I was sort of thinking that a properly working democracy could REPLACE money. Which is likely to be rather important, considering the rate at which it's being devalued. As for being pressured, there's nothing wrong with that, that's how politics are supposed to work. Intimidation, that's a problem, but it's a problem that can be dealt with just like any other physical violence, it's not like the nature of physical crime changes when you bring politics into the equation.
The Roman empire was built on the foundations of a primitive implementation of a democratic system such as I've described. When that system was lost, the empire fell within a few generations. So, clearly it works. The only question is, how do you make it scale out. The answer is modern telecommunications technology.
The truth is, you can't have secret ballots and still have an election that isn't subverted.
Here's my take on how to do a proper paperless democracy:
Everyone gets a personal digital recorder that acts as a "testament", and when they cast their votes, the device preserves a copy as evidence.
Votes are public information, not secret.
We establish two networks for the casting of votes. One secure wired network that carries votes to a centralized point for counting, and one citizens mesh network that logs votes to a multitude of geographically distributed sites.
We should design wireless devices that can capture voting data from the mesh network and store it on a write-once medium. They should meet the goal of providing forensic evidence that would make wide scale vote tampering impossible, and they should be placed far and wide by citizens acting entirely independently of any centralized plan.
You organize things this way, everyone can confirm that their votes are being tabulated correctly, and everyone can remain in control of their own political voice. Instead of distrusting the government, we could eradicate the line that separates the government from the people and govern ourselves.
I've never compiled anything from source. I've never hacked anything to do with my install. I don't enjoy mucking around with code to figure out how it works. I don't enjoy mucking around with config files to tweak things. I don't have a beard, and I'm not fat. I'm good at talking to people. I never had any trouble meeting women. I have friends, and a girlfriend. I have outside interests that have nothing to do with computers, like music and athletics.
I'm not a Linux geek. I just use it, because it's superior, it's free, and I can work with confidence that some money grubbing corporation isn't going to remotely sabotage my computer.
I am an end user, not a geek of any sort. And I spend a hell of a lot more money on computers than the average man on the street, so I'm a particularly important end user.
The majority of my family and friends use either Linux desktops or Mac laptops. Most people I know avoid Windows these days if they can manage it.
This might not be the Year of the Linux Desktop... but it's sure as hell the Year of Broken Windows.
I'm the end user. I'm far more loyal to my software vendor than I am to my hardware vendor. If Nvidias hardware won't work with Ubuntu because they want to keep playing stupid tricks with their binary drivers, then it is not fit for purchase, and I will buy from someone else.
His work on quantum mechanics was almost always in collaboration with others and while he provided the insight to the physics of general relativity he got a lot of help with the maths. Most of Feynman's works were also collaborations.
The math isn't the part that requires a genius. The math is the language that you use to communicate the pattern that you see to others who cannot see it. Seeing the pattern in the first place is what requires a genius, and it requires them to look at the world with the clear vision of a child tempered with a relentless focus. When you've been indoctrinated, you don't really look, you categorize and choose an algorithm that someone else conceived long ago out of your mental tool chest, then implement it like an automaton.
Ever tried to teach something simple to someone stupider than yourself and been ready to pull your hair out because it's so obvious and yet they don't get it? Being a genius means that the average man on the street puts you in that situation every time you interact with them. It means that things are obvious, all over the place they're obvious, and the hard work is in thinking down to their level so you can encapsulate what you see in technical language and allow them to behave as though they see it too, when really they don't see it, but just accept that your system works and integrate your system into the aforementioned "mental tool chest".
To a very large degree, being a genius is a cursed fate. It's being a gifted child forced to go to school with mentally disabled people for the entirety of your life, being misunderstood every time you open your mouth and repeatedly enjoying the experience of watching helplessly while your peers drag you down with them despite your having informed them exactly how everything is going to play out long before.
If it wasn't for open source software being made available under the BSD license, Apple would have gone out of business. Their operating system, which is all they have to differentiate them now that they're using standard x86 hardware, would never have been built if they had been forced to start from zero. All they did was stick a bunch of DRM and eye candy onto an already existing operating system, decorate their cases like jewelery and market the result to people who self-identify as "computer idiots".
As for HAVING to modify it, myself, my gf, my daughter and my niece have all been running Linux as our sole operating system for over a year, and have never been obliged to modify anything.
And they wonder why TV shows are so popular on Torrent sites..
You put people in the backseat not give them what they want and then wonder why they circumvent your revenue stream..
Nah... I wouldn't have watched anyways. Because of the commercials.
If I had to wait a year to see it on a torrent commercial free, I'd watch it in a year. If I had to do without, I'd do without. You couldn't pay me by the hour to sit and watch commercials, I'm sure as hell not doing it during my leisure time.
