Because they have a responsibility as a company to maximize their profits.
This is one of the biggest myths of Capitalism -- nobody has a responsibility to maxmize profits. Your only responsibility is to provide your investors with a reasonable return on their investment. In many industries profit maximization can have nasty side effects, up to and including the destruction of the industry itself (think of forestry and fishing).
Tit for Tat never wins a Prisoner's Dilemma challenge - it never defects first, and it never defects more than its opponent. Thus it will always tie or lose. It's in the aggregate score over all players combined that it comes out on top.
Furthermore, in the original Prisoner's Dilemma tournament, there were several rather obvious strategies that would have defeated Tit for Tat in aggregate score, but simply were not submitted.
Good point - but what percentage is sufficient? After all, blacks, native americans, and women (among others) were not allowed to vote in the U.S. until comparatively recently. If we draw the line for meaningful democracy at, say, 50% of the adult population (therefore requiring the participation of women as a minimum criteria), then the oldest and most stable democracy is New Zealand. Dates of women's suffrage:
1893 - New Zealand
1902 - Australia
1906 - Finland
1913 - Norway
1915 - Denmark
1917 - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
1918 - Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Luxembourg, Poland, UK
1919 - Netherlands, Sweden
1920 - Iceland, USA
So that puts the U.S. at 18th or 19th.
And if that's being too strict in terms of what constitutes a "real" democracy, then what's wrong with 10%?
Actually, you're measuring area, not length. There are a thousand linear millimetres in a linear metre. You went with a million, which would be only be true if you were measuring square millimetres in a square metre.
As an aside, these numbers would be so much more manageable if we simply worked in 6 dimensions. Then you could fit a billion billion cubic millimetres into a single 6-D cube that was 1 metre on a side. It could fit into my car!
But there are one billion cubic millimetres in one cubic metre.
There are a billion billion cubic millimetres in one cubic kilometre.
There are 16 billion billion cubic millimetres in two ajacent cubes that are each 2 kilometres on a side.
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
No, socialism is individuals expecting society for provide for them for free (or at least subsidized). Capitalism is where people say how much they are willing to pay for real property or a provided service, and if that matches what a person is willing to sell such things for, then they make the deal.
No, still wrong. You've described bohemianism and the free market, respectively.
Socialism is the state claiming ownership of economic production. An enlightened socialist state will redistribute the profits in some fair manner (such as by provided services to the poor), while a despotic one will enrich the inner circle and whip the workers harder.
Capitalism is particular propertied individuals taking ownership of economic production. An enlightened capitalist will redistribute the profits in some fair manner (such as a reward to productive workers), while a despotic one will enrich his heirs and whip the workers harder.
Corporatism is private associations of investors taking ownership of economic production. An enlightened corporation will redistribute the profits in some fair manner (such as by sponsoring good causes or funding research), while a despotic one will enrich the shareholders and whip the workers harder.
Communism is individuals taking ownership of their own economic production. Since this only seems to actually happen in hunter-gatherer tribes, there are no profits left to redistribute, and trying to shoe-horn the whole idea into an industrial society seems to leave you with a seriously maladjusted case of despotic socialism, much to the chagrin of Marxists everywhere.
Okay, that last one is a bit weird, but the basic theme is that every *ism is about appropriating other peoples' wealth, and then either doing something cool with it, or saying "fuck off it's mine!"
A police state does not mean you live in jail. It means that your fundamental rights are decided by the police.
Anyone can walk around freely and voice opinions in a police state, just as anyone can commit crimes in a law-abiding society. The real question is: what rights can you fall back on when the police take exception to your activities? If the law and the courts can protect you against the police, then you live in a reasonably free society. If not, then you live in a police state, even if it's a comfy, prosperous police state where few people ever find themselves in that position.
I have traveled in the Middle East, eastern Europe, and Cuba, all of which have a much higher police presence and authority than the U.S., and I traveled freely, spoke freely, and spent freely in all of those places. Of course, I was never arrested, so I never had the opportunity to experience the police state apparatus directly. And so my experience of those countries was universally that they were warm, beautiful places full of nice people. A lot like America.
What do people that have too much money want? Power.
Ironic, considering this is exaclty Moore's thesis.
