Re:Cox on governments adopting open source softwar
on
Alan Cox Interview
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· Score: 5, Insightful
> .. government unlawfully competing with private enterprise?
The real question is, what services are considered so basic as to deserve to be free of the shackles of private interests. Private interests are always directed at a profitable consumer base, not a consumer base with needs. I think, if you say that computing is going to be a fundamental part of your infrastructure (like, broadcasting, roads, etc), you have every right to prefer solutions that are free of private interest influences. Sure, it might cost more in training, migration, etc, but at least you arn't placing important services that your country relys on in the hands of so-and-so's markting plans. The justification is doubly so when the only (real) private-interest solution is doing everything in its power (and thats a lot of power, in MS's case) to minimize competition. The government has every right to say, "Look, if MS allowed competition, then sure, we'd favour domestic market stimulation over the costs associated with riding on the back of private interests. There are enough disperate private interests to garauntee long term viability of this buy-in should this investment fail or suddenly change horses." However, when you go with an MS infrastructure, you're placing all your eggs in one basket, thus giving you a vested interest in their success. In the governments situation, thats the very thing they should be free of. (Good example: Enron. In hiding the details and placing all their eggs in the Enron basket, old boys club notwithstanding, the government effectively screwed a fair number of its citizens in not 'tampering with the market'.) If anything, staying with MS software interferes with the market more than trying to knock MS down a few notches by preferring the only real cost effective alternative, free software.
If there were more than 2 truely viable commercial OS's, I'd say, who cares, but the government is really just doing the market a disservice by not placing a 'preferred' status with 'competitors' (even if said competitor is being forced to give away said software for free because of the barrier to entry of the market that the Intels and MSs have created).
Just my two cents. The whole blind-faith thing that the market works itself out is a successful sell on behalf of large companies. When you look at countries that have fostered the fastest growth in their economy, they've done it through government regulation and placing 'preferred' status' on solutions based on their long term benifit to the economy. It's not by bolstering up the champion of the market at the time the decisions are being made, which is why I think the government, for the sake of their citizens at large, should be going out of their way to not do MS any favours (and the way MS acts, leaving MS alone is a favour in itself.)
150 patents would be the best thing to happen to this world. A few people who be sticking rich and basically own a crud load of what should be public domain, the pressure will build, and a revolution would come. I'm more frusterated by how the system is ignoring its own problems by way of settlements. Nothing gets solved, issues don't get addressed, and as long as enough big players don't suffer, we'll keep seeking jobs from them instead of picking up our torches and pitchforks and solving the problem.
> Don't fault lawyers for getting paid any more than you fault yourself for getting paid.
Don't worry, I only fault them for making it cheaper to ignore real problems than to actually analyse and solve them by way of an impartial judicial system. Then I fault the companies for placing all of their shareholders value in a concept that would cost crudloads to defend. And then I fault shareholders for being more interested in the success of their stock than the improvements that the technology their money is behind makes to life in general.
Patents really have shifted from implementation to idea in the software world, it seems.
And doesn't the W3C accept RAND licensed patents now a W3C endorsed standards? (I can't recall if that went through or not.)
Re:Licensure does not Mean What You Might Think
on
Losing the War on Patents
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· Score: 5, Insightful
> settling lawsuits (also known as ADR, Alternative Dispute Resolution) is a *good thing*
No it's not. It only means that trying to do the right thing (that is, figure out who really owns a patent and whether or not its valid) is more expensive than paying wallet-service to unsubstantiated claims.
If thats the pinnacle of achievement of the market based economy, count me out. Like how the IMF bailed everyone out of the Asian market crisis, nobody ends up learning anything, and stupidity is allowed to reign. Market based tactics always place the interests of the few (private interests, natch), above those of a soceity at large, which is why in this day of wealth-stroking penetance, the social costs of systems supporting private interests are huge. So long as you blindly stroke the market with your narrow minded rhetoric, it will continue to do so, instead of serving the broader social interests (ie, barrier to market, equality in market participation) that it was designed to do.
Money talks louder than Right. If you claim thats a good thing, you're too far gone to save.
