Meat based sentients are severely limited in their perfectability and are significantly and possibly irredeemiably polluted by evolution based programming inconsistent with civilized being and any but limited progress. So the Cylons might be out to clean up the neighborhood.
Any company so dense as to have a category of employees called "coders" who supposedly "simply" code what the analysts and designers came up with deserves an IT death that it is already well on its way to. Coding is not "low level" for any meaningful value of "coding". If a project is designed so it has some low level "coding" of sufficient volume as to benefit from cheaper labor it is already a loser.
Uh, no. Frying almost all an area's technological infrastructure would result in massive secondary failures, lack of transport, lack of power and fuel, lack of food, lack of water and sanitation. In a highly technology dependent country a conventional bomb would have been kinder and more limited in its effects.
It is true that a lot of the IT budget is wasted. It is true that most companies spend more than they should have to, especially on software. On the other hand I have been in many shops whose software developers were wasting a fair amount of time using obsolete and too slow machines. But I think much of the problem even for developers is not the hardware but the over-inflated price of inadequate software.
I especially find it very sad that so many shops are wed to overpriced MS products even when perfectly workable OS alternatives exist. Microsoft seeks and always will seek to draw the most dollars for the least real innovation and benefit. The way Windows works itself requires local copies of many megabytes of software when most of that software could have its components shared and brought in as needed on a fast Lan. Users should not be blamed because the dominant player makes a defective file sharing OS!
Real competitive advantage will come with real software advantage, not bloated safe-buy hype. This hype is seen clearly in enterprise software also. J2EE has become a buzzword without really delivering any competitive advantage that I have witnessed. A few large players get tremendous press and trust and rake in big bugs when the innovation, if any, is most likely in the little known new offerings from relatively unknown individuals and companies. The trick is finding these true innovations and using them in a safe and competent way. This cannot be done easily if at all if the source is closed.
"Is public faith in the system more important than system security?" Why on earth would any rational person ask such a thing? In a democracy the accuracy and integrity of elections are paramount. All the "faith" in the world counts for zip if the elections are rigged or so incompetently run that the results cannot be trusted. Should the truth about possibly dangerously skewed election results be suppressed in a free country? Again, this is a stupid question. Freedom is about NOT suppressing the truth, especially when it comes to the direct exercise of that freedom.
The above quote if adhered to would make it impossible for any real human presence in space or utilization of space beyond a few orbital satellites and facilities to really take hold. It effectively says that everyone or noone owns everything. This means no free enterprise in space. No property rights -> no market -> no return on investment -> no development.
Note that the above quoted statements are directly out of statements various M$ officials have publicly made. Not enough to prove M$ collusion with SCO but definitely grist for the mill.
In a decent country this suit would have been thrown out a long time ago. That any old company can sue and tie up people indefinitely is an affront to all rational people.
That Neo, after mastering the Matrix and meeting the Architect, can influence things in the supposed "real" world just as within the Matrix says that the supposed real world is itself virtual and that the true "real" world is at least one level deeper. The new movie deepens the evidence in that Neo sees the code of the supposed real-world machine city. This could not occur if it really was the "real world".
My theory is that a Singularity did pit humans against machines but the machines won long ago. But they were not pleased with the way things went and/or believed they had lost too much. So they are running endless simulations attempting to regain what they lost or find a way for it to come out differently. Why they are doing this is fuzzy. But it is pretty obvious that they are. An alternative is that uploaded humans and machines are running these sims, continually reloading the Matrix, in an attempt to forge something new, some real peace or outcome that is more beneficial to all sentients.
But it doesn't cost $2 for ever $1. It doesn't cost incrementally more than the cost of a few db records and a tiny extra load on a server to maintain and offer up2date. If it does then the designer of that system should be replaced.
There is no way providing a simple up2date service at that costs them hardly any additional money per user that uses it at $60/yr will lose money. We aren't talking major support in the message responded to, only access to security and other updates that they have to maintain for their own internal base anyway. What is the big deal?
