Schneier seems to instinctively grasp what so many people don't: the hierarchical nature of virtually all human organizations - and derived from that vestigial alpha-male instinct - is prone to corruption, subversion, and ultimately ethical failure. Or to quote the old cliche: the Peter Principle applies here, with a twist: it's often the least ethical scum that rises to the top, not the least capable. Even the supposedly democratic United States government is organized in such a fashion, and the successful treasonous behavior of the Bush administration is a useful demonstration of how it can go wrong very quickly.
What Schneier is very reasonably suggesting is that we lessen that hierarchy, not add to it.
Ummm, dudes, ALL ethics are by definition artificial, since they are PREscriptive and not DEscriptive. Making up ethics for a robot is no more artificial than making up ethics for ourselves, and we've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.
Hey, I was soaking up some of that seating for more than an hour today. If the try to "demarcate" me out of the way, I might just park outside and not even buy anything. Turns out they haven't figured out how to isolate the wireless signals entirely within the building.
Re:"simply by showing it to them"
on
Mobile Wi-Fi Hot Spot
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I guess you get up and leave! Or yank the battery.
... was its amusingly heavy reliance on people consistently agreeing to buy suspiciously frequent "upgrades" to development software that already worked just fine. Borland tried to create a sort of subscriptions-based business model without actual subscriptions, and people balked. Borland never made quite as much money as it anticipated; it underestimated the fiscal and material conservatism of its target market.
Isn't it funny that the United States government has gone after so many corporations, accusing them of abusing positions of dominance in markets to create monopolies, when in fact that same government - and Americans collectively as a nation - have been guilty of the exact same monopolistic behaviors, perpetrated against the rest of the world? The United States has been abusing its economic position to "export" its economic values and system for many decades. In fact, that exportation is more coercive and extortionate than it is consensual: "you style your economy and trade laws after our own, to protect OUR interests and desire to profit from YOUR citizens, or we won't do business with you".
Oh, and THEN there was the Iraq War(s).
It's about time the United States Government itself was indicted on anti-trust charges. It has violated all the "trust" the American people have ever placed in it. Actions speak louder than words: this is an industrialist-dominated capitalist economy first and a democracy a distant second. Those decades of coercion, the Iraq War, and now this unsurprising revelation about yet more economic browbeating. So-called intellectual property law is one of the key aspects of that monopolistic behavior.
Forget about impeaching just Bush and Cheney... we need to impeach the entire American government, retroactively back to at least the early 1900s, and the entire American people for quietly condoning this and turning a blind eye. This is an entire nation guilty of monopolistic behavior, and using both the might of our economy AND our military to enable it.
Economists actually don't know anything - anything correct - about economic systems. They've been beer-bonging the wrong Kool-Aid and preaching the wrong sermons for a very long time; the entire field of economics has been hijacked by a greedy minority and perverted to their benefit. Climatologists actually understand more about economic systems than economists do, since climate and economics have quite a bit in common in terms of systemic behavior.
If the Founding Fathers had access to the 'Net and the same technology we do today, is there any doubt that they would have been blogging their dissenting opinions and activities? They would have been using the 'Net to organize "flash mobs" like the Boston Tea Party. Is there any doubt that TPTB of the day would have declared their blogs "hostile"?
The only thing new here is the medium. Only control-freak idiots would dare try to treat the activity different because of the medium.
Who gets to decide what is "severe, repeated, and hostile"? I don't think I want to trust that sort of nonobjective ambiguous judgement to either Congressmen or juries.
Blogs ARE a weapon of sorts, in any case: the best ones are used to attack groupthink and dogma and make people think and reconsider their cherished pork.
Branches of one's own government should not be in the business of manipulating their own citizens in this fashion.
And yes, I recognize that ship has generally sailed, but this is an egregious example... and then to arrest peaceful protesters on top of it to squelch dissent and keep that manipulation out of public awareness? That's unconstitutional and criminal.
"Thats bad moderation it was obviously intended to be funny and a little sarcastic, maybe insightful. - not flamebait...."
Exactly: it was comic relief. I hope some other folks are kind and fair enough to reverse that. Good god, do I honestly have to terminate everything intended as sarcasm or humor with a smiley or sickening "lol"? Luckily I have enough good karma to spare that a couple spiteful people can't wreck my wrep, but it's the principle of the thing! Obviously the parent of my comment intended some comic relief with the reference, too, but it was even less obvious.
Thanks for the synopsis of Soylent Green, but just the Wikipedia or IMDB linkies would've saved precious bandwidth for those folks on TWC accounts.;-)
I disagree. When the goats ruminate upon the grass, they add intellectual property value to it. That makes their poop even more valuable than the dead grass.
The best answer to the conundrum you described, I guess, is to register your own domain and then configure OpenID to use that. I've been meaning to do that with my domain. I haven't needed to use OpenID very much, so it hasn't been as pressing as it might be for you.
I've seen it, indeed, but I was put off by the "business model". Since the people who help, for whom it happens to be free, are not actually paid for their expertise (are they?), the site is actually abusing BOTH ends of the process: making the "users" pay and abusing the knowledge of the "experts".
Experts Exchange operates on a business model exactly like many dating services, where women are allowed to join for free and then the desperately horny men are milked for all it's worth: women = experts, men = users with problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Schneier seems to instinctively grasp what so many people don't: the hierarchical nature of virtually all human organizations - and derived from that vestigial alpha-male instinct - is prone to corruption, subversion, and ultimately ethical failure. Or to quote the old cliche: the Peter Principle applies here, with a twist: it's often the least ethical scum that rises to the top, not the least capable. Even the supposedly democratic United States government is organized in such a fashion, and the successful treasonous behavior of the Bush administration is a useful demonstration of how it can go wrong very quickly.
