I'd like to point out that it's not the result of inevitable progress, but a choice. You can work to increase yield, or to make easier to use, easier to maintain, stuff. One direction ends up in efficiency gobbled up by the oligarchy who manages it. The other ends up in a ecosystem which often manages to surpass the former in many aspects.
You see it in the software world. One is the new Apple model, the other is the FOSS movement. Or in the electronic world. One is the stuff that comes shipped with schematics, the other is the stuff you can't open with a normal screwdriver.
In the long run the first is the narrow path that leads to salvation, the second is the large path that leads to perdition.
The choice is as usual made by the most powerful people, possibly they are aware of it, possibly it's just he composition of their interest that ends up in the creation of a system.
> As an aside, why is it nowadays that I spend more time trying to get software to behave the way it used to behave before it was updated?
Possibly because if software progressed towards perfection you'd need updates less and less frequently. So commercial software rehashes stuff or even boycotts its own stuff, look at adobe/flash, microsoft/.net, oracle/java, nokia/maemo, apple/final cut pro. and sadly the pressure to look like the advertised latest and greatest affects free software developers that end up doing the same.
That's because this particular experiment needs communication and agreement between simulation and real world.
Try something simpler.
Put a complete simulation of an existing human in a simulated environment and tell him "hey you are simulated, you feel anything different from your memories"?
Then it doesn't matter what the speed of the simulation is, an accurate one will have normal speed from the point of view of the simulated being: it's another timeline.
My objection to this experiment is that it doesn't prove anything about reality. It only says if the simulation is accurate or not.
My position is: there is no difference in substance between reality and a simulation. Only a difference in "level of recursion". "simulation" is just what our reality is for the meta-world. That meta-world might or might not meta-exist, that's a different question, but please just reject the argument that says "if our world does need a meta-world then the meta-world needs one too", because it depends on the rules of the meta-world: a meta world needs a meta cause only if it has its own meta time defined in the same way of our world, which is a terribly arbitrary assumption.
Fun fact: it's perfectly possible to model a planet based on turtles all the way down. Put one turtle into space. Put another underneath it in a specular position. Gravity keeps em together, each one is over the other. Put other turtles around them in all directions. Voila', the turtlesphere.
If you had been in the wrong circles, you probably would have understood that some of the reasons you listed are used to make the conspirators more secure.
First thing that comes to mind: 60 senators managed to have a popular and very very powerful Julius Caesar assassinated. Your "anti-conspiracy" theory doesn't explain it very well.
the fact that China exists, or that Widgets cost 3x as much to make in country A than in country B.
Both irrelevant to a market as "facts"... unless some criminal law allows products made under near slavery to compete on the same terms with products made where people (used to) have rights. Consumers save money for one generation, the one later is jobless.
The company that holds some million people email and web search and history deploys stuff controlled by on 1 one 1 engineer. But hey, it was only a few tera of data...
How much they care for privacy is seen in the way they implement their OS and apps. I don't judge them in that regard, BIT before you judge, try to see how other players in the field, esp. Debian, tackle the problem of broadcasting the OS, the updates, and get optional feedback (popcon).
It IS a notable story, the first time in 10+ years that I hear a story about airports where security officials and procedures do the right thing. Send 'em a pie.:)
I Completely agree with you. It's like blaming religion. Well, not really, because you can create a financial crisis and be mathematically correct, it's more difficult to do stuff in the name of a god and adhere completely to religion, most of them have real or perceived contradictions in their teaching.
So I expect the slashdotters who criticize religion based on its implementation (which is discussed here twice a month or more often) to not agree with you and blame Math.
God can kill you can't. Or God can't kill and you can't turn down a computer running a simulation of a living thingie (game of life, for example) because it's homicide.
I bet a debian desktop will still be free from patented stuff by default, so business will have workstations that can't play videos unless explicitly authorized. A win - win scenario, if you ask me, but then, I can't stand web browsing with flash enabled and all those inane animations.
> Religion is gay. The gay news aka the good news aka the gospel, sure. One guy reportedly comes and says I have a good news for you. They put him to death and his followers go on like: he died and it's all YOUR FAULT. So your suggestion is quite apt but kind of specialized. Try with more universal/generic/devoid of meaning terms.
> a large (or at least largely vocal) part of that community is made up of idealists and professional bitchers who think everything should be open source and free.
Here we go again.
Who was the idealist in the bitkeeper issue? The one who said "it just works it will always do", and did not foresee problems. OSS people were the problem? Possibly but what if MS had later bought bitkeeper through intermediaries and making it slowly bloated and unreliable? The kernel project would have lost much more time deciding what to do.
An idealist is a guy who thinks some ideal situation and tries to implement it. Stallman started working in the ideal situation, that is being able to hack the source he used, and then the money junkies implemented THEIR ideal, powerless users depending on the publisher. He is an idealist when he wants ALL software to be FOSS. But most FOSS people seem to be content when they can use FOSS to do ALL, which is quite a different concept and completely pragmatic if you have been bitten by planned obsolescence and all other problems with proprietary and closed stuff. Saying that it's better to base one's infrastructure on published and freely modifiable codebases is not idealism, it is pragmatism.
