Uh, you *do* realize that the "greying" you speak of mostly will occur in the U.S. and Europe (due to the baby boom created shortly after World War II), not in the rest of the world, right?
Besides, India has over 1 billion people. IIRC, only some fraction of 1% of them are actually employed in IT (for now). China has 1.2 billion people, and is in a similar situation.
In 1991, only 285 million of their then about 0.9 billion people were actually "economically active". Assuming the rate has remained approximately the same with India's growth, then about 316 million people now are "economically active" there. That only leaves, oh, about 700 million people as unproductive labor, waiting to be educated and put to work in IT (or engineering, or other fields)...
China has about 740 million of their 1.2 billion employed (assuming China isn't lying about these statistics). So there's another 500 million then in China who could be tapped for IT work, given the training and education (and that's ignoring the people they already employ in IT).
And then there's Russia, Belgium, the former Soviet-bloc eastern European nations, South Korea, etc. etc., which I haven't touched-upon... Believe me, there are *PLENTY* of people in other nations to fill whatever labor demands American businesses may have.
In short, for practical purposes, there is no "greying" you speak of, once you include the labor supplies of the world economy, not just the U.S. economy. Think globally, not locally.
The only thing the offshoring option has done is hold wages down a bit for the last three years, but prices in India are going up too.
Of course, there's always China, or Indonesia, or Singapore, or Russia, or Belgium, or South Korea, or Kenya, or Iraq, or Iran, or the former Soviet-bloc east-European nations, etc. etc.
India is certainly not the only nation on Earth with lower wages than the U.S. has which has a competent labor supply.
Re:Freedom of speech is absolute.
on
Revamping Freenet
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What you are conveniently forgetting is that the folks who look at the child porn are creating the market for it. Without them, there would be none.
You're looking at the problem from the demand-side, not supply-side. Low supply = unfilled demand = high price.
Analogize the problem of child porn to the problem of the drug trade. We've attacked the demand-side (users) for decades. Result? Half of our entire prison population is made up of non-violent offenders found posessing pot, crowding out more-worthy offenders (rapists, pedos, murderers, etc.). It's been as much a failure as the Prohibition that preceded it.
Going after the source hasn't been much more effective, but we have at various times managed to drive up the price of (for instance) heroin -- like when we went to war in Afghanistan a few years ago (Afghanistan's primary export, at something like 65% of GDP, was heroin). Going after the supply has been scarcely more-effective, but it is certainly more effective than going after the demand, because the suppliers are more centralized and less-numerous than the demanders are.
That is, supply-to-demand in any market is almost always a few-to-many relationship.
So it is with legal adult porn, and (I would guess) child porn as well... A few twisted kid-fiddlers peddling their wares to a larger audience which has a taste for it. Hence, we ought to go after the producers of child porn, cut an arm, and string them upside-down by their toes over a pool of hungry sharks.
In truth, both the supply and demand sides are a problem. As anywhere else in the economy, both must work in tandem to produce results; one cannot exist without the other. Supply doesn't necessarily create its own demand (look at the various e-commerce sites of the late 1990s that collapsed due to a stupid product/service), and demand doesn't necessarily create its own supply (everybody would like an extra $1 million in their bank accounts by tomorrow morning, but there's no way in hell that's going to be supplied (barring utterly *absurd* inflation)).
But going after the demand-side has been a proven failure time-and-again in virtually any other analogous case... Hence, I say the supply side -- like the root of any plant -- is ultimately the side that needs to be worked-against the most.
What's the implication then for Freenet? How about that the demanders of child porn who use Freenet are (or ought to be) less-culpable than the suppliers who insert child porn into the encrypted data stores of the users' nodes worldwide, giving Freenet a bad rap among the non-Freenet-using populace just because the project promotes absolute freedom-of-expression (and, although it's logically-fallacious to do so, giving a bad rap to absolute freedom-of-expression generally)?
Unfortunately, Freenet became a dead project about a year or 2 ago. I ran it off and on between 2000 (when it was started) and last year, and it's always been extremely questionable as to whether data would be retrievable or not, let alone retrievable *quickly*.
As of the spring of last year or so, Freenet had ceased to reliably retrieve pretty much any data at all, so I gave up on it (again).
Sadly, Freenet died under the weight of its own insane complexity and the inherently low performance of Java with which it was written.
There was also Entropy ( http://entropy.stop1984.com/ ), written in C and much faster than Freenet (though less secure), but development on that stopped sometime last year as well. At present, I know of no project which offers the following features:
* encrypted, plausibly-deniable data store (basically, an encrypted filesystem contained within files on your HDD) * encrypted network traffic * routing of requested data through multiple nodes (i.e. proxying)
...as Freenet and Entropy had, effectively creating a second Internet... Some of the Entropy developers, IIRC, moved to I2P ( www.i2p.net ), however, but I2P seemingly only does traffic encryption and routing, not data storage and searching as well...
