If all comes down to what you believe about human nature. Roughly speaking, some people believe that poor people are poor because they are lazy and violent, while others believe that people are poor because they don't have opportunities available to them, so they turn to violence as an effective, but not ideal, way of problem solving in their miserable lives.
People on either side have fundamentally different views about reality and human nature, and thus there is no common ground in which to have a productive discussion.
So the RIAA/MPAA got to the dictionary writers too. How long has that definition of 'steal' been in there?
Why should I trust reference.com? Miriam Webster makes no such mention of "appropriating words, ideas, credit without right or acknowledgement":
to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
to come or go secretly, unobtrusively, gradually, or unexpectedly
to steal or attempt to steal a base
transitive verb
a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b : to take away by force or unjust means c : to take surreptitiously or without permission d : to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of
a : to move, convey, or introduce secretly : SMUGGLE b : to accomplish in a concealed or unobserved manner
a : to seize, gain, or win by trickery, skill, or daring b of a base runner : to reach (a base) safely solely by running and usually catching the opposing team off guard
Turn off the propaganda and turn on your critical thinking skills. You're not even looking at a law dictionary. Besides, OP said 'copyright is not theft', so you even looked up the wrong word. Your reference.comagrees that copyright is not theft:
the act of stealing; the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny.
He didn't get screwed because he took the appropriate steps to protect his own selfish interests, just like any company would. His story is an example of how *not* to get screwed.
The only conclusion that I can come to is that someone is tracking these contractors to figure out who they are.
These can't be general circulation coins. It's too expensive to put RFID in a coin, and there's no use for it. If the government was minting RFID coins, even as a test-run, there would be *some* mention of it *somewhere. If the government were doing it for legit purposes, they would own up to it after these reports. These coins must be being specially made.
Why would you want to make them? I don't think you're really worried about the coin itself; you are worried about the person carrying the coins. You don't need to know where they are at any moment -- there is no infrastructure to track a single coin. You just want to correlate a person carrying these tagged coins on a regular basis with the source of the tagged coins. It's a kind of 'swarming' identification. If the person regularly has a number of tagged coins in their pocket 3 days out of the week, you know they must be one of the people interacting directly with the source. This person is part of the group of people you are trying to identify.
Imagine a customs checkpoint on the border with thousands of people passing by every day. Suppose you know that there are some 50 contractors passing by there every day on their way to work in Canada. For whatever reason, you can't figure out who they are in any other way. But suppose you have access to the Canadian money supply inside the vending machines of the worksite. So you make sure that all of the Canadian money coming into the vending machine is tagged. You have a scanner inside the customs booth. Everyday, there are a number of cars where the driver has anywhere from 0-3 tagged coins. You know these guys must be getting tagged coins from the vending machine you control.
That's not entirely correct really true. In hunter/gatherers, the exchange and distribution of food is mostly what we are talking about. But you are right -- in all other material culture, such as tools, clothing, pottery, etc. most adults are self-sufficient.
There is a division of labor. The first division of labor is between productive adults and the elderly/children, who cannot provide for themselves, and then between men and women. Human beings typically cannot fully provide for all their needs on their own. We rely on our families to meet our basic everyday economic needs. For western people, that means the nuclear family, but for hunter/gatherers, that means you have obligations with all kinds of cousins and aunts and uncles. When you go out hunting or gathering, it's kind of a lottery; you might not find anything, but then if you do find something, it's way more than you can eat right now, and you have no refrigerator. So, you bring it back to the village and share it with everyone.
When we talk about trade in the modern western world, we usually are talking about interacting with strangers who we have no relationship with other than economic. When talking about the distribution of food. So you will find a lot of trade in hunter/gatherer society, but it is highly ritualized and traditional. Along the lines of, if you go out hunting and get a warthog, your cross-cousin gets the left leg, your parallel cousin gets the right, your parents get this cut, etc. etc. If you get a caribou, then your parents get the head and the liver, your cross-cousin gets the rump, etc. etc.
So theoretically you could give the meat away to anyone you wanted to, but they choose to keep of traditional distribution models lest they face ostracism. These traditions also make sure that *you* get some meat when you come home empty-handed.
This is patently untrue. For thousands of years, if you wanted to be a shopkeeper, all you needed was your dad to keep shop. If you wanted to be a blacksmith, all you needed was your father to be blacksmith. That's why we have family names like Smith, Miller, and Farmer. Occupations were something that belonged within a family.
For most of human history, there was an upper class of elites, about 10% of the population, who ruled over the other 90% who grew food and served the elites. There are variations throughout the world, but this is the basic pattern. There was no free market or middle class or political freedom. Wikipedia says this about free markets: "The consensus among economic historians is that the free market economy is a specific historic phenomenon, and that it emerged in late medieval and early-modern Europe". It gets a little convoluted in places like Europe and India, where what emerges is a system of classes or casts: the religious/priest group, the warrior/nobility, and the mercantile class. But don't think that there was a free market. Kings had absolute power; they could levy fines, confiscate assets, fix prices, etc. etc. What emerged out of the class struggles of Europe was the idea of liberty -- freedom -- where nobody, not a King, not a priest, could tell you want to do. Applied to economics, the conclusion is the free market. You don't need the church fixing the price of apples, claiming that changing prices was a challenge to Go'ds natural order. Applied to politics, we get the idea of political freedom and the rights of man.
Hunter gathers do/did live in a society with greater political and economic freedom, but technically, that's before history, since history is the recorded word. Furthermore, those societies are ruled by complex system of obligations to kin, so you can't really say that they have absolute freedom. As far as taxes, they have been part of business for as long as we have recorded history. The very first writings were receipts for business transactions. You needed these so that the King's tax collector wouldn't demand more than you owed, and the tax collector wanted to see that you weren't cheating him.
