It wasn't stable to last in Soviet Union, because it couldn't be (and wasn't) built there at that time. Bolsheviks realised that well, but they didn't have a choice. There was no other strong political force, and someone had to take power (with czar overthrown and with Russia fighting in the WW1). After that they had to keep the power and after the Civil War they started to build the production capacity. Russia was predominantly an agrarian country, but under communists it was quickly turned into a modern industrialized state that managed to defeat Nazi Germany in WW2 and to become a superpower. Unfortunately, that still wasn't enough to actually transform to communism. And you can't have a supposedly comminist country with state capitalism/socialism economic system, just like you couldn't have a capitalist democracy in 10th century Europe.
When production capacities are sufficient, communism will be not just stable, it will for some time the only stable economic order. Of course, now it is conceivable that even communism will relatively soon be replaced by a posthuman society, but during a decade or two (around 2020-2050) it will probably be quite common in the world.
Sorry, but I have to question how much you know about communism if you claim that it still uses money. Or if you claim that decisions are made politically, while factional conflict was specifically discouraged, and Lenin (and others) argued that when you know the correct answer, everyone should embrace it. These are just two things, but if you don't know about this, you don't know anything about communism (other than government propaganda). I suggest you read up on it, you might be really surprised when you find out that the technocratic ideas are not so original after all.
An average farmer could be trained to do manual work at the factory. Some training was needed, but not very much. With robots, there might not be (that's what the parent and Brain argue) any job for those 50% (or 90%) of the people, simply because even the new jobs could be performed by robots. And you can develop new robots as fast as you can invent new jobs.
If we want to understand transitions between social orders, we need to check what Marx and Engels wrote (and also how scientists in Soviet Union, especially in late Soviet Union, elaborated on marxism). And they told that there will not be an upgraded capitalism, there will be a new socio-economic formation. It's called communism. BTW, the ideas of late communist scientists are somewhat similar to the transhumanist ideas. They both realised that we will soon have an "artificial nature" - the environment that provides stuff to humans, without much work on our part.
So robots (and then nanorobots + AI) ARE a bigger deal than factories and computers were.
I don't know very much about technocracy, but I would guess that ideas like communism weren't too popular among the governments of the 30s and 40s. That would explain why the obvious links to Marx would be concealed.
Even today (!) many people still use "communism" as a synonym of totalitarism and "communist" as a swear-word. It's understandable (although sad) that some movements want to distance themselves from communism.
McDonalds, Microsoft, and Major Movie labels.... You might enjoy the little know fact that the biggest piramide scheme in post-Soviet Russia was the company called MMM.:)
Printing money in the pre-industrial economy is stupid, because you can't correspondingly increase production.
Printing money in robotics-based economy is ok, because you are not limited in production factors. You can easily make more robots to process more resources, to build more solar/wind power plants and to make more robots. Of course, there are still some limits and they are quite close (until we get to nanotech), but the ultrafast growth will become possible with robots.
Today the economic theory teaches us about two sides of the GDP. One side is production - everything that comprises the GDP is consumed by a human somewhere. And the second side is wages - every dollar of costs eventually reaches some person as his salary.
With robots, when it becomes possible to replace workers with robots, some parts of the salary side will disappear. In a market that would lead to dropping prices. It seems that Brain makes a stupid assumption that relative prices will stay constant - that's just nonsense. Anyway, the government can maintain this equilibrium by charging every McDonalds about 5000-10000$ per month - the equivalent of current salaries (here we ignore the costs of robots) and pay it back in the form of these $25000 subsidies. Eventually the economy will have the majority of money rotating without purpose (... companies -> "robotic salary payments" -> government -> 25K subsidies -> companies ->...). At this point the government should nationalise the robotised industries and make their products and services free.
Welcome into communism. Communist Party of Soviet Union promised to build it by 1980. They were overoptimistic, because Russia was not ready for the transition to communism and everyone (including the bolsheviks) knew that even before 1917. But our generation will live under communism (for some time).
Peasants/workers were very poorly educated then. That's why one of the tasks of the bolsheviks was to teach the workers. As Lenin wrote, it was absolutely vital to explain dialectic materialism to workers. Today nobody cares about advanced philosophy courses for the masses, but fortunately, people today are educated enough to be a driving force in the revolution. Actually, I don't see why intelligentsia can't lead the revolution once again. Many of them are quite capable of thinking about the common good and working to achieve that.
