How many more times are we going to hear about the DMCA and the extreem mesures some companies and people will go to use it?
Probably a couple per week until the damned thing is repealed or struck down.
When will the DMCA start getting some media attention outside of/.?
When there are media outside of/. that aren't part of entertainment conglomerates that are pushing the use of the DMCA to "protect" their "content", or by conglomerates that also own proprietary software vendors who are using it to "protect" their software products from reverse engineering, exposure of security flaws, and/or competition.
The DMCA strikes down a lot of rights that many people hold near and dear. I don't know about the rest of/. readers but I [am] disgusted by the DMCA.
It will be interesting to see if the shock waves from the cavitation (the sudden formation of the tiny bubbles) affects the operation of the chip or erodes the surface, limiting the life.
The camera has a long focus, making it unsuitable for parking on top of your monitor like a web cam. They already have a "condom-like device" for covering the lens for guaranteed privacy. Why not a snap-on corrective lens for 3-foot focus?
So you're saying that Objectivists, and therefore by extension Libertarians, are psychopaths?
No.
Being a member of the same set, or of a similar set, does not imply that all other members of the set (or similar set) have the same charicteristics. That falsehood is part of magical thinking, not logic. Follow it far enough, and you get "Psychopaths are humans, therefore all humans are psychopaths."
I'm saying that even psychopaths can become upstanding citizens if they practice Objectivism, because it is an internally-consistent philosophy that shows them "What's in it for me?" in the law-abiding, productive life.
Now, having said that, I DO get the impression that, among libertairans, the psychopaths DO gravitate toward Objectivism, resulting in them being over-represented among that fraction. A psychopath needs an explicit set of rules in order to know how to stay out of trouble, and Objectivism provides this. Libertarianism in general provides only one basic rule: Don't hit first. This leaves a LOT of room for flexibility, and a conscience is just about necessary to stay out of trouble.
But not that "over-represented" means "more than among the general population". The general population is between 1/2% and 2% psychopaths, so expect a bit more among Objectivists. But you don't have to be a psychopath to internalize Objectivism, and many (perhaps most) of them are not. (Of course if they're living by the rules, rather than merely giving them lip service, how would you tell? B-) )
I've met a lot of compensated psychopaths - most of them NOT objectivists. They're rule-bound. Everything's fine as long as YOU play by the rule set THEY learned - and if you're careful about interactions where they are ALLOWED to harm or cheat you (i.e. salesmen). But if you don't play by their rules they perceive you as "bad" - which makes them angry at you, perhaps jealous of you, and (depending on the rule set) may put you in a category where their rules allow them to cause you serious trouble.
The rules the Objectivists play by are very clear: If you didn't hit them, steal from them, threaten them, or cheat them by fraud, you're ALLOWED to be "bad". This psychopaths who compensated by learning Objectivism the most get-along-with-able psychopaths I've ever encountered.
One of the biggest problems for any consultant on projects is "scope creep". A good project manager will ensure that the client gets all that he has paid for, and no more. If the fee wasn't enough - too bad. The consuitant loses. If it was accurate or generous, he makes some money.
What the original poster is describing is the "extra mile" above and beyond the agreed scope. Consultants who do this for free too much go broke.
Which is why the firms I've worked with NEVER bid fixed-price, always time-and-materials. If you did an ethical job, fixed-price was always a loser because you'd lose the bid unless you underestimated the work.
Babysitting the billing is the job of the contract administrator of a multi-man shop, not of the consultant. That way you can play good-consultant/bad-administrator if the client has an issue. (Of course if you're a one-man-band you have to wear both hats, so you're stuck.)
My algorithm for dealing with the original question:
During the project definition phase:
- Research the customer's problem to figure out what he needs. (Because when you ask him what he needs, he'll tell you the new stuff that he wants, completely skipping the core of the problem as an uspoken "of course".)
- Suggest a design that gives him what he needs. Try to convince him that THAT is what he wants. Then.
- Build what he now WANTS.
Sometimes the customer will now want what he needs. Sometimes he won't. In the latter case maybe he's right, maybe you are. Doesn't matter. Now that he's informed, if he overrules you, it's his money so do it his way.
If you go down a rathole at this point, it's his problem. But if you didn't tell him IN ADVANCE that he'd taken a wrong turn, you didn't do your job.
[Visicalc] also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era.
I highly doubt that this one application started an era of "greed is good." People have always been greedy, this just let them be greedying is a slighly more sucessful manner.
"Greed is good", IMNSHO, came from Ayn Rand, via the Objectivist society, the Society(?) for Individiual Liberties (SIL), the Libertarian Party (and non-party-member libertarians).
Rand's thesis is a reaction to, and an analysis of the reasons for, the success of Capitalism in the US, contrasted with the despotism that arose from Socialism, National Socialism, and Communism in Europe (especially her native Russia).
Objectivism's prescription for social organization: instead of attempting to perfect the individual and train him to work against his instincts, you organize inter-individual interactions so that the so-called "vices" lead the individual into what the society (and most individuals) define as MORAL behavior.
Interestingly: Just about the ONLY way that has been found to turn psychopaths into law-abiding citizens with a high success rate is to teach them Objectivism. (Since a psychopath is precicely a person who reasons solely from "What's in it for me?", this is exactly what you'd expect if the social design of Objectivist philosophy was successful. B-) )
Where libertarians stop with "stay off me and I'll stay off you", Objectivists have a well-reasoned party line that INCLUDES that as a basic element. So Objectivists tend to be revolted by many libertarians' personal morals, yet they still get along. (That's because they share that basic principle of "don't hit first", so arguments go on forever but fights never start.)
Continued rotation against resistance from a static charge seems strange to me.
I wonder if they've adequately controlled against the phenomenon of "electric wind"?
They're "holding the potential constant" on the central sphere, despite any leakage from irregularities in its surface. The two uncharged spheres nearby should create a stronger field in their direction. Corona discharges toward the space between the spheres could result in a net outward motion of air there, and inward motion of air between the outer and central spheres. Friction of this air against the outer spehres would provide a rotational force, in opposite directions on the two spheres, with no net force on the central sphere.