I mean, think of it, Coke and H come from defined regions, in small areas of the world, usually tightly controlled by corporate-like entities, whereas meth is largely made by thousands of smalltime cooks in their spare time with recipes they got off the internet.
Proof that OSS works!
There's a recipe for open-source PR -- compare the development of OSS to meth labs!...
*waits for the DEA to call for the banning of OSS*
Sweet jesus... I hope in 25+ years when I'm old enough to have to have prostate exams and proctology services that we've advanced beyond *Windows* into my ass...
I'm going to make it a yearly trip to piss on his grave.
And when the officer pulls me over at the not-really-random checkpoints along the Interstate to ask me for my "papers please", I'll tell him I'm going to piss on the grave of the man who made it easy for him to look me up.
I cannot believe that even Russ Feingold (D-WI) didn't stand up to this (he was the sole voice voting against the PATRIOT Act)... But the Republicans are to blame here, as they control the majority, and it is a Republican who will sign it into law.
Principles? Fuck 'em. Republicans have never adhered to principle any longer than politically-convenient. Concern for Big Brother government and Soviet-style national ID systems? Whatever happened to worrying that we would become like the very communist and socialist states we were fighting against in the Cold War?
Try running a Java or C# app sometime. You'll see the what's so great about SMP then!:)
(please, no flames, I don't care about your language holy war... (besides, I like Java as a language. It's the slow-running, memory-hogging VM I hate.))
Another 2nd Amendment lover here. Your post is the *best* advice I've seen. I agree with every word...
Requiring the finding of a replacement, unless it's written into his contract, does seem fraudulent. A lawyer and/or small-claims court (unless the paycheck is too big) are certainly the way to go.
Packing heat will just make things far, *far* worse.
I always preferred the Dragon Tooth sword anyway. Silent, stealthy, and deadly...:-)
A suppressed pistol and sniper rifle came in handy often enough too though.
DX, in terms of social commentary though, was an utterly *amazing* game. A confluence of conspiracy theories that (in the case of Echelon, at least) are slowly proving true, and modern technology that are increasingly coming into use -- just as in that dystopian game. Warren Spector is a genius. DX is easily one of my top 5 all-time favorite games, despite the fact that it crashed a bit more often than I would normally tolerate...
Do Brits have a fascination with the surveillance state or what? Do Brits think an Orwellian society will really make them better off? Did every Brit in parliament read "1984" and exclaim "hey, that's a bloody good idea!"?
Cameras up everybody's asses, mics on the walls, their main news source being the 1 government-run news agency (BBC)... if the U.S. weren't increasingly-similar (except w.r.t. news sources), I'd point and laugh...
can we have a special moderation adjective for the first asswipe to say 'Meh, people have been doing this for years!' Something like "-1, Nothing New Under the Sun"?
You want an acronym that would be spelled "NNUTS"?:)
IMO (as a moderate libertarian, though former lefty myself), it doesn't matter who's in power. Republican or Democrat -- all that matters is getting into the government and using it for the party's own ideological ends.
Until at least 2006, those ends will be neocon Republican ends -- meaning, stripping away all individual liberties possible, putting religion into as many public institutions as possible, going to war with as many nations as possible, and running up deficits that a probably-Democratic Presiddent elected in 2008 or 2012 will have to clean up after (i.e., by raising taxes or doing the politically-unlikely due to a variety of special interests -- cutting spending).
No, Republicans have *zero* interest in the very small-government rhetoric they tout so highly -- when they're not in office.
And whenever the pendulum swings back the other way and the Democrats are the majority party in the legislative, executive, and (arguably) judicial branches again, it will be more of the same -- except, the left will ignore their calls for individual liberties by taking away guns (see also Janet Reno) and kicking down the doors of religious people (see also the FBI and Waco).
It doesn't matter who's in power. Government by its nature is corrupt.
IMO, I would define the word "conservative" to mean "desiring a return to an era resembling that prior to the Enligtenment", which is to say, a theocracy.
I would thusly define the word "liberal" in 2 ways, both of which are post-Enlightenment and thus more "progressive" in view:
1) the classical sense (which libertarians and "classical liberals" like myself follow), which is to say "promoting a view of society involving minimal, limited government, free markets, and individual liberties as far as the eye can see"
2) the modern sense (which Democrats, Greens, socialists, etc. follow) of "the same as the classical sense, minus gun-ownership rights and economic freedoms"
By those definitions, IMO, either of the liberal views is preferable to that of any "conservative" view. I would (and have, many times) argue that socialism and other economically-collective systems are empirically-proven failures and that we ought to limit their use in our own govn't as much as possible, but that's an argument for a different thread.:-)
Basically, American "conservatives" just want to institute an American version of Iranian theocracy... Given my opinion of religion -- *all* religions, not just Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, but any system of factually-devoid belief in a higher or spiritual power -- I can do nothing else than give American conservatives a hearty "FUCK YOU AND DIE!"
