I've always found it odd that people have so much trouble grokking 'Secure Boot'. It's very simple: it's a locked bootloader for your PC, just like the one everyone hates on their phone.
What does 'cost something' mean in the context of a world where the cost of labor is zero, though? Really your statement's a tautology: the 'cost' simply represents the finite nature of the resource, assuming it really *is* finite.
So why do we think that's a problem? Well, we currently use money as a handy way to transfer the value of labor and hence partition up the finite resources to which we have access. In A World Where humans don't have to labor it's not as if everything will fall apart and we'll somehow have the ability to produce huge (but not unlimited) amounts of food but no one will be able to buy a loaf of bread: we'll simply readjust our economic systems so money doesn't just represent human labor but some other human value. Really, we've done this already. We pay people to make music - that's not labor. The money we pay them doesn't represent the physical labor involved in plucking a guitar string, it represents the human intelligence / creativity / taste involved in coming up with the tune. In a world where humans don't have to do any work, then money (or whatever the awesome future equivalent of 'money' is) will just represent reputation, or taste, or social ability, or whatever. Again, we're already quite advanced in this process. A lot of the people reading this post don't really get paid for their labor, exactly.
(The logical end point of this process has already been imagined and turn into a series of books by Iain M. Banks, by the way.)
the good news is that the socio-political-economic system by which we achieve this is a pretty robustly designed one, and there doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why it won't allow us to keep coming up with ever more ridiculous uses of our time indefinitely, as we continue to automate the things we previously had to do ourselves.
the only bad news, i suppose, is that the ridiculous uses of our time which we invent seem to wind up being resource- and space-intensive as well as labor- and time-intensive, and those are two things we *don't* have in abundance. but hey, fusion power! space rockets! it'll all work out in the end.
You're almost right - in fact I agree with your whole post, except for one wrinkle: the 'work' to be done isn't really work at all. It's just creative time-wasting.
A long time ago, we passed the point where it actually took a reasonable chunk of work on the part of every person on Earth to keep all the people on Earth alive, fed, basically clothed and housed.
Ever since then, we've been playing increasingly elaborate shell games in which we introduce a new field of essentially unnecessary endeavour and declare it to be work, and pay people to do it.
It's a rather neat wheeze, really. Instead of worrying about we split up the relatively microscopic amount of actually essential labour fairly, we keep inventing new stuff to do which entails non-essential labor, so everyone has something to do.
This is what 'creation of wealth' and 'creation of jobs' really is: the art of inventing stupid new stuff for people to do or desire, in order to increase the overall quantity of effort expended by the human race, and thus put all that spare time that robots were supposed to give us to some kind of use.
We pay people millions and millions of dollars to hit little white balls a long way. Then we pay lots of other people to build places where they can do it, and people to sell us crappy food while we watch the balls getting hit, and other people to build and operate television cameras and microphones and satellites so they can take pictures of the people hitting the little white balls, and other people to build machines on which those pictures can be displayed in our houses, so we can watch the people hitting the little white balls without the inconvenience of going to the place where they're hitting them.
All of that labor - all of it - is utterly non-essential to the continued survival of humanity. It's work that no-one really _has_ to do. The whole socioeconomic system in which all of the above happens is a very whizzy trick by which we stop ourselves from dying of extreme boredom, which is what would happen if we all lived like we did in 1873 but had the machines from 2011 which do the tasks which took up people's time in 1873 - all that planting and harvesting and manual washing of everything and looking after horses and walking places and manually cooking everything.
Instead of working very little and doing the kind of 'recreational' pursuits people from the past had available to them - which were light on both time and labor out of simple necessity - we've ended up inventing ever-increasingly elaborate and time/labor-intensive recreational pursuits, and calling the implementation of them 'work', so we can all go on working just as much as we ever have.
I tried homeplug for a while. It was nice and fast, compared to 2.4GHz wireless at least, but it corrupted data: about half of my large file downloads wound up corrupted. I'd download a 4GB ISO and find it didn't match the sha256sum, re-download it and it'd be okay.
Never happened on the same systems since I ditched the homeplug and just ran an ethernet cable across the ceiling to the router, so it was definitely the homeplug screwing it up. Mine are now collecting dust...
I mostly agree, except I found it to have infuriating reliability issues compared to my old router, a WRT-310N. Every so often - say, once or twice a day - it'd just stop passing traffic to/from the WAN for a minute or two. No rhyme nor reason, no useful info in the control panel or logs; the traffic just went into a black hole. My 310N never, ever did this.
