Harken back to the recent past, where workplace regulations were a dream, businesses routinely exposed their workers to deadly risk to save pitiful amounts of money, everyone worked weekends, and the minimum wage was zero dollars and zero cents.
Fighting an epic, intensely violent and brutal struggle against their aristocrats (adverseries so used to victory they had become surprisingly complacent), the proletariat of America carved out a victory, and they did it without abandoning capitalism or resorting to the dangers of political revolution - though we certainly came close on a number of occasions.
We now live in shocking wealth and splendor - a victory for the "common man" made possible through a lively democratic process and a series of reforms that dragged business owners, wailing, kicking and screaming, into the modern age - where the entire standards of what was acceptable in terms of working conditions, wages, and workplace safety changed. Yes, it cost more money. And... what a surprise - with a newly propsperous middle-class, it was also intensely profitable.
Free Trade was thus inevitable. It's the prisoner's dillemma of the modern business.
The issue has proved a bit too subtle for most people to grasp thus far, even as it impoverished America and eviscerated the progress of the middle and lower classes, handing victory after victory to regressive enterprises.
The question free trade raises is simple. Is it cheaper to produce goods and services in a society where the underclass is abused?
Why be surprised?
The American South used to produce cotton so cheap, you'd think it was picked by slaves.
The sad irony is that (with only a little help), we're doing it to ourselves. All I have to do is hold up cheap jeans, and the underclass will skewer itself on its own greed, happily selling themselves out to save money at the cash register, never wondering about the hidden costs of trade without policy, never quite realizing that they had just bought back into laissez faire capitalism.
And yes, when you admit that national boundaries can contain arbitrary laws but not trade, that is exactly what you just returned to. The fleet, famously, travels as fast as its slowest ship.
In America, when we legislated ourselves a decent life, we made it impossible to compete with those who lived indecent ones.
Of course, we shouldn't have to compete with them.
The logical extension is to ask a farm worker to find a job in a field full of slaves. His value is reduced to nothing.
"But Slavery is Illegal!" the farmworker shouts. "Not in Namibia," the slaves reply.
Free Trade is a code word. It stands for the elimination of the 1st world's gains for its ordinary people - by forcing them to compete with what they are bound to lose against: the economies of worker abuse.
Its proponents depend on the American population's ignorance of the issues. You can talk around it in circles with most people, while all the time they have carefully insulated themselves from the basic issue at hand:
Is it OK if I break the law, as long as I do it out of your sight? To people you don't care about? Maybe people in another country?
Free Trade is supposed to reduce the importance of nations and bring about the ascendance of a global community. And it has! The American Working Class is no longer in America. They are in India, China, and Indonesia! Mexico, and Costa Rica, and Guatemala! They are in Afghanistan, growing our opium, and in Iraq, pumping our oil.
So I welcome you all, prosperous last descendants of the old 1st world dream, back into the world you created.
Welcome to India. I hope they really do let you go. Just don't be surprised when you realize it's a one-way trip.
Most of the basic stuff is under control - windows update is operating mostly to the extent that it should, and I understand XP will now be packaging a software firewall, so after installing the requisite antivirus software, the next most important thing is to try to head off the more egregious trouble one gets into while surfing the web.
Microsoft's answer to Java's security sandbox was ActiveX controls, code signing and carte blanche. Many people are now paying for this bullshit cavalier short-sightedness with limitless frustration caused by unscupulous (and copiously predicted) abuses of the system.
Microsoft, and their many partisans, laughed off the sandbox as a cumbersome, unnecessary and losing solution. And now we are reaping the whirlwind.
Even some of the more "reputable" sites I've visited lately will popup-spam you to death, and almost instantly from one of the popups you will see the rapidly-becoming-infamous dialog box:
Do you want to install and run "Important Update From The United States Of America Consumer Outreach Group - Click Yes, Because You Want Your Computer To Miss Out On All These Exciting New Opportunities - Absolutely Free - Dont Click No!!!"? Publisher authenticity verified by Verisign Commercial Software Publishers etc. etc.
And of course half the hapless idiots in the world click yes, and are forever running slowly, crashing, relaying their all their activities hither and yon, getting 5x as many popups as before (with more and more malware in each).
Before you point out that Java is ultimately the same (in that the same mechanism, code signing by a "trusted authority" controls privilege escalation) let me point out that with ActiveX this is the end of the road, and you are entirely screwed, where as with a sandbox like Java gives you, it is not difficult for someone to simply selectively disable various privilege escalations in a very fine-grained way.
Fine, you will say - I will just disable autoinstall, which is truthfully what many people (and especially many companies) do. Great. With IE you're stuck with a much less interesting web (who cares, most people grumble) - but needlessly, because with Java I can just disable privilege escalation, and still get lots of interesting things.
If sandboxes were mandated, Flash, Director, etc. and all of the various things, past and future, that make the web interesting would have been written to run in the sandbox. But now, from the people who gave us the email clients that instantly run scripts in the emails they receive, we have 1-click-computer-destruction made easy for any "entrepeneur" anywhere in the world, with the way paved by well-meaning "just click yes" advice from back in the day when Macromedia was the only signer you'd encounter. The whole infrastructure is under attack, exactly like we said it would be.
The only surprise is that it took this many years for abuses of the system to reach the fever pitch they're at now. And to be safe, now our only way to look out for those who can't look out for themselves is to lock the whole machine down to the point that tremendous opportunities will be missed.
Thanks, Microsoft. I could go through some hoops to sanitize your browser, but it's easier just to switch to Firebird.
OK, we have a "computer" here in the lab that's crashing a lot, and losing people's data, and we have this new theory for how to fix it. I don't exactly know how these "computers" work, of course, so we can't be sure... but we have some ideas gleaned we from when we used to just get rid of them when they broke. A lot of times, we'd take a computer out of the garbage pile and see what was inside. They're mostly green plastic in there. Lots of very small, small parts - too small for the eye to see. No one knows how they all work together, yet, but we put one in an X-Ray and gave it an MRI and we notice that certain parts are hotter than others when the computer is doing different tasks. Also, we put a computer in the blender and then studied the little chunks under a microscope. So we're definitely making progress.
Based on all this we figure Jim in maintenance can insert some electrical probes into the "chips" and send in little shocks with just the right voltage to stop Microsoft Word from crashing so much. Plus we think it might really help our Quake 3 framerates.
We think this could be better than the best idea we've had so far, having computer therapists sit with them and press different keys to try to recreate past successes we've had by trial and error. It couldn't be worse than our previous attempts, which involved just putting unruly computers in the closet until they got better on their own, or administering electric shocks to the outside of the case, or (my favorite) just taking the sucker down to the shop and really giving it a good whack on the drill press.