It is almost impossible for network admins to know what is on every single network share on the LAN.
And doubly so if anyone operating an engine that catalogs what is on the LAN is sued.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't that what they're doing in these cases? Claiming that anything that catalogs the accessable shared files is a "piracy tool" that must be suppressed?
Told him his.306 wouldn't do diddly squat to a lazer guided 2000lb chunk of steel and high explosives [...]
True.
[...] and that his entire gun collection would be scattered across a four state area before he managed to take out more than four of whatever government force was bothering to invade his rural county home.
Probably not. Depends on how he uses 'em.
But it's beside the point. Because if it's "the UN invading his rural country home" he won't be alone. And the four-to-one kill ratio you quote, alone, should be more than adequate to defeat an invading army - or at least one smaller than that of China.
Not that it would stay there. If the UN were to invade to sieze the citizens' guns, even with the enthusiastic cooperation of the power structure in Washing, any bets on how long until the defenders have siezed weapons, first from the National Guard armories, then from Army and Air Force bases?
With the full cooperation of the military personnel in question, I might add. Remember: They took an oath to the Constitution, and they're composed of gun-toting citizens, too. While they might have been purged heavily, you can bet a significant number will at least look the other way, if not come over in mass, with tanks, planes, missiles, and support equipment.)
Just like with knives, you shouldn't completely absolve the maker from any responsibility with the knives, but should limit the extent to which they can be placed in the line of fault. I suppose the same should go for many situations.
You're confusing the issue. The legal principle is simple.
The manufacturer is liable if the product does not perform according to its design - if it's defective, or if it has a dangerous side-effect that was not what was intended and which was disguised:
- If the knife handle comes off and cuts you.
- If the cigarette gives you cancer and the tobacco company told you it wouldn't.
- If the gun blows up in your hand (when fed the correct ammunition).
The manufacutrer is NOT liable if the product is MISUSED by a criminal to commit a crime:
- If he uses a knife to cut their throat.
- If he uses a gun to shoot them in the heart.
- If he uses a car to run them over.
In each of these cases the product was performing within its design parameters (cutting meat, throwing a lead pellet really fast in the direction pointed, moving itself and its contents where directed). So the product is not defective. The CROOK is responsible for the crime, which resulted solely from his own actions.
If, for instance, the democratic process was subverted in some way, We The People were expected to take up our arms and restore proper government.
And it has happened. More than once.
The poster-child for this is the Battle of Athens, where returning WW II veterans overthrew a pair of political machines by force of arms.
Another less reputable example is the San Francisco Vigilance Committee's "Second Clensing" in which the cleaned out the Barbary Coast political machine.
But there are plenty more.
Note that "law and order" is just the institutionalization of vigilantism, with checks against misapplying penalties in the heat of the moment. If the instution breaks down, the people often will take the power back into their own hands, from which (according to the US's legal theories) it originates.
People in the US are normally loathe to do this except under extreme circumstances, and generally use their power to restore the institutions to proper function rather than replace them outright. (Even the Revolution started as a battle to recover what the colonists perceived as the "Rights of Free Englishmen")
you will find similar articles, mostly from the summer of 2001 [...] Either the people involved are doing a series of pilot plants in scaling this up, or somebody's dragging their feet.
One year to build the plant, IF all goes well. (Try getting capital for a "high-tech oil from garbage" scheme in the wake of the dotcom crash.) That takes you to summer of 2002.
Find a customer for the output, start it up, shake it down, ramp it up, tweak the process until the product is to the customer's liking and the operating parameters are OK. That takes you, say, to winter 2002.
Now run it for a year to acquire some operating experience. (Does the reaction eat your expensive tanks and need a lot of repair and replacement? It is prone to leaks, or explosions? What happens if the power fails while the plant is running?) Winter of 2003.
Are you profitable for 2003? You probably have a lot of startup expense the first year. So you're not proven yet. Run it another fiscal year. Go cash-flow positive by winter of 2004. Now other people will become interested - and your stock will start to climb.
Pro-forma profitable by winter 2005 and the me-toos will be raising money and building plants in 2006.
Just what I don't need: A day when, if there is any REAL news of significance, it will be buried in "jokes".
Remember: The information-theory definition of informtaion transfer is surprising the receiver. (If he already KNEW it, you didn't send him information - your transmission was redundant.) So real news of major import will look much like these jokes.
This is not "Stuff that Matters" - and buries stuff that does matter. Disinformation is evil even when it is traditional.
What happens when all content is automatically tagged with the geographical location of its production?
One thing: Filtering by geographic location. This creates ghettos. It's the electronic equivalent of redlining.
Another: Privacy violations. It's yet another marker useful for identifying an originator that you must remember to spoof or disable if you want to publish anonymously.
One of the most highly touted benefits of The Net is that "no one knows that you're a dog". Your ideas can be considered in isolation from your appearance, ethnicity, age, sex, nationality, and so on. This would take a BIG bite out of the net's egalitarianism.
[...] one of my friends commented that "A few thousand years ago, this would have been taken as an omen. Perhaps an omen of the end of the earth!" we all chuckled and got a bit smug about how far we've come as a civilization five days later we returned from the wilderness, switched on the TV in the motel room and were treated to the news of the Heaven's Gate mass suicide [...]
Remember that not EVERYBODY is civilized - or intelligent - or well-educated.
Also rembember that everybody starts out life ignorant. Bring up a child - or a generation of children - with the training methods and lore of any past culture and you get a typical member of that culture.
It takes about 13 to 15 years to go from the just-talking to young-warrior (i.e. cannon-fodder) stages of maturation. So that's the amount of time it take to completely turn a civilization around.
This has happened a number of times. Japan between WW I and WW II is one shining example. In WW I the Japanese treated their prisoners of war with impeccable courtesy, in good European style. After WW I the descendants of the Samurai class ran the education system, and raised a generation with a belief set including the idea that anyone who would surrender was essentially subhuman. Thus the Death March on Bataan and other atrocities during WW II.