Is there a single shred of political coverage in the American media that doesn't qualify as propaganda? How many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11? How many Americans give a rat's ass about the fact that their nation has been transformed into a police state in which fundamental rights are suspended because they are in a "state of war"? A war against an improper noun, which means there is nobody to surrender, negotiate, or lose (war on drugs, anyone?), which means you can count on it being eternal.
There's nothing but propaganda from here on, friends.
I had this on my DecStation in 1989, and I'm sure it was just borrowed from the PDP-4 or some such thing.
Re:"affecting literally millions of people."
on
Make Money Fast
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· Score: 1
Two stories:
In one of my first ever jobs, in retail, a customer purchased some magazines and asked if I was able to change a large bill. No problem, I said. He slaps a $1000 on the counter. Problem, I said. Only had about $300 in the till. But I played with his money for a little while before I gave it back;-)
In '95 I purchased a motorcycle in Amsterdam using cash. The price was around 3700 guilders, and a guilder was slightly less then a dollar at the time, but close. I paid for it with four 1000-guilder notes. I was little nervous walking around with that much cash, and rightfully so: I was pickpocketed that night. Fourtunately they only got the 300 guilders in change from the motorcycle purchase. Still a lot of money, but the thought that it could have been 4000 made it seem like nothing.
I once wrote for and maintained code for a 68000-based realtime parallel computing system. The individual computing nodes were pretty spare, but they ran Fortran code that was cross-compiled on a VAX, and then loaded into the compute nodes' memory. As a real-time data acquisition system, the application and OS were pretty much the same thing. Fortran is good at array/buffer processing, and the great math and science libraries available for it meant that you could do real data analysis right in the data acquisition stage of the pipeline. That was important for filtering out junk data and keeping throughput down to a level that the tape drives could keep up with.
Civilians have been open game since time immemorial. A few of the more notable examples:
332 BC: Siege of Tyre - Alexander the Great executes the male population of Tyre, and sells the women and children into slavery.
1099: First Crusade - civilian population of Jerusalem massacred by crusaders
1209: Albigensian Crusade - civilian population of Béziers massacred by papal troops
1500s-1800s: Indian Wars - wholesale slaughter of indigenous tribes and nations
1618-48: The 30 Years War - up to 30% of the civilian population of Germany killed
1945: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden - air attacks on purely civilian targets that claimed 100,000 lives each
1968: My Lai - several hundred civilians massacred by Charlie company
Terrorism has nothing to do with the targeting of civlians, or you might as well define it as being synonymous with war. Terrorism is the use of fear to achieve political ends, and while it is employed by some violent radicals, it is more effectively used by certain states and governments against their own civilians. Most violent radicals perceive themselves as guerilla warriors anyway, and the truth of this belief is primarily a function of how widespread their movement is, not of their methods or beliefs (cf. IRA). For instance, it is a well-understood principle of revolutionary war that terrorism-like tactics lead to police strong-arm counter-tactics, which increases resentment against the state, which allows the revolutionary movement to grow into full-fledged insurgency, and by similar processes into open war. Exactly the profile we're seeing in Iraq, not coincidentally.
Honestly, only an idiot would pay that kind of money to have their drive wiped and os reloaded.
Anybody whose data is worth less than their computer is just using it as a toy. Regaining access to your data is of far greater value than making the stupid hardware run. If it was one of my computers, I'd happily pay the $800 (or even $8000) to get my data back, and *then* I'd ditch the "ancient piece of crap machine" and buy a new one.
(Well, actually, I keep distributed backups to avoid this problem, and use almost exclusively ancient piece of crap hardware since the machines themselves are irrelevant. So if it were my computer, I'd probably just spend the $800 on women and beer.)
I think it would be quite ironic if Canadian citizens did win the X Prize seeing as the Canadian government and most Canadians (they keep voting for those guys) seem to detest private industry and much prefer government dominance.
So which country could win without a trace of irony? Do you know of one that doesn't prefer government dominance of the space industry?
Actually Canada is near the top of the list, since our space industry is largely commercial and profit-driven, with half of our revenues derived from export, and only an eighth from government contracts.
And by the way, your beloved Conservatives are responsible for axing the original Arrow, and sending our best aerospace engineers south to find decent jobs. Not satisfied with destroying the Canadian advanced aircraft industry, they followed up by selling DeHavilland and Canadair in the 1980s. Boeing bought DeHavilland and then sold the scraps back 5 years later. There's your government support of Canadian aerospace.