Your prerogative, of course. If you paid close attention you will see that most of my complaints stem from a single deficiency in their presentation - that they led with the fluff, and their real work, if it's on there at all, is somewhat obscured. So it's difficult to evaluate whether this research is interesting or not. I hope you can see, I think their ideas are interesting too. I just can't tell yet if any of their interesting ideas are actually being demonstrated, which is already a bad sign.
You should consider the importance of skepticism. I think you will find, especially if you spend much time in an academic environment, that not all lines of research, or all researchers, have an equal chance of paying off. Worse, if you humor them all with endlessly open-minded ears, it's you that won't get the progress you expect. For every person doing real work, there are hundreds of others who, whether from lack of ability or desire, just want to phone it in and retire comfortably, or worse, float glitz and hype instead of real results.
There are plenty of times you must point to something and say, "justify it." It's certainly routine, as well as essential for the health of the academic community, for your colleagues in your field to challenge your presentations criticially rather than close their eyes and embrace you. This is not the liberal arts; this is science. This adverserial system is mirrored across many kinds of human endeavor and has served us very well over the millenia. It's very important in the way we collectively accomplish intellectual tasks.
I fully hope some advocate for the project will arrive and engage in a debate (a fiesty one, even) - perhaps then we'll learn what, if anything, actually research oriented is happening in this project, or if it is indeed all theater. But you haven't done anything except be hurt on their behalf and toss a few humorous insults. Better you should argue the substance instead.
By the way, what is the evolutionary aspect of it? I read their teaser about "implicit voting" and Vialence, and they drop the term alife, but are they actually using a genetic algorithm? If so, how does it work?
They have a good web designer and have clearly purchased the top of the line speech synthesizer (which has recorded canned audio clips narrating a few snippets of text for them)... they claim "all the voices you encounter on this site are generated by computers." Congratulations. Kraftwerk has been doing this trick since the 80's. Musical stings to provide ambience for different "ghost activities..." Little PHPbb posts about each ghost's personality that sounds like something cut from Starship Titanic's promotional materials...
The papers on their site that I've skimmed were extremely "light." They were at least suggestive of interesting ideas (albeit ones that have a nothing to do with AI and everything to do with human-computer interaction... "ambience," new ideas for interfaces, which seem promising or at least interesting). Their "main paper" is a 404.
So they're not exactly leading with the great breakthrough that makes their ghosts possible. Can anyone more familiar with the project comment? It looks like a lot of fancy dressing on the same kind of waste-of-time vanilla AI project (yet-another-unambitious-stab-at-natural-language- processing) that's been going on in countless CS departments around the world for decades...
What's the real meat of this project? Have they really accomplished anything of interest from an AI or user interface perspective? Or is their main accomplishment an unusually skillful PR coup for themselves?
Many of you will remember the brouhaha over GTA3: Vice City and the phrase "Kill all the Hatians."
It was a big stink - bigger than any of the stuff you thought would be worse (you can kill police, or anyone for that matter, in the game) that ended in Rockstar actually changing the game - they now only push a "patched" version to stores AFAIK.
I was wondering why we don't demand an apology from Francis Ford Coppola about the Godfather movies (to which the GTA series is often, for obvious reasons, compared). After all, there's a line in one about black people being animals "who have no souls."
Then again, that was said by a character, not by the screenwriter.
Isn't it interesting that sometimes we're capable of knowing the difference, and other times we're not?
People apparently love these "gotcha" stories. They have no relation to the facts, and are frightening in their ignorance about the basic issues. I mean, distinguishing between something a character is saying and something the game/movie's makers are saying is a pretty basic feat of human intelligence. Of course the context is everything - the context of the line in the game is a gang war (and "the hatains" are one of the gangs in the game). But when it's time to worry about how many people are watching your news program rather than the competitions, a scare story, a little race baiting, even when the facts aren't exactly straight, can slip through.
Especially when it's a video game.
Where are the defenders of all Hatians now? Probably advocating Edward Norton be locked up for being a Nazi (since he played one in American History X).
Apparently we still hold games to a different standard than movies, even when these games are obviously made for adults, and are rated accordingly. If the game were a movie you'd be laughed out of the room for talking about it like that.
And the amazing thing is that Rockstar has caved to this kind of idiocy.
So what's the point of all this?
If Rockstar feels they have to edit everything in their products to fly this far under the stupid-radar, then they will essentially be neutering their product - which succeeds in a large part on the basis of its funny, irreverent, transgressive "creative" (i.e. game design and story, which are, in this as in many cases, inextricable).
I'm wondering how San Andreas will stack up - if they still have their spine after the "Hatian Incident." If they PC'd and PG-13'd the series, I predict an adverse response from the audience, and at the "box office."
It's because slashdot doesn't have software for painting "actual technical facts" a different color than the rest of the text. People have to figure things out with critical thinking.
Critical thinking swiftly discards people who contradict things like this in the source article (by an order of magnitude or two) without providing anything to back them up.
Now you cite a source - that's a different story. (This URL, right?)
So, any idea why these guys say 0.2mW, and Intel says 300mW?
Frankly, wireless USB sounds less interesting to me. Well, it's a threat to Wifi, from the sound of it. It's really, really fast and power hungry. It sounds primarily for unwiring our desk-bound, non-mobile computer peripherals from the computer. But then we will have to plug them all into the wall instead. So there are a few that had power anyway and now we've cut the number of cables from 2 to 1 - OK. But quite a few the only cable was USB (and that was providing power) anyway. It wouldn't be a viable solution for things like wireless mouses and keyboards, for instance. And I don't think I'd want that instead of bluetooth for the PDA/phone or PDA/computer link.
There are a lot of applications where very low power (1 mw!) is much more important than bandwidth.
Look, you said: "Class 1 Bluetooth (100m range) is going nowhere, because both devices need to be class 1."
That's deceptive. It's simple. The range limit of two class 2 or 3 devices is not equal to the range limit of a class 2 or 3 device and a class 1 device. Good class 1 devices are geared to communicate at a distance with class 2 or 3 devices.
I was skeptical about it too, but it works.
Try this yourself if you don't believe me.
Class 1 is not going nowhere. It is a smart potential replacement for WIFI in the home.
As I said, I have done so (i.e. hotsync, SMB, use the internet, at abnormal distance) many times. For instance, I believe I was at about 25 meters when I first posted. Of course environment, interference, and the quality of your equipment will vary the results - I'm not saying it will work for everybody, and I doubt many will get the whole 100 meters, but it definitely works for me, and if you read the literature you can see why. If you design your receiver and antenna correctly, you can compensate for a low power transmitter.
By the way, all use of bluetooth requires both transmitting and receiving.