So basically you're taking this libertarian fantasy of a free market and applying it backwards into history where it never really existed.
There is one concept that you are missing in your analysis, and that is "natural monopoly". Unless we want fifteen different wires coming into people's homes, the telcos, power companies, and cable companies will have a natural monopoly on service to your home. Somebody owns those wires running across the sidewalks. We can't just quadruple the amount of phone poles overnight. If you are unhappy with your phone company, you can't just have another company drive their van to your house trailing copper wire behind them. There is just one phone wire coming into your house.
You viewpoint is naive. Read some American history about the period 100 years ago. Standard Oil wasn't created by government 'interference'.
The intense competition of the marketplace creates great incentive to cheat and deal with people unfairly in order to get ahead. A truly free market will be taken over by powerful monopolies who will work to *remove* competition. Corporations have no incentive to tell us the truth or to use less hazardous manufacturing methods if it makes them more money. They have no incentive to pay people decent wages if they could have child laborers working 80 hour weeks, or even serfs or slaves. The slaves were freed through government 'interference' in the marketplace. Children were taken out of factories and mines by government 'interference'. Workers were given 40-hour work weeks with overtime thereafter, lunch breaks, bathroom/coffee breaks, and retirement accounts by unionization and government 'interference' which allowed unions. Read some history about how labor organizers were beaten up and killed by private 'security' services employed by corporations.
The role of government is to keep the marketplace fair by creating the rules through law, and punishing cheaters. Otherwise a free market will simply reward cheaters and strongmen. Part of keeping the marketplace fair is ensuring competition. This involves breaking up monopolies. We are a democratic republic, and we have the rule of law. In order for the government to legitimately regulate the marketplace, law must be passed.
Yes, people are ppor in many parts of the world, but I would imagine that they have the footwear issue figured out well enough to get where they need to go everyday.
In an earlier conversation about OLPC, somebody asked a question similar to yours, except it was about pencil, paper, and textbooks for learning, not laptops. Basically, my argument is that these are fishing poles, and not fish. I'll quote my reply:
"This is my opinion on the subject. Simply my humble predictions: this will be a *very* disruptive technology, changing the world in ways that we are not planning and we cannot for see. Children will use these laptops for their own purposes.
As far as teaching plain ol' reading, writing, and 'rythmetic, a pencil and paper would do just as good a job for a lot less money. As a teaching device, they won't be a smashing success. However, what they will do is usher kids in third world poverty into the global communication revolution.
Have you read about cell phones in rural Africa? These were places so poor that nobody, not business, not the corrupt government, not international aide programs, could justify the cost of wiring these places for phone service and electricity. However, once cell phone towers started going up, poor people started getting a hold of cell phones. Poor farmers were lining up buyers for fruit they were picking in the fields *as they were picking it*, instead of dragging it all the way to market and having it rot in the sun when there were no buyers. African societies have formalized rules of friendship and obligation, and having these fast communication tools allowed people to better utilize their social network and provide for the daily needs.
These OLPC laptops will be used more like cell phones than desktop office computers. Yes, children are going to use these laptops to learn a little at school. But far and away, they will use them to talk to each other via the wireless capabilities. They will talk to people everyday that are more that a day's walk away. They will meet new people in neighboring villages electronically; people they have never met in real life.
All people everywhere provide for their daily needs through their social networks. These rural third world kids will have a much expanded social network on account of these laptop. The tittering, giggling children passing gossip and songs back and forth on these laptops will one day grow up, start families, plant gardens, and conduct business, and uses these communication technologies to improve their lives.
The paper and pencil model prepares kids for the office of the 1950s, where the only problem solving tools are pens and paper, in/out boxes on each person's desk, and vacuum tubes shuttling papers around. Kids of today will make their lives in a new world where we can organize flash mobs in a hour on a cell phone. They need to play with the tools to tomorrow, so they can creatively explore all the yet-unimagined possibilities they will use in the future."
"Ignoring problems won't make them go away. At some point you have to deal with memory management, either manually, as in plain C, or automatically, as in Java. It's not a waste of time solving 'computer' problems, because if you do not solve them, your program won't work. How do you think your ontological system will manage memory - by magic?"
How does Java's or Python's garbage collection work -- magic? No, what happened was that people solved the problem once already, in a re-useable way, so that we don't have keep solving them every time we write a program. The idea is to make progress, to make things easier. If you're writing an accounting program, you should be worrying about accounting problems, not memory management. Or do you think all programs should be written in assembly?
I'm not saying that Java's memory management has reached Nirvana and there aren't any more improvements to be made. I'm just saying that not every programmer should be working on it, especially when you're trying to solve other problems. Sure, memory issues will show up in any programming project you undertake, but that doesn't mean that every program should be optimized to that level, or that every programmer should be able to work at that level.
It's like saying a figure animator at Pixar needs to know how to push memory around in a stack, and that will help him when he is animating a running lion on a computer. No, it won't. We make higher-level programming tools so he doesn't *have* to worry about registers and stacks. Tha animator needs to study physiology and anatomy to be a better animator on a computer, not boolean logic.
He doesn't need to learn about auto-repair to help him drive to work in the morning. If his car has trouble, call AAA and let him spend his valuable time learning to be a better artist. We have a complex, diversified society so that we can have experts that push the boundaries and advance our culture, whether it is in computer science or animation.