First half of the article was almost bearable. I though that it was a definite improvement after the original Robotic Nation. But then he started suggesting reform ideas... If everyone in the States is so narrow-minded, it's going to be extremely funny to look at capitalism trying to reform itself into communism. Brain may be a smart guy, but when I started reading his ideas, like ads on dollar bills, I cannot help but laugh.
Soviet Union always tried to boost production levels. More coal, more oil, more tractors, more grain, more machines, more electricity, more everything. They knew very well that to build communism (instead of socialism) they needed high economic development. But the Soviet Union started too early. It was impossible to reach the necessary levels without advanced computers, telecommunications, and yes, robots. And the Soviet Union didn't have stamina to last more than 70 years.
Now the USA, the EU and other developed countries finally approach the necessary production capabilities. Brain is correct in his estimates. But where he is totally wrong, is that with high production capabilities communism is inevitable. No props will support the falling capitalism in a few decades. There is no way to revitalise it by cash injections fueled by ads or national lotteries.:) There are two main possible outcomes: 1) Governments (or at least some forward-looking politicians) realise it and start the transition to communism. 2) Workers revolt.:)
Let's hope, for the sake of American citizens, that the government will be smart enough (and not very corrupt).
There was a mod for Quake 2 (Jailbreak or something like that), where on dying you was transported into a prison at the enemy base. You could either escape (required a team effort to jump on each other) or wait for your free teammates to resque you.
Even with all the terrible accidents (one, to be more specific), Concorde is still much more capable than a meteorite. And it's not that meteorites evolved through natural selection. Howether, you actually can say that about meteoroids - they did evolve, while meteorites and meteors can be considered "unfit".:) But if we limit ourselves to comparing evolution on Earth with the achievements of human science and technology, meteor*s do not enter the picture.
Some supertankers weight at least 500 thousand tons empty. Less than a million (although there might be ones that weight more), but still impressive. And hopefully the Freedom Ship will be built soon.
That's cool.:) The only thing that spoils the fun is the fact that Click Here to Win! is not in the index (this time not because of DMCA, but because of robots.txt).
The point is not to support AltaVista, but to 1) communicate to Google the idea that the users don't want it to censor the results 2) show people that there are alternatives to Google. We will be too vulnerable using only Google - having a single point of failure is always bad.
I am really disturbed by the tendency of people to proclaim "scientists are no match for millions of years of evolution" after scientists understand (somewhat) another mystery. Look, this achievement is the first step after a long preparatory work. Now for the first time scientists really understand what is going on. Yes, they still don't know some aspects of the process, but they are just getting started. The area of bionics is booming. Just recently we could read in the news that engineers are building submarines that swim without propellers - by moving the "tail" instead. Yes, their crude attempts are no match for a dolphin, but give them time. We have supersonic aicrafts, we have spaceships, we can dig more than 10km deep into the Earth, we can move from the ocean surface into the Mariana trench in the same craft, we can build moving objects weighting million tons! Can the nature do that? Did the evolution do that? The answer is a resounding no!
So wait a few years (at most a decade) and artificial spider silk will be stronger than natural. After a decade more we will have not only stronger, but ligher, more flexible, cheaper and overall better threads than any spider will ever have. Evolution is too slow and we gave it a huge start - billions of years. And we are gaining on it now.
It's impossible to perceive it as neutral if they remove links at the request of others. Currently Google presents biased information regarding Kazaa Lite. I don't think blocking all Kazaa links for certain period (or may be just providing an empty results page with information for users about DMCA and Sharman's threats and a link for those who still want to search for "kazaa", which would lead to all searches, except lite). I am not suggesting they score any points, political or otherwise. I am just saying that bowing to unreasonable requests (legal, but that's an abuse of a bad law) doesn't present a search engine in the best light. I don't usually give a shit about boycotts and I will use Google if I decide that I need it, but for now my default engine is Altavista (and I e-mailed Google about it).
Altavista is now a pretty good search engine. Sponsored links may be annoying, but they are clearly marked and can be removed by a simple Proxomitron filter (remove all pairs that include "*Sponsored*"). I just may be as happy with it, as I was with Google.
So Japan, Korea, China share the need for coherent Unicode support in their software at OS and application level. This is something missing from anything one can put together today in the West, either using Windows or Linux. How about MacOS? I've heard it's built to support Unicode from the group up. I don't know about input support, but anyway, may be Asian countries should just Switch?