Because ign.com does tons of other stuff other than video games, they don't have this problem.
I own a GC, and am certainly experienced enough not to count on reviews of games before the game has shipped. IGN is good about this stuff. They play the games, and they dont go easy on them in reivews (I've found the X-Box team at IGN is more prone to 'gloss' for bad games), I'd say that they arn't afraid of biting the hand that feeds them.
I think the key is relying on sources that are:
a) knowledgable
b) cover a broader base of interests than those you seek, such that their business doesn't rely soley on the area of interests you are seeking objective info from
is the best way to go.
But people should already be aware of this. I mean, everyone has to dance with the one that brought them to the party, so just make sure you're not listning to those who wouldn't gave gotten to the party otherwise.
Or maybe they just can't afford to buy the 400$ USD 'software'cover version...
Not flamebait. I'm just curious what the financials are? How much is an eBook, and how much is a suitably equipped Palm? Where do they meet, in terms of number of books, where you recoup your investment on the Palm?
Man, Quake makes you kill people, and Harry Potter makes you worship satan.
It's becoming increasingly difficult not to single out the computer as the tool of the devil! (Move over alcohol, drugs, and any sexual position other than missionary!)
From the Hostmail Terms of Use:
By way of example, and not as a limitation, you agree that when using a Communication Service, you will not:
...
Create a false identity for the purpose of misleading others
...
Funny. I thought that point was their business model and represented their 'heaviest users' base! (Of course, if you dont like it, you can email their abuse department at angelgirl435_abuse@hotmail.com.. )
ROFL! So we have these companies, who have to abide by laws to do business and make profits.
Companies dont like said laws, so they buy the government.
Your proposal. Remove government from the equation.
Result? COMPANIES GET TO DO WHAT THEY WANTED TO DO BY BRIBING YOUR GOVERNMENT, ONLY THEY DONT EVEN NEED TO PAY ADMISSION NOW!
You're an idiot if you think this would help matters. It would only let private interests destroy our society and economy without those annoying 'law' things getting in their way.
Right on. The best evidence is how culture perceives these types of infringements in entertertainment and media.
In basing the economy and culture on self-interest, there is little social importance placed on 'paying your interests forward' - that is, respecting that even if a decision doesn't affect you or your family right now ("Id never need an abortion", or "I'd never be an alcoholic", or "I'm not gay, so what do I care") doesn't mean it won't in the future.
The market (that by which we depend on to exist) has little interest in social rights until they affect a majority that hurts a bottom line. Large books stores are obstinately worried about their customers privacy, but only in so far as it will affect their profit margin. If each decision of this type alienates or resticts the liberty of 2% of their consumer base (especially if they are in the 'light users' category, which can be up to 70% of your customer base, but only 10% of your profits), they are unlikely to defend said restrictions vohemently. What the market fails to take into account is that once you've sufficiently chipped away at various liberties, ovet time, the cost of the social damage is far larger than the sum of the parts. This is when everyone wakes up and realizes that the attitude references in your post do do make up a larger social structure that we've depended on to justify the more destructive aspects of our political and economic system. Everyone is (or will be) in the same boat, so the 'It doest affect me' attitude really does the society, including the immediately unaffected, a disservice.
> agreed to refrain from participating in deceptive schemes in the future, or lying about the legality or potential earnings from any such schemes
... in fact, they were encouraged to visit an FTC hyperlink where they could enter their email addresses opt-out of receiving any warnings or punishments in the future.;)
Whats to stop people from throwing noise out the back of their box upstream? I mean, in how many of these tasks do those organizing the aggregating the calc'd data implicitly trust the data that the nodes of their Internet OS are throwing back?
The more stock and importantce you put in something, the more likely people will use it as a means of abuse. I can envision a world where people who are against a particular scientific task (for whatever reason, ethical, on principal, or whatever), use this Internet OS, and join particular distributed apps simply to throw noise into the upstream...
You, my dear friend, must learn a little about the technology and its trappings. Name me one technology that did not cause as many problems as it solved. I'm not saying technology is bad, as a whole. I'm only saying that to portray technology as the salvation of existance is as completely unsupportable a concept as that of the afterlife, heaven and hell.
