No. It's more like game theory, combined with energy-use efficiency optimization as the major utility function. This may be partly in the domain of economic theory, but also has applicability to understanding the functioning and likely trajectories and destinies of all kinds of part-whole systems comprised of semi-autonomous parts co-operating and competing.
That includes multi-cellular organisms (co-operating cells), and all kinds of group-organizing memes in human and animal societies, such as families, dominance hierarchies, mutual protection societies, organized religious groups, street gangs, corporations, governments, ethnic groups, and nation-states.
The "American Dream" (or American Nightmare) of the propertied individual with a shotgun to protect his property, is not, when taken to its limit, an effective way for people to live.
If people don't contribute some of their energy (whether in the form of taxes, kindness to strangers, or contributions to the commonwealth) to their surrounding organizational groups, then life is nasty, brutish, and short.
That's just basic emergent systems thermodynamics. Ok, maybe it's not considered basic yet, but it will be.
So hoarding all your goods is very myopic, and, ultimately, ineffective for all of us. Please remember that copyright is a legal privilege GRANTED by the society as a whole to individuals.
Why fix a problem (American cars SUCK (gas and in other ways), when you can fix the perception of the problem way cheaper.
I'm sure this way of thinking (and clever lobbying of politicians and government agencies) will definitely make your auto industry get competitive again. Yup. Definitely gonna work.
Now excuse me while I step up into my beefy steroidal-looking TR-U-U-C-K!
So it's up to governments to set the tilt of the economic playing field if society as a whole needs to make a substantial change. The carbon tax would do this nicely. It's annoying that the most simple and effective solution is usually the least politically popular one.
Perhaps a better education system, that taught people to think for themselves, to know how to learn, to know why it would be good to learn, would lead to more responsible citizens on this and other issues. Right now, anyone that owns a TV or reads the daily newspapers pretty much has their opinions owned by the economic interests that run (and influence through threat of advertising holdback) the mainstream media networks. If the majority of people realized that and realized that that situation sucked, then I think we'd be on the road to progressive democratic politics and real solutions. Right now, we're being herded by sheep to the malls in our SUVs.
Firstly, the nuclear bombs worked, didn't they? Secondly, the governments managed to build and maintain the highway system, didn't they? Now both of these may have been unwise plans, but they were carried out well by government, surprise, surprise. Thirdly, Canadians have a government-planned free healthcare system that works pretty well for the entire population most of the time. A government is just a big corporation (city governments actually ARE corporations) and a large corporation is really similar to a government. It depends more who's in charge as to whether anything gets done right or not.
Secondly, I agree with you that a massive carbon tax would do the trick best, and I'm all for it, but maybe we should take a straw poll to see what percentage of Americans would go for that. Thought so.
So a diversion of existing tax revenues from government subsidies to the fossil fuel energy sector and the road transportation sector, into a focussed set of projects, would probably be more palatable to the taxpayers.
That's what the energy guzzling nations (particularly the Kyoto-Scofflaw USA) need to put into action if we want to have any real impact on global warming.
I have no doubt that if the urgency was there and the resources were put into it that we would be able to meet all our energy needs with a combination of fusion, new-tech solar, wind, smart-grid, ocean wave power generation, and large-scale geothermal generation. If we can drill for the last dregs of oil, why can't we drill for Earth's heat instead?
Major technological challenges exist for all of these technologies except wind power which is already well-established and optimized. But every single one of them is well within reach of a concentrated decade-long project with massive resources put into it by a mixture of government and private sector.
A whole bunch of jobs with a future, instead of dead-end dying industry jobs, would also be created.
Seems too sensible for actual human politics though, doesn't it.
What we need are 3 or so packet priorities, universally defined across the (ipv6 I guess) net, to handle traffic with different latency requirements, but just charge the end user as usual for bandwidth, or for classes of bandwidth usage (peak and sustained), as part of their ISP package. If they want more movies or lots of voip, both of which would use high-priority packets, then more bandwidth would be used up, so more bandwidth charges would accrue. There is absolutely no need to charge any of the players more for sending or recieving high-priority packet streams, because they automatically (send) get more packets per second or per hour so their bandwidth charges will cover their increased net utilization.