Like I said, there will always be a place for low-level programming, boolean logic, OS development, etc. But I think we think of programming too often as computer science, rather than as a way to create tools to allow people to solve problems in other areas of life. The perspective we seem to use is "How can we translate problems from other areas into computer science problems" rather than "How can we make programs that are more helpful in solving other people's problems?" Introducing an accountant to memory management is *not* progress.
Basically all I'm saying is that for most programming jobs, we are still working at too low of a level. We seem to think that real programmers need to work at the memory-manipulating level, and if you're not doing that, you're not doing real programming. Well, not every smart, talented person working in programming needs to be doing memory management.
What you're missing is that an ontology system like cyc has hundreds of thousands of such assertions, and has reasoning capabilities of basic abstract concepts such as 'things', 'temporal things', 'spatial things', 'intangible', etc.
Check out this diagram. Cyc has 1.4 million assertions. How long will it take you to finish your program? How long to troubleshoot?;)
Cyc has a language for making assertions. It has no ambiguity. In my example of the IM interface, cyc could determine ambiguity and ask clarifying questions.
I'm willing to go with you, but I don't understand the logic behind going 50/50. Scientifically, we can be certain that particular phenomena are governed by chance. How is guessing whether or not life is Earth-like similiar to coin-tossing -- i.e. governed by chance? What chain of logic lead you to this conclusion?
I believe that these days there is a gap between the kinds of concepts that you learn in computer science, which are mathematical things, and the everyday social problems that people are trying to solve with computers. It was summed up nicely a few years ago in a criticism of open-source software someone on the internet -- someone was complaining that the developers of GNUcash were dealing with memory leaks. I think they were using c or c++, and the complainer was saying they should migrate to java or python or something. If you're trying to make a computer program to solve problems, it's a waste of time to be solving computer problems. You should be solving the pre-existing human problem.
Every tool has its own problems. One problem is accounting, or keeping track of money. With pen and paper, you can run out of ink or paper. Humans aren't good at adding numbers in their heads. With computers, you can completely erase all of your work with a few clicks of the mouse or keyboard. So there are ways that problems inherent in the tool can emerge, which take energy and attention away from solving the pre-existing problem.
Currently with computers we are trying to abstract problems such as banking and business into simple logic puzzles. I think that's too much of a simplification.
I think we need to create a virtual world full of basic human-percieved concepts, such as time, weather, humans, animals, etc. and create programs by manipulating those basic ideas and objects.
An example is an ontological system like OpenCyc. An ontological system holds hundreds of thousands of logical assertions like "Animals eat Food" and "Paris is the Capital of France". Basically, an ontology system has some basic common sense. From all of these assertions, it can make logical conclusions. So, if well tell Cyc that Duke is a Dog, it can conclude that Duke has a tail and eats food. If we tell it that Duke lives in Paris, it knows that Duke lives in France.
Now imagine, instead of dealing with animals and where they live, it has a bunch of assertions about generally accepting accounting principles. One day, you might be able to just sit down and talk with an ontological system via email or IM, and say, "We got a check from client A for $575, another check for $440." and then the computer balances the books with all the other accounting principles it 'knows'.
Current programs seems to be exclusively a digital re-creation of paper-based forms and filing cabinets. It's a sheet of paper with a bunch of field:value pairs, and reports are the resulting logical operations you can do with all of that data. This is *basically* the relational database. I think we are hitting the limit of the field:value model of reality. I think there are other models, such as virtual realities like online worlds, knowledge systems like opencyc, etc.
Programmers are working exclusively at too low of a level. Yes, of course, we will always need to teach and understand basic boolean logic and computer science terms, but we need to start working at higher-level, human friendly concepts.
I did phrase this badly. I really don't have the background on entropy and organic chemistry that I should.
But basically, living organisms make food. The very first organisms began reproducing no matter how inefficiently. Organisms don't evolve to use energy more efficiently unless they encounter selective pressure ( and of course, one selective pressure is competing against more efficient organisms ). They are happy being sloppy, inefficient eaters, so long as they are able to reproduce. But, cells that consume food so efficiently that there isn't any more food for them in their immediate environment simply die. So there is a point which there is selective pressure *against* more efficient energy consumption. So evolution doesn't necessarily produce maximum efficiency. It produces minimum *necessary* efficiency. It's survival of the good enough, not the greatest.
Cells don't have a constant income of energy. They produce chemicals such as sugars that store energy that they use when they aren't getting energy. So there is always this currency of surplus energy in the form of sugars in the biosphere.
My terms may not be up to snuff, and my logic might have a few holes, but I hope I gave you the basic idea. Hopefully other slashdotters will improve and expound.
"Except that life originated in an anaerobic environment: oxygen was not a significant component of Earth's atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years after life began. When oxygen did increase, the atmosphere became inhospitable to those early organisms."
What do you mean 'Except that...'? I only mentioned water, sunlight, and the temperature range as the necessary components in my postulation. Are you talking about the oxygen molecules in water? IIRC, I think the theory is that there was water on Earth from the beginning, way before life.
First, there is an 'energy' definition of life. That is to say, alien life may not be carbon-based, may not use water, may not be composed of cells, and may not have DNA inside of it. However, one of the defining characteristics of life is that it uses energy. It metabolizes, grows, and reproduces. It eats something, somehow. It makes a waste product.
So, if we look at a planet's chemical composition, we can make a good guess as to whether there is life there by looking at its chemistry. If there are living things there, they will be making reactive chemicals. From outer space, we could tell that the Earth has a lot of metabolic activity in it, because the sky is mostly highly reactive oxygen that is a result of plant respiration. Mars, on the other hand, is mostly chemically inert. There is very little metabolism going on there, if there is any at all. Either life there has already eaten up the planet, or else there wasn't enough resource to really get started, or there was never life at all.
