>for a long time I've wanted to write the story of a bunch minions working for a super-villain.
See if you can find the sitcom 'Better Off Ted'. The 'super-villain' is the board and upper management of a mega-corporation, but it's done from the viewpoint from the minions and supervisory level. And it's hilarious, and a tragedy that it only got two seasons.
> our every instinct, written over millions of years of hunter-gatherer society,
I was going to correct you, as I believe anatomically modern humans have only been around for 200kya or so... then of course I recognized that we didn't pop out of the ether at that time, and the evolution of our social behaviour probably started with our first social ancestor - and that could have been shortly after animals colonized land 360 million years ago.
Sometimes I am surprised by how fast evolution can go, other times the timespan over which it has acted simply awe.
Because we're primates that evolved living in small family groups, and our social instincts developed before we were intelligent enough to understand their shortcomings.
And now that we do have these relatively fantastic brains... most people don't bother to try.
>Spy equipment producers are breaking laws and circumventing international sanctions by agreeing to sell stock to countries known for human rights abuses, and to clients who do not declare the end user -- meaning surveillance tools could easily fall into the hands of armed groups, corporations, governments cracking down on dissent, or opposition leaders,
Unless you have a cop assigned to follow each device 24/7, they're going to end up wherever anyway.
Unlike nuclear bombs which are kind of difficult to make (and we still can't stop the tech and materials from spreading), most 'spy tech' is fairly easy to reproduce once you understand it.
It's like trying to stop a river with a chain link fence...
>Products with a defined "end of life" are extremely damaging to consumers and to the environment
A defined end of life would only mean that's when the manufacturer was no longer legally bound to support the product (if they'd chosen that rather than opening up the repair process to the end-user and 3rd party parts and service).
Though you're right, maybe there'd have to be a reclaim/recycle clause in there too... because what good is a device you can't fix, unless it never breaks?
> especially once the manufacturer has lost interest in supporting the product at all.
Now that one really annoys me (specifically with software that depends on a remote server only the vendor can supply). If something's no longer supported due to lack of demand, the vendor should be required to make public the code required to build the back end server and also the modifications required to point the clients to it. At least for any software you've paid for, anyway.
>I was thinking of a specific use case -- inland lake recreational marine.
There's a fun English show about these guys who travel around finding ways to use renewable energy sources to replace traditional hydrocarbon based ones. It's fun because they do the planning, building, and testing right in front of the camera. (Sorry, I can't recall the name right now).
Anyway, one job they did was a solar-powered water taxi. I believe the batteries ended up being ballast to counter the roof of solar panels they put on the thing. Or I may be mixing up two different boat-based episodes.
Regardless, they had an electric boat going one way or the other, for a commercial (though small scale) application.
Personally, I'd have a shore-based charging station rather than carry what amounts to a huge wind-catching weight above the center of mass of my vessel... and I'd want a really good bilge pump because I think filling the boat with enough foam to ensure you'd stay afloat if you took on water would mean no usable interior space.
>Due to this debilitating condition he is unable to repair any of the equipment he owns.
And this is why my 'nice, simple law' would have to go through a few rounds of review and improvement - because the obvious intent isn't enough to stop the legal system from subverting it based on the imprecision of the English language.
Let's go with revision two:
"If the vendor prohibits the consumer from repairing the purchased item or contracting a 3rd party of their choice to do so on their behalf, then the vendor must provide free parts and labour for the advertised lifetime of the item, provided within a reasonable response time for the industry and item in question".
And I'd certainly allow a vendor to void any warranty if self or 3rd party repair was done against the sales agreement. I'm OK with that, just not with "we're the only one you can go to, no matter what, because we want to be able to charge you till we've milked the marrow from your bones".
Imagine all the problems with Bitcoin arranged in a ring. When you point out one problem (Like you just did: Bitcoin has failed to make a full-cycle economy), they move one step along the ring and start a different argument.