Of course something similar happened in Germany during the same period. Along with other countries. (For instance: The US went from a confederation of small countries with a weak central government to an imperial welfare-state whose massive central government was mostly unquestioned.)
Actually, it's because the VW Bug is a common object in American culture, and probably elsewhere in the world as well. When you say "VW Bug", it doesn't take a whole lot of scrabbling around in ones memory to come up with an appropriate mental picture of how large the asteroid is.
Also because it's round and heavy. B-)
And because if the asteroid were the size of a Cadilac ElDorado they wouldn't be explaining just a few damaged roofs. And if it were the size of a semitractor/trailer rig or a house they might not be explaining anything at all.
(I think it was by Seymour Cray when he was still working for Control Data.)
Now that I think about it, if it was Cray and integrated circuits, it would have been AFTER he left Control Data. He first used integrated circuits in the Cray I.
He used discrete components before that, because in those days the speed advantage of discrete transistors and lower-resistance wiring sped up the logic more than the wider spacing of the parts slowed it down, so he could make faster machines that way. The crossover point was reached for TTL about the time he started his own company.
Back in the '60s (or maybe the early '70s) I saw a board for a high-end processor that used a related trick. (I think it was by Seymour Cray when he was still working for Control Data.)
The board had some hysterical number of layers (for the time), like in the 30s or 40s. And it was literally paved with 14- and/or 16-pin DIPs. On BOTH sides.
Now this was a problem, because DIPs have feet that go through holes and are mormally soldered on the OPPOSITE side of the board. To get maximum density the DIPs had to be laid out so that the pins of the DIPs on ONE side come up under the middle of the DIPs on the OTHER side. If you stuff one side you can get to the legs of the DIPs to solder them. But how do you solder down the legs of the dips from the other side? (It doesn't help to stuff 'em both at the same time, because then you can't get to EITHER side.)
The solution was to start by soldering down the first side's worth of DIPs with ordinary-temperature solder, as usual. Then they put little donuts of low-temperature solder with flux paste around each leg of each second-side DIP, insert them, and heat the whole assembly to a temperature that would melt the low-temp but not the high-temp solder.
Of course you had to bring all the legs to be soldered and the through-holes up to soldering temperature and back down in a few seconds. Otherwise you'd cook the chips and/or destroy the multilayer board (wich was DREADFULLY expensive). That's a very short time to heat and cool the parts to a very carefully controlled temperature. Too high and you unsolder the first layer of chips, too low and you get bad joints among the tens of thousands of chip legs.
So they dunked 'em in hot vegetable oil, with a carefully controlled temperature and dunk duration.
Ahem...I think it's worth pointing out that what you say is true for only some SF literature. Truly, a lot of the works from Gibson, Stephenson, Herbert, Clarke, etc. have been the kinds of work that have shaped minds, but the works of these writers exist surrounded by a deluge of SF adventure tripe.
And it was a SF author - Theodor Sturgeon - who analyzed that phenomenon off-the-cuff in an incedent at a science fiction convention. Story goes:
Little old lady at the hotel has noticed that there's an SF convention going on. She recognizes Sturgeon as an author from his nametag and asks him something to the effect of "You're one of those Science Fiction authors, aren't you?". Thinking he's being admired, Ted answers "Why, yes, I am." She says "But 90% of that stuff is shit!" To which he replys "Madam, 90% of EVERYTHING is shit." This formulation is now known as "Sturgeon's Law."
(I've given the canonical number form the current oral tradition. But when I first heard that, in the late '60s from a Sturgeon fan, the percentage quoted was 98.)
This strikes me as extremely perceptive - and just the kind of insight that good SF produces. Think about it. Take classical music, for instance. There was no doubt a LOT of junk when it was current. But what survived is part of the cream of that crop: Bach, for instance. Of COURSE there's a lot of rocket westerns. But there are also what-if stories (change one rule and see where it leads). And puzzle stories. And technichal speculation.
And most of them are wrong. But so what?
To paraphrase the forward of an HP Lovecraft anthology I own, it's as if, at some point, all the pulp western writers started replacing Lazy X Ranch with Planet X...six-shooters with laser pistols
And American Indians with Martians. Yep, exactly that DID happen. (I recall a cover from an early pulp magazine with a guy and a gal in cowboy outfits riding astradle 6-foot long V2 knockoff missiles across a desert scene. B-) ) Also take "true crime" or "wartime sabotage" and replace the crook or evil spy with a bug-eyed monster or mad scientist. And so on.
It doesn't matter whether the junk is there, as long as the good stuff is also there. The good stuff does its job, while the junk does ITS job - entertain the reader and make some money for the author and publisher.
But "the good stuff" in SF is precicely the stuff that meets the original criterion of this thread's base article: "fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.'". That's what classic SF IS, and HAS BEEN since at least Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.
Indeed, there are strong motif types running through SF that can connect to early human myths and non-SF literature. Consider a bog-standard SF story about thinking machines that go amok. This well connects back to Frankenstein, which, depending on one's perspective, may or may not be SF, and also connects back to early myths about golems.
And then Asimov got hold of it and stood it on its head, with the "Three Laws of Robotics" - and how THOSE could go wrong - or right. (Not to mention Jack Williamson's _With Folded Hands_ and _The Humanoids_.) There's a problem with creating beings. Let's see how we can solve it, and get the benefits without the disasters. Oops, that solution may have problems. Let's try another.
What it may be is that SF is really the new wrapper for old tale types. We live in an age of technology rather than gods and magic, and so the tales are now told with technology. In the end, the thematic messages are the same.
And there's nothing new under the sun? You have a good insight, but I think you're pushing it too far.
Yes, SF didn't arise fully formed from the forhead of John Campbell. It draws on a lot of previous forms - sometimes with admirable results, sometimes disasterous. Speculative fiction is an evolution on things that went before. Its roots can be traced back as far as the Gre
While the DoA is one of the most corrupt branches of our government [...]
