It's an ex Microsoft security chief... What do you expect?
What I expected (from the reporter's story) was a description of the alleged security threats he was talking about and possibly an insight into some microsoft vulnerabilities that we haven't yet seen exploited in the wild.
What I got was a content-free hatchet piece that was so busy ridiculing the ex-Microsoftie and his alleged threats that it didn't bother to actually REPORT them.
We know how fast something like the Morris worm can spread. I'd like to know if Schmidt was describing, for instance, a similarly fast-spreading beast that could infest Microsoftware.
Anyone who engineers anything as critical as the controls to a pacemaker or a traffic light to be remotely configurable or writable is just asking for trouble.
Unfortunately, remote adjustment of medical implants (including pacemakers and drug-delivery systems) is sometimes life-critical, often greatly health-enhancing. So many of the devices are remote-accessable. Some of them (such as implanted defibrilators) also log info about the patient (i.e. when / how many times he had to be de-fibbed) and can be interrogated remotely.
But "remotely" means "via a nearby inductive loop (or the like) on a special-purpose device", not an internet link. (The interrogation device, of course, will have a computer in it and might be networked - but that's a separate issue.)
But don't you think the people who design the device and its software don't KNOW that? Medical device hardware and software is built by engineers working to a standard above that of telephony, which is in turn far beyond mil spec. (Yes you can get screwups. But they really do put in the effort. The management knows that killing a couple patients will kill the company, and they have the money to pay for good work rather than cutting corners.)
anything that has incoming can be flooded to death whether it wants to respond or not
Not true. Anything with an incoming link can have the link itself DOSed and taken down for the duration of the interference. Any radio can be jammed, too. But a communication module can be designed so that it doesn't exhaust resources needed by the rest of the system, and so that it will recover from the exhaustion of its own resources as soon as the attack ends.
But the challenges of constructing formal proofs are irrelevant to the claim that algorithmic systems are inherently unstable. The fact that you can prove correctness for some algorithms is sufficient to refute that claim.
Substitute "equivalence" for "correctness" and I agree completely. Algorithmic systems are not inherently unstable (read that "buggy").
The ease with which they can be built and modified leads to the construction of software that is fantastically more complicated than what could be implemented in hardware with a similar amount of manpower. This creates more opportunities for error. Then sloppy programmers (or programmers rushed by sloppy managers) ship software with errors and this creates the illusion that flakeyness is inherent in software.
But with sufficient care every piece of this complexity, including the assembly of the pieces into a system, can be implemented correctly (no bugs) and/or robustly (works appropriately despite bugs). And unlike hardware, once implemented appropriately software KEEPS working correctly and/or robustly, unless/until someone breaks it by changing it or its environment.
It's possible to prove correct behavior for algorithmic systems. Time is explicitly accounted for in most such proofs.
I thought all this "proven correctness" stuff was laid to rest when the "proven correct" software examples in Dijkstra's seminal book on the subject proved to have at least four bugs.
It is not possible to prove that software is "correct". That is because what constitutes "correct" varies with the intent of the software. hello.c is "correct" if the intent was to type "Hello, world!\n" but not if the intent was to display a popup window or play a CD.
What it IS possible to do is to prove two or more distinct expressions of the desired program behavior, one of them the program itself and all of them in formal languages, are equivalent.
But expressing the desired behavior in ANY formal language is the act of writing a program. How do you know that the non-program expressions of the "correct" behavior themselves are "correct", rather than having equivalant bugs?
The answer is that you do it by having the languages be as different as practical and having different people (or teams) write the various versions of the expressions of intent. Then you debug them all together, until they all agree, and all also agree with what the people THOUGHT was right when their attention was brought to the places they initially disagreed.
This works because different people tend to make different mistakes, and different languages tend to lead even the same programmer into making different mistakes. (The former has been known since before automation. It was put to good use in the tab-card era, where one operator would punch the cards on a keypunch, then another would "verify" them by typing the same keystrokes on a similar machine.)
Of course, if you substitute "spec" and/or "comments" for "formal description", and "QA team" for "proof engine" you have the classic team software development process. Substitute "other programmers" for "QA team" and you have the walkthrough. And so on.
= = = =
I agree with the rest of your point, however: Well designed, well tested software can be enormously more reliable than the hardware it runs on. A program is digital. If it is correct, it is ALWAYS correct. It never fails, never makes a mistake, and never wears out.
Actually it is quite possible for a cult to be accidental. That is, an organisation of people develops cult-esque behaviour without the intent of doing so.
Any group with the intention of 'converting' new people over to join them has that danger. Of course, it is very difficult to detect intent in such situations.
According to meme theory it really doesn't matter if a cult is constructed and/or operated by people with a conscious intent to defraud or true believers who are working from the highest of motives. What matters is whether the system of ideas converts those holding them into machines to propagate itself into the minds of others.
It's just like creating an operating system that is robust against crashing: For this purpose it doesn't matter if a bug that allows a crash is exercised accidentally by an application program bug or deliberately by a malicious user - it still crashes the system, and if the bug is present it will eventually be activated. The only difference between the buggy app and the malicious user is that the malicious user MIGHT trigger the OS bug earlier.
About one in 100 (somewhere between 1 in 50 and one in 200) people in the general population is a psychopath. This is a (set of?) brain disfunction(s) that amounts to "no conscience". (Think "colorblind" but with respect to harm-to-others. But it's not known yet whether it's genetic, foetal insult, or what.) Additionally there are "sociopaths" - similar symptoms but as a result of training and social factors rather than an organic problem.
Some fraction of these people learn a moral, ethical, or legal code to compensate for their affliction. They can become honest, productive, and/or beneficial citizens. In some positions (such as political or military leadership or business administration) they can even excell, because their judgement about actions that will hurt other people is not as biased by immediate emotional concern. But many do not learn a code (or learn a defective one). From these come the bulk of the criminals, scam artists, tyrants, white-collar crooks, and so on.
In the absense of compensation a psychopath will be looking out solely for number one. It's not well correlated with intelligence - some are stupid, some very smart. A significant number will be able to handle spamming tools, and be willing to go for the immediate benefit to them (even if it's small), regardless of the damage to others or even long-term consequences.
Yes, Virgina, there ARE evil people.
Much of the social and legal institutions of all civilizations are dedicated to the problem of this small-but-effective population of psychopaths. In particular, legal systems exist to give them a set of rules to live by, a set of personal bad consequences for violating them (so acts that harm the law-abiding become bad for "number one"), and to remove from circulation those who just don't get it.
Short of genocide against psychopaths we will continue to have a plague of spammers for at least as long as people think there's money to be made (or fun to be had) and it won't get you busted.
Maybe in the states it works differently, but in Canada you don't *have* to give out your SIN (our version) unless its to the government... not that companies don't ask anyway.
Actually, the US does have such a law. It's just completely ignored.
Every so often someone suggests enforcing the rule, but that would require so many changes that it won't happen.
Actually, you CAN keep it to yourself in most cases. And I have for a couple decades. (I've been concerned about identity theft since long before the term was coined.)
The battle has been lost with respect to withholding it from the state governments when you go for a driver's license - congress authorized them to collect it. (They actually MANDATED it - allegedly to help track dads who skipped out on child support. So why are they collecting womens' numbers, hmm?)
Some entities are entitled to your SS number - generally those that may pay you taxable money: employers and banks. (NOT insurance companies, at least until there's a taxable payout, and most payouts are not taxable.) The rest can ask and you can refuse. They're usually stuck serving you anyhow - especially if they're already contracted to do so, as with certain employee benefits.