> we have a lot of lazy people
I'm so glad we have lazy people to blame everything on. Once you get over the fact that, yes, lazy people do exist and always will, you cease to have an argument on which to build your 'technology will solve our problems' argument. No they won't, because 'lazy people' (as conveniently defined by you) will always screw shit up. Conversly, I could claim that 'not so intelligent people' consistantly force technology on societies and cultures that are not built on value systems that will fail see any benifit from the existance of particular technologies. There are thousands of societies on this planet alone that have existed happily and peacibly without technology. And without the death toll associated with cars. Or the cancer rates (quadrupled in western society over the last 30 years) associated with the electric fields present in developed (note I dont say civilized) areas. Or obseity rates that make North Americans (I am one) the fattest fucks on the planet.
> the technology they need to survive
So basically, life was utter and complete unenjoyable shit until we started inventing shit, eh? You're a microcosm on a large planet, in a huge history, in an insanely huge galaxy. Your values (such as your emphasis on technology in order to delude you into a sense of control over your environment) may be applicable to your society, but not to humanity in the same way that you will probably never understand why some Japanese pop stars are more rich and famous than your favorite band. Different cultures and socities have different needs, and technology as a whole is not a blanket solution to the human condition. It might keep you busy and give you a sense of direction, but to ignore the problems it causes in adjacent communities and environments will ultimately leave someone with the dubious job of cleaning up after your 'misunderstanding of technology'.
> And any country that isn't capitalist today probably wouldn't have enough technology to cause problems
That would be true if we all lived in a vacuum, but there are many non-capitalist societies with power elites who've been allowed access to technologies to furthur entrench their totalitarian regimes, or sweatshop industries, or... non-capitalist societies still have to clean up after the capitalist ones, and to think otherwise is to display a frightening naivite with respect to history and the international political and economic system.
Hehe, nothing hurts AC's feelings like the truth. Speaking of luddites, do you support the 'Sewing Machine for a Life' laws passed in the 19th century to prevent people from rejecting certain technologies that disrupted social patterns? You know.. the ones that said, if you didn't want your jobs taken away by mechanical looms, you could be killed for it?
I love it. Hell no about the green revolution. I think the only thing that helps humans is other humans. It is, after all, why we havn't really disproved the conclusion that we are social animals that seek and depend on social interaction for a happy life. Everything else is just the the quest for centralized power pitted against those who seek to decentralize it.
This because technology can absolutely never solve more problems than its design, implenetation, production, and use cause. Ever.
It's in the laws of thermodynamics, but we have to ignore it because we all depend on it to offload those problems (and sometimes the origional problem if the technology 'transports' the original problem rather than solves it) to other parts of the world.
>"For that you need a language that blurs the distinction between data and instructions"
My point was that instructions are data. But I challenge you to illustrate that in order to solve a problem, you can provide data that does not encompas the intrucstions. "My house is on fire" is data that will instruct people to run out of it, but only because they were previously programmed with a 'fire' trigger. Escape it when it's inputted into your system.
So neither english nor C can go outside of it's own contextural setting. English is just so more complicated with so many more possible branches of execution based on data that it's difficult to compare the two without either belittling humanity or getting 1984ish about technology. C/can/ change itself via function pointers and, lets say, random data to throw on the execution stack. But brute force only works when you can test a result within the programattic bounds of the inputted data, including instructions. I mean, really, humans are just wildly complex computers, which is why our data-exchange set is so much more advanced.:)
"Why are we here?" has multiple answers, so you can really only validate successful self-programming if you already think you know what the answer is. And for that, you depend on previous data entry... etc, etc, etc..
Well, lets ask why nature gets around unexpected problems. I suspect it is because nature doesn't 'invest functionality' in a natural thing that requires excluding certain types of input in order to survive or function.
> Nature mostly gets around unexpected problems
The dinos would agree with 'mostly'. I want mostly. I want computers that are built to work regardless of input, unless said input is likely to occurr on a frequency of say, once every decade or some crap.