Department of Agriculture? That's nothing.
Do you REALLY want your laptop regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF)? (Maybe with a little assistance from the FBI and the National Guard?)
I can see it now: Some kids are holding a LAN party. A sniper takes out the dogs in the yard. Then cattle cars full of ninja-suited jackbooted thugs pull up, blocking the view of the front door from the tipped-off press held at bay a mile away. They knock on the door. The homeowner answers, and is shot first in the arm and then the chest. The house is stormed, the cats stomped to death. Helicopters appear and fire into the upper floors, while a group brakes into the second-floor window and the last one throws a grenade in after them. The people not shot are herded into the upper floors or the underground basement sideroom by teargas. Then tanks crush the passages to the sideroom, take out the stairs to the second floor, smash much of the building to tinder, and open ventilation holes to the wind. Once the solvent has evaporated from the injected teargas (so the remaining dust is thoroughly flammible) a few pyrotechnic-based teargas grenades light it off. The teargas dust lights off the tinder, setting the building on fire, while producing Hydrogen Cyanide gas. And anyone not already dead is poisoned the first time they take a breath of smoke while trying to make it out (or just sitting trapped in the basement room).
And at the press conference they tell us that they really HAD to go after these low lifes, because, even though they had a license to make high-capacity laptop batteries they were suspected of not paying a $200 tax on one of 'em. And they were teaching their kids to download MP3s.
Moreover, the cross-linked enzyme crystals are able to withstand organic solvents but they are not that heat-stable - and if they are overheated, we can just hope that they don't go denatured, but their specificity to temperature will not change, i.e. Power goes down when temperature goes up or down, ooops....;-)
I recall that there has been quite a bit of work being done to industralize the enzymes from the bacteria that grow in sulphur mudpots in places like Yosemite, and to understand what makes them tick so it could be applied to other enzymes. Those function nicely up to the temperature of boiling mud.
While I don't know that these are what the enzyme fuel-cells are based on, if they ARE one might expect them to work BETTER as they heat up - just what you want. (And cross-linking for stability at high temperatures sounds just like the sort of thing that would be discovered by analyzing such enzymes.)
(Then there's the bacteria, tube worms, and shrimp from the subocean vents, which are running nicely WAY above sea-level boiling point. But you probably wouldn't want your laptop battery getting TOO far above boiling point - especially if it's full of ethanol.)
For those interested, the Vixen [obsoleteco...museum.org] is the system that was pre-announced and caused the demise of Osborne Computer due to the ensuing cash flow crunch.
And for years I referred to killing your cash cow by announcing its replacement before it's ready as "pulling an Osborne".
I have since found out that marketing types have a term for it: "Overhang". (Though I don't know if they already had the term in the Osborne I eclipsed by Vixen days.)
Not to assume or suggest that all fiction should have a point or a message/moral to it, but all fiction has the power to inspire us or make us question reality/society/etc.
if you take something away from a work of fiction (or film, or recording, or game) then you will be all the better for it.
Not necessarily. It depends a lot on what you take away from it.
If you take, for instance, the idea that Jews are subhuman and need to be exterminated, or blacks ditto and properly should be slaves, are you "the better for it"? The NAZIs would have thought so for the first case, the KKK for the second, wouldn't they?
Mainstream fiction is an art form directed at the masses by their masters (i.e. the art school establishment). The central message is that, no matter how bad things are, if you try to improve them (especially if you break the rules doing so), you will make them worse. So be a good little domestic animals. Obey your masters, don't break down the fence, and go quitely to the shearing and the slaughter.
(Classic) SF, on the other hand, is (mostly) by and for the people who design the tech and make it run. SF offers a rich toolset for speculating about both current situations and potential future changes - and for disconnecting them from the immediate problem so the reader can think about the core issues without biases from the current political situation or technical paradigm. The central message is that, by the application of intelligence and effort, you can make things better both for yourself and humanity at large. (It also includes the cautionary tale: If you break it THIS way you CAN'T fix it afterward, so apply your intelligence and effort up front, while it can still do some good.) It teaches the mindset that builds technologies and civilizations.
And of course that's why both SF in particular, and fiction in general, are held in contempt by the arts school types - which include historians, sociaologists, political scientists, and the like. Of COURSE you "can't" have a "valid" thought about the future based on fiction - THEIR fiction - because it's defeatist propaganda rather than valid speculation. (And SF doesn't obey their rules - when it's true to its own, so it is suppressed as "escapist trash" which must not be validated as a "serious" art form and thus must not be viewed by anyone "sophisticated".)
Notice that, even in the "golden age", there were a few authors and stories that obeyed the mainstream fiction rather than the SF rules. (_The Machine Stops_ springs to mind, as does virtually everything by Bradbury.) And (surprise!) only these stories and others like them are considered "valid" by arts types. (Of course they were pushed on the inmates of classrooms as examples of what SF is about, making the experience massively unpleasant and giving most of them an aversion to the whole art form.)
(I won't attempt to do modern SF justice, beyond mentioning that it includes both classic SF ruleset stories and stories from a number of other artforms, all lumped under one category. But thank GHOD the "new wave" has broken on the shore and sunk back into the depths. B-) )
But SF, in the classic sense, is EXACTLY the art form where the authors bring up real-world issues and speculate about possible outcomes, alternatives and their effects, and how to improve the human condition. They engage their readers in the sort of thinking that both inspries them and trains them to problem-solve and strive to bring about constructive change.
So of COURSE at least THIS kind of fiction is a vaild way to "talk about the real world". That's what it's FOR!
I'll believe there's a "war on spam" when I see spammers or their I.T. sites targeted by mortars or cruise missiles, or a few spammers strung up from lampposts or up against a wall with the firing squad going "ready! aim!..."
Right now there isn't even a minor skirmish.
And as government action - your email box seems to have less protection than your fax machine - (though a FEW small claims courts may be coming around on that).
Slashdot Mirror
How many more times are we going to hear about the DMCA and the extreem mesures some companies and people will go to use it?