(No, I am not very tolerant of religious people. I support their right to practice religion insofar as their practice doesn't infringe my liberties, but that's it. People can believe in whatever invisible friends they like; that's their business. But fuck anyone who tries to impose their faith on me.)
Why are you laughing at me (in your categorical laugh-in)?
I voted for 3 Libertarians (President, VP, and 1 Senator) and 2 Democrats, all of whom failed to get elected (not unsurprisingly in the Libertarians' cases) in the Nov. 2004 election. I didn't vote for President Bush or any of his fascist cronies, and I certainly didn't vote for this sort of totalitarian bullshit. If I had my way, there would never be a national ID in the U.S., nor would there be a PATRIOT Act, or any laws which treat differently foreigners who have entered the U.S. legally. [1]
Yet you categorically laugh at me, and the many tens of thousands of Americans like me who favor individual freedom over fascist statism like the Real ID Act institutes. What is your justification? Anger at the *other* 50%, perhaps?
[1] With the exception of some laws relating to election to office, but that is based on the grounds of gaining experience with American culture and society first. That said, I'm "on the fence regarding the "Schwarzenegger Amendment", which would allow foreigners to serve as President, mostly because I haven't considered the issue enough to have an opinion either way.
It seems that the small-government Republicans have their priorities in order: destroy liberty first, then maybe do something about terrorism (after pracising some heavy borrow-and-spend).
I would argue that the idea of a "small government Republican" is dead for the most part.
Both the Republicans and Democrats support big government when it suits their purposes. For the Republicans, it's anything having to do with security or the military, the latter of which demands basically all the same resources (and more) that civilians do (hence, we have the military-industrial complex). For the Democrats (and the Greens, and the socialists, and any other strain of "you mean the Berlin Wall fell and communism was an empirical failure?" leftist collectivists still around), it's anything that involves any reason *except* the military.
Big government fascists everywhere. Know what I'd like to do? Get a bunch of libertarians and classical liberals to pool their money to buy an unused offshore oil rig in international waters and declare it our own sovereign nation. Sort of like this famous data haven... Or build a large floating island for the same purpose... wTaking over NH isn't likely to achieve any significant goals, sadly.:(
Borrow from the latest military hardware and mount a 9mm on the robot. Code the firmware to detect intruders, give them a warning and detect hostility, and mow them down if hostility is detected after the warning has begun being given...:)
(No, I'm not serious. I've played Deus Ex and DX: Invisible War too much to think this is a good idea...)
I'm quite happy with mine. I'm pecking out this post in Opera at 480x640 while listening to MP3s streamed from my server via an SMB share from a different floor in my house.
Got it in Oct 2004 when Amazon had them on deep-discount. I'm still happy with my purchase.
Still, a few gripes:
* no decent RSS reader * included media player only supports MP3/WAV/AVI/MPG2; no OGG or MOD/S3M/XM/IT or DivX support. It also only reads from hardcoded dir paths (on the CF, SD, and int. flash) -- it won't read from USB drives (with the Z's USB host), mounted SMB shares, etc. I use a Python + ncurses app called "cplay" for this... * 802.11b radio could be stronger (the Z only draws 5W though, so you expect a tradeoff) * use these PIM apps instead of Sharp's; they're *MUCH* better * IIRC, the 2D hardware accel is disabled by default, meaning redraws can be slow (somebody is working on this though); this means video is usually choppy and emulated games - even the NES emu (fceu) - are intolerable * it's relatively-large for a PDA * pkg management could be better
Positives include: * decent Word/Excel apps * wi-fi works stably and fast overall * stable OS * Kismet works very well * displays PDFs faster than my 2.4GHz laptop * Opera is awesome on this thing...
Overall, it's great for traveling with as a laptop replacement. Good for light surfing, wardriving, reading books, listening to MP3s, etc.. It's true that if you think of it as "a Linux box in your hands", rather than a mere PDA, you'll understand the 6000L'z usefulness much easier. Despite the above annoyances, I love mine and really do use it every day... I replaced my Handspring Visor because of its very limited functionality and haven't missed it since...
Hmmm. I find your ultimate question more depressing than tough. "Which is better?" Eh, they're both impossible, it seems. I'd think the latter is much better, but quite (trustworthy politicians??? HA!:-P ). The former seems tied to the first. So, I guess my question would be... how do we realize either one?
