The geek's infatuation with jury nullification never ends.
Historically, jury nullification meant that the black man would be lynched before the trial began and the Klansman would go free. The outsider - the stranger - never holds the winning card in this game.
But good luck trying to explain to the geek why he is not the hometown hero who gets the free pass.
If we're to believe that Ross Ulbricht is really a internet and tor mastermind surely a Jury of his peers would require some sort of technical experience.
Oh, hell.
Ulbrich isn't a master criminal mastermind --- he's just another greedy, babble-mouthed, geek with a handful of technical tricks and an ego the size of the planet.
If you ran a construction firm and we being prosecuted for fraud or something after a bridge collapse don't you think the jury should have members that know somethings about materials science and masonry? I think that would be fair.
The jury of your peers is supposed to be representative of the community as a whole --- and that is essential to keep the system from being corrupted for "the good of the team."
Think of the rage that surrounds every police shooting or choke-hold death.
Rape on campus. Bishops sheltering priests who sexually abuse children. The "watchdogs" who presided over the physical decay and medical malpractice in our Veterans' Hospitals.
And what did they accomplish? They knocked Silk Road off the net for a few months, and in so doing helped it improve its security for next time.
There is no tech and no system that can protect a geek from his own inflated ego. The problem isn't getting a geek to talk, the problem is getting him to shut up.
Why is it necessary for Mozilla to have paid employees, let alone an actual corporate structure? There's lots of open-source software projects out there that continue to run based solely on the contributions of their developers.
How soon we forget.
Firefox had the money and manpower needed to develop the first credible open source alternative to Internet Explorer on the mainstream Windows platform.
The uncomfortable and unspoken truth about open source is that projects beyond a certain size and complexity need a formal organization, full-time staff and funding that rivals their commercial --- proprietary --- alternatives.
This is never more true when the target audience or market is not the computer geek.
Look at Open Town Meetings as an example. It is one of the most democratic and empowering form of governments in practice and it exists without a secret ballot for most matters.
The town meeting works only if everyone is willing to play by the rules. It is not particularly good at protecting minority interests, and can be quite short-sighted, stupid and irresponsible when emotions are running high, no matter how trivial the issue.
In fact, the 3 laws were a convenient plot device to show how those 3 laws would break down. I don't believe Asimov himself ever treated them as anything other than a plot device to explore the topic.
In-universe, the 3 Laws began as a PR gimmick to promote public acceptance of robots. Robert Heinlein, no fan of the 3 Laws, made short work of them in "Friday."
It's jarring --- but perfectly consistent --- to see how often Asimov used the word "boy" (=black=slave) in summoning a robot in his early stories. The 3 laws can be used to define a relationship that is neither healthy or informed on either side,
The scratching sound of a quill pen against paper - done in by the typewriter
The modern fountain pen came into general use about the same time as the typewriter.
It was only after three key inventions were in place that the fountain pen became a widely popular writing instrument. Those were the iridium-tipped gold nib, hard rubber, and free-flowing ink.
The first fountain pens making use of all these key ingredients appeared in the 1850s. In the 1870s Duncan MacKinnon, a Canadian living in New York City, and Alonzo T. Cross of Providence, Rhode Island, created stylographic pens with a hollow, tubular nib and a wire acting as a valve. Stylographic pens are now used mostly for drafting and technical drawing but were very popular in the decade beginning in 1875. In the 1880s the era of the mass-produced fountain pen finally began. The dominant American producers in this pioneer era were Waterman, of New York City, and Wirt, based in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Waterman soon outstripped Wirt, along with many companies that sprang up to fill the new and growing fountain pen market. Waterman remained the market leader until the early 1920s.
1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.
This is the rock where Freenet comes to grief.
The corporate data service can bury its servers in a salt mine or cavern tucked away somewhere deep in the Appalachians. When ISIS or the Feds are breaking down the doors, on-site physical security becomes their problem, not yours, or your family's.
The geek can become obsessed with the notion of "plausible deniability." [Not so much with thinking clearly about what is actually plausible, but that is another story.] The problem is finding someone who gives a damn one way or the other. "Tag. You're It!"
