I think people that use homeopathic medicine should be allowed to marry.
But only in extreme dilution like say 10e-30th of couples per country. After all, from an evolutionary standpoint, assuming they'd pass that "belief" along to their kids, that makes for a stronger... solution... (oh I love/. puns)
Practitioners and patients of Homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine seem to believe that they work. Wouldn't it be good to devote some resources towards scientific study of these practices? Even if it's to prove that the placebo effect is playing a part, at least science is advanced. Just because we don't understand whether/how it works doesn't rule out the possibility that there might be something to be discovered. If we want to be objective about it, why not study it?
Its more profitable to study self deception and con-artistry in the School-of-Economics or Poli-Sci or the business classes or religion classes if your institution has them. You could argue that's all those guys do all day.
Taking "their thing" into the science labs would probably be about as inappropriate as trying to wedge voltammetry electrochemical analysis into the theology class, just a big WTF for all involved..
science insists on being able to measure stuff with a physical instrument (human perception not being good enough).
On one hand, I want to make fun of the "soft sciences" like psych. On the other hand, I want to make fun of the alternative loons by pointing out... practically all pre-1980-ish psych experiments (post 1980 psych students started hauling early home computers into the lab, probably because they were tired of writing down the data).
Just part of our decent into a post-industrial dark age, where technology is magic to most folks.
And since it's magic, why shouldn't other forms of magic work?
Next thing you know, we'll be engraving our coinage with trust in religious beings. Maybe that'll fix the economy?
The problem is we're trying homeopathetic treatment on the inflation adjusted median midle class family income. After all, the lower the income, the more effective each dollar is, right?
Another angle is that I'm reading a novel, some historical event is mentioned, and I pop over to Wiki or something to fill in any knowledge gap. I learned something. Yay.
There's a nice librivox recording of Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around the World", from about 110 years ago, which assumes you have memorized a maritime map. I sspent lots of time while listening, google map-ing strange locations. For example, one of the small islands off the east coast of Australia discovered by captain cook "north solitary island", which back then was probably "known to everyone" as a recent discovery? Well, recent discovery as in less than 100 years before his generation, as opposed to 240 years before our time...
Similarly, I wish wikipedia had been around the first time I read Herodotus and Xenophon and similar. All I had was a cruddy map in the back of the book.
Now taking bets on 10:1 odds that after posting this, some joker adds spliceman to the wiki page. Frankly it probably does belong there.
Yes, I am one of "those guys" who trys to make my perl scripts Perl::Critic compliant, in addition to running them thru perltidy. The closest thing I know of for Ruby is "laser" and I don't know a good reformatting tool for Ruby.
Re:Nice hacker
on
GitHub Hacked
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Also, the process of carefully crafting weird http traffic to insert unexpected things is exactly the process for SQL injection, except obviously strange non-developer intended attributes are being inserted instead of "sql EOL character followed by big sql fun" from a classic sql injection attack. Its a very close analogy... The meta-rule that both specific rules lives under is if you're depending on the general internet public to send you something, you can expect someone out there to send you some absolutely crazy stuff and you better be prepared for absolutely anything. If you're not planning on getting UTF-16 encoded XML with embedded COBOL source code for an Intercal interpreter, there's someone in China coding it up right now, so you better get ready for it...
His alternative way to describe how it works and at least one way to avoid it was pretty good, regardless of his analogy analysis skills... I though "as few words as possible" and "more or less the equivalent" was about as wishy washy as I could be when tossing an analogy out there. True, I may have a low/. UID, but I wasn't exactly Moses reading the commandments off the tablets there... And if I was I'd have better commandments than this one...
I enjoy the immersible experience of recreational reading but you can't smell a f*cking eBook!
I love to plant my face right in the middle of a book and breath deeply and long. I like to fan out the pages of a book and then allow it to compress slowly, burping out its scented air.
After some late night alcohol consumption (I don't drink much) I got into a conversation about selling scented "bookmarks" to squoosh into your kindle case along with the kindle for people with your... interests... but we could never get a straight answer on the smell you're looking for. Which I suppose fragments the market.