Secondly, let's talk about a scenario where life can really only happen with water and organic ( meaning carbon-containing ) compounds. What conditions are necessary for life? What conditions does life thrive in? Take the Earth as an example. Where do we find the greatest mass and biodiversity? In the oceans. Ocean water is practically alive itself, there is so much life in it. On land, the places with the greatest biomass and biodiversity are the rainforests, where they have near 100% humidity. So water as a medium seem to really grow and reproduce. What temperature range do we find the most life in? About 70-90 degrees F -- I'm talking about the *most* life. So the metabolism of life forms seems to function optimally at 70-90 F.
The point I'm trying to make is that yes, we do find life in weird places on Earth -- inside solid rock, in 200 degree sulfuric vents on the ocean floor, inside nuclear reactor cores. However, there isn't very much of it in terms of biomass, and there's not much diversity of forms. My guess is that those 'extremophiles' are descendants of creatures who lived in more hospital environments and became adapted to increasingly extreme environments. I don't think that life originated in rocks or in ocean vents. I think life originated in an environment that is most like where we find the greatest biomass and biodiversity -- water in sunlight at about 60-120 F.
If we're not talking about the above scenarios, we are getting away from materialism, and thus science. This might include "Imagine beings of pure energy" (hey, atoms are 'pure energy') or "What if the sun is conscious?" ( well, we can't measure consciousness *yet* so we can't tell scientifically ) These are fun to think about, but scientifically they are kind of a non-starter.
I understand what you're saying about thinking outside the box, expecting the unexpected, and not limiting our minds or our past experiences. But science puts some serious restraints on what we can imagine or postulate *scientifically*.
"I think you're bang on when you say that the OLPC has similar possibilities to change the way people do things in these developing nations, however, I also think it's going to very strongly matter HOW they are used."
Well, unless they are going to be total Nazis about it, teachers really won't be able to control how the kids use it. It's like hiding a comic inside the textbook you're pretending to read. The moment the teacher turns their back, the kids will be IMing each other. There will be some nerd in the class who will hurry and finish all of the assignments so he can continue working on his own little program. They will quickly learn how to multi tasks and pay attention to the teacher and the screen.
I think we both agree that this activity -- children's uncontrolled, creative play and usage -- will really be where the revolution comes from.
"If these computers are used how I suspect they will be, mostly in an institutionalized setting, sitting on desks in schools, I don't think they'll have the desired effect. If the children are allowed, or even encouraged, to take them home, to use them as they were their machines, we will soon see a generation of children who have learned how to exploit this disruptive technology to their own benefit."
Your concern is obviously valid. I got the impression that the "One Laptop Per Child" meant that the laptop would belong to the child. But I really don't know.
I think the real concern would be adults taking the laptops from the children and selling them on the black market. Not every parent is entirely consumed with seeing their child succeed. And there might be relatives or others in the village or wherever who are willing to take advantage of a child in such a way. Maybe it would be safer to keep them at the school.
This is my opinion on the subject. Simply my humble predictions: this will be a *very* disruptive technology, changing the world in ways that we are not planning and we cannot for see. Children will use these laptops for their own purposes.
As far as teaching plain ol' reading, writing, and 'rythmetic, a pencil and paper would do just as good a job for a lot less money. As a teaching device, they won't be a smashing success. However, what they will do is usher kids in third world poverty into the global communication revolution.
Have you read about cell phones in rural Africa? These were places so poor that nobody, not business, not the corrupt government, not international aide programs, could justify the cost of wiring these places for phone service and electricity. However, once cell phone towers started going up, poor people started getting a hold of cell phones. Poor farmers were lining up buyers for fruit they were picking in the fields *as they were picking it*, instead of dragging it all the way to market and having it rot in the sun when there were no buyers. African societies have formalized rules of friendship and obligation, and having these fast communication tools allowed people to better utilize their social network and provide for the daily needs.
These OLPC laptops will be used more like cell phones than desktop office computers. Yes, children are going to use these laptops to learn a little at school. But far and away, they will use them to talk to each other via the wireless capabilities. They will talk to people everyday that are more that a day's walk away. They will meet new people in neighboring villages electronically; people they have never met in real life.
All people everywhere provide for their daily needs through their social networks. These rural third world kids will have a much expanded social network on account of these laptop. The tittering, giggling children passing gossip and songs back and forth on these laptops will one day grow up, start families, plant gardens, and conduct business, and uses these communication technologies to improve their lives.
The paper and pencil model prepares kids for the office of the 1950s, where the only problem solving tools are pens and paper, in/out boxes on each person's desk, and vacuum tubes shuttling papers around. Kids of today will make their lives in a new world where we can organize flash mobs in a hour on a cell phone. They need to play with the tools to tomorrow, so they can creatively explore all the yet-unimagined possibilites they will use in the future.
The president cannot use Executive Orders as he wishes. The president cannot order anybody to break the law. Nor can he break the law himself.
Bush is using presidential signing statements as a way to act as his own legislature -- he is amending law and using a virtual line-item veto -- or at least he thinks so. These statements don't carry any force of law. At most they are just evidence that he intends to break or ignore the awl.
Slashdot Mirror
If all comes down to what you believe about human nature. Roughly speaking, some people believe that poor people are poor because they are lazy and violent, while others believe that people are poor because they don't have opportunities available to them, so they turn to violence as an effective, but not ideal, way of problem solving in their miserable lives.
