensive. They aren't LAPTOPS, for Pete's sakes, which cost twice as much but do far more.
Produce a reader that costs $50, people may buy them.
I have a long list.
If somebody submits a story that generates a lot of personal discussion about the submitter, split the story into "on topic" and "on submitter" sections, and let people post in the appropriate section.
In fact, who cares one way or the other? If I see a story I want to read, and I hit the first page of posts only to find it's all bullshit, I'll either spot-check a couple other pages to see if there's anything else to read, or I'll move on.
I don't spend all day on
I'm quite aware of what he's done.
He's what I call a "Geek Moron" - a brilliant person in his technical field with no fucking clue in any other matter. The IT industry is full of these people.
As for being a teenager, I'm 57 years old. Intelligence is no measure of rationality. You'll learn that as YOU get older.
But he's correct here:
"The wild card is the core nature of software. If someone can figure out a way to get rid of brittleness, then the scenario I sketched becomes possible, or even normative. (Don't believe every computer scientist who claims to already know how to get rid of brittleness. It's a hard problem that perversely yields a lot of promising partial results that are ultimately useless, fooling many researchers.)"
Conceptual processing IS that way. And yes, it IS hard.
The rest of his article is not worth discussing, and can be summed up with his phrase (which is correct): Software sucks.
Gates' "Foundation" is a stock laundering scheme to allow him to control other corporations through the investments of the Foundation and to make him look good to offset his convicted monopolist status.
If you look at the Federal philanthropy rules, the Foundation is required to spend at least 3% of its assets. It barely does. A couple years ago, when the Gates's were donating another $3 billion, it was around 1.18% IIRC and the article I read said they'd have to pump up the issuance to meet Fed regulations.
If you look at those "huge" sums given to charity listed on their Web site, almost everything over one million dollars is usually handed out OVER MULTIPLE YEARS - sometimes over ten years or more - meaning the impact on the Foundation's income is negligible.
Do the math - they have nearly $30 billion in assets, and they hand out maybe a billion a year. Do you think with those assets, they can't get at least ten percent return on their investments?
That's THREE BILLION more bucks under Gates control PER YEAR. And he hands out less than half.
Obviously the people who DO get money from the Foundation are benefiting, and presumably that's a good thing for them - but it's not done because Gates is a fucking philanthropist.
It's a stock-laundering and PR scheme - nothing more. Anybody who believes differently is a moron.
The optical media hardware industry can't get CURRENT DVD media to work reliably in all CURRENT drives. Go to any of the major DVD recording Web sites and see how many people have insane problems trying to find media to work with their drives. How are they going to get this one to work?
If you can measure the failure rate, it's too high. And DVD media are a nightmare to get working reliably. Only buy top-of-the-line Taiyo Yuden media and DVD drives made in Japan. Nobody else - meaning the Taiwanese - can get it to work reliably.
Call me when there are HD drives on the market and media that work together RELIABLY.
In other words, call me in two or three years.
Given that the product is intended to be a public-facing one on their Web site, the CIO had better have some clue that the people under him have some clue. If the people under him have no clue how it works, how they can judge its effectiveness - and therefore its impact on their marketing? Obviously they didn't.
Obviously, nobody at Wal-Mart has a clue - big surprise - like everybody already knows Wal-Mart is clueless.
Mod your remark redundant again.
I think you missed his point - Kinsella IS a Libertarian. He may well be wrong about what percentage of socialists oppose the patent system, but he's quite well aware of how most socialists believe in state power.
Mod your comment redundant.
As an aside to this, why is it that everytime I post a comment to Slashdot using Firefox running on Mandriva 2006 Linux, my Shorewall firewall says
And as a further aside, why is it that everytime I try to save a Web page to a file folder on Mandriva Linux 2006 using Firefox, that Firefox pops up the right-click context menu, then after I click on the save item, and the save dialog comes up, it pops up the right=click context menu AGAIN on top of the save dialog - and it won't go away unless I cancel the dialog and then try again?