I'm not sure if lenders are entitled or if it's just "Well, I have to serve you anyhow. But I get to do so on my personal estimate of your credit risk, based on rules I use that are common to all applicants. I think someone who withholds their SS# from a lender has a skeleton in his financial closet and is a high risk." Either way if you want a loan you'll need to give 'em the number.
The big problem has always been hospitals and medical insurance companies. Hospitals normally assign a hospital number separately and will let you leave your SS# field blank or fill it with "withheld". They have a separate field for the insurance ID, because lots of people are on their spouses' or parents' insurance. Insurance companies generally let you use a replacement I.D. Some will assign it themselves. Some will ask you to generate one - and be responsible if it collides with someone else' number.
If you must generate one: there are several rules for numbers the US will never assign. One I remember is "any of the three fields is all zero". I think any field all-9 is also unused. Two insurance companies that assign numbers are apparently using counters, one starting at 000-00-0001, the other at 100-00-0001 (probably to avoid collisions with each other). If that's where they started they've each assigned more than a thousand before they got to me. Regardless: I have yet to encounter any billing or hospital registration software that rejects "illegal" SS# patterns.
Lately it has gotten a LOT easier to withhold the numbers. Apparently enough people have been doing so that it's no longer a "lone nut" thing. (This is possibly because identity theft has been in the news for a couple years, possibly because people like me have dealt with enough companies to bring their I.T. departments kicking and screaming into the world of privacy.) Companies have gotten the message - clear down to the clerk level - and are no longer fighting the withholding of SS#s and other personal info.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility has a project on keeping SS#s private and can give you some tips if you run into a company that's being obstinate.
Meanwhile, get your passport and use THAT for I.D. B-)
Not to speak for Mr. Anthony, of course. But your question confuses me.
Mac's are always touted as the "Creative Artist" machine.
PR department.
Substitute "Graphic Artist" and/or "Musician" and there may be some truth to it. Apple has had graphic tools far longer than PCs, and was the only serious graphics-capable platform in the personal machine space for some years. After that the legacy continued to give it a leg up. And the OS, with its object-oriented accessability, leant itself to music add-ons as well. PCs, on the other hand, were text based, with graphics eventually bolted on as an afterthought.
But writing is text based. And Apple was trying to close its box, and using incompatible 3" drives, about the time early adopters like Piers Anthony were looking for a CPM replacement.
Meanwhile...
Seems like a successful author like you would be able to afford one of Apple's high end systems like the TiBook or the PowerMac G4.
Ever heard the term "starving artist"? Goes well with "impoverished student". Doesn't apply to the established pros, of course. But for people just starting out the platforms they chose will be the ones they can afford. Once they're successful it will take a BIG potential improvement for them to take the risk and climb a new learning-curve by switching.
As with other materials, tools, and instruments, a graphics artist or musician might shell out extra for a platform that supports them well, as a cost of doing good art. But why on Earth should a novelist or poet spend an extra cent for bells and whistles?
The war of the apples and the clones was fought on standards-and-price vs. slickness-and-snob-appeal. Business picked IBM for reliability, joe user picked clones for compatability and price. Then it snowballed, with market share leading to more application development and business adoption leading to PC formats as defacto standard for moving from paper to data submission of manuscripts. Apple was relegated to a niche while the clones won the general market hands-down.
Seems to me that Mr. Anthony made the right choice of hardware up front, then moved to a better choice for OS for that hardware as soon as the pro-quality compatible applications necessary to support his workflow became available.
hen traveling near solids, however, the movement tends to kick up opposing positive charges. These charges can distract the signal from completing its appointed rounds.
So what are they saying? Air offers no electrical resistance? Last I heard, air was one of the best insulators around. Or did they perchance confuse resistance with the dielectric value?
Yes, they confused resistance with dilectric value. The phenomenon described is the the slowing of propogation of signals in a wire surrounded by a material of high dilectric constant.
What puzzles me is the description of this material as a replacement for silicon. The point of the silicon is that it is a suitable material for the fabrication of transistors. The article talks as if the transistors were painted on and the wiring was in the silicon, rather than the other way around. While chips sometimes have a layer of polysilicon wiring for interconnecting slow signals, the bulk of the wiring is successive layers of metal separated by glass above the chip.
Now maybe if they laid layers of this stuff on top of the wafer and built the wiring in it, or etched away the silicon around the active components and filled it with this stuff, it would be useful.
And once the transistors are again discrete components fabricated by nanotech, perhaps something like this might make a suitable microscopic "circuit board". But the techniques to fab nanotransistors in bulk may also provide a way to construct a low-dilectric-constant matrix to contain them and their interconnecting wiring.
Godwin's Law states that as any discussion gets longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Unfortunately, one of the corollaries of Godwin's law is that any discussion where NAZIs are mentioned is effectively over, because (if it hasn't already) it will now degenerate into either namecalling, a flame war over NAZI Germany, or a flame war over Godwin's Law. And it is this corollary that is usually meant when the law is cited.
Godwin's law is VERY CONVENIENT for neo-NAZIs, too
on
Coursey on Palladium
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
Interesting idea, but according to Goodwin's Law, the first party in a discussion to mention "Hitler" or "Nazi" has lost the discussion.
...it was a tounge in cheek joke about USENET flames of its day. It was never considered by its creator to be an actual, accurate commentary on internet speech, much less some deeply wise insight into the human psyche, and certainly not as a new "rule" of debate.
Indeed.
And the literal interpretation of Godwin's law has been used heavily by anti-freedom posters (including neo-fascists) to shut down debate. They do this when someone:
points out how their proposal is similar to one of the programs of the NAZI party, or
tries to show how the NAZIs already took that nice-sounding idea and ran it into the ground.
So I now formulate:
Rod's Law of Internet Debate: "Anyone citing Godwin's Law against an opponent in a serious political debate has admitted he is an authoritarian and has lost the argument."
They are selling you 500K/128K with the implicit assumption that you are using a traditional home-user access pattern (i.e. occasional bursts when you hit a good porn site, lotsa intermittent email and ICQ traffic, etc.)
And if they configured their routers and/or subscriber management system correctly it wouldn't be an issue.
"Correctly" in this case means to evenly divide the inbound bandwidth among all destination IP addresses with inbound traffic, and similarly with outbound traffic bandwidth from each IP address, both on a moment-by-moment (i.e. queue length) basis.
When the other users are using their bandwidth you only get your fair share.
When the other users AREN'T using their bandwidth, WHO CARES if you use it?
(You can even do it intelligently and drop TCP established-link packets preferentially, throttling TCP links while still allowing establishment of more and passage of non-TCP protocols, at least until there's so much non-established-TCP traffic for the address that it must also be throttled.)
Or instead, get them a 15" TFT for £300 (or $400, whatever). Plug into VGA out on laptop. Problem solved, without forking out $5000.
You miss the point.
It's worth an extra two grand (5 grand fancy laptop - (2 grand non-fancy laptop with 1 grand spare display)) to have it in one pretty package and impress the customer with how slick you are. Not to mention the attract-the-nerds value. Helps them control the discussion and lead the customer's mind into saying yes.
You make it back in the first sale, with interest, then keep making it back over and over.
Two little screens are really not anywhere near as good as one big one.
Note, however, that after the thing is opened up one of them can be spun around to face the opposite way. Slave the two together and run a powerpoint presentation on it and you don't need a projector to hold a small meeting.
Actually, in one key way, UUNET is already gone. UUNET has always been one of the main channels for spam broadcasting (maybe because they were first, maybe because they were biggest, maybe because their sales staff accepted anyone (including previously-terminated customers), maybe because their abuse department was slow, I'm not sure).