Companies are notorious for turning this around. Witness warrentees. "This product will work unless you do X" Sometimes X is why people buy it in the first place!
In the realm of computer and hardware, there is nothing to say that we can't make the PCI bus X times slower in order to build complete down-to-electron-level fault tolerance into it. Obviously, I'm unaware of the actual feasibility of this, but I think people above, in blaming the market, were far more on point than saying, "Well it happens in nature, so it happens in PCs." Sure, but I didn't see species dropping off the face of the earth like flies until the 1970s, when we starting making impossible-to-fulfill demands of our eco system.
Same of computers. The vision, the story, the 'sales pitch' is really lightyears ahead of the design. It could only happen in an economy who's goal is to get shit out as fast and cheaply as possible to everyone, instead of considering the social and unquanitiable costs of certain technologies. Until manufacturers are really allowed to say, "We made it X times slower, but you can't crash it short of excersising your physical superiority on it, so I dare you to even try to feel stress or mistreatment in using it", and I think that might be never under current circumstances, posters above were more on point than you were.
Which isn't to say that I don't agree.. I think it's just more about the demands you place on the technology over aknowledging the unpredictability of it's operating envrionment.
Yeah, I know, but that doesn't prevent me from hoping that some day futurists will be led to conclude:
"In the next 10 years, humans will be able to make sensible decisions that do not give them excuses and scape-goats to feel unhappy about their experiences in this society."
Honestly, I think there is an entrenchment in the 'bitterness' and 'stress' social industry that we're lenient to give up. The day computers actually start working, we'd have to start focusing on our own problems again - the very antithesis of the desires of a market.
It's called a compiler. You use C/C++, or whatever, to 'tell' the computer what the program it should make will do.
Computers that can 'program themselves' is simply an extention of that concept to the point where (presumably) you can 'code' in your natural spoken language. A computer shouldn't do anything until you've told it what to do. Currently, we use C, but there really isn't a functional difference between English and C except for the granularity of the specification of the problem and the desired implentation of its solution. For instance, with PHP, I no longer need to tell the computer that the $foobar variable will be an unsigned long... of course, you'll always give up speed, just as when you tell someone else to do something. The more granular you describe the solution you want, the less time the other person/computer has to spend figuring it out themselves.
Careful man, or the market pundits will start looking for the "-1, Communist" moderation point! But yeah, I agree. When entrenched powerful industries have gone to far, it takes real shit to take em down. Today, this is due to the public allowing IP to represent serious amounts of 'value'. The market spoke (or rather we let the market speak), and we ended up ceding control to a few players and a seriously rich-up-the-ass industry. However, when its workers, yep, its just tough shit for them; even tho they're far more likely to suffer from losing their jobs. Thats why the only people you see dissing unions are non-unionized industries and the suits who sometimes have to make less money because the people who actually do the work want a little more, or more security, or more shit that any self-respecting suit would feel they should never deserve. It's pretty interesting.. many of the Adam Smith era writers would even come out and say how fucked they would be if it wern't for the powerless poor.
I think this is because we've been told that this is the best it will get (or, in MS speak, it doesn't break in the first place.)
Cell phones rarely crash (granted, much simpler in terms of the complexity of their input), but I think this is because, since there is no focus in marketing about their 'stability', makers really do have to make them stable. As long as 'stability' is a marketable selling point, computers will have to be unstable.
I'm so sick and tired of what the next 10 years will bring us. Howabout OSes that dont crash? How about hardware that won't lock up your computer? How about open standards, a generally more cautious approach to computing that will allow us to stabilize the developments that occur? Nah.. of course not. Lets take this overly complicated not-so-realiable thing and throw a transparent layer of 'self-healing' autonomy to it. I know thats what I've been looking for... yet another reason why I have to explain to my boss that computers ain't perfect. I can hear him now: "But they're supposed to heal themselves! Why didn't the OS dial up our energy provider and ask why the power went out?!"
Slashdot Mirror
> .. government unlawfully competing with private enterprise?