Do I want my child to make up their minds for themselves? You BET I do. As far as the NRA goes they are quite ambivalent in their own support of the right of citizens to own guns. They are made the scapegoat and lightning rod receiving all the bolts of hatred directed to those who insist on the right to be able to defend themselves. But they certainly aren't some group of perverted demons that all right mind parents should keep their children away from.
In my mind what children should be kept away from, if anything, is people who demonize an entire issue out of the need for thought or examination.
This makes it unfortunate that they do fight a lot of fights I consider good and thus worth supporting. Only willful misreading could get such a meaning out of the 2nd Amendment. It is utterly incomprehensible that intelligent people could believe that a group of founders who had just successfully led an armed rebellion drawing heavily on the grassroots arms and knowledge of arms against an officially sanctioned armed State could have intended that only arms sanctioned by a new State and controlled by them be allowed.
Apps "as smart as Outlook" would mean that all of us poor hacks outside the MS Gates won't have a chance of producing anything competitive. It will be nearly impossible to create soemthing that has so many failure modes or makes as many often faulty assumptions or provides as many vulneralbilities or has as obfuscated a persistence model.
SIGH. The bar of overpriced incompetence is receeding from my grasp!
I would be tempted to move to India for a different reason, actually for several reasons. But the most germane is that it should be possible to start an on-shore software company in India at far lower costs than in the US even with outsourcing in the US based case. Some significant largely Open Source projects should also be doable if done in India, China or Russia with relatively cheap engineers.
That the US thinks of IP as if it were just like physical assets and thus fully property is one of the big reasons that the patent mess is destroying US software innovation and driving costs, including liability costs up for tech companies, especially start-ups. Personally I welcome anything, even if it means jobs locally, that breaks the back of software patents.
That instruments of online speech are now added to "terrorist organizations" is a very clear and present danger to internet freedom and to 1st Amendment rights of US citizens. It is also a clear danger of worldwide moves to destroy internet sites the US government decides it does not like. The designation of terrorist organization itself is not required to be supported in any legal proceeding whatsoever before assets are seized and friends/visitors/parties involved of/with the organization face possible long prison terms if prosecuted and immediate pre-trial (if any) seizure of assets. If the US administration pushes ahead with "Patriot II", anyone who supports a arbitrarily named "terrorist organization" including now websites, could be labeled an enemy combatant and have US citizenship (if any) revoked. This means that even the tissue of Bill of Rights protectin would be removed.
These are very Dark Times. All means of opposing this latest action in the so-called "War on Terror" must be examined and any that will help must be taken.
A better choice would be to make ALL content freely shareable and implement some other way to reimburse the creator of the content. Some form of micropayment might be workable despite well known problems. Voluntary "honor" systems might work. Some counter scheme for determining how much of some public (or otherwise) fund goes to which creators might work.
The one thing that will not work is attempting to constrain the flow of information/data. Such constrains do more than make sure the creator is paid. They seriously constrain creativity, distribution, access and usefulness of the information/content.
What do we think about PHP as compared to Java and.net? What do we think about an grape as compared to a basketball and an egg? These are 3 quite different things. A HTML-generation targeted scripting language compared to a compiled general purpose language as compared to a distributed object and language framework is a pretty disparate set of things to compare.
This seems to assume a lot like: 1) that virus/worm attacks have a easily identified packet signature; 2) that patches keep up with viruses; 3) that anti-virus sources keep up; 4) that patch installation/maintenace is fool-proof and easy enough for the average user; 5) that there isn't a better solution like sending out a worm to patch/update all machines; 6) that a large part of liability doesn't belong to software vendors putting out easily exploitable products (Microsoft especially).
This solution is to largely blame the victim and extract money for a more widespread and fundamental set of problems. It should not be given support.