The ring is big enough that no matter how exhaustively you try to shut them up, they always have another goalpost to jump to that you forgot to cover.
Today we look back at Amway as an archaic scam. Our children will shake their heads with disappointment that their parent's generation ever got taken in by something as obviously fatally flawed as Bitcoin, and perhaps be awed by how many people got suckered in and how much wealth was extracted from them.
"If the consumer can not repair the purchased item, then the vendor must provide free parts and labour for the advertised lifetime of the item, provided within a reasonable response time for the industry and item in question".
In other words, a mandatory all-encompassing warranty with an SLA.
You want to lock in your customer base? How about the customer base locks in the manufacturer?
Get back to me with numbers based on Group X makes Y% of Group Z for the same job description and experience level and then we can start to worry about corrective measures.
What do you think about the Republicans calling what was essentially their own ACA 'Obamacare' for 8 years and training their base to hate it?
This is a milder version of that. It's just a reminder that the guy who thinks he's running it all (which no president can actually do) is officially responsible.
He's going to drain the swamp, he's going to shake things up, he's going to stick it to the 1%ers, right?
Well, it's his show. Regardless of whether or not he has actual authority, Trump has claimed responsibility and the media's running with it... probably because they mostly don't align with him politically.
If you don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention, then don't show off. I don't condone rape, but how fucking stupid do you have to be to wear anything less than a burka?
If a woman wants to send me explicit photos or videos of herself, presumably for my titillation, she should feel free to do so with the knowledge that it is socially unacceptable to forward them on without permission, and that the blow back for doing so would be on ME and not HER.
I might punch you in the face some day. Possibly even shoot you. So, is it right to preemptively kill me just in case?
No. Until there's an imminent credible threat, it's not right to take ANY kind of action against me.
Same with these devices - the fact that they COULD be compromised in the future and used for destructive purposes is not sufficient justification for attacking them. Once they are and are being used to commit a crime, then yes, they should be open season.
Now, if you want to start a class action suit against the manufacturers for negligence (after the first device is compromised) or lobby politicians to block the import or domestic sale of devices that fail to meet minimum security standards, maybe even start a boycott... fill your boots. All excellent and morally unquestionable actions.
I can break into your house because it's not secure enough. Is that OK too?
Just because something isn't locked doesn't mean it's OK to access it. You're either civilized or you're not, and the person who released this code should be having a long stay in jail to think about the morality of what they've done.
>You are simultaneously underestimating what it takes to be a programmer and overestimating what university provides.
Well... I am a programmer (of sorts... depends on how strict your definition since while I churn out lots of code it's all scripting and almost never in a language requiring compiling) and have been for over a decade.
And I've been through university.
> Elements of mathematics, psychology, geography, and philosophy will likely all play a role in any modestly complicated piece of software.
Math is everything, or rather the language that describes everything, so that is would be involved is more or less a tautology. Psychology is for interface design and you don't need formal training of any sort in it to have what you will need. Geography? For specific jobs, I suppose. Most likely you would be more than qualified enough with an understanding of what a map is, the shape of the globe, and a couple of courses in GIS. Philosophy? Only to keep your brain busy while waiting for results.
You are overestimating programming and underestimating university.
Vertical integration results in monopolies (regional ones at least) and consumer abuse once the consumers no longer have reasonable alternatives to turn to.
The carrier and the content provider can not be permitted to have agreements to suppress competition.
Bits are bits, and while in the case of an Internet connection I think there's room for ISPs to enforce SPAM/botnet/DOS protection strategies, to provide generic tiered traffic (to say, minimize delay on real-time traffic over other types not so sensitive to jitter)... but NOT to say that media provider A gets priority over media provider B because A ponied up some extra cash to block a competitor.
Fight this, or you're going to have a much, much shittier Internet in a few years.
I include those. University degrees are for training people to push knowledge forward, to research and hopefully invent, create, or develop the next new thing in their field.
