Fear is a good thing. It keeps you from getting killed.
Fear is an instinctive response, however. It operates independently of reason of logic - how many times have you been afraid of something or startled when you knew intellectually it posed no real danger?
Part of the point of fear is to override your other "higher level" reasoning faculties in the presence of "danger". In pre-historic times, fear was probably an excellent way to keep oneself out of danger, but in modern society, the tables are turned, and fear isn't nearly as useful.
Flying in an airplane or walking over a very high bridge isn't dangerous, but our fear tells us it is. Having unprotected sex with a stranger doesn't evoke fear (it may cause worry, but not instinctive fear), and yet relatively speaking it's far more dangerous.
Fear has its positives, but its irrational nature means it can be mistaken, overridden, and even manipulated in the modern world.
Listen sonny: It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
They can't afford to be chasing down people who casually put the word 'bong' in the text of their emails.
No, but if they come across someone who's making their lives difficult or doing something objectionable but legal (like criticizing the government or national security efforts), it becomes a lot easier to turn the dataminer on them and find every bit of information necessary to destroy them.
Yes, you can't simultaneously pay attention to all the surveillance. But the nature of all-encompassing datamining is that everyone's personal data trail is compiled and retained forever, so the effort required to dredge an individual's entire past up for inspection is very small. The result is that it can be done at a whim if the individual causes so much as a slight annoyance to someone in power, or even if enough people in his/her community decide he/she is suspicious.
In societies where people are aware of this possibility, the people are much more subdued and reluctant to do anything unusual or express dissent. The reason is obvious - almost everyone's got some questionable behavior, or behavior that could be misinterpreted somewhere in their past, and if you do anything to arouse suspicion, you might trigger an investigation into your past which will almost certainly show you in an unfairly bad light. Even if the result of such an investigation isn't enough to put you in jail, it would still have very real and severe impacts on your life. It's this mentality that creates the "chilling effect" on free speech. The government can grant you all the freedom of speech you want, but it's meaningless if people are afraid to use it.
I'd like to recommend finding a job that treats its staff with a base-level of respect and trust, instead of complaining that Slashdot doesn't preemptively self-censor for the convenience of your employer.
When I flood the network with packets like that, it has to devote a greater share of the resources to me.
When you flood the network with 3mbps of dummy packets, it forces the network to devote about as much resources as if you were sending 3mbps of real data. Since you've paid for a 3mbps pipe, you have the right to consume that much resources, no questions asked, and the ISP has (hopefully) factored that into how much capacity they sell and build. Since you can't go over 3mbps no matter how legitimate or illegitimate your traffic is, you don't really have the ability to disrupt anyone else's service - both the ISP and its customers expect that you may at any and all times be using the full 3mbps.
When I want to send "serious" data, I just swap out the dummy packets with serious ones.
Sure, but then when you want to send a "serious" packet, it'll have to get in line behind all the dummy packets you've been firing non-stop. Dummy packets can't "save a spot" for a serious packet in the routing queue, so having dummy packets in the routing queue won't give your serious packets better priority. In fact, it's possible it could give them slightly lower priority since the router has to first deal with the dummy packets that preceded the serious one.
I could even charge other users for the "service" of not flooding the network like that, so that some of their packets can get that "equal treatment".
No, you couldn't. It's like claiming you can charge people at the same hotel as you for the "service" of not shitting on every bed you see. You've paid for access to your room, they've paid for access to theirs, so they don't care if you're shitting on beds because the only one you're able to mess up is your own. The only way you could realistically mess up all the beds is by paying to book them all, but then there's nobody to shake down, and you're out a lot of money.
I was just trying to show how crude NN approaches can simply cause the unfairness to manifest differently rather than eliminate it.
It's good that you're trying to come up with exploits and weaknesses in possible net neutrality scenarios, and I don't think you should stop. But you should understand that the ideas you've suggested so far are wrong - giving all packets equal treatment does not open up a network to any of the attacks you described.
First, you can already send packets non-stop, but only up to the bandwidth cap you've been given. If you have a 3mb/s connection, you can send 3 megabits worth of packets each second and no more - which is exactly as it should be. You paid for that capacity, and should be able to saturate it with whatever traffic you like and have it routed.
Second, even if someone could do that, why? The purpose of sending a packet onto the internet isn't to send the packet anywhere, it's to send information somewhere. I guess if you just wanted to be an asshole, you could send a whole bunch of packets all the time and try to slow the internet down for others, but how does that help you move information better? I guess you could take your data stream and send each packet in it 5 times to ensure that it gets priority, but then you're slowing down your own traffic too, since packet #16 has to get processed 5 times before the router is ready for packet #17.
