If a nuke took out DC, the military would take over in about... 15 minutes. Maybe 20. The "chain of command" bullshit is just window dressing for the naive. The banks and the military industrial complex run the USA. Period, end of story. The civilian government is maintained because it give people the illusion they have some political agency. They don't. So if a nuke ever took out DC, the next ruler of the USA would likely be the highest ranking general or admiral available and willing to step up and be the object of disgust. The first thing would be a "calm down, we're fixing this" statement to america, followed by a "we will set up new elections as soon as we can" statement, so the military industrial complex and the banking industry can go back to doing what they do best - looting the treasury in secret.
Companies might build TRUST with their employees that they won't get fired at the drop of a hat, and Companies might develop an ecosystem of resilience with their workers, such that everyone feels responsible for the company and vice versa. How? Socialism. Democritise the work place. VOTE for your boss. You wouldn't accept totalitarian political solutions, why do you accept totalitarian economic solutions? If everyone felt like what they did mattered, and felt like their employment was a vital part of their existence (as opposed to something they do to make money) then people wouldn't dream of walking off with data when they get fired, because getting fired would be rare, and a mark of massive failure. CHANGE YOUR WORLD. For the better. it's not that hard. You just have to get off your ass and demand it.
"Looks like an advert for some kind of leisure footwear."
"I can see that, but what IS this infernal thing, I mean, like WTF?"
"It seems the Microsoftian overlords of Skype are looking for yet another way to extract value from the working class."
"That's unfortunate."
"yes, it is. I guess we'll just have to find some alternative to Skype now. Fuck. What a pain in the ass."
"No shit."
"And the damnedest thing is they figured the ads would spark conversation on Skype."
"Right. Like I'm going to go on about some ad for Crocks. "Crocks! For when Flip Flops are a bit too formal!"
"See - you just did."
"Oh, FML."
"I think the next conversation is when can we meet again, F2F?"
"When I'm back in town, next week, darling."
"Cool. So, doesn't Apple have some kind of alternative to Skype on the iPad we can use to avoid - LOOK! There's another! I see it as an ad for boil creme. What do you see?"
"Oil. All I see is oil."
"Yeah - well that'll run out soon enough and put an end to all this garbage."
"Not a moment too soon, love. Not a moment too soon."
"I'll check into the Apple angle, and see what we can do. Gotta go - love you!"
senses opportunity - my lobes vibrate - thinking: DIY hearing aids. They're probably all made in the same damn factory in China. So, buy a crate of the parts and post instructions on how to build them.
And they are "Studio standards" - AKG-240M. Big, comfy and accurate. Not as good as $200 Bose or Sennheisers, but a fuckton better than most of the other crap out there.
Ford compared this scenario to the intertwining, complex relationships and structures that helped contribute to the global financial crisis."
The difference being, of course, that the global financial crisis was the product of the abyssal greed of speculators and the stupidity of venal governments borrowing from private banks instead of doing the right thing and being directly responsible for the creation of money.
i understand you are math challenged. Here's the fact: one generation (20 years) raised to the 14th power is: 1.6384e+18 years, basically several orders of magnitude longer than the universe has existed.
20^14 is:
20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20
The last I heard the new version won't work with old hardware. Nice. Spent $20k on a system three years ago, and now it's $20k of JUNK if I want to use the new features of the new software. Dear Avid: Fuck. You.
a net zero data farm is actually trivial. Just mount up (x) acres with solar arrays and vanadium redox batteries (for night time) and bingo - you gots a net zero data farm.
Where the rubber meets the road is: ? can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines in Congo that dig the coltan out of the ground for the warlords to sell to ICT companies, and can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that build the ICT machines in the data center, including smelting the aluminum out of the bauxite, and the electrical power needed to pull the Al out of the molten rock and then refine the remains, and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that smelt and fry up all the other elements needed (silicon, indium, gallium, germanium, etc.) and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that deliver all of these components to the factory in China where all this crap is manufactured, and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines in China that build the ICT and deliver the ICT to the data farms and homes and businesses that depend on this technology.