This seems really simple to me. What's complicated?
Could we really get a consensus on that with all the diverse and conflicting interests out there now?
Perhaps the original internet only got a sensible design because very few people or companies or governments had much of a stake in it and most of those who actively used it and developed it had PhDs or were uber-geeks who could be fairly rational and objective about it.
I would say there's a pretty massive bipolar view on it right now. On the one side you have the following cluster of beliefs/philosophies:
The decentrist anarchist emergent-systemists:
-Information wants to be free and freely available
-Open standards and lots of F/OSS software are great things
-The United States government should not run the online world
-The future is decentralized, P2P, edge-network-oriented,
and strongly encrypted to allow massive locationless anonymous
sharing of private and public "inner-nets".
- Bandwidth should be symmetrical up and downstream.
- We might need 3 packet priorities, but money should not attach to them.
- the internet should be globally seamless, not nation-state oriented.
On the other hand you have the content-owning or pipe-owning capitalists, and the NSA:
-I bought all the valuable information, so pay me rent
-You're using my pipes to look at stuff, so pay me rent
=You're my competitor and you're using my pipes to compete with me, so pay me more rent
-You're using my pipes, so I should decide what goo to feed you through them
-It's not YourTube its MyTube, like it always has been.
-You're breathing too much data. If you don't pay me more rent, I'll cut off your windpipe.
-Repeat after me. "I am a consumer. I am a consumer." "I want you to choose for me."
-Fast downstream IPTV for a fee. No upstream bandwidth. No P2P.
-P2P is a security risk, and a haven of illegality.
-Strong encryption in the hands of the masses is helping the terrorists win.
-The US government needs to snoop on everyone everywhere at all times.
-Net anonymity is wrong.
How could we design a single new net architecture that would satisfy both of these viewpoints? It seems impossible to me. Maybe we need two nets?
On many topics, there's a high ratio of insight to drivel on slashdot, but when it comes to discussions of global warming, I realize that most slashdotters are young, impressionable Americans brainwashed by their media, their megacorporations, and their mega-corporation loving government, into not even bothering to evaluate the science of global warming themselves before going into their kneejerk, programmed-in denials of it.
Go read the website ( http://www.ipc.ch/ ) and a bunch of credible references out from its reports, then come back and post with some good, peer-reviewed knowledge under your hat.
Comment without research is just cocktail party gossip on the web, and frankly, I'd rather read your uninformed opinion on Paris Hilton's fashion sense than your deliberately uninformed opinion on global climate processes.
One of the big problems with the "software" or "computerized business process" patents granted at USPTO is that many of them are very obvious to "a skilled practitioner in the field". This is the major factor that brings the whole area of law into disrepute.
You know, maybe I couldn't have thought up the RSA algorithm on the spur of the moment after a moment's pondering of the topic, but for many of the US software or biz process patents these days, the inherent structure of the problem domain, analyzed with standard requirements analysis techniques, suggests to any competent analyst the form of the computerized solution, and standardized design principles and patterns supply the rest of the solution. But lo and behold, it's still patented at USPTO.
You see, clicking on a link to purchase something, or downloading and running a software program in a browser, or tracking who is clicking on hyperlinks by including a personal code in the url... or making a doubly linked list...
I could go on and on... These are all "moment's thought" obvious to a computer science graduate, or else were the subject of second-year lectures on algorithms, thus known widely in computer science for decades.
Here's an idea. Why doesn't the USPTO have the software tech community and the computer science academic community elect a board of 20 truly leading innovators (software engineering gods) and truly leading academics in the field, who are willing to serve as a software or computerized business process review board. If ninety percent of this board finds a given patent application non-obvious by their standards, then heck, maybe there's a (still weak) case for patentability.
But otherwise, leave us the hell alone to think and design and code as we see fit and are more than capable of doing easily for the vast majority of these ridiculous patents, without bothering to look at how the patenter did it.
At least if the general public is aware of the issue, it provides those equipped to know more precisely, and politicians assigned to take the lead on fixing the issue, with the mandate and resources to gather better information on the problem and to take significant measures.
Without public awareness, people pointing out a large but nebulous problem tend to be labeled lunatics.
