In terms of functionality, individual or collective satisfaction with the results, and general sanity.
with Darwin's definition, "good" == "fitness" == "the option to kill everyone else, either fast (usually violently), or slow (usually outbreeding them)".
Those are not quite the fitness criteria I seek in a political representative. Though they're usually what I get.
The problem with our current "there is only one ideology... " approach is that it prevents people from even seeing the structure of alternative approaches, and what makes them tick.
I disagree. The problem, I think you'll find, is that the education level in society has been diminished. What society used to collectively know and have certainty about, it now lacks solid facts on which to base its conclusion. Everything becomes a matter of conflicting opinion as a result. Each individual has his own opinion, and each sings it in his own key. We grow up taught to conflate "Treating others with dignity and respect" with "Accepting, or at least quietly tolerating, any baseless piece of balderdash that is spouted at you." We're taught that, "All people are equal", and therefore all opinions are too. But uninformed opinions are not equal to a known fact, and a lot of society's problems result from the acceptance that they are.
We can't even see that we're sabotaging ourselves these days.
I find myself in the uncommon position of being able to see precisely how society is sabotaging itself, but it's generally too busy spouting or embracing various opinions to pay heed.
I've noticed a similar tendency. It's true of Anonymous, of Wikileaks, and of the American People in general.
If any or all of these groups were better-informed, so would their results be. That they're not has been the result of consolidated media and a systematized effort to make uninformed peasants and dullards of them. That effort is coming to a close.
Getting people more aware - and aware of what's actually meaningful and how to discern the difference - would appear to be the next part of the process. Fortunately the information technology is already present, and mechanisms like Slashdot's moderation system will serve the People well. Valid stuff gets promoted into public awareness better, and that's just what we need. The combination of unemployed bloggers, information technology, social networking and an increasingly motivated public will enable us to form solutions and information distribution channels and get them noticed. It's less about diagnosing the problem, and getting to the business of forming solutions. Together. Not to mention getting onto the process of exposure and accountability for wrongdoers.
A lot of the stumbling blocks for people at the moment seem to be that they're predominantly unknowledgeable, they don't yet have sufficient discernment to know what to toss out let alone solutions to contribute or even participate in, and as a result they're pretty reactive to what passes before them, complaining about it or offering uneducated opinions and interpretations. Forming solutions, rather than complaining about the silliness we encounter, is The Next Thing. To stay ahead of the trends, work out what The Next Thing is, and then implement it.
For instance, how about a hybrid Wiki / Kickstarter specifically for corruption? Crowds can compile research - with citations - on the wrongdoings of corporations, politicians, CEOs and public notables. Each entry could have a fund, with people throwing in $50 or $100 to hire an attorney. When the fund fills up, you take them to court. You then return any damages awarded back to the users who invested in that specific fund, in whatever percentage they invested. Result: Crowd-based accountability to law. A new way to glean money for taking care of the rampant corruption. So instead of complaining about politicians, the public can finally do something about it. It wouldn't matter so much who got into office, provided they were accountable to the law and their sworn duties. And we could stop approaching elections like they were some giant slot machine, not to ineffectually telling each other to "Impeach [politician]" to no avail. With Drupal and BitCoin, it wouldn't take that much for a bunch of geeks to get started.
I was going through the Stratfor leak to assist in crowdsourcing research on the material. I found predominantly old news, employees sending each other e-mail links of dated internet articles, and dingbattily off-base novice assessments of geopolitical maneuverings and trends. The rest was industry-specific minutae ("How does [situation] affect the [goods] market in [country]?") and a few Excel spreadsheets of personally-identifiable employee and contact data. Stratfor appears to be what happens when someone with more money than brains gets an inflated sense of self-importance and decides it would be cool to run a corporate cloak-and-dagger firm.
Yes Stratfor is a joke. But like most jokes, the problem was that people were willing to take it seriously. Worse, Stratfor's intelligence and comprehension of geopolitics was still light-years ahead of the average U.S. citizen's.
A much better source of intel - though hardly ideal - for the curious would be at Benjamin Fulford's leak site. Each Monday morning new updates arrive that are behind a paywall. They are then repeated for free on various blogs within hours.
I'm sure governments aren't as ignorantly bumbling to catch up like they want us to believe.