People on either side have fundamentally different views about reality and human nature, and thus there is no common ground in which to have a productive discussion.
Why should I trust reference.com? Miriam Webster makes no such mention of "appropriating words, ideas, credit without right or acknowledgement":
- to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
- to come or go secretly, unobtrusively, gradually, or unexpectedly
- to steal or attempt to steal a base
transitive verb- a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b : to take away by force or unjust means c : to take surreptitiously or without permission d : to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of
- a : to move, convey, or introduce secretly : SMUGGLE b : to accomplish in a concealed or unobserved manner
- a : to seize, gain, or win by trickery, skill, or daring b of a base runner : to reach (a base) safely solely by running and usually catching the opposing team off guard
Turn off the propaganda and turn on your critical thinking skills. You're not even looking at a law dictionary. Besides, OP said 'copyright is not theft', so you even looked up the wrong word. Your reference.com agrees that copyright is not theft:"Sounds like you really got screwed."
Who was saying that he got screwed?
He didn't get screwed because he took the appropriate steps to protect his own selfish interests, just like any company would. His story is an example of how *not* to get screwed.
Neptune?! Why, in my day, we only had Uranus!
The only conclusion that I can come to is that someone is tracking these contractors to figure out who they are.
These can't be general circulation coins. It's too expensive to put RFID in a coin, and there's no use for it. If the government was minting RFID coins, even as a test-run, there would be *some* mention of it *somewhere. If the government were doing it for legit purposes, they would own up to it after these reports. These coins must be being specially made.
Why would you want to make them? I don't think you're really worried about the coin itself; you are worried about the person carrying the coins. You don't need to know where they are at any moment -- there is no infrastructure to track a single coin. You just want to correlate a person carrying these tagged coins on a regular basis with the source of the tagged coins. It's a kind of 'swarming' identification. If the person regularly has a number of tagged coins in their pocket 3 days out of the week, you know they must be one of the people interacting directly with the source. This person is part of the group of people you are trying to identify.
Imagine a customs checkpoint on the border with thousands of people passing by every day. Suppose you know that there are some 50 contractors passing by there every day on their way to work in Canada. For whatever reason, you can't figure out who they are in any other way. But suppose you have access to the Canadian money supply inside the vending machines of the worksite. So you make sure that all of the Canadian money coming into the vending machine is tagged. You have a scanner inside the customs booth. Everyday, there are a number of cars where the driver has anywhere from 0-3 tagged coins. You know these guys must be getting tagged coins from the vending machine you control.
That's not entirely correct really true. In hunter/gatherers, the exchange and distribution of food is mostly what we are talking about. But you are right -- in all other material culture, such as tools, clothing, pottery, etc. most adults are self-sufficient.
There is a division of labor. The first division of labor is between productive adults and the elderly/children, who cannot provide for themselves, and then between men and women. Human beings typically cannot fully provide for all their needs on their own. We rely on our families to meet our basic everyday economic needs. For western people, that means the nuclear family, but for hunter/gatherers, that means you have obligations with all kinds of cousins and aunts and uncles. When you go out hunting or gathering, it's kind of a lottery; you might not find anything, but then if you do find something, it's way more than you can eat right now, and you have no refrigerator. So, you bring it back to the village and share it with everyone.
When we talk about trade in the modern western world, we usually are talking about interacting with strangers who we have no relationship with other than economic. When talking about the distribution of food. So you will find a lot of trade in hunter/gatherer society, but it is highly ritualized and traditional. Along the lines of, if you go out hunting and get a warthog, your cross-cousin gets the left leg, your parallel cousin gets the right, your parents get this cut, etc. etc. If you get a caribou, then your parents get the head and the liver, your cross-cousin gets the rump, etc. etc.
So theoretically you could give the meat away to anyone you wanted to, but they choose to keep of traditional distribution models lest they face ostracism. These traditions also make sure that *you* get some meat when you come home empty-handed.
Whoops! I read about half your post before I when off on my anti-libertarian rant. Sorry!
This is patently untrue. For thousands of years, if you wanted to be a shopkeeper, all you needed was your dad to keep shop. If you wanted to be a blacksmith, all you needed was your father to be blacksmith. That's why we have family names like Smith, Miller, and Farmer. Occupations were something that belonged within a family.
For most of human history, there was an upper class of elites, about 10% of the population, who ruled over the other 90% who grew food and served the elites. There are variations throughout the world, but this is the basic pattern. There was no free market or middle class or political freedom. Wikipedia says this about free markets: "The consensus among economic historians is that the free market economy is a specific historic phenomenon, and that it emerged in late medieval and early-modern Europe". It gets a little convoluted in places like Europe and India, where what emerges is a system of classes or casts: the religious/priest group, the warrior/nobility, and the mercantile class. But don't think that there was a free market. Kings had absolute power; they could levy fines, confiscate assets, fix prices, etc. etc. What emerged out of the class struggles of Europe was the idea of liberty -- freedom -- where nobody, not a King, not a priest, could tell you want to do. Applied to economics, the conclusion is the free market. You don't need the church fixing the price of apples, claiming that changing prices was a challenge to Go'ds natural order. Applied to politics, we get the idea of political freedom and the rights of man.
Hunter gathers do/did live in a society with greater political and economic freedom, but technically, that's before history, since history is the recorded word. Furthermore, those societies are ruled by complex system of obligations to kin, so you can't really say that they have absolute freedom. As far as taxes, they have been part of business for as long as we have recorded history. The very first writings were receipts for business transactions. You needed these so that the King's tax collector wouldn't demand more than you owed, and the tax collector wanted to see that you weren't cheating him.