Maybe I'm just being snobby, but it seems like you don't have a clear enough understanding of the way routed networks operate to be making economic metaphors about them, let alone implying that network neutrality advocates are uninformed. If I'm wrong, please educate me - I would be glad to learn more if I'm missing something.
ultimately I think privacy is a evolutionary relic, in the modern world its like believing in creationism. You can try to protect your privacy but the tools available to observe and gather data are far beyond your ability to control them.
This doesn't ring true to me. Just because society has the technological capacity to do something doesn't mean it has to do it, or inevitably will. We've had the technological capacity to vaporize our enemies with ICBMs for quite some time, but we've agreed collectively that it's not a good idea to use that power.
Similarly, people have had the power to do heinous things with biological and chemical engineering such as putting highly addictive ingredients in consumer products. But as a society, we've decided that such things are a violation of human rights, and they may not be done. We may have lost out on a few cool innovations here and there because of restrictions like this, but overall I think we're better off.
I fail to see how the ability to invade someone's privacy can or should be treated any differently than any other abuse of technology. Simply because it is happening doesn't mean that it must happen, although I'm sure the people in power will assure you otherwise.
Everyone knows where he stands, he stands and fights to the end.
having the President of the US land a war-plane on a carrier sure sets up the "Holy-Fucking-Shit Batman" on our enemies.
You have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the theatrics of public officials. Politicians are celebrities, just like Eminem or Brad Pitt. They put on an act, adopt a persona, and they get lots of fans and supporters, because people love the persona.
A lot of people think they really know celebrities. All the times they've seen them on TV, doing interviews, recording albums, speaking out about issues... you don't know them. You don't know them because "they" are a completely fabricated facade that's cultivated to make simple people feel like they can relate to their leaders on a personal level.
President Bush making a tough speech on an aircraft carrier has about as much to do with the actual things our government is doing to us as what Jay-Z says on his records has to do with how they're produced and sold.
Applying, such social systems to human social systems would not be advised.
I just thought of something:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That's totally a swarm algorithm, right? All individuals, with limited information, act according to a simple rule. And it totally applies to social systems - it's not just theory either, it's largely responsible for the emergent phenomenon of stable societies. Sometimes people act nice because of fear of the law, but often they do so simply because that's the way they think people should be treated.
Right, the selfish gene. But now we're blurring the distinction between individual interest and group interest. It's like saying "Cuba may not be a free market, but the international community it participates in is." Sure, as a meta-actor, Cuba exhibits free market behavior, trying to import goods for cheap, export its own for as high as possible, but that has nothing to do with the individuals living under communism, so it's not very useful when making a socio-economic analysis.
From a biological perspective, I see that you're right, but as an individual, I don't really give a crap about the interests of the genes I may be carrying;)
The article also includes a very clear example of human swarm behaviour in race track betting. In both of these instances the emergent behaviour is the product of self-interested actions.
Good point - in that case the swarm activity is closer to free market behavior, but like I said, almost all the examples slant the other way. While some swarms do have similarities to markets, it's a serious stretch to claim that the phenomenon of swarming itself is a validation of free-market theory.
but the example of herd behaviour among caribou threatened by a wolf is pretty clear
It seems clear intuitively, because each caribou is doing what it would do individually to escape a threat: stop grazing, freeze and be hyper-vigilant, and run at the sign of danger. Only they're doing it as a group, and therefore it's not substantially more advantageous for an individual caribou to bother anymore. Obviously it still needs to bolt when everyone else does, but why stop eating? A self-interested caribou would continue to stuff itself, building up fat and muscle which will help them escape predators more readily, while all the others kept watch for it.
So, I don't think it's as simple as "all the caribou have common individual goals of not getting eaten". They're doing things which hinder their individual interests for the sake of protecting the group. Possibly, this is because they require the group to ensure individual survival, but if so, then the interests of the individual are essentially the same as the group, which is kind of my point.
Important is that most individuals rationally evaluate which exchanges produce a net benefit for themselves, and accept only those exchanges.