Well, I certainly share your cynicism about the trustworthiness of politicians. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that the only natural criminal class in the U.S. is Congress?:-)
For practical purposes, we'll always have a balance between transparency and censorship. Personally, I'm a very pro-transparency kinda guy for all but the most-extreme, most-necessary circumstances (e.g. nuclear launch codes, the present location and paths of soldiers still active in a given mission, etc.). Most people probably don't share my degree of disdain for censorship though...
I'd like to think that the treason clause of the Constitution was put in place for this purpose -- that is, if somebody goes to war against us or gives aid to the enemy (among other possibilities), they are a traitor to the U.S. -- and such aid could certainly include critical military information.
I'd like to think that the way the Founding Fathers intended this country to be run was that we would have a govn't so transparent that citizens might even know about the locations of their own troops -- but with that knowledge comes the great and grave responsibility to keep it secret within the borders of the U.S. and the population of U.S. citizens. And whoever breaks that responsibility is potentially subject to the crime of treason (which requires 2 witnesses or a confession to the crime), which, of course, is (and should be) punishable by death.
I'd like to think that if we applied the Constitution's treason provisions more-strictly that we could have a more-transparent government, theoretically solving both the problem of transparency and of having to trust politicians (after all, the Founding Fathers knew all-too-well the dangers that politicians posed to peoples' liberty!). Critical information would be protected by the treason clause, while the government would remain open to public scrutiny.
But in practice, I have serious doubts these days...:-/ Such a design for treason would've worked much-better in the Founding Fathers' day, when information spread much more slowly. But now, especially with the Internet -- it would be ridiculously easy for some confused leftist in college (who nominally "hates America" only until he/she grows up, as is so often the case) to take the military's real-time position data and re-post the locations of our troops in Iraq or Afghanistan anywhere in the world, making that data accessible to undesireables (i.e., whoever we're fighting!) with only mere seconds of delay between the military's copy and the enemy's copy of the information (less than that, if one were to script it. I mean, how hard would that be in Perl?:P ).
If it were easier to track people down on the 'net, it might be possible to still apply my "treason reasoning" I described a couple paragraphs ago. But it's rarely so easy, and besides, that relative anonymity has positives elsewhere -- like providing individuals with privacy from foreign governments, well-financed corporations who might sue them (or groups of them, e.g. the RIAA/MPAA), one's neighbors (who may not like their politics, religion, etc.), and so on.
And so here we have a tradeoff: (1) do we preserve (relative) privacy and anonymity on the Internet, at the expense of government transparency, or (2) do we give up those things in exchange for more knowledge of what our government is doing and more-strict enforcement of treason-related law?
There again, I don't know the answer.:-/ On one hand, personally, I'm
I'm not sure what your post has to do with the grandparent, but that's OK, because...
Your post ranks among probably the top 3 most economically-insightful posts I've ever seen on Slashdot (despite my high UID, I lurked here for several years before registering). Just when I had lost about all belief that more than about a half-dozen economically-literate people existed on Slashdot, along came your post...:)
Anyway, I agree, although, I'm not sure the situation is quite as dire as your analysis might initially seem; the value of the dollar has been holding steady lately (vs. the Euro, around 1.30USD/1EU). Then again, so long as our deficit spending continues, I don't expect that to last, so to that end, you're quite right about the inflation problem (which has been slowly creeping upwards for the last couple years, from around 0.95% around 2001-2002 (IIRC), to around 3.0% now).
Precisely, and since this directly affects some of the units I'd worked with, I fully support the (time-limited*) "censorship" of this kind of information.
What about the flip-side problem of D.C. politicians knowing the enemy might attack U.S. soldiers, but not telling the soldiers about it?
For example, Pearl Harbor. There's significant evidence that FDR knew beforehand that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor, but he let it happen anyway.
Should that kind of information be restricted too? Even if it results in 2,000+ deaths?
Of course, this asks the question "should FDR have told the soldiers about it", which invites 2 possibilities.
If the answer is "yes" (as it historically seems to have been), we might've saved soldiers' lives, but the Japanese would've known we had broken their communication encryption so we could listen in on their messages, and moreover, the American people might've been less-willing to get involved in WWII without that strike occurring.
OTOH, if the answer is "no", then this invites abuse by politicians to keep secrets from the public and even its own military, some of which may result in massive loss of life -- Pearl Harbor, again, is one example, and many people claim the same was true of the 9/11 attacks (some of whom are family of victims of the 9/11 attacks).
So ultimately, the question is "which is better: a transparent government, or one which requires publicly-spirited (rather than self-interested), trustworthy politicians who will "do the right thing"?" A tough question, really (particularly in situations of war, where censoring information for a limited time *can* be beneficial in the long-run)...