It's a scam as uch as any cryptocurrency is a scam; ie. essentially a pyramid-scheme. But then, so is the current market economy system
Market economies are built on the hard realities of finance, trade and production. The pyramid scheme is a something-from nothing, get-rich-quick, fantasy.
In theory a society rich enough to afford it would have moved to the oft-fictionalised post work utopia that you sometimes see in things like Star Trek.
But all you ever really see in Star Trek is life as viewed through the lens of the Starfleet officer. Utopian societies always look plausible when viewed from a height --- and you can't get much higher than a starship.
Looking back upon Slashdot history (you know, back when it was News for Nerds), I'd say it's about as clear as fucking mud. That line you attempt to draw between relevance (Freedom of Speech issue) and Slashdot is practically anorexic.
Having been around here awhile ---
I'd say that "News For Nerds" becomes an issue only when a story takes a geek outside his comfort zone, which seems to shrink a little faster each year. When the talk turns to gender issues in tech, for example, you can see him circling the wagons.
Leaving a TV prop replica sitting in your driveway is douchey. Store it in the garage, or your storage shed, or the back yard, or a storage facility.
This thing looks big enough to be a problem for our local zoning board. Basically a full-sized shed or playhouse more less permanently installed on your front yard --- which is not a particularly good idea for any number of reasons.
The fact that we accept something won't pass despite it being universally wanted by "the people" (not pronounced "corporations")....
The geek's first mistake in politics is to begin by assuming that everyone wants what he wants.
The second is to forget that people outside his own group may be actually and quite naturally aligned with the interests and values with whatever corporate entity he chooses to demonize.
Net neutrality is a distant, ill-defined abstraction.
What you see at ground level are the tens of millions of users drawn to add-supported and subscription media services like Netflix. This isn't how the geek expected the Internet to evolve or the purposes it would serve. But good luck trying to put the genii back into the bottle.
It does not require the massive infrastructure that starts with Western toilets to solve this problem. It can be done with wood and stone and gravity, assembled using nothing more than muscle power.
The essential requirement was a constant flow of fresh water in roughly the same volume as consumed daily by a modern European city.
There were eleven aqueducts supplying water to Rome that --- after serving drinking, bathing, sanitation and other needs --- was flushed through the sewers.
Over time, the Romans expanded the network of sewers that ran through the city and linked most of them, including some drains, to the Cloaca Maxima, which emptied into the Tiber River. Sanitation in ancient Rome
Is it necessary to add that flooding the Tiber with raw sewage is not the same as sewage treatment?
I have grown more than a little weary of the geek's lame attempts at humor at Gate's expense.
Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity?
Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren't properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.
If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.
Western toilets aren't the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn't feasible in many poor countries.
One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I've written about before.
Another idea is to reinvent the sewage treatment plant.
Today, in many places without modern sewage systems, truckers take the waste from latrines and dump it into the nearest river or the ocean --- or at a treatment facility that doesn't actually treat the sewage. Either way, it often ends up in the water supply. If they took it to the Omniprocessor instead, it would be burned safely. The machine runs at such a high temperature (1000 degrees Celsius) that there's no nasty smell; in fact it meets all the emissions standards set by the U.S. government.
Before we even started the tour, I had a question: Don't modern sewage plants already incinerate waste? I learned that some just turn the waste into solids that are stored in the desert. Others burn it using diesel or some other fuel that they buy. That means they use a lot of energy, which makes them impractical in most poor countries.
The Omniprocessor solves that problem. Through the ingenious use of a steam engine, it produces more than enough energy to burn the next batch of waste. In other words, it powers itself, with electricity to spare. The next-generation processor, more advanced than the one I saw, will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity.
correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIR the US justice system, It is up to the prosecution side to prove there was evidence on teh HD, not on the side of the defense there was not.
In the real world of the courtroom, the burden of proof is constantly shifting back-and-forth.