Now we're ranging far off topic, but surely absolute enlightened self-interest requires just as much omniscience as enlightened altrusim? Are you telling me it's possible for me to determine the absolute most beneficial action I should take at any given time? Let's say a guy offers me a pocket knife for $20. Maybe I can evaluate perfectly whether $20 is higher than lower than the current average for pocket knives, but that's not the extent of my self-interest...what if that pocket knife was manufactured in a factory right next to my house that's responsible for lead in my water? The otherwise beneficial transaction is no longer in my absolute self-interest, because the more knives that are bought, the more they'll manufacture, and the more pollution will harm my health, creating a net loss. Or what if the knife is actually manufactured by child slaves in east Asia, who are so abused and impoverished that they're anti-American fanatics who will murder me while I'm on vacation? Again, giving such an enterprise my business turns out to be a net loss for my "enlightened self interest". I may know that my personal preference is to not die, but unless I know every way that everyone I interact with is likely to kill me, I'm incapable of making the decisions necessary to correctly optimize the market.
To bring this back on topic, my point is that there's no such thing as absolute enlightened interest - selfish or altruistic, and theories that are predicated on it are increasingly demonstrating to be as quaint as the old "clockwork" model of the world. That's why swarms are an exciting new thing, because they demonstrate how individuals who don't know much at all can produce a positive outcome if they operate according to a simple set of common rules.
Excluding species of ants which take slaves, this ratio shows that the workers are actually in charge and are using their mother as an egg laying sister producing machine. (*3) The workers have every incentive to do so selfishly because the pay off for them is greater then if they raised their own children.
Okay, I think I understand. You're saying that the worker ants aren't "laboring selflessly", but are in fact feeding the queen because of a selfish desire to create more related offspring. But the fact remains that there are a whole lot of workers all feeding the same queen, and they don't derive any direct individual payoff for having done so. If an individual ant was selfish, it would try to avoid doing the dangerous work of food gathering. After all, the queen will get fed by the other ants just the same, and the queen's offspring will be just as genetically related to the lazy ant, whether it works or not, right? Where's the incentive for the selfish individual to act in this scenario?
Actualy they are very much more like a free market.
Communism is a tightly hierarchical system in which all decisions are made at the top and everyone has to do what they are told by the chain of command.
I don't want to seem snotty or disrespectful, but please read what someone's written before disagreeing with them. You're right. As I wrote above, authoritarian systems - including communism - are not swarms, and in fact are usually set up to deliberately suppress swarm behavior (which undermine centralized power). So swarms are not a good example of communism.
I think, however, you've fallen into the classic trap of thinking that there are only two economic models: communism and free market capitalism. It reminds me of when I was a young kid and thought that if you weren't Christian, it meant you were Jewish:)
There are a ton of socio-economic models which critique and are sometimes opposed to free market capitalism - and only one of them is communism. The rest are things like participatory economics, anarchism, gift economies...I would say that swarms are more closely related to some of these models.
Human beings in a free market make decisions based on the information we get from our interactions with others in society
That's true, but irrelevant. All life forms make decisions based on the information they receive, that has nothing to do with swarms. The interesting thing about swarms is that when you get a bunch of actors together, and each one of them follows a pattern of behavior that has no benefit to the individual, you get an overall emergent result which benefits the whole group. Individual humans in a free market environment base their decisions on what will help their personal interests to the exclusion of anyone else's - that's the hallmark of the system.
Swarms are like a proof-of-concept that when people are able to stop being myopically selfish and participate in a collective "organ" that's larger than them, rewards return to them which couldn't have been anticipated with a free market perspective. In one way, this is a kind of creepy realization, since it suggests that the most efficient mode of socio-economic organization would be some kind of Borg-like hive-mind. Obviously, I don't think that'd be a good thing, but I do think there's room for individuals participating in collective swarms when it comes to important matters (like food,clothes,shelter), and going their own ways when it's not.
It strikes me as very "zen" somehow, how media that offers no visual or literal representation of its subject (like books or non-graphical games) can give a more realistic feel than media which shows the environment in painstaking, realistic detail. It's sort of a paradox: the absence of realistic audio/visual immersion can make a game all the more immersive.
This is mostly due to the way people relate to games, and what their expectations are. When I see a beautifully rendered environment in a game, I'm initially blown away, and feel very immersed. However, after a very short time, I start to notice the hallmarks of gaming engines. Many objects look exactly the same. Patterns on surfaces repeat. Sounds recur, sounding pretty much the same each time. Because of the way a 3D game is made, these unrealistic elements aren't "gaps", they're actively dispelling the illusion that I'm looking at something real. They're like little red signs all over the place that read "You're just staring at a computer screen, remember?" The better a game's graphics are, the more let-down I am when I see the embarrassing signs of a fake, computer-rendered scene.
