Already there. Knoppix does pretty much what you're describing.
Yeah, like I said, it's the kind of model pioneered by Knoppix, and of course I'm just projecting what I do now with Knoppix and which seems so incredibly useful: all your data sits on a removable device like a USB dongle that is entirely portable to any PC, and all your OS and applications sit on a bootable CD. You get all the security of a Linux diskless "terminal", without any of the hassle of setting up the network.
Having set-up several PCs for people to use, on this basis, in the last few weeks, I'm suddenly asking myself why I ever need to install an OS again... and thus my comment. Linux makes this possible in a way no other OS ever has, and I believe it's creating the way for a shift in the way we use (or could use) PC hardware.
Using Linux for a CD-ROM bootable game is no simple thing. It assumes full and excellent detection of hardware: graphics, sounds,...
I see the future and it looks like this: a bootable Linux CD with my choice of applications, and a USB dongle with my/home. Need new software? Download a new ISO, burn it. Take any PC (office, home, cybercafe), insert CD, boot, insert dongle, work/play.
It is a revolutionary way of using PCs. And only possible (AFAICS) with Linux and the kind of support provided by Knoppix et al.
I predict 12 months before bootable Linux CDs become a completely standard model for games and application distribution, and 24 months before Microsoft attempt an imitation.
It's a basic rule of employment, accept the money, play by the rules.
If one of my employees did or said something that was obviously against the interests of my business, I would reprimand and possibly fire him. If they discussed this in public, I would blacklist him as a "big mouth".
What Greer says is something I also believe, but unfortunately being right does not pay the bills. He has probably made himself unemployable by any conventional organisation, and will have to find a way to leverage his notoriety into another kind of power: lobbyist, perhaps.
...comes naturally from any relatively fair exchange of goods and services.
All one has to do is give people a domain in which they can exchange their services. Even "average" people (if there was such a thing) can participate in this process, and do, all the time.
A major problem with modern society is that in the interests of scale and efficiency, we have turned general skills into vertical niches. Our modern enterprises are like complex factories, where each skill serves only one very specific need.
My preferred method of getting people involved in creating wealth is to give them challenges which if they can solve, they can make some money. For example, I'm organizing concerts for local groups, and everyone who participates is a volunteer. But if the venue takes off, and we get a regular public, there will be a few full-time jobs at the end of it. It may take a year, and probably two-thirds of those who start will drop out and be replaced, but it's something real that does create wealth.
Similarly, I'm organizing a school for local children to learn IT. Not "Office", but system admin, fixing PCs, basics of programming, etc. Again, everyone who participates is a volunteer but at the end of it, we'll have some young guys with more skills, more prospects, and more wealth, and a couple of part-time jobs running the place.
Wealth creation is about exchange, and everyone, even the most "average" person has things they can do easier, cheaper, or better than someone else. When they can exchange this, they create wealth.
If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck it probably is a duck. "Smartmobs" looks and sounds like technogabble, and probably is. There is no sign at all that even a sophisticated urban public has any inclination to form "mobs", smart or stupid, except as part of a passing fashion.
Yes, you can get a couple hundred artists to mob a shoestore. Once, maybe twice. But try getting most people to think beyond the five minute/five day horizon of their lives? Good luck!
It's not a matter of technology. People just don't, for the most part, have the excess energy for things like instant parties.
Besides, what's the "African village" business? I wish people who wrote such comments would actually go to an African village and take a look. As a model of economical, ecological, and sociological stability and harmony, it's hard to do better. What... the... heck do you want to go adding "smart mobs" to this for?
Each time struggling to get it installed and working on my hardware, and thereafter wondering what I was going to do with it.
I think it's nice to see alternatives to the mainstream, but this ranks alongside Kontiki as a sheer folly, in the Victorian sense.
Operating systems have become entirely commoditized, and now serve only as platforms for running applications, more than ever in the past.
The future operating system is invisible, boots onto whatever hardware you happen to have lying around, and lets you keep your work on cheap removable media. Take Knoppix 3.0 with USB memory plug as an example.