Of course not. But publicizing the domestic use of drones over U.S. cities and Jay Rockefeller going balls-out to stifle internet free speech doesn't make for particularly good press. So they do this instead; it worked wonders for George Bush, Jr.'s career. Why mess with perfection?
The original solution to this was to have the American Common Law so very simple that you'd have to be a mental invalid not to comprehend it (hence, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."). When sovereignty devolved upon the People after the War for Independence, we were free to do anything we liked so long as it didn't encroach upon another sovereign's (1) life, (2) liberty, or (3) property. This elegance in simplicity enabled the People to commonly understand the law, and only a minimal amount of education was necessary in order to do so. Result: The law was simple and internally-consistent, and peoples' rights were retained successfully because everybody got it.
Modern "spaghetti code" legislation, internal inconsistencies, misleading terms, and a systematic effort to consolidate understanding of the law to a select, wealthy few has brought about the reverse situation today. Rather successfully. The process of hacking our laws and societal mindset has taken about 200 years, and has predominantly undone the work of the War for Independence.
I sometimes think that War never really ended. The British just stopped firing bullets and alternated to using bribery, propaganda and social engineering. One of the most effective things you can do when someone is in the right and making a concerted effort to argue for it is to stop them making their argument. You can usually accomplish that by convincing them that they've succeeded. Then you have plenty of time to rework the situation. If Britain had not let up, it's very likely that the idea of freedom would have spread back from the colonies to the mainland, and Britain would have started losing far more than just its colonies. Instead, it played it cool and set about gradually and subtly hacking the new system. They would appear to have hacked root, so to speak, at this point.
Spread a bunch of trendy coffee-shop, faux-minimalist, designer-colored graphics over it, and make sure it works with social networking, and the majority of people will mob to buy it./. types won't find much value in using it, but will be able to make a bundle coding glitzy apps for the technologically-unsophisticated social networking crowd. I suspect Microsoft has been watching Planet of the Apes again.
Doesn't consumer just mean an entity that consumes?
Increasingly, the term means an entity whose sole defining characteristic is that it just consumes.
It's becoming appropriate for the majority of people. But a lot of this is due to strategic coordinated efforts between corporations and the media - making the term, when used by the mainstream media, doubly offensive. Injury, as well as insult.
I get your point. I had assumed the question had been asked in a general sense rather than specifically about today's release, but it's open to interpretation.
I was just watching the Developer's Preview. They were touting "a new kind of copying files... you don't have to copy files to your hard drive anymore, they can just stay in the cloud".
Well how nice! Why have the tedium of being sure your files will be there when you go for them, when you can suddenly become dependent upon a third-party service? It's not like they've ever ratcheted up the price on their customers before.
I'm just waiting for them to abandon the hard drive entirely, in favor of a coin slot. Using your computer will be just like internet video poker.
If we had a functioning system, explain to me the war on drug users.
Alright.
We had a functioning system. That system has been systematically hacked for the last 200 years. By now, citizens are trained to conflate legislation - that which comes out of a bureaucrat's pen - and law - which must have a proper derivation of authority in order to be valid. In the Union, the People delegate authorities specifically to their political representatives. What had not been delegated to them, they never had.
Instead, we now have politicians purporting to draft any old piece of legislation - such as anti-drug legislation - and the People have been parrot-trained to call it law. It's not. So for instance when Obama signed the NDAA in December, he purported to give himself authorities he didn't already have. The legislation was authorized by him signing it, and he supposedly received authority from that legislation - a closed loop of authority. See what I mean?
Typically, in order for me to give something to myself or anyone else, I must first have it to give already. I suppose I could take it from someone else, but that would just make me a criminal. When politicians do this, the term is usurpation.
The People are supposed to have a basic comprehension of these things. It's only because they don't that politicians have been getting away with it.
The Union is not a democracy. It was established as a representative republic.
Under a republic, rights are considered given to us by our Maker and intrinsic to us. The government's role, as delegated by us, is to safeguard those rights. To the extent to which it doesn't do that, and certainly to which it violates them itself, it's no longer serving its purpose.
Under a democracy, as you propose, the majority can and do vote themselves the rights out from under the minority. Mob rule. Moreover, there are no major prequalifications to voting - any trainee fry cook, no matter how clueless, can throw in his or her vote. The result is an easily-led crowd, and the media have become highly sophisticated in doing just that. At that point, you have a plutocracy.