Idealism is: "it is paid software from a commercial company. They have all the incentive to make it work the best possible way". (which indeed is true, once you properly define 'best', it is just wrong to assume it's best for the buyer)
Maybe it IS a feature, so they hate to have to remove that. Don't rumors about NSA backdoors surface every now and then? Not implementing a likely trivial patch to a gaping security hole hasn't many other credible explanations.
There's no such thing as saying "there's no such thing" in personal computing. You should know by now. The full story:
-XP laptop's disk goes full, XP displays helpful dialog with options to compress stuff et al. -Apparently (I tend to avoid windows so I dunno) one of the options was to uninstall programs. -User sees a lot of programs never heard before and starts happily to uninstall. -User is happy because apparently he had removed some bloat and XP is way faster. -Later, user tries to launch iTunes. iTunes says "Quicktime not found, please reinstall iTunes". -User goes F#!@%KKKKK and phones me. -I get to the laptop and try to install quicktime. No backup of system files available, only documents (and a snapshot too old to be usable). Quicktime says: I'll install but you'll need to upgrade iTunes. Older versions of iTunes are available from third-party sites, I might as well put the laptop on rent as botnet node if I install from them. - So I go F#!@%KKKKK and upgrade - New version makes laptop swap sooner than usual. Playing mp3 playlists used to be done by my 166mhz mac, one could expect a 10x more powerful cpu with 5x the RAM to do the same 15 years laters huh? Of course that's not iTunes fault, but iTunes+XP+average user's, or who knows, mine since I didn't spend enough time looking for a solution. The upgrade was still forced. And they say linux is difficult. archive.debian.org FTW
Slashdot Mirror
Optimizing brains for emacs is pointless, until we have optimized hands.
Managed to mess up the paths.
I'd like to point out that it's not the result of inevitable progress, but a choice.
You can work to increase yield, or to make easier to use, easier to maintain, stuff.
One direction ends up in efficiency gobbled up by the oligarchy who manages it. The other ends up in a ecosystem which often manages to surpass the former in many aspects.
You see it in the software world. One is the new Apple model, the other is the FOSS movement.
Or in the electronic world. One is the stuff that comes shipped with schematics, the other is the stuff you can't open with a normal screwdriver.
In the long run the first is the narrow path that leads to salvation, the second is the large path that leads to perdition.
The choice is as usual made by the most powerful people, possibly they are aware of it, possibly it's just he composition of their interest that ends up in the creation of a system.
> As an aside, why is it nowadays that I spend more time trying to get software to behave the way it used to behave before it was updated?
Possibly because if software progressed towards perfection you'd need updates less and less frequently. So commercial software rehashes stuff or even boycotts its own stuff, look at adobe/flash, microsoft/.net, oracle/java, nokia/maemo, apple/final cut pro. and sadly the pressure to look like the advertised latest and greatest affects free software developers that end up doing the same.
That's because this particular experiment needs communication and agreement between simulation and real world.
Try something simpler.
Put a complete simulation of an existing human in a simulated environment and tell him "hey you are simulated, you feel anything different from your memories"?
Then it doesn't matter what the speed of the simulation is, an accurate one will have normal speed from the point of view of the simulated being: it's another timeline.
My objection to this experiment is that it doesn't prove anything about reality. It only says if the simulation is accurate or not.
My position is: there is no difference in substance between reality and a simulation. Only a difference in "level of recursion". "simulation" is just what our reality is for the meta-world. That meta-world might or might not meta-exist, that's a different question, but please just reject the argument that says "if our world does need a meta-world then the meta-world needs one too", because it depends on the rules of the meta-world: a meta world needs a meta cause only if it has its own meta time defined in the same way of our world, which is a terribly arbitrary assumption.
Fun fact: it's perfectly possible to model a planet based on turtles all the way down. Put one turtle into space. Put another underneath it in a specular position. Gravity keeps em together, each one is over the other. Put other turtles around them in all directions. Voila', the turtlesphere.
If you had been in the wrong circles, you probably would have understood that some of the reasons you listed are used to make the conspirators more secure.
First thing that comes to mind: 60 senators managed to have a popular and very very powerful Julius Caesar assassinated. Your "anti-conspiracy" theory doesn't explain it very well.
Please then send me your PC for a few weeks. No issue for you, right?
App stores in one line:
"A nice app you got here, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Web2.0 suffers from the second album syndrome.
> Or did you mean that cruise ship lying on its side that I saw out of the window of the plane I flew to Italy on recently?
She's not dead, she's restin'.
>It was a few tera that was broadcast in public
Because it needed to travel from hotspot to PC.
Let's say you go to work every day. You have to appear in public. Everybody does it minds its own business. Problem, none.
Somebody starts tracking everybody's movement and puts it in a database: RED ALERT. No matter what the justification.
the fact that China exists, or that Widgets cost 3x as much to make in country A than in country B.