I'll take all manner of exaggeration and minimization as a side effect of more public awareness, and thus more political action.
It is crystal clear to the well informed that we are way, way, way, way underperforming on the necessary, effective actions on this issue, so more action is all good.
These days, with the Internet and Google available, there is really no excuse for a person of average mental wattage not to be well informed.
The real question and challenge is whether they WANT to be well informed on a given topic.
So it's a GOOD THING that people now want to be well informed about climate change and what to do about it.
I humbly suggest that before you decide what to believe that you look into what is known (or hypothesized, or believed) about what belief actually is,
-and look into the general reasons why you should or should not believe proposition X, whatever X is,
-and look into what sorts of factors should make you believe X more strongly or less strongly.
A lot of people are really confident about what their beliefs are, without reflecting much on what that means, or on what it should mean, in order for them to be acting rationally.
I suggest starting out by looking into reason-maintenance-systems, the philosophy of scientific revolutions, logical inconsistency, godel's incompleteness theorem, possible worlds logic (model theory), bayesian inference, zen buddhist ideas about the limitations of ideas, and so on.
Then get back to us on what you believe, but more importantly, why you believe X, and why strongly, and why you are justified and rational in believing as you do.
We are hardwired to get together in groups by creating a shared ethos (way of living) and the way we train each other in the way is through telling each other traditional stories. Religion is an example of such a group-work-creating meme.
The god-concept is a tool of the religion group-work-creating meme. It takes advantage of our tendency to reason by analogy. We first understand how other humans, like our parents when we are infants, and like those around us generally, exercise intentional agency upon the world. How they cause events to happen; how they shape situations for theiror our benefit.
So when early humans perceived large-scale,natural events, or perceived the seemingly intentional agency of non-human animals, they, by analogy, imbued these large-scale natural systems, or the animals, with human-like spirits.
Human leaders (themselves tools of the group-work=creating memes), understood how they could use stories of the actions, intentions, and attitudes of powerful animal spirits and natural-system spirits, as way-teaching stories and as stories designed to threaten supernaturally powerful deterrence of dissenting ideas and ways.
It's all simply the systematic way that "the way' persists itself in human cultures. And why is "the way" able to persist itself like this? It's simply because groups of people working together (and forming sub-organizations and specialization of labour within a shared set of norms of behaviour and interaction), are much more effective at living than are the same number of people unorganized.
Our genetic tendency is to communicate and to create alliances. These alliances work better, both for the alliance, and foreach member. i.e. members of an effective alliance survive more probably than unattached humans or worse-organized humans.
Religion and god-concepts are memes that constrain peoples' behaviour sufficiently so that the group will function well together (in a civilized, "altruistic" manner, i.e. selfish to the group instead of to the individual)
If you are creating a user interface largely for people who have something better to do than learn about how their operating system works (i.e. 95% of computer users), then your primary UI design goal had better be: THE DEFAULT SHALL BE GOOD. or better: THE DEFAULT SHALL BE SIMPLE AND GOOD.
So if you MUST indulge your configuration addiction, you must NOT make the configurability features get in the way of simplicity of use in the default case. e.g. Adding a whole bunch of configuration adjustment menu items or choices in primary use-case dialogs would be fatal to usability for your target audience. Configurability features must be deeply, deeply hidden; only findable by someone who has RTFM.
And even well hidden configurability reduces the chance that person A will be able to use person B's (or web cafe B's) computer.
So there better be a damn good reason for configurable options, because they have seriously destructive properties in general, when we're talking about a user interface for human beings in general, as opposed to a user interface for kernel hackers.
What we need are digital timestamps that incorporate a hash of the digital content item and a statement of the license terms. These need to use digital signature technology so that they cannot be repudiated.
The idea would be that if you want to license your content under a create commons license, then you submit the file of that content to a license certifying server.
A well-known repository of such content (or a search engine setting in google) could then find all the content that had been so certified.
And you could run a file through a site that would verify that "yep, it had this license on this date."
If you received (and still possess) such a written offer, for Pete's sake hire a lawyer and sue the company. Use your slashdot post as the basis for an affidavit (statement about how they withdrew the promised offer.)
What you allege they did is a clear breach of contract on their part.