/.?
/. that aren't part of entertainment conglomerates that are pushing the use of the DMCA to "protect" their "content", or by conglomerates that also own proprietary software vendors who are using it to "protect" their software products from reverse engineering, exposure of security flaws, and/or competition.
/. readers but I [am] disgusted by the DMCA.
Probably a couple per week until the damned thing is repealed or struck down.
When will the DMCA start getting some media attention outside of
When there are media outside of
The DMCA strikes down a lot of rights that many people hold near and dear. I don't know about the rest of
Your opinion is widely shared.
It will be interesting to see if the shock waves from the cavitation (the sudden formation of the tiny bubbles) affects the operation of the chip or erodes the surface, limiting the life.
The camera has a long focus, making it unsuitable for parking on top of your monitor like a web cam. They already have a "condom-like device" for covering the lens for guaranteed privacy. Why not a snap-on corrective lens for 3-foot focus?
So you're saying that Objectivists, and therefore by extension Libertarians, are psychopaths?
No.
Being a member of the same set, or of a similar set, does not imply that all other members of the set (or similar set) have the same charicteristics. That falsehood is part of magical thinking, not logic. Follow it far enough, and you get "Psychopaths are humans, therefore all humans are psychopaths."
I'm saying that even psychopaths can become upstanding citizens if they practice Objectivism, because it is an internally-consistent philosophy that shows them "What's in it for me?" in the law-abiding, productive life.
Now, having said that, I DO get the impression that, among libertairans, the psychopaths DO gravitate toward Objectivism, resulting in them being over-represented among that fraction. A psychopath needs an explicit set of rules in order to know how to stay out of trouble, and Objectivism provides this. Libertarianism in general provides only one basic rule: Don't hit first. This leaves a LOT of room for flexibility, and a conscience is just about necessary to stay out of trouble.
But not that "over-represented" means "more than among the general population". The general population is between 1/2% and 2% psychopaths, so expect a bit more among Objectivists. But you don't have to be a psychopath to internalize Objectivism, and many (perhaps most) of them are not. (Of course if they're living by the rules, rather than merely giving them lip service, how would you tell? B-) )
I've met a lot of compensated psychopaths - most of them NOT objectivists. They're rule-bound. Everything's fine as long as YOU play by the rule set THEY learned - and if you're careful about interactions where they are ALLOWED to harm or cheat you (i.e. salesmen). But if you don't play by their rules they perceive you as "bad" - which makes them angry at you, perhaps jealous of you, and (depending on the rule set) may put you in a category where their rules allow them to cause you serious trouble.
The rules the Objectivists play by are very clear: If you didn't hit them, steal from them, threaten them, or cheat them by fraud, you're ALLOWED to be "bad". This psychopaths who compensated by learning Objectivism the most get-along-with-able psychopaths I've ever encountered.
One of the biggest problems for any consultant on projects is "scope creep". A good project manager will ensure that the client gets all that he has paid for, and no more. If the fee wasn't enough - too bad. The consuitant loses. If it was accurate or generous, he makes some money.
What the original poster is describing is the "extra mile" above and beyond the agreed scope. Consultants who do this for free too much go broke.
Which is why the firms I've worked with NEVER bid fixed-price, always time-and-materials. If you did an ethical job, fixed-price was always a loser because you'd lose the bid unless you underestimated the work.
Babysitting the billing is the job of the contract administrator of a multi-man shop, not of the consultant. That way you can play good-consultant/bad-administrator if the client has an issue. (Of course if you're a one-man-band you have to wear both hats, so you're stuck.)
My algorithm for dealing with the original question:
During the project definition phase:
- Research the customer's problem to figure out what he needs. (Because when you ask him what he needs, he'll tell you the new stuff that he wants, completely skipping the core of the problem as an uspoken "of course".)
- Suggest a design that gives him what he needs. Try to convince him that THAT is what he wants. Then.
- Build what he now WANTS.
Sometimes the customer will now want what he needs. Sometimes he won't. In the latter case maybe he's right, maybe you are. Doesn't matter. Now that he's informed, if he overrules you, it's his money so do it his way.
If you go down a rathole at this point, it's his problem. But if you didn't tell him IN ADVANCE that he'd taken a wrong turn, you didn't do your job.
[Visicalc] also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era.
I highly doubt that this one application started an era of "greed is good." People have always been greedy, this just let them be greedying is a slighly more sucessful manner.
"Greed is good", IMNSHO, came from Ayn Rand, via the Objectivist society, the Society(?) for Individiual Liberties (SIL), the Libertarian Party (and non-party-member libertarians).
Rand's thesis is a reaction to, and an analysis of the reasons for, the success of Capitalism in the US, contrasted with the despotism that arose from Socialism, National Socialism, and Communism in Europe (especially her native Russia).
Objectivism's prescription for social organization: instead of attempting to perfect the individual and train him to work against his instincts, you organize inter-individual interactions so that the so-called "vices" lead the individual into what the society (and most individuals) define as MORAL behavior.
Interestingly: Just about the ONLY way that has been found to turn psychopaths into law-abiding citizens with a high success rate is to teach them Objectivism. (Since a psychopath is precicely a person who reasons solely from "What's in it for me?", this is exactly what you'd expect if the social design of Objectivist philosophy was successful. B-) )
Where libertarians stop with "stay off me and I'll stay off you", Objectivists have a well-reasoned party line that INCLUDES that as a basic element. So Objectivists tend to be revolted by many libertarians' personal morals, yet they still get along. (That's because they share that basic principle of "don't hit first", so arguments go on forever but fights never start.)
Continued rotation against resistance from a static charge seems strange to me.
I wonder if they've adequately controlled against the phenomenon of "electric wind"?
They're "holding the potential constant" on the central sphere, despite any leakage from irregularities in its surface. The two uncharged spheres nearby should create a stronger field in their direction. Corona discharges toward the space between the spheres could result in a net outward motion of air there, and inward motion of air between the outer and central spheres. Friction of this air against the outer spehres would provide a rotational force, in opposite directions on the two spheres, with no net force on the central sphere.