UUNET was around back when the net was forming and the battle was to get people access, not to cut off the abusers. Like Gary Gilmore (sun co-founder, cygnus founder, gnuthian) who runs an open mail relay out of ideology, UUNET would try to give anybody access.
(I believe that at one point you could get an instant UUNET email-via-uucp feed by calling a 900 number and paying by the minute for connect time. I think that's still there for anonymous FTP from their archives.)
People that cheat thousands of everyday people out of money that they invest in their 401k, IRA, or other investment vehicle should get life at hard labor. It is high time the Federal Government tightened up corporate law...
But it's already illegal!
and DRASTICALLY increased penalties for offenders. No Club Fed for this guy or Ken Lay and his Enron cronies. No, they need to spend their lives in Lousisana's Angola Prison where deer and Aligators play and everyone stands upright in the shower.
I'm completely with you there. Who cares whether the crook took a thousand bux by waylaying you on the way from the bank, cracking your account, burlgling your house, scamming you, or faking a corporate financial report and causing you to lose it in the market? You're out just as many bux.
(Extra points for force and threat of force, of course.)
An[d] even though anybody else has little to do with WCOM, the whole market is going to plunge.
For good reason.
1) Worldcom is MCI and UUNET. MCI is the first of the competitive long distance companies and the second largest telecom. UUNET is the first commercial ISP and one of the largest. Both may just go away now.
2) Bankruptcy of something as large as Worldcom can affect a lot of other operations. While the people who buy the pieces will probably keep them running, the people they bought equipment and owe money to can probably kiss it goodbye (along with future orders they were counting on and building equipment to fill). So can everybody who bought their stock or bonds: Banks, retirement funds, money market funds, bond funds, corporations who parked some of their cash reserves in those funds,... You'd be surprised who will be hurt, because you don't know who has exposure. The investors don't know who either, so they'll avoid everybody until they find out.
3) Also if they go belly-up, their stuff gets sold at bankruptcy-auction prices, like ten cents on the dollar or less. Equipment winds up on E-bay and equipment manufacturers find themselves competing against their own stuff. Bottom drops out of market and equipment manufacturers suffer still more. If the buyers keep MCI and/or UUNET running, they now have working networks for which they paid nearly nothing. So they can drop their prices almost to the cost of operation and undercut competitors who had to pay for (and are still paying for) their equipment. The other tecoms and/or ISPs tighten belts further and/or start operating at a loss and also go belly-up. Down go more suppliers, more investors, more associated industries. Maybe some of THOSE go belly-up, and the fire spreads further.
4) It's another accounting scandal. (Anderson again. Oops.) This will make investors leery of other companies, raising the perceived risk of further financial scandal. ("Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.") The value of stocks and corporate bonds is ONLY what people are willing to pay for them at any given instant, and people base their valuation on perceived risk vs. benefit. If the risk just got bigger than the benefit, they won't trust stocks and bonds and won't buy them. The whole market tanks.
A broad drop the market from this makes perfect sense to me.
When dealing with a "psycho", it is not advisable to get them to continue on their same selfish path, with a financial goal.
But the point of teaching Objectivism to psychopaths is not to get them to switch to financial goals. Many psychopaths already have financial goals. We call them things like "burglar", "mugger", "con-man", "white-collar criminal", and the like.
The point is teaching them ENLIGHTENED self-interest. "Yes, that young lady you picked up in the bar would be fun for a night. But you have a nice wife who is fun, too, and she's about ready to leave you because you pick up girls like that. Would you rather have fun for one night with the girl from the bar, or have fun with your wife for years?" The same applies to crime-versus-job, lie-versus-truth, etc.
Often it's a tough sell - psychopaths are not noted for impulse control. But once they learn that there's more in it for them by being solid citizens than by being crooks they can become some of the solidest citizens there are.
For years, the practice has been to get them to value more than just material and primal needs...convince them life has value, spirituality or religion or just seeing the big picture of life are more important, we're all gentle and unique snowflakes, blahblahblah.
And THAT doesn't work worth a damn. They look out for number one, and will ALWAYS look out for number one. The trick is to show them how it's good for number one to look out for numbers two-through-five-billion.
Which do you think will be more successful at converting crooks into good citizens: A philosophy that requires them to first become unselfish, sacrificing themselves for the benefit of others? Or one that lets their selfishness motivate win-for-everybody "good" behavior?
Say what you will about Objectivism, but it has never been the goal of any intelligent psychiatrist to promote the construction of maniacal tendencies into financial pursuits...
Now you're back to the lie the left-wing told you about what constitutes Objectivism.
But in fact there HAS been a project to teach Objectivism to convicts - in the Canadian prison system. It is one of the few things that actually works.
A psychopath can become socialized if he learns a ruleset that lets him get along, and many of them learn such rulesets early and never do end up living a life of crime. But when you have one who has already learned some crime techniques that provide a short-term payoff for breaking one set of rules, it's a hard sell to convince him that following an even tighter set of rules will give him a bigger long-term payoff. But there are several ways that it does work.
Religion has sometimes been successful to a limited extent. Some Christian variants have had occasional success. (But psychopaths in Christian countries are usually already familiar with it and are very good at faking a conversion in the hope of easier treatment.) Islam has been even more effective. (It comes with a strong support group and major social pressure to remain lawful.)
But religions usually ask for self-sacrifice up front and promise payoff mainly after death. That's a long time for most psychopaths to wait. Objectivism promises a payoff here-and-now, by understandable means, and delivers well enough even in the short term that it can be easily checked. This probably explains its success.
Objectivism assumes everyone wants the same thing; that's the last thing you want to tell a guy at the end of his rope.
No, Objectivism assumes that everybody wants something, but different people want different things. It recognizes and encourages those differences, with its emphasis on the individual. It suggests that each individual attempt to advance himself and achieve his own personal goals, within the constraint of not harming others (except in legitimate self-defense). And it recognizes that the person with the best information and strongest incentive for deciding what's good or bad for a person is the person himself. So it rejects involuntary impositions even "for your own good".
Now many of a typical person's motivations are financial. "I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is better." Prosperity may be a goal in itself. But even when it isn't, it provides resources to pursue other goals. Objectivism recognizes rights to private property, voluntary trade with no outside interference by disinterested parties, and pursuit of happiness. And it explicitly rejects both mysticism and placing the welfare of a group over that of its component individuals. So it's easy to misrepresent Objectivism as a purely financial philosophy - then once that's been put over, go on to claiming it's "success at any cost", "if you want it, take it", trash-the-environment, and so on.
But in fact, "If you want it, take it." is actually characteristic of the left wing, and the biggest difference between it and Objectivism. "From each according to his abilities...", "If it feels good, do it!", "Liberation" as a synonym for theft, and "Property is Theft" are catchphraises of the left, whose core ideology includes self-gratification regardless of consequences and the denial of the right to property. Objectivism is more "If you own it keep it - until YOU decide to trade it for something you like better." and "Be sure you're right, then go ahead.". And it recognizes "Never start a fight. Always finish it." as a valid strategy.
But I'm getting WAY deep into describing it, and since I'm NOT an Objectivist I'm not the one to do it.
The point is that to reform a psychopath you must convince him that following some socially-acceptable set of rules is good for him. Objectivism is a socially-acceptable set of rules that promises (and delivers) a better life for those who follow it than for those who live a life of crime, and which is internally consistent, understandable, and testable. So letting a criminal psychopath learn it is an effective way to enable his reform.
. . ..