I don't think I will be buying a third BeOS.
Excellent for insurance
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
An RFID scanner, a small portable application, and I can inventory the contents of my house and get fair insurance in a couple of hours.
Not to mention tracing stolen couches.
I got burglared a month or two back, and ripped off by the insurance last week, and this is one application I could go for.
Presumably there will be a market in removing RFIDs from objects, but it's like serial numbers on cars and computers and mobile phones: do you really object that someone, somewhere, knows your taste in cars? For me, it's easily worth the security.
Although... my car was also stolen, and although the thieves abandoned it 4 days afterwards, the cops did not tell me about it, two months later I got a huge bill from the car pound where it had been towed.
Which is both good and bad: don't expect the authorities to be even semi-capable of using such technology in any meaningful way; they can't even be bothered to read the 6-character license plate off recovered vehicles.
Why is the plant is so small? Jurassic plants were much larger because the CO2 content was higher and the planet was warmer and damper. Quite a difference between that and modern Australia. It's typical of species that survive in niche environments that they adapt to shortage of nutrients by shrinking over time.
The boys, now in their late teens, decide to hold a reunion on They Island. They all get there, except Piggy, who is now running a rubberwear franchise in Taipei and can't make time.
After five hours on The Island, their Net link goes down and the Boys find themselves cut off from civilisation. It's Deja Vu all over again!
The group splits into two, the first half decide to call themselves "the Lost Artists" and they try to recover their cultural heritage by recording every pop song they know (acappela) onto a portable MD player.
But they only get as far as BoyzRUs, "Gotta little itch", before the second part of the group, who have ripped their t-shirts and now call themselves the "Island Pirates", descend in fury and steal all the precious minidiscs.
The pirates stop only to smash everything they can find, snort some cocaine that was handily lying around, and then flee, laughing evilly, into the hills.
Our heroes, stunned by the barbarism of it all, take a few minutes to collect their senses, and some precious original Brittney CDs, then they give chase.
Hours later, in a craggy valley high in the hills, the two groups confront each other. "You stole our music", cry the white-shirted artists. "It was just lying around", the black-shirted pirates retort, throwing stones and the occasional piece of dried hog dung. "Property is theft," they continue, "it all belongs to the people, and we are the people, so fuck off!"
The artists can take no more. They play their Brittney CDs, which being 100% legal, have none of those nasty bumps and scratches, at full volume on a salvaged boom box. The pirates collapse onto the ground, unable to resist the pure power of Brittney as she hits them with that Asian sound. The artists take large rocks and smash them onto the pirate's heads. "Steal our music, yeah?" SMASH!! "Property is theft?" CRASH!!!
Just then, the Internet link comes back up. A voice comes over the mobile VOIP: "Hey sorry for that 5-minute downtime, our router was being fixed. It's all OK again now".
The artists collect themselves, thankful that civilisation has rescued them from total descent into barbarism.
I'm sure the RIAA will quickly get a reputation for being so incredibly cool and streetwise that kids will diss each other for daring to P2P.
Or perhaps exactly the opposite? I've always thought that a good way of teaching kids that something is incredibly cool is to tell them, in school, why it's a bad idea.
Go RIAA!! You are just hastening your own destruction. Ever thought that people share because it's something they feel is innately a good thing? Ever thought that you cannot, by definition, educate people out of innate behaviour? Ever thought that when the rules are broken by a majority of people, the rules have become meaningless?
Even if you understand the equations behind socioeconomic movements, it is impossible to turn these into medium or long-term predictions given the impossibility of measuring the current state accurately.
But it's likely that such theories can be used to make models - like weather maps - that allow short-term prediction of events with a certain degree of accuracy.
Presumably a single state ruling against this makes the entire DNC list unenforcable. "Oh, hi, we're just calling to check whether you're in Oklahoma or not. Hey, since you're on the line, can we explain why you want a new kitchen?"
How well democracy works.