The real question is, what services are considered so basic as to deserve to be free of the shackles of private interests. Private interests are always directed at a profitable consumer base, not a consumer base with needs. I think, if you say that computing is going to be a fundamental part of your infrastructure (like, broadcasting, roads, etc), you have every right to prefer solutions that are free of private interest influences. Sure, it might cost more in training, migration, etc, but at least you arn't placing important services that your country relys on in the hands of so-and-so's markting plans. The justification is doubly so when the only (real) private-interest solution is doing everything in its power (and thats a lot of power, in MS's case) to minimize competition. The government has every right to say, "Look, if MS allowed competition, then sure, we'd favour domestic market stimulation over the costs associated with riding on the back of private interests. There are enough disperate private interests to garauntee long term viability of this buy-in should this investment fail or suddenly change horses." However, when you go with an MS infrastructure, you're placing all your eggs in one basket, thus giving you a vested interest in their success. In the governments situation, thats the very thing they should be free of. (Good example: Enron. In hiding the details and placing all their eggs in the Enron basket, old boys club notwithstanding, the government effectively screwed a fair number of its citizens in not 'tampering with the market'.) If anything, staying with MS software interferes with the market more than trying to knock MS down a few notches by preferring the only real cost effective alternative, free software.
If there were more than 2 truely viable commercial OS's, I'd say, who cares, but the government is really just doing the market a disservice by not placing a 'preferred' status with 'competitors' (even if said competitor is being forced to give away said software for free because of the barrier to entry of the market that the Intels and MSs have created).
Just my two cents. The whole blind-faith thing that the market works itself out is a successful sell on behalf of large companies. When you look at countries that have fostered the fastest growth in their economy, they've done it through government regulation and placing 'preferred' status' on solutions based on their long term benifit to the economy. It's not by bolstering up the champion of the market at the time the decisions are being made, which is why I think the government, for the sake of their citizens at large, should be going out of their way to not do MS any favours (and the way MS acts, leaving MS alone is a favour in itself.)
> Not that similar things don't happen in the U.S., but i don't think Dubya has ever attended one of these
;)
MS might get him to show up if they start(?) touting embedded windows for ICBM missle guidance systems, with one-click 'Kill Evil Axis' processing.
150 patents would be the best thing to happen to this world. A few people who be sticking rich and basically own a crud load of what should be public domain, the pressure will build, and a revolution would come. I'm more frusterated by how the system is ignoring its own problems by way of settlements. Nothing gets solved, issues don't get addressed, and as long as enough big players don't suffer, we'll keep seeking jobs from them instead of picking up our torches and pitchforks and solving the problem.
> Don't fault lawyers for getting paid any more than you fault yourself for getting paid.
Don't worry, I only fault them for making it cheaper to ignore real problems than to actually analyse and solve them by way of an impartial judicial system. Then I fault the companies for placing all of their shareholders value in a concept that would cost crudloads to defend. And then I fault shareholders for being more interested in the success of their stock than the improvements that the technology their money is behind makes to life in general.
And then I go back to work.
Patents really have shifted from implementation to idea in the software world, it seems.
And doesn't the W3C accept RAND licensed patents now a W3C endorsed standards? (I can't recall if that went through or not.)
> settling lawsuits (also known as ADR, Alternative Dispute Resolution) is a *good thing*
No it's not. It only means that trying to do the right thing (that is, figure out who really owns a patent and whether or not its valid) is more expensive than paying wallet-service to unsubstantiated claims.
If thats the pinnacle of achievement of the market based economy, count me out. Like how the IMF bailed everyone out of the Asian market crisis, nobody ends up learning anything, and stupidity is allowed to reign. Market based tactics always place the interests of the few (private interests, natch), above those of a soceity at large, which is why in this day of wealth-stroking penetance, the social costs of systems supporting private interests are huge. So long as you blindly stroke the market with your narrow minded rhetoric, it will continue to do so, instead of serving the broader social interests (ie, barrier to market, equality in market participation) that it was designed to do.
Money talks louder than Right. If you claim thats a good thing, you're too far gone to save.
Because ign.com does tons of other stuff other than video games, they don't have this problem.