If yes, then industrialism can last for at least another century or two. If no, then no amount of wishful gee whiz thinking is going make it happen. Thermodynamics isn't just a good idea - it's the law.
Just communicating facts won't work, instead we need to use "information-framing techniques" delivered by "communicators" specifically chosen to "enhance their credibility" in order to convey these 'facts'. This will be a new science. "And we shall call it...
Propaganda."
No, it's called education. I teach complex material to first and second years who are in a field not generally amenable or known to be deeply interested in complex thinking (cough)media production(cough) and throwing Shannon's entropy equations at them doesn't work. They revolt and stop participating. So, I have to figure out ways of explaining information entropy to them in way that they find interesting and amusing and valuable to their world. It's kind of like the opposite of explaining the northern romantic tradition to physicists, or industrial music composition techniques to midwifery students...
If you want to get sinister with it, it's not propaganda per se, it's more neuro-linguistic programming.
Furthermore, read Bernays or Rapaille and you will learn an interesting problem about human beings - they make rational choices but irrational decisions. If something doesn't "feel good" they won't do it. They can, and often do, rationally dissect an issue and develop a logical set of choices. And one choice might be glaringly obvious (like, industrial civilisation is a suicidal nightmare destroying the planet and must be stopped at all costs before it sterilises the planet) but when it comes time to make a decision, they make the choice that feels good to make, that 'makes sense'. (like plan a vacation to South America and crank up the AC because it's getting hot in my suburban McMansion, and remind the wife that her SUV needs servicing before she brings Muffy and Skittles to soccer practice...)
Building an EMP rifle is trivial technology. Hardening against EMP is not as easy - if you build a shield, you just use a bigger pulse that over comes the shield. A friend of mine who was in the army for many years said "Look, between a Map and a GPS? I'll take the map. Shoot a map with a bullet - whaddya got? A map with a hole in it. Shoot a GPS and waddya got? Useless Junk." It all scales from there. The "high / robotic / tech" battlefield is just some circle jerk fantasy by beltway bandits looking for a way to strip mine more money out of the Treasury Dept.
with the summary in the post, and I for one applaud it. How many times do we see posts about military tools / weapons / toys described without irony or critique - as if such things were normal and "OK"? People then post critiques in the comments, but this is dealing from a position of weakness - the assumption of the summary is the dominant discourse. It is a pleasure to finally see a summary state the obvious. While facts actually don't have a liberal bias, the contradictions of our present situation are such that statements of "fact" regarding the status quo become endorsements of the status quo. It is good to see the opposite for a change. And for those who don't like it, now you know what it feels like to be "on the other side".
The cloud is only effective as long as YOU PAY YOUR BILL. Oh, and your government (which is a jointly owned subsidiary of the media conglomerates and the military hardware companies) thinks your files are kosher.
The internet is basically dead, but it's really big, so it will take a long time for the parts to decay.
combine the effects the article talks about with "Good Enough Computing" (GEC). GEC capped out printing technology when the dots were too small for people to see. We don't bother with 50,000 dpi printers because anything higher than 600 - 1000 is a complete waste of effort. The printing engines saturate the market, and the rate of profit falls in competition - the printers become expendable and the profit is then made on Ink. Not hardware. Ink. (I use iPhone and iPad generically in the following - I don't really own one or the other...)
It used to be that really high end machines were needed to do audio synthesis. I now have a mellotron on my iPhone and iPad. The iPad, for audio editing, is GEC.
It used to take a super high end computer and a fleet of striped SCSI drives to edit the simplest SD Video. Now, you can edit insanely high quality HD video on a fucking laptop. It is only a matter of time before I can edit video from a Red camera on an iPad. At that point, the iPad is GEC.
Fashioning devices on a 3D printer is presently the domain of a laptop. It's just a matter of time before it is on an iPad or an iPhone.
Again, the iPhone and iPad are GEC. The article talks about investments in things non-Web2.0, and it is largely correct. However, even the digital substrate of Web2.0 is under constraint of GEC. If you live 80 year from cradle to grave, that's about 29,220 days. If you were born with the ability to read from birth and read one book a day on a kindle or iPad and each book was about 5 megs on average - (picture books eat a lot of space compared to text) then you're only talking 146GB of storage. That's GEC...