I dunno... she comes across ridiculous when she's trying to be earnest. The scenes where she's involved with the Häagen-Dazs key are a perfect example...
When the education system institutionalizes you for 30 years and tells you what the world looks like, how the hell are you supposed to actually see it when you're finally released?
Not everybody uses their Internet anonymity to be a jerk, but enough do that I wonder if things would be different if they were using their real names. Still, I have no interest in forcing people to use their real names, mainly because it's not really any of my business if someone doesn't want to do so. I'm free to ignore anonymous jerks, just as I'm free to ignore jerks who use their real names.
Hi. I'm an anonymous jerk. I'm the one who hit your car in the parking lot and didn't leave his name. Please, just ignore me.
Or, you could go in the other direction, and reduce the typist burden, allowing them to use concepts to get things done quickly so they get positive feedback.
The code is designed like lego blocks, and you attach things together. You can publish to the MIT website from within the development environment and develop a fan base, which gives more positive feedback. You can also download someone elses program from the site, tear it apart in the IDE, change things, then republish your new program and it will automatically attribute the program as being built by Jack, but based on work by Jill.
If you want something a little more sophisticated, you can teach them Squeak.
My 8 year old has used both of these, and I've introduced Scratch to 13 year old children to it and had them get very excited at what they could do with it.
I think a person with no arms might like being able to communicate via computer and use it without having to type or breath into a tube to get stuff done.
There is no such thing as "good formal requirements gathering." You are right that the owner does not understand his employees' day-to-day problems...but you need to go one step further and recognize that the employees don't understand them either. They won't know what they want until they see your interpretation of what it is they think they want. Rapid development/prototyping needs to be one of your essential tools. You really need to take a look at the agile manifesto and negotiate this type of relationship in order to be successful as an independent developer. It's not the document that will win him, it's the shippable product increment he gets along with the bill.
I disagree. I think agile development is wasteful, leads to a lack of long term planning and a ridiculous amount of refactoring that could have been avoided. It also is hard on the users, because instead of being delivered a system that suits them, learning how it works once and using it to do their job for years to come, they're trying to get their work done with a system that is in a constant state of flux. The real world cost of that is dramatic, because you're paying every single employee to waste time getting their bearings on a daily basis.
Good requirements gathering is hard. Most people don't have the critical thinking skills to do it, and most critical thinkers don't have the people skills to do it. But it's still the best way to produce software if you're capable.
If you choose you can believe I've made those up, but I haven't. This is running out of my home office, and is still in beta, not being promoted at all.
I would recommend that if you're going to be doing a project that is going to take longer than a month for anything larger than a small business, you sell them on the importance of good, formal requirements gathering. Tell the owner that he doesn't really understand his employees day to day problems well enough to tell you what he needs, and that he should pay you by the hour to interview an individual in the organization that will be using your software for each particular role and give him a document specifying precisely what he needs. Explain to him that this understanding allows him to be in control of the project he is paying for. If anything were to happen to you, he would be able to present the document to another programmer and they would be able to pick it up and get to work and give him what he needs. If he's smart, he'll be thinking that having the liberty to replace you is a smart move, while you should be thinking that this document is going to be paying work all by itself, and also allow you to negotiate a fair price for your work without having false expectations, a failed project and a black mark on your name.
Slashdot Mirror
I was sort of thinking that a properly working democracy could REPLACE money. Which is likely to be rather important, considering the rate at which it's being devalued. As for being pressured, there's nothing wrong with that, that's how politics are supposed to work. Intimidation, that's a problem, but it's a problem that can be dealt with just like any other physical violence, it's not like the nature of physical crime changes when you bring politics into the equation.
The Roman empire was built on the foundations of a primitive implementation of a democratic system such as I've described. When that system was lost, the empire fell within a few generations. So, clearly it works. The only question is, how do you make it scale out. The answer is modern telecommunications technology.
The truth is, you can't have secret ballots and still have an election that isn't subverted.
Here's my take on how to do a proper paperless democracy:
Everyone gets a personal digital recorder that acts as a "testament", and when they cast their votes, the device preserves a copy as evidence.
Votes are public information, not secret.
We establish two networks for the casting of votes. One secure wired network that carries votes to a centralized point for counting, and one citizens mesh network that logs votes to a multitude of geographically distributed sites.
We should design wireless devices that can capture voting data from the mesh network and store it on a write-once medium. They should meet the goal of providing forensic evidence that would make wide scale vote tampering impossible, and they should be placed far and wide by citizens acting entirely independently of any centralized plan.
You organize things this way, everyone can confirm that their votes are being tabulated correctly, and everyone can remain in control of their own political voice. Instead of distrusting the government, we could eradicate the line that separates the government from the people and govern ourselves.