And as I expected, my previous post was moderated down. Does anyone honestly believe that occurred because it really didn't rate, and not because some leftists will use moderator points to bash any posting that calls attention to left-wing political bias or propaganda?
You almost had a point until you cried conspiracy just because people disagree with you, especially since your original post was just screaming "left wing radicals" at a joke website and really had no merit and contributed nothing to the discussion.
Actually, I didn't cry "conspiracy". I merely pointed out that some left-wingers are willing to moderate on the basis of ideology rather than discussion interest. The moderation system is supposed to bring attention to the active discussion points and winnow the redundant, flaming, or off-topic chatter.
How is a rant about the damn leftists who run that website differant than the trolls complaining about "the Jews who run Hollywood", in a movie review?
It's relevant because it was pointing out that the site's humor included jokes with a consistent political bias, and would thus be painfully un-funny to people of a different leaning, degrading their enjoyment of the site. (And also because the pokes at Rand might actually do some real harm, by undermining a rehabilitation program.)
Minimally, people of a more conservative or libertarian bent would be forwarned. Ideally the site's operators would see the posting and (if that wasn't their intent), balance the site by including some left-wing "vilians" along with those based on the left-wing's enimies list.
There are plenty to chose from. Most of the domestic acts of political terrorism in the last half-century or more have been perpetrated by the left wing, rather than the right. (I could go into cases, or reasons for the discrepancy. But this is already too long.)
Being an "equal-opportunity lampooner" would remove the readers' "I'm being propagandized" thorn-in-the-brain, allowing people other than leftist politics to enjoy the site. Even the portions lampooning their own would become enjoyable, once they appeared to be only poking fun at individual misbehavior rather than striking blows in a serious political struggle.
If the next "villian of the month" is, say:
the Unibomber,
an animal-rightist (disrupting medical research or [more in the site's style] trying to enslave the world by raising a generation of retarded children through protien deficiency),
a save-the-earth type (maiming and killing working-class lumber workers with spiked trees while living in a redwood lair, or locking up a resource in don't-mine federal parks, while buying up the other sources outside the US to make a bundle),
Gray Davis (the flip side of Enron's CEO, lining his campaign coffers for the next election in his climb to world domination by setting up the fake "deregulation", Graying-out California, soaking the citizens and non-energy businesses, and bankrupting PG&E),
Any of several womanizing Democratic politicians (love 'em, leave 'em, maybe kill 'em if they become inconvenient, trash their reps if it comes to light or start a war to distract the press, with minnions in the Feminist movement sacking women's rights to defend their leader)
or something along that line, I'll know they're in it for the fun rather than the politics.
Meanwhile, my original post led directly to the conversation on Objectivism-to-reform-crooks and indirectly to propaganda-or-humor. Would you say that either is irrelevant chaff?
Ayn Rand's major goal of it was that "altruism robs a man's soul" and "if you want something, take it".
You misunderstand and misrepresent Rand's philosophy. You are welcome to to chose to despise what it actually is. But it is a mistake to believe a lie about it, then despise what you believe it to be.
"Altruism robs a man's soul" is an accurate description of part of it. But she goes on to describe in excruciating detail exactly HOW altruism robs a man's (or woman's) soul, reducing them to poverty and misery. You may not agree with her. But her analysis had the Soviet Union pegged dead-on, and described the form of its eventual collapse when it was still in its infancy. It also accurately described the "cycle of poverty" and "political correctness" when the socialist experiments of the west were just beginning.
On the other hand, claiming she advocated "If you want something, take it" is a flat-out lie. What she actually advocated is "If you want something that belongs to someone else, you may NOT just take it. To get it you must get him to trade it to you voluntarily, without using force, lies, or threats."
So yes, I believe it is a good thing to not have 'psychopaths' living for themselves, despising the concept of helping others and just running around taking what is 'theirs'.
I, on the other hand, believe it is good to have them:
making things of value,
advertising them honestly,
selling them to interested buyers,
honoring contracts, and
settling disputes through arbratation or the legal system
and bad to have them:
robbing,
killing,
raping,
bashing all who "dis" them, and
doing anything else that gives them a moment of satisfaction.
Rand's philosoply gives them a believable argument that the former will make them happier.
Since the defining characteristic of a psychopath is that he IS totally selfish, don't you think a philosophy that tells him "a smart selfish person will be honest and hard working because it will make him happy" is a desirable thing?
. . . ..
And as I expected, my previous post was moderated down. Does anyone honestly believe that occurred because it really didn't rate, and not because some leftists will use moderator points to bash any posting that calls attention to left-wing political bias or propaganda?
It was funny until I hit all the left-wing propaganda. (Notice that lampooning of domestic "villians" was limitied to businesmen, conservatives, libertarians, Republican political officials, and Objectivists.)
A pity, too. Just about the only known way to get a true psychopath to reform is to introduce him to Objectivism - a philosophy that shows him what's in it for him to be good (or at least to be honest and avoid hitting first) and gives him an acceptable ruleset to live by. Lampooning Objectivists makes it harder to convince psychopaths to take it up.
But I suppose doing some real evil helps them to live up to their billing.
The reason [liquid fuel is used in most well-developed space launch systems] is simple: solid fuel allows no control over the burn. You can't change thrust except in predetermined ways, you can't shut it down, you can't restart it. That's why liquid fuel is necessary for all but the simplest applications.
There's an alternative: Solid/liquid hybrids, such as AMROC (AMerican ROcket Corporation) tried to commercialize.
Basic idea is you use one part (typically the fuel) as a solid, the other part (typically the oxidizer) as a liquid.
You only need to throttle ONE of the two parts to get the throttling advantage if you chose to throttle the oxidizer (which results in a lowered flame) rather than the fuel (which results in a lean and unstable flame). Meanwhile, a fuel-only solid fuel is literally safe as houses.
With only one part liquid you have only one tank, one set of valves, one pump-or-tank-pressurizer, and no problems with balancing the fuel flows of the two parts.
LOX is reasonably easy to make and handle, only moderately dangerous, while LH2 is extremely difficult and dangerous to make and handle. LOX is dense while LH2 is very light - much less dense than an equivalent amount of hydrogen bound into a compound (such as a hydrocarbon). So you're way ahead to use a LOX/solid hydrocarbon hybrid.
AMROC used LOX and synthetic rubber. The fuel part was 'way stable - they handed out paperweights made of it for fund-raising trinkets and bounced them off the desks of bureaucrats who wanted them to get explosives licences for their fuel facility. (I've still got one around here somewhere.) One of the advantages of this combo was that it was flat-out impossible to get it to explode. (The worst you could do is make it burn extra hot.)
AMROC got pretty far along before they folded. The end came after their primary evangalest/fundraiser died in an auto accident. (I forget his name just now. But he was the same guy who talked the city of Chicago to let the people making the move The Blues Brothers to air-drop an automobile over the city.)
They had already done their engine tests and had their first suborbital launch ready to go at a rented pad at Vandenberg. They went ahead with the test and had what was probably the worst possible engine failure: After lighting the LOX valve stuck at 10% open - too low to get off the pad, too high to put out the fire. So the rocket sat there burning up, and eventually flame-damaged part of the launch tower. They didn't have enough funding for a second try, and without their primary fundraiser they folded.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an ex Microsoft security chief... What do you expect?
What I expected (from the reporter's story) was a description of the alleged security threats he was talking about and possibly an insight into some microsoft vulnerabilities that we haven't yet seen exploited in the wild.
What I got was a content-free hatchet piece that was so busy ridiculing the ex-Microsoftie and his alleged threats that it didn't bother to actually REPORT them.