And can then be sabotaged by one or two well-placed bribes. Oh, sorry, was I speaking out loud?
The DNC list is a triumph of Internet activism, and a courtroom should not be allowed to overrule one's right to a peaceful evening at home.
In 1992, we were supporting a large COBOL application that was trying to run on an undersized mini (some kind of nasty French system, a BULL/TDS) that tried to immitate an IBM mainframe but with pathetically little memory.
The RDBMS was Oracle, which ran reasonably well because it had its own CPU, and about five times more RAM than the main system.
But the applications had lots of problems getting their data into memory.
So, we made a memory-to-disk serialization system, in COBOL with a few assembler subroutines. It was quite fun: swapping large amounts of data into large sequential files addressed by record number. It was also incredibly robust, mainly because it was so simple.
It was also at least 3000 times faster than the Oracle database, and I'd reckon (since we never tested this) probably around 50,000 to 100,000 times faster. That's easy when you are basically acting as a memory swap system: 95% of your accesses are from live memory.
But... but... this is _not_ a database product and it is an unfair and unwise comparison.
A database holds long-term persistent data and (most vitally) makes this available to multiple readers and writers through various non-trivial locking mechanisms. Additionally, a relational database provides non-trivial mechanisms for indexing and searching and linking this data together.
Lastly, and so very, very importantly, a database is independent from the application programming language. I am 100% sure I could read that same Oracle database today, in C, PHP, Perl, Java, or even COBOL if I could find a compiler.
Separating the database from your application implementation is such a fundamental design principle for serious application development (along with separation of the UI) that this concept, however fast and neat, is something I'd reject out of hand for anything our company made.
This is what it should do. Sit on an idle and protected partition on the hard drive. Allow Windows to be installed as usual. Then, after six months, or every time there is a BSOD, virus attack, new piece of hardware that needs the now unfindable installation CDROM, popup a little window saying:
Hi. I see that you're having some trouble
using your Windows operating system. Would
you like me to install Lindows so that all
your problems will disappear?
I'd tend to agree except that you're probably overreacting to what I said.
You will find my own comments on previous stories where I discuss the recent findings that parental influence on children is incredibly low, less than genetics and less than peer influences. To me, with a daughter of 3 weeks, it's already clear that we are born with a character and we develop that character despite, not thanks to, the influences we receive.
However... the study was based on historical data of women born in Canada around the turn of the century, a large and complete population, and the only firm conclusion it drew was that there was a statistically-significant difference in fertility, as measured by the number of grand children, depending on the month of birth.
You have confused the two basic units of LOC conversion, the "screen" and the "pixel". The theoretical data capacity of 1 pixel was 1.25e6 bytes, so 125LOC/pixel.
Which, as I have said earlier, is within the limits of LOC estimation.
Conrad and Goulding seem to have it about right...
They have it entirely wrong: in the abscence of existing social structures the very first thing we do it try to recreate them, and this almost always works unless someone is actively suppressing us.
The Hobbesian view of human nature as inherently brutal ignores the reality we see around us, that most people are kind and generous and willing to pay a significant personal price to see justice and fairness applied to others.
Society is not something brought from outside, it is something that comes from inside us.
Your comments about "primitive communism" are typical of the misguided attempts to frame the discussion in 20th century political terms.
It is much simpler. In societies where success is a matter of luck rather than hard work, obsessive sharing (what you call "primitive communism") is a successful survival strategy. Feed your relatives when you get lucky, and they will feed you when it's their turn. I've seen this in action, in extended African families such as the one I married into, and it is anything except "primitive" and anything except "communism".
Secondly, in societies where success comes from hard work (typically starting with reliable agriculture), this model of sharing breaks down incredibly rapidly, into a model of hoarding and what you might call "primitive capitalism" if you were being fair in your descriptions.
Humans naturally and successfully adapt their societies to the circumstances in which they find themselves. This works, and has worked for millions of years.