There's a slightly musty smell which probably violates some health dept rules due to mold. Or the "old cellulose" odor (smell some old raw carpentry wood, not pine or cedar obviously). Then there's the slight, very slight acidic tang of browning decaying books. And mostly the organic solvent stench of inks.
The solution we came up with, which will probably make a true book lover throw up, was to grind up and solvent extract old books... like when "half price books" can't even move it, rather than incineration or donation to prisons or whatever they do, we'd take care of it for them. The main killer of our idea was what solvent to extract with, that would not interfere with the stench of fresh ink.
Further beer consumption led to origami style hardcover book "covers" for ipads and kindles. Looks, feels, smells just like a hardcover book, but there's a tablet in there.
I don't remember it all but more beer led to an add on scratch and sniff or iSmell appliance for adventure, action, historical, and erotica novels.
After sobering up the next morning, these brilliant ideas didn't go anywhere. Probably for the best.
We gave up at the point of researching aromatherapy smells. I expect they probably have something you'd like.
Personally, my biggest problem with ebooks on the tablet is that there isn't a great selection available from the public library. Our library has a really great selection of paper books, but for ebooks they're quite limited--mostly due to the publishers.
You're going to the wrong public library. My paper books public library is downtown by the river about a 15 minute drive away, but my ebooks public library is old fashioned u****t (1) alt.binaries.whatever it is and to a lesser extent the torrent sites. Poor handling of djvu files on tablets annoys me. Also some of the PDFs I have are excellent scans on a desktop but 80 gigs is a big large for a tablet to eat.
1) The first rule of u****t is we don't talk about u****t....
Re:I like both forms, but printed is still best
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 1
Sadly $100 is less than the cost of one paper textbook. Crazy but true.
Re:I like both forms, but printed is still best
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 1
I would love to see publishers include a scratch off code or receipt activated code with books to get the ebook version. Kind of similar to how you can get the portable version of a movie.
A link to the torrent on the pirate bay would probably be more effective and cheaper, and its probably there already anyway.
I'd disagree in that the hidden assumption of the cruddy article is reading is a virtue and puritan style self denial of the much more fun alternatives is the only reason anyone reads anything. F that bad idea. I'm a big boy and no one tells me what to do in my spare time and if I wanna look at boring youtube videos I do so, and if I wanna read, I read, because I want to. I just finished Stross's laundry series and most recently Halting State. No I'm not being paid to astroturf and yes those were entertaining kind of light hard science fiction and I didn't read them out of some desire for hair shirt denigration but because I greatly enjoyed them.
If I'm reading and I want to stop reading, I'm a big boy, I can just stop, I don't need some far fetched explanation of how its all the devices fault that the email app zapped out of cyberspace like a bad ST:TNG episode and pulled me away while wearing a Sherlock Holmes costume. Its very much like people who blame the gun after one gang member shoots another, instead of blaming the person who intentionally pulled the trigger. Lame.
Once you operate and excise the lameness from the article, there's sadly not much left to it. Whoops.
2) Smart people don't vote (which makes you question how smart they really are).
Here is an excellent list of reasons not to vote, titled "Why I Do Not Vote by Michael S. Rozeff". I don't support everything rockwell and/or rozeff has ever said because I'm not the blind follower type; arguments based on guilt by association are not going to have much impact. I do strongly support everything in this individual article of theirs. You're operating from a position of weakness by assuming intelligence = voting with absolutely no reasoning to back it up. The article contains a considerable amount of reasoning for the opposing view. Please read it, think about it, share it, etc. You might even like it, or change your mind.
Only those with IQ above certain threshold and with the basic ability of logical thinking should be allowed to vote. Of course, the latter constraint excludes all those with illogical belief in any kind of deity.
Even worse, the theists will probably interpret the latter constraint as only evangelical christians should be allowed to vote.
I would support a religious based government where religion takes control when and only when a predefined miracle occurs. When the pope can walk on water, then and only after then he should be able to dictate worldwide contraception laws. Till then, well...