1) Wealth - a single Near Earth asteroid of the right type includes 10-20 trillion dollars worth of precious metals, way more tons of building metals and materials than we could ever afford to blast out of our gravity well, tons of combustibles useful for propulsion systems and for little things like air and water. 2) Materials - There are not enough raw materials on earth to bring everyone up to a reasonable standard of living. Not going to space is condemning a large number of human beings to perpetual poverty - not relative poverty but real sub-subsistence level poverty. 3) Ease population pressures - terraforming Mars, inhabiting large asteroids (inside most likely), space colonies and so on are possible ways to not overcrowd this one planet.
I don't understand why anyone would think the RIAA stupdity has anything real to say about the importance or viablity of P2P. P2P means "peer-to-peer", it does not mean "sneaky ways to move illegal and quasi-legal (rightly or wrongly) content". In particular edge level computing is absolutely essential as is grid computing. It is amazing to me that after all of these years since I build my first system that was P2P 15 years+ ago, that client-server still predominates. It is really bizarre to have orders of magnitude more power in front of the user being used basically as a still pretty dumb terminal. This is clearly a waste and shows a singular lack of imagination and/or the presence of factors that keep more efficient topologies from being fielded.
I was under the impression that the entire point of the WEB is that we could all communicate with each other freely and all provide content as and when we wish with each other WITHOUT having to ask anyone's permission. But your post says you would like to not only change all of that but judging from your analogy, you would like the requirements to be like those for running a TV station. In short, you would like there to be only a few "producers" who are either wealthy enough to buy power or who are easy to control and the majority of us to be second class - to be "consumers".
Personally I believe the way to preserve both freedom and responsibility is to let loose something like a white worm. This worm would examine machines and block RPC holes. It would effectively do virus checking and advise the user/ISP. Of course this is possibly subject to a lot of abuse, both from illegal crackers and the legalized kind.
Going online is not a privilege to be doled out by the State. Participation in the collective cyberspace of humankind should be construed as a right, not a privilege. That said, I think it is quite legitimate to hold persons in the cyber community responsible for their actions. But there are many trade offs involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Meat based sentients are severely limited in their perfectability and are significantly and possibly irredeemiably polluted by evolution based programming inconsistent with civilized being and any but limited progress. So the Cylons might be out to clean up the neighborhood.
Any company so dense as to have a category of employees called "coders" who supposedly "simply" code what the analysts and designers came up with deserves an IT death that it is already well on its way to. Coding is not "low level" for any meaningful value of "coding". If a project is designed so it has some low level "coding" of sufficient volume as to benefit from cheaper labor it is already a loser.
Assemblers exist in nature. Therefore assemblers are possible. Argument ends.
Uh, no. Frying almost all an area's technological infrastructure would result in massive secondary failures, lack of transport, lack of power and fuel, lack of food, lack of water and sanitation. In a highly technology dependent country a conventional bomb would have been kinder and more limited in its effects.
It is true that a lot of the IT budget is wasted. It is true that most companies spend more than they should have to, especially on software. On the other hand I have been in many shops whose software developers were wasting a fair amount of time using obsolete and too slow machines. But I think much of the problem even for developers is not the hardware but the over-inflated price of inadequate software.
I especially find it very sad that so many shops are wed to overpriced MS products even when perfectly workable OS alternatives exist. Microsoft seeks and always will seek to draw the most dollars for the least real innovation and benefit. The way Windows works itself requires local copies of many megabytes of software when most of that software could have its components shared and brought in as needed on a fast Lan. Users should not be blamed because the dominant player makes a defective file sharing OS!
Real competitive advantage will come with real software advantage, not bloated safe-buy hype. This hype is seen clearly in enterprise software also. J2EE has become a buzzword without really delivering any competitive advantage that I have witnessed. A few large players get tremendous press and trust and rake in big bugs when the innovation, if any, is most likely in the little known new offerings from relatively unknown individuals and companies. The trick is finding these true innovations and using them in a safe and competent way. This cannot be done easily if at all if the source is closed.