Both devices do not need to be class 1. I understand the principle, which is that the class 1 device has a strong transmitter and the class 3 device has a weak one, but I have simply verified experimentally that it works. Not to 100 meters yet, although I suppose at this point a 100 meter walk is in order, but already to at least half that.
I did find language that referred to this online. Unfortunately I did not bookmark it. It basically comes down to the quality and sensitivity of the receiving hardware, which is purposefully designed to receive class 2 and 3 signals from a greater distance.
on a clie peg-ux50. I predict enderle is wrong, because of a simple observation i have made from several weeks of using this device. WIFI kills the battery nearly instantly - you can practically watch the meter drain. You would not get more than an hour or two. Bluetooth seems to draw nearly nothing. I have been surfing for several hours, and the battery is at 87%.
There is simply no comparison to being uncabled from your phone, and the $30 USB pc adapter has a 100 meter range that I have personally seen at least 50 of.
For local wireless nets with realistic power consumption, there seems to be no other game in town. I'm sure people have trouble, but it works effortlessly for me. I am guessing it will remain comfortably in its niche for some time. A welcome thing.
I disagree. There is an easily understandable argument that our ability to write and maintain trouble-free code depends on our ability to easily understand our language. Every additional complexity, even if it results in a minor or moderate additional amount of thinking, is drawing on a "finite" reserve of "bandwidth" that the reader has when interpreting written work, and increasing the likelihood for error or misunderstanding.
The ability to represent more sophisticated mathematical calculations more tersely and ultimately in forms more familiar to mathematicians comes at a cost. Prolog, for instance, is highly expressive - but prolog code will quickly escape the author, and her successors', grasp. Your implicit argument for code which is more like conventional mathematical notation (used for "hundreds of years") sounds like a plea for "natural language programming." (English has also been used for X's of years.)
Yes, more complex operators _may be_ more familiar to (some!) humans. That does not make them part of a better programming practice.
I could see a case for a math-oriented language or toolset with more complex operators and datatypes. (To be clear, since people seem to be confused about this, "operator overloading" is not the same as a langauge with multi-functional operators.) But how appropriate is that for a general purpose language? Reasonable people can disagree. But open-ended operator overloading is bad in every case. If your goal is to reach correctness, and stay there, you want to minimize the complexity of your operators in any case. If you want your work to be safe and useful, people need to develop new operator behaviors as if they were creating a new langauge, and encounter them in the field as if in the context of learning a new language. With much less gravity than that, the pain starts.
I believe it is short-sighted to ignore the obvious human factors in the equation, so to speak. There is a trade-off in "walking farther towards the language" to express your mathematical functions, but in the real-world cases I have seen (where one has deep math in non-standard data types) the effort to express things with method calls was not nearly as onerous in fact as it was in principle, and you immediately gain maintainability and readability.
Compact, highly expressive languages with lots of complex operators may be useful for mathematical experimentation, but we are talking about writing code, not using Mathematica. You need to know why it's slow. Where it's leaking memory. Why it crashes on Joe's computer and not Jim's. And you need to do this on a deadline. There may even be lives staked on the correctness of your code. And so I would say it is beyond short sighted to trade the clarity, simplicity, predictability and transparency of a language for keystrokes and clever expressions.
I see what you are saying. Well, it's a balance, reasonable people will disagree, and who knows in the end. The compiler flag is a good idea. It's all a matter of degrees. Most programmers are not mathematicians, and I still say the more complicated you make your operators, the more trouble you'll get into.
And to your specific question, the simple fact is that you can define your operators however you like - when you create the language - which can be bad or good, depending on your decisions - and this is not operator overloading (which is always bad).
My central point is that that operators are 1-letter function names. You just don't want them doing a dozen different things depending on circumstances that aren't immediately visually apparent.
You may find it difficult to handle math if you can't treat it like algebra on the line. I find it difficult to debug your code when I have to stare at your code for longer to figure out what is actually happening. When troubleshooting becomes really more complex, then you have things like mars probes landing at the wrong velocity and so forth. You will just throw up your hands, but I will be telling you why it was more likely that someone would make a mistake.
So the source of my confidence in my pronouncement is that after a decade I have never a place where there was so much "good" use of operator overloading that wasn't more than overshadowed by the problems that came from it.
This may be a function of the kind of programming I've done, but I just don't see a lot of deep math in non-standard data types where the method rule really makes it as bad as you say. It is often a lot easier to express yourself with methods clearly than people admit...
I don't think taking clever advantage of the order of operations is functional value. This is the closest you can get, but I would say it is still only saving typing.
You are arguing that because you are also reorganizing things on the line, your code is easier to understand.
But you would never write case 1:
a = divide(add(b, sqrt(subtract(multiply(4, multiply(a, c)), b)), times(2, c))
You would write case 2:
a = (b + sqrt(4 * a * c - b)) / (2 * c)
Unless you really wanted case 3:
a = mySpecialDivide(mySpecialAdd(b, mySpecialSqrt(mySpecialSubtract(mySpecialMultiply( 4, mySpecialMultiply(a, c)), b)), mySpecialTimes(2, c))
And yes, I would rather maintain case 3! You see, it is very difficult not to abuse operator overloading. The issue is how quickly and how well you will understand code by looking at it. And my experience has been unambiguously that, yes, it saves typing and is "easier" for the person that wrote it (in theory), and it is a raving nightmare for everyone else... even when it is used "properly."
The language should define the operators. You should define the methods. Saving keystrokes makes so much heartache... and whatever you think you gain by expressing things more closely to algebra you lose when something in one of those operators goes wrong, and it takes you (or more importantly, someone else) longer to figure out what.
I can understand and respect a firm position on open standards and non-proprietary technologies, and that's fine for some folks. On the other hand, I have no problem with Java's licensing or ownership encumberances, and I know I am not alone. The source is open enough that crucial problems, even in the VM, can be fixed by me (rather than begging and whining and being ignored for years, or writing ugly workarounds). In practice I have no issues at all. Certainly, Java compares favorably to things like.Net on this score.
Some thoughts:
Java genericity has no special support in the runtime, which limits the type safety it can provide.
True.
Generics over primitive types are boxed, meaning they are inefficient.
Collections were already boxing primitives. How often do you think this will come up for you in the real world? Can you come up with a convincing example?
Java's native code interface is still inefficient and complex.
Funny, I've used it for a few different things (in 1.4) and never found it to be either. But perhaps if you made a more specific complaint...
Java still lacks value classes and operator overloading, making it a poor choice for applications involving numerics or graphics.
Pardon my ignorance about value classes; I'm wondering if you can be more specific about when they're really useful and what benefits they have for numerics or graphics?