I think it's practical enough to be possible.
No, I'm not agreeing with you.
I've never compiled anything from source. I've never hacked anything to do with my install. I don't enjoy mucking around with code to figure out how it works. I don't enjoy mucking around with config files to tweak things. I don't have a beard, and I'm not fat. I'm good at talking to people. I never had any trouble meeting women. I have friends, and a girlfriend. I have outside interests that have nothing to do with computers, like music and athletics.
I'm not a Linux geek. I just use it, because it's superior, it's free, and I can work with confidence that some money grubbing corporation isn't going to remotely sabotage my computer.
So, basically, I'm saying... fuck off smartass.
I am an end user, not a geek of any sort. And I spend a hell of a lot more money on computers than the average man on the street, so I'm a particularly important end user. The majority of my family and friends use either Linux desktops or Mac laptops. Most people I know avoid Windows these days if they can manage it. This might not be the Year of the Linux Desktop... but it's sure as hell the Year of Broken Windows.
When I sit down on an unfamiliar machine, I expect to be able to do some things without having to consult a help file.
Tough shit. Expectations are a bitch, aren't they?
I'm the end user. I'm far more loyal to my software vendor than I am to my hardware vendor. If Nvidias hardware won't work with Ubuntu because they want to keep playing stupid tricks with their binary drivers, then it is not fit for purchase, and I will buy from someone else.
Pretty cut and dried.
Anyone know of a way to convert virtual machines from Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 to run on VirtualBox?
Everyone knows a blind mapmaker will finish his work much faster on a motorcycle than he will on foot. This is basically the same thing...
His work on quantum mechanics was almost always in collaboration with others and while he provided the insight to the physics of general relativity he got a lot of help with the maths. Most of Feynman's works were also collaborations.
The math isn't the part that requires a genius. The math is the language that you use to communicate the pattern that you see to others who cannot see it. Seeing the pattern in the first place is what requires a genius, and it requires them to look at the world with the clear vision of a child tempered with a relentless focus. When you've been indoctrinated, you don't really look, you categorize and choose an algorithm that someone else conceived long ago out of your mental tool chest, then implement it like an automaton.
Ever tried to teach something simple to someone stupider than yourself and been ready to pull your hair out because it's so obvious and yet they don't get it? Being a genius means that the average man on the street puts you in that situation every time you interact with them. It means that things are obvious, all over the place they're obvious, and the hard work is in thinking down to their level so you can encapsulate what you see in technical language and allow them to behave as though they see it too, when really they don't see it, but just accept that your system works and integrate your system into the aforementioned "mental tool chest".
To a very large degree, being a genius is a cursed fate. It's being a gifted child forced to go to school with mentally disabled people for the entirety of your life, being misunderstood every time you open your mouth and repeatedly enjoying the experience of watching helplessly while your peers drag you down with them despite your having informed them exactly how everything is going to play out long before.
If it wasn't for open source software being made available under the BSD license, Apple would have gone out of business. Their operating system, which is all they have to differentiate them now that they're using standard x86 hardware, would never have been built if they had been forced to start from zero. All they did was stick a bunch of DRM and eye candy onto an already existing operating system, decorate their cases like jewelery and market the result to people who self-identify as "computer idiots".
As for HAVING to modify it, myself, my gf, my daughter and my niece have all been running Linux as our sole operating system for over a year, and have never been obliged to modify anything.
The value of open source is that you can modify it.
But, we're living in a world where are hardware is mass manufactured.
The killer app of open source can't be expressed on mass manufactured hardware.
The answer is custom hardware. The answer is personalized fabrication. And it is coming.
Wesnoth is a good one.
Might also look into Teeworlds, World of Padman TORCS, Neverball and OpenArena.
And they wonder why TV shows are so popular on Torrent sites.. You put people in the backseat not give them what they want and then wonder why they circumvent your revenue stream..
Nah... I wouldn't have watched anyways. Because of the commercials.
If I had to wait a year to see it on a torrent commercial free, I'd watch it in a year. If I had to do without, I'd do without. You couldn't pay me by the hour to sit and watch commercials, I'm sure as hell not doing it during my leisure time.
Freema Agyeman is eye candy AND can act.
I dunno... she comes across ridiculous when she's trying to be earnest. The scenes where she's involved with the Häagen-Dazs key are a perfect example...
Who actually watches Doctor Who on CBC? It's been available on isohunt.com for a year now...
When the education system institutionalizes you for 30 years and tells you what the world looks like, how the hell are you supposed to actually see it when you're finally released?
Geniuses need to see the world for themselves.