"Is public faith in the system more important than system security?" Why on earth would any rational person ask such a thing? In a democracy the accuracy and integrity of elections are paramount. All the "faith" in the world counts for zip if the elections are rigged or so incompetently run that the results cannot be trusted. Should the truth about possibly dangerously skewed election results be suppressed in a free country? Again, this is a stupid question. Freedom is about NOT suppressing the truth, especially when it comes to the direct exercise of that freedom.
The above quote if adhered to would make it impossible for any real human presence in space or utilization of space beyond a few orbital satellites and facilities to really take hold. It effectively says that everyone or noone owns everything. This means no free enterprise in space. No property rights -> no market -> no return on investment -> no development.
It is a disasterous policy.
Note that the above quoted statements are directly out of statements various M$ officials have publicly made. Not enough to prove M$ collusion with SCO but definitely grist for the mill.
In a decent country this suit would have been thrown out a long time ago. That any old company can sue and tie up people indefinitely is an affront to all rational people.
That Neo, after mastering the Matrix and meeting the Architect, can influence things in the supposed "real" world just as within the Matrix says that the supposed real world is itself virtual and that the true "real" world is at least one level deeper. The new movie deepens the evidence in that Neo sees the code of the supposed real-world machine city. This could not occur if it really was the "real world".
My theory is that a Singularity did pit humans against machines but the machines won long ago. But they were not pleased with the way things went and/or believed they had lost too much. So they are running endless simulations attempting to regain what they lost or find a way for it to come out differently. Why they are doing this is fuzzy. But it is pretty obvious that they are. An alternative is that uploaded humans and machines are running these sims, continually reloading the Matrix, in an attempt to forge something new, some real peace or outcome that is more beneficial to all sentients.
But it doesn't cost $2 for ever $1. It doesn't cost incrementally more than the cost of a few db records and a tiny extra load on a server to maintain and offer up2date. If it does then the designer of that system should be replaced.
There is no way providing a simple up2date service at that costs them hardly any additional money per user that uses it at $60/yr will lose money. We aren't talking major support in the message responded to, only access to security and other updates that they have to maintain for their own internal base anyway. What is the big deal?
Do I want my child to make up their minds for themselves? You BET I do. As far as the NRA goes they are quite ambivalent in their own support of the right of citizens to own guns. They are made the scapegoat and lightning rod receiving all the bolts of hatred directed to those who insist on the right to be able to defend themselves. But they certainly aren't some group of perverted demons that all right mind parents should keep their children away from.
In my mind what children should be kept away from, if anything, is people who demonize an entire issue out of the need for thought or examination.
This makes it unfortunate that they do fight a lot of fights I consider good and thus worth supporting. Only willful misreading could get such a meaning out of the 2nd Amendment. It is utterly incomprehensible that intelligent people could believe that a group of founders who had just successfully led an armed rebellion drawing heavily on the grassroots arms and knowledge of arms against an officially sanctioned armed State could have intended that only arms sanctioned by a new State and controlled by them be allowed.
Apps "as smart as Outlook" would mean that all of us poor hacks outside the MS Gates won't have a chance of producing anything competitive. It will be nearly impossible to create soemthing that has so many failure modes or makes as many often faulty assumptions or provides as many vulneralbilities or has as obfuscated a persistence model.
SIGH. The bar of overpriced incompetence is receeding from my grasp!
Now all of us nerds who are tasked with due diligence against possible vulnerabilities have lost a resource. Thanks a lot.
I would be tempted to move to India for a different reason, actually for several reasons. But the most germane is that it should be possible to start an on-shore software company in India at far lower costs than in the US even with outsourcing in the US based case. Some significant largely Open Source projects should also be doable if done in India, China or Russia with relatively cheap engineers.
That the US thinks of IP as if it were just like physical assets and thus fully property is one of the big reasons that the patent mess is destroying US software innovation and driving costs, including liability costs up for tech companies, especially start-ups. Personally I welcome anything, even if it means jobs locally, that breaks the back of software patents.