And yes, some societies are brutal, but it's no more a default situation than any of the other options. When brutality is the key to survival, humans can become incredible brutal. But when peaceful cooperation will get you more karma, that is the route we choose.
To pretend that we are natural brutes, domesticated and tamed by a paternal society is to ignore the obvious truth of history and the world around us.
Actually, and this is serious...
on
IT Career Horoscopes
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Research has shown that the time of birth does have an impact on your life, especially in countries with sharp seasonal differences.
Things like the amount of food available to your pregnant mother, the amount of sun light you got when you were a few weeks old, the temperature you had to adapt to when you were a toddler... these seem to have an impact in later life.
The specific study was on fertility in Canadian women, and showed a difference of (IIRC) 40%+ between those born in the summer and those born in the winter.
So, before you laugh, there might actually be some basis for assuming that "Capricorns are always horny" and "Leos are dishonest".
Please read the comment on the nature of the LOC unit. Thank you.
By the way, the number of electrons in a gram of phosphorous is about 2e22. Assuming 1 gram of the stuff on an monitor, and a 1600x1200 resolution, that's about 1e16 electrons per pixel, and assuming 1 bit per electron (somewhat beyond the state of today's spintronics, but not unimaginable), that's 1,250,000 Gb of data.
But, the LOC is the standard unit for measuring unquantifiably huge amounts of storage since (a) no-one knows exactly how big a LOC is, so they cannot dispute your estimate, and (b) the LOC always gets larger, and thus the estimate of "I can fit N LOCs into that space", where N is an integer between 1 and 100, remains accurate despite the logrithmic nature of storage growth.
I for one have never been able to convert LOCs to bushels, and I have no intention of starting now!
Initially, it was "if the damn idiot can get it wrong, he will", which was an indictment of poor design assuming that the user was smart, when we all know that a smart design assumes the user is stoned and half-asleep on a muggy Monday morning.
The victims of Murphy's Law then turned around and said "if the system can go wrong, it will", which was around the same period we invented the notion of "computer error".
Finally, Murphy's Law made the leap to non-technological domains, "if something can break, it will, in the worst possible way".
So Murphy's Law today delegates responsibility for our fuck-ups to the hostile hand of fate, whereas Murphy's original comment was all about our own responsibility for making systems that actually work.
Indeed, the strong abuse the weak, but they do it within very specific and almost formal ways. The strong abuse the weak exactly as much as the weak tolerate without leaving the group. The children need each other, because without the weak, the strong are nothing either. The common need creates the group, but the disparities in ability and strength create the possibility for exploitation.
Street children can survive in incredibly difficult circumstances, but it's not a coincidence: those groups which tolerate too much parasitical behaviour by the stronger members simply break up.
My example of street kids can be taken literally or as a metaphor for wider human society. Mutual need, to survive, has always been the driving force behind human cooperation and human society, be it child or adult.
For a counter example to LOTF, you should read "If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi. That is a book worth teaching to young people.
Well, allegories are fine. Animal Farm is at least a clear caricature of historical events. LOTF is sociofiction: not based on real events, or on documented cases. If it is a moral story about adult human society, it has the same failings as if it was literal fiction about children. Adults do not spontaneously resort to violence without specific triggers, none of which are even hinted at in the book.
Animal Farm carefully examines how the lust for power makes an egalitarian system impossible, how when freed from their human masters, the animals recreate the same structures of power and control they tried to hard to escape, how the revolution eats its own children, and why the destruction of political structures is so much worse than the gentle reformation of them.
Lord of The Flies just says: little boys are nasty things that go around poking each other with sharp sticks, and that's it as far as serious analysis goes. Metaphor or not, it stinks as much as the pigs head that forms the most interesting and relevant character in the book.
Like I said, it is propaganda, widely used by teachers to instill fear in children.
Fiction like this says a lot more about the author than it says about the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Already there. Knoppix does pretty much what you're describing.