So basically you're taking this libertarian fantasy of a free market and applying it backwards into history where it never really existed.
There is one concept that you are missing in your analysis, and that is "natural monopoly". Unless we want fifteen different wires coming into people's homes, the telcos, power companies, and cable companies will have a natural monopoly on service to your home. Somebody owns those wires running across the sidewalks. We can't just quadruple the amount of phone poles overnight. If you are unhappy with your phone company, you can't just have another company drive their van to your house trailing copper wire behind them. There is just one phone wire coming into your house.
You viewpoint is naive. Read some American history about the period 100 years ago. Standard Oil wasn't created by government 'interference'.
The intense competition of the marketplace creates great incentive to cheat and deal with people unfairly in order to get ahead. A truly free market will be taken over by powerful monopolies who will work to *remove* competition. Corporations have no incentive to tell us the truth or to use less hazardous manufacturing methods if it makes them more money. They have no incentive to pay people decent wages if they could have child laborers working 80 hour weeks, or even serfs or slaves. The slaves were freed through government 'interference' in the marketplace. Children were taken out of factories and mines by government 'interference'. Workers were given 40-hour work weeks with overtime thereafter, lunch breaks, bathroom/coffee breaks, and retirement accounts by unionization and government 'interference' which allowed unions. Read some history about how labor organizers were beaten up and killed by private 'security' services employed by corporations.
The role of government is to keep the marketplace fair by creating the rules through law, and punishing cheaters. Otherwise a free market will simply reward cheaters and strongmen. Part of keeping the marketplace fair is ensuring competition. This involves breaking up monopolies. We are a democratic republic, and we have the rule of law. In order for the government to legitimately regulate the marketplace, law must be passed.
Yes, people are ppor in many parts of the world, but I would imagine that they have the footwear issue figured out well enough to get where they need to go everyday. In an earlier conversation about OLPC, somebody asked a question similar to yours, except it was about pencil, paper, and textbooks for learning, not laptops. Basically, my argument is that these are fishing poles, and not fish. I'll quote my reply:
"This is my opinion on the subject. Simply my humble predictions: this will be a *very* disruptive technology, changing the world in ways that we are not planning and we cannot for see. Children will use these laptops for their own purposes.
As far as teaching plain ol' reading, writing, and 'rythmetic, a pencil and paper would do just as good a job for a lot less money. As a teaching device, they won't be a smashing success. However, what they will do is usher kids in third world poverty into the global communication revolution.
Have you read about cell phones in rural Africa? These were places so poor that nobody, not business, not the corrupt government, not international aide programs, could justify the cost of wiring these places for phone service and electricity. However, once cell phone towers started going up, poor people started getting a hold of cell phones. Poor farmers were lining up buyers for fruit they were picking in the fields *as they were picking it*, instead of dragging it all the way to market and having it rot in the sun when there were no buyers. African societies have formalized rules of friendship and obligation, and having these fast communication tools allowed people to better utilize their social network and provide for the daily needs.
These OLPC laptops will be used more like cell phones than desktop office computers. Yes, children are going to use these laptops to learn a little at school. But far and away, they will use them to talk to each other via the wireless capabilities. They will talk to people everyday that are more that a day's walk away. They will meet new people in neighboring villages electronically; people they have never met in real life.
All people everywhere provide for their daily needs through their social networks. These rural third world kids will have a much expanded social network on account of these laptop. The tittering, giggling children passing gossip and songs back and forth on these laptops will one day grow up, start families, plant gardens, and conduct business, and uses these communication technologies to improve their lives.
The paper and pencil model prepares kids for the office of the 1950s, where the only problem solving tools are pens and paper, in/out boxes on each person's desk, and vacuum tubes shuttling papers around. Kids of today will make their lives in a new world where we can organize flash mobs in a hour on a cell phone. They need to play with the tools to tomorrow, so they can creatively explore all the yet-unimagined possibilities they will use in the future."
"Ignoring problems won't make them go away. At some point you have to deal with memory management, either manually, as in plain C, or automatically, as in Java. It's not a waste of time solving 'computer' problems, because if you do not solve them, your program won't work. How do you think your ontological system will manage memory - by magic?"
How does Java's or Python's garbage collection work -- magic? No, what happened was that people solved the problem once already, in a re-useable way, so that we don't have keep solving them every time we write a program. The idea is to make progress, to make things easier. If you're writing an accounting program, you should be worrying about accounting problems, not memory management. Or do you think all programs should be written in assembly?
I'm not saying that Java's memory management has reached Nirvana and there aren't any more improvements to be made. I'm just saying that not every programmer should be working on it, especially when you're trying to solve other problems. Sure, memory issues will show up in any programming project you undertake, but that doesn't mean that every program should be optimized to that level, or that every programmer should be able to work at that level.
It's like saying a figure animator at Pixar needs to know how to push memory around in a stack, and that will help him when he is animating a running lion on a computer. No, it won't. We make higher-level programming tools so he doesn't *have* to worry about registers and stacks. Tha animator needs to study physiology and anatomy to be a better animator on a computer, not boolean logic.
He doesn't need to learn about auto-repair to help him drive to work in the morning. If his car has trouble, call AAA and let him spend his valuable time learning to be a better artist. We have a complex, diversified society so that we can have experts that push the boundaries and advance our culture, whether it is in computer science or animation.
Like I said, there will always be a place for low-level programming, boolean logic, OS development, etc. But I think we think of programming too often as computer science, rather than as a way to create tools to allow people to solve problems in other areas of life. The perspective we seem to use is "How can we translate problems from other areas into computer science problems" rather than "How can we make programs that are more helpful in solving other people's problems?" Introducing an accountant to memory management is *not* progress.
