"One women said that she almost hit one of the company's minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn..."
She almost hit the vehicle in front of her -- making her almost an unsafe driver. This is not grounds for her to complain.
Safe drivers allow sufficient stopping distance between themselves and the vehicle ahead. Doesn't matter why the vehicle ahead stops abruptly (driver had a stroke, software crashed, doesn't matter). The vehicle behind is always responsible for not hitting the vehicle ahead.
A hammer purchased today still looks like a hammer from a millennia ago for a reason.
"If you go through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance."
I am reminded of this passage from Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem:
“Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
Future Shockshock (Alvin Toffler, 1970) observed that change is stressful, accelerating rapidly in our time, and sure to get worse.
Get worse it has. Change continues to accelerate, fulfilling Toffler's predictions.
John Brunner's excellent novel The Shockwave Rider (1975) puts it well:
In the twentieth century one did not have to be a pontificating pundit to predict that success would breed success and the nations that first were lucky enough to combine massive material resources with advanced knowhow would be those where social change would accelerate until it approximated the limit of what human beings can endure.
There's the rub: change will accelerate until it approximates the limit of what human beings can endure.
Those who cannot endure? They kill themselves, or others, or go insane.
True, we are apex predators, and thus apex toxin accumulators.
But heavy metals and other accumulative toxins are not the reason that pregnant women -- or anyone, for that matter -- should not eat people. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm pretty sure that you won't ingest that much cadmium and whatever, even if human flesh is your primary food source.
Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart.
Harold Innis talked about this in his lecture series, and subsequent book, Empire and Communications. Excerpt:
The rise of absolutism in a bureaucratic state reflected the influence of writing and was supported by an increase in the production of papyrus.
The spread of writing hastened the downfall of the Roman Republic, he argues, facilitating the emergence of a Roman Empire stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia. To administer such a vast empire, the Romans were forced to establish centralized bureaucracies. These bureaucracies depended on supplies of cheap papyrus from the Nile Delta for the long-distance transmission of written rules, orders and procedures. The bureaucratic Roman state backed by the influence of writing, in turn, fostered absolutism, the form of government in which power is vested in a single ruler. Innis adds that Roman bureaucracy destroyed the balance between oral and written law giving rise to fixed, written decrees. The torture of Roman citizens and the imposition of capital punishment for relatively minor crimes became common as living law "was replaced by the dead letter."
I don't have the book right at hand, but as I recall, Thomas made it quite clear that Dr. Cameron was valuable to the CIA precisely because he was Canadian -- an American doctor would be more closely scrutinized, more vulnerable to exposure.
Also as I recall, Dr. Cameron was quite vigorous about his business. He was not a tool to be deceived or coerced by American spooks. He did what he did of his own active volition.
His two lab assistants -- they were the super-creeps, the Igor assistants to Herr Doktor. The ones who spent a lot of time with patients, carrying out the doctor's orders, and whatever: drugging patients into comas, shocking patients into comas, drugging patients out of comas, making patients wear headphones repeating short loops of their own voices, over and over for hours ("psychic driving").
In the mid-1970s, Inslaw developed for the United States Department of Justice a highly efficient, people-tracking, computer program known as Prosecutor's Management Information System (Promis). Inslaw's principal owners, William Anthony Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Burke Hamilton, later sued the United States Government (acting as principal to the Department of Justice) for not complying with the terms of the Promis contract and for refusing to pay for an enhanced version of Promis once delivered. This allegation of software piracy led to three trials in separate federal courts and two congressional hearings.
During ensuing investigations, the Department of Justice was accused of deliberately attempting to drive Inslaw into Chapter 7 liquidation; and of distributing and selling stolen software for covert intelligence operations of foreign governments such as Canada, Israel, Singapore, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan; and of becoming directly involved in murder.
Later developments implied that derivative versions of Enhanced Promis sold on the black market may have become the high-tech tools of worldwide terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and international money launderers and thieves.
I am reminded of a passage from A Tale of Two Cities, where Monsieur runs down and kills a young boy:
He took out his purse.
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”
Slashdot Mirror
And the best money government can print.
She almost hit the vehicle in front of her -- making her almost an unsafe driver. This is not grounds for her to complain.
Safe drivers allow sufficient stopping distance between themselves and the vehicle ahead. Doesn't matter why the vehicle ahead stops abruptly (driver had a stroke, software crashed, doesn't matter). The vehicle behind is always responsible for not hitting the vehicle ahead.