Just because the degree is in mathematics or a hard science doesn't make that any more applicable to the purpose of job training.
And a decent university would never let you away with taking only courses in your major anyway. There's a requirement to broaden your horizons... which, if you're in it for job training, is a massive waste of your time and money.
If you're looking for someone trained for a task, you don't look for a university degree... that's a filter for "People willing to put 4 years and a massive amount of debt into a piece of paper to get past an HR/social hurdle".
Because university is about broadening your horizons and teaching you how to think so you have the capacity to develop the next thing other people will be going to job training for, and using it for anything else is the giant, expensive, frustrating thing that's keeping otherwise talented people out of your shop.
If you want a programmer, you don't need someone who can think up the next great programming language. You need someone who knows a current programming language and has the capacity to learn the next one, with a side order of sufficient social skills to work cooperatively and (in some cases) interact directly with clients.
American voters have wanted a King and a ruling dynasty for the longest time.
There's a worship of political families, and just having the right name increases your odds dramatically of getting votes for election to the same position held by someone of a previous generation of your family. It's not just increased access to connections and vertical knowledge transmission, people want the bloodline. And that's external... within the system, those bloodlines have similar supportive effects.
I'm pretty sure it's basic primate psychology at work. We just really, really want to be ruled by a divinely selected bloodine no matter how stupid that idea has repeatedly been shown to be.
Awesome. So, you've either gone full cultist or you have no morals and are fine encouraging the growth of the market so you can continue to leech off the rubes.
Slashdot Mirror
>for a long time I've wanted to write the story of a bunch minions working for a super-villain.
See if you can find the sitcom 'Better Off Ted'. The 'super-villain' is the board and upper management of a mega-corporation, but it's done from the viewpoint from the minions and supervisory level. And it's hilarious, and a tragedy that it only got two seasons.
> our every instinct, written over millions of years of hunter-gatherer society,
I was going to correct you, as I believe anatomically modern humans have only been around for 200kya or so... then of course I recognized that we didn't pop out of the ether at that time, and the evolution of our social behaviour probably started with our first social ancestor - and that could have been shortly after animals colonized land 360 million years ago.
Sometimes I am surprised by how fast evolution can go, other times the timespan over which it has acted simply awe.
Because we're primates that evolved living in small family groups, and our social instincts developed before we were intelligent enough to understand their shortcomings.
And now that we do have these relatively fantastic brains... most people don't bother to try.
"You will get no course credit for COBOL, but you might want to take the class so you can get a job between semesters"
Few of us did (and I wasn't one of them), but those that did always had jobs come summer while a lot of the rest of us didn't.
TINSTAAFL (two As, only one F!!!) is grammatically corrected.
There's nothing wrong with replacing "ain't" with "is", especially since it also removes an annoying double negative.
We're not Russian ex-con Loonies, so why talk like them?
Which is perfectly acceptable. Why would you think I'd have any issue with that?
In fact, it would force vendors to supply a more accurate TCO.
>Spy equipment producers are breaking laws and circumventing international sanctions by agreeing to sell stock to countries known for human rights abuses, and to clients who do not declare the end user -- meaning surveillance tools could easily fall into the hands of armed groups, corporations, governments cracking down on dissent, or opposition leaders,
Unless you have a cop assigned to follow each device 24/7, they're going to end up wherever anyway.
Unlike nuclear bombs which are kind of difficult to make (and we still can't stop the tech and materials from spreading), most 'spy tech' is fairly easy to reproduce once you understand it.
It's like trying to stop a river with a chain link fence...
>Products with a defined "end of life" are extremely damaging to consumers and to the environment
A defined end of life would only mean that's when the manufacturer was no longer legally bound to support the product (if they'd chosen that rather than opening up the repair process to the end-user and 3rd party parts and service).
Though you're right, maybe there'd have to be a reclaim/recycle clause in there too... because what good is a device you can't fix, unless it never breaks?
> especially once the manufacturer has lost interest in supporting the product at all.