If you're going to be a knee-jerk idealogue with a hoplessly inconsistent grasp of the facts, move south of the border, where they'll love your free enterprise boosterism and you'll actually have one of the most government subsidized and controlled space industries in the free world to take aim at.
You should watch Highlander III then... damn that's even worse.
Highlander 2 retroactively ruined the original Highlander [1]. Mathematically it follows that H2 must therefore rate about a -8 on a scale of 1 to 10. Since the Highlander franchise was already in complete ruin by H3, that movie could not have scored negative, since that would violate the Law of Conservation of Movie Ratings.
Indeed, a normal film cannot rate below 1/10, but aggregate films (ones with sequels, prequels, spin-offs, etc.) can be treated as elements of a greater meta-film that carries its own meta-rating. That means that these films are in the priveleged position of being able to earn negative ratings, with the proviso that the meta-rating (a sum of the regular ratings) must remain positive. This is due to the parity rules in Copenhagen formulation of the Law of Conservation of Movie Ratings, the mathematics of which are too complex to get into here.
Negative ratings are very special, because they mean that the movie was so bad that it ruined a completely different movie, one which was otherwise a perfectly fine film. It takes a very special film to accomplish this. Most bad sequels are merely bad, but they do not spoil one's enjoyment of the earlier films. Thus they merely earn low, but positive, ratings, and do not cause the earlier films to mysteriously become bad through association. However, if the original film, once highly thought of, is no longer enjoyable after a sequel, only then does the possibility of an actual negative movie rating become conceivable.
There are very few films that meet this criteria, and Highlander 2 is the finest example of this select group. Therefore the original poster is correct [2]. Highlander II is the Worst Movie of All Time. QED.
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Footnotes:
The irrational insistence by Highlander fans that H2 simply doesn't exist, that it was in effect a mass hallucination, is further evidence of the ruinous effect of H2 on the Highlander universe, as is the fact that Highlander producers elected to start over again with the TV series.
Incidentally, the orginal poster's later nomination of Escape from L.A. fails to meet this standard. Proving this is left as an exercise for the reader.
There's something profoundly strange about reading an article comparing Apple and Microsoft as proprietary vs. open;-)
Especially when you consider that Apple invented the open computing hardware platform (Apple II) that was later copied by the PC. If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft wrote the OS for that platform, too (meaning AppleSoft Basic).
You're measuring angles with an analog device with at best 1 degree accuracy per angle. When adding such imprecise data, yes, the margin for error increases. [...]
1. Any experimental data which neatly falls _exactly_ on the theoretical curve, and adds up to _exactly_ the predicted number is most probably cheated.
Actually, the margin of error increases only if you are multiplying the results. In this case you are adding them, and if your errors are evenly distributed about the mean (which they should be, if they are not systematic), then they will tend to cancel out, leaving you with something very close to the predicted number. If you take enough a sufficient number of measurements, you will get the predicted number exactly (meaning to within the accuracy that it has been specified).
My biggest problem with Tolkien's writing is the utter lack of any inner life or motivation for any of the characters. You have good guys and you have bad guys. The good guys do good things (all the time), the bad guys do bad things (all the time).
Your problem is evidently that you were smoking crack while you read the book. Virtually every Tolkien good guy is in danger of being corrupted into a bad guy, and virtually every bad guy is a good guy who was corrupted in some sense. More than a few characters cross back and forth across this line during the course of the story.
Saruman is the greatest and wisest of the wizards at the start of the books, and thoroughly corrupted by the end (well, the middle). Gollum is thoroughly corrupted at the start of the books, but actually shows signs of redemption (while Frodo shows signs of corruption). Denethor and Boromir are both outstanding examples of good men driven to evil. Men in general are portrayed as the most easily corrupted of races. The Nazgul are corrupted kings of the same stock as Aragorn. Orcs are corrupted elves. Balrogs are corrupted Maiar (same order of being as Gandalf). And Sauron himself is a corrupted Maiar who redeemed himself once (in the Second Age - read your Appendices), and then fell back into darkness again.
Even the super-goodies, like Gandalf, Aragorn, and Galadriel, fret about how corruptible they are.
The only pure good agent in the books is Tom Bombadil. The only pure evil agent is the Ring itself.
Files that you have no control over the naming of are usually generated by some automated tool that will not be able to inspect content such as images to determine their subject.