So the solution to political corruption is a slew of undifferentiated amateur lawmakers churning out legislation even faster than the public can keep up with?
This smells hideously false flag.
We had a functional system. We need to restore it by reasserting it and enforcing it, not by Monsanto-ing up more bizarre legislation faster than we can track it. One of the underlying problems has always been a decreasing public understanding of the legal models in play. Without resolving that, this approach will only exacerbate it. What publisher solicits books from writers who are illiterate?
Speaking of digital Kool-Aid, that kind of balderdash is probably why they're a handful of genii surrounded by a legion of idiots. That's the demographic it appeals to.
That being said, it's charming the way they always say, "Expect us." In this day and age, it's very civilized to find anyone who RSVPs anymore, let alone a hacking group.
So when you're down to deciding which ultra-wealthy criminal racket is better than the other, it may just be time to collectively admit there's a problem and retire the term "conspiracy theory".
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on your definition of "worse".
In terms of functionality, individual or collective satisfaction with the results, and general sanity.
with Darwin's definition, "good" == "fitness" == "the option to kill everyone else, either fast (usually violently), or slow (usually outbreeding them)".
Those are not quite the fitness criteria I seek in a political representative. Though they're usually what I get.
The problem with our current "there is only one ideology ... " approach is that it prevents people from even seeing the structure of alternative approaches, and what makes them tick.
I disagree. The problem, I think you'll find, is that the education level in society has been diminished. What society used to collectively know and have certainty about, it now lacks solid facts on which to base its conclusion. Everything becomes a matter of conflicting opinion as a result. Each individual has his own opinion, and each sings it in his own key. We grow up taught to conflate "Treating others with dignity and respect" with "Accepting, or at least quietly tolerating, any baseless piece of balderdash that is spouted at you." We're taught that, "All people are equal", and therefore all opinions are too. But uninformed opinions are not equal to a known fact, and a lot of society's problems result from the acceptance that they are.
We can't even see that we're sabotaging ourselves these days.
I find myself in the uncommon position of being able to see precisely how society is sabotaging itself, but it's generally too busy spouting or embracing various opinions to pay heed.
I've noticed a similar tendency. It's true of Anonymous, of Wikileaks, and of the American People in general.
If any or all of these groups were better-informed, so would their results be. That they're not has been the result of consolidated media and a systematized effort to make uninformed peasants and dullards of them. That effort is coming to a close.
Getting people more aware - and aware of what's actually meaningful and how to discern the difference - would appear to be the next part of the process. Fortunately the information technology is already present, and mechanisms like Slashdot's moderation system will serve the People well. Valid stuff gets promoted into public awareness better, and that's just what we need. The combination of unemployed bloggers, information technology, social networking and an increasingly motivated public will enable us to form solutions and information distribution channels and get them noticed. It's less about diagnosing the problem, and getting to the business of forming solutions. Together. Not to mention getting onto the process of exposure and accountability for wrongdoers.
A lot of the stumbling blocks for people at the moment seem to be that they're predominantly unknowledgeable, they don't yet have sufficient discernment to know what to toss out let alone solutions to contribute or even participate in, and as a result they're pretty reactive to what passes before them, complaining about it or offering uneducated opinions and interpretations. Forming solutions, rather than complaining about the silliness we encounter, is The Next Thing. To stay ahead of the trends, work out what The Next Thing is, and then implement it.
For instance, how about a hybrid Wiki / Kickstarter specifically for corruption? Crowds can compile research - with citations - on the wrongdoings of corporations, politicians, CEOs and public notables. Each entry could have a fund, with people throwing in $50 or $100 to hire an attorney. When the fund fills up, you take them to court. You then return any damages awarded back to the users who invested in that specific fund, in whatever percentage they invested. Result: Crowd-based accountability to law. A new way to glean money for taking care of the rampant corruption. So instead of complaining about politicians, the public can finally do something about it. It wouldn't matter so much who got into office, provided they were accountable to the law and their sworn duties. And we could stop approaching elections like they were some giant slot machine, not to ineffectually telling each other to "Impeach [politician]" to no avail. With Drupal and BitCoin, it wouldn't take that much for a bunch of geeks to get started.