We know how fast something like the Morris worm can spread. I'd like to know if Schmidt was describing, for instance, a similarly fast-spreading beast that could infest Microsoftware.
Anyone who engineers anything as critical as the controls to a pacemaker or a traffic light to be remotely configurable or writable is just asking for trouble.
Unfortunately, remote adjustment of medical implants (including pacemakers and drug-delivery systems) is sometimes life-critical, often greatly health-enhancing. So many of the devices are remote-accessable. Some of them (such as implanted defibrilators) also log info about the patient (i.e. when / how many times he had to be de-fibbed) and can be interrogated remotely.
But "remotely" means "via a nearby inductive loop (or the like) on a special-purpose device", not an internet link. (The interrogation device, of course, will have a computer in it and might be networked - but that's a separate issue.)
But don't you think the people who design the device and its software don't KNOW that? Medical device hardware and software is built by engineers working to a standard above that of telephony, which is in turn far beyond mil spec. (Yes you can get screwups. But they really do put in the effort. The management knows that killing a couple patients will kill the company, and they have the money to pay for good work rather than cutting corners.)
anything that has incoming can be flooded to death whether it wants to respond or not
Not true. Anything with an incoming link can have the link itself DOSed and taken down for the duration of the interference. Any radio can be jammed, too. But a communication module can be designed so that it doesn't exhaust resources needed by the rest of the system, and so that it will recover from the exhaustion of its own resources as soon as the attack ends.
But the challenges of constructing formal proofs are irrelevant to the claim that algorithmic systems are inherently unstable. The fact that you can prove correctness for some algorithms is sufficient to refute that claim.
Substitute "equivalence" for "correctness" and I agree completely. Algorithmic systems are not inherently unstable (read that "buggy").
The ease with which they can be built and modified leads to the construction of software that is fantastically more complicated than what could be implemented in hardware with a similar amount of manpower. This creates more opportunities for error. Then sloppy programmers (or programmers rushed by sloppy managers) ship software with errors and this creates the illusion that flakeyness is inherent in software.
But with sufficient care every piece of this complexity, including the assembly of the pieces into a system, can be implemented correctly (no bugs) and/or robustly (works appropriately despite bugs). And unlike hardware, once implemented appropriately software KEEPS working correctly and/or robustly, unless/until someone breaks it by changing it or its environment.
It's possible to prove correct behavior for algorithmic systems. Time is explicitly accounted for in most such proofs.
I thought all this "proven correctness" stuff was laid to rest when the "proven correct" software examples in Dijkstra's seminal book on the subject proved to have at least four bugs.
It is not possible to prove that software is "correct". That is because what constitutes "correct" varies with the intent of the software. hello.c is "correct" if the intent was to type "Hello, world!\n" but not if the intent was to display a popup window or play a CD.
What it IS possible to do is to prove two or more distinct expressions of the desired program behavior, one of them the program itself and all of them in formal languages, are equivalent.
But expressing the desired behavior in ANY formal language is the act of writing a program. How do you know that the non-program expressions of the "correct" behavior themselves are "correct", rather than having equivalant bugs?
The answer is that you do it by having the languages be as different as practical and having different people (or teams) write the various versions of the expressions of intent. Then you debug them all together, until they all agree, and all also agree with what the people THOUGHT was right when their attention was brought to the places they initially disagreed.
This works because different people tend to make different mistakes, and different languages tend to lead even the same programmer into making different mistakes. (The former has been known since before automation. It was put to good use in the tab-card era, where one operator would punch the cards on a keypunch, then another would "verify" them by typing the same keystrokes on a similar machine.)
Of course, if you substitute "spec" and/or "comments" for "formal description", and "QA team" for "proof engine" you have the classic team software development process. Substitute "other programmers" for "QA team" and you have the walkthrough. And so on.
= = = =
I agree with the rest of your point, however: Well designed, well tested software can be enormously more reliable than the hardware it runs on. A program is digital. If it is correct, it is ALWAYS correct. It never fails, never makes a mistake, and never wears out.
Actually it is quite possible for a cult to be accidental. That is, an organisation of people develops cult-esque behaviour without the intent of doing so.
Any group with the intention of 'converting' new people over to join them has that danger. Of course, it is very difficult to detect intent in such situations.
According to meme theory it really doesn't matter if a cult is constructed and/or operated by people with a conscious intent to defraud or true believers who are working from the highest of motives. What matters is whether the system of ideas converts those holding them into machines to propagate itself into the minds of others.
It's just like creating an operating system that is robust against crashing: For this purpose it doesn't matter if a bug that allows a crash is exercised accidentally by an application program bug or deliberately by a malicious user - it still crashes the system, and if the bug is present it will eventually be activated. The only difference between the buggy app and the malicious user is that the malicious user MIGHT trigger the OS bug earlier.
As I read the suit, Mr. Gilmore is not objecting to being required to show ID, he is objecting to the GOVERNMENT requiring that he show ID. ...
If the airlines themselves want to require ID (for tickets, seating whatever) that's fine.
I'd pick a nit and say: If the airlines want to require ID that's a separate issue. And I suspect John would object to that as well.
But it would be an issue that can be handled by chosing a different airline. You can't chose a different federal government.
(Well, actually, you can. But if you do the old government will probably call you a terrorist and arrest you. B-) )
If idiotic pricks didn't ...
I'm dreaming of course.
Yes, you're dreaming.
About one in 100 (somewhere between 1 in 50 and one in 200) people in the general population is a psychopath. This is a (set of?) brain disfunction(s) that amounts to "no conscience". (Think "colorblind" but with respect to harm-to-others. But it's not known yet whether it's genetic, foetal insult, or what.) Additionally there are "sociopaths" - similar symptoms but as a result of training and social factors rather than an organic problem.
Some fraction of these people learn a moral, ethical, or legal code to compensate for their affliction. They can become honest, productive, and/or beneficial citizens. In some positions (such as political or military leadership or business administration) they can even excell, because their judgement about actions that will hurt other people is not as biased by immediate emotional concern. But many do not learn a code (or learn a defective one). From these come the bulk of the criminals, scam artists, tyrants, white-collar crooks, and so on.
In the absense of compensation a psychopath will be looking out solely for number one. It's not well correlated with intelligence - some are stupid, some very smart. A significant number will be able to handle spamming tools, and be willing to go for the immediate benefit to them (even if it's small), regardless of the damage to others or even long-term consequences.
Yes, Virgina, there ARE evil people.
Much of the social and legal institutions of all civilizations are dedicated to the problem of this small-but-effective population of psychopaths. In particular, legal systems exist to give them a set of rules to live by, a set of personal bad consequences for violating them (so acts that harm the law-abiding become bad for "number one"), and to remove from circulation those who just don't get it.
Short of genocide against psychopaths we will continue to have a plague of spammers for at least as long as people think there's money to be made (or fun to be had) and it won't get you busted.
Maybe in the states it works differently, but in Canada you don't *have* to give out your SIN (our version) unless its to the government... not that companies don't ask anyway.
Actually, the US does have such a law. It's just completely ignored.
Every so often someone suggests enforcing the rule, but that would require so many changes that it won't happen.
Actually, you CAN keep it to yourself in most cases. And I have for a couple decades. (I've been concerned about identity theft since long before the term was coined.)
The battle has been lost with respect to withholding it from the state governments when you go for a driver's license - congress authorized them to collect it. (They actually MANDATED it - allegedly to help track dads who skipped out on child support. So why are they collecting womens' numbers, hmm?)