Yeah, like I said, it's the kind of model pioneered by Knoppix, and of course I'm just projecting what I do now with Knoppix and which seems so incredibly useful: all your data sits on a removable device like a USB dongle that is entirely portable to any PC, and all your OS and applications sit on a bootable CD. You get all the security of a Linux diskless "terminal", without any of the hassle of setting up the network.
Having set-up several PCs for people to use, on this basis, in the last few weeks, I'm suddenly asking myself why I ever need to install an OS again... and thus my comment. Linux makes this possible in a way no other OS ever has, and I believe it's creating the way for a shift in the way we use (or could use) PC hardware.
Using Linux for a CD-ROM bootable game is no simple thing. It assumes full and excellent detection of hardware: graphics, sounds,...
/home. Need new software? Download a new ISO, burn it. Take any PC (office, home, cybercafe), insert CD, boot, insert dongle, work/play.
I see the future and it looks like this: a bootable Linux CD with my choice of applications, and a USB dongle with my
It is a revolutionary way of using PCs. And only possible (AFAICS) with Linux and the kind of support provided by Knoppix et al.
I predict 12 months before bootable Linux CDs become a completely standard model for games and application distribution, and 24 months before Microsoft attempt an imitation.
Just love it...
It's a basic rule of employment, accept the money, play by the rules.
If one of my employees did or said something that was obviously against the interests of my business, I would reprimand and possibly fire him. If they discussed this in public, I would blacklist him as a "big mouth".
What Greer says is something I also believe, but unfortunately being right does not pay the bills. He has probably made himself unemployable by any conventional organisation, and will have to find a way to leverage his notoriety into another kind of power: lobbyist, perhaps.
...comes naturally from any relatively fair exchange of goods and services.
All one has to do is give people a domain in which they can exchange their services. Even "average" people (if there was such a thing) can participate in this process, and do, all the time.
A major problem with modern society is that in the interests of scale and efficiency, we have turned general skills into vertical niches. Our modern enterprises are like complex factories, where each skill serves only one very specific need.
My preferred method of getting people involved in creating wealth is to give them challenges which if they can solve, they can make some money. For example, I'm organizing concerts for local groups, and everyone who participates is a volunteer. But if the venue takes off, and we get a regular public, there will be a few full-time jobs at the end of it. It may take a year, and probably two-thirds of those who start will drop out and be replaced, but it's something real that does create wealth.
Similarly, I'm organizing a school for local children to learn IT. Not "Office", but system admin, fixing PCs, basics of programming, etc. Again, everyone who participates is a volunteer but at the end of it, we'll have some young guys with more skills, more prospects, and more wealth, and a couple of part-time jobs running the place.
Wealth creation is about exchange, and everyone, even the most "average" person has things they can do easier, cheaper, or better than someone else. When they can exchange this, they create wealth.
Just my 2c.
If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck it probably is a duck. "Smartmobs" looks and sounds like technogabble, and probably is. There is no sign at all that even a sophisticated urban public has any inclination to form "mobs", smart or stupid, except as part of a passing fashion.
Yes, you can get a couple hundred artists to mob a shoestore. Once, maybe twice. But try getting most people to think beyond the five minute/five day horizon of their lives? Good luck!
It's not a matter of technology. People just don't, for the most part, have the excess energy for things like instant parties.
Besides, what's the "African village" business? I wish people who wrote such comments would actually go to an African village and take a look. As a model of economical, ecological, and sociological stability and harmony, it's hard to do better. What... the... heck do you want to go adding "smart mobs" to this for?
Each time struggling to get it installed and working on my hardware, and thereafter wondering what I was going to do with it.
I think it's nice to see alternatives to the mainstream, but this ranks alongside Kontiki as a sheer folly, in the Victorian sense.
Operating systems have become entirely commoditized, and now serve only as platforms for running applications, more than ever in the past.
The future operating system is invisible, boots onto whatever hardware you happen to have lying around, and lets you keep your work on cheap removable media. Take Knoppix 3.0 with USB memory plug as an example.
I don't think I will be buying a third BeOS.