Would a kickstarter project for the next NASA mars probe payable using income tax vouchers be the idea? I like the idea of nuclear submarine builders groveling for contributors on kickstarter.
I have given considerable financial support to several different documentary films on kickstarter... I like the kickstarter funding model.
The way this will probably be subverted is we can't have a kickstarter project for every little street pothole, so we'll probably end up with like two projects we can select which to fund, both of them porked up to the max one called choice D and one called choice R and both fundamentally the same. Or at the very least we'll have mission creep where the only way to fund the nuclear waste depository will be to fund a project that also funds, say, military dirty bomb deployment. Lots of "This project aims to feed starving children; also builds a bridge to nowhere"
rely on the government to educate and inform us, when they gain power over us by poorly educating us and propagandizing. Which leads to worse govt, leading to worse education and information, leading to...
You need a way to break that cycle. I like the idea of abolishing legislative elections and raising a random draft of single term congresspeople. At least in the house, maybe.
Also a veto-only nonhereditary dictatorship (basically a supreme court) for the executive branch and maybe legislative too. Need someone in the loop unafraid to say "no".
The US is too far gone to be able to fix the problem at this point.
Agreed but you could try it again on the reboot.
I've often though that getting rid of legislative branch voting would be a good idea and replace it with tax revenue directed toward the political party of your choice and any party getting over 5% of the vote gets to run its own government from the top down, or at least at some upper budgeting level. Taxes where you can't specify your party like sales/vending machine taxes would have to be unconstitutional. I would imagine the EPA would get most of its funding from green party taxpayers and the DOD would get most of its funding from republican taxpayers. The libertarian taxpayers would have their money spent hiring their own govt employees to intentionally grief the other parties employees so they can't grief the general public.
but there's no way to ensure the enlightenment and benevolence.
I was going to suggest an non-hereditary oligarchy of Nobel Prize Winners, thinking of dudes like the deceased Saint Feynman, but then I thought of some of the recent peace prize winners so that's not gonna work out so well.... you'd have to dump the peace and economics laureates completely, then maybe a dictatorship of American born Nobel Prize Laureates would work.
It explains the popularity of Sarah Palin. Well, other than all the men who just wanted to see her naked perhaps.
She's not that great looking. I'd consider voting for her just so she has a job and doesn't have to pose for playboy to pay the bills. Pres might not be a good position but she seems to be right around the median level of the average school board / PTO, or maybe clerk of courts, or dogcatcher.
are they making a case for eugenics or eliminating democracy?
My first guess was more along the lines of bringing back the poll tax and reducing (eliminating?) the rest of the taxes. I think that's an excellent idea, you only get to influence the government if you pay for the government.
A veto-powers-only non-hereditary dictatorship would not be a terribly bad idea either. Essentially a supreme court for the legislative and executive branches. I'm not clear why the judicial branch gets lifetime veto-only dictators but the other branches miss out on this valuable feature.
Yeah, well intelligence isn't the measure of all things. If given the choice, I would rather live under a kind-hearted, mentally disabled dictator than under a ruthless, intelligent one.
The more intelligent someone with a cruel heart is, the worse everyone else will be off.
This reasoning begins with the theory that its possible to be a ruthless sociopath and be intelligent at the same time. Historically that has been a recipe for the sociopath and/or descendents to be slaughtered in a civil war or collapse and invaded from outside. If you gotta be a sociopath, and you have to be, to be a leader, then a smart one is one who at least fakes not being a sociopath as much as possible so as to survive as long and gloriously as possible.
The really smart way to run it is keep it in the family, let the peasants select one brother or another who have the same exact marching orders but wildly different marketing campaigns, and keep them happy. This is the D vs R thing in the USA
Another way is the mafia style keep the civillians out of it. So occasionally a president's lawyer commits suicide in an empty park by shooting himself in the head... multiple times... OK obvious criminal act but thats the President's Laywer not the dude down the street from me, so "eh". This is the defense otherwise known as "Who shot jfk? Who cares, they're not shooting at me... besides hillbilly handfishin is on TV tonight"
"Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they 'effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.''"