With a non-graphical game, it's plainly obvious that what I'm looking at isn't supposed to trick me into thinking it's real. Because of this, I'm not limited to interpreting what's displayed on the screen - I can imagine my own environment, and every detail they add to the game/adds/ to my imaginative world, instead of threatening to dispel its illusion. You don't play Nethack and go "wait a minute, every single wall tile is a # sign - that's totally unrealistic!" Because the game makes no effort to show you literally what the wall looks like, you imagine your own vision of it, which is far more detailed and realistic than a graphics programmer could hope for.
I do like pretty games and play them, but I think the role of suspension of disbelief and visual imagination that were so key to enjoy older forms of entertainment are rapidly atrophying with the influx of cheap hyper-realistic computer graphics in movies and games. Kids these days (hah!) consume media that is so realistic-seeming that it demands nothing from their imaginations, and so tasks which do require imagination may someday be rejected as not engaging or entertaining enough. After all, what kid wants to dream up new inventions when you can just pop in a disc and see them already working in all their hi-def anti-aliased glory?
The idea that there is a net benefit for a group from the collective selfish actions of individual actors is closer to what this article is describing as swarm theory.
Actually, the article doesn't say anything about the collective selfish actions of anybody. In fact, in almost all the examples given, the actors are behaving unselfishly. The ants don't know exactly why they should go out and follow a given trail, the bees don't really understand why they should choose one nest over another - even a protester wasn't aware of how their movement to a particular street would help overwhelm police.
There is no apparent benefit to any of the individuals in doing any of that. In fact, I daresay that a "free market" ant wouldn't follow any trails, wouldn't bother to smell any pheromones, it would just chill in the nest and eat what the other ants brought, expending the minimum effort for the maximum gain. And free market ants certainly wouldn't automatically tell everyone else where the food-jackpot was that one of them had personally worked to find.
So I agree that swarms are unlike authoritarian communism. They're unlike authoritarian anything, simply because swarms are anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchial - any structure involving a boss or a "chain of command" cannot function as a swarm. However, they're definitely not behaving the way a free market does, either. The key thing to understand is that the actors in a swarm are voluntarily doing non-selfish things because those things, when done by a lot of actors all together, will result in a net benefit for all the actors.
So, swarms definitely have a sort of collectivist, socialist tinge to them, because they require all the actors to base their actions on what will benefit and sustain the group - not them personally. However, because of the lack of authority, swarms are sort of a more pure form of socialism that is inherently resistant to the corruption and oppression by things like governments or leaders.
I think swarms are one of the most important trends in society, because they're the one thing that terrifies all people in power - capitalist CEOs and communist dictators alike.
If that is what you are saying, move to the Muslim region of the world, after-all the Quraan forbids lending/borrowing/gaining interest in a bank-account.
All major religions have been opposed to "usury", or the practice of making a profit by doing nothing more than having money. Islam is not unique in this way.
Investment has created a good-deal of the worlds wealth
So has slavery. So has genocide. Just because something increases your standard of living doesn't mean it's automatically good. You're allowed to enjoy and take advantage of modern technologies without uncritically endorsing every action that led up to their creation.
You set up a situation where the person MUST gold farm to have enough money to eat and you say you will NOT support the system
By your logic, the workers in the sweatshop are like hostages and the company can say "If you don't support our company, these poor people will STARVE to death! You don't want that, do you? So give us your business!", meanwhile skimming off a huge percentage for their own non-starving asses.
It's like saying during slavery that Northerners should have preferentially bought goods from slave plantations, because otherwise the slavemasters wouldn't be able to give the slaves new blankets in the winter, and they'd freeze. "Oh, you're boycotting slave-picked cotton? Black people are freezing to death because of you!" No, black people are freezing because they're being exploited by heartless bastards who will always give their laborers as little as they can get away with, no matter how much profit is being generated from their labor. I'm boycotting those heartless bastards.
maybe I got this wrong: situation 1: no job, no money: good situation 2: a job, some money: bad is this right ?
We at Slashdot love our analogies, so check this one out: International sweatshop operators are to third-world peasants as drug pushers are to junkies.
Let me elaborate. Before a person becomes a hopeless drug addict, they usually have a pretty crappy life. They may be poor, or extremely depressed, or otherwise unhappy. They're functioning, but their life does suck pretty bad. The drug dealer comes along and gives these people drugs, which make them happy and give them new purpose in their lives - they actually have something to look forward to every day. But because the drug has become the best source of happiness in their life, everything else drops away. People lose their jobs, friends, all other support that was helping them to barely function before. Now they only have the drug to make them happy, and they're even more dependent on it than before, because they no longer have anything to go back to.