The destruction or disappearance of records under circumstances which are wildly improbable, suspiciously well-timed, or very unusual, to say the least, raises questions that the defense cannot afford to ignore.
It's the defendant's behavior that jury is examining here, not the contents of his files.
The geek in court tends to think that he holds the jury spellbound by his intellectual superiority and technical genius. He'll spin a yarn that stretches probability to the breaking-point and beyond in the absolute certainty that they can't possibly vote to convict.
A lot of middle-class homes used to have a piano for that purpose, no lie.
In our family that would be four generations and counting.
My sister, who teaches and plays professionally, owns both a modern mid-sized Steinway concert grand and a restored antique parlor reed pump organ. The Steinway is everything you would expect it to be.
The organ --- typical of the mass-market product sold out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog ca. 1897 --- genuinely surprised me. I had no idea how capable and pleasing an instrument it could be.
Of course, there is the fact that DRM and the play device phoning home isn't an issue, and it doesn't take that much in the way of electronics to play a record compared to a CD or MP3 file.
I very much doubt that the vinyl enthusiast shares the geek's obsession with DRM.
You'll understand them better when you look at the reasons why a collector will pay a premium for a traditionally bound and illustrated book.
The audiophile turntable as much about sculpture as it is about music. The machine is exposed and celebrated, not hidden.
The geek can be so focused on the tech that he misses everything else that is important. From the earliest days listening to the phonograph was advertised as a social experience. It was never about the ear bud, it was about dancing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure there have been other more positive instances of Jury Nullification
and maybe next week I'll win the Tri-State Lotto
--- but that isn't how I plan to meet the mortgage payment on my house.
can you post a single example of a geek who escaped conviction because of jury nullification?
Until it's on a store shelf it isn't for sale.
If I see a $1500 charge on my credit card, it's for sale.
If there is an online retail shopping site, it's for sale. Glass Explore
We need a medium of exchange that stands by itself, not subject to speculations of the 'market'.
There ain't no such thing.
Jury Nullification
The geek's infatuation with jury nullification never ends.
Historically, jury nullification meant that the black man would be lynched before the trial began and the Klansman would go free. The outsider - the stranger - never holds the winning card in this game.
But good luck trying to explain to the geek why he is not the hometown hero who gets the free pass.
If we're to believe that Ross Ulbricht is really a internet and tor mastermind surely a Jury of his peers would require some sort of technical experience.
Oh, hell.
Ulbrich isn't a master criminal mastermind --- he's just another greedy, babble-mouthed, geek with a handful of technical tricks and an ego the size of the planet.
If you ran a construction firm and we being prosecuted for fraud or something after a bridge collapse don't you think the jury should have members that know somethings about materials science and masonry? I think that would be fair.
The jury of your peers is supposed to be representative of the community as a whole --- and that is essential to keep the system from being corrupted for "the good of the team."
Think of the rage that surrounds every police shooting or choke-hold death.
Rape on campus. Bishops sheltering priests who sexually abuse children. The "watchdogs" who presided over the physical decay and medical malpractice in our Veterans' Hospitals.
And what did they accomplish? They knocked Silk Road off the net for a few months, and in so doing helped it improve its security for next time.
There is no tech and no system that can protect a geek from his own inflated ego. The problem isn't getting a geek to talk, the problem is getting him to shut up.
Why is it necessary for Mozilla to have paid employees, let alone an actual corporate structure?
There's lots of open-source software projects out there that continue to run based solely on the contributions of their developers.
How soon we forget.
Firefox had the money and manpower needed to develop the first credible open source alternative to Internet Explorer on the mainstream Windows platform.
The uncomfortable and unspoken truth about open source is that projects beyond a certain size and complexity need a formal organization, full-time staff and funding that rivals their commercial --- proprietary --- alternatives.
This is never more true when the target audience or market is not the computer geek.
Look at Open Town Meetings as an example. It is one of the most democratic and empowering form of governments in practice and it exists without a secret ballot for most matters.
The town meeting works only if everyone is willing to play by the rules. It is not particularly good at protecting minority interests, and can be quite short-sighted, stupid and irresponsible when emotions are running high, no matter how trivial the issue.