An RFID scanner, a small portable application, and I can inventory the contents of my house and get fair insurance in a couple of hours.
Not to mention tracing stolen couches.
I got burglared a month or two back, and ripped off by the insurance last week, and this is one application I could go for.
Presumably there will be a market in removing RFIDs from objects, but it's like serial numbers on cars and computers and mobile phones: do you really object that someone, somewhere, knows your taste in cars? For me, it's easily worth the security.
Although... my car was also stolen, and although the thieves abandoned it 4 days afterwards, the cops did not tell me about it, two months later I got a huge bill from the car pound where it had been towed.
Which is both good and bad: don't expect the authorities to be even semi-capable of using such technology in any meaningful way; they can't even be bothered to read the 6-character license plate off recovered vehicles.
Why is the plant is so small? Jurassic plants were much larger because the CO2 content was higher and the planet was warmer and damper. Quite a difference between that and modern Australia. It's typical of species that survive in niche environments that they adapt to shortage of nutrients by shrinking over time.
OK, so you all knew this already.
Lord of The Flies II - The Return
The boys, now in their late teens, decide to hold a reunion on They Island. They all get there, except Piggy, who is now running a rubberwear franchise in Taipei and can't make time.
After five hours on The Island, their Net link goes down and the Boys find themselves cut off from civilisation. It's Deja Vu all over again!
The group splits into two, the first half decide to call themselves "the Lost Artists" and they try to recover their cultural heritage by recording every pop song they know (acappela) onto a portable MD player.
But they only get as far as BoyzRUs, "Gotta little itch", before the second part of the group, who have ripped their t-shirts and now call themselves the "Island Pirates", descend in fury and steal all the precious minidiscs.
The pirates stop only to smash everything they can find, snort some cocaine that was handily lying around, and then flee, laughing evilly, into the hills.
Our heroes, stunned by the barbarism of it all, take a few minutes to collect their senses, and some precious original Brittney CDs, then they give chase.
Hours later, in a craggy valley high in the hills, the two groups confront each other. "You stole our music", cry the white-shirted artists. "It was just lying around", the black-shirted pirates retort, throwing stones and the occasional piece of dried hog dung. "Property is theft," they continue, "it all belongs to the people, and we are the people, so fuck off!"
The artists can take no more. They play their Brittney CDs, which being 100% legal, have none of those nasty bumps and scratches, at full volume on a salvaged boom box. The pirates collapse onto the ground, unable to resist the pure power of Brittney as she hits them with that Asian sound. The artists take large rocks and smash them onto the pirate's heads. "Steal our music, yeah?" SMASH!! "Property is theft?" CRASH!!!
Just then, the Internet link comes back up. A voice comes over the mobile VOIP: "Hey sorry for that 5-minute downtime, our router was being fixed. It's all OK again now".
The artists collect themselves, thankful that civilisation has rescued them from total descent into barbarism.
I'm sure the RIAA will quickly get a reputation for being so incredibly cool and streetwise that kids will diss each other for daring to P2P.
Or perhaps exactly the opposite? I've always thought that a good way of teaching kids that something is incredibly cool is to tell them, in school, why it's a bad idea.
Go RIAA!! You are just hastening your own destruction. Ever thought that people share because it's something they feel is innately a good thing? Ever thought that you cannot, by definition, educate people out of innate behaviour? Ever thought that when the rules are broken by a majority of people, the rules have become meaningless?
Very amusing.
Even if you understand the equations behind socioeconomic movements, it is impossible to turn these into medium or long-term predictions given the impossibility of measuring the current state accurately.
But it's likely that such theories can be used to make models - like weather maps - that allow short-term prediction of events with a certain degree of accuracy.
Presumably a single state ruling against this makes the entire DNC list unenforcable. "Oh, hi, we're just calling to check whether you're in Oklahoma or not. Hey, since you're on the line, can we explain why you want a new kitchen?"
How well democracy works.
And can then be sabotaged by one or two well-placed bribes. Oh, sorry, was I speaking out loud?