I remember there was some U.S. govn't PDF a few years ago that was put out which had "classified" text blacked-out, only to be so easily defeated by copy/paste into any text editor.
Wish I had a link or could remember the document, but IIRC, it was around 2000 or 2001 (anybody else know WTF I'm talking about?:P )...
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, you *do* realize that the "greying" you speak of mostly will occur in the U.S. and Europe (due to the baby boom created shortly after World War II), not in the rest of the world, right?
Besides, India has over 1 billion people. IIRC, only some fraction of 1% of them are actually employed in IT (for now). China has 1.2 billion people, and is in a similar situation.
In 1991, only 285 million of their then about 0.9 billion people were actually "economically active". Assuming the rate has remained approximately the same with India's growth, then about 316 million people now are "economically active" there. That only leaves, oh, about 700 million people as unproductive labor, waiting to be educated and put to work in IT (or engineering, or other fields)...
China has about 740 million of their 1.2 billion employed (assuming China isn't lying about these statistics). So there's another 500 million then in China who could be tapped for IT work, given the training and education (and that's ignoring the people they already employ in IT).
And then there's Russia, Belgium, the former Soviet-bloc eastern European nations, South Korea, etc. etc., which I haven't touched-upon... Believe me, there are *PLENTY* of people in other nations to fill whatever labor demands American businesses may have.
In short, for practical purposes, there is no "greying" you speak of, once you include the labor supplies of the world economy, not just the U.S. economy. Think globally, not locally.
Of course, there's always China, or Indonesia, or Singapore, or Russia, or Belgium, or South Korea, or Kenya, or Iraq, or Iran, or the former Soviet-bloc east-European nations, etc. etc.
India is certainly not the only nation on Earth with lower wages than the U.S. has which has a competent labor supply.
Oh great, somebody who subscribes to Keyne's Law (the flipped version of Say's Law), a.k.a. "demand creates its own supply."
You're looking at the problem from the demand-side, not supply-side. Low supply = unfilled demand = high price.
Analogize the problem of child porn to the problem of the drug trade. We've attacked the demand-side (users) for decades. Result? Half of our entire prison population is made up of non-violent offenders found posessing pot, crowding out more-worthy offenders (rapists, pedos, murderers, etc.). It's been as much a failure as the Prohibition that preceded it.
Going after the source hasn't been much more effective, but we have at various times managed to drive up the price of (for instance) heroin -- like when we went to war in Afghanistan a few years ago (Afghanistan's primary export, at something like 65% of GDP, was heroin). Going after the supply has been scarcely more-effective, but it is certainly more effective than going after the demand, because the suppliers are more centralized and less-numerous than the demanders are.
That is, supply-to-demand in any market is almost always a few-to-many relationship.
So it is with legal adult porn, and (I would guess) child porn as well... A few twisted kid-fiddlers peddling their wares to a larger audience which has a taste for it. Hence, we ought to go after the producers of child porn, cut an arm, and string them upside-down by their toes over a pool of hungry sharks.
In truth, both the supply and demand sides are a problem. As anywhere else in the economy, both must work in tandem to produce results; one cannot exist without the other. Supply doesn't necessarily create its own demand (look at the various e-commerce sites of the late 1990s that collapsed due to a stupid product/service), and demand doesn't necessarily create its own supply (everybody would like an extra $1 million in their bank accounts by tomorrow morning, but there's no way in hell that's going to be supplied (barring utterly *absurd* inflation)).
But going after the demand-side has been a proven failure time-and-again in virtually any other analogous case... Hence, I say the supply side -- like the root of any plant -- is ultimately the side that needs to be worked-against the most.
What's the implication then for Freenet? How about that the demanders of child porn who use Freenet are (or ought to be) less-culpable than the suppliers who insert child porn into the encrypted data stores of the users' nodes worldwide, giving Freenet a bad rap among the non-Freenet-using populace just because the project promotes absolute freedom-of-expression (and, although it's logically-fallacious to do so, giving a bad rap to absolute freedom-of-expression generally)?
Unfortunately, Freenet became a dead project about a year or 2 ago. I ran it off and on between 2000 (when it was started) and last year, and it's always been extremely questionable as to whether data would be retrievable or not, let alone retrievable *quickly*.
...as Freenet and Entropy had, effectively creating a second Internet... Some of the Entropy developers, IIRC, moved to I2P ( www.i2p.net ), however, but I2P seemingly only does traffic encryption and routing, not data storage and searching as well...
As of the spring of last year or so, Freenet had ceased to reliably retrieve pretty much any data at all, so I gave up on it (again).
Sadly, Freenet died under the weight of its own insane complexity and the inherently low performance of Java with which it was written.