I would still say that's a plus.
Needs more research. Best bet is find a country/place/culture with separation of church and state, and do a comparative study of the "quality" of elected political leaders vs dictatorial appointed religious leaders vs oligarchical business leaders.
In the USA, trying all three leader selection criteria with more or less the same underlying population, I'd say the pedo priests, crooked politicians, and sociopath CEOs all end up around the same low level disproving the original assumption.
Randomly selected juries and randomly selected military draftees seem to screw up less than the other selection criteria... I'm thinking a draft would work better.
Re:GitHub hacked
on
GitHub Hacked
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you can't imagine a way that unfettered access to *alter* an exceptionally popular piece of software, virtually undetected
I can't imagine a way to do that with git. Sorry, its just pretty hard to do, especially "virtually undetected". git just doesn't work that way. Probably a hell of a lot easier and more likely to succeed and frankly cheaper to get commit rights "the right way" and then sneak in 100 perfectly legit real world commits and just one with an intentional bug or issue or whatever. Now, if by "... alter... popular... software.." you mean something like modify the github site and user provided data itself to point to some images on some.ru domain that include yet another drive by MSIE exploit, sure that could probably have been done. But the git hosted projects are basically safe, assuming anyone is actually using them.
Which brings up an interesting attack vector, if you find generic abandoned mp3 player number 2352 on sf or github and "take it over" by whatever means, then you could put weird stuff into it without anyone noticing since no one git pulls it. This could be a problem.
Re:What no Guantanamo Bay for him?
on
GitHub Hacked
·
· Score: 1
For those who don't get the "joke" he's about as close to being an insider as a outsider can be. It would be kind of like Alan Cox posting a GIT commit in the 3.0 series using Linus's account for April Fools Day, although thats technically wrong, no ones going to freak out, or at least his odds of waterboarding are no greater than any other random innocent civilian, in other words too high in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense pretty low odds... Actually putting this in writing probably ruins the chances of Alan and Linus doing this as a april fools joke...
Slashdot Mirror
I think people that use homeopathic medicine should be allowed to marry.
But only in extreme dilution like say 10e-30th of couples per country. After all, from an evolutionary standpoint, assuming they'd pass that "belief" along to their kids, that makes for a stronger ... solution... (oh I love /. puns)
Practitioners and patients of Homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine seem to believe that they work. Wouldn't it be good to devote some resources towards scientific study of these practices? Even if it's to prove that the placebo effect is playing a part, at least science is advanced. Just because we don't understand whether/how it works doesn't rule out the possibility that there might be something to be discovered. If we want to be objective about it, why not study it?
Its more profitable to study self deception and con-artistry in the School-of-Economics or Poli-Sci or the business classes or religion classes if your institution has them. You could argue that's all those guys do all day.
Taking "their thing" into the science labs would probably be about as inappropriate as trying to wedge voltammetry electrochemical analysis into the theology class, just a big WTF for all involved..
science insists on being able to measure stuff with a physical instrument (human perception not being good enough).
On one hand, I want to make fun of the "soft sciences" like psych. On the other hand, I want to make fun of the alternative loons by pointing out ... practically all pre-1980-ish psych experiments (post 1980 psych students started hauling early home computers into the lab, probably because they were tired of writing down the data).
Just part of our decent into a post-industrial dark age, where technology is magic to most folks.
And since it's magic, why shouldn't other forms of magic work?
Next thing you know, we'll be engraving our coinage with trust in religious beings. Maybe that'll fix the economy?
The problem is we're trying homeopathetic treatment on the inflation adjusted median midle class family income. After all, the lower the income, the more effective each dollar is, right?
And if the postman knocks her up, the baby only gets hyperdiluted powdered formula. After all, the lower the concentration, the more effective it is!
Another angle is that I'm reading a novel, some historical event is mentioned, and I pop over to Wiki or something to fill in any knowledge gap. I learned something. Yay.