Some entities are entitled to your SS number - generally those that may pay you taxable money: employers and banks. (NOT insurance companies, at least until there's a taxable payout, and most payouts are not taxable.) The rest can ask and you can refuse. They're usually stuck serving you anyhow - especially if they're already contracted to do so, as with certain employee benefits.
I'm not sure if lenders are entitled or if it's just "Well, I have to serve you anyhow. But I get to do so on my personal estimate of your credit risk, based on rules I use that are common to all applicants. I think someone who withholds their SS# from a lender has a skeleton in his financial closet and is a high risk." Either way if you want a loan you'll need to give 'em the number.
The big problem has always been hospitals and medical insurance companies. Hospitals normally assign a hospital number separately and will let you leave your SS# field blank or fill it with "withheld". They have a separate field for the insurance ID, because lots of people are on their spouses' or parents' insurance. Insurance companies generally let you use a replacement I.D. Some will assign it themselves. Some will ask you to generate one - and be responsible if it collides with someone else' number.
If you must generate one: there are several rules for numbers the US will never assign. One I remember is "any of the three fields is all zero". I think any field all-9 is also unused. Two insurance companies that assign numbers are apparently using counters, one starting at 000-00-0001, the other at 100-00-0001 (probably to avoid collisions with each other). If that's where they started they've each assigned more than a thousand before they got to me. Regardless: I have yet to encounter any billing or hospital registration software that rejects "illegal" SS# patterns.
Lately it has gotten a LOT easier to withhold the numbers. Apparently enough people have been doing so that it's no longer a "lone nut" thing. (This is possibly because identity theft has been in the news for a couple years, possibly because people like me have dealt with enough companies to bring their I.T. departments kicking and screaming into the world of privacy.) Companies have gotten the message - clear down to the clerk level - and are no longer fighting the withholding of SS#s and other personal info.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility has a project on keeping SS#s private and can give you some tips if you run into a company that's being obstinate.
Meanwhile, get your passport and use THAT for I.D. B-)
Not to speak for Mr. Anthony, of course. But your question confuses me.
...
Mac's are always touted as the "Creative Artist" machine.
PR department.
Substitute "Graphic Artist" and/or "Musician" and there may be some truth to it. Apple has had graphic tools far longer than PCs, and was the only serious graphics-capable platform in the personal machine space for some years. After that the legacy continued to give it a leg up. And the OS, with its object-oriented accessability, leant itself to music add-ons as well. PCs, on the other hand, were text based, with graphics eventually bolted on as an afterthought.
But writing is text based. And Apple was trying to close its box, and using incompatible 3" drives, about the time early adopters like Piers Anthony were looking for a CPM replacement.
Meanwhile
Seems like a successful author like you would be able to afford one of Apple's high end systems like the TiBook or the PowerMac G4.
Ever heard the term "starving artist"? Goes well with "impoverished student". Doesn't apply to the established pros, of course. But for people just starting out the platforms they chose will be the ones they can afford. Once they're successful it will take a BIG potential improvement for them to take the risk and climb a new learning-curve by switching.
As with other materials, tools, and instruments, a graphics artist or musician might shell out extra for a platform that supports them well, as a cost of doing good art. But why on Earth should a novelist or poet spend an extra cent for bells and whistles?
The war of the apples and the clones was fought on standards-and-price vs. slickness-and-snob-appeal. Business picked IBM for reliability, joe user picked clones for compatability and price. Then it snowballed, with market share leading to more application development and business adoption leading to PC formats as defacto standard for moving from paper to data submission of manuscripts. Apple was relegated to a niche while the clones won the general market hands-down.
Seems to me that Mr. Anthony made the right choice of hardware up front, then moved to a better choice for OS for that hardware as soon as the pro-quality compatible applications necessary to support his workflow became available.
hen traveling near solids, however, the movement tends to kick up opposing positive charges. These charges can distract the signal from completing its appointed rounds.
So what are they saying? Air offers no electrical resistance? Last I heard, air was one of the best insulators around. Or did they perchance confuse resistance with the dielectric value?
Yes, they confused resistance with dilectric value. The phenomenon described is the the slowing of propogation of signals in a wire surrounded by a material of high dilectric constant.
What puzzles me is the description of this material as a replacement for silicon. The point of the silicon is that it is a suitable material for the fabrication of transistors. The article talks as if the transistors were painted on and the wiring was in the silicon, rather than the other way around. While chips sometimes have a layer of polysilicon wiring for interconnecting slow signals, the bulk of the wiring is successive layers of metal separated by glass above the chip.
Now maybe if they laid layers of this stuff on top of the wafer and built the wiring in it, or etched away the silicon around the active components and filled it with this stuff, it would be useful.
And once the transistors are again discrete components fabricated by nanotech, perhaps something like this might make a suitable microscopic "circuit board". But the techniques to fab nanotransistors in bulk may also provide a way to construct a low-dilectric-constant matrix to contain them and their interconnecting wiring.
Godwin's Law states that as any discussion gets longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Unfortunately, one of the corollaries of Godwin's law is that any discussion where NAZIs are mentioned is effectively over, because (if it hasn't already) it will now degenerate into either namecalling, a flame war over NAZI Germany, or a flame war over Godwin's Law. And it is this corollary that is usually meant when the law is cited.
More here.
...it was a tounge in cheek joke about USENET flames of its day. It was never considered by its creator to be an actual, accurate commentary on internet speech, much less some deeply wise insight into the human psyche, and certainly not as a new "rule" of debate.
Indeed.
And the literal interpretation of Godwin's law has been used heavily by anti-freedom posters (including neo-fascists) to shut down debate. They do this when someone:
points out how their proposal is similar to one of the programs of the NAZI party, or
tries to show how the NAZIs already took that nice-sounding idea and ran it into the ground.
So I now formulate:
Rod's Law of Internet Debate: "Anyone citing Godwin's Law against an opponent in a serious political debate has admitted he is an authoritarian and has lost the argument."
And if they configured their routers and/or subscriber management system correctly it wouldn't be an issue.
"Correctly" in this case means to evenly divide the inbound bandwidth among all destination IP addresses with inbound traffic, and similarly with outbound traffic bandwidth from each IP address, both on a moment-by-moment (i.e. queue length) basis.
When the other users are using their bandwidth you only get your fair share.
When the other users AREN'T using their bandwidth, WHO CARES if you use it?
(You can even do it intelligently and drop TCP established-link packets preferentially, throttling TCP links while still allowing establishment of more and passage of non-TCP protocols, at least until there's so much non-established-TCP traffic for the address that it must also be throttled.)
Or instead, get them a 15" TFT for £300 (or $400, whatever). Plug into VGA out on laptop. Problem solved, without forking out $5000.
You miss the point.
It's worth an extra two grand (5 grand fancy laptop - (2 grand non-fancy laptop with 1 grand spare display)) to have it in one pretty package and impress the customer with how slick you are. Not to mention the attract-the-nerds value. Helps them control the discussion and lead the customer's mind into saying yes.
You make it back in the first sale, with interest, then keep making it back over and over.
Read _Winning Through Intimidation_ for more.
Two little screens are really not anywhere near as good as one big one.
Note, however, that after the thing is opened up one of them can be spun around to face the opposite way. Slave the two together and run a powerpoint presentation on it and you don't need a projector to hold a small meeting.
Salesmen will LOVE this.
Like Gary Gilmore (sun co-founder, cygnus founder, gnuthian)
ARGH! JOHN Gilmore.
(That's what I get for posting while half-asleep. Sorry, John.)