If you listen to music 16 hours a day from cradle to grave, that's only 28 TB @ 256kbps compression. And if you listen to every song twice, that's 14 TB. And if you listen to every song 4 times, that's only 7 TB. And if you listen to every song 8 times, that's 3.5 TB. And if you listen to each song 16 times, that's only 1.75 TB - a 2 TB drive can be had for less than $100. That's GEC....
And video? Do the same math. If you watch a movie (or basically 2 hours of video) a day every day from cradle to grave, and it's 2GB per hour, that's 4GB per day, or about 117 TB. So, what will store a LIFETIME of entertainment? about 120 TB of storage. If the storage trends of the past 20 years hold, I would suggest that a 120 TB drive will be available for less than $250 (in 2012 dollars) in less than 10 years, possibly less than 5, and probably no more than 15 years.That's GEC in storage.
Soooo, what happens when we put all that together? The internet will cease to be a space for file trading thanks to the concerted actions of governments and IP capital. File trading will go to Sneakernet, and the sneakernet will consist of PirateBoxes in cafes and friends attaching their Thunderbolt drives at home, and moving stupendous amounts of data between machines and watching them on flat screen TV or on their audio kit which will run off the wireless video card in their iPhone or iPad. GEC. Basically, innovation at that point, as in BASIC innovation will cease. Content, as in something stored, simply evapourates onto a "life drive" of media files. Encumbered with patents and a ceiling of perception created by the human sensorium, GEC will reign until the industrial system turns the planet into a smoking dead husk. The biosphere collapses, cities flood, people starve, but damn - did you see American Idol last night? Fuck - that chick sings like an angel...
"will they once again balk at a perceived bilking?""
No, they will balk at getting fucked like they have been getting fucked by Comcast and the rest of them as usual. There's no "perceiving" involved. It's just a dag blasted fact.
Anyone can "friend" you. I find that irritating. I would rather everyone be completely blocked unless they ask to be friends, and I have to know and approve them to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
If a nuke took out DC, the military would take over in about... 15 minutes. Maybe 20. The "chain of command" bullshit is just window dressing for the naive. The banks and the military industrial complex run the USA. Period, end of story. The civilian government is maintained because it give people the illusion they have some political agency. They don't. So if a nuke ever took out DC, the next ruler of the USA would likely be the highest ranking general or admiral available and willing to step up and be the object of disgust. The first thing would be a "calm down, we're fixing this" statement to america, followed by a "we will set up new elections as soon as we can" statement, so the military industrial complex and the banking industry can go back to doing what they do best - looting the treasury in secret.
Fuck You.
Companies might build TRUST with their employees that they won't get fired at the drop of a hat, and Companies might develop an ecosystem of resilience with their workers, such that everyone feels responsible for the company and vice versa. How? Socialism. Democritise the work place. VOTE for your boss. You wouldn't accept totalitarian political solutions, why do you accept totalitarian economic solutions? If everyone felt like what they did mattered, and felt like their employment was a vital part of their existence (as opposed to something they do to make money) then people wouldn't dream of walking off with data when they get fired, because getting fired would be rare, and a mark of massive failure. CHANGE YOUR WORLD. For the better. it's not that hard. You just have to get off your ass and demand it.
"Looks like an advert for some kind of leisure footwear."
"I can see that, but what IS this infernal thing, I mean, like WTF?"
"It seems the Microsoftian overlords of Skype are looking for yet another way to extract value from the working class."
"That's unfortunate."
"yes, it is. I guess we'll just have to find some alternative to Skype now. Fuck. What a pain in the ass."
"No shit."
"And the damnedest thing is they figured the ads would spark conversation on Skype."
"Right. Like I'm going to go on about some ad for Crocks. "Crocks! For when Flip Flops are a bit too formal!"
"See - you just did."
"Oh, FML."
"I think the next conversation is when can we meet again, F2F?"
"When I'm back in town, next week, darling."