If they reneged on a clear written promise to you without you having provided some cause for them to void that contract, and this failure to live up to the promise caused you the type of harm you talked about and you can dig up some documentation of your losses,
Sounds to me like you will likely win the lawsuit, but IANAL. You'll have to have the cajones to withstand all kinds of threats from their legal team, but that's why you hire yourself a lawyer.
I bet you could get a lawyer to take this one on on a percentage of damages basis.
The Internet (and archived content on it) will last as long as there is a continuous level of human civilization large enough and organized enough to maintain electric power services on a fairly widespread basis.
When the Internet goes away, you can be pretty sure that government is vested entirely in local, small-time warlords/ganglords/evangelists worldwide at that point.
Of course the net and computers will evolve in architecture, but at a certain level, a data bitsequence is a bitsequence is a bitsequence, and if we can store it now, we can sure as heck store it later.
Interpreting statements such as "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" may prove difficult in the future however. Exclamations like "What targeted-neural-pleasure-center-stimulator-nanobug s were they smoking?" might be heard in the archeological/anthropological corridors.
Slashdot Mirror
It's going to be annoying to have to move
;-)
to Uzbekistan to continue coding...
- no insult intended to Uzbeks - it's the Kazakhs I can't stand
but move there I will if I have to to get these patent retards off my
back.
Coding is basically the application of math and logic to the world,
and those who tell me I'm not free to do that can go f**k themselves.
No.
It's more like game theory, combined with energy-use efficiency optimization
as the major utility function.
This may be partly in the domain of economic theory, but also has
applicability to understanding the functioning and likely trajectories and
destinies of all kinds of part-whole systems
comprised of semi-autonomous parts co-operating and competing.
That includes multi-cellular organisms (co-operating cells), and all kinds
of group-organizing memes in human and animal societies, such as
families, dominance hierarchies, mutual protection societies, organized religious groups,
street gangs, corporations, governments, ethnic groups, and nation-states.
It's not just economics.
The "American Dream" (or American Nightmare) of the propertied individual
with a shotgun to protect his property, is not, when taken to its limit, an effective
way for people to live.
If people don't contribute some of their energy (whether in the form of
taxes, kindness to strangers, or contributions to the commonwealth) to
their surrounding organizational groups, then life is nasty, brutish, and
short.
That's just basic emergent systems thermodynamics. Ok, maybe
it's not considered basic yet, but it will be.
So hoarding all your goods is very myopic, and, ultimately, ineffective
for all of us. Please remember that copyright is a legal privilege GRANTED
by the society as a whole to individuals.
Why fix a problem (American cars SUCK (gas and in other ways),
when you can fix the perception of the problem way cheaper.
I'm sure this way of thinking (and clever lobbying of
politicians and government agencies) will definitely make
your auto industry get competitive again. Yup. Definitely gonna work.
Now excuse me while I step up into my beefy steroidal-looking TR-U-U-C-K!
herded "like" sheep, not "by" sheep, although, with the level of "don't make me think" these days, we probably could be herded by sheep.
So it's up to governments to set the tilt of the economic playing field if society as a whole
needs to make a substantial change. The carbon tax would do this nicely. It's annoying that
the most simple and effective solution is usually the least politically popular one.
Perhaps a better education system, that taught people to think for themselves, to know
how to learn, to know why it would be good to learn, would lead to more responsible citizens
on this and other issues. Right now, anyone that owns a TV or reads the daily newspapers
pretty much has their opinions owned by the economic interests that run (and influence through
threat of advertising holdback) the mainstream media networks. If the majority of people realized
that and realized that that situation sucked, then I think we'd be on the road to progressive
democratic politics and real solutions. Right now, we're being herded by sheep to the malls in
our SUVs.
Firstly, the nuclear bombs worked, didn't they?
Secondly, the governments managed to build and maintain the highway system, didn't they?
Now both of these may have been unwise plans, but they were carried out well by government,
surprise, surprise.
Thirdly, Canadians have a government-planned free healthcare system that works pretty well for the entire population
most of the time.
A government is just a big corporation (city governments actually ARE corporations) and a large corporation is really
similar to a government. It depends more who's in charge as to whether anything gets done right or not.