There isn't much that you can do about this, but I suggest at least sending an e-mail to Google. Let them know what people think. I just sent an e-mail and informed them that I will not use Google to search for anything other than "kazaa lite", unless the links are restored.
P.S. This once again demonstrates the danger of the "whole Internet" depending on a single monopoly, no matter how well-intended and how much liked by the users. This is a risk that we should not agree to bear.
It's sad that Google decided not to do just that. Since they are under no obligation to index ANY sites, they could have just removed all pages that have high relevance on "kazaa" query. That would really send a message to the lawyers that you don't force search engines to filter results. Unfortunately, Google didn't do that and established an ugly precedent. It's good that they at least included the DMCA mention, but it's bad nevertheless. And it would be much better if the notice was at the top, on a bright red background, like a MEGA-SPONSORED link, so that noone could miss it.:) It would also be great if they listed in plain text the sites that they are prohibited from linking to.:) But alas, they were too frightened.:( I don't know why, because obviously, no sane judge would order Google to close, no matter what...
As you can see, most of it is code in system DLLs. Of course, it has been shown in the past that MS code is bloat. We can safely assume that 90-95% of the typical DLL is never used. Some useless resources, uncompressed bitmaps and crap like that. A lot of space is occupied by dll cache, a completely stupid feature made to solve a completely stupid problem. The rest of the WINNT directory is bloat as well, the problem is that it's distributed bloat and you can't easily pinpoint it and say "remove this file" (although that was done for Win95 recently very successfully). All files are bloated and all look like they serve some function. But they are bloated, oh yes, they are.
Don't be sorry, it's all right. I jsut want to mention the possibility of letting Trillian run their own server (connected to the MSN servers to interconnect these two segments of MSN IM network). This might be a fair solution as well. Of course, it all depends on how much money MS wants to get.
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It wasn't stable to last in Soviet Union, because it couldn't be (and wasn't) built there at that time. Bolsheviks realised that well, but they didn't have a choice. There was no other strong political force, and someone had to take power (with czar overthrown and with Russia fighting in the WW1). After that they had to keep the power and after the Civil War they started to build the production capacity. Russia was predominantly an agrarian country, but under communists it was quickly turned into a modern industrialized state that managed to defeat Nazi Germany in WW2 and to become a superpower. Unfortunately, that still wasn't enough to actually transform to communism. And you can't have a supposedly comminist country with state capitalism/socialism economic system, just like you couldn't have a capitalist democracy in 10th century Europe.
When production capacities are sufficient, communism will be not just stable, it will for some time the only stable economic order. Of course, now it is conceivable that even communism will relatively soon be replaced by a posthuman society, but during a decade or two (around 2020-2050) it will probably be quite common in the world.
Sorry, but I have to question how much you know about communism if you claim that it still uses money. Or if you claim that decisions are made politically, while factional conflict was specifically discouraged, and Lenin (and others) argued that when you know the correct answer, everyone should embrace it. These are just two things, but if you don't know about this, you don't know anything about communism (other than government propaganda). I suggest you read up on it, you might be really surprised when you find out that the technocratic ideas are not so original after all.
An average farmer could be trained to do manual work at the factory. Some training was needed, but not very much. With robots, there might not be (that's what the parent and Brain argue) any job for those 50% (or 90%) of the people, simply because even the new jobs could be performed by robots. And you can develop new robots as fast as you can invent new jobs.
If we want to understand transitions between social orders, we need to check what Marx and Engels wrote (and also how scientists in Soviet Union, especially in late Soviet Union, elaborated on marxism). And they told that there will not be an upgraded capitalism, there will be a new socio-economic formation. It's called communism. BTW, the ideas of late communist scientists are somewhat similar to the transhumanist ideas. They both realised that we will soon have an "artificial nature" - the environment that provides stuff to humans, without much work on our part.
So robots (and then nanorobots + AI) ARE a bigger deal than factories and computers were.
I don't know very much about technocracy, but I would guess that ideas like communism weren't too popular among the governments of the 30s and 40s. That would explain why the obvious links to Marx would be concealed.
Even today (!) many people still use "communism" as a synonym of totalitarism and "communist" as a swear-word. It's understandable (although sad) that some movements want to distance themselves from communism.
That's precisely the point made by Bob Black in his 1985 essay "The Abolition of Work".