Anyone interested? Message me.
I was going through the Stratfor leak to assist in crowdsourcing research on the material. I found predominantly old news, employees sending each other e-mail links of dated internet articles, and dingbattily off-base novice assessments of geopolitical maneuverings and trends. The rest was industry-specific minutae ("How does [situation] affect the [goods] market in [country]?") and a few Excel spreadsheets of personally-identifiable employee and contact data. Stratfor appears to be what happens when someone with more money than brains gets an inflated sense of self-importance and decides it would be cool to run a corporate cloak-and-dagger firm.
Yes Stratfor is a joke. But like most jokes, the problem was that people were willing to take it seriously. Worse, Stratfor's intelligence and comprehension of geopolitics was still light-years ahead of the average U.S. citizen's.
A much better source of intel - though hardly ideal - for the curious would be at Benjamin Fulford's leak site. Each Monday morning new updates arrive that are behind a paywall. They are then repeated for free on various blogs within hours.
It does seem a pretty daft agenda, doesn't it?
Either they don't succeed in what they attempt, or worse yet they do and are miserable because of it.
Pity that it takes a sane public in order to enforce sanity in politics.
I've reproduced the device's effect over the Internet. =)
I'm sure governments aren't as ignorantly bumbling to catch up like they want us to believe.
Of course not. But publicizing the domestic use of drones over U.S. cities and Jay Rockefeller going balls-out to stifle internet free speech doesn't make for particularly good press. So they do this instead; it worked wonders for George Bush, Jr.'s career. Why mess with perfection?
TThHeErReE'sS aA NNoObBeElL pPrRiIzZe wWaAiItTiInNgG fFoOrR tThHeE pPeErRsSoOnN wWhHoO iInNvVeEnNtTsS aA wWaAyY tToO uUsSeE TtHhIiSs oOvVeErR tThHe IInNtTeErRnNeEtT. PPoOsSsSiIbBlLyY tThHe NNoObBeElL PPeEaAcCe PPrRiIzZe iItTsSeElLfF.
Don't bother with the Peace Prize. They only give that to warmongers.
SSiIlLeEnNcCe, pPeEoOnN. YYoOuUrR mMuUsStT wWaAiItT yYoOuUrR tTuUrRnN. AAnNdD nNoOtT yYeElLlL. IIfF yYoOuU sSpPeEaAkK oOuUtT oOfF tTuUrRnN oOrR tToOoO lLoOuUdDlLyY, yYoOuU wWiIlLlL bBeE mMuUtTeEdD.
This. ^
The original solution to this was to have the American Common Law so very simple that you'd have to be a mental invalid not to comprehend it (hence, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."). When sovereignty devolved upon the People after the War for Independence, we were free to do anything we liked so long as it didn't encroach upon another sovereign's (1) life, (2) liberty, or (3) property. This elegance in simplicity enabled the People to commonly understand the law, and only a minimal amount of education was necessary in order to do so. Result: The law was simple and internally-consistent, and peoples' rights were retained successfully because everybody got it.
Modern "spaghetti code" legislation, internal inconsistencies, misleading terms, and a systematic effort to consolidate understanding of the law to a select, wealthy few has brought about the reverse situation today. Rather successfully. The process of hacking our laws and societal mindset has taken about 200 years, and has predominantly undone the work of the War for Independence.
I sometimes think that War never really ended. The British just stopped firing bullets and alternated to using bribery, propaganda and social engineering. One of the most effective things you can do when someone is in the right and making a concerted effort to argue for it is to stop them making their argument. You can usually accomplish that by convincing them that they've succeeded. Then you have plenty of time to rework the situation. If Britain had not let up, it's very likely that the idea of freedom would have spread back from the colonies to the mainland, and Britain would have started losing far more than just its colonies. Instead, it played it cool and set about gradually and subtly hacking the new system. They would appear to have hacked root, so to speak, at this point.
Yes, mixing up Skydrive integration and a vastly improved copy dialog
Who did that? No distinction had been made by Microsoft in the product demo I watched.
Difficult to mix something up that hasn't been presented. That's pretty basic reasoning.