"Cool. So, doesn't Apple have some kind of alternative to Skype on the iPad we can use to avoid - LOOK! There's another! I see it as an ad for boil creme. What do you see?"
"Oil. All I see is oil."
"Yeah - well that'll run out soon enough and put an end to all this garbage."
"Not a moment too soon, love. Not a moment too soon."
"I'll check into the Apple angle, and see what we can do. Gotta go - love you!"
"Love you too."
senses opportunity - my lobes vibrate - thinking: DIY hearing aids. They're probably all made in the same damn factory in China. So, buy a crate of the parts and post instructions on how to build them.
oh, and 10 shitloads = 1 fuckton, just so's ya know.
And they are "Studio standards" - AKG-240M. Big, comfy and accurate. Not as good as $200 Bose or Sennheisers, but a fuckton better than most of the other crap out there.
The difference being, of course, that the global financial crisis was the product of the abyssal greed of speculators and the stupidity of venal governments borrowing from private banks instead of doing the right thing and being directly responsible for the creation of money.
But other than that, sure it's just like it.
(/snark)
20^14 is:
20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20x20
play with your calculator - you'll be surprised.
^14 is a power, not a multiple.
The last I heard the new version won't work with old hardware. Nice. Spent $20k on a system three years ago, and now it's $20k of JUNK if I want to use the new features of the new software. Dear Avid: Fuck. You.
Where the rubber meets the road is: ? can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines in Congo that dig the coltan out of the ground for the warlords to sell to ICT companies, and can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that build the ICT machines in the data center, including smelting the aluminum out of the bauxite, and the electrical power needed to pull the Al out of the molten rock and then refine the remains, and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that smelt and fry up all the other elements needed (silicon, indium, gallium, germanium, etc.) and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that deliver all of these components to the factory in China where all this crap is manufactured, and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines in China that build the ICT and deliver the ICT to the data farms and homes and businesses that depend on this technology.
If yes, then industrialism can last for at least another century or two. If no, then no amount of wishful gee whiz thinking is going make it happen. Thermodynamics isn't just a good idea - it's the law.
No, it's called education. I teach complex material to first and second years who are in a field not generally amenable or known to be deeply interested in complex thinking (cough)media production(cough) and throwing Shannon's entropy equations at them doesn't work. They revolt and stop participating. So, I have to figure out ways of explaining information entropy to them in way that they find interesting and amusing and valuable to their world. It's kind of like the opposite of explaining the northern romantic tradition to physicists, or industrial music composition techniques to midwifery students...
If you want to get sinister with it, it's not propaganda per se, it's more neuro-linguistic programming.
Furthermore, read Bernays or Rapaille and you will learn an interesting problem about human beings - they make rational choices but irrational decisions. If something doesn't "feel good" they won't do it. They can, and often do, rationally dissect an issue and develop a logical set of choices. And one choice might be glaringly obvious (like, industrial civilisation is a suicidal nightmare destroying the planet and must be stopped at all costs before it sterilises the planet) but when it comes time to make a decision, they make the choice that feels good to make, that 'makes sense'. (like plan a vacation to South America and crank up the AC because it's getting hot in my suburban McMansion, and remind the wife that her SUV needs servicing before she brings Muffy and Skittles to soccer practice...)
Building an EMP rifle is trivial technology. Hardening against EMP is not as easy - if you build a shield, you just use a bigger pulse that over comes the shield. A friend of mine who was in the army for many years said "Look, between a Map and a GPS? I'll take the map. Shoot a map with a bullet - whaddya got? A map with a hole in it. Shoot a GPS and waddya got? Useless Junk." It all scales from there. The "high / robotic / tech" battlefield is just some circle jerk fantasy by beltway bandits looking for a way to strip mine more money out of the Treasury Dept.
with the summary in the post, and I for one applaud it. How many times do we see posts about military tools / weapons / toys described without irony or critique - as if such things were normal and "OK"? People then post critiques in the comments, but this is dealing from a position of weakness - the assumption of the summary is the dominant discourse. It is a pleasure to finally see a summary state the obvious. While facts actually don't have a liberal bias, the contradictions of our present situation are such that statements of "fact" regarding the status quo become endorsements of the status quo. It is good to see the opposite for a change. And for those who don't like it, now you know what it feels like to be "on the other side".