And finally, when you say operator overloading, you lose me. My opinion of operator overloading is that it is absolutely bad. Let me be clear. It is always bad, under any circumstances, when used for any reason. It has exactly zero functional value, and, as opposed to other kinds of "syntactic sugar" it has a tendency to make code where it is used with any frequency into a confusing, unmaintainable minefield. When advocating for operator overloading you are basically advocating a programming style with 1 letter method names, only it's worse, because you're limited to a few "commonly used" letters.
Thank you for writing. I can see myself in your shoes.
One thing to remember is that America is not such a rich country - we just have rich people. I was very poor - I struggled to keep a roof over my head and eat. I started out typing and and I struggled to get an education here with loans and work. Programming, of course. Already, in just a few years, it's very hard to get a job here in the USA doing that anymore. I know that in a few more years, it will be impossible, and I will have to start over.
But because I struggled against a shitty system to try to get a better life and kind of succeeded, I have a natural respect for you. I see somebody doing the same thing and it makes me happy, really happy. I've never been to India or even close but I hear you guys have big problems, bigger than us, even, so it's good news if there are more jobs there.
I don't know much about economics, but I know enough to know that all these guys here who are really pissed off about outsourcing are pissing in the wind - nobody could ever stop it before when it was with other jobs, and we're less likely to stop it now. It's a fact of life, like the weather.
I don't understand currency markets. All I know is that your currency is worth less than ours, so you can work for "less," even though your "smaller" salary gets you the same stuff mine does, because it's all cheaper for you. I'm still trying to figure that one out.
The only really sad part is that I kind of like programming. I wish I could keep doing it. Maybe I would move to India, to stay in the job, even become a teacher myself, and help more people learn to program, or learn English. But I hear that you guys won't let Americans come and work. That's the only part that seems pretty unfair. So I guess it's working out for the best, but I think you should keep it in mind that our country, ignorant as it is, of course, still welcomes a lot of people into our schools and our businesses, and I wish other places like India would do the same.
I think people would like free trade and free markets a lot more if it just meant that we had to move over to India to keep working, rather than we had no chance to work at all.
But anyway, good luck, and keep doing what you've gotta do. I think you guys are awesome for beating the system, figuring out a good way to make money like that. And don't be mad at Americans if we act like assholes about it all; everybody gets freaked out when things get scary like this - you guys probably will too, when something like this happens where you are.
There's a lot of rumor and inconclusive news about Spirit floating around right now, so this is entirely subjective, but I'm getting the feeling this, too, is a software fault of some kind. Put most simply, you could interpret what we're reading right now as "we received the ACK tone for our instructions but didn't get the data back we expected."
These kinds of problems are not unprecedented, and furthermore I'm under the impression there are options for dealing with even serious OS-level trouble that would shock and awe the average general purpose computer user.
I just couldn't get that upset about watching it bog down, sicken and die... Berman and Braga are stunningly mediocre in my opinion, and, though they let a few interesting ideas or even whole episodes slip by once in a while, I tend to find their work cringe-inducing and unwatchable. And that's from a confirmed advocate of really bad scifi.
After trying to watch 5 minutes of the "average" Voyager episode I feel like I need a shower and then probably a stiff drink. Another alien food joke? Another agonizing "human" moment between characters that spans four commercial breaks? What's the particle of the week, Rick? There have to be community college drama classes that are less painful than this. Or DS9? How about 30 minutes of Why-Pop-Psychology-Has-A-Bad-Reputation with forehead and nose prosthetics for emphasis? If I were forced to watch it I would have fantasies about putting actual liquor in those stupid blue drinks at that alien's bar just because it would be something, anything to halt the impenetrable monotony. Don't even get me started on "Enterprise." Pokemon is more creative than these guys 9 days out of 10. I imagine the writers were raised on a diet of constant, uninterrupted daytime soap operas, but really their kind of dreamlike self-indulgence is hard to find parallels for and is probably in a class by itself. On the bright side, if you want to clear out a room, all you need is some recent Star Trek on tape and a big TV.
Star Trek should pray for a quick death. Maybe after the name is finally wrested from the idiot clutches of the current regime there might be some interesting new work done... but I kind of doubt it. RIP...
Good point. Complacency and ignorance, however, are not particularly novel qualities at our present point in human history. Society has catalysts. They're always popping up; maybe press or politicians, or ordinary people who have thought of a better way. So perhaps it comes down to how a regime suppresses the natural impetus for change. That is why I paint fear as a big part of this - fear on the part of the press, of rival politicians, and even ordinary citizens to speak their mind.
Political movements are organic. Ordinary Germans who opposed parts of the national socialist platform (such as genocide) found themselves mute out of fear, not even because of an elaborate political police apparatus, but because the ideology itself had something of a life of its own in its "hosts." Expressing sympathy for a lower caste could provoke terrible reprisals from "ordinary people." And we certainly have that in America today, where (largely absent a classical, centralized method of control) more and more people perceive a threat (physical, economic, and of course emotional) for too vocally questioning a variety of our prejudices and policies. And that is how a minority begins to dominate a majority.
The history of our country, mirroring the history of most of the world, is bleak. Stratified, monopoly-based, laissez faire "oligarchal capitalism", perfected to the point of feudalism, following on actual, brutal slavery, highly institutionalized mysogyny, the utter dominance of a highly specific subset of a major religion, militant xenophobia... The McCarthy period is particularly instructive today, especially since modern American Neoconservatives are attempting to rehabilitate McCarthy. If you are not familiar with it, simply put, they blacklisted, and often locked up, their political opponents, clearly closing in on the dream of exercising the same free hand with dissidents that the Soviets did. In short, although we are in many respects regressing, we are far, far better off than we have been in the recent past, and we go into the present days of struggle with ignorance and fear armed with new and exceptional tools, and from what is basically a position of extraordinary success.
Complacency is the dingy Lay-Z-Boy of evil, placed too close to the TV set of Ignorance, but Fear is what keeps you from climbing out of it. Although there is a fourth problem, just as effective at keeping people down, which you should especially be careful of: Despair, or Futility. That is, a sense that the world is inherently broken, and attempts to improve it are wasted energy. Accepting witty overgeneralizations about the entire population of a country is a far step in that direction. I find it hard to look at any part of recent history and believe it for a minute.
Slashdot Mirror
Harken back to the recent past, where workplace regulations were a dream, businesses routinely exposed their workers to deadly risk to save pitiful amounts of money, everyone worked weekends, and the minimum wage was zero dollars and zero cents.
Fighting an epic, intensely violent and brutal struggle against their aristocrats (adverseries so used to victory they had become surprisingly complacent), the proletariat of America carved out a victory, and they did it without abandoning capitalism or resorting to the dangers of political revolution - though we certainly came close on a number of occasions.