I eventually wound up running (and am still running) a dumb-but-works combination of the WNDR-3700v2, using its native firmware, acting purely as a wireless bridge, with the 310N doing all the routing, with its wireless adapter disabled. That gets me the wireless abilities of the 3700 (so I run 802.11n on the 5GHz band and g on the 2.4GHz band for compatibility with devices that can't handle n-on-5) with the reliability for routing purposes of the 310N.
I haven't managed to find any dd-wrt supported, dual-band, gigabit router which is less problematic than the 3700, so I'm not sure a perfect answer to the OP's question exists, at least at present.
"I don't mind a few chuckles between explosions" leads to the Culture series (fine) but "I don't have a sense of humor that I'm aware of" and "I just like my action intense" goes to the Vorkosigan Saga? What the hell? Bujold is funnier than most sf on her worst day. And sure, there's _some_ intense action, but just as much, well, character comedy and romance. I'm, er, not sure if the person who did that bit of the flowchart ever actually read the books at all...
"It is rare for a piece of scientific equipment to hold a place in a nation's heart."
I can think of at least one other similar example; the site at Jodrell Bank is pretty popular in the U.K., especially in the local area. It's a well-visited tourist spot and there was quite a lot of news locally when there was a possibility of it shutting down a few years back.
well, we *could* have switched to it at any time, but it's made a bit awkward by the fact that the only real benefit of switching is upstream support. despite its ridiculous panoply of shiny features, grub2 doesn't give Fedora much that grub didn't, really. we're only switching now because we decided the pain threshold of essentially maintaining grub-legacy ourselves downstream had been reached.
in fact, if we were doing things over, we'd probably switch at f17 instead, because we haven't been able to make grub2 work well enough for EFI installs or PPC installs, so we still have to use grub-legacy for those, and that's just causing a ton of annoying complexity and possible breakage in the installer and upgrade paths.
ironically, neither does grub2. well, it does, but very badly. we're actually still using grub-legacy for EFI installs in F16, because grub2-efi is just too unreliable at present.
Mac EFI with Fedora has been a real piece of work all along, just because - as you say on your page - the Mac EFI implementation is hideous. Actually, the Fedora devs responsible for the EFI support say they explicitly don't support Macs just because the EFI implementation is so crap/weird. Macs are a best effort, I'm afraid.
well, since CentOS is a fairly close RHEL clone, even if CentOS goes down the tubes, it should be pretty damn trivial to migrate the system to any of the *other* close RHEL clones. Or, you know RHEL. That's kinda the point, I guess.
(and to OP, I can't see anyone from the 'Ubuntu / Fedora crowd' would flame you for that; it's perfectly sensible to choose a long-term supported distro for a fairly boring PHP server installation. I run my servers on Fedora, but I wouldn't tell anyone else to.)
"A bit of bash scripting, shortcut assigning / cron and udev triggering, etc, and life already become a lot easier than with any dumbed-down OS where you never have gotten anywhere."
Until three years later when you realize something you duct taped together with bash scripts three years ago doesn't work any more and you haven't a fucking clue how to fix it.
I do get _tired_ of Gentoo ricers who convince themselves that hacking stuff together in ugly ways based on the mistaken assumption that building everything from source magically taught them how their operating system actually works is the highest form of achievement. That isn't how it works.
That's why you name the positions they occupy - the Gates Professor of Dodgy Operating Systems, or whatever. A fundraising wheeze with a long and proud history.
banks are only allowed to operate fractional reserves under a strict regulatory framework, with deposit insurance and all the rest of it. i'm going to go out on a limb and suggest FTP probably didn't have those things.
Robots were supposed to save us all a lifetime of drudgery working in factories to make enough money to put food on the table and buy a few modest necessities.
Instead, the robots do the drudge work in factories, and we spend lifetimes of drudgery working in call centres in order to be able to afford stupid crap we don't need.
This can go on ad infinitum. There's no limited definition of 'a job'. Our economic system, barring a few ultimately insignificant adjustment periods, will happily invent new jobs for as many people as we're able to produce, and merrily invent new fripperies for us all to spend the proceeds of those useless jobs on, for just about as long as we like.
If we *wanted*, we could have a world where we all live quite simply and only have to work about five hours a week. But no-one, apparently, wants that.