What Schneier is very reasonably suggesting is that we lessen that hierarchy, not add to it.
Ummm, dudes, ALL ethics are by definition artificial, since they are PREscriptive and not DEscriptive. Making up ethics for a robot is no more artificial than making up ethics for ourselves, and we've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.
Hey, I was soaking up some of that seating for more than an hour today. If the try to "demarcate" me out of the way, I might just park outside and not even buy anything. Turns out they haven't figured out how to isolate the wireless signals entirely within the building.
I guess you get up and leave! Or yank the battery.
A Slashdotter in Tatas building? How likely is that?
Hey, I can still mount my 62-inch LCD TV on the ceiling above the bed, right? Turn it off and it doubles as a mirror, eh?
I clicked into this thinking that "low on fuel" was gonna be a clever euphemism for "lack of funding", but I was sorely disappointed!
Perhaps the insane upgrades could be indirectly attributed to Kahn's megalomania, too? I wasn't my intention to mini-mize his mega-lomania. :-)
... was its amusingly heavy reliance on people consistently agreeing to buy suspiciously frequent "upgrades" to development software that already worked just fine. Borland tried to create a sort of subscriptions-based business model without actual subscriptions, and people balked. Borland never made quite as much money as it anticipated; it underestimated the fiscal and material conservatism of its target market.
... that being a geek with a bad case of Asperger's Syndrome traits isn't contraceptive enough? Actually it's more like contra-female....
Isn't it funny that the United States government has gone after so many corporations, accusing them of abusing positions of dominance in markets to create monopolies, when in fact that same government - and Americans collectively as a nation - have been guilty of the exact same monopolistic behaviors, perpetrated against the rest of the world? The United States has been abusing its economic position to "export" its economic values and system for many decades. In fact, that exportation is more coercive and extortionate than it is consensual: "you style your economy and trade laws after our own, to protect OUR interests and desire to profit from YOUR citizens, or we won't do business with you".
Oh, and THEN there was the Iraq War(s).
It's about time the United States Government itself was indicted on anti-trust charges. It has violated all the "trust" the American people have ever placed in it. Actions speak louder than words: this is an industrialist-dominated capitalist economy first and a democracy a distant second. Those decades of coercion, the Iraq War, and now this unsurprising revelation about yet more economic browbeating. So-called intellectual property law is one of the key aspects of that monopolistic behavior.
Forget about impeaching just Bush and Cheney... we need to impeach the entire American government, retroactively back to at least the early 1900s, and the entire American people for quietly condoning this and turning a blind eye. This is an entire nation guilty of monopolistic behavior, and using both the might of our economy AND our military to enable it.
Economists actually don't know anything - anything correct - about economic systems. They've been beer-bonging the wrong Kool-Aid and preaching the wrong sermons for a very long time; the entire field of economics has been hijacked by a greedy minority and perverted to their benefit. Climatologists actually understand more about economic systems than economists do, since climate and economics have quite a bit in common in terms of systemic behavior.
If the Founding Fathers had access to the 'Net and the same technology we do today, is there any doubt that they would have been blogging their dissenting opinions and activities? They would have been using the 'Net to organize "flash mobs" like the Boston Tea Party. Is there any doubt that TPTB of the day would have declared their blogs "hostile"?
The only thing new here is the medium. Only control-freak idiots would dare try to treat the activity different because of the medium.
Who gets to decide what is "severe, repeated, and hostile"? I don't think I want to trust that sort of nonobjective ambiguous judgement to either Congressmen or juries.
Blogs ARE a weapon of sorts, in any case: the best ones are used to attack groupthink and dogma and make people think and reconsider their cherished pork.
Branches of one's own government should not be in the business of manipulating their own citizens in this fashion.
And yes, I recognize that ship has generally sailed, but this is an egregious example... and then to arrest peaceful protesters on top of it to squelch dissent and keep that manipulation out of public awareness? That's unconstitutional and criminal.
Exactly: it was comic relief. I hope some other folks are kind and fair enough to reverse that. Good god, do I honestly have to terminate everything intended as sarcasm or humor with a smiley or sickening "lol"? Luckily I have enough good karma to spare that a couple spiteful people can't wreck my wrep, but it's the principle of the thing! Obviously the parent of my comment intended some comic relief with the reference, too, but it was even less obvious.
Thanks for the synopsis of Soylent Green, but just the Wikipedia or IMDB linkies would've saved precious bandwidth for those folks on TWC accounts. ;-)
Soylent toner is made from the dessicated bodies of people stupid enough to have been suckered into buying soy-based toner.
I disagree. When the goats ruminate upon the grass, they add intellectual property value to it. That makes their poop even more valuable than the dead grass.
... they also got free fertilizer, so that next year's meadow will grow even taller and require more goats. Bah, humbug!
POLITICS.
I don't mean politics as in government, I mean politics as in social manipulation.
I know, but I had to disrespect them for the sake of the metaphor!
This is a tangent... we weren't even thinking about KDE any more. ;-)
Been there, discussed that! I think we need a wiki to discuss the wiki....
I wouldn't mind that, since it's usually friendly to me. :-)
The best answer to the conundrum you described, I guess, is to register your own domain and then configure OpenID to use that. I've been meaning to do that with my domain. I haven't needed to use OpenID very much, so it hasn't been as pressing as it might be for you.
I've seen it, indeed, but I was put off by the "business model". Since the people who help, for whom it happens to be free, are not actually paid for their expertise (are they?), the site is actually abusing BOTH ends of the process: making the "users" pay and abusing the knowledge of the "experts".
Experts Exchange operates on a business model exactly like many dating services, where women are allowed to join for free and then the desperately horny men are milked for all it's worth: women = experts, men = users with problems.