Basically all I'm saying is that for most programming jobs, we are still working at too low of a level. We seem to think that real programmers need to work at the memory-manipulating level, and if you're not doing that, you're not doing real programming. Well, not every smart, talented person working in programming needs to be doing memory management.
What you're missing is that an ontology system like cyc has hundreds of thousands of such assertions, and has reasoning capabilities of basic abstract concepts such as 'things', 'temporal things', 'spatial things', 'intangible', etc.
;)
Check out this diagram. Cyc has 1.4 million assertions. How long will it take you to finish your program? How long to troubleshoot?
Cyc has a language for making assertions. It has no ambiguity. In my example of the IM interface, cyc could determine ambiguity and ask clarifying questions.
I'm willing to go with you, but I don't understand the logic behind going 50/50. Scientifically, we can be certain that particular phenomena are governed by chance. How is guessing whether or not life is Earth-like similiar to coin-tossing -- i.e. governed by chance? What chain of logic lead you to this conclusion?
;)
I'm not being sarcastic, I'm being pedantic
Your 50/50 is totally unscientific. What is your basis for using rules of chance?
I believe that these days there is a gap between the kinds of concepts that you learn in computer science, which are mathematical things, and the everyday social problems that people are trying to solve with computers. It was summed up nicely a few years ago in a criticism of open-source software someone on the internet -- someone was complaining that the developers of GNUcash were dealing with memory leaks. I think they were using c or c++, and the complainer was saying they should migrate to java or python or something. If you're trying to make a computer program to solve problems, it's a waste of time to be solving computer problems. You should be solving the pre-existing human problem.
Every tool has its own problems. One problem is accounting, or keeping track of money. With pen and paper, you can run out of ink or paper. Humans aren't good at adding numbers in their heads. With computers, you can completely erase all of your work with a few clicks of the mouse or keyboard. So there are ways that problems inherent in the tool can emerge, which take energy and attention away from solving the pre-existing problem.
Currently with computers we are trying to abstract problems such as banking and business into simple logic puzzles. I think that's too much of a simplification. I think we need to create a virtual world full of basic human-percieved concepts, such as time, weather, humans, animals, etc. and create programs by manipulating those basic ideas and objects.
An example is an ontological system like OpenCyc. An ontological system holds hundreds of thousands of logical assertions like "Animals eat Food" and "Paris is the Capital of France". Basically, an ontology system has some basic common sense. From all of these assertions, it can make logical conclusions. So, if well tell Cyc that Duke is a Dog, it can conclude that Duke has a tail and eats food. If we tell it that Duke lives in Paris, it knows that Duke lives in France.
Now imagine, instead of dealing with animals and where they live, it has a bunch of assertions about generally accepting accounting principles. One day, you might be able to just sit down and talk with an ontological system via email or IM, and say, "We got a check from client A for $575, another check for $440." and then the computer balances the books with all the other accounting principles it 'knows'.
Current programs seems to be exclusively a digital re-creation of paper-based forms and filing cabinets. It's a sheet of paper with a bunch of field:value pairs, and reports are the resulting logical operations you can do with all of that data. This is *basically* the relational database. I think we are hitting the limit of the field:value model of reality. I think there are other models, such as virtual realities like online worlds, knowledge systems like opencyc, etc.
Programmers are working exclusively at too low of a level. Yes, of course, we will always need to teach and understand basic boolean logic and computer science terms, but we need to start working at higher-level, human friendly concepts.
I did phrase this badly. I really don't have the background on entropy and organic chemistry that I should.
But basically, living organisms make food. The very first organisms began reproducing no matter how inefficiently. Organisms don't evolve to use energy more efficiently unless they encounter selective pressure ( and of course, one selective pressure is competing against more efficient organisms ). They are happy being sloppy, inefficient eaters, so long as they are able to reproduce. But, cells that consume food so efficiently that there isn't any more food for them in their immediate environment simply die. So there is a point which there is selective pressure *against* more efficient energy consumption. So evolution doesn't necessarily produce maximum efficiency. It produces minimum *necessary* efficiency. It's survival of the good enough, not the greatest.
Cells don't have a constant income of energy. They produce chemicals such as sugars that store energy that they use when they aren't getting energy. So there is always this currency of surplus energy in the form of sugars in the biosphere.
My terms may not be up to snuff, and my logic might have a few holes, but I hope I gave you the basic idea. Hopefully other slashdotters will improve and expound.
But you can take the example of how life works on one planet. What are the chances that Earth is totally unique, an exception?
"Except that life originated in an anaerobic environment: oxygen was not a significant component of Earth's atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years after life began. When oxygen did increase, the atmosphere became inhospitable to those early organisms."
What do you mean 'Except that...'? I only mentioned water, sunlight, and the temperature range as the necessary components in my postulation. Are you talking about the oxygen molecules in water? IIRC, I think the theory is that there was water on Earth from the beginning, way before life.
There are two things here.
First, there is an 'energy' definition of life. That is to say, alien life may not be carbon-based, may not use water, may not be composed of cells, and may not have DNA inside of it. However, one of the defining characteristics of life is that it uses energy. It metabolizes, grows, and reproduces. It eats something, somehow. It makes a waste product.
So, if we look at a planet's chemical composition, we can make a good guess as to whether there is life there by looking at its chemistry. If there are living things there, they will be making reactive chemicals. From outer space, we could tell that the Earth has a lot of metabolic activity in it, because the sky is mostly highly reactive oxygen that is a result of plant respiration. Mars, on the other hand, is mostly chemically inert. There is very little metabolism going on there, if there is any at all. Either life there has already eaten up the planet, or else there wasn't enough resource to really get started, or there was never life at all.