A hammer purchased today still looks like a hammer from a millennia ago for a reason.
"If you go through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance."
- Jack Handey
I am reminded of this passage from Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem:
Source
Read: Holograms to tour as Andy Kaufman and Redd Foxx.
Future Shockshock (Alvin Toffler, 1970) observed that change is stressful, accelerating rapidly in our time, and sure to get worse.
Get worse it has. Change continues to accelerate, fulfilling Toffler's predictions.
John Brunner's excellent novel The Shockwave Rider (1975) puts it well:
There's the rub: change will accelerate until it approximates the limit of what human beings can endure.
Those who cannot endure? They kill themselves, or others, or go insane.
Sources:
Thank you for the polite correction. Useful knowledge.
You said it. We want a lot of energy in a hand-held format. But it's dangerous.
That energy will get hacked for purposes both good and bad, and the bad purposes will include explosions.
I wonder if morphological computation can solve prion folding.problems.
If not an outright solution, such models may provide insight: "Soft is as soft does."
Another thought:
Perhaps these morpho-squishy computers can run competitive genetic algorithms.
Think Robot Wars meets Fight Club.
I would pay to see that.
True, we are apex predators, and thus apex toxin accumulators.
But heavy metals and other accumulative toxins are not the reason that pregnant women -- or anyone, for that matter -- should not eat people. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm pretty sure that you won't ingest that much cadmium and whatever, even if human flesh is your primary food source.
The real peril is Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy -- "Mad Human Disease" -- which begins with a single strand of broken protein.
Also, social-evolutionary pressures tend to work against cannibalism, in the long run. Maybe. I hope.
True, insightful, and comprehensive. Well said.
How about leader avoidance?
Maybe I want a certain number of slackers and deserters -- free thinkers -- in my swarm army.
Harold Innis talked about this in his lecture series, and subsequent book, Empire and Communications. Excerpt:
See also Empire and Communications at Wikipedia. Excerpt:
See also Harold Innis's communications theories.
Innis has his admirers -- John Brunner's epic Stand on Zanzibar opens with a laudatory quote from Marshall McLuhan about Innis.
But Innis also has his critics, who dismiss (or ridicule) the idea that the Roman empire fell because it lost access to Egyptian papyrus. See:
Most of what I know about CIA mind control, I read in Journey into Madness by Gordon Thomas.
I don't have the book right at hand, but as I recall, Thomas made it quite clear that Dr. Cameron was valuable to the CIA precisely because he was Canadian -- an American doctor would be more closely scrutinized, more vulnerable to exposure.
Also as I recall, Dr. Cameron was quite vigorous about his business. He was not a tool to be deceived or coerced by American spooks. He did what he did of his own active volition.
His two lab assistants -- they were the super-creeps, the Igor assistants to Herr Doktor. The ones who spent a lot of time with patients, carrying out the doctor's orders, and whatever: drugging patients into comas, shocking patients into comas, drugging patients out of comas, making patients wear headphones repeating short loops of their own voices, over and over for hours ("psychic driving").
Of course, for "patients" read "torture victims".
Christ, what a world we live in.
I was thinking mind control, MK-Ultra, medically programmable assassins -- that sort of thing.
But okay, improved health would be a good peace dividend.
If common medications can do all that, just think what uncommon medications might do.
Weaponize it: soldiers who serve for home and memory.
Promis:
Reality is disappointing?
This is why we create fiction in the first place.
Damn, this is both +Funny and +Insightful. Wish I had mod points, and the ability to assign two of them to your post.
"All but confirm" means "everything up to, but not actually, confirming".
So the "all but" includes "strongly suggests", "gives reason to believe", and similar suggestive (but non-confirming) phrases.
In other words: "We can't confirm (prove) the assertion, but we strongly believe in the assertion."
"Everything short of" is a similar phrase.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Attributed (questionably) to Edmund Burke.
It may be spelled "Trans-Pacific Partnership", but it's pronounced "Greater Pacific Rim Co-Prosperity Sphere".
Excellent quote; thank you.
I am reminded of a passage from A Tale of Two Cities, where Monsieur runs down and kills a young boy:
A Tale of Two Cities
I'm glad you had sardonic irony in mind; I made you a Friend with this in mind.
But damn, it's often difficult to tell, and somebody will usually take it literally. This is why I should stick to my rule: Don't comment on politics.