Spread a bunch of trendy coffee-shop, faux-minimalist, designer-colored graphics over it, and make sure it works with social networking, and the majority of people will mob to buy it. /. types won't find much value in using it, but will be able to make a bundle coding glitzy apps for the technologically-unsophisticated social networking crowd. I suspect Microsoft has been watching Planet of the Apes again.
I did miss the point of the "new kind of copying" actually - I didn't find the distinction being made, so it sounded like that was the cloud.
The cloud thing was therefore my issue.
Doesn't consumer just mean an entity that consumes?
Increasingly, the term means an entity whose sole defining characteristic is that it just consumes.
It's becoming appropriate for the majority of people. But a lot of this is due to strategic coordinated efforts between corporations and the media - making the term, when used by the mainstream media, doubly offensive. Injury, as well as insult.
I get your point. I had assumed the question had been asked in a general sense rather than specifically about today's release, but it's open to interpretation.
I was just watching the Developer's Preview. They were touting "a new kind of copying files ... you don't have to copy files to your hard drive anymore, they can just stay in the cloud".
Well how nice! Why have the tedium of being sure your files will be there when you go for them, when you can suddenly become dependent upon a third-party service? It's not like they've ever ratcheted up the price on their customers before.
I'm just waiting for them to abandon the hard drive entirely, in favor of a coin slot. Using your computer will be just like internet video poker.
Yes. It's somewhere between "helpless end-user" and "grazing cattle".
If we had a functioning system, explain to me the war on drug users.
Alright.
We had a functioning system. That system has been systematically hacked for the last 200 years. By now, citizens are trained to conflate legislation - that which comes out of a bureaucrat's pen - and law - which must have a proper derivation of authority in order to be valid. In the Union, the People delegate authorities specifically to their political representatives. What had not been delegated to them, they never had.
Instead, we now have politicians purporting to draft any old piece of legislation - such as anti-drug legislation - and the People have been parrot-trained to call it law. It's not. So for instance when Obama signed the NDAA in December, he purported to give himself authorities he didn't already have. The legislation was authorized by him signing it, and he supposedly received authority from that legislation - a closed loop of authority. See what I mean?
Typically, in order for me to give something to myself or anyone else, I must first have it to give already. I suppose I could take it from someone else, but that would just make me a criminal. When politicians do this, the term is usurpation.
The People are supposed to have a basic comprehension of these things. It's only because they don't that politicians have been getting away with it.
The Union is not a democracy. It was established as a representative republic.
Under a republic, rights are considered given to us by our Maker and intrinsic to us. The government's role, as delegated by us, is to safeguard those rights. To the extent to which it doesn't do that, and certainly to which it violates them itself, it's no longer serving its purpose.
Under a democracy, as you propose, the majority can and do vote themselves the rights out from under the minority. Mob rule. Moreover, there are no major prequalifications to voting - any trainee fry cook, no matter how clueless, can throw in his or her vote. The result is an easily-led crowd, and the media have become highly sophisticated in doing just that. At that point, you have a plutocracy.
What makes you think they wouldn't cook something like this up from the start?
When trying to dumb down the majority, you have to find something to keep the intelligentsia busy. And we're immune to Counterstrike.
So the solution to political corruption is a slew of undifferentiated amateur lawmakers churning out legislation even faster than the public can keep up with?
This smells hideously false flag.
We had a functional system. We need to restore it by reasserting it and enforcing it, not by Monsanto-ing up more bizarre legislation faster than we can track it. One of the underlying problems has always been a decreasing public understanding of the legal models in play. Without resolving that, this approach will only exacerbate it. What publisher solicits books from writers who are illiterate?
Together, the four fiber-optic cables channel thousands of gigabytes of information per second
They're called petabytes.
Sure. I know this. You know this. But if you say 'Peta' anything the media think you're against animal abuse.
The media think now? When did this happen?
They lie. It was that same elderly Georgian woman, scavenging in scuba gear.
See? Not that much of a coincidence.
Speaking of digital Kool-Aid, that kind of balderdash is probably why they're a handful of genii surrounded by a legion of idiots. That's the demographic it appeals to.
That being said, it's charming the way they always say, "Expect us." In this day and age, it's very civilized to find anyone who RSVPs anymore, let alone a hacking group.
So when you're down to deciding which ultra-wealthy criminal racket is better than the other, it may just be time to collectively admit there's a problem and retire the term "conspiracy theory".