I own a GC, and am certainly experienced enough not to count on reviews of games before the game has shipped. IGN is good about this stuff. They play the games, and they dont go easy on them in reivews (I've found the X-Box team at IGN is more prone to 'gloss' for bad games), I'd say that they arn't afraid of biting the hand that feeds them.
I think the key is relying on sources that are:
a) knowledgable
b) cover a broader base of interests than those you seek, such that their business doesn't rely soley on the area of interests you are seeking objective info from
is the best way to go.
But people should already be aware of this. I mean, everyone has to dance with the one that brought them to the party, so just make sure you're not listning to those who wouldn't gave gotten to the party otherwise.
>Those who claim that they prefer paper-based ..
...
Or maybe they just can't afford to buy the 400$ USD 'software'cover version
Not flamebait. I'm just curious what the financials are? How much is an eBook, and how much is a suitably equipped Palm? Where do they meet, in terms of number of books, where you recoup your investment on the Palm?
Man, Quake makes you kill people, and Harry Potter makes you worship satan.
It's becoming increasingly difficult not to single out the computer as the tool of the devil! (Move over alcohol, drugs, and any sexual position other than missionary!)
From the Hostmail Terms of Use:
By way of example, and not as a limitation, you agree that when using a Communication Service, you will not:
Funny. I thought that point was their business model and represented their 'heaviest users' base! (Of course, if you dont like it, you can email their abuse department at angelgirl435_abuse@hotmail.com
ROFL! So we have these companies, who have to abide by laws to do business and make profits.
Companies dont like said laws, so they buy the government.
Your proposal. Remove government from the equation.
Result? COMPANIES GET TO DO WHAT THEY WANTED TO DO BY BRIBING YOUR GOVERNMENT, ONLY THEY DONT EVEN NEED TO PAY ADMISSION NOW!
You're an idiot if you think this would help matters. It would only let private interests destroy our society and economy without those annoying 'law' things getting in their way.
Right on. The best evidence is how culture perceives these types of infringements in entertertainment and media.
In basing the economy and culture on self-interest, there is little social importance placed on 'paying your interests forward' - that is, respecting that even if a decision doesn't affect you or your family right now ("Id never need an abortion", or "I'd never be an alcoholic", or "I'm not gay, so what do I care") doesn't mean it won't in the future.
The market (that by which we depend on to exist) has little interest in social rights until they affect a majority that hurts a bottom line. Large books stores are obstinately worried about their customers privacy, but only in so far as it will affect their profit margin. If each decision of this type alienates or resticts the liberty of 2% of their consumer base (especially if they are in the 'light users' category, which can be up to 70% of your customer base, but only 10% of your profits), they are unlikely to defend said restrictions vohemently. What the market fails to take into account is that once you've sufficiently chipped away at various liberties, ovet time, the cost of the social damage is far larger than the sum of the parts. This is when everyone wakes up and realizes that the attitude references in your post do do make up a larger social structure that we've depended on to justify the more destructive aspects of our political and economic system. Everyone is (or will be) in the same boat, so the 'It doest affect me' attitude really does the society, including the immediately unaffected, a disservice.
A wise observation on your part, in my opinion.
> agreed to refrain from participating in deceptive schemes in the future, or lying about the legality or potential earnings from any such schemes
... in fact, they were encouraged to visit an FTC hyperlink where they could enter their email addresses opt-out of receiving any warnings or punishments in the future. ;)
Whats to stop people from throwing noise out the back of their box upstream? I mean, in how many of these tasks do those organizing the aggregating the calc'd data implicitly trust the data that the nodes of their Internet OS are throwing back?
...
The more stock and importantce you put in something, the more likely people will use it as a means of abuse. I can envision a world where people who are against a particular scientific task (for whatever reason, ethical, on principal, or whatever), use this Internet OS, and join particular distributed apps simply to throw noise into the upstream
You, my dear friend, must learn a little about the technology and its trappings. Name me one technology that did not cause as many problems as it solved. I'm not saying technology is bad, as a whole. I'm only saying that to portray technology as the salvation of existance is as completely unsupportable a concept as that of the afterlife, heaven and hell.