Just because someone doesn't like a description of themselves which is, shall we say, couched in a somewhat intellectual vocabulary does not make the description untrue. I'd say New Yorkers certainly are 'conscious of shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm', as are proud inhabitants of just about any city with a long history and a strong identity. How many people say they'd never live anywhere but New York? What was all that pomp and circumstance on TV over the weekend about how great New York (and, particularly, the Fire Department of New York) is? Why does Dave Letterman open every show with 'Live from New York, the greatest city in the world!' to rapturous applause? As long as you're not standing near anyone too blue collar, you can say "because New Yorkers are conscious of shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm". If you are, you can say "because New York fucking rules", and you'll be saying pretty much the same thing...
Erm...no it isn't. For a start, it's attached at the hip to Stanley Park, which is a park that is, in itself, nearly as large as the entire downtown core. How many other major cities can say that?
Aside from that, at a quick glance on Google, downtown Vancouver contains at least 15 designated parks, one of which - Sunset Beach - covers one entire coast.
In regards to the OP's other points, downtown Vancouver has excellent transit and is heavily populated. It's a pretty textbook example of what the OP was talking about, in fact.
Urban sprawl is caused *exactly* by building big nice attractive 'campuses' outside of the existing urban area and having everyone drive there.
It's an excellent way to render transit impractical: instead of having, say, a million people from a reasonably cohesive suburban area wanting to get downtown every morning, you have 10 sets of 10 sets of 10,000 people trying to get from 10 different suburbs to 10 different 'campuses'.
Slightly counter-intuitively, the way to combat urban sprawl is to build more intensively in existing urban space, not to extend development out ever further and further as every company wants to build its own little pristine mini-country - just as, in previous decades, American families wanted to build their own little mini-castles in vast, sprawling suburbs.
(The article is an excellent piece of criticism; the 'castle' analogy above is from another excellent piece I read a few years back, which proposed that the reason American suburban homes tend to have tiny, vestigial, fenced-in front gardens is that suburban homes are essentially miniaturized castles in intent.)
and many of the problems lie right there in the line 'needs of consumers', if you unpick it: capitalism requires consumers with needs, so it does its damnedest to make sure we consume all the time, and generate 'needs' which are really 'entirely foolish desires'.
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The security fixes?
Don't worry, that's getting fixed for PCs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/fsf-windows-8-security-secure-boot-linux,13762.html
I've always found it odd that people have so much trouble grokking 'Secure Boot'. It's very simple: it's a locked bootloader for your PC, just like the one everyone hates on their phone.
What does 'cost something' mean in the context of a world where the cost of labor is zero, though? Really your statement's a tautology: the 'cost' simply represents the finite nature of the resource, assuming it really *is* finite.
So why do we think that's a problem? Well, we currently use money as a handy way to transfer the value of labor and hence partition up the finite resources to which we have access. In A World Where humans don't have to labor it's not as if everything will fall apart and we'll somehow have the ability to produce huge (but not unlimited) amounts of food but no one will be able to buy a loaf of bread: we'll simply readjust our economic systems so money doesn't just represent human labor but some other human value. Really, we've done this already. We pay people to make music - that's not labor. The money we pay them doesn't represent the physical labor involved in plucking a guitar string, it represents the human intelligence / creativity / taste involved in coming up with the tune. In a world where humans don't have to do any work, then money (or whatever the awesome future equivalent of 'money' is) will just represent reputation, or taste, or social ability, or whatever. Again, we're already quite advanced in this process. A lot of the people reading this post don't really get paid for their labor, exactly.
(The logical end point of this process has already been imagined and turn into a series of books by Iain M. Banks, by the way.)
The Culture. Which doesn't seem like a very bad place to live.
the good news is that the socio-political-economic system by which we achieve this is a pretty robustly designed one, and there doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why it won't allow us to keep coming up with ever more ridiculous uses of our time indefinitely, as we continue to automate the things we previously had to do ourselves.
the only bad news, i suppose, is that the ridiculous uses of our time which we invent seem to wind up being resource- and space-intensive as well as labor- and time-intensive, and those are two things we *don't* have in abundance. but hey, fusion power! space rockets! it'll all work out in the end.
"There will always be more work to be done"
You're almost right - in fact I agree with your whole post, except for one wrinkle: the 'work' to be done isn't really work at all. It's just creative time-wasting.
A long time ago, we passed the point where it actually took a reasonable chunk of work on the part of every person on Earth to keep all the people on Earth alive, fed, basically clothed and housed.
Ever since then, we've been playing increasingly elaborate shell games in which we introduce a new field of essentially unnecessary endeavour and declare it to be work, and pay people to do it.
It's a rather neat wheeze, really. Instead of worrying about we split up the relatively microscopic amount of actually essential labour fairly, we keep inventing new stuff to do which entails non-essential labor, so everyone has something to do.