And when AI has reached the level where your digital camera can observe for itself that photo X is of a bird, and photo Y is of your brother, then who the heck needs meta data, since this info can be placed in the filename where it you, the person it matters to, can actually see it. Until that fine day, you still have to supply the meta data yourself, and since you are manually editing the file anyway, you might as well put it into the filename, for the same reason.
But if there are too many files, then this can be hugely tedious, so you'll want some kind of mechanism to group them under a common attribute. Then at least your automatic file generator can use its stupid names, but you can access them using a single easily-remembered tag. And it would be nice if we could associate a file with more than one such tag, so we'll need some kind of mechanism for connecting a file with an arbitrary number of tags.
And let's call these tags "directories", and the connecting mechanism "links". That way we can use these advanced new features in filesystems that were written over 20 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the biggest myths of Capitalism -- nobody has a responsibility to maxmize profits. Your only responsibility is to provide your investors with a reasonable return on their investment. In many industries profit maximization can have nasty side effects, up to and including the destruction of the industry itself (think of forestry and fishing).
Furthermore, in the original Prisoner's Dilemma tournament, there were several rather obvious strategies that would have defeated Tit for Tat in aggregate score, but simply were not submitted.
- 1893 - New Zealand
- 1902 - Australia
- 1906 - Finland
- 1913 - Norway
- 1915 - Denmark
- 1917 - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
- 1918 - Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Luxembourg, Poland, UK
- 1919 - Netherlands, Sweden
- 1920 - Iceland, USA
So that puts the U.S. at 18th or 19th.And if that's being too strict in terms of what constitutes a "real" democracy, then what's wrong with 10%?
This part: "That means a million is one meter"
As an aside, these numbers would be so much more manageable if we simply worked in 6 dimensions. Then you could fit a billion billion cubic millimetres into a single 6-D cube that was 1 metre on a side. It could fit into my car!
But there are one billion cubic millimetres in one cubic metre.
There are a billion billion cubic millimetres in one cubic kilometre.
There are 16 billion billion cubic millimetres in two ajacent cubes that are each 2 kilometres on a side.
No, still wrong. You've described bohemianism and the free market, respectively.
Socialism is the state claiming ownership of economic production. An enlightened socialist state will redistribute the profits in some fair manner (such as by provided services to the poor), while a despotic one will enrich the inner circle and whip the workers harder.
Capitalism is particular propertied individuals taking ownership of economic production. An enlightened capitalist will redistribute the profits in some fair manner (such as a reward to productive workers), while a despotic one will enrich his heirs and whip the workers harder.
Corporatism is private associations of investors taking ownership of economic production. An enlightened corporation will redistribute the profits in some fair manner (such as by sponsoring good causes or funding research), while a despotic one will enrich the shareholders and whip the workers harder.
Communism is individuals taking ownership of their own economic production. Since this only seems to actually happen in hunter-gatherer tribes, there are no profits left to redistribute, and trying to shoe-horn the whole idea into an industrial society seems to leave you with a seriously maladjusted case of despotic socialism, much to the chagrin of Marxists everywhere.
Okay, that last one is a bit weird, but the basic theme is that every *ism is about appropriating other peoples' wealth, and then either doing something cool with it, or saying "fuck off it's mine!"
Then what the hell is it doing on MY monitor?
A lot lovelier than the idea of killing tens of thousands of people for free.
Anyone can walk around freely and voice opinions in a police state, just as anyone can commit crimes in a law-abiding society. The real question is: what rights can you fall back on when the police take exception to your activities? If the law and the courts can protect you against the police, then you live in a reasonably free society. If not, then you live in a police state, even if it's a comfy, prosperous police state where few people ever find themselves in that position.
You want facts? If the police arrest you without cause, hold you without trial or even charges, deny you access to counsel, conduct secret proceedings, and contradict the courts, then citizens are fundamentally defenseless.
I have traveled in the Middle East, eastern Europe, and Cuba, all of which have a much higher police presence and authority than the U.S., and I traveled freely, spoke freely, and spent freely in all of those places. Of course, I was never arrested, so I never had the opportunity to experience the police state apparatus directly. And so my experience of those countries was universally that they were warm, beautiful places full of nice people. A lot like America.
Ironic, considering this is exaclty Moore's thesis.