Similarly, most pre-sweatshop third world communities suck pretty bad, but they are functional. There are local craftspeople, and villagers pay each other to provide services and goods to each other. People live in pretty bad poverty, but they are getting by. Then, the sweatshop shows up, where everyone can earn "big bucks". Everyone goes to work there, and since it's by far the best way to earn money, all the other enterprises drop away. None of the villagers bother to make shoes or bread anymore, because working in the sweatshop is more profitable. Now, the community has only one way to make money, and they're even more dependent on it before, because they no longer have anything to go back to.
In these situations, the dealer/owner starts out by offering something that seems like a solution to a lot of really bad problems, but they end up having almost complete control over the junkies/villagers because they've become so dependent on his services. At this point, the dealer/owner can tighten the screws as much as they want. A dealer can make junkies far more unhappy than they would have been without the drug by cutting them off or jacking up the price. A sweatshop owner can make people far more impoverished than they'd have otherwise been by firing them, or lowering their wages.
To sum things up: Sweatshops may seem like a great way to give more people jobs and help them rise out of poverty, but they're created with the intention of creating an employment monopoly, which will allow them to pay extremely low wages without workers leaving. And that results in third world people staying impoverished forever, even though they may be employed. The point of a sweatshop is to make sure that your workers can never save up enough money or acquire enough skills to be able to leave, because then you'd have to pay those workers more in order to keep them around.
If you are going to argue exploitation in the case of gold farming companies, you had better start arguing exploitation in the case of every single company in existence.
If the controllers of company sell the goods created by their employees for significantly higher than it cost to produce and distribute them, that's exploitive. That's like the definition of exploitive. A middleman sees the fact that there are poor people who will do shit jobs for almost no money, and exploits this situation to buy very cheap goods or services from them. He then sells those goods/services for a reasonably high price, and even though the profit generated is far more than his expenses and a fair compensation for his labor as a middleman, he pockets it all rather than passing some of the profit on to those who produced the good.
People or institutions who exploit the fact that others are in a weaker position than them, in order to rip those people off are, as you said, very common, so common that they even rip off people like you and me.
The net result, of course, would firmly label you as a communist.
Call me whatever you like. If you depend on loaded labels to avoid real debate, however, I'm not sure you have much more to contribute to the discussion.
I think you may be right about it being from the 90's, but somehow it still seems relevant on Slashdot, considering the preponderance of high-brow and obviously completely theoretical (not going to result in any action) discussions about anarchism and radical politics in general. You know how people sometimes talk about politics or how much activism they've done just to score "radical points"? Well with 'karma' on Slashdot, those points are literal!:)
Anyway, the main point I wanted to get across is that almost everybody isn't down with every aspect of your (our?) platform, and they never will be, period. Therefore, it's much better to work with people on the radical issues that they are on the same page about than to distance and alienate ourselves from them because of the issues we disagree on. More broadly, when we stop waxing academic about the finer points of theory and take some actual actions, it's surprising how many people who have no clue what a "deconstructive anti-authoritarian analysis" is will join in the fight.
Even looking at the early Anarchists of the 19th century, Proudhon's Property is Theft! certainly upholds its title's point, but Proudhon also admits that private property is inherently anarchistic, saying "The absolute right of the State is in conflict with the absolute right of the property owner."
I love you guys, but come on. Anarchist, anarcho-capitalist, libertarian, crypto-eco-anarcho-socialist... who cares? Are they fighting for the power or against it? Your politics are boring as fuck.
Slashdot Mirror
Fear is a good thing. It keeps you from getting killed.
Fear is an instinctive response, however. It operates independently of reason of logic - how many times have you been afraid of something or startled when you knew intellectually it posed no real danger?
Part of the point of fear is to override your other "higher level" reasoning faculties in the presence of "danger". In pre-historic times, fear was probably an excellent way to keep oneself out of danger, but in modern society, the tables are turned, and fear isn't nearly as useful.
Flying in an airplane or walking over a very high bridge isn't dangerous, but our fear tells us it is. Having unprotected sex with a stranger doesn't evoke fear (it may cause worry, but not instinctive fear), and yet relatively speaking it's far more dangerous.
Fear has its positives, but its irrational nature means it can be mistaken, overridden, and even manipulated in the modern world.