Secondly, I agree with you that a massive carbon tax would do the trick best, and I'm all for it, but maybe
we should take a straw poll to see what percentage of Americans would go for that. Thought so.
So a diversion of existing tax revenues from government subsidies to the fossil fuel energy sector and the road
transportation sector, into a focussed set of projects, would probably be more palatable to the taxpayers.
That's what the energy guzzling nations (particularly the Kyoto-Scofflaw USA) need to put into action
if we want to have any real impact on global warming.
I have no doubt that if the urgency was there and the resources were put into it that we
would be able to meet all our energy needs with a combination of
fusion, new-tech solar, wind, smart-grid, ocean wave power generation,
and large-scale geothermal generation. If we can drill for the last dregs of oil, why can't
we drill for Earth's heat instead?
Major technological challenges exist for all of these technologies except wind power which is
already well-established and optimized. But every single one of them is well within reach
of a concentrated decade-long project with massive resources put into it by a mixture of
government and private sector.
A whole bunch of jobs with a future, instead of dead-end dying industry jobs, would also
be created.
Seems too sensible for actual human politics though, doesn't it.
What we need are 3 or so packet priorities, universally defined across the (ipv6 I guess) net,
to handle traffic with different latency requirements,
but just charge the end user as usual for bandwidth, or for classes of bandwidth
usage (peak and sustained), as part of their ISP package. If they want more movies or lots of voip,
both of which would use high-priority packets, then more bandwidth would be used up, so more
bandwidth charges would accrue. There is absolutely no need to charge any of the players more
for sending or recieving high-priority packet streams, because they automatically (send) get more packets
per second or per hour so their bandwidth charges will cover their increased net utilization.
This seems really simple to me. What's complicated?
for Internet 3 or whatever?
Could we really get a consensus on that with all the diverse and conflicting interests out there now?
Perhaps the original internet only got a sensible design because very few people or companies or governments
had much of a stake in it and most of those who actively used it and developed it had PhDs or were uber-geeks
who could be fairly rational and objective about it.
I would say there's a pretty massive bipolar view on it right now.
On the one side you have the following cluster of beliefs/philosophies:
The decentrist anarchist emergent-systemists:
-Information wants to be free and freely available
-Open standards and lots of F/OSS software are great things
-The United States government should not run the online world
-The future is decentralized, P2P, edge-network-oriented,
and strongly encrypted to allow massive locationless anonymous
sharing of private and public "inner-nets".
- Bandwidth should be symmetrical up and downstream.
- We might need 3 packet priorities, but money should not attach to them.
- the internet should be globally seamless, not nation-state oriented.
On the other hand you have the content-owning or pipe-owning
capitalists, and the NSA:
-I bought all the valuable information, so pay me rent
-You're using my pipes to look at stuff, so pay me rent
=You're my competitor and you're using my pipes to compete with me, so pay me more rent
-You're using my pipes, so I should decide what goo to feed you through them
-It's not YourTube its MyTube, like it always has been.
-You're breathing too much data. If you don't pay me more rent, I'll cut off your windpipe.
-Repeat after me. "I am a consumer. I am a consumer." "I want you to choose for me."
-Fast downstream IPTV for a fee. No upstream bandwidth. No P2P.
-P2P is a security risk, and a haven of illegality.
-Strong encryption in the hands of the masses is helping the terrorists win.
-The US government needs to snoop on everyone everywhere at all times.
-Net anonymity is wrong.
How could we design a single new net architecture that would satisfy both of these
viewpoints? It seems impossible to me. Maybe we need two nets?
We're experiencing loss of document format stability up here....
We just changed from the small platform to the larger one.
I don't understand what happened to the document.
I'm pulling off the access panel now. Seems to be a whole ratsnest of old embedded
OLE objects in there. Christ that's some ugly HTML.
Sproing! What the hell just happened to my paragraph format?? Oh my god, we have a backward compatibility failure!
Somebody open the hatch, quick! Open it! what do you mean there are two different opening standards!
Ahhhhhhhh!, We're losing all design integrity here. There are so many buttons. Don't know which ones to push......