FUCK YOU
Then you won't have a Windows OS. Is it worth $99 to have your OS removed? I dunno. But inquiring minds want to know!
Thanks for not doing the research before you shot your mouth off, as actually I'm talking about the PRESENT.
PirateBox: http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox
Thunderbolt Drive Adaptor: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5499/seagate-goflex-thunderbolt-adapter-now-available
The cloud is only effective as long as YOU PAY YOUR BILL. Oh, and your government (which is a jointly owned subsidiary of the media conglomerates and the military hardware companies) thinks your files are kosher.
The internet is basically dead, but it's really big, so it will take a long time for the parts to decay.
http://www.salsadancedvd.com/images/asseenontv_large.jpg I would say, No.
It used to be that really high end machines were needed to do audio synthesis. I now have a mellotron on my iPhone and iPad. The iPad, for audio editing, is GEC.
It used to take a super high end computer and a fleet of striped SCSI drives to edit the simplest SD Video. Now, you can edit insanely high quality HD video on a fucking laptop. It is only a matter of time before I can edit video from a Red camera on an iPad. At that point, the iPad is GEC.
Fashioning devices on a 3D printer is presently the domain of a laptop. It's just a matter of time before it is on an iPad or an iPhone.
Again, the iPhone and iPad are GEC. The article talks about investments in things non-Web2.0, and it is largely correct. However, even the digital substrate of Web2.0 is under constraint of GEC. If you live 80 year from cradle to grave, that's about 29,220 days. If you were born with the ability to read from birth and read one book a day on a kindle or iPad and each book was about 5 megs on average - (picture books eat a lot of space compared to text) then you're only talking 146GB of storage. That's GEC...
If you listen to music 16 hours a day from cradle to grave, that's only 28 TB @ 256kbps compression. And if you listen to every song twice, that's 14 TB. And if you listen to every song 4 times, that's only 7 TB. And if you listen to every song 8 times, that's 3.5 TB. And if you listen to each song 16 times, that's only 1.75 TB - a 2 TB drive can be had for less than $100. That's GEC....
And video? Do the same math. If you watch a movie (or basically 2 hours of video) a day every day from cradle to grave, and it's 2GB per hour, that's 4GB per day, or about 117 TB. So, what will store a LIFETIME of entertainment? about 120 TB of storage. If the storage trends of the past 20 years hold, I would suggest that a 120 TB drive will be available for less than $250 (in 2012 dollars) in less than 10 years, possibly less than 5, and probably no more than 15 years.That's GEC in storage.
Soooo, what happens when we put all that together? The internet will cease to be a space for file trading thanks to the concerted actions of governments and IP capital. File trading will go to Sneakernet, and the sneakernet will consist of PirateBoxes in cafes and friends attaching their Thunderbolt drives at home, and moving stupendous amounts of data between machines and watching them on flat screen TV or on their audio kit which will run off the wireless video card in their iPhone or iPad. GEC. Basically, innovation at that point, as in BASIC innovation will cease. Content, as in something stored, simply evapourates onto a "life drive" of media files. Encumbered with patents and a ceiling of perception created by the human sensorium, GEC will reign until the industrial system turns the planet into a smoking dead husk. The biosphere collapses, cities flood, people starve, but damn - did you see American Idol last night? Fuck - that chick sings like an angel...
No, they will balk at getting fucked like they have been getting fucked by Comcast and the rest of them as usual. There's no "perceiving" involved. It's just a dag blasted fact.
Anyone can "friend" you. I find that irritating. I would rather everyone be completely blocked unless they ask to be friends, and I have to know and approve them to do that.
And SHAKE your way to success!!!!
I meant DOS in its literal term - the disk operating system, i.e., how it gets data off the drive.
More powerful than the banking cartels that have basically strip minded the US Treasury for TRILLIONS of dollars? I don't think so.