Both irrelevant to a market as "facts"... unless some criminal law allows products made under near slavery to compete on the same terms with products made where people (used to) have rights. Consumers save money for one generation, the one later is jobless.
Wait but you can't say that, because Google is "not evil"(tm).
They have painted themselves into a corner quite well, this time.
But people forget soon. Heck, they are still buying Windows, praising Jobs, and considering Richard Matthew "Told you so!" Stallman a commie idealist.
The company that holds some million people email and web search and history deploys stuff controlled by on 1 one 1 engineer. But hey, it was only a few tera of data...
Or a token move.
How much they care for privacy is seen in the way they implement their OS and apps. I don't judge them in that regard, BIT before you judge, try to see how other players in the field, esp. Debian, tackle the problem of broadcasting the OS, the updates, and get optional feedback (popcon).
It IS a notable story, the first time in 10+ years that I hear a story about airports where security officials and procedures do the right thing. :)
Send 'em a pie.
I Completely agree with you. It's like blaming religion.
Well, not really, because you can create a financial crisis and be mathematically correct, it's more difficult to do stuff in the name of a god and adhere completely to religion, most of them have real or perceived contradictions in their teaching.
So I expect the slashdotters who criticize religion based on its implementation (which is discussed here twice a month or more often) to not agree with you and blame Math.
Now choose, -1 troll or flamebait.
God can kill you can't.
Or God can't kill and you can't turn down a computer running a simulation of a living thingie (game of life, for example) because it's homicide.
That's my analytic thinking. YTMV
I bet a debian desktop will still be free from patented stuff by default, so business will have workstations that can't play videos unless explicitly authorized. A win - win scenario, if you ask me, but then, I can't stand web browsing with flash enabled and all those inane animations.
> Religion is gay.
The gay news aka the good news aka the gospel, sure.
One guy reportedly comes and says I have a good news for you.
They put him to death and his followers go on like: he died and it's all YOUR FAULT. So your suggestion is quite apt but kind of specialized. Try with more universal/generic/devoid of meaning terms.
> a large (or at least largely vocal) part of that community is made up of idealists and professional bitchers who think everything should be open source and free.
Here we go again.
Who was the idealist in the bitkeeper issue? The one who said "it just works it will always do", and did not foresee problems. OSS people were the problem? Possibly but what if MS had later bought bitkeeper through intermediaries and making it slowly bloated and unreliable? The kernel project would have lost much more time deciding what to do.
An idealist is a guy who thinks some ideal situation and tries to implement it. Stallman started working in the ideal situation, that is being able to hack the source he used, and then the money junkies implemented THEIR ideal, powerless users depending on the publisher.
He is an idealist when he wants ALL software to be FOSS. But most FOSS people seem to be content when they can use FOSS to do ALL, which is quite a different concept and completely pragmatic if you have been bitten by planned obsolescence and all other problems with proprietary and closed stuff. Saying that it's better to base one's infrastructure on published and freely modifiable codebases is not idealism, it is pragmatism.
Idealism is: "it is paid software from a commercial company. They have all the incentive to make it work the best possible way". (which indeed is true, once you properly define 'best', it is just wrong to assume it's best for the buyer)
Maybe it IS a feature, so they hate to have to remove that. Don't rumors about NSA backdoors surface every now and then?
Not implementing a likely trivial patch to a gaping security hole hasn't many other credible explanations.
There's no such thing as saying "there's no such thing" in personal computing. You should know by now. The full story:
-XP laptop's disk goes full, XP displays helpful dialog with options to compress stuff et al.
-Apparently (I tend to avoid windows so I dunno) one of the options was to uninstall programs.
-User sees a lot of programs never heard before and starts happily to uninstall.
-User is happy because apparently he had removed some bloat and XP is way faster.
-Later, user tries to launch iTunes. iTunes says "Quicktime not found, please reinstall iTunes".
-User goes F#!@%KKKKK and phones me.
-I get to the laptop and try to install quicktime. No backup of system files available, only documents (and a snapshot too old to be usable). Quicktime says: I'll install but you'll need to upgrade iTunes. Older versions of iTunes are available from third-party sites, I might as well put the laptop on rent as botnet node if I install from them.
- So I go F#!@%KKKKK and upgrade
- New version makes laptop swap sooner than usual. Playing mp3 playlists used to be done by my 166mhz mac, one could expect a 10x more powerful cpu with 5x the RAM to do the same 15 years laters huh?
Of course that's not iTunes fault, but iTunes+XP+average user's, or who knows, mine since I didn't spend enough time looking for a solution. The upgrade was still forced.
And they say linux is difficult. archive.debian.org FTW
> to choose a phone that doesn't require them to expend more effort than necessary to be able to do what they require
Am reading this the day after having to perform a forced itunes upgrade (no not on my boxes of course)
> Ruby is basically Perl
warning: probable troll who hasn't ever heard about smalltalk detected.