Not everybody uses their Internet anonymity to be a jerk, but enough do that I wonder if things would be different if they were using their real names. Still, I have no interest in forcing people to use their real names, mainly because it's not really any of my business if someone doesn't want to do so. I'm free to ignore anonymous jerks, just as I'm free to ignore jerks who use their real names.
Hi. I'm an anonymous jerk. I'm the one who hit your car in the parking lot and didn't leave his name. Please, just ignore me.
*smirk*
Cause really, what else you gonna do?
Or, you could go in the other direction, and reduce the typist burden, allowing them to use concepts to get things done quickly so they get positive feedback.
I'd suggest Scratch, from MIT:
http://scratch.mit.edu/
The code is designed like lego blocks, and you attach things together. You can publish to the MIT website from within the development environment and develop a fan base, which gives more positive feedback. You can also download someone elses program from the site, tear it apart in the IDE, change things, then republish your new program and it will automatically attribute the program as being built by Jack, but based on work by Jill.
If you want something a little more sophisticated, you can teach them Squeak.
http://www.squeak.org/
Squeak is a full featured implementation of Smalltalk, which was designed from the ground up to teach OOP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
My 8 year old has used both of these, and I've introduced Scratch to 13 year old children to it and had them get very excited at what they could do with it.
I think a person with no arms might like being able to communicate via computer and use it without having to type or breath into a tube to get stuff done.
Cut his legs off and call him Matt.
There is no such thing as "good formal requirements gathering." You are right that the owner does not understand his employees' day-to-day problems...but you need to go one step further and recognize that the employees don't understand them either. They won't know what they want until they see your interpretation of what it is they think they want. Rapid development/prototyping needs to be one of your essential tools. You really need to take a look at the agile manifesto and negotiate this type of relationship in order to be successful as an independent developer. It's not the document that will win him, it's the shippable product increment he gets along with the bill.
I disagree. I think agile development is wasteful, leads to a lack of long term planning and a ridiculous amount of refactoring that could have been avoided. It also is hard on the users, because instead of being delivered a system that suits them, learning how it works once and using it to do their job for years to come, they're trying to get their work done with a system that is in a constant state of flux. The real world cost of that is dramatic, because you're paying every single employee to waste time getting their bearings on a daily basis.
Good requirements gathering is hard. Most people don't have the critical thinking skills to do it, and most critical thinkers don't have the people skills to do it. But it's still the best way to produce software if you're capable.
When this thing crashes and burns, perhaps it will provide some insight into the nature of the relationship between lies, damn lies and statistics.
He's proven he's fertile. Men are going infertile and the world is awash with women. And you think he's irrelevant?
That's fine. I'd also tell the jury that I think Michaelangelo's David, an image of an underage body without clothes, is also beautiful.
Michelangelo thought he was beautiful too. In a sexual way. That's why he made the statue. If he wasn't dead, he'd be in jail under current laws.
Do you have proof that google crawled your page every 2 seconds? I've heard nothing of this.
They've slowed down a bit, but yes... Here's the top few entries of my "Google Recent Visit Report"
2008-12-07 23:04:05.887876-04 /svensk/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=73&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:04:00.031226-04 /pyccko/viewjournalentry.php?entryid=9&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:53.482872-04 /arabic/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=79&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:46.776078-04 /slovene/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=80&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:42.534327-04 /svensk/viewjournalentry.php?entryid=22&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:33.373614-04 /latvian/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=44&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:26.681602-04 /pyccko/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=124&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:20.461428-04 /arabic/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=63&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:13.759767-04 /polski/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=59&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:07.066574-04 /polski/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=67&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:03:00.840937-04 /svensk/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=42&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:02:57.742184-04 /pyccko/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=76&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:02:47.4434-04 /hebrew/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=81&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:02:40.741955-04 /svensk/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=59&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
2008-12-07 23:02:34.549513-04 /korean/viewartpiece.php?artpieceid=71&EnvLID=1 66.249.70.156
If you choose you can believe I've made those up, but I haven't. This is running out of my home office, and is still in beta, not being promoted at all.
I would recommend that if you're going to be doing a project that is going to take longer than a month for anything larger than a small business, you sell them on the importance of good, formal requirements gathering. Tell the owner that he doesn't really understand his employees day to day problems well enough to tell you what he needs, and that he should pay you by the hour to interview an individual in the organization that will be using your software for each particular role and give him a document specifying precisely what he needs. Explain to him that this understanding allows him to be in control of the project he is paying for. If anything were to happen to you, he would be able to present the document to another programmer and they would be able to pick it up and get to work and give him what he needs. If he's smart, he'll be thinking that having the liberty to replace you is a smart move, while you should be thinking that this document is going to be paying work all by itself, and also allow you to negotiate a fair price for your work without having false expectations, a failed project and a black mark on your name.