The DNC list is a triumph of Internet activism, and a courtroom should not be allowed to overrule one's right to a peaceful evening at home.
In 1992, we were supporting a large COBOL application that was trying to run on an undersized mini (some kind of nasty French system, a BULL/TDS) that tried to immitate an IBM mainframe but with pathetically little memory.
The RDBMS was Oracle, which ran reasonably well because it had its own CPU, and about five times more RAM than the main system.
But the applications had lots of problems getting their data into memory.
So, we made a memory-to-disk serialization system, in COBOL with a few assembler subroutines. It was quite fun: swapping large amounts of data into large sequential files addressed by record number. It was also incredibly robust, mainly because it was so simple.
It was also at least 3000 times faster than the Oracle database, and I'd reckon (since we never tested this) probably around 50,000 to 100,000 times faster. That's easy when you are basically acting as a memory swap system: 95% of your accesses are from live memory.
But... but... this is _not_ a database product and it is an unfair and unwise comparison.
A database holds long-term persistent data and (most vitally) makes this available to multiple readers and writers through various non-trivial locking mechanisms. Additionally, a relational database provides non-trivial mechanisms for indexing and searching and linking this data together.
Lastly, and so very, very importantly, a database is independent from the application programming language. I am 100% sure I could read that same Oracle database today, in C, PHP, Perl, Java, or even COBOL if I could find a compiler.
Separating the database from your application implementation is such a fundamental design principle for serious application development (along with separation of the UI) that this concept, however fast and neat, is something I'd reject out of hand for anything our company made.
This is what it should do. Sit on an idle and protected partition on the hard drive. Allow Windows to be installed as usual. Then, after six months, or every time there is a BSOD, virus attack, new piece of hardware that needs the now unfindable installation CDROM, popup a little window saying:
Hi. I see that you're having some trouble
using your Windows operating system. Would
you like me to install Lindows so that all
your problems will disappear?
[OK] [Not yet] [Tell me more]
I'd tend to agree except that you're probably overreacting to what I said.
You will find my own comments on previous stories where I discuss the recent findings that parental influence on children is incredibly low, less than genetics and less than peer influences. To me, with a daughter of 3 weeks, it's already clear that we are born with a character and we develop that character despite, not thanks to, the influences we receive.
However... the study was based on historical data of women born in Canada around the turn of the century, a large and complete population, and the only firm conclusion it drew was that there was a statistically-significant difference in fertility, as measured by the number of grand children, depending on the month of birth.
This has nothing to do with parenting.
Good question, my comment was too vague.
40% more grandchildren, was the actual figure.
Ah, sir, I beg to correct you.
You have confused the two basic units of LOC conversion, the "screen" and the "pixel". The theoretical data capacity of 1 pixel was 1.25e6 bytes, so 125LOC/pixel.
Which, as I have said earlier, is within the limits of LOC estimation.
Conrad and Goulding seem to have it about right...
They have it entirely wrong: in the abscence of existing social structures the very first thing we do it try to recreate them, and this almost always works unless someone is actively suppressing us.
The Hobbesian view of human nature as inherently brutal ignores the reality we see around us, that most people are kind and generous and willing to pay a significant personal price to see justice and fairness applied to others.
Society is not something brought from outside, it is something that comes from inside us.
Your comments about "primitive communism" are typical of the misguided attempts to frame the discussion in 20th century political terms.
It is much simpler. In societies where success is a matter of luck rather than hard work, obsessive sharing (what you call "primitive communism") is a successful survival strategy. Feed your relatives when you get lucky, and they will feed you when it's their turn. I've seen this in action, in extended African families such as the one I married into, and it is anything except "primitive" and anything except "communism".
Secondly, in societies where success comes from hard work (typically starting with reliable agriculture), this model of sharing breaks down incredibly rapidly, into a model of hoarding and what you might call "primitive capitalism" if you were being fair in your descriptions.
Humans naturally and successfully adapt their societies to the circumstances in which they find themselves. This works, and has worked for millions of years.