Try again in a HARD vaccuum.
It is almost impossible for network admins to know what is on every single network share on the LAN.
And doubly so if anyone operating an engine that catalogs what is on the LAN is sued.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't that what they're doing in these cases? Claiming that anything that catalogs the accessable shared files is a "piracy tool" that must be suppressed?
Told him his .306 wouldn't do diddly squat to a lazer guided 2000lb chunk of steel and high explosives [...]
True.
[...] and that his entire gun collection would be scattered across a four state area before he managed to take out more than four of whatever government force was bothering to invade his rural county home.
Probably not. Depends on how he uses 'em.
But it's beside the point. Because if it's "the UN invading his rural country home" he won't be alone. And the four-to-one kill ratio you quote, alone, should be more than adequate to defeat an invading army - or at least one smaller than that of China.
Not that it would stay there. If the UN were to invade to sieze the citizens' guns, even with the enthusiastic cooperation of the power structure in Washing, any bets on how long until the defenders have siezed weapons, first from the National Guard armories, then from Army and Air Force bases?
With the full cooperation of the military personnel in question, I might add. Remember: They took an oath to the Constitution, and they're composed of gun-toting citizens, too. While they might have been purged heavily, you can bet a significant number will at least look the other way, if not come over in mass, with tanks, planes, missiles, and support equipment.)
Just like with knives, you shouldn't completely absolve the maker from any responsibility with the knives, but should limit the extent to which they can be placed in the line of fault. I suppose the same should go for many situations.
You're confusing the issue. The legal principle is simple.
The manufacturer is liable if the product does not perform according to its design - if it's defective, or if it has a dangerous side-effect that was not what was intended and which was disguised:
- If the knife handle comes off and cuts you.
- If the cigarette gives you cancer and the tobacco company told you it wouldn't.
- If the gun blows up in your hand (when fed the correct ammunition).
The manufacutrer is NOT liable if the product is MISUSED by a criminal to commit a crime:
- If he uses a knife to cut their throat.
- If he uses a gun to shoot them in the heart.
- If he uses a car to run them over.
In each of these cases the product was performing within its design parameters (cutting meat, throwing a lead pellet really fast in the direction pointed, moving itself and its contents where directed). So the product is not defective. The CROOK is responsible for the crime, which resulted solely from his own actions.
If, for instance, the democratic process was subverted in some way, We The People were expected to take up our arms and restore proper government.
And it has happened. More than once.
The poster-child for this is the Battle of Athens, where returning WW II veterans overthrew a pair of political machines by force of arms.
Another less reputable example is the San Francisco Vigilance Committee's "Second Clensing" in which the cleaned out the Barbary Coast political machine.
But there are plenty more.
Note that "law and order" is just the institutionalization of vigilantism, with checks against misapplying penalties in the heat of the moment. If the instution breaks down, the people often will take the power back into their own hands, from which (according to the US's legal theories) it originates.
People in the US are normally loathe to do this except under extreme circumstances, and generally use their power to restore the institutions to proper function rather than replace them outright. (Even the Revolution started as a battle to recover what the colonists perceived as the "Rights of Free Englishmen")
... get better with time?
you will find similar articles, mostly from the summer of 2001 [...] Either the people involved are doing a series of pilot plants in scaling this up, or somebody's dragging their feet.
One year to build the plant, IF all goes well. (Try getting capital for a "high-tech oil from garbage" scheme in the wake of the dotcom crash.) That takes you to summer of 2002.
Find a customer for the output, start it up, shake it down, ramp it up, tweak the process until the product is to the customer's liking and the operating parameters are OK. That takes you, say, to winter 2002.
Now run it for a year to acquire some operating experience. (Does the reaction eat your expensive tanks and need a lot of repair and replacement? It is prone to leaks, or explosions? What happens if the power fails while the plant is running?) Winter of 2003.
Are you profitable for 2003? You probably have a lot of startup expense the first year. So you're not proven yet. Run it another fiscal year. Go cash-flow positive by winter of 2004. Now other people will become interested - and your stock will start to climb.
Pro-forma profitable by winter 2005 and the me-toos will be raising money and building plants in 2006.
That goes double.
Just what I don't need: A day when, if there is any REAL news of significance, it will be buried in "jokes".
Remember: The information-theory definition of informtaion transfer is surprising the receiver. (If he already KNEW it, you didn't send him information - your transmission was redundant.) So real news of major import will look much like these jokes.
This is not "Stuff that Matters" - and buries stuff that does matter. Disinformation is evil even when it is traditional.
What happens when all content is automatically tagged with the geographical location of its production?
One thing: Filtering by geographic location. This creates ghettos. It's the electronic equivalent of redlining.
Another: Privacy violations. It's yet another marker useful for identifying an originator that you must remember to spoof or disable if you want to publish anonymously.
One of the most highly touted benefits of The Net is that "no one knows that you're a dog". Your ideas can be considered in isolation from your appearance, ethnicity, age, sex, nationality, and so on. This would take a BIG bite out of the net's egalitarianism.
[...] one of my friends commented that "A few thousand years ago, this would have been taken as an omen. Perhaps an omen of the end of the earth!" we all chuckled and got a bit smug about how far we've come as a civilization five days later we returned from the wilderness, switched on the TV in the motel room and were treated to the news of the Heaven's Gate mass suicide [...]
Remember that not EVERYBODY is civilized - or intelligent - or well-educated.
Also rembember that everybody starts out life ignorant. Bring up a child - or a generation of children - with the training methods and lore of any past culture and you get a typical member of that culture.
It takes about 13 to 15 years to go from the just-talking to young-warrior (i.e. cannon-fodder) stages of maturation. So that's the amount of time it take to completely turn a civilization around.
This has happened a number of times. Japan between WW I and WW II is one shining example. In WW I the Japanese treated their prisoners of war with impeccable courtesy, in good European style. After WW I the descendants of the Samurai class ran the education system, and raised a generation with a belief set including the idea that anyone who would surrender was essentially subhuman. Thus the Death March on Bataan and other atrocities during WW II.
