So, let me get this straight. A conservative-leaning judge would probably think it was, on balance, in the public interest to remove a left-leaning political leader from office.
So if some conservative journalist "slips up" and slags the leftie using untrue statements ("for the sake of the country")
This new ruling does not mention who has to prove that the defamatory statement is true, or prove that it is false.
The ruling says: Even if the statement is proven false (i.e. not corresponding with reality i.e. made up), the journalist or blogger can just shrug it off by saying, in effect:"meh, I thought it was true at the time."
That is encouraging irresponsible, and sometimes deliberately irresponsible journalism.
We are talking about the (proven unjustified but nonetheless effective) ruination of reputation here.That is a serious crime, causing serious and irreparable harm to the libeled individual.
All the old law said was: If you are going to raise a hue and cry telling a story about someone that is going to ruin their reputation and possibly their financial wellbeing, make sure the story is true, because if you are wrong, you've done a terrible injustice.
Now, in Canada, there is no such caution to limit your publicized criticism to that which you know to be true.
Remember that this new ruling only assists journalists and bloggers whose story about someone is false.
If the story was true, there is no libel, under existing law.
I think it will be easy to put a patina of professional responsible diligence on acts of deliberate character assassination using lies and incendiary innuendo.
All you have to do is say that you got it from some sources, and tried to reach some sources to contradict it but couldn't get hold of them by publication time etc. etc.
The media is already manufacturing opinion and making and breaking kings, and this just allows them to do it using false stories with impunity.
To maintain some semblance of freedom of communication, we will probably have to try to standardize on a thin layer over current net protocols which provides: 1. Encryption of transmitted data routinely 2. Encryption on disk of data 3. Distribution of any particular "page" of data into many redundant encrypted fragments around the world that know how to coalesce on demand. 4. Automatic mobility of such data fragments, such that they migrate, and seek newer and more reliable storage for themselves. 5. DHTs for finding stuff 6. Onion routing (at least a few hops standard)
That ought to do for starters.
Make it available as a trivially easy install on multiple platforms which can use standard web protocols as a base transport layer.
A couple of months after Mosaic browser was publicised.
Does that count?
It used a tcl/tk app to draw vector topographic maps. The tcl/tk app commanded the mosaic browser to fetch data for the map, and to display accompanying text info in its browser window, changing the text depending on clicks in different locations on the map.
regarding the difference between tree farms and original wild forest eco-systems:
"The Redesigned Forest" by Chris Maser
One point he makes is that current logging methods, which for example still include clearcutting that leads to rapid soil erosion, and slash burning that removes biomass (future soil) and makes it into CO2 and short-term fertilizer, result in a gradual depletion of the hydrocarbon biomass in the region, so that, in the tropics (where forest soils are already thin) you can only get two or three generations of regrown rainforest, and in temperate forests, you can get 5 or 6 gradually depleted tree-farm generations, then you basically have the Irish heather-covered hills (grazing range land) instead of forests.
Because it is only by doing that that we will get an accurate picture of where we are at now, and how significant any further changes one way or the other are.
For example, I'd guess three quarters of the UK, continental Europe, and the Americas were forested at that time, with the remainder being grasslands and mountaintops.
The challenge of global environmental issues is that they are enormous in both geography and time, and both of those scale problems make them difficult for us to plan for, understand economically, and solve. We have no problem at all causing unintended consequences at global and century scales, but so far have not been able to cause any intended consequences on systems at these scales.
There is an emerging offshoot of evolutionary theory and the mathematics of game theory that will soon be saying a lot about "values", "morality" etc. I will admit that the research and theories in this area are preliminary, but the direction it will go is pretty clear.
Much of morality will be explained as special cases of the survival benefits of co-operation, where that co-operation is enabled via the trust and reciprocity that is engendered by following the golden rule "Do unto others..."
Co-operation, in many situations, creates an increased probability of survival per unit of energy expended by the members of a co-operating group, compared to if they competed alone. Therefore co-operation is a thermodynamically optimal solution to many problems confronted by autonomous, planning agents such as ourselves.
Regarding values: Many of our values e.g. 1. protect the young, 2. admire the beautiful, 3. "be kind to strangers", 4. "value the natural eco-systems"
can be interpreted as: 1. "help the species survive" 2. "admire the central/average form of your organism, and/or the efficient (for some reproductive purpose or moving purpose etc.), or simply, admire complex and purposeful shapes, such as ourselves. 3. See "golden rule" and thermodynamic efficiency of cooperative survival strategies. 4. A complex, bio-diverse eco-system exhibiting a variety of complex, adaptive forms and functions, is a thing that can generate many benefits for us, and a thing that is much like ourselves in its creative quest for persistence of form, so just for that reason alone, may be valued and thought beautiful.