There's a nice librivox recording of Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around the World", from about 110 years ago, which assumes you have memorized a maritime map. I sspent lots of time while listening, google map-ing strange locations. For example, one of the small islands off the east coast of Australia discovered by captain cook "north solitary island", which back then was probably "known to everyone" as a recent discovery? Well, recent discovery as in less than 100 years before his generation, as opposed to 240 years before our time...
Similarly, I wish wikipedia had been around the first time I read Herodotus and Xenophon and similar. All I had was a cruddy map in the back of the book.
Rephrased, its a static code analysis tool for mRNA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis
Now taking bets on 10:1 odds that after posting this, some joker adds spliceman to the wiki page. Frankly it probably does belong there.
Yes, I am one of "those guys" who trys to make my perl scripts Perl::Critic compliant, in addition to running them thru perltidy. The closest thing I know of for Ruby is "laser" and I don't know a good reformatting tool for Ruby.
Also, the process of carefully crafting weird http traffic to insert unexpected things is exactly the process for SQL injection, except obviously strange non-developer intended attributes are being inserted instead of "sql EOL character followed by big sql fun" from a classic sql injection attack. Its a very close analogy... The meta-rule that both specific rules lives under is if you're depending on the general internet public to send you something, you can expect someone out there to send you some absolutely crazy stuff and you better be prepared for absolutely anything. If you're not planning on getting UTF-16 encoded XML with embedded COBOL source code for an Intercal interpreter, there's someone in China coding it up right now, so you better get ready for it...
His alternative way to describe how it works and at least one way to avoid it was pretty good, regardless of his analogy analysis skills... I though "as few words as possible" and "more or less the equivalent" was about as wishy washy as I could be when tossing an analogy out there. True, I may have a low /. UID, but I wasn't exactly Moses reading the commandments off the tablets there... And if I was I'd have better commandments than this one...
I enjoy the immersible experience of recreational reading but you can't smell a f*cking eBook!
I love to plant my face right in the middle of a book and breath deeply and long. I like to fan out the pages of a book and then allow it to compress slowly, burping out its scented air.
After some late night alcohol consumption (I don't drink much) I got into a conversation about selling scented "bookmarks" to squoosh into your kindle case along with the kindle for people with your ... interests ... but we could never get a straight answer on the smell you're looking for. Which I suppose fragments the market.
There's a slightly musty smell which probably violates some health dept rules due to mold. Or the "old cellulose" odor (smell some old raw carpentry wood, not pine or cedar obviously). Then there's the slight, very slight acidic tang of browning decaying books. And mostly the organic solvent stench of inks.
The solution we came up with, which will probably make a true book lover throw up, was to grind up and solvent extract old books... like when "half price books" can't even move it, rather than incineration or donation to prisons or whatever they do, we'd take care of it for them. The main killer of our idea was what solvent to extract with, that would not interfere with the stench of fresh ink.
Further beer consumption led to origami style hardcover book "covers" for ipads and kindles. Looks, feels, smells just like a hardcover book, but there's a tablet in there.
I don't remember it all but more beer led to an add on scratch and sniff or iSmell appliance for adventure, action, historical, and erotica novels.
After sobering up the next morning, these brilliant ideas didn't go anywhere. Probably for the best.
We gave up at the point of researching aromatherapy smells. I expect they probably have something you'd like.
Personally, my biggest problem with ebooks on the tablet is that there isn't a great selection available from the public library. Our library has a really great selection of paper books, but for ebooks they're quite limited--mostly due to the publishers.
You're going to the wrong public library. My paper books public library is downtown by the river about a 15 minute drive away, but my ebooks public library is old fashioned u****t (1) alt.binaries.whatever it is and to a lesser extent the torrent sites. Poor handling of djvu files on tablets annoys me. Also some of the PDFs I have are excellent scans on a desktop but 80 gigs is a big large for a tablet to eat.
1) The first rule of u****t is we don't talk about u****t....
Sadly $100 is less than the cost of one paper textbook. Crazy but true.
I would love to see publishers include a scratch off code or receipt activated code with books to get the ebook version. Kind of similar to how you can get the portable version of a movie.