Of course something similar happened in Germany during the same period. Along with other countries. (For instance: The US went from a confederation of small countries with a weak central government to an imperial welfare-state whose massive central government was mostly unquestioned.)
Actually, it's because the VW Bug is a common object in American culture, and probably elsewhere in the world as well. When you say "VW Bug", it doesn't take a whole lot of scrabbling around in ones memory to come up with an appropriate mental picture of how large the asteroid is.
Also because it's round and heavy. B-)
And because if the asteroid were the size of a Cadilac ElDorado they wouldn't be explaining just a few damaged roofs. And if it were the size of a semitractor/trailer rig or a house they might not be explaining anything at all.
(I think it was by Seymour Cray when he was still working for Control Data.)
Now that I think about it, if it was Cray and integrated circuits, it would have been AFTER he left Control Data. He first used integrated circuits in the Cray I.
He used discrete components before that, because in those days the speed advantage of discrete transistors and lower-resistance wiring sped up the logic more than the wider spacing of the parts slowed it down, so he could make faster machines that way. The crossover point was reached for TTL about the time he started his own company.
Back in the '60s (or maybe the early '70s) I saw a board for a high-end processor that used a related trick. (I think it was by Seymour Cray when he was still working for Control Data.)
The board had some hysterical number of layers (for the time), like in the 30s or 40s. And it was literally paved with 14- and/or 16-pin DIPs. On BOTH sides.
Now this was a problem, because DIPs have feet that go through holes and are mormally soldered on the OPPOSITE side of the board. To get maximum density the DIPs had to be laid out so that the pins of the DIPs on ONE side come up under the middle of the DIPs on the OTHER side. If you stuff one side you can get to the legs of the DIPs to solder them. But how do you solder down the legs of the dips from the other side? (It doesn't help to stuff 'em both at the same time, because then you can't get to EITHER side.)
The solution was to start by soldering down the first side's worth of DIPs with ordinary-temperature solder, as usual. Then they put little donuts of low-temperature solder with flux paste around each leg of each second-side DIP, insert them, and heat the whole assembly to a temperature that would melt the low-temp but not the high-temp solder.
Of course you had to bring all the legs to be soldered and the through-holes up to soldering temperature and back down in a few seconds. Otherwise you'd cook the chips and/or destroy the multilayer board (wich was DREADFULLY expensive). That's a very short time to heat and cool the parts to a very carefully controlled temperature. Too high and you unsolder the first layer of chips, too low and you get bad joints among the tens of thousands of chip legs.
So they dunked 'em in hot vegetable oil, with a carefully controlled temperature and dunk duration.
Think "deep fryer".
Ahem...I think it's worth pointing out that what you say is true for only some SF literature. Truly, a lot of the works from Gibson, Stephenson, Herbert, Clarke, etc. have been the kinds of work that have shaped minds, but the works of these writers exist surrounded by a deluge of SF adventure tripe.
And it was a SF author - Theodor Sturgeon - who analyzed that phenomenon off-the-cuff in an incedent at a science fiction convention. Story goes:
Little old lady at the hotel has noticed that there's an SF convention going on. She recognizes Sturgeon as an author from his nametag and asks him something to the effect of "You're one of those Science Fiction authors, aren't you?". Thinking he's being admired, Ted answers "Why, yes, I am." She says "But 90% of that stuff is shit!" To which he replys "Madam, 90% of EVERYTHING is shit." This formulation is now known as "Sturgeon's Law."
(I've given the canonical number form the current oral tradition. But when I first heard that, in the late '60s from a Sturgeon fan, the percentage quoted was 98.)
This strikes me as extremely perceptive - and just the kind of insight that good SF produces. Think about it. Take classical music, for instance. There was no doubt a LOT of junk when it was current. But what survived is part of the cream of that crop: Bach, for instance. Of COURSE there's a lot of rocket westerns. But there are also what-if stories (change one rule and see where it leads). And puzzle stories. And technichal speculation.
And most of them are wrong. But so what?
To paraphrase the forward of an HP Lovecraft anthology I own, it's as if, at some point, all the pulp western writers started replacing Lazy X Ranch with Planet X...six-shooters with laser pistols
And American Indians with Martians. Yep, exactly that DID happen. (I recall a cover from an early pulp magazine with a guy and a gal in cowboy outfits riding astradle 6-foot long V2 knockoff missiles across a desert scene. B-) ) Also take "true crime" or "wartime sabotage" and replace the crook or evil spy with a bug-eyed monster or mad scientist. And so on.
It doesn't matter whether the junk is there, as long as the good stuff is also there. The good stuff does its job, while the junk does ITS job - entertain the reader and make some money for the author and publisher.
But "the good stuff" in SF is precicely the stuff that meets the original criterion of this thread's base article: "fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.'". That's what classic SF IS, and HAS BEEN since at least Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.
Indeed, there are strong motif types running through SF that can connect to early human myths and non-SF literature. Consider a bog-standard SF story about thinking machines that go amok. This well connects back to Frankenstein, which, depending on one's perspective, may or may not be SF, and also connects back to early myths about golems.
And then Asimov got hold of it and stood it on its head, with the "Three Laws of Robotics" - and how THOSE could go wrong - or right. (Not to mention Jack Williamson's _With Folded Hands_ and _The Humanoids_.) There's a problem with creating beings. Let's see how we can solve it, and get the benefits without the disasters. Oops, that solution may have problems. Let's try another.
What it may be is that SF is really the new wrapper for old tale types. We live in an age of technology rather than gods and magic, and so the tales are now told with technology. In the end, the thematic messages are the same.
And there's nothing new under the sun? You have a good insight, but I think you're pushing it too far.
Yes, SF didn't arise fully formed from the forhead of John Campbell. It draws on a lot of previous forms - sometimes with admirable results, sometimes disasterous. Speculative fiction is an evolution on things that went before. Its roots can be traced back as far as the Gre
While the DoA is one of the most corrupt branches of our government [...]