... non-capitalist societies still have to clean up after the capitalist ones, and to think otherwise is to display a frightening naivite with respect to history and the international political and economic system.
> we have a lot of lazy people
I'm so glad we have lazy people to blame everything on. Once you get over the fact that, yes, lazy people do exist and always will, you cease to have an argument on which to build your 'technology will solve our problems' argument. No they won't, because 'lazy people' (as conveniently defined by you) will always screw shit up. Conversly, I could claim that 'not so intelligent people' consistantly force technology on societies and cultures that are not built on value systems that will fail see any benifit from the existance of particular technologies. There are thousands of societies on this planet alone that have existed happily and peacibly without technology. And without the death toll associated with cars. Or the cancer rates (quadrupled in western society over the last 30 years) associated with the electric fields present in developed (note I dont say civilized) areas. Or obseity rates that make North Americans (I am one) the fattest fucks on the planet.
> the technology they need to survive
So basically, life was utter and complete unenjoyable shit until we started inventing shit, eh? You're a microcosm on a large planet, in a huge history, in an insanely huge galaxy. Your values (such as your emphasis on technology in order to delude you into a sense of control over your environment) may be applicable to your society, but not to humanity in the same way that you will probably never understand why some Japanese pop stars are more rich and famous than your favorite band. Different cultures and socities have different needs, and technology as a whole is not a blanket solution to the human condition. It might keep you busy and give you a sense of direction, but to ignore the problems it causes in adjacent communities and environments will ultimately leave someone with the dubious job of cleaning up after your 'misunderstanding of technology'.
> And any country that isn't capitalist today probably wouldn't have enough technology to cause problems
That would be true if we all lived in a vacuum, but there are many non-capitalist societies with power elites who've been allowed access to technologies to furthur entrench their totalitarian regimes, or sweatshop industries, or
Hehe, nothing hurts AC's feelings like the truth. Speaking of luddites, do you support the 'Sewing Machine for a Life' laws passed in the 19th century to prevent people from rejecting certain technologies that disrupted social patterns? You know .. the ones that said, if you didn't want your jobs taken away by mechanical looms, you could be killed for it?
I love it. Hell no about the green revolution. I think the only thing that helps humans is other humans. It is, after all, why we havn't really disproved the conclusion that we are social animals that seek and depend on social interaction for a happy life. Everything else is just the the quest for centralized power pitted against those who seek to decentralize it.
This because technology can absolutely never solve more problems than its design, implenetation, production, and use cause. Ever.
It's in the laws of thermodynamics, but we have to ignore it because we all depend on it to offload those problems (and sometimes the origional problem if the technology 'transports' the original problem rather than solves it) to other parts of the world.
>"For that you need a language that blurs the distinction between data and instructions"
/can/ change itself via function pointers and, lets say, random data to throw on the execution stack. But brute force only works when you can test a result within the programattic bounds of the inputted data, including instructions. I mean, really, humans are just wildly complex computers, which is why our data-exchange set is so much more advanced. :)
... etc, etc, etc ..
My point was that instructions are data. But I challenge you to illustrate that in order to solve a problem, you can provide data that does not encompas the intrucstions. "My house is on fire" is data that will instruct people to run out of it, but only because they were previously programmed with a 'fire' trigger. Escape it when it's inputted into your system.
So neither english nor C can go outside of it's own contextural setting. English is just so more complicated with so many more possible branches of execution based on data that it's difficult to compare the two without either belittling humanity or getting 1984ish about technology. C
"Why are we here?" has multiple answers, so you can really only validate successful self-programming if you already think you know what the answer is. And for that, you depend on previous data entry
Well, lets ask why nature gets around unexpected problems. I suspect it is because nature doesn't 'invest functionality' in a natural thing that requires excluding certain types of input in order to survive or function.
.. I think it's just more about the demands you place on the technology over aknowledging the unpredictability of it's operating envrionment.
> Nature mostly gets around unexpected problems
The dinos would agree with 'mostly'. I want mostly. I want computers that are built to work regardless of input, unless said input is likely to occurr on a frequency of say, once every decade or some crap.