Now that one really annoys me (specifically with software that depends on a remote server only the vendor can supply). If something's no longer supported due to lack of demand, the vendor should be required to make public the code required to build the back end server and also the modifications required to point the clients to it. At least for any software you've paid for, anyway.
>I was thinking of a specific use case -- inland lake recreational marine.
There's a fun English show about these guys who travel around finding ways to use renewable energy sources to replace traditional hydrocarbon based ones. It's fun because they do the planning, building, and testing right in front of the camera. (Sorry, I can't recall the name right now).
Anyway, one job they did was a solar-powered water taxi. I believe the batteries ended up being ballast to counter the roof of solar panels they put on the thing. Or I may be mixing up two different boat-based episodes.
Regardless, they had an electric boat going one way or the other, for a commercial (though small scale) application.
Personally, I'd have a shore-based charging station rather than carry what amounts to a huge wind-catching weight above the center of mass of my vessel... and I'd want a really good bilge pump because I think filling the boat with enough foam to ensure you'd stay afloat if you took on water would mean no usable interior space.
>Due to this debilitating condition he is unable to repair any of the equipment he owns.
And this is why my 'nice, simple law' would have to go through a few rounds of review and improvement - because the obvious intent isn't enough to stop the legal system from subverting it based on the imprecision of the English language.
Let's go with revision two:
"If the vendor prohibits the consumer from repairing the purchased item or contracting a 3rd party of their choice to do so on their behalf, then the vendor must provide free parts and labour for the advertised lifetime of the item, provided within a reasonable response time for the industry and item in question".
And I'd certainly allow a vendor to void any warranty if self or 3rd party repair was done against the sales agreement. I'm OK with that, just not with "we're the only one you can go to, no matter what, because we want to be able to charge you till we've milked the marrow from your bones".
Imagine all the problems with Bitcoin arranged in a ring. When you point out one problem (Like you just did: Bitcoin has failed to make a full-cycle economy), they move one step along the ring and start a different argument.
The ring is big enough that no matter how exhaustively you try to shut them up, they always have another goalpost to jump to that you forgot to cover.
Today we look back at Amway as an archaic scam. Our children will shake their heads with disappointment that their parent's generation ever got taken in by something as obviously fatally flawed as Bitcoin, and perhaps be awed by how many people got suckered in and how much wealth was extracted from them.
"If the consumer can not repair the purchased item, then the vendor must provide free parts and labour for the advertised lifetime of the item, provided within a reasonable response time for the industry and item in question".
In other words, a mandatory all-encompassing warranty with an SLA.
You want to lock in your customer base? How about the customer base locks in the manufacturer?
Big deal.
Get back to me with numbers based on Group X makes Y% of Group Z for the same job description and experience level and then we can start to worry about corrective measures.
It's OK, I have a fallback plan... I just continue to live in Canada.
What do you think about the Republicans calling what was essentially their own ACA 'Obamacare' for 8 years and training their base to hate it?
This is a milder version of that. It's just a reminder that the guy who thinks he's running it all (which no president can actually do) is officially responsible.
He's going to drain the swamp, he's going to shake things up, he's going to stick it to the 1%ers, right?
Well, it's his show. Regardless of whether or not he has actual authority, Trump has claimed responsibility and the media's running with it... probably because they mostly don't align with him politically.
Well, I've never wanted to travel to India, but a nice long vacation there seems like a no-brainer if you get Hep-C and aren't extremely wealthy.
I could just do a quick round trip to get the drugs and not even worry about missing work or having to pay for a hotel room.
Customs would probably steal the drugs from me at the border, I suppose, and maybe lock me up as a mule.
If you don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention, then don't show off. I don't condone rape, but how fucking stupid do you have to be to wear anything less than a burka?
If a woman wants to send me explicit photos or videos of herself, presumably for my titillation, she should feel free to do so with the knowledge that it is socially unacceptable to forward them on without permission, and that the blow back for doing so would be on ME and not HER.