Department of Agriculture? That's nothing.
Do you REALLY want your laptop regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF)? (Maybe with a little assistance from the FBI and the National Guard?)
I can see it now: Some kids are holding a LAN party. A sniper takes out the dogs in the yard. Then cattle cars full of ninja-suited jackbooted thugs pull up, blocking the view of the front door from the tipped-off press held at bay a mile away. They knock on the door. The homeowner answers, and is shot first in the arm and then the chest. The house is stormed, the cats stomped to death. Helicopters appear and fire into the upper floors, while a group brakes into the second-floor window and the last one throws a grenade in after them. The people not shot are herded into the upper floors or the underground basement sideroom by teargas. Then tanks crush the passages to the sideroom, take out the stairs to the second floor, smash much of the building to tinder, and open ventilation holes to the wind. Once the solvent has evaporated from the injected teargas (so the remaining dust is thoroughly flammible) a few pyrotechnic-based teargas grenades light it off. The teargas dust lights off the tinder, setting the building on fire, while producing Hydrogen Cyanide gas. And anyone not already dead is poisoned the first time they take a breath of smoke while trying to make it out (or just sitting trapped in the basement room).
And at the press conference they tell us that they really HAD to go after these low lifes, because, even though they had a license to make high-capacity laptop batteries they were suspected of not paying a $200 tax on one of 'em. And they were teaching their kids to download MP3s.
Moreover, the cross-linked enzyme crystals are able to withstand organic solvents but they are not that heat-stable - and if they are overheated, we can just hope that they don't go denatured, but their specificity to temperature will not change, i.e. Power goes down when temperature goes up or down, ooops.... ;-)
I recall that there has been quite a bit of work being done to industralize the enzymes from the bacteria that grow in sulphur mudpots in places like Yosemite, and to understand what makes them tick so it could be applied to other enzymes. Those function nicely up to the temperature of boiling mud.
While I don't know that these are what the enzyme fuel-cells are based on, if they ARE one might expect them to work BETTER as they heat up - just what you want. (And cross-linking for stability at high temperatures sounds just like the sort of thing that would be discovered by analyzing such enzymes.)
(Then there's the bacteria, tube worms, and shrimp from the subocean vents, which are running nicely WAY above sea-level boiling point. But you probably wouldn't want your laptop battery getting TOO far above boiling point - especially if it's full of ethanol.)
For those interested, the Vixen [obsoleteco...museum.org] is the system that was pre-announced and caused the demise of Osborne Computer due to the ensuing cash flow crunch.
And for years I referred to killing your cash cow by announcing its replacement before it's ready as "pulling an Osborne".
I have since found out that marketing types have a term for it: "Overhang". (Though I don't know if they already had the term in the Osborne I eclipsed by Vixen days.)
RIP, Adam. You will be missed.
Not to assume or suggest that all fiction should have a point or a message/moral to it, but all fiction has the power to inspire us or make us question reality/society/etc.
if you take something away from a work of fiction (or film, or recording, or game) then you will be all the better for it.
Not necessarily. It depends a lot on what you take away from it.
If you take, for instance, the idea that Jews are subhuman and need to be exterminated, or blacks ditto and properly should be slaves, are you "the better for it"? The NAZIs would have thought so for the first case, the KKK for the second, wouldn't they?
Mainstream fiction is an art form directed at the masses by their masters (i.e. the art school establishment). The central message is that, no matter how bad things are, if you try to improve them (especially if you break the rules doing so), you will make them worse. So be a good little domestic animals. Obey your masters, don't break down the fence, and go quitely to the shearing and the slaughter.
(Classic) SF, on the other hand, is (mostly) by and for the people who design the tech and make it run. SF offers a rich toolset for speculating about both current situations and potential future changes - and for disconnecting them from the immediate problem so the reader can think about the core issues without biases from the current political situation or technical paradigm. The central message is that, by the application of intelligence and effort, you can make things better both for yourself and humanity at large. (It also includes the cautionary tale: If you break it THIS way you CAN'T fix it afterward, so apply your intelligence and effort up front, while it can still do some good.) It teaches the mindset that builds technologies and civilizations.
And of course that's why both SF in particular, and fiction in general, are held in contempt by the arts school types - which include historians, sociaologists, political scientists, and the like. Of COURSE you "can't" have a "valid" thought about the future based on fiction - THEIR fiction - because it's defeatist propaganda rather than valid speculation. (And SF doesn't obey their rules - when it's true to its own, so it is suppressed as "escapist trash" which must not be validated as a "serious" art form and thus must not be viewed by anyone "sophisticated".)
Notice that, even in the "golden age", there were a few authors and stories that obeyed the mainstream fiction rather than the SF rules. (_The Machine Stops_ springs to mind, as does virtually everything by Bradbury.) And (surprise!) only these stories and others like them are considered "valid" by arts types. (Of course they were pushed on the inmates of classrooms as examples of what SF is about, making the experience massively unpleasant and giving most of them an aversion to the whole art form.)
(I won't attempt to do modern SF justice, beyond mentioning that it includes both classic SF ruleset stories and stories from a number of other artforms, all lumped under one category. But thank GHOD the "new wave" has broken on the shore and sunk back into the depths. B-) )
But SF, in the classic sense, is EXACTLY the art form where the authors bring up real-world issues and speculate about possible outcomes, alternatives and their effects, and how to improve the human condition. They engage their readers in the sort of thinking that both inspries them and trains them to problem-solve and strive to bring about constructive change.
So of COURSE at least THIS kind of fiction is a vaild way to "talk about the real world". That's what it's FOR!
I'll believe there's a "war on spam" when I see spammers or their I.T. sites targeted by mortars or cruise missiles, or a few spammers strung up from lampposts or up against a wall with the firing squad going "ready! aim! ..."
Right now there isn't even a minor skirmish.
And as government action - your email box seems to have less protection than your fax machine - (though a FEW small claims courts may be coming around on that).