The Internet is a concept, not a thing;
Listen sonny: It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
They can't afford to be chasing down people who casually put the word 'bong' in the text of their emails.
No, but if they come across someone who's making their lives difficult or doing something objectionable but legal (like criticizing the government or national security efforts), it becomes a lot easier to turn the dataminer on them and find every bit of information necessary to destroy them.
Yes, you can't simultaneously pay attention to all the surveillance. But the nature of all-encompassing datamining is that everyone's personal data trail is compiled and retained forever, so the effort required to dredge an individual's entire past up for inspection is very small. The result is that it can be done at a whim if the individual causes so much as a slight annoyance to someone in power, or even if enough people in his/her community decide he/she is suspicious.
In societies where people are aware of this possibility, the people are much more subdued and reluctant to do anything unusual or express dissent. The reason is obvious - almost everyone's got some questionable behavior, or behavior that could be misinterpreted somewhere in their past, and if you do anything to arouse suspicion, you might trigger an investigation into your past which will almost certainly show you in an unfairly bad light. Even if the result of such an investigation isn't enough to put you in jail, it would still have very real and severe impacts on your life. It's this mentality that creates the "chilling effect" on free speech. The government can grant you all the freedom of speech you want, but it's meaningless if people are afraid to use it.
I'd like to recommend finding a job that treats its staff with a base-level of respect and trust, instead of complaining that Slashdot doesn't preemptively self-censor for the convenience of your employer.
When I flood the network with packets like that, it has to devote a greater share of the resources to me.
When you flood the network with 3mbps of dummy packets, it forces the network to devote about as much resources as if you were sending 3mbps of real data. Since you've paid for a 3mbps pipe, you have the right to consume that much resources, no questions asked, and the ISP has (hopefully) factored that into how much capacity they sell and build. Since you can't go over 3mbps no matter how legitimate or illegitimate your traffic is, you don't really have the ability to disrupt anyone else's service - both the ISP and its customers expect that you may at any and all times be using the full 3mbps.
When I want to send "serious" data, I just swap out the dummy packets with serious ones.
Sure, but then when you want to send a "serious" packet, it'll have to get in line behind all the dummy packets you've been firing non-stop. Dummy packets can't "save a spot" for a serious packet in the routing queue, so having dummy packets in the routing queue won't give your serious packets better priority. In fact, it's possible it could give them slightly lower priority since the router has to first deal with the dummy packets that preceded the serious one.
I could even charge other users for the "service" of not flooding the network like that, so that some of their packets can get that "equal treatment".
No, you couldn't. It's like claiming you can charge people at the same hotel as you for the "service" of not shitting on every bed you see. You've paid for access to your room, they've paid for access to theirs, so they don't care if you're shitting on beds because the only one you're able to mess up is your own. The only way you could realistically mess up all the beds is by paying to book them all, but then there's nobody to shake down, and you're out a lot of money.
I was just trying to show how crude NN approaches can simply cause the unfairness to manifest differently rather than eliminate it.
It's good that you're trying to come up with exploits and weaknesses in possible net neutrality scenarios, and I don't think you should stop. But you should understand that the ideas you've suggested so far are wrong - giving all packets equal treatment does not open up a network to any of the attacks you described.
Then someone can just send packets non-stop
First, you can already send packets non-stop, but only up to the bandwidth cap you've been given. If you have a 3mb/s connection, you can send 3 megabits worth of packets each second and no more - which is exactly as it should be. You paid for that capacity, and should be able to saturate it with whatever traffic you like and have it routed.
Second, even if someone could do that, why? The purpose of sending a packet onto the internet isn't to send the packet anywhere, it's to send information somewhere. I guess if you just wanted to be an asshole, you could send a whole bunch of packets all the time and try to slow the internet down for others, but how does that help you move information better? I guess you could take your data stream and send each packet in it 5 times to ensure that it gets priority, but then you're slowing down your own traffic too, since packet #16 has to get processed 5 times before the router is ready for packet #17.
Maybe I'm just being snobby, but it seems like you don't have a clear enough understanding of the way routed networks operate to be making economic metaphors about them, let alone implying that network neutrality advocates are uninformed. If I'm wrong, please educate me - I would be glad to learn more if I'm missing something.
This is similar to a road system: say that AT&T owns a ferry system to get people quickly from point A to point B.
Look, I don't know how many times I need to say it: The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck.
1/ how much do you earn?
;-)
2/ how often do you have sex or masturbate?
it is inevitable they will take offense.