Secondly, let's talk about a scenario where life can really only happen with water and organic ( meaning carbon-containing ) compounds. What conditions are necessary for life? What conditions does life thrive in? Take the Earth as an example. Where do we find the greatest mass and biodiversity? In the oceans. Ocean water is practically alive itself, there is so much life in it. On land, the places with the greatest biomass and biodiversity are the rainforests, where they have near 100% humidity. So water as a medium seem to really grow and reproduce. What temperature range do we find the most life in? About 70-90 degrees F -- I'm talking about the *most* life. So the metabolism of life forms seems to function optimally at 70-90 F.
The point I'm trying to make is that yes, we do find life in weird places on Earth -- inside solid rock, in 200 degree sulfuric vents on the ocean floor, inside nuclear reactor cores. However, there isn't very much of it in terms of biomass, and there's not much diversity of forms. My guess is that those 'extremophiles' are descendants of creatures who lived in more hospital environments and became adapted to increasingly extreme environments. I don't think that life originated in rocks or in ocean vents. I think life originated in an environment that is most like where we find the greatest biomass and biodiversity -- water in sunlight at about 60-120 F.
If we're not talking about the above scenarios, we are getting away from materialism, and thus science. This might include "Imagine beings of pure energy" (hey, atoms are 'pure energy') or "What if the sun is conscious?" ( well, we can't measure consciousness *yet* so we can't tell scientifically ) These are fun to think about, but scientifically they are kind of a non-starter.
I understand what you're saying about thinking outside the box, expecting the unexpected, and not limiting our minds or our past experiences. But science puts some serious restraints on what we can imagine or postulate *scientifically*.
"I think you're bang on when you say that the OLPC has similar possibilities to change the way people do things in these developing nations, however, I also think it's going to very strongly matter HOW they are used."
Well, unless they are going to be total Nazis about it, teachers really won't be able to control how the kids use it. It's like hiding a comic inside the textbook you're pretending to read. The moment the teacher turns their back, the kids will be IMing each other. There will be some nerd in the class who will hurry and finish all of the assignments so he can continue working on his own little program. They will quickly learn how to multi tasks and pay attention to the teacher and the screen.
I think we both agree that this activity -- children's uncontrolled, creative play and usage -- will really be where the revolution comes from.
"If these computers are used how I suspect they will be, mostly in an institutionalized setting, sitting on desks in schools, I don't think they'll have the desired effect. If the children are allowed, or even encouraged, to take them home, to use them as they were their machines, we will soon see a generation of children who have learned how to exploit this disruptive technology to their own benefit."
Your concern is obviously valid. I got the impression that the "One Laptop Per Child" meant that the laptop would belong to the child. But I really don't know.
I think the real concern would be adults taking the laptops from the children and selling them on the black market. Not every parent is entirely consumed with seeing their child succeed. And there might be relatives or others in the village or wherever who are willing to take advantage of a child in such a way. Maybe it would be safer to keep them at the school.
This is my opinion on the subject. Simply my humble predictions: this will be a *very* disruptive technology, changing the world in ways that we are not planning and we cannot for see. Children will use these laptops for their own purposes.
As far as teaching plain ol' reading, writing, and 'rythmetic, a pencil and paper would do just as good a job for a lot less money. As a teaching device, they won't be a smashing success. However, what they will do is usher kids in third world poverty into the global communication revolution.
Have you read about cell phones in rural Africa? These were places so poor that nobody, not business, not the corrupt government, not international aide programs, could justify the cost of wiring these places for phone service and electricity. However, once cell phone towers started going up, poor people started getting a hold of cell phones. Poor farmers were lining up buyers for fruit they were picking in the fields *as they were picking it*, instead of dragging it all the way to market and having it rot in the sun when there were no buyers. African societies have formalized rules of friendship and obligation, and having these fast communication tools allowed people to better utilize their social network and provide for the daily needs.
These OLPC laptops will be used more like cell phones than desktop office computers. Yes, children are going to use these laptops to learn a little at school. But far and away, they will use them to talk to each other via the wireless capabilities. They will talk to people everyday that are more that a day's walk away. They will meet new people in neighboring villages electronically; people they have never met in real life.
All people everywhere provide for their daily needs through their social networks. These rural third world kids will have a much expanded social network on account of these laptop. The tittering, giggling children passing gossip and songs back and forth on these laptops will one day grow up, start families, plant gardens, and conduct business, and uses these communication technologies to improve their lives.
The paper and pencil model prepares kids for the office of the 1950s, where the only problem solving tools are pens and paper, in/out boxes on each person's desk, and vacuum tubes shuttling papers around. Kids of today will make their lives in a new world where we can organize flash mobs in a hour on a cell phone. They need to play with the tools to tomorrow, so they can creatively explore all the yet-unimagined possibilites they will use in the future.
The president cannot use Executive Orders as he wishes. The president cannot order anybody to break the law. Nor can he break the law himself.
Bush is using presidential signing statements as a way to act as his own legislature -- he is amending law and using a virtual line-item veto -- or at least he thinks so. These statements don't carry any force of law. At most they are just evidence that he intends to break or ignore the awl.
If we impeach the lesser evil, surely we can impeach the greater evil that follows him?
If we don't have the ability or power to deal with great evil, we are fucked no matter what.
I wouldn't have blamed you. I was totally goading the OP!
Maybe this will usher in a new era of civil, rational, fact-based debate on slashdot! </sarcasm>