Is there a single shred of political coverage in the American media that doesn't qualify as propaganda? How many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11? How many Americans give a rat's ass about the fact that their nation has been transformed into a police state in which fundamental rights are suspended because they are in a "state of war"? A war against an improper noun, which means there is nobody to surrender, negotiate, or lose (war on drugs, anyone?), which means you can count on it being eternal.
There's nothing but propaganda from here on, friends.
I had this on my DecStation in 1989, and I'm sure it was just borrowed from the PDP-4 or some such thing.
In one of my first ever jobs, in retail, a customer purchased some magazines and asked if I was able to change a large bill. No problem, I said. He slaps a $1000 on the counter. Problem, I said. Only had about $300 in the till. But I played with his money for a little while before I gave it back ;-)
In '95 I purchased a motorcycle in Amsterdam using cash. The price was around 3700 guilders, and a guilder was slightly less then a dollar at the time, but close. I paid for it with four 1000-guilder notes. I was little nervous walking around with that much cash, and rightfully so: I was pickpocketed that night. Fourtunately they only got the 300 guilders in change from the motorcycle purchase. Still a lot of money, but the thought that it could have been 4000 made it seem like nothing.
- "A long time ago, in a [land] far away..."
- farm boy inherits his father's sword, goes adventuring
- learns ancient martial arts secrets from old master
- teams up with a salty pirate
- rescues princess from dungeon of dark sorcerer
Where's the science? And don't use the word "parsec" in your answer, please.To be fairer, Unix was orginally created on a PDP-7, which likely had less memory than the original 16K IBM PC.
I once wrote for and maintained code for a 68000-based realtime parallel computing system. The individual computing nodes were pretty spare, but they ran Fortran code that was cross-compiled on a VAX, and then loaded into the compute nodes' memory. As a real-time data acquisition system, the application and OS were pretty much the same thing. Fortran is good at array/buffer processing, and the great math and science libraries available for it meant that you could do real data analysis right in the data acquisition stage of the pipeline. That was important for filtering out junk data and keeping throughput down to a level that the tape drives could keep up with.
Civilians have been open game since time immemorial. A few of the more notable examples:
- 332 BC: Siege of Tyre - Alexander the Great executes the male population of Tyre, and sells the women and children into slavery.
- 1099: First Crusade - civilian population of Jerusalem massacred by crusaders
- 1209: Albigensian Crusade - civilian population of Béziers massacred by papal troops
- 1500s-1800s: Indian Wars - wholesale slaughter of indigenous tribes and nations
- 1618-48: The 30 Years War - up to 30% of the civilian population of Germany killed
- 1945: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden - air attacks on purely civilian targets that claimed 100,000 lives each
- 1968: My Lai - several hundred civilians massacred by Charlie company
Terrorism has nothing to do with the targeting of civlians, or you might as well define it as being synonymous with war. Terrorism is the use of fear to achieve political ends, and while it is employed by some violent radicals, it is more effectively used by certain states and governments against their own civilians. Most violent radicals perceive themselves as guerilla warriors anyway, and the truth of this belief is primarily a function of how widespread their movement is, not of their methods or beliefs (cf. IRA). For instance, it is a well-understood principle of revolutionary war that terrorism-like tactics lead to police strong-arm counter-tactics, which increases resentment against the state, which allows the revolutionary movement to grow into full-fledged insurgency, and by similar processes into open war. Exactly the profile we're seeing in Iraq, not coincidentally.Anybody whose data is worth less than their computer is just using it as a toy. Regaining access to your data is of far greater value than making the stupid hardware run. If it was one of my computers, I'd happily pay the $800 (or even $8000) to get my data back, and *then* I'd ditch the "ancient piece of crap machine" and buy a new one.
(Well, actually, I keep distributed backups to avoid this problem, and use almost exclusively ancient piece of crap hardware since the machines themselves are irrelevant. So if it were my computer, I'd probably just spend the $800 on women and beer.)
So which country could win without a trace of irony? Do you know of one that doesn't prefer government dominance of the space industry?
Actually Canada is near the top of the list, since our space industry is largely commercial and profit-driven, with half of our revenues derived from export, and only an eighth from government contracts.
And by the way, your beloved Conservatives are responsible for axing the original Arrow, and sending our best aerospace engineers south to find decent jobs. Not satisfied with destroying the Canadian advanced aircraft industry, they followed up by selling DeHavilland and Canadair in the 1980s. Boeing bought DeHavilland and then sold the scraps back 5 years later. There's your government support of Canadian aerospace.