Sorry to make it all so plain and lacking in mystery. There is plenty of mystery still in the details, but the shape of these explanatory sociobiological theories / emergent system game theory explanations is pretty clear and compelling.
People talk, and behave, 90% on their perception of their interests (mixed with vague hunches of what is the case), and 10% based on anything that if examined could be called "knowledge".
I think scientists today have been reduced to dishonesty, "sexing up" their results, knowing the answer before they do the experiment etc., because of the insanely competitive and ruthless battle for funding grants. That is what is distorting the practice of science today.
We as a society need to look at how we support science and scientists, and improve it, if we want improved science coming out of it.
into the "brights", who have been educated (and taken their education to heart) enough, or are just intelligent enough, to understand on a first-principles basis why you should in general believe the (long term unfalsified) results of science, and why you should occasionally disbelieve particular isolated results that may have human interests behind them,
and those who are easily swayed (on a question that requires science to explain it) by a persuasive and publicised "just so" story.
What percentage of people do you think come down on either side of that divide?
Debate amongst yourselves. I'm off to do some science;-)
Yes, but messy code is guaranteed to become unmaintainable within 2 years or so.
What happens is, a manager cracks the whip on programmers, gets the credit for getting the "messy" program done on schedule and budget, gets promoted to other responsibilities, and is at a safe distance when the bomb goes off.
This issue seems structural in software development within business, but I wonder if it is avoidable in a more casual schedule open-source project.
I also got a comment from a Google exec one time that "they don't really have schedules" for software developments. They wait til they're ready.
You can say that's because they're rolling in dough, but you've got to wonder how did they get to that position? Maybe enlightened management from early on played a big role.
They are just as serious. Updating/"maintaining" a piece of code and not updating the comment should be made into close to a firing offense, after the suitable number of admonitions.
The biggest weakness I find with code I review is that the programmers seem to be either inarticulate, lazy, smug, or exhibiting Aspergers syndrome (lack of empathy), in that they forget to include the most important comment for any method or class;
The "What the h*ll is this?" comment that explains the gist of the method/class and why and in what contexts one should care about it.
Also frequently missing is the considerate: "Mind the low headroom" comment.
If we are talking at a global scale, energy input and energy end-use are probably measures which will determine the macroeconomic feasibility of various activities, in a global-business and environmentally constrained world. I am confident that energy based measures will better match up with ecological limits than money based measures will.
My general point is we could do it if we put our best minds and resources toward the task of making the significant infrastructure changes and the significant breakthroughs necessary. I believe for example that if the amount by which the fossil-fuel industry is being subsidized by tax breaks and environmental regulation overrides were directed instead to alternative energy technology r&d, and if a small carbon tax were levied and added into the pot, there would be more than enough funding to get the changes and improvements done. This is a case where the free market is stuck in a local maximum, and we need some government intervention to tilt the playing field and make some new markets for competition to later optimize.
My boss in a ridiculously small s-a-a-s co. would frequently call up at all hours and on weekends with an emergency problem with the servers, the webapp, or the office IT. Nominally I was "lead developer". He wanted me to get the alerts hooked up directly to my cellphone.
Now if somehow he had seen fit to include his tech employees as (even small) partners in the venture, my attitude just may have been different,
but as it was, I basically let him know at one point that this was extra value to the company beyond our agreement, and that some form of compensation or compensating time off would be a fair gesture.
This kind of disagreement ultimately led to our parting of ways.
Labour standards for tech workers where I live are way slanted toward the employer. Tech workers are not included in the normal "40-hour or overtime or flex-time" rules that govern the rest of the economy, even if we are not given shares or options.
So it is basically up to the employees to stick up for their rights, and it leads to a lot of bad blood if an employee doesn't agree to be a slave. I guess the companies end up with "willing lackey" types exclusively.
Because it is the amount of work we are putting in to things we want to do or want to have happen.
I predict that economic theory in general will move in this direction.
There are other alternatives to the nuke method however. We could do massive wind and solar, supplemented by ocean wave and geothermal.
Opponents with a vested interest in the status quo claim these are marginal and intermittent (not core) power sources, but they do not understand or are deliberately ignoring the power balancing you could do with a continent-wide superconducting smart-switching power grid.
Another, complementary, alternative is that we can back off on our tendency to destroy natural eco-systems and replace them by our own systems, and let some of them (natural systems) thrive, and do some of the work for us. This only works if we support them and harvest them with humility and respect.
"civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market"
The co-operation may start all market-egalitarian, peer-to-peer, but thermodynamically, co-operation will pretty much always morph into hierarchical command and control (with varying degrees of semi-autonomy allowed the parts in the whole.) The underlying reason for this is that it is more feasible to coordinate things in a hierarchical structure. The information flows are limited in scope and complexity at each level of communication between a supervisor and multiple but not many controlled elements. Also the incentive structures tend to morph toward increasing reward for controlling (via hierarchy) a larger and larger sized co-operating organization.
So if we accept that hierarchy formation in society and economy is inevitable, our moral/ethical question is what technical form such hierarchy should take. Should it be representative democracy, mafia oligarchy, totalitarian dictatorship etc. But taxation is just an inevitable artifact of hierarchically co-ordinated co-operation.
In the thermodynamically efficient hierarchical form of (semi-willing, semi-imposed) co-operation, the controlling agents at the top of each level of the hierarchy (of each sub-unit of the economy), demand, and have the power to enforce, the extraction of "taxes", defined as a portion of the work-product of each unit further down the hierarchy. This portion of work dedicated to the more global unit's needs provides the resources necessary to the control and centralized or semi-centralized co-ordination of the co-operation.
There is no difference in essence between taxation and monopoly price-raising in a formerly free market that has evolved toward a small number of monopolies. The only substantial difference may be in how much democratic adjustment there may be to what uses the accumulated, concentrated funds are put to. In the market monopoly situation, the control can only be overthrown by the arising of another competing corporate hierarchy. In a democracy, the control (and directed dispersement of the funds) can theoretically be guided to some extent by the will of the people in a one-person-one-vote power-leveling manner.
Slashdot Mirror
So, let me get this straight.
A conservative-leaning judge would probably think it was,
on balance,
in the public interest to remove a left-leaning political
leader from office.
So if some conservative journalist "slips up" and
slags the leftie using untrue statements ("for the
sake of the country")
then this is now ok.
Wonderful.
This new ruling does not mention who has to prove
that the defamatory statement is true, or prove that it is false.
The ruling says: Even if the statement is proven false
(i.e. not corresponding with reality i.e. made up),
the journalist or blogger can just shrug it off by saying,
in effect:"meh, I thought it was true at the time."
That is encouraging irresponsible, and sometimes deliberately
irresponsible journalism.
We are talking about the (proven unjustified but nonetheless effective)
ruination of reputation here.That is a serious crime, causing
serious and irreparable harm to the libeled individual.
All the old law said was: If you are going to raise a hue and cry
telling a story about someone that is going to ruin their reputation
and possibly their financial wellbeing, make sure the story is true,
because if you are wrong, you've done a terrible injustice.
Now, in Canada, there is no such caution to limit your publicized
criticism to that which you know to be true.
Remember that this new ruling only assists journalists and bloggers whose story about someone is false.
If the story was true, there is no libel, under existing law.
I think it will be easy to put a patina of professional responsible diligence on acts of deliberate
character assassination using lies and incendiary innuendo.
All you have to do is say that you got it from some sources, and tried to reach some sources
to contradict it but couldn't get hold of them by publication time etc. etc.
The media is already manufacturing opinion and making and breaking kings, and this
just allows them to do it using false stories with impunity.
Scary
To maintain some semblance of freedom of communication,
we will probably have to try to standardize on a thin layer over current
net protocols which provides:
1. Encryption of transmitted data routinely
2. Encryption on disk of data
3. Distribution of any particular "page" of data into many
redundant encrypted fragments around the world that know how
to coalesce on demand.
4. Automatic mobility of such data fragments, such that they
migrate, and seek newer and more reliable storage for themselves.
5. DHTs for finding stuff
6. Onion routing (at least a few hops standard)
That ought to do for starters.
Make it available as a trivially easy install on multiple platforms
which can use standard web protocols as a base transport
layer.
A couple of months after Mosaic browser was publicised.
Does that count?
It used a tcl/tk app to draw vector topographic maps. The tcl/tk app
commanded the mosaic browser to fetch data for the map, and to
display accompanying text info in its browser window, changing the
text depending on clicks in different locations on the map.
It seemed f'ing obvious at the time.
regarding the difference between tree farms and original wild forest eco-systems:
"The Redesigned Forest" by Chris Maser
One point he makes is that current logging methods, which for example still include clearcutting that leads to rapid soil erosion, and slash burning that removes biomass (future soil) and makes it into CO2 and short-term fertilizer, result in a gradual depletion of the hydrocarbon biomass in the region, so that, in the tropics (where forest soils are already thin) you can only get two or three generations of regrown rainforest, and in temperate forests, you can get 5 or 6 gradually depleted tree-farm generations, then you basically have the Irish heather-covered hills (grazing range land) instead of forests.