We now live in shocking wealth and splendor - a victory for the "common man" made possible through a lively democratic process and a series of reforms that dragged business owners, wailing, kicking and screaming, into the modern age - where the entire standards of what was acceptable in terms of working conditions, wages, and workplace safety changed. Yes, it cost more money. And... what a surprise - with a newly propsperous middle-class, it was also intensely profitable.
Free Trade was thus inevitable. It's the prisoner's dillemma of the modern business.
The issue has proved a bit too subtle for most people to grasp thus far, even as it impoverished America and eviscerated the progress of the middle and lower classes, handing victory after victory to regressive enterprises.
The question free trade raises is simple. Is it cheaper to produce goods and services in a society where the underclass is abused?
Why be surprised?
The American South used to produce cotton so cheap, you'd think it was picked by slaves.
The sad irony is that (with only a little help), we're doing it to ourselves. All I have to do is hold up cheap jeans, and the underclass will skewer itself on its own greed, happily selling themselves out to save money at the cash register, never wondering about the hidden costs of trade without policy, never quite realizing that they had just bought back into laissez faire capitalism.
And yes, when you admit that national boundaries can contain arbitrary laws but not trade, that is exactly what you just returned to. The fleet, famously, travels as fast as its slowest ship.
In America, when we legislated ourselves a decent life, we made it impossible to compete with those who lived indecent ones.
Of course, we shouldn't have to compete with them.
The logical extension is to ask a farm worker to find a job in a field full of slaves. His value is reduced to nothing.
"But Slavery is Illegal!" the farmworker shouts. "Not in Namibia," the slaves reply.
Free Trade is a code word. It stands for the elimination of the 1st world's gains for its ordinary people - by forcing them to compete with what they are bound to lose against: the economies of worker abuse.
Its proponents depend on the American population's ignorance of the issues. You can talk around it in circles with most people, while all the time they have carefully insulated themselves from the basic issue at hand:
Is it OK if I break the law, as long as I do it out of your sight? To people you don't care about? Maybe people in another country?
Free Trade is supposed to reduce the importance of nations and bring about the ascendance of a global community. And it has! The American Working Class is no longer in America. They are in India, China, and Indonesia! Mexico, and Costa Rica, and Guatemala! They are in Afghanistan, growing our opium, and in Iraq, pumping our oil.
So I welcome you all, prosperous last descendants of the old 1st world dream, back into the world you created.
Welcome to India. I hope they really do let you go. Just don't be surprised when you realize it's a one-way trip.
Don't forget my favorite, Electroconvulsive Therapy. Still in use today!
Psychotherapy, cognitivie science... today we are about in the leeches and cauterization phase.
Microsoft's answer to Java's security sandbox was ActiveX controls, code signing and carte blanche. Many people are now paying for this bullshit cavalier short-sightedness with limitless frustration caused by unscupulous (and copiously predicted) abuses of the system.
Microsoft, and their many partisans, laughed off the sandbox as a cumbersome, unnecessary and losing solution. And now we are reaping the whirlwind.
Even some of the more "reputable" sites I've visited lately will popup-spam you to death, and almost instantly from one of the popups you will see the rapidly-becoming-infamous dialog box:
And of course half the hapless idiots in the world click yes, and are forever running slowly, crashing, relaying their all their activities hither and yon, getting 5x as many popups as before (with more and more malware in each).
Before you point out that Java is ultimately the same (in that the same mechanism, code signing by a "trusted authority" controls privilege escalation) let me point out that with ActiveX this is the end of the road, and you are entirely screwed, where as with a sandbox like Java gives you, it is not difficult for someone to simply selectively disable various privilege escalations in a very fine-grained way.
Fine, you will say - I will just disable autoinstall, which is truthfully what many people (and especially many companies) do. Great. With IE you're stuck with a much less interesting web (who cares, most people grumble) - but needlessly, because with Java I can just disable privilege escalation, and still get lots of interesting things.
If sandboxes were mandated, Flash, Director, etc. and all of the various things, past and future, that make the web interesting would have been written to run in the sandbox. But now, from the people who gave us the email clients that instantly run scripts in the emails they receive, we have 1-click-computer-destruction made easy for any "entrepeneur" anywhere in the world, with the way paved by well-meaning "just click yes" advice from back in the day when Macromedia was the only signer you'd encounter. The whole infrastructure is under attack, exactly like we said it would be.
The only surprise is that it took this many years for abuses of the system to reach the fever pitch they're at now. And to be safe, now our only way to look out for those who can't look out for themselves is to lock the whole machine down to the point that tremendous opportunities will be missed.
Thanks, Microsoft. I could go through some hoops to sanitize your browser, but it's easier just to switch to Firebird.
OK, we have a "computer" here in the lab that's crashing a lot, and losing people's data, and we have this new theory for how to fix it. I don't exactly know how these "computers" work, of course, so we can't be sure... but we have some ideas gleaned we from when we used to just get rid of them when they broke. A lot of times, we'd take a computer out of the garbage pile and see what was inside. They're mostly green plastic in there. Lots of very small, small parts - too small for the eye to see. No one knows how they all work together, yet, but we put one in an X-Ray and gave it an MRI and we notice that certain parts are hotter than others when the computer is doing different tasks. Also, we put a computer in the blender and then studied the little chunks under a microscope. So we're definitely making progress.
Based on all this we figure Jim in maintenance can insert some electrical probes into the "chips" and send in little shocks with just the right voltage to stop Microsoft Word from crashing so much. Plus we think it might really help our Quake 3 framerates.
We think this could be better than the best idea we've had so far, having computer therapists sit with them and press different keys to try to recreate past successes we've had by trial and error. It couldn't be worse than our previous attempts, which involved just putting unruly computers in the closet until they got better on their own, or administering electric shocks to the outside of the case, or (my favorite) just taking the sucker down to the shop and really giving it a good whack on the drill press.
Somebody call Discover Magazine.
Your prerogative, of course. If you paid close attention you will see that most of my complaints stem from a single deficiency in their presentation - that they led with the fluff, and their real work, if it's on there at all, is somewhat obscured. So it's difficult to evaluate whether this research is interesting or not. I hope you can see, I think their ideas are interesting too. I just can't tell yet if any of their interesting ideas are actually being demonstrated, which is already a bad sign.
You should consider the importance of skepticism. I think you will find, especially if you spend much time in an academic environment, that not all lines of research, or all researchers, have an equal chance of paying off. Worse, if you humor them all with endlessly open-minded ears, it's you that won't get the progress you expect. For every person doing real work, there are hundreds of others who, whether from lack of ability or desire, just want to phone it in and retire comfortably, or worse, float glitz and hype instead of real results.