A link to the torrent on the pirate bay would probably be more effective and cheaper, and its probably there already anyway.
Self discipline is dead.
I'd disagree in that the hidden assumption of the cruddy article is reading is a virtue and puritan style self denial of the much more fun alternatives is the only reason anyone reads anything. F that bad idea. I'm a big boy and no one tells me what to do in my spare time and if I wanna look at boring youtube videos I do so, and if I wanna read, I read, because I want to. I just finished Stross's laundry series and most recently Halting State. No I'm not being paid to astroturf and yes those were entertaining kind of light hard science fiction and I didn't read them out of some desire for hair shirt denigration but because I greatly enjoyed them.
If I'm reading and I want to stop reading, I'm a big boy, I can just stop, I don't need some far fetched explanation of how its all the devices fault that the email app zapped out of cyberspace like a bad ST:TNG episode and pulled me away while wearing a Sherlock Holmes costume. Its very much like people who blame the gun after one gang member shoots another, instead of blaming the person who intentionally pulled the trigger. Lame.
Once you operate and excise the lameness from the article, there's sadly not much left to it. Whoops.
2) Smart people don't vote (which makes you question how smart they really are).
Here is an excellent list of reasons not to vote, titled "Why I Do Not Vote by Michael S. Rozeff". I don't support everything rockwell and/or rozeff has ever said because I'm not the blind follower type; arguments based on guilt by association are not going to have much impact. I do strongly support everything in this individual article of theirs. You're operating from a position of weakness by assuming intelligence = voting with absolutely no reasoning to back it up. The article contains a considerable amount of reasoning for the opposing view. Please read it, think about it, share it, etc. You might even like it, or change your mind.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff224.html
Only those with IQ above certain threshold and with the basic ability of logical thinking should be allowed to vote.
Of course, the latter constraint excludes all those with illogical belief in any kind of deity.
Even worse, the theists will probably interpret the latter constraint as only evangelical christians should be allowed to vote.
I would support a religious based government where religion takes control when and only when a predefined miracle occurs. When the pope can walk on water, then and only after then he should be able to dictate worldwide contraception laws. Till then, well...
Would a kickstarter project for the next NASA mars probe payable using income tax vouchers be the idea? I like the idea of nuclear submarine builders groveling for contributors on kickstarter.
I have given considerable financial support to several different documentary films on kickstarter... I like the kickstarter funding model.
The way this will probably be subverted is we can't have a kickstarter project for every little street pothole, so we'll probably end up with like two projects we can select which to fund, both of them porked up to the max one called choice D and one called choice R and both fundamentally the same. Or at the very least we'll have mission creep where the only way to fund the nuclear waste depository will be to fund a project that also funds, say, military dirty bomb deployment. Lots of "This project aims to feed starving children; also builds a bridge to nowhere"
rely on the government to educate and inform us, when they gain power over us by poorly educating us and propagandizing. Which leads to worse govt, leading to worse education and information, leading to ...
You need a way to break that cycle. I like the idea of abolishing legislative elections and raising a random draft of single term congresspeople. At least in the house, maybe.
Also a veto-only nonhereditary dictatorship (basically a supreme court) for the executive branch and maybe legislative too. Need someone in the loop unafraid to say "no".
The US is too far gone to be able to fix the problem at this point.
Agreed but you could try it again on the reboot.
I've often though that getting rid of legislative branch voting would be a good idea and replace it with tax revenue directed toward the political party of your choice and any party getting over 5% of the vote gets to run its own government from the top down, or at least at some upper budgeting level. Taxes where you can't specify your party like sales/vending machine taxes would have to be unconstitutional. I would imagine the EPA would get most of its funding from green party taxpayers and the DOD would get most of its funding from republican taxpayers. The libertarian taxpayers would have their money spent hiring their own govt employees to intentionally grief the other parties employees so they can't grief the general public.
but there's no way to ensure the enlightenment and benevolence.