McDonalds, Microsoft, and Major Movie labels.... :)
You might enjoy the little know fact that the biggest piramide scheme in post-Soviet Russia was the company called MMM.
Printing money in the pre-industrial economy is stupid, because you can't correspondingly increase production.
Printing money in robotics-based economy is ok, because you are not limited in production factors. You can easily make more robots to process more resources, to build more solar/wind power plants and to make more robots. Of course, there are still some limits and they are quite close (until we get to nanotech), but the ultrafast growth will become possible with robots.
Today the economic theory teaches us about two sides of the GDP. One side is production - everything that comprises the GDP is consumed by a human somewhere. And the second side is wages - every dollar of costs eventually reaches some person as his salary.
With robots, when it becomes possible to replace workers with robots, some parts of the salary side will disappear. In a market that would lead to dropping prices. It seems that Brain makes a stupid assumption that relative prices will stay constant - that's just nonsense. Anyway, the government can maintain this equilibrium by charging every McDonalds about 5000-10000$ per month - the equivalent of current salaries (here we ignore the costs of robots) and pay it back in the form of these $25000 subsidies. Eventually the economy will have the majority of money rotating without purpose (... companies -> "robotic salary payments" -> government -> 25K subsidies -> companies ->...). At this point the government should nationalise the robotised industries and make their products and services free.
Welcome into communism. Communist Party of Soviet Union promised to build it by 1980. They were overoptimistic, because Russia was not ready for the transition to communism and everyone (including the bolsheviks) knew that even before 1917. But our generation will live under communism (for some time).
Peasants/workers were very poorly educated then. That's why one of the tasks of the bolsheviks was to teach the workers. As Lenin wrote, it was absolutely vital to explain dialectic materialism to workers. Today nobody cares about advanced philosophy courses for the masses, but fortunately, people today are educated enough to be a driving force in the revolution. Actually, I don't see why intelligentsia can't lead the revolution once again. Many of them are quite capable of thinking about the common good and working to achieve that.
First half of the article was almost bearable. I though that it was a definite improvement after the original Robotic Nation. But then he started suggesting reform ideas... If everyone in the States is so narrow-minded, it's going to be extremely funny to look at capitalism trying to reform itself into communism. Brain may be a smart guy, but when I started reading his ideas, like ads on dollar bills, I cannot help but laugh.
:) There are two main possible outcomes: :)
Soviet Union always tried to boost production levels. More coal, more oil, more tractors, more grain, more machines, more electricity, more everything. They knew very well that to build communism (instead of socialism) they needed high economic development. But the Soviet Union started too early. It was impossible to reach the necessary levels without advanced computers, telecommunications, and yes, robots. And the Soviet Union didn't have stamina to last more than 70 years.
Now the USA, the EU and other developed countries finally approach the necessary production capabilities. Brain is correct in his estimates. But where he is totally wrong, is that with high production capabilities communism is inevitable. No props will support the falling capitalism in a few decades. There is no way to revitalise it by cash injections fueled by ads or national lotteries.
1) Governments (or at least some forward-looking politicians) realise it and start the transition to communism.
2) Workers revolt.
Let's hope, for the sake of American citizens, that the government will be smart enough (and not very corrupt).
There was a mod for Quake 2 (Jailbreak or something like that), where on dying you was transported into a prison at the enemy base. You could either escape (required a team effort to jump on each other) or wait for your free teammates to resque you.
Even with all the terrible accidents (one, to be more specific), Concorde is still much more capable than a meteorite. And it's not that meteorites evolved through natural selection. Howether, you actually can say that about meteoroids - they did evolve, while meteorites and meteors can be considered "unfit". :) But if we limit ourselves to comparing evolution on Earth with the achievements of human science and technology, meteor*s do not enter the picture.
Some supertankers weight at least 500 thousand tons empty. Less than a million (although there might be ones that weight more), but still impressive. And hopefully the Freedom Ship will be built soon.
That's cool. :) The only thing that spoils the fun is the fact that Click Here to Win! is not in the index (this time not because of DMCA, but because of robots.txt).
The point is not to support AltaVista, but to
1) communicate to Google the idea that the users don't want it to censor the results
2) show people that there are alternatives to Google. We will be too vulnerable using only Google - having a single point of failure is always bad.
AltaVista knows it as well. And AltaVista is better, because it doesn't block sites under DCMA yet.
Boycott Google!