This is what 'creation of wealth' and 'creation of jobs' really is: the art of inventing stupid new stuff for people to do or desire, in order to increase the overall quantity of effort expended by the human race, and thus put all that spare time that robots were supposed to give us to some kind of use.
We pay people millions and millions of dollars to hit little white balls a long way. Then we pay lots of other people to build places where they can do it, and people to sell us crappy food while we watch the balls getting hit, and other people to build and operate television cameras and microphones and satellites so they can take pictures of the people hitting the little white balls, and other people to build machines on which those pictures can be displayed in our houses, so we can watch the people hitting the little white balls without the inconvenience of going to the place where they're hitting them.
All of that labor - all of it - is utterly non-essential to the continued survival of humanity. It's work that no-one really _has_ to do. The whole socioeconomic system in which all of the above happens is a very whizzy trick by which we stop ourselves from dying of extreme boredom, which is what would happen if we all lived like we did in 1873 but had the machines from 2011 which do the tasks which took up people's time in 1873 - all that planting and harvesting and manual washing of everything and looking after horses and walking places and manually cooking everything.
Instead of working very little and doing the kind of 'recreational' pursuits people from the past had available to them - which were light on both time and labor out of simple necessity - we've ended up inventing ever-increasingly elaborate and time/labor-intensive recreational pursuits, and calling the implementation of them 'work', so we can all go on working just as much as we ever have.
Yay, the human race!
"Was there particular functionality you wanted, which led you to DD-WRT? Or might other routers be able to do what it is that you need?"
I've found most consumer router firmwares don't support NAT loopback, which I find pretty useful. dd-wrt does.
I tried homeplug for a while. It was nice and fast, compared to 2.4GHz wireless at least, but it corrupted data: about half of my large file downloads wound up corrupted. I'd download a 4GB ISO and find it didn't match the sha256sum, re-download it and it'd be okay.
Never happened on the same systems since I ditched the homeplug and just ran an ethernet cable across the ceiling to the router, so it was definitely the homeplug screwing it up. Mine are now collecting dust...
I mostly agree, except I found it to have infuriating reliability issues compared to my old router, a WRT-310N. Every so often - say, once or twice a day - it'd just stop passing traffic to/from the WAN for a minute or two. No rhyme nor reason, no useful info in the control panel or logs; the traffic just went into a black hole. My 310N never, ever did this.
I eventually wound up running (and am still running) a dumb-but-works combination of the WNDR-3700v2, using its native firmware, acting purely as a wireless bridge, with the 310N doing all the routing, with its wireless adapter disabled. That gets me the wireless abilities of the 3700 (so I run 802.11n on the 5GHz band and g on the 2.4GHz band for compatibility with devices that can't handle n-on-5) with the reliability for routing purposes of the 310N.
I haven't managed to find any dd-wrt supported, dual-band, gigabit router which is less problematic than the 3700, so I'm not sure a perfect answer to the OP's question exists, at least at present.
Er...
"I don't mind a few chuckles between explosions" leads to the Culture series (fine) but "I don't have a sense of humor that I'm aware of" and "I just like my action intense" goes to the Vorkosigan Saga? What the hell? Bujold is funnier than most sf on her worst day. And sure, there's _some_ intense action, but just as much, well, character comedy and romance. I'm, er, not sure if the person who did that bit of the flowchart ever actually read the books at all...
or the phone can fake the location data. which I suspect isn't hard if you have a reason to do it.
"It is rare for a piece of scientific equipment to hold a place in a nation's heart."
I can think of at least one other similar example; the site at Jodrell Bank is pretty popular in the U.K., especially in the local area. It's a well-visited tourist spot and there was quite a lot of news locally when there was a possibility of it shutting down a few years back.
Start key.
well, we *could* have switched to it at any time, but it's made a bit awkward by the fact that the only real benefit of switching is upstream support. despite its ridiculous panoply of shiny features, grub2 doesn't give Fedora much that grub didn't, really. we're only switching now because we decided the pain threshold of essentially maintaining grub-legacy ourselves downstream had been reached.
in fact, if we were doing things over, we'd probably switch at f17 instead, because we haven't been able to make grub2 work well enough for EFI installs or PPC installs, so we still have to use grub-legacy for those, and that's just causing a ton of annoying complexity and possible breakage in the installer and upgrade paths.
ironically, neither does grub2. well, it does, but very badly. we're actually still using grub-legacy for EFI installs in F16, because grub2-efi is just too unreliable at present.