And yes, some societies are brutal, but it's no more a default situation than any of the other options. When brutality is the key to survival, humans can become incredible brutal. But when peaceful cooperation will get you more karma, that is the route we choose.
To pretend that we are natural brutes, domesticated and tamed by a paternal society is to ignore the obvious truth of history and the world around us.
Research has shown that the time of birth does have an impact on your life, especially in countries with sharp seasonal differences.
Things like the amount of food available to your pregnant mother, the amount of sun light you got when you were a few weeks old, the temperature you had to adapt to when you were a toddler... these seem to have an impact in later life.
The specific study was on fertility in Canadian women, and showed a difference of (IIRC) 40%+ between those born in the summer and those born in the winter.
So, before you laugh, there might actually be some basis for assuming that "Capricorns are always horny" and "Leos are dishonest".
Please read the comment on the nature of the LOC unit. Thank you.
By the way, the number of electrons in a gram of phosphorous is about 2e22. Assuming 1 gram of the stuff on an monitor, and a 1600x1200 resolution, that's about 1e16 electrons per pixel, and assuming 1 bit per electron (somewhat beyond the state of today's spintronics, but not unimaginable), that's 1,250,000 Gb of data.
Enough for a few LOCs, I believe.
But, the LOC is the standard unit for measuring unquantifiably huge amounts of storage since (a) no-one knows exactly how big a LOC is, so they cannot dispute your estimate, and (b) the LOC always gets larger, and thus the estimate of "I can fit N LOCs into that space", where N is an integer between 1 and 100, remains accurate despite the logrithmic nature of storage growth.
I for one have never been able to convert LOCs to bushels, and I have no intention of starting now!
In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.
.
Incredible, really. I could store the Library of Congress in the LCD pixels represented by this:
Several times, I suspect.
Initially, it was "if the damn idiot can get it wrong, he will", which was an indictment of poor design assuming that the user was smart, when we all know that a smart design assumes the user is stoned and half-asleep on a muggy Monday morning.
The victims of Murphy's Law then turned around and said "if the system can go wrong, it will", which was around the same period we invented the notion of "computer error".
Finally, Murphy's Law made the leap to non-technological domains, "if something can break, it will, in the worst possible way".
So Murphy's Law today delegates responsibility for our fuck-ups to the hostile hand of fate, whereas Murphy's original comment was all about our own responsibility for making systems that actually work.
Indeed, the strong abuse the weak, but they do it within very specific and almost formal ways. The strong abuse the weak exactly as much as the weak tolerate without leaving the group. The children need each other, because without the weak, the strong are nothing either. The common need creates the group, but the disparities in ability and strength create the possibility for exploitation.
Street children can survive in incredibly difficult circumstances, but it's not a coincidence: those groups which tolerate too much parasitical behaviour by the stronger members simply break up.
My example of street kids can be taken literally or as a metaphor for wider human society. Mutual need, to survive, has always been the driving force behind human cooperation and human society, be it child or adult.
For a counter example to LOTF, you should read "If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi. That is a book worth teaching to young people.
Well, allegories are fine. Animal Farm is at least a clear caricature of historical events. LOTF is sociofiction: not based on real events, or on documented cases. If it is a moral story about adult human society, it has the same failings as if it was literal fiction about children. Adults do not spontaneously resort to violence without specific triggers, none of which are even hinted at in the book.
Animal Farm carefully examines how the lust for power makes an egalitarian system impossible, how when freed from their human masters, the animals recreate the same structures of power and control they tried to hard to escape, how the revolution eats its own children, and why the destruction of political structures is so much worse than the gentle reformation of them.
Lord of The Flies just says: little boys are nasty things that go around poking each other with sharp sticks, and that's it as far as serious analysis goes. Metaphor or not, it stinks as much as the pigs head that forms the most interesting and relevant character in the book.
Like I said, it is propaganda, widely used by teachers to instill fear in children.
Fiction like this says a lot more about the author than it says about the rest of the world.