There are plenty of times you must point to something and say, "justify it." It's certainly routine, as well as essential for the health of the academic community, for your colleagues in your field to challenge your presentations criticially rather than close their eyes and embrace you. This is not the liberal arts; this is science. This adverserial system is mirrored across many kinds of human endeavor and has served us very well over the millenia. It's very important in the way we collectively accomplish intellectual tasks.
I fully hope some advocate for the project will arrive and engage in a debate (a fiesty one, even) - perhaps then we'll learn what, if anything, actually research oriented is happening in this project, or if it is indeed all theater. But you haven't done anything except be hurt on their behalf and toss a few humorous insults. Better you should argue the substance instead.
By the way, what is the evolutionary aspect of it? I read their teaser about "implicit voting" and Vialence, and they drop the term alife, but are they actually using a genetic algorithm? If so, how does it work?
They have a good web designer and have clearly purchased the top of the line speech synthesizer (which has recorded canned audio clips narrating a few snippets of text for them)... they claim "all the voices you encounter on this site are generated by computers." Congratulations. Kraftwerk has been doing this trick since the 80's. Musical stings to provide ambience for different "ghost activities..." Little PHPbb posts about each ghost's personality that sounds like something cut from Starship Titanic's promotional materials...
- processing) that's been going on in countless CS departments around the world for decades...
The papers on their site that I've skimmed were extremely "light." They were at least suggestive of interesting ideas (albeit ones that have a nothing to do with AI and everything to do with human-computer interaction... "ambience," new ideas for interfaces, which seem promising or at least interesting). Their "main paper" is a 404.
So they're not exactly leading with the great breakthrough that makes their ghosts possible. Can anyone more familiar with the project comment? It looks like a lot of fancy dressing on the same kind of waste-of-time vanilla AI project (yet-another-unambitious-stab-at-natural-language
What's the real meat of this project? Have they really accomplished anything of interest from an AI or user interface perspective? Or is their main accomplishment an unusually skillful PR coup for themselves?
Yeah - case in point. Just imagine if they tried to give Mel the same treatment they gave Rockstar.
:)
Actually, that's kind of fun to imagine.
Many of you will remember the brouhaha over GTA3: Vice City and the phrase "Kill all the Hatians."
It was a big stink - bigger than any of the stuff you thought would be worse (you can kill police, or anyone for that matter, in the game) that ended in Rockstar actually changing the game - they now only push a "patched" version to stores AFAIK.
I was wondering why we don't demand an apology from Francis Ford Coppola about the Godfather movies (to which the GTA series is often, for obvious reasons, compared). After all, there's a line in one about black people being animals "who have no souls."
Then again, that was said by a character, not by the screenwriter.
Isn't it interesting that sometimes we're capable of knowing the difference, and other times we're not?
People apparently love these "gotcha" stories. They have no relation to the facts, and are frightening in their ignorance about the basic issues. I mean, distinguishing between something a character is saying and something the game/movie's makers are saying is a pretty basic feat of human intelligence. Of course the context is everything - the context of the line in the game is a gang war (and "the hatains" are one of the gangs in the game). But when it's time to worry about how many people are watching your news program rather than the competitions, a scare story, a little race baiting, even when the facts aren't exactly straight, can slip through.
Especially when it's a video game.
Where are the defenders of all Hatians now? Probably advocating Edward Norton be locked up for being a Nazi (since he played one in American History X).
Apparently we still hold games to a different standard than movies, even when these games are obviously made for adults, and are rated accordingly. If the game were a movie you'd be laughed out of the room for talking about it like that.
And the amazing thing is that Rockstar has caved to this kind of idiocy.
So what's the point of all this?
If Rockstar feels they have to edit everything in their products to fly this far under the stupid-radar, then they will essentially be neutering their product - which succeeds in a large part on the basis of its funny, irreverent, transgressive "creative" (i.e. game design and story, which are, in this as in many cases, inextricable).
I'm wondering how San Andreas will stack up - if they still have their spine after the "Hatian Incident." If they PC'd and PG-13'd the series, I predict an adverse response from the audience, and at the "box office."
It's because slashdot doesn't have software for painting "actual technical facts" a different color than the rest of the text. People have to figure things out with critical thinking.
Critical thinking swiftly discards people who contradict things like this in the source article (by an order of magnitude or two) without providing anything to back them up.
Now you cite a source - that's a different story. (This URL, right?)
So, any idea why these guys say 0.2mW, and Intel says 300mW?
Is Intel mistaken? Or is Staccato?
This is fascinating, but it contradicts the text of the Intel white paper...
They try to get those numbers right for these things.
Please, site some sources! I'd love to know how you plan to do 480 Mbps with 0.2mW!
Right now it just looks like you're a troll, making up numbers to try to be funny.
Let me summarize why Bluetooth is not dead, and wireless USB is not really a competitor for bluetooth:
Wireless USB Power requirements: 300 mw ("with a target of 100 over time")
Bluetooth power requirements: 100 mW, 2.5 mW, 1 mW (the last two are class 2 and 3, the variants widely used.)
Frankly, wireless USB sounds less interesting to me. Well, it's a threat to Wifi, from the sound of it. It's really, really fast and power hungry. It sounds primarily for unwiring our desk-bound, non-mobile computer peripherals from the computer. But then we will have to plug them all into the wall instead. So there are a few that had power anyway and now we've cut the number of cables from 2 to 1 - OK. But quite a few the only cable was USB (and that was providing power) anyway. It wouldn't be a viable solution for things like wireless mouses and keyboards, for instance. And I don't think I'd want that instead of bluetooth for the PDA/phone or PDA/computer link.
There are a lot of applications where very low power (1 mw!) is much more important than bandwidth.
Look, you said: "Class 1 Bluetooth (100m range) is going nowhere, because both devices need to be class 1."
That's deceptive. It's simple. The range limit of two class 2 or 3 devices is not equal to the range limit of a class 2 or 3 device and a class 1 device. Good class 1 devices are geared to communicate at a distance with class 2 or 3 devices.
I was skeptical about it too, but it works.
Try this yourself if you don't believe me.
Class 1 is not going nowhere. It is a smart potential replacement for WIFI in the home.
Not at all.
As I said, I have done so (i.e. hotsync, SMB, use the internet, at abnormal distance) many times. For instance, I believe I was at about 25 meters when I first posted. Of course environment, interference, and the quality of your equipment will vary the results - I'm not saying it will work for everybody, and I doubt many will get the whole 100 meters, but it definitely works for me, and if you read the literature you can see why. If you design your receiver and antenna correctly, you can compensate for a low power transmitter.