There was also Entropy ( http://entropy.stop1984.com/ ), written in C and much faster than Freenet (though less secure), but development on that stopped sometime last year as well. At present, I know of no project which offers the following features:
* encrypted, plausibly-deniable data store (basically, an encrypted filesystem contained within files on your HDD)
* encrypted network traffic
* routing of requested data through multiple nodes (i.e. proxying)
There's a recipe for open-source PR -- compare the development of OSS to meth labs!...
*waits for the DEA to call for the banning of OSS*
What type of CPU do those emulators emulate? And OSX's VirtualPC of course too...
Sweet jesus... I hope in 25+ years when I'm old enough to have to have prostate exams and proctology services that we've advanced beyond *Windows* into my ass...
I'm going to make it a yearly trip to piss on his grave.
And when the officer pulls me over at the not-really-random checkpoints along the Interstate to ask me for my "papers please", I'll tell him I'm going to piss on the grave of the man who made it easy for him to look me up.
I cannot believe that even Russ Feingold (D-WI) didn't stand up to this (he was the sole voice voting against the PATRIOT Act)... But the Republicans are to blame here, as they control the majority, and it is a Republican who will sign it into law.
Principles? Fuck 'em. Republicans have never adhered to principle any longer than politically-convenient. Concern for Big Brother government and Soviet-style national ID systems? Whatever happened to worrying that we would become like the very communist and socialist states we were fighting against in the Cold War?
Free country, huh? Bullshit, not anymore.
Try running a Java or C# app sometime. You'll see the what's so great about SMP then! :)
(please, no flames, I don't care about your language holy war... (besides, I like Java as a language. It's the slow-running, memory-hogging VM I hate.))
Another 2nd Amendment lover here. Your post is the *best* advice I've seen. I agree with every word...
Requiring the finding of a replacement, unless it's written into his contract, does seem fraudulent. A lawyer and/or small-claims court (unless the paycheck is too big) are certainly the way to go.
Packing heat will just make things far, *far* worse.
I always preferred the Dragon Tooth sword anyway. Silent, stealthy, and deadly... :-)
A suppressed pistol and sniper rifle came in handy often enough too though.
DX, in terms of social commentary though, was an utterly *amazing* game. A confluence of conspiracy theories that (in the case of Echelon, at least) are slowly proving true, and modern technology that are increasingly coming into use -- just as in that dystopian game. Warren Spector is a genius. DX is easily one of my top 5 all-time favorite games, despite the fact that it crashed a bit more often than I would normally tolerate...
Do Brits have a fascination with the surveillance state or what? Do Brits think an Orwellian society will really make them better off? Did every Brit in parliament read "1984" and exclaim "hey, that's a bloody good idea!"?
Cameras up everybody's asses, mics on the walls, their main news source being the 1 government-run news agency (BBC)... if the U.S. weren't increasingly-similar (except w.r.t. news sources), I'd point and laugh...
"Microsoft to Introduce Faster Security Flaws"?
I did...
You want an acronym that would be spelled "NNUTS"?
Sad, isn't it?
:-)
IMO (as a moderate libertarian, though former lefty myself), it doesn't matter who's in power. Republican or Democrat -- all that matters is getting into the government and using it for the party's own ideological ends.
Until at least 2006, those ends will be neocon Republican ends -- meaning, stripping away all individual liberties possible, putting religion into as many public institutions as possible, going to war with as many nations as possible, and running up deficits that a probably-Democratic Presiddent elected in 2008 or 2012 will have to clean up after (i.e., by raising taxes or doing the politically-unlikely due to a variety of special interests -- cutting spending).
No, Republicans have *zero* interest in the very small-government rhetoric they tout so highly -- when they're not in office.
And whenever the pendulum swings back the other way and the Democrats are the majority party in the legislative, executive, and (arguably) judicial branches again, it will be more of the same -- except, the left will ignore their calls for individual liberties by taking away guns (see also Janet Reno) and kicking down the doors of religious people (see also the FBI and Waco).
It doesn't matter who's in power. Government by its nature is corrupt.
IMO, I would define the word "conservative" to mean "desiring a return to an era resembling that prior to the Enligtenment", which is to say, a theocracy.
I would thusly define the word "liberal" in 2 ways, both of which are post-Enlightenment and thus more "progressive" in view:
1) the classical sense (which libertarians and "classical liberals" like myself follow), which is to say "promoting a view of society involving minimal, limited government, free markets, and individual liberties as far as the eye can see"
2) the modern sense (which Democrats, Greens, socialists, etc. follow) of "the same as the classical sense, minus gun-ownership rights and economic freedoms"
By those definitions, IMO, either of the liberal views is preferable to that of any "conservative" view. I would (and have, many times) argue that socialism and other economically-collective systems are empirically-proven failures and that we ought to limit their use in our own govn't as much as possible, but that's an argument for a different thread.