Actually, in one key way, UUNET is already gone. UUNET has always been one of the main channels for spam broadcasting (maybe because they were first, maybe because they were biggest, maybe because their sales staff accepted anyone (including previously-terminated customers), maybe because their abuse department was slow, I'm not sure).
UUNET was around back when the net was forming and the battle was to get people access, not to cut off the abusers. Like Gary Gilmore (sun co-founder, cygnus founder, gnuthian) who runs an open mail relay out of ideology, UUNET would try to give anybody access.
(I believe that at one point you could get an instant UUNET email-via-uucp feed by calling a 900 number and paying by the minute for connect time. I think that's still there for anonymous FTP from their archives.)
People that cheat thousands of everyday people out of money that they invest in their 401k, IRA, or other investment vehicle should get life at hard labor. It is high time the Federal Government tightened up corporate law ...
But it's already illegal!
and DRASTICALLY increased penalties for offenders. No Club Fed for this guy or Ken Lay and his Enron cronies. No, they need to spend their lives in Lousisana's Angola Prison where deer and Aligators play and everyone stands upright in the shower.
I'm completely with you there. Who cares whether the crook took a thousand bux by waylaying you on the way from the bank, cracking your account, burlgling your house, scamming you, or faking a corporate financial report and causing you to lose it in the market? You're out just as many bux.
(Extra points for force and threat of force, of course.)
An[d] even though anybody else has little to do with WCOM, the whole market is going to plunge.
... You'd be surprised who will be hurt, because you don't know who has exposure. The investors don't know who either, so they'll avoid everybody until they find out.
For good reason.
1) Worldcom is MCI and UUNET. MCI is the first of the competitive long distance companies and the second largest telecom. UUNET is the first commercial ISP and one of the largest. Both may just go away now.
2) Bankruptcy of something as large as Worldcom can affect a lot of other operations. While the people who buy the pieces will probably keep them running, the people they bought equipment and owe money to can probably kiss it goodbye (along with future orders they were counting on and building equipment to fill). So can everybody who bought their stock or bonds: Banks, retirement funds, money market funds, bond funds, corporations who parked some of their cash reserves in those funds,
3) Also if they go belly-up, their stuff gets sold at bankruptcy-auction prices, like ten cents on the dollar or less. Equipment winds up on E-bay and equipment manufacturers find themselves competing against their own stuff. Bottom drops out of market and equipment manufacturers suffer still more. If the buyers keep MCI and/or UUNET running, they now have working networks for which they paid nearly nothing. So they can drop their prices almost to the cost of operation and undercut competitors who had to pay for (and are still paying for) their equipment. The other tecoms and/or ISPs tighten belts further and/or start operating at a loss and also go belly-up. Down go more suppliers, more investors, more associated industries. Maybe some of THOSE go belly-up, and the fire spreads further.
4) It's another accounting scandal. (Anderson again. Oops.) This will make investors leery of other companies, raising the perceived risk of further financial scandal. ("Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.") The value of stocks and corporate bonds is ONLY what people are willing to pay for them at any given instant, and people base their valuation on perceived risk vs. benefit. If the risk just got bigger than the benefit, they won't trust stocks and bonds and won't buy them. The whole market tanks.
A broad drop the market from this makes perfect sense to me.
But the point of teaching Objectivism to psychopaths is not to get them to switch to financial goals. Many psychopaths already have financial goals. We call them things like "burglar", "mugger", "con-man", "white-collar criminal", and the like.
The point is teaching them ENLIGHTENED self-interest. "Yes, that young lady you picked up in the bar would be fun for a night. But you have a nice wife who is fun, too, and she's about ready to leave you because you pick up girls like that. Would you rather have fun for one night with the girl from the bar, or have fun with your wife for years?" The same applies to crime-versus-job, lie-versus-truth, etc.
Often it's a tough sell - psychopaths are not noted for impulse control. But once they learn that there's more in it for them by being solid citizens than by being crooks they can become some of the solidest citizens there are.
For years, the practice has been to get them to value more than just material and primal needs...convince them life has value, spirituality or religion or just seeing the big picture of life are more important, we're all gentle and unique snowflakes, blahblahblah.
And THAT doesn't work worth a damn. They look out for number one, and will ALWAYS look out for number one. The trick is to show them how it's good for number one to look out for numbers two-through-five-billion.
Which do you think will be more successful at converting crooks into good citizens: A philosophy that requires them to first become unselfish, sacrificing themselves for the benefit of others? Or one that lets their selfishness motivate win-for-everybody "good" behavior?
Say what you will about Objectivism, but it has never been the goal of any intelligent psychiatrist to promote the construction of maniacal tendencies into financial pursuits...
Now you're back to the lie the left-wing told you about what constitutes Objectivism.
But in fact there HAS been a project to teach Objectivism to convicts - in the Canadian prison system. It is one of the few things that actually works.
A psychopath can become socialized if he learns a ruleset that lets him get along, and many of them learn such rulesets early and never do end up living a life of crime. But when you have one who has already learned some crime techniques that provide a short-term payoff for breaking one set of rules, it's a hard sell to convince him that following an even tighter set of rules will give him a bigger long-term payoff. But there are several ways that it does work.
Religion has sometimes been successful to a limited extent. Some Christian variants have had occasional success. (But psychopaths in Christian countries are usually already familiar with it and are very good at faking a conversion in the hope of easier treatment.) Islam has been even more effective. (It comes with a strong support group and major social pressure to remain lawful.)
But religions usually ask for self-sacrifice up front and promise payoff mainly after death. That's a long time for most psychopaths to wait. Objectivism promises a payoff here-and-now, by understandable means, and delivers well enough even in the short term that it can be easily checked. This probably explains its success.
Objectivism assumes everyone wants the same thing; that's the last thing you want to tell a guy at the end of his rope.
No, Objectivism assumes that everybody wants something, but different people want different things. It recognizes and encourages those differences, with its emphasis on the individual. It suggests that each individual attempt to advance himself and achieve his own personal goals, within the constraint of not harming others (except in legitimate self-defense). And it recognizes that the person with the best information and strongest incentive for deciding what's good or bad for a person is the person himself. So it rejects involuntary impositions even "for your own good".
Now many of a typical person's motivations are financial. "I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is better." Prosperity may be a goal in itself. But even when it isn't, it provides resources to pursue other goals. Objectivism recognizes rights to private property, voluntary trade with no outside interference by disinterested parties, and pursuit of happiness. And it explicitly rejects both mysticism and placing the welfare of a group over that of its component individuals. So it's easy to misrepresent Objectivism as a purely financial philosophy - then once that's been put over, go on to claiming it's "success at any cost", "if you want it, take it", trash-the-environment, and so on.
But in fact, "If you want it, take it." is actually characteristic of the left wing, and the biggest difference between it and Objectivism. "From each according to his abilities...", "If it feels good, do it!", "Liberation" as a synonym for theft, and "Property is Theft" are catchphraises of the left, whose core ideology includes self-gratification regardless of consequences and the denial of the right to property. Objectivism is more "If you own it keep it - until YOU decide to trade it for something you like better." and "Be sure you're right, then go ahead.". And it recognizes "Never start a fight. Always finish it." as a valid strategy.
But I'm getting WAY deep into describing it, and since I'm NOT an Objectivist I'm not the one to do it.
The point is that to reform a psychopath you must convince him that following some socially-acceptable set of rules is good for him. Objectivism is a socially-acceptable set of rules that promises (and delivers) a better life for those who follow it than for those who live a life of crime, and which is internally consistent, understandable, and testable. So letting a criminal psychopath learn it is an effective way to enable his reform.