Mayday, Mayday,
(Sure hope I land on my money pile. Oh, Sh***t)
http://www.ipcc.ch/
low-rent keyboard
On many topics, there's a high ratio of insight to drivel on slashdot, but when it comes to
discussions of global warming, I realize that most slashdotters are young, impressionable
Americans brainwashed by their media, their megacorporations, and their mega-corporation
loving government, into not even bothering to evaluate the science of global warming themselves
before going into their kneejerk, programmed-in denials of it.
Go read the website ( http://www.ipc.ch/ ) and a bunch of credible references out from its reports,
then come back and post with some good, peer-reviewed knowledge under your hat.
Comment without research is just cocktail party gossip on the web, and frankly, I'd rather read
your uninformed opinion on Paris Hilton's fashion sense than your deliberately uninformed
opinion on global climate processes.
Have the academic and leading innovator board examine only those that the current "rest of the board" say should be granted.
One of the big problems with the "software" or "computerized business process" patents granted at USPTO is that many of them are very obvious to "a skilled practitioner in the field". This is the major factor that brings the whole area of law into disrepute.
You know, maybe I couldn't have thought up the RSA algorithm on the spur of the moment after a moment's pondering of the topic,
but for many of the US software or biz process patents these days, the inherent structure of the problem domain, analyzed with
standard requirements analysis techniques, suggests to any competent analyst the form of the computerized solution, and
standardized design principles and patterns supply the rest of the solution. But lo and behold, it's still patented at USPTO.
You see, clicking on a link to purchase something, or downloading and running a software program in a browser,
or tracking who is clicking on hyperlinks by including a personal code in the url... or making a doubly linked list...
I could go on and on... These are all "moment's thought" obvious to a computer science graduate, or else were the
subject of second-year lectures on algorithms, thus known widely in computer science for decades.
Here's an idea. Why doesn't the USPTO have the software tech community and the computer science academic community
elect a board of 20 truly leading innovators (software engineering gods) and truly leading academics in the field, who
are willing to serve as a software or computerized business process review board. If ninety percent of this board finds
a given patent application non-obvious by their standards, then heck, maybe there's a (still weak) case for patentability.
But otherwise, leave us the hell alone to think and design and code as we see fit and are more than capable of doing easily
for the vast majority of these ridiculous patents, without bothering to look at how the patenter did it.
At least if the general public is aware of the issue, it provides those equipped
to know more precisely, and politicians assigned to take the lead on fixing
the issue, with the mandate and resources to gather better information on
the problem and to take significant measures.
Without public awareness, people pointing out a large but nebulous
problem tend to be labeled lunatics.
I'll take all manner of exaggeration and minimization as a side effect
of more public awareness, and thus more political action.
It is crystal clear to the well informed that we are way, way, way,
way underperforming on the necessary, effective actions on this issue,
so more action is all good.
These days, with the Internet and Google available, there is really no excuse for a person
of average mental wattage not to be well informed.
The real question and challenge is whether they WANT to be well informed on
a given topic.
So it's a GOOD THING that people now want to be well informed about climate
change and what to do about it.
in related "matter of semantics" stories..., Mexico might declare "New Mexico" a trademark violation.
I humbly suggest that before you decide what to believe
that you look into what is known (or hypothesized, or believed)
about what belief actually is,
-and look into the general reasons why you should or should
not believe proposition X, whatever X is,
-and look into what sorts of factors should make you believe
X more strongly or less strongly.
A lot of people are really confident about what their beliefs are,
without reflecting much on what that means, or on what it should
mean, in order for them to be acting rationally.
I suggest starting out by looking into reason-maintenance-systems,
the philosophy of scientific revolutions, logical inconsistency,
godel's incompleteness theorem, possible worlds logic (model theory),
bayesian inference,
zen buddhist ideas about the limitations of ideas, and so on.
Then get back to us on what you believe, but more importantly,
why you believe X, and why strongly, and why you are justified
and rational in believing as you do.
We are hardwired to get together in groups by creating a shared ethos (way of living) and the way we train each other in the way is through telling each other traditional stories. Religion is an example of such a group-work-creating meme.