If you're going to be a knee-jerk idealogue with a hoplessly inconsistent grasp of the facts, move south of the border, where they'll love your free enterprise boosterism and you'll actually have one of the most government subsidized and controlled space industries in the free world to take aim at.
Highlander 2 retroactively ruined the original Highlander [1]. Mathematically it follows that H2 must therefore rate about a -8 on a scale of 1 to 10. Since the Highlander franchise was already in complete ruin by H3, that movie could not have scored negative, since that would violate the Law of Conservation of Movie Ratings.
Indeed, a normal film cannot rate below 1/10, but aggregate films (ones with sequels, prequels, spin-offs, etc.) can be treated as elements of a greater meta-film that carries its own meta-rating. That means that these films are in the priveleged position of being able to earn negative ratings, with the proviso that the meta-rating (a sum of the regular ratings) must remain positive. This is due to the parity rules in Copenhagen formulation of the Law of Conservation of Movie Ratings, the mathematics of which are too complex to get into here.
Negative ratings are very special, because they mean that the movie was so bad that it ruined a completely different movie, one which was otherwise a perfectly fine film. It takes a very special film to accomplish this. Most bad sequels are merely bad, but they do not spoil one's enjoyment of the earlier films. Thus they merely earn low, but positive, ratings, and do not cause the earlier films to mysteriously become bad through association. However, if the original film, once highly thought of, is no longer enjoyable after a sequel, only then does the possibility of an actual negative movie rating become conceivable.
There are very few films that meet this criteria, and Highlander 2 is the finest example of this select group. Therefore the original poster is correct [2]. Highlander II is the Worst Movie of All Time. QED.
----
Footnotes:
Especially when you consider that Apple invented the open computing hardware platform (Apple II) that was later copied by the PC. If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft wrote the OS for that platform, too (meaning AppleSoft Basic).
1. Any experimental data which neatly falls _exactly_ on the theoretical curve, and adds up to _exactly_ the predicted number is most probably cheated.
Actually, the margin of error increases only if you are multiplying the results. In this case you are adding them, and if your errors are evenly distributed about the mean (which they should be, if they are not systematic), then they will tend to cancel out, leaving you with something very close to the predicted number. If you take enough a sufficient number of measurements, you will get the predicted number exactly (meaning to within the accuracy that it has been specified).
Your problem is evidently that you were smoking crack while you read the book. Virtually every Tolkien good guy is in danger of being corrupted into a bad guy, and virtually every bad guy is a good guy who was corrupted in some sense. More than a few characters cross back and forth across this line during the course of the story.
Saruman is the greatest and wisest of the wizards at the start of the books, and thoroughly corrupted by the end (well, the middle). Gollum is thoroughly corrupted at the start of the books, but actually shows signs of redemption (while Frodo shows signs of corruption). Denethor and Boromir are both outstanding examples of good men driven to evil. Men in general are portrayed as the most easily corrupted of races. The Nazgul are corrupted kings of the same stock as Aragorn. Orcs are corrupted elves. Balrogs are corrupted Maiar (same order of being as Gandalf). And Sauron himself is a corrupted Maiar who redeemed himself once (in the Second Age - read your Appendices), and then fell back into darkness again.
Even the super-goodies, like Gandalf, Aragorn, and Galadriel, fret about how corruptible they are. The only pure good agent in the books is Tom Bombadil. The only pure evil agent is the Ring itself.
"It was really interesting until he pointed out that great hackers work differently than I do, at which point it became clear that he is a moron."
And when AI has reached the level where your digital camera can observe for itself that photo X is of a bird, and photo Y is of your brother, then who the heck needs meta data, since this info can be placed in the filename where it you, the person it matters to, can actually see it. Until that fine day, you still have to supply the meta data yourself, and since you are manually editing the file anyway, you might as well put it into the filename, for the same reason.
But if there are too many files, then this can be hugely tedious, so you'll want some kind of mechanism to group them under a common attribute. Then at least your automatic file generator can use its stupid names, but you can access them using a single easily-remembered tag. And it would be nice if we could associate a file with more than one such tag, so we'll need some kind of mechanism for connecting a file with an arbitrary number of tags.
And let's call these tags "directories", and the connecting mechanism "links". That way we can use these advanced new features in filesystems that were written over 20 years ago.