Or sometimes I try to save a Web page to a directory to which I have full permissions, and Firefox says the page cannot be saved "due to an unknown error", and recommends I save the page elsewhere? This appears to be some sort of MIME-type handling issue, but I can't be sure.
Firefox is beginning to have as many bugs and problems as IE 5. If this shit keeps up, I'm going to switch back to Opera, which is now free as well.
READ MY LIPS, FIREFOX DEVELOPERS! FIX THE FUCKING BUGS *BEFORE* YOU ADD ANY MORE SO-CALLED FEATURES!
Another complaint - the moronic Mandriva MenuDrake. Click on the Menu Editor from the Start button, go through the whole process of modifying the menu, save the result. Now see that NOTHING has been updated! I had to go in as root and modify the "System Menu" to get a change to take effect. Supposedly Mandriva has changed the menu handling to merge menus from several sources in the system. Obviously this is working like shit...
Is EVERYBODY in the IT industry - commercial AND open source - a complete fucking MORON?
Trying to match user preferences based on matching text strings!
How stupid can you get?
Everybody else matches on previous customer preferences. You click on an item, they check everybody else's purchases of that item, and then see what else everybody else bought, and recommend the same to you. That makes some sense. It uses humans as the matching algorithm.
Trying to match "black" with "chocolate" is just fucking stupid.
Computers do NOT do conceptual processing. Until they do, this sort of thing is braindead.
And the primary buffer panel just fell off my ship!
My ship don't crash! If it crashes, you crashed her!
Steven Kinsella's comment (which is in the Business Week comments about the article) follows - should be required reading:
> .
Nickname: Stephan Kinsella
Review: As a practicing patent attorney, I've observed that both proponents and opponents of the patent system use unprincipled, flawed, utilitarian (wealth-maximization) reasoning to support their position. The primarily principled opponents of patents are anti-industrialist, anti-private-property socialists. The solution is to realize that there is a non-socialist, pro-property rights, principled case against patents, as I have laid out in my article Against Intellectual Property, available at Mises.org http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
Date reviewed: Jan 3, 2006 8:54 PM
And his article referenced therein.
Nickname: Stephan Kinsella
Review: As a practicing patent attorney, I've observed that both proponents and opponents of the patent system use unprincipled, flawed, utilitarian (wealth-maximization) reasoning to support their position. The primarily principled opponents of patents are anti-industrialist, anti-private-property socialists. The solution is to realize that there is a non-socialist, pro-property rights, principled case against patents, as I have laid out in my article Against Intellectual Property, available at Mises.org http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
Date reviewed: Jan 3, 2006 8:54 PM
"Even if you do the worst possible thing -- put one 4.3 GB tar.gz file onto a DVD -- a single bad sector will only make 50% of the data unusable on the average."
That depends on the software you use to try to recover the data - my experience in this regard is not good. I DO have tools for that sort of thing, but most people wouldn't.
As for tape drives, I've just been through an extensive discussion about them elsewhere in the threads - which ended when I cited at industry study that showed 30% of tape backups fail due to media corruption or drive failure or operator error. I also cited a study showing that the industry is moving to disk-to-disk and disk-to-disk-to-tape for local recovery and backup-to-archive operations. I have no objection to using tape for archival backup - meaning stuff that is merely being saved with no expectation of requiring it to be restored in order to continue to operate. But if you're backing up mission-critical data and you need to be sure of restoring it to get back in operation, disk-to-disk is the only way to go - it's faster and far more reliable and the expense is irrelevant compared to the costs of not being in operation. Further backup to tape for "last-ditch" restoration (if your building blows up) is also okay, but for that data, I'd recommend not to both archive and compress simultaneously - the risk is too high.
Compression and archiving at the same time should only be used for data that is strictly archival and not a mission-critical backup.
You people need to realize that the major problem with the IT industry is that, as Woody Allen once put it, "Nothing works and nobody cares". Much of what the industry produces is complicated and not reliable - that includes hardware and software. You simply cannot rely on somebody's promises that all this crap is going to work and work well together. Therefore it is imperative to keep it as simple as possible - disk to disk backups with no compression or archiving removes extra steps that can compromise reliability. It's that simple.