I am really disturbed by the tendency of people to proclaim "scientists are no match for millions of years of evolution" after scientists understand (somewhat) another mystery. Look, this achievement is the first step after a long preparatory work. Now for the first time scientists really understand what is going on. Yes, they still don't know some aspects of the process, but they are just getting started. The area of bionics is booming. Just recently we could read in the news that engineers are building submarines that swim without propellers - by moving the "tail" instead. Yes, their crude attempts are no match for a dolphin, but give them time. We have supersonic aicrafts, we have spaceships, we can dig more than 10km deep into the Earth, we can move from the ocean surface into the Mariana trench in the same craft, we can build moving objects weighting million tons! Can the nature do that? Did the evolution do that? The answer is a resounding no!
So wait a few years (at most a decade) and artificial spider silk will be stronger than natural. After a decade more we will have not only stronger, but ligher, more flexible, cheaper and overall better threads than any spider will ever have. Evolution is too slow and we gave it a huge start - billions of years. And we are gaining on it now.
It's impossible to perceive it as neutral if they remove links at the request of others. Currently Google presents biased information regarding Kazaa Lite. I don't think blocking all Kazaa links for certain period (or may be just providing an empty results page with information for users about DMCA and Sharman's threats and a link for those who still want to search for "kazaa", which would lead to all searches, except lite). I am not suggesting they score any points, political or otherwise. I am just saying that bowing to unreasonable requests (legal, but that's an abuse of a bad law) doesn't present a search engine in the best light. I don't usually give a shit about boycotts and I will use Google if I decide that I need it, but for now my default engine is Altavista (and I e-mailed Google about it).
Altavista is now a pretty good search engine. Sponsored links may be annoying, but they are clearly marked and can be removed by a simple Proxomitron filter (remove all pairs that include "*Sponsored*"). I just may be as happy with it, as I was with Google.
So Japan, Korea, China share the need for coherent Unicode support in their software at OS and application level. This is something missing from anything one can put together today in the West, either using Windows or Linux.
How about MacOS? I've heard it's built to support Unicode from the group up. I don't know about input support, but anyway, may be Asian countries should just Switch?
There isn't much that you can do about this, but I suggest at least sending an e-mail to Google. Let them know what people think. I just sent an e-mail and informed them that I will not use Google to search for anything other than "kazaa lite", unless the links are restored.
P.S. This once again demonstrates the danger of the "whole Internet" depending on a single monopoly, no matter how well-intended and how much liked by the users. This is a risk that we should not agree to bear.
It seems that once again it's time to place Blue ribbons on our websites and webpages...
It's sad that Google decided not to do just that. Since they are under no obligation to index ANY sites, they could have just removed all pages that have high relevance on "kazaa" query. That would really send a message to the lawyers that you don't force search engines to filter results. Unfortunately, Google didn't do that and established an ugly precedent. It's good that they at least included the DMCA mention, but it's bad nevertheless. And it would be much better if the notice was at the top, on a bright red background, like a MEGA-SPONSORED link, so that noone could miss it. :) It would also be great if they listed in plain text the sites that they are prohibited from linking to. :) But alas, they were too frightened. :( I don't know why, because obviously, no sane judge would order Google to close, no matter what...
I don't have WinXP, I use Windows 2000. It currently takes about 1Gb. Here is a picture of the contents made using Sequoia.
http://www.lut.fi/~medvedev/misc/winnt.jpg
As you can see, most of it is code in system DLLs. Of course, it has been shown in the past that MS code is bloat. We can safely assume that 90-95% of the typical DLL is never used. Some useless resources, uncompressed bitmaps and crap like that. A lot of space is occupied by dll cache, a completely stupid feature made to solve a completely stupid problem. The rest of the WINNT directory is bloat as well, the problem is that it's distributed bloat and you can't easily pinpoint it and say "remove this file" (although that was done for Win95 recently very successfully). All files are bloated and all look like they serve some function. But they are bloated, oh yes, they are.
I think it's time to switch to Miranda. It is open source, free and supports ICQ/AIM/MSN/Jabber protocols. Don't know if it runs on Linux, though.
Don't be sorry, it's all right. I jsut want to mention the possibility of letting Trillian run their own server (connected to the MSN servers to interconnect these two segments of MSN IM network). This might be a fair solution as well. Of course, it all depends on how much money MS wants to get.
In Soviet Russia - explanation on Everything2.
Very simple. Encrypt and sign.