Basically, American "conservatives" just want to institute an American version of Iranian theocracy... Given my opinion of religion -- *all* religions, not just Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, but any system of factually-devoid belief in a higher or spiritual power -- I can do nothing else than give American conservatives a hearty "FUCK YOU AND DIE!"
(No, I am not very tolerant of religious people. I support their right to practice religion insofar as their practice doesn't infringe my liberties, but that's it. People can believe in whatever invisible friends they like; that's their business. But fuck anyone who tries to impose their faith on me.)
Why are you laughing at me (in your categorical laugh-in)?
I voted for 3 Libertarians (President, VP, and 1 Senator) and 2 Democrats, all of whom failed to get elected (not unsurprisingly in the Libertarians' cases) in the Nov. 2004 election. I didn't vote for President Bush or any of his fascist cronies, and I certainly didn't vote for this sort of totalitarian bullshit. If I had my way, there would never be a national ID in the U.S., nor would there be a PATRIOT Act, or any laws which treat differently foreigners who have entered the U.S. legally. [1]
Yet you categorically laugh at me, and the many tens of thousands of Americans like me who favor individual freedom over fascist statism like the Real ID Act institutes. What is your justification? Anger at the *other* 50%, perhaps?
[1] With the exception of some laws relating to election to office, but that is based on the grounds of gaining experience with American culture and society first. That said, I'm "on the fence regarding the "Schwarzenegger Amendment", which would allow foreigners to serve as President, mostly because I haven't considered the issue enough to have an opinion either way.
I would argue that the idea of a "small government Republican" is dead for the most part.
Both the Republicans and Democrats support big government when it suits their purposes. For the Republicans, it's anything having to do with security or the military, the latter of which demands basically all the same resources (and more) that civilians do (hence, we have the military-industrial complex). For the Democrats (and the Greens, and the socialists, and any other strain of "you mean the Berlin Wall fell and communism was an empirical failure?" leftist collectivists still around), it's anything that involves any reason *except* the military.
Big government fascists everywhere. Know what I'd like to do? Get a bunch of libertarians and classical liberals to pool their money to buy an unused offshore oil rig in international waters and declare it our own sovereign nation. Sort of like this famous data haven... Or build a large floating island for the same purpose... wTaking over NH isn't likely to achieve any significant goals, sadly.
Borrow from the latest military hardware and mount a 9mm on the robot. Code the firmware to detect intruders, give them a warning and detect hostility, and mow them down if hostility is detected after the warning has begun being given... :)
(No, I'm not serious. I've played Deus Ex and DX: Invisible War too much to think this is a good idea...)
The 480x640 screen on this is utterly *gorgeous*, and rotating to landscape mode is smooth and seamless.
I'm quite happy with mine. I'm pecking out this post in Opera at 480x640 while listening to MP3s streamed from my server via an SMB share from a different floor in my house.
Got it in Oct 2004 when Amazon had them on deep-discount. I'm still happy with my purchase.
Still, a few gripes:
* no decent RSS reader
* included media player only supports MP3/WAV/AVI/MPG2; no OGG or MOD/S3M/XM/IT or DivX support. It also only reads from hardcoded dir paths (on the CF, SD, and int. flash) -- it won't read from USB drives (with the Z's USB host), mounted SMB shares, etc. I use a Python + ncurses app called "cplay" for this...
* 802.11b radio could be stronger (the Z only draws 5W though, so you expect a tradeoff)
* use these PIM apps instead of Sharp's; they're *MUCH* better
* IIRC, the 2D hardware accel is disabled by default, meaning redraws can be slow (somebody is working on this though); this means video is usually choppy and emulated games - even the NES emu (fceu) - are intolerable
* it's relatively-large for a PDA
* pkg management could be better
Positives include:
* decent Word/Excel apps
* wi-fi works stably and fast overall
* stable OS
* Kismet works very well
* displays PDFs faster than my 2.4GHz laptop
* Opera is awesome on this thing...
Overall, it's great for traveling with as a laptop replacement. Good for light surfing, wardriving, reading books, listening to MP3s, etc.. It's true that if you think of it as "a Linux box in your hands", rather than a mere PDA, you'll understand the 6000L'z usefulness much easier. Despite the above annoyances, I love mine and really do use it every day... I replaced my Handspring Visor because of its very limited functionality and haven't missed it since...