Because it is only by doing that that we will get an accurate picture of where we are at now,
and how significant any further changes one way or the other are.
For example, I'd guess three quarters of the UK, continental Europe, and the Americas were forested at
that time, with the remainder being grasslands and mountaintops.
The challenge of global environmental issues is that they are enormous in both geography
and time, and both of those scale problems make them difficult for us to plan for, understand
economically, and solve. We have no problem at all causing unintended consequences at global
and century scales, but so far have not been able to cause any intended consequences on systems
at these scales.
I've got a well-published racist neo-nazi with the same name as me.
Life basically sucks, in some ways.
Get over it and get on with it.
There is an emerging offshoot of evolutionary theory and the mathematics of game theory
that will soon be saying a lot about "values", "morality" etc.
I will admit that the research and theories in this area are preliminary, but the direction it will go is pretty clear.
Much of morality will be explained as special cases of the survival benefits of co-operation, where that
co-operation is enabled via the trust and reciprocity that is engendered by following the golden rule "Do unto others..."
Co-operation, in many situations, creates an increased probability of survival per unit of energy expended by
the members of a co-operating group, compared to if they competed alone. Therefore co-operation is a thermodynamically
optimal solution to many problems confronted by autonomous, planning agents such as ourselves.
Regarding values: Many of our values e.g.
1. protect the young,
2. admire the beautiful,
3. "be kind to strangers",
4. "value the natural eco-systems"
can be interpreted as:
1. "help the species survive"
2. "admire the central/average form of your organism, and/or the efficient (for some reproductive purpose or moving purpose etc.), or simply,
admire complex and purposeful shapes, such as ourselves.
3. See "golden rule" and thermodynamic efficiency of cooperative survival strategies.
4. A complex, bio-diverse eco-system exhibiting a variety of complex, adaptive forms and functions, is a thing that can generate
many benefits for us, and a thing that is much like ourselves in its creative quest for persistence of form, so just for that reason alone,
may be valued and thought beautiful.
Sorry to make it all so plain and lacking in mystery. There is plenty of mystery still in the details, but the shape of these explanatory
sociobiological theories / emergent system game theory explanations is pretty clear and compelling.
You are now going to drink an HIV & DDT cocktail !!
People talk, and behave, 90% on their perception of their interests (mixed with vague hunches of what is the case), and 10% based on anything
that if examined could be called "knowledge".
I think scientists today have been reduced to dishonesty, "sexing up" their results, knowing the answer before they do the experiment etc.,
because of the insanely competitive and ruthless battle for funding grants. That is what is distorting the practice of science today.
We as a society need to look at how we support science and scientists, and improve it, if we want improved science coming out of it.
"A Stanford researcher not too long ago discovered that ignorant people have no idea that they are ignorant."
Agreed. Skepticism, along with experimental technique, and a sound mastery of logic, arithmetic, and statistical methods.
Any of these without the others will not create scientific knowledge.
into the "brights", who have been educated (and taken their education to heart) enough,
or are just intelligent enough, to understand on a first-principles basis why you should
in general believe the (long term unfalsified) results of science, and why you should
occasionally disbelieve particular isolated results that may have human interests behind
them,
and those who are easily swayed (on a question that requires science to explain it)
by a persuasive and publicised "just so" story.
What percentage of people do you think come down on either side of that divide?
Debate amongst yourselves. I'm off to do some science ;-)
Yes, but messy code is guaranteed to become unmaintainable within 2 years or so.
What happens is, a manager cracks the whip on programmers, gets the credit for
getting the "messy" program done on schedule and budget, gets promoted to other
responsibilities, and is at a safe distance when the bomb goes off.
This issue seems structural in software development within business, but I wonder if
it is avoidable in a more casual schedule open-source project.
I also got a comment from a Google exec one time that "they don't really have schedules"
for software developments. They wait til they're ready.
You can say that's because they're rolling in dough, but you've got to wonder how did they
get to that position? Maybe enlightened management from early on played a big role.
They are just as serious. Updating/"maintaining" a piece of code and not updating the comment
should be made into close to a firing offense, after the suitable number of admonitions.
The biggest weakness I find with code I review is that the programmers seem to be either
inarticulate, lazy, smug, or exhibiting Aspergers syndrome (lack of empathy), in that they forget to
include the most important comment for any method or class;
The "What the h*ll is this?" comment that explains the gist of the method/class and why and
in what contexts one should care about it.
Also frequently missing is the considerate: "Mind the low headroom" comment.