I was going to suggest an non-hereditary oligarchy of Nobel Prize Winners, thinking of dudes like the deceased Saint Feynman, but then I thought of some of the recent peace prize winners so that's not gonna work out so well.... you'd have to dump the peace and economics laureates completely, then maybe a dictatorship of American born Nobel Prize Laureates would work.
It explains the popularity of Sarah Palin. Well, other than all the men who just wanted to see her naked perhaps.
She's not that great looking. I'd consider voting for her just so she has a job and doesn't have to pose for playboy to pay the bills. Pres might not be a good position but she seems to be right around the median level of the average school board / PTO, or maybe clerk of courts, or dogcatcher.
are they making a case for eugenics or eliminating democracy?
My first guess was more along the lines of bringing back the poll tax and reducing (eliminating?) the rest of the taxes. I think that's an excellent idea, you only get to influence the government if you pay for the government.
A veto-powers-only non-hereditary dictatorship would not be a terribly bad idea either. Essentially a supreme court for the legislative and executive branches. I'm not clear why the judicial branch gets lifetime veto-only dictators but the other branches miss out on this valuable feature.
Yeah, well intelligence isn't the measure of all things. If given the choice, I would rather live under a kind-hearted, mentally disabled dictator than under a ruthless, intelligent one.
The more intelligent someone with a cruel heart is, the worse everyone else will be off.
This reasoning begins with the theory that its possible to be a ruthless sociopath and be intelligent at the same time. Historically that has been a recipe for the sociopath and/or descendents to be slaughtered in a civil war or collapse and invaded from outside. If you gotta be a sociopath, and you have to be, to be a leader, then a smart one is one who at least fakes not being a sociopath as much as possible so as to survive as long and gloriously as possible.
The really smart way to run it is keep it in the family, let the peasants select one brother or another who have the same exact marching orders but wildly different marketing campaigns, and keep them happy. This is the D vs R thing in the USA
Another way is the mafia style keep the civillians out of it. So occasionally a president's lawyer commits suicide in an empty park by shooting himself in the head ... multiple times ... OK obvious criminal act but thats the President's Laywer not the dude down the street from me, so "eh". This is the defense otherwise known as "Who shot jfk? Who cares, they're not shooting at me... besides hillbilly handfishin is on TV tonight"
"Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they 'effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.''"
I would still say that's a plus.
Needs more research. Best bet is find a country/place/culture with separation of church and state, and do a comparative study of the "quality" of elected political leaders vs dictatorial appointed religious leaders vs oligarchical business leaders.
In the USA, trying all three leader selection criteria with more or less the same underlying population, I'd say the pedo priests, crooked politicians, and sociopath CEOs all end up around the same low level disproving the original assumption.
Randomly selected juries and randomly selected military draftees seem to screw up less than the other selection criteria... I'm thinking a draft would work better.
If you can't imagine a way that unfettered access to *alter* an exceptionally popular piece of software, virtually undetected
I can't imagine a way to do that with git. Sorry, its just pretty hard to do, especially "virtually undetected". git just doesn't work that way. Probably a hell of a lot easier and more likely to succeed and frankly cheaper to get commit rights "the right way" and then sneak in 100 perfectly legit real world commits and just one with an intentional bug or issue or whatever. Now, if by "... alter ... popular ... software.." you mean something like modify the github site and user provided data itself to point to some images on some .ru domain that include yet another drive by MSIE exploit, sure that could probably have been done. But the git hosted projects are basically safe, assuming anyone is actually using them.
Which brings up an interesting attack vector, if you find generic abandoned mp3 player number 2352 on sf or github and "take it over" by whatever means, then you could put weird stuff into it without anyone noticing since no one git pulls it. This could be a problem.
For those who don't get the "joke" he's about as close to being an insider as a outsider can be.
It would be kind of like Alan Cox posting a GIT commit in the 3.0 series using Linus's account for April Fools Day, although thats technically wrong, no ones going to freak out, or at least his odds of waterboarding are no greater than any other random innocent civilian, in other words too high in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense pretty low odds... Actually putting this in writing probably ruins the chances of Alan and Linus doing this as a april fools joke...