Not that I disagree with your overall point (everyone has some secrets they have a right to keep), but you must hang out with some uptight people!
Approx. $20/hour
Approx. twice a week
ultimately I think privacy is a evolutionary relic, in the modern world its like believing in creationism. You can try to protect your privacy but the tools available to observe and gather data are far beyond your ability to control them.
This doesn't ring true to me. Just because society has the technological capacity to do something doesn't mean it has to do it, or inevitably will. We've had the technological capacity to vaporize our enemies with ICBMs for quite some time, but we've agreed collectively that it's not a good idea to use that power.
Similarly, people have had the power to do heinous things with biological and chemical engineering such as putting highly addictive ingredients in consumer products. But as a society, we've decided that such things are a violation of human rights, and they may not be done. We may have lost out on a few cool innovations here and there because of restrictions like this, but overall I think we're better off.
I fail to see how the ability to invade someone's privacy can or should be treated any differently than any other abuse of technology. Simply because it is happening doesn't mean that it must happen, although I'm sure the people in power will assure you otherwise.
I prefer to think of him as a brawling frat boy.
Everyone knows where he stands, he stands and fights to the end.
having the President of the US land a war-plane on a carrier sure sets up the "Holy-Fucking-Shit Batman" on our enemies.
You have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the theatrics of public officials. Politicians are celebrities, just like Eminem or Brad Pitt. They put on an act, adopt a persona, and they get lots of fans and supporters, because people love the persona.
A lot of people think they really know celebrities. All the times they've seen them on TV, doing interviews, recording albums, speaking out about issues... you don't know them. You don't know them because "they" are a completely fabricated facade that's cultivated to make simple people feel like they can relate to their leaders on a personal level.
President Bush making a tough speech on an aircraft carrier has about as much to do with the actual things our government is doing to us as what Jay-Z says on his records has to do with how they're produced and sold.
Applying, such social systems to human social systems would not be advised.
I just thought of something:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That's totally a swarm algorithm, right? All individuals, with limited information, act according to a simple rule. And it totally applies to social systems - it's not just theory either, it's largely responsible for the emergent phenomenon of stable societies. Sometimes people act nice because of fear of the law, but often they do so simply because that's the way they think people should be treated.
The ant may not be free market but its genes are.
;)
Right, the selfish gene. But now we're blurring the distinction between individual interest and group interest. It's like saying "Cuba may not be a free market, but the international community it participates in is." Sure, as a meta-actor, Cuba exhibits free market behavior, trying to import goods for cheap, export its own for as high as possible, but that has nothing to do with the individuals living under communism, so it's not very useful when making a socio-economic analysis.
From a biological perspective, I see that you're right, but as an individual, I don't really give a crap about the interests of the genes I may be carrying
The article also includes a very clear example of human swarm behaviour in race track betting. In both of these instances the emergent behaviour is the product of self-interested actions.
Good point - in that case the swarm activity is closer to free market behavior, but like I said, almost all the examples slant the other way. While some swarms do have similarities to markets, it's a serious stretch to claim that the phenomenon of swarming itself is a validation of free-market theory.
but the example of herd behaviour among caribou threatened by a wolf is pretty clear
It seems clear intuitively, because each caribou is doing what it would do individually to escape a threat: stop grazing, freeze and be hyper-vigilant, and run at the sign of danger. Only they're doing it as a group, and therefore it's not substantially more advantageous for an individual caribou to bother anymore. Obviously it still needs to bolt when everyone else does, but why stop eating? A self-interested caribou would continue to stuff itself, building up fat and muscle which will help them escape predators more readily, while all the others kept watch for it.
So, I don't think it's as simple as "all the caribou have common individual goals of not getting eaten". They're doing things which hinder their individual interests for the sake of protecting the group. Possibly, this is because they require the group to ensure individual survival, but if so, then the interests of the individual are essentially the same as the group, which is kind of my point.
Important is that most individuals rationally evaluate which exchanges produce a net benefit for themselves, and accept only those exchanges.
Now we're ranging far off topic, but surely absolute enlightened self-interest requires just as much omniscience as enlightened altrusim? Are you telling me it's possible for me to determine the absolute most beneficial action I should take at any given time? Let's say a guy offers me a pocket knife for $20. Maybe I can evaluate perfectly whether $20 is higher than lower than the current average for pocket knives, but that's not the extent of my self-interest...what if that pocket knife was manufactured in a factory right next to my house that's responsible for lead in my water? The otherwise beneficial transaction is no longer in my absolute self-interest, because the more knives that are bought, the more they'll manufacture, and the more pollution will harm my health, creating a net loss. Or what if the knife is actually manufactured by child slaves in east Asia, who are so abused and impoverished that they're anti-American fanatics who will murder me while I'm on vacation? Again, giving such an enterprise my business turns out to be a net loss for my "enlightened self interest". I may know that my personal preference is to not die, but unless I know every way that everyone I interact with is likely to kill me, I'm incapable of making the decisions necessary to correctly optimize the market.