In fact, the 3 laws were a convenient plot device to show how those 3 laws would break down.
I don't believe Asimov himself ever treated them as anything other than a plot device to explore the topic.
In-universe, the 3 Laws began as a PR gimmick to promote public acceptance of robots. Robert Heinlein, no fan of the 3 Laws, made short work of them in "Friday."
It's jarring --- but perfectly consistent --- to see how often Asimov used the word "boy" (=black=slave) in summoning a robot in his early stories. The 3 laws can be used to define a relationship that is neither healthy or informed on either side,
The scratching sound of a quill pen against paper - done in by the typewriter
The modern fountain pen came into general use about the same time as the typewriter.
It was only after three key inventions were in place that the fountain pen became a widely popular writing instrument. Those were the iridium-tipped gold nib, hard rubber, and free-flowing ink.
The first fountain pens making use of all these key ingredients appeared in the 1850s. In the 1870s Duncan MacKinnon, a Canadian living in New York City, and Alonzo T. Cross of Providence, Rhode Island, created stylographic pens with a hollow, tubular nib and a wire acting as a valve. Stylographic pens are now used mostly for drafting and technical drawing but were very popular in the decade beginning in 1875. In the 1880s the era of the mass-produced fountain pen finally began. The dominant American producers in this pioneer era were Waterman, of New York City, and Wirt, based in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Waterman soon outstripped Wirt, along with many companies that sprang up to fill the new and growing fountain pen market. Waterman remained the market leader until the early 1920s.
Fountain pen
Elegant or practical, the fountain pen is a survivor.
1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.
This is the rock where Freenet comes to grief.
The corporate data service can bury its servers in a salt mine or cavern tucked away somewhere deep in the Appalachians. When ISIS or the Feds are breaking down the doors, on-site physical security becomes their problem, not yours, or your family's.
The geek can become obsessed with the notion of "plausible deniability." [Not so much with thinking clearly about what is actually plausible, but that is another story.] The problem is finding someone who gives a damn one way or the other. "Tag. You're It!"
It's a scam as uch as any cryptocurrency is a scam; ie. essentially a pyramid-scheme. But then, so is the current market economy system
Market economies are built on the hard realities of finance, trade and production. The pyramid scheme is a something-from nothing, get-rich-quick, fantasy.
In theory a society rich enough to afford it would have moved to the oft-fictionalised post work utopia that you sometimes see in things like Star Trek.
But all you ever really see in Star Trek is life as viewed through the lens of the Starfleet officer. Utopian societies always look plausible when viewed from a height --- and you can't get much higher than a starship.
Looking back upon Slashdot history (you know, back when it was News for Nerds), I'd say it's about as clear as fucking mud.
That line you attempt to draw between relevance (Freedom of Speech issue) and Slashdot is practically anorexic.
Having been around here awhile ---
I'd say that "News For Nerds" becomes an issue only when a story takes a geek outside his comfort zone, which seems to shrink a little faster each year. When the talk turns to gender issues in tech, for example, you can see him circling the wagons.
Leaving a TV prop replica sitting in your driveway is douchey. Store it in the garage, or your storage shed, or the back yard, or a storage facility.
This thing looks big enough to be a problem for our local zoning board. Basically a full-sized shed or playhouse more less permanently installed on your front yard --- which is not a particularly good idea for any number of reasons.
The fact that we accept something won't pass despite it being universally wanted by "the people" (not pronounced "corporations") ....
The geek's first mistake in politics is to begin by assuming that everyone wants what he wants.
The second is to forget that people outside his own group may be actually and quite naturally aligned with the interests and values with whatever corporate entity he chooses to demonize.
Net neutrality is a distant, ill-defined abstraction.
What you see at ground level are the tens of millions of users drawn to add-supported and subscription media services like Netflix. This isn't how the geek expected the Internet to evolve or the purposes it would serve. But good luck trying to put the genii back into the bottle.