If we are talking at a global scale, energy input and energy end-use are probably measures which will determine the macroeconomic feasibility of various activities, in a global-business and environmentally constrained world. I am confident that energy based measures will better match up with ecological limits than money based measures will.
My general point is we could do it if we put our best minds and resources toward the task of making the significant infrastructure changes and the significant breakthroughs necessary. I believe for example that if the amount by which the fossil-fuel industry is being subsidized by tax breaks and environmental regulation overrides were directed instead to alternative energy technology r&d, and if a small carbon tax were levied and added into the pot, there would be more than enough funding to get the changes and improvements done. This is a case where the free market is stuck in a local maximum, and we need some government intervention to tilt the playing field and make some new markets for competition to later optimize.
The scientific community is very good at weeding out scientific fraud, and if proven, such a scientist will never work in science again.
It does not need armchair quarterbacks commentating on fraud. That's about as informative and rational as late night talk radio.
Perhaps if their operating system properly separated and sandboxed applications, malware
would have a harder time crashing the whole OS?
Just a thought. Last time I checked my watch, it was 2009, and we've known how to do
that sort of OS design for probably two decades now.
And, out of my earshot, you order drugs from your dealer, or for that matter,
give the launch command for the terrorist bombing attack.
So I guess I am vicariously liable for your criminal action?
I can't see anything in my example that is not parallel to the case mentioned.
My boss in a ridiculously small s-a-a-s co. would frequently call up at all hours and
on weekends with an emergency problem with the servers, the webapp, or the office IT. Nominally
I was "lead developer". He wanted me to get the alerts hooked up directly to my
cellphone.
Now if somehow he had seen fit to include his tech employees as (even small) partners
in the venture, my attitude just may have been different,
but as it was, I basically let him know at one point that this was extra value to the company beyond
our agreement, and that some form of compensation or compensating time off would be a fair gesture.
This kind of disagreement ultimately led to our parting of ways.
Labour standards for tech workers where I live are way slanted toward the employer. Tech workers
are not included in the normal "40-hour or overtime or flex-time" rules that govern the rest of the
economy, even if we are not given shares or options.
So it is basically up to the employees to stick up for their rights, and it leads to a lot of bad blood
if an employee doesn't agree to be a slave. I guess the companies end up with "willing lackey"
types exclusively.
Because it is the amount of work we are putting in to things we want to do or want to have happen.
I predict that economic theory in general will move in this direction.
There are other alternatives to the nuke method however. We could do massive wind and solar,
supplemented by ocean wave and geothermal.
Opponents with a vested interest in the status quo claim these are marginal and intermittent (not core)
power sources, but they do not understand or are deliberately ignoring the power balancing you could do
with a continent-wide superconducting smart-switching power grid.
Another, complementary, alternative is that we can back off on our tendency to destroy natural eco-systems and
replace them by our own systems,
and let some of them (natural systems) thrive, and do some of the work for us. This only works if we support them
and harvest them with humility and respect.
"civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market"
The co-operation may start all market-egalitarian, peer-to-peer, but thermodynamically, co-operation will pretty much always morph into hierarchical command and control (with varying degrees of semi-autonomy allowed the parts in the whole.)
The underlying reason for this is that it is more feasible to coordinate things in a hierarchical structure. The information flows are limited in scope and complexity at each level of communication between a supervisor and multiple but not many controlled elements. Also the incentive structures tend to morph toward increasing reward for controlling (via hierarchy) a larger and larger sized co-operating organization.
So if we accept that hierarchy formation in society and economy is inevitable, our moral/ethical question is what technical form such hierarchy should take. Should it be representative democracy, mafia oligarchy, totalitarian dictatorship etc. But taxation is just an inevitable artifact of hierarchically co-ordinated co-operation.
In the thermodynamically efficient hierarchical form of (semi-willing, semi-imposed) co-operation, the controlling agents at the top of each level of the hierarchy (of each sub-unit of the economy), demand, and have the power to enforce, the extraction of "taxes", defined as a portion of the work-product of each unit further down the hierarchy. This portion of work dedicated to the more global unit's needs provides the resources necessary to the control and centralized or semi-centralized co-ordination of the co-operation.
There is no difference in essence between taxation and monopoly price-raising in a formerly free market that has evolved toward a small number of monopolies. The only substantial difference may be in how much democratic adjustment there may be to what uses the accumulated, concentrated funds are put to. In the market monopoly situation, the control can only be overthrown by the arising of another competing corporate hierarchy. In a democracy, the control (and directed dispersement of the funds) can theoretically be guided to some extent by the will of the people in a one-person-one-vote power-leveling manner.