Mac EFI with Fedora has been a real piece of work all along, just because - as you say on your page - the Mac EFI implementation is hideous. Actually, the Fedora devs responsible for the EFI support say they explicitly don't support Macs just because the EFI implementation is so crap/weird. Macs are a best effort, I'm afraid.
well, since CentOS is a fairly close RHEL clone, even if CentOS goes down the tubes, it should be pretty damn trivial to migrate the system to any of the *other* close RHEL clones. Or, you know RHEL. That's kinda the point, I guess.
(and to OP, I can't see anyone from the 'Ubuntu / Fedora crowd' would flame you for that; it's perfectly sensible to choose a long-term supported distro for a fairly boring PHP server installation. I run my servers on Fedora, but I wouldn't tell anyone else to.)
"A bit of bash scripting, shortcut assigning / cron and udev triggering, etc, and life already become a lot easier than with any dumbed-down OS where you never have gotten anywhere."
Until three years later when you realize something you duct taped together with bash scripts three years ago doesn't work any more and you haven't a fucking clue how to fix it.
I do get _tired_ of Gentoo ricers who convince themselves that hacking stuff together in ugly ways based on the mistaken assumption that building everything from source magically taught them how their operating system actually works is the highest form of achievement. That isn't how it works.
That's why you name the positions they occupy - the Gates Professor of Dodgy Operating Systems, or whatever. A fundraising wheeze with a long and proud history.
banks are only allowed to operate fractional reserves under a strict regulatory framework, with deposit insurance and all the rest of it. i'm going to go out on a limb and suggest FTP probably didn't have those things.
With a lot more vacation time?
But don't worry, it'll never happen.
Robots were supposed to save us all a lifetime of drudgery working in factories to make enough money to put food on the table and buy a few modest necessities.
Instead, the robots do the drudge work in factories, and we spend lifetimes of drudgery working in call centres in order to be able to afford stupid crap we don't need.
This can go on ad infinitum. There's no limited definition of 'a job'. Our economic system, barring a few ultimately insignificant adjustment periods, will happily invent new jobs for as many people as we're able to produce, and merrily invent new fripperies for us all to spend the proceeds of those useless jobs on, for just about as long as we like.
If we *wanted*, we could have a world where we all live quite simply and only have to work about five hours a week. But no-one, apparently, wants that.
Just because someone doesn't like a description of themselves which is, shall we say, couched in a somewhat intellectual vocabulary does not make the description untrue. I'd say New Yorkers certainly are 'conscious of shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm', as are proud inhabitants of just about any city with a long history and a strong identity. How many people say they'd never live anywhere but New York? What was all that pomp and circumstance on TV over the weekend about how great New York (and, particularly, the Fire Department of New York) is? Why does Dave Letterman open every show with 'Live from New York, the greatest city in the world!' to rapturous applause? As long as you're not standing near anyone too blue collar, you can say "because New Yorkers are conscious of shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm". If you are, you can say "because New York fucking rules", and you'll be saying pretty much the same thing...
Erm...no it isn't. For a start, it's attached at the hip to Stanley Park, which is a park that is, in itself, nearly as large as the entire downtown core. How many other major cities can say that?
Aside from that, at a quick glance on Google, downtown Vancouver contains at least 15 designated parks, one of which - Sunset Beach - covers one entire coast.
In regards to the OP's other points, downtown Vancouver has excellent transit and is heavily populated. It's a pretty textbook example of what the OP was talking about, in fact.
Urban sprawl is caused *exactly* by building big nice attractive 'campuses' outside of the existing urban area and having everyone drive there.
It's an excellent way to render transit impractical: instead of having, say, a million people from a reasonably cohesive suburban area wanting to get downtown every morning, you have 10 sets of 10 sets of 10,000 people trying to get from 10 different suburbs to 10 different 'campuses'.
Slightly counter-intuitively, the way to combat urban sprawl is to build more intensively in existing urban space, not to extend development out ever further and further as every company wants to build its own little pristine mini-country - just as, in previous decades, American families wanted to build their own little mini-castles in vast, sprawling suburbs.
(The article is an excellent piece of criticism; the 'castle' analogy above is from another excellent piece I read a few years back, which proposed that the reason American suburban homes tend to have tiny, vestigial, fenced-in front gardens is that suburban homes are essentially miniaturized castles in intent.)
and many of the problems lie right there in the line 'needs of consumers', if you unpick it: capitalism requires consumers with needs, so it does its damnedest to make sure we consume all the time, and generate 'needs' which are really 'entirely foolish desires'.