The god-concept is a tool of the religion group-work-creating meme. It takes advantage of our tendency to reason by analogy. We first understand how other humans, like our parents when we are infants, and like those around us generally, exercise intentional agency upon the world. How they cause events to happen; how they shape situations for
theiror our benefit.
So when early humans perceived large-scale,natural events, or perceived the seemingly intentional agency of non-human animals, they, by analogy, imbued these large-scale natural systems, or the animals, with human-like spirits.
Human leaders (themselves tools of the group-work=creating memes), understood how they could use stories of the actions, intentions, and attitudes of powerful animal spirits and natural-system spirits, as way-teaching stories and as stories designed to threaten supernaturally powerful deterrence of dissenting ideas and ways.
It's all simply the systematic way that "the way' persists itself in human cultures. And why is "the way" able
to persist itself like this? It's simply because groups of people working together (and forming sub-organizations
and specialization of labour within a shared set of norms of behaviour and interaction), are much more
effective at living than are the same number of people unorganized.
Our genetic tendency is to communicate and to create alliances. These alliances work better, both for the
alliance, and foreach member. i.e. members of an effective alliance survive more probably than unattached
humans or worse-organized humans.
Religion and god-concepts are memes that constrain peoples' behaviour sufficiently so that the group will
function well together (in a civilized, "altruistic" manner, i.e. selfish to the group instead of to the individual)
Let me put it another way.
If you are creating a user interface largely for people who have something better to do than learn about how their operating system works (i.e. 95% of computer users), then your primary UI design goal had better be:
THE DEFAULT SHALL BE GOOD.
or better:
THE DEFAULT SHALL BE SIMPLE AND GOOD.
So if you MUST indulge your configuration addiction, you must NOT make the configurability features get in the way of simplicity of use in the default case. e.g. Adding a whole bunch of configuration adjustment menu items or choices in primary use-case dialogs would be fatal to usability for your target audience.
Configurability features must be deeply, deeply hidden; only findable by someone who has RTFM.
And even well hidden configurability reduces the chance that person A will be able to use person B's (or web cafe B's) computer.
So there better be a damn good reason for configurable options, because they have seriously destructive properties in general, when we're talking about a user interface for human beings in general, as opposed to a user interface for kernel hackers.
What we need are digital timestamps that incorporate a hash of the digital content item
and a statement of the license terms. These need to use digital signature technology
so that they cannot be repudiated.
The idea would be that if you want to license your content under a create commons license,
then you submit the file of that content to a license certifying server.
A well-known repository of such content (or a search engine setting in google) could
then find all the content that had been so certified.
And you could run a file through a site that would verify that "yep, it had this license on this date."
If you received (and still possess) such a written offer,
for Pete's sake hire a lawyer and sue the company.
Use your slashdot post as the basis for an affidavit
(statement about how they withdrew the promised offer.)
What you allege they did is a clear breach of contract on their
part.
If they reneged on a clear written promise to you without
you having provided some cause for them to void that contract,
and this failure to live up to the promise caused you the type
of harm you talked about and you can dig up some documentation
of your losses,
Sounds to me like you will likely win the lawsuit, but IANAL.
You'll have to have the cajones to withstand all kinds of threats
from their legal team, but that's why you hire yourself a lawyer.
I bet you could get a lawyer to take this one on on a percentage
of damages basis.
The Internet (and archived content on it) will last as long as there is a continuous level of human civilization large enough
g s were they smoking?" might be heard in
and organized enough to maintain electric power services on a fairly widespread basis.
When the Internet goes away, you can be pretty sure that government is vested entirely in local, small-time warlords/ganglords/evangelists
worldwide at that point.
Of course the net and computers will evolve in architecture, but at a certain level, a data bitsequence is a bitsequence is a
bitsequence, and if we can store it now, we can sure as heck store it later.
Interpreting statements such as "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" may prove difficult in the future however.
Exclamations like "What targeted-neural-pleasure-center-stimulator-nanobu
the archeological/anthropological corridors.
Because the contents of your sig data will not register you ought to be arrested.
Carl was the long lost twin brother of Groucho.
He formed the little-known, blacklisted Groucho Marxist-Leninist splinter group.
I meant K-A-R-L of course. I even google-spellchecked that and then forgot to correct the spell-o.