It does not require the massive infrastructure that starts with Western toilets to solve this problem. It can be done with wood and stone and gravity, assembled using nothing more than muscle power.
The essential requirement was a constant flow of fresh water in roughly the same volume as consumed daily by a modern European city.
There were eleven aqueducts supplying water to Rome that --- after serving drinking, bathing, sanitation and other needs --- was flushed through the sewers.
Over time, the Romans expanded the network of sewers that ran through the city and linked most of them, including some drains, to the Cloaca Maxima, which emptied into the Tiber River. Sanitation in ancient Rome
Is it necessary to add that flooding the Tiber with raw sewage is not the same as sewage treatment?
Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity?
Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren't properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.
If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.
Western toilets aren't the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn't feasible in many poor countries.
One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I've written about before.
Another idea is to reinvent the sewage treatment plant.
Today, in many places without modern sewage systems, truckers take the waste from latrines and dump it into the nearest river or the ocean --- or at a treatment facility that doesn't actually treat the sewage. Either way, it often ends up in the water supply. If they took it to the Omniprocessor instead, it would be burned safely. The machine runs at such a high temperature (1000 degrees Celsius) that there's no nasty smell; in fact it meets all the emissions standards set by the U.S. government.
Before we even started the tour, I had a question: Don't modern sewage plants already incinerate waste? I learned that some just turn the waste into solids that are stored in the desert. Others burn it using diesel or some other fuel that they buy. That means they use a lot of energy, which makes them impractical in most poor countries.
The Omniprocessor solves that problem. Through the ingenious use of a steam engine, it produces more than enough energy to burn the next batch of waste. In other words, it powers itself, with electricity to spare. The next-generation processor, more advanced than the one I saw, will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity.
From Poop To Potable: This Ingenious Machine Turns Feces Into Drinking Water
I mean the guy already excelled at selling SHIT to people for years...
Cheap shot gets an instant mod-up, to "Insightful," no surprise there.
correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIR the US justice system, It is up to the prosecution side to prove there was evidence on teh HD, not on the side of the defense there was not.
In the real world of the courtroom, the burden of proof is constantly shifting back-and-forth.
The destruction or disappearance of records under circumstances which are wildly improbable, suspiciously well-timed, or very unusual, to say the least, raises questions that the defense cannot afford to ignore.
It's the defendant's behavior that jury is examining here, not the contents of his files.
The geek in court tends to think that he holds the jury spellbound by his intellectual superiority and technical genius. He'll spin a yarn that stretches probability to the breaking-point and beyond in the absolute certainty that they can't possibly vote to convict.
"Reasonable doubt" and all that.
When it comes out, be sure and get it before it is sued out of existence by someone who ate something that was accidentally recognized as edible
I have no need for an app that can't be trusted to do its job. Least of all when a mistake can be lethal.
If these companies were hiring a cook they would require 3 years experience working on an Ace cooktop...
Worst analogy ever.
When the culinary staff screws up, they can set fire to the kitchens or put employees in the hospital. Experience and credentials matter here.
A lot of middle-class homes used to have a piano for that purpose, no lie.
In our family that would be four generations and counting.
My sister, who teaches and plays professionally, owns both a modern mid-sized Steinway concert grand and a restored antique parlor reed pump organ. The Steinway is everything you would expect it to be.
The organ --- typical of the mass-market product sold out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog ca. 1897 --- genuinely surprised me. I had no idea how capable and pleasing an instrument it could be.
Of course, there is the fact that DRM and the play device phoning home isn't an issue, and it doesn't take that much in the way of electronics to play a record compared to a CD or MP3 file.
I very much doubt that the vinyl enthusiast shares the geek's obsession with DRM.
You'll understand them better when you look at the reasons why a collector will pay a premium for a traditionally bound and illustrated book.
The audiophile turntable as much about sculpture as it is about music. The machine is exposed and celebrated, not hidden.
The geek can be so focused on the tech that he misses everything else that is important. From the earliest days listening to the phonograph was advertised as a social experience. It was never about the ear bud, it was about dancing.