. . .
And as I expected, my previous post was moderated down. Does anyone honestly believe that occurred because it really didn't rate, and not because some leftists will use moderator points to bash any posting that calls attention to left-wing political bias or propaganda?
You almost had a point until you cried conspiracy just because people disagree with you, especially since your original post was just screaming "left wing radicals" at a joke website and really had no merit and contributed nothing to the discussion.
Actually, I didn't cry "conspiracy". I merely pointed out that some left-wingers are willing to moderate on the basis of ideology rather than discussion interest. The moderation system is supposed to bring attention to the active discussion points and winnow the redundant, flaming, or off-topic chatter.
How is a rant about the damn leftists who run that website differant than the trolls complaining about "the Jews who run Hollywood", in a movie review?
It's relevant because it was pointing out that the site's humor included jokes with a consistent political bias, and would thus be painfully un-funny to people of a different leaning, degrading their enjoyment of the site. (And also because the pokes at Rand might actually do some real harm, by undermining a rehabilitation program.)
Minimally, people of a more conservative or libertarian bent would be forwarned. Ideally the site's operators would see the posting and (if that wasn't their intent), balance the site by including some left-wing "vilians" along with those based on the left-wing's enimies list.
There are plenty to chose from. Most of the domestic acts of political terrorism in the last half-century or more have been perpetrated by the left wing, rather than the right. (I could go into cases, or reasons for the discrepancy. But this is already too long.)
Being an "equal-opportunity lampooner" would remove the readers' "I'm being propagandized" thorn-in-the-brain, allowing people other than leftist politics to enjoy the site. Even the portions lampooning their own would become enjoyable, once they appeared to be only poking fun at individual misbehavior rather than striking blows in a serious political struggle.
If the next "villian of the month" is, say:
the Unibomber,
an animal-rightist (disrupting medical research or [more in the site's style] trying to enslave the world by raising a generation of retarded children through protien deficiency),
a save-the-earth type (maiming and killing working-class lumber workers with spiked trees while living in a redwood lair, or locking up a resource in don't-mine federal parks, while buying up the other sources outside the US to make a bundle),
Gray Davis (the flip side of Enron's CEO, lining his campaign coffers for the next election in his climb to world domination by setting up the fake "deregulation", Graying-out California, soaking the citizens and non-energy businesses, and bankrupting PG&E),
Any of several womanizing Democratic politicians (love 'em, leave 'em, maybe kill 'em if they become inconvenient, trash their reps if it comes to light or start a war to distract the press, with minnions in the Feminist movement sacking women's rights to defend their leader)
or something along that line, I'll know they're in it for the fun rather than the politics.
Meanwhile, my original post led directly to the conversation on Objectivism-to-reform-crooks and indirectly to propaganda-or-humor. Would you say that either is irrelevant chaff?
You misunderstand and misrepresent Rand's philosophy. You are welcome to to chose to despise what it actually is. But it is a mistake to believe a lie about it, then despise what you believe it to be.
"Altruism robs a man's soul" is an accurate description of part of it. But she goes on to describe in excruciating detail exactly HOW altruism robs a man's (or woman's) soul, reducing them to poverty and misery. You may not agree with her. But her analysis had the Soviet Union pegged dead-on, and described the form of its eventual collapse when it was still in its infancy. It also accurately described the "cycle of poverty" and "political correctness" when the socialist experiments of the west were just beginning.
On the other hand, claiming she advocated "If you want something, take it" is a flat-out lie. What she actually advocated is "If you want something that belongs to someone else, you may NOT just take it. To get it you must get him to trade it to you voluntarily, without using force, lies, or threats."
So yes, I believe it is a good thing to not have 'psychopaths' living for themselves, despising the concept of helping others and just running around taking what is 'theirs'.
I, on the other hand, believe it is good to have them:
making things of value,
advertising them honestly,
selling them to interested buyers,
honoring contracts, and
settling disputes through arbratation or the legal system
and bad to have them:
robbing,
killing,
raping,
bashing all who "dis" them, and
doing anything else that gives them a moment of satisfaction.
.
Rand's philosoply gives them a believable argument that the former will make them happier.
Since the defining characteristic of a psychopath is that he IS totally selfish, don't you think a philosophy that tells him "a smart selfish person will be honest and hard working because it will make him happy" is a desirable thing?
. . . .
And as I expected, my previous post was moderated down. Does anyone honestly believe that occurred because it really didn't rate, and not because some leftists will use moderator points to bash any posting that calls attention to left-wing political bias or propaganda?
Let's see how this posting does. B-)
It's funny
It was funny until I hit all the left-wing propaganda. (Notice that lampooning of domestic "villians" was limitied to businesmen, conservatives, libertarians, Republican political officials, and Objectivists.)
A pity, too. Just about the only known way to get a true psychopath to reform is to introduce him to Objectivism - a philosophy that shows him what's in it for him to be good (or at least to be honest and avoid hitting first) and gives him an acceptable ruleset to live by. Lampooning Objectivists makes it harder to convince psychopaths to take it up.
But I suppose doing some real evil helps them to live up to their billing.
I think I know the friend in question. B-)
The reason [liquid fuel is used in most well-developed space launch systems] is simple: solid fuel allows no control over the burn. You can't change thrust except in predetermined ways, you can't shut it down, you can't restart it. That's why liquid fuel is necessary for all but the simplest applications.
There's an alternative: Solid/liquid hybrids, such as AMROC (AMerican ROcket Corporation) tried to commercialize.
Basic idea is you use one part (typically the fuel) as a solid, the other part (typically the oxidizer) as a liquid.
You only need to throttle ONE of the two parts to get the throttling advantage if you chose to throttle the oxidizer (which results in a lowered flame) rather than the fuel (which results in a lean and unstable flame). Meanwhile, a fuel-only solid fuel is literally safe as houses.
With only one part liquid you have only one tank, one set of valves, one pump-or-tank-pressurizer, and no problems with balancing the fuel flows of the two parts.
LOX is reasonably easy to make and handle, only moderately dangerous, while LH2 is extremely difficult and dangerous to make and handle. LOX is dense while LH2 is very light - much less dense than an equivalent amount of hydrogen bound into a compound (such as a hydrocarbon). So you're way ahead to use a LOX/solid hydrocarbon hybrid.
AMROC used LOX and synthetic rubber. The fuel part was 'way stable - they handed out paperweights made of it for fund-raising trinkets and bounced them off the desks of bureaucrats who wanted them to get explosives licences for their fuel facility. (I've still got one around here somewhere.) One of the advantages of this combo was that it was flat-out impossible to get it to explode. (The worst you could do is make it burn extra hot.)
AMROC got pretty far along before they folded. The end came after their primary evangalest/fundraiser died in an auto accident. (I forget his name just now. But he was the same guy who talked the city of Chicago to let the people making the move The Blues Brothers to air-drop an automobile over the city.)
They had already done their engine tests and had their first suborbital launch ready to go at a rented pad at Vandenberg. They went ahead with the test and had what was probably the worst possible engine failure: After lighting the LOX valve stuck at 10% open - too low to get off the pad, too high to put out the fire. So the rocket sat there burning up, and eventually flame-damaged part of the launch tower. They didn't have enough funding for a second try, and without their primary fundraiser they folded.
The logic of record companies of paying thousands to get airplay on the radio, but trying extract thousands for wireplay on the net escapes me still.
They're afraid that if you broadcast digitally your listeners will record digitally and obtain a perfect copy of the material.
Off-the-analog-radio-air recording has not been a big problem, but digital is a new world and they're scared.