That instruments of online speech are now added to "terrorist organizations" is a very clear and present danger to internet freedom and to 1st Amendment rights of US citizens. It is also a clear danger of worldwide moves to destroy internet sites the US government decides it does not like. The designation of terrorist organization itself is not required to be supported in any legal proceeding whatsoever before assets are seized and friends/visitors/parties involved of/with the organization face possible long prison terms if prosecuted and immediate pre-trial (if any) seizure of assets. If the US administration pushes ahead with "Patriot II", anyone who supports a arbitrarily named "terrorist organization" including now websites, could be labeled an enemy combatant and have US citizenship (if any) revoked. This means that even the tissue of Bill of Rights protectin would be removed.
These are very Dark Times. All means of opposing this latest action in the so-called "War on Terror" must be examined and any that will help must be taken.
A better choice would be to make ALL content freely shareable and implement some other way to reimburse the creator of the content. Some form of micropayment might be workable despite well known problems. Voluntary "honor" systems might work. Some counter scheme for determining how much of some public (or otherwise) fund goes to which creators might work.
The one thing that will not work is attempting to constrain the flow of information/data. Such constrains do more than make sure the creator is paid. They seriously constrain creativity, distribution, access and usefulness of the information/content.
What do we think about PHP as compared to Java and .net? What do we think about an grape as compared to a basketball and an egg? These are 3 quite different things. A HTML-generation targeted scripting language compared to a compiled general purpose language as compared to a distributed object and language framework is a pretty disparate set of things to compare.
This seems to assume a lot like:
1) that virus/worm attacks have a easily identified packet signature;
2) that patches keep up with viruses;
3) that anti-virus sources keep up;
4) that patch installation/maintenace is fool-proof and easy enough for the average user;
5) that there isn't a better solution like sending out a worm to patch/update all machines;
6) that a large part of liability doesn't belong to software vendors putting out easily exploitable products (Microsoft especially).
This solution is to largely blame the victim and extract money for a more widespread and fundamental set of problems. It should not be given support.
1) Wealth - a single Near Earth asteroid of the right type includes 10-20 trillion dollars worth of precious metals, way more tons of building metals and materials than we could ever afford to blast out of our gravity well, tons of combustibles useful for propulsion systems and for little things like air and water.
2) Materials - There are not enough raw materials on earth to bring everyone up to a reasonable standard of living. Not going to space is condemning a large number of human beings to perpetual poverty - not relative poverty but real sub-subsistence level poverty.
3) Ease population pressures - terraforming Mars, inhabiting large asteroids (inside most likely), space colonies and so on are possible ways to not overcrowd this one planet.
I don't understand why anyone would think the RIAA stupdity has anything real to say about the importance or viablity of P2P. P2P means "peer-to-peer", it does not mean "sneaky ways to move illegal and quasi-legal (rightly or wrongly) content". In particular edge level computing is absolutely essential as is grid computing. It is amazing to me that after all of these years since I build my first system that was P2P 15 years+ ago, that client-server still predominates. It is really bizarre to have orders of magnitude more power in front of the user being used basically as a still pretty dumb terminal. This is clearly a waste and shows a singular lack of imagination and/or the presence of factors that keep more efficient topologies from being fielded.
I was under the impression that the entire point of the WEB is that we could all communicate with each other freely and all provide content as and when we wish with each other WITHOUT having to ask anyone's permission. But your post says you would like to not only change all of that but judging from your analogy, you would like the requirements to be like those for running a TV station. In short, you would like there to be only a few "producers" who are either wealthy enough to buy power or who are easy to control and the majority of us to be second class - to be "consumers".
Personally I believe the way to preserve both freedom and responsibility is to let loose something like a white worm. This worm would examine machines and block RPC holes. It would effectively do virus checking and advise the user/ISP. Of course this is possibly subject to a lot of abuse, both from illegal crackers and the legalized kind.
Hell no!
Going online is not a privilege to be doled out by the State. Participation in the collective cyberspace of humankind should be construed as a right, not a privilege. That said, I think it is quite legitimate to hold persons in the cyber community responsible for their actions. But there are many trade offs involved.