By the way, all use of bluetooth requires both transmitting and receiving.
As it turns out, you are exactly wrong.
Both devices do not need to be class 1. I understand the principle, which is that the class 1 device has a strong transmitter and the class 3 device has a weak one, but I have simply verified experimentally that it works. Not to 100 meters yet, although I suppose at this point a 100 meter walk is in order, but already to at least half that.
I did find language that referred to this online. Unfortunately I did not bookmark it. It basically comes down to the quality and sensitivity of the receiving hardware, which is purposefully designed to receive class 2 and 3 signals from a greater distance.
on a clie peg-ux50. I predict enderle is wrong, because of a simple observation i have made from several weeks of using this device. WIFI kills the battery nearly instantly - you can practically watch the meter drain. You would not get more than an hour or two. Bluetooth seems to draw nearly nothing. I have been surfing for several hours, and the battery is at 87%.
There is simply no comparison to being uncabled from your phone, and the $30 USB pc adapter has a 100 meter range that I have personally seen at least 50 of.
For local wireless nets with realistic power consumption, there seems to be no other game in town. I'm sure people have trouble, but it works effortlessly for me. I am guessing it will remain comfortably in its niche for some time. A welcome thing.
I disagree. There is an easily understandable argument that our ability to write and maintain trouble-free code depends on our ability to easily understand our language. Every additional complexity, even if it results in a minor or moderate additional amount of thinking, is drawing on a "finite" reserve of "bandwidth" that the reader has when interpreting written work, and increasing the likelihood for error or misunderstanding.
The ability to represent more sophisticated mathematical calculations more tersely and ultimately in forms more familiar to mathematicians comes at a cost. Prolog, for instance, is highly expressive - but prolog code will quickly escape the author, and her successors', grasp. Your implicit argument for code which is more like conventional mathematical notation (used for "hundreds of years") sounds like a plea for "natural language programming." (English has also been used for X's of years.)
Yes, more complex operators _may be_ more familiar to (some!) humans. That does not make them part of a better programming practice.
I could see a case for a math-oriented language or toolset with more complex operators and datatypes. (To be clear, since people seem to be confused about this, "operator overloading" is not the same as a langauge with multi-functional operators.) But how appropriate is that for a general purpose language? Reasonable people can disagree. But open-ended operator overloading is bad in every case. If your goal is to reach correctness, and stay there, you want to minimize the complexity of your operators in any case. If you want your work to be safe and useful, people need to develop new operator behaviors as if they were creating a new langauge, and encounter them in the field as if in the context of learning a new language. With much less gravity than that, the pain starts.
I believe it is short-sighted to ignore the obvious human factors in the equation, so to speak. There is a trade-off in "walking farther towards the language" to express your mathematical functions, but in the real-world cases I have seen (where one has deep math in non-standard data types) the effort to express things with method calls was not nearly as onerous in fact as it was in principle, and you immediately gain maintainability and readability.
Compact, highly expressive languages with lots of complex operators may be useful for mathematical experimentation, but we are talking about writing code, not using Mathematica. You need to know why it's slow. Where it's leaking memory. Why it crashes on Joe's computer and not Jim's. And you need to do this on a deadline. There may even be lives staked on the correctness of your code. And so I would say it is beyond short sighted to trade the clarity, simplicity, predictability and transparency of a language for keystrokes and clever expressions.
I see what you are saying. Well, it's a balance, reasonable people will disagree, and who knows in the end. The compiler flag is a good idea. It's all a matter of degrees. Most programmers are not mathematicians, and I still say the more complicated you make your operators, the more trouble you'll get into.
Here is my general response to this observation.
And to your specific question, the simple fact is that you can define your operators however you like - when you create the language - which can be bad or good, depending on your decisions - and this is not operator overloading (which is always bad).
My central point is that that operators are 1-letter function names. You just don't want them doing a dozen different things depending on circumstances that aren't immediately visually apparent.
You may find it difficult to handle math if you can't treat it like algebra on the line. I find it difficult to debug your code when I have to stare at your code for longer to figure out what is actually happening. When troubleshooting becomes really more complex, then you have things like mars probes landing at the wrong velocity and so forth. You will just throw up your hands, but I will be telling you why it was more likely that someone would make a mistake.
So the source of my confidence in my pronouncement is that after a decade I have never a place where there was so much "good" use of operator overloading that wasn't more than overshadowed by the problems that came from it.
This may be a function of the kind of programming I've done, but I just don't see a lot of deep math in non-standard data types where the method rule really makes it as bad as you say. It is often a lot easier to express yourself with methods clearly than people admit...
I don't think taking clever advantage of the order of operations is functional value. This is the closest you can get, but I would say it is still only saving typing.
( 4, mySpecialMultiply(a, c)), b)), mySpecialTimes(2, c))
You are arguing that because you are also reorganizing things on the line, your code is easier to understand.
But you would never write case 1:
a = divide(add(b, sqrt(subtract(multiply(4, multiply(a, c)), b)), times(2, c))
You would write case 2:
a = (b + sqrt(4 * a * c - b)) / (2 * c)
Unless you really wanted case 3:
a = mySpecialDivide(mySpecialAdd(b, mySpecialSqrt(mySpecialSubtract(mySpecialMultiply
And yes, I would rather maintain case 3! You see, it is very difficult not to abuse operator overloading. The issue is how quickly and how well you will understand code by looking at it. And my experience has been unambiguously that, yes, it saves typing and is "easier" for the person that wrote it (in theory), and it is a raving nightmare for everyone else... even when it is used "properly."
The language should define the operators. You should define the methods. Saving keystrokes makes so much heartache... and whatever you think you gain by expressing things more closely to algebra you lose when something in one of those operators goes wrong, and it takes you (or more importantly, someone else) longer to figure out what.
This is a deceptive non-answer. A sugary Java shortcut is not operator overloading, and dare I say... "you" + "know" + "it."
I can understand and respect a firm position on open standards and non-proprietary technologies, and that's fine for some folks. On the other hand, I have no problem with Java's licensing or ownership encumberances, and I know I am not alone. The source is open enough that crucial problems, even in the VM, can be fixed by me (rather than begging and whining and being ignored for years, or writing ugly workarounds). In practice I have no issues at all. Certainly, Java compares favorably to things like .Net on this score.
Some thoughts:
Java genericity has no special support in the runtime, which limits the type safety it can provide.
True.
Generics over primitive types are boxed, meaning they are inefficient.
Collections were already boxing primitives. How often do you think this will come up for you in the real world? Can you come up with a convincing example?
Java's native code interface is still inefficient and complex.