Well, I certainly share your cynicism about the trustworthiness of politicians. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that the only natural criminal class in the U.S. is Congress? :-)
:-/ Such a design for treason would've worked much-better in the Founding Fathers' day, when information spread much more slowly. But now, especially with the Internet -- it would be ridiculously easy for some confused leftist in college (who nominally "hates America" only until he/she grows up, as is so often the case) to take the military's real-time position data and re-post the locations of our troops in Iraq or Afghanistan anywhere in the world, making that data accessible to undesireables (i.e., whoever we're fighting!) with only mere seconds of delay between the military's copy and the enemy's copy of the information (less than that, if one were to script it. I mean, how hard would that be in Perl? :P ).
:-/ On one hand, personally, I'm
For practical purposes, we'll always have a balance between transparency and censorship. Personally, I'm a very pro-transparency kinda guy for all but the most-extreme, most-necessary circumstances (e.g. nuclear launch codes, the present location and paths of soldiers still active in a given mission, etc.). Most people probably don't share my degree of disdain for censorship though...
I'd like to think that the treason clause of the Constitution was put in place for this purpose -- that is, if somebody goes to war against us or gives aid to the enemy (among other possibilities), they are a traitor to the U.S. -- and such aid could certainly include critical military information.
I'd like to think that the way the Founding Fathers intended this country to be run was that we would have a govn't so transparent that citizens might even know about the locations of their own troops -- but with that knowledge comes the great and grave responsibility to keep it secret within the borders of the U.S. and the population of U.S. citizens. And whoever breaks that responsibility is potentially subject to the crime of treason (which requires 2 witnesses or a confession to the crime), which, of course, is (and should be) punishable by death.
I'd like to think that if we applied the Constitution's treason provisions more-strictly that we could have a more-transparent government, theoretically solving both the problem of transparency and of having to trust politicians (after all, the Founding Fathers knew all-too-well the dangers that politicians posed to peoples' liberty!). Critical information would be protected by the treason clause, while the government would remain open to public scrutiny.
But in practice, I have serious doubts these days...
If it were easier to track people down on the 'net, it might be possible to still apply my "treason reasoning" I described a couple paragraphs ago. But it's rarely so easy, and besides, that relative anonymity has positives elsewhere -- like providing individuals with privacy from foreign governments, well-financed corporations who might sue them (or groups of them, e.g. the RIAA/MPAA), one's neighbors (who may not like their politics, religion, etc.), and so on.
And so here we have a tradeoff: (1) do we preserve (relative) privacy and anonymity on the Internet, at the expense of government transparency, or (2) do we give up those things in exchange for more knowledge of what our government is doing and more-strict enforcement of treason-related law?
There again, I don't know the answer.
I'm not sure what your post has to do with the grandparent, but that's OK, because...
:)
Your post ranks among probably the top 3 most economically-insightful posts I've ever seen on Slashdot (despite my high UID, I lurked here for several years before registering). Just when I had lost about all belief that more than about a half-dozen economically-literate people existed on Slashdot, along came your post...
Anyway, I agree, although, I'm not sure the situation is quite as dire as your analysis might initially seem; the value of the dollar has been holding steady lately (vs. the Euro, around 1.30USD/1EU). Then again, so long as our deficit spending continues, I don't expect that to last, so to that end, you're quite right about the inflation problem (which has been slowly creeping upwards for the last couple years, from around 0.95% around 2001-2002 (IIRC), to around 3.0% now).
You might also like this Economist article, BTW.
What about the flip-side problem of D.C. politicians knowing the enemy might attack U.S. soldiers, but not telling the soldiers about it?
For example, Pearl Harbor. There's significant evidence that FDR knew beforehand that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor, but he let it happen anyway.
Should that kind of information be restricted too? Even if it results in 2,000+ deaths?
Of course, this asks the question "should FDR have told the soldiers about it", which invites 2 possibilities.
If the answer is "yes" (as it historically seems to have been), we might've saved soldiers' lives, but the Japanese would've known we had broken their communication encryption so we could listen in on their messages, and moreover, the American people might've been less-willing to get involved in WWII without that strike occurring.
OTOH, if the answer is "no", then this invites abuse by politicians to keep secrets from the public and even its own military, some of which may result in massive loss of life -- Pearl Harbor, again, is one example, and many people claim the same was true of the 9/11 attacks (some of whom are family of victims of the 9/11 attacks).
So ultimately, the question is "which is better: a transparent government, or one which requires publicly-spirited (rather than self-interested), trustworthy politicians who will "do the right thing"?" A tough question, really (particularly in situations of war, where censoring information for a limited time *can* be beneficial in the long-run)...
I remember there was some U.S. govn't PDF a few years ago that was put out which had "classified" text blacked-out, only to be so easily defeated by copy/paste into any text editor.
:P )...
Wish I had a link or could remember the document, but IIRC, it was around 2000 or 2001 (anybody else know WTF I'm talking about?
They support TCP/IP! (although, they don't want to)