Companies are notorious for turning this around. Witness warrentees. "This product will work unless you do X" Sometimes X is why people buy it in the first place!
In the realm of computer and hardware, there is nothing to say that we can't make the PCI bus X times slower in order to build complete down-to-electron-level fault tolerance into it. Obviously, I'm unaware of the actual feasibility of this, but I think people above, in blaming the market, were far more on point than saying, "Well it happens in nature, so it happens in PCs." Sure, but I didn't see species dropping off the face of the earth like flies until the 1970s, when we starting making impossible-to-fulfill demands of our eco system.
Same of computers. The vision, the story, the 'sales pitch' is really lightyears ahead of the design. It could only happen in an economy who's goal is to get shit out as fast and cheaply as possible to everyone, instead of considering the social and unquanitiable costs of certain technologies. Until manufacturers are really allowed to say, "We made it X times slower, but you can't crash it short of excersising your physical superiority on it, so I dare you to even try to feel stress or mistreatment in using it", and I think that might be never under current circumstances, posters above were more on point than you were.
Which isn't to say that I don't agree
Yeah, I know, but that doesn't prevent me from hoping that some day futurists will be led to conclude:
"In the next 10 years, humans will be able to make sensible decisions that do not give them excuses and scape-goats to feel unhappy about their experiences in this society."
Honestly, I think there is an entrenchment in the 'bitterness' and 'stress' social industry that we're lenient to give up. The day computers actually start working, we'd have to start focusing on our own problems again - the very antithesis of the desires of a market.
>computers that will program themselves
... of course, you'll always give up speed, just as when you tell someone else to do something. The more granular you describe the solution you want, the less time the other person/computer has to spend figuring it out themselves.
It's called a compiler. You use C/C++, or whatever, to 'tell' the computer what the program it should make will do.
Computers that can 'program themselves' is simply an extention of that concept to the point where (presumably) you can 'code' in your natural spoken language. A computer shouldn't do anything until you've told it what to do. Currently, we use C, but there really isn't a functional difference between English and C except for the granularity of the specification of the problem and the desired implentation of its solution. For instance, with PHP, I no longer need to tell the computer that the $foobar variable will be an unsigned long
>are you willing to pay the price premium for a Unix desktop PC?
More and more with each passing day. Looks like I'll be coming home to OSX in the near future.
Careful man, or the market pundits will start looking for the "-1, Communist" moderation point! But yeah, I agree. When entrenched powerful industries have gone to far, it takes real shit to take em down. Today, this is due to the public allowing IP to represent serious amounts of 'value'. The market spoke (or rather we let the market speak), and we ended up ceding control to a few players and a seriously rich-up-the-ass industry. However, when its workers, yep, its just tough shit for them; even tho they're far more likely to suffer from losing their jobs. Thats why the only people you see dissing unions are non-unionized industries and the suits who sometimes have to make less money because the people who actually do the work want a little more, or more security, or more shit that any self-respecting suit would feel they should never deserve. It's pretty interesting .. many of the Adam Smith era writers would even come out and say how fucked they would be if it wern't for the powerless poor.
..
It wasn't always like this
I think this is because we've been told that this is the best it will get (or, in MS speak, it doesn't break in the first place.)
Cell phones rarely crash (granted, much simpler in terms of the complexity of their input), but I think this is because, since there is no focus in marketing about their 'stability', makers really do have to make them stable. As long as 'stability' is a marketable selling point, computers will have to be unstable.
I'm so sick and tired of what the next 10 years will bring us. Howabout OSes that dont crash? How about hardware that won't lock up your computer? How about open standards, a generally more cautious approach to computing that will allow us to stabilize the developments that occur? Nah .. of course not. Lets take this overly complicated not-so-realiable thing and throw a transparent layer of 'self-healing' autonomy to it. I know thats what I've been looking for ... yet another reason why I have to explain to my boss that computers ain't perfect. I can hear him now: "But they're supposed to heal themselves! Why didn't the OS dial up our energy provider and ask why the power went out?!"