Funny, I've used it for a few different things (in 1.4) and never found it to be either. But perhaps if you made a more specific complaint...
Java still lacks value classes and operator overloading, making it a poor choice for applications involving numerics or graphics.
Pardon my ignorance about value classes; I'm wondering if you can be more specific about when they're really useful and what benefits they have for numerics or graphics?
And finally, when you say operator overloading, you lose me. My opinion of operator overloading is that it is absolutely bad. Let me be clear. It is always bad, under any circumstances, when used for any reason. It has exactly zero functional value, and, as opposed to other kinds of "syntactic sugar" it has a tendency to make code where it is used with any frequency into a confusing, unmaintainable minefield. When advocating for operator overloading you are basically advocating a programming style with 1 letter method names, only it's worse, because you're limited to a few "commonly used" letters.
Thank you for writing. I can see myself in your shoes.
One thing to remember is that America is not such a rich country - we just have rich people. I was very poor - I struggled to keep a roof over my head and eat. I started out typing and and I struggled to get an education here with loans and work. Programming, of course. Already, in just a few years, it's very hard to get a job here in the USA doing that anymore. I know that in a few more years, it will be impossible, and I will have to start over.
But because I struggled against a shitty system to try to get a better life and kind of succeeded, I have a natural respect for you. I see somebody doing the same thing and it makes me happy, really happy. I've never been to India or even close but I hear you guys have big problems, bigger than us, even, so it's good news if there are more jobs there.
I don't know much about economics, but I know enough to know that all these guys here who are really pissed off about outsourcing are pissing in the wind - nobody could ever stop it before when it was with other jobs, and we're less likely to stop it now. It's a fact of life, like the weather.
I don't understand currency markets. All I know is that your currency is worth less than ours, so you can work for "less," even though your "smaller" salary gets you the same stuff mine does, because it's all cheaper for you. I'm still trying to figure that one out.
The only really sad part is that I kind of like programming. I wish I could keep doing it. Maybe I would move to India, to stay in the job, even become a teacher myself, and help more people learn to program, or learn English. But I hear that you guys won't let Americans come and work. That's the only part that seems pretty unfair. So I guess it's working out for the best, but I think you should keep it in mind that our country, ignorant as it is, of course, still welcomes a lot of people into our schools and our businesses, and I wish other places like India would do the same.
I think people would like free trade and free markets a lot more if it just meant that we had to move over to India to keep working, rather than we had no chance to work at all.
But anyway, good luck, and keep doing what you've gotta do. I think you guys are awesome for beating the system, figuring out a good way to make money like that. And don't be mad at Americans if we act like assholes about it all; everybody gets freaked out when things get scary like this - you guys probably will too, when something like this happens where you are.
- Part 1
- Part 2 (more detail)
There's a lot of rumor and inconclusive news about Spirit floating around right now, so this is entirely subjective, but I'm getting the feeling this, too, is a software fault of some kind. Put most simply, you could interpret what we're reading right now as "we received the ACK tone for our instructions but didn't get the data back we expected."These kinds of problems are not unprecedented, and furthermore I'm under the impression there are options for dealing with even serious OS-level trouble that would shock and awe the average general purpose computer user.
You took the words out of my mouth.
I just couldn't get that upset about watching it bog down, sicken and die... Berman and Braga are stunningly mediocre in my opinion, and, though they let a few interesting ideas or even whole episodes slip by once in a while, I tend to find their work cringe-inducing and unwatchable. And that's from a confirmed advocate of really bad scifi.
After trying to watch 5 minutes of the "average" Voyager episode I feel like I need a shower and then probably a stiff drink. Another alien food joke? Another agonizing "human" moment between characters that spans four commercial breaks? What's the particle of the week, Rick? There have to be community college drama classes that are less painful than this. Or DS9? How about 30 minutes of Why-Pop-Psychology-Has-A-Bad-Reputation with forehead and nose prosthetics for emphasis? If I were forced to watch it I would have fantasies about putting actual liquor in those stupid blue drinks at that alien's bar just because it would be something, anything to halt the impenetrable monotony. Don't even get me started on "Enterprise." Pokemon is more creative than these guys 9 days out of 10. I imagine the writers were raised on a diet of constant, uninterrupted daytime soap operas, but really their kind of dreamlike self-indulgence is hard to find parallels for and is probably in a class by itself. On the bright side, if you want to clear out a room, all you need is some recent Star Trek on tape and a big TV.
Star Trek should pray for a quick death. Maybe after the name is finally wrested from the idiot clutches of the current regime there might be some interesting new work done... but I kind of doubt it. RIP...
Complacency and ignorance are safer alternatives.
Good point. Complacency and ignorance, however, are not particularly novel qualities at our present point in human history. Society has catalysts. They're always popping up; maybe press or politicians, or ordinary people who have thought of a better way. So perhaps it comes down to how a regime suppresses the natural impetus for change. That is why I paint fear as a big part of this - fear on the part of the press, of rival politicians, and even ordinary citizens to speak their mind.
Political movements are organic. Ordinary Germans who opposed parts of the national socialist platform (such as genocide) found themselves mute out of fear, not even because of an elaborate political police apparatus, but because the ideology itself had something of a life of its own in its "hosts." Expressing sympathy for a lower caste could provoke terrible reprisals from "ordinary people." And we certainly have that in America today, where (largely absent a classical, centralized method of control) more and more people perceive a threat (physical, economic, and of course emotional) for too vocally questioning a variety of our prejudices and policies. And that is how a minority begins to dominate a majority.
The history of our country, mirroring the history of most of the world, is bleak. Stratified, monopoly-based, laissez faire "oligarchal capitalism", perfected to the point of feudalism, following on actual, brutal slavery, highly institutionalized mysogyny, the utter dominance of a highly specific subset of a major religion, militant xenophobia... The McCarthy period is particularly instructive today, especially since modern American Neoconservatives are attempting to rehabilitate McCarthy. If you are not familiar with it, simply put, they blacklisted, and often locked up, their political opponents, clearly closing in on the dream of exercising the same free hand with dissidents that the Soviets did. In short, although we are in many respects regressing, we are far, far better off than we have been in the recent past, and we go into the present days of struggle with ignorance and fear armed with new and exceptional tools, and from what is basically a position of extraordinary success.
Complacency is the dingy Lay-Z-Boy of evil, placed too close to the TV set of Ignorance, but Fear is what keeps you from climbing out of it. Although there is a fourth problem, just as effective at keeping people down, which you should especially be careful of: Despair, or Futility. That is, a sense that the world is inherently broken, and attempts to improve it are wasted energy. Accepting witty overgeneralizations about the entire population of a country is a far step in that direction. I find it hard to look at any part of recent history and believe it for a minute.