I might punch you in the face some day. Possibly even shoot you. So, is it right to preemptively kill me just in case?
No. Until there's an imminent credible threat, it's not right to take ANY kind of action against me.
Same with these devices - the fact that they COULD be compromised in the future and used for destructive purposes is not sufficient justification for attacking them. Once they are and are being used to commit a crime, then yes, they should be open season.
Now, if you want to start a class action suit against the manufacturers for negligence (after the first device is compromised) or lobby politicians to block the import or domestic sale of devices that fail to meet minimum security standards, maybe even start a boycott... fill your boots. All excellent and morally unquestionable actions.
I can break into your house because it's not secure enough. Is that OK too?
Just because something isn't locked doesn't mean it's OK to access it. You're either civilized or you're not, and the person who released this code should be having a long stay in jail to think about the morality of what they've done.
>You are simultaneously underestimating what it takes to be a programmer and overestimating what university provides.
Well... I am a programmer (of sorts... depends on how strict your definition since while I churn out lots of code it's all scripting and almost never in a language requiring compiling) and have been for over a decade.
And I've been through university.
> Elements of mathematics, psychology, geography, and philosophy will likely all play a role in any modestly complicated piece of software.
Math is everything, or rather the language that describes everything, so that is would be involved is more or less a tautology. Psychology is for interface design and you don't need formal training of any sort in it to have what you will need. Geography? For specific jobs, I suppose. Most likely you would be more than qualified enough with an understanding of what a map is, the shape of the globe, and a couple of courses in GIS. Philosophy? Only to keep your brain busy while waiting for results.
You are overestimating programming and underestimating university.
Vertical integration results in monopolies (regional ones at least) and consumer abuse once the consumers no longer have reasonable alternatives to turn to.
The carrier and the content provider can not be permitted to have agreements to suppress competition.
Bits are bits, and while in the case of an Internet connection I think there's room for ISPs to enforce SPAM/botnet/DOS protection strategies, to provide generic tiered traffic (to say, minimize delay on real-time traffic over other types not so sensitive to jitter)... but NOT to say that media provider A gets priority over media provider B because A ponied up some extra cash to block a competitor.
Fight this, or you're going to have a much, much shittier Internet in a few years.
I include those. University degrees are for training people to push knowledge forward, to research and hopefully invent, create, or develop the next new thing in their field.
Just because the degree is in mathematics or a hard science doesn't make that any more applicable to the purpose of job training.
And a decent university would never let you away with taking only courses in your major anyway. There's a requirement to broaden your horizons... which, if you're in it for job training, is a massive waste of your time and money.
If you're looking for someone trained for a task, you don't look for a university degree... that's a filter for "People willing to put 4 years and a massive amount of debt into a piece of paper to get past an HR/social hurdle".
Because university is about broadening your horizons and teaching you how to think so you have the capacity to develop the next thing other people will be going to job training for, and using it for anything else is the giant, expensive, frustrating thing that's keeping otherwise talented people out of your shop.
If you want a programmer, you don't need someone who can think up the next great programming language. You need someone who knows a current programming language and has the capacity to learn the next one, with a side order of sufficient social skills to work cooperatively and (in some cases) interact directly with clients.
American voters have wanted a King and a ruling dynasty for the longest time.
There's a worship of political families, and just having the right name increases your odds dramatically of getting votes for election to the same position held by someone of a previous generation of your family. It's not just increased access to connections and vertical knowledge transmission, people want the bloodline. And that's external... within the system, those bloodlines have similar supportive effects.
I'm pretty sure it's basic primate psychology at work. We just really, really want to be ruled by a divinely selected bloodine no matter how stupid that idea has repeatedly been shown to be.
Awesome. So, you've either gone full cultist or you have no morals and are fine encouraging the growth of the market so you can continue to leech off the rubes.
Either way you're not much of a human being.