To bring this back on topic, my point is that there's no such thing as absolute enlightened interest - selfish or altruistic, and theories that are predicated on it are increasingly demonstrating to be as quaint as the old "clockwork" model of the world. That's why swarms are an exciting new thing, because they demonstrate how individuals who don't know much at all can produce a positive outcome if they operate according to a simple set of common rules.
Excluding species of ants which take slaves, this ratio shows that the workers are actually in charge and are using their mother as an egg laying sister producing machine. (*3) The workers have every incentive to do so selfishly because the pay off for them is greater then if they raised their own children.
Okay, I think I understand. You're saying that the worker ants aren't "laboring selflessly", but are in fact feeding the queen because of a selfish desire to create more related offspring. But the fact remains that there are a whole lot of workers all feeding the same queen, and they don't derive any direct individual payoff for having done so. If an individual ant was selfish, it would try to avoid doing the dangerous work of food gathering. After all, the queen will get fed by the other ants just the same, and the queen's offspring will be just as genetically related to the lazy ant, whether it works or not, right? Where's the incentive for the selfish individual to act in this scenario?
Actualy they are very much more like a free market.
:)
Communism is a tightly hierarchical system in which all decisions are made at the top and everyone has to do what they are told by the chain of command.
I don't want to seem snotty or disrespectful, but please read what someone's written before disagreeing with them. You're right. As I wrote above, authoritarian systems - including communism - are not swarms, and in fact are usually set up to deliberately suppress swarm behavior (which undermine centralized power). So swarms are not a good example of communism.
I think, however, you've fallen into the classic trap of thinking that there are only two economic models: communism and free market capitalism. It reminds me of when I was a young kid and thought that if you weren't Christian, it meant you were Jewish
There are a ton of socio-economic models which critique and are sometimes opposed to free market capitalism - and only one of them is communism. The rest are things like participatory economics, anarchism, gift economies...I would say that swarms are more closely related to some of these models.
Human beings in a free market make decisions based on the information we get from our interactions with others in society
That's true, but irrelevant. All life forms make decisions based on the information they receive, that has nothing to do with swarms. The interesting thing about swarms is that when you get a bunch of actors together, and each one of them follows a pattern of behavior that has no benefit to the individual, you get an overall emergent result which benefits the whole group. Individual humans in a free market environment base their decisions on what will help their personal interests to the exclusion of anyone else's - that's the hallmark of the system.
Swarms are like a proof-of-concept that when people are able to stop being myopically selfish and participate in a collective "organ" that's larger than them, rewards return to them which couldn't have been anticipated with a free market perspective. In one way, this is a kind of creepy realization, since it suggests that the most efficient mode of socio-economic organization would be some kind of Borg-like hive-mind. Obviously, I don't think that'd be a good thing, but I do think there's room for individuals participating in collective swarms when it comes to important matters (like food,clothes,shelter), and going their own ways when it's not.
It strikes me as very "zen" somehow, how media that offers no visual or literal representation of its subject (like books or non-graphical games) can give a more realistic feel than media which shows the environment in painstaking, realistic detail. It's sort of a paradox: the absence of realistic audio/visual immersion can make a game all the more immersive.
/adds/ to my imaginative world, instead of threatening to dispel its illusion. You don't play Nethack and go "wait a minute, every single wall tile is a # sign - that's totally unrealistic!" Because the game makes no effort to show you literally what the wall looks like, you imagine your own vision of it, which is far more detailed and realistic than a graphics programmer could hope for.
This is mostly due to the way people relate to games, and what their expectations are. When I see a beautifully rendered environment in a game, I'm initially blown away, and feel very immersed. However, after a very short time, I start to notice the hallmarks of gaming engines. Many objects look exactly the same. Patterns on surfaces repeat. Sounds recur, sounding pretty much the same each time. Because of the way a 3D game is made, these unrealistic elements aren't "gaps", they're actively dispelling the illusion that I'm looking at something real. They're like little red signs all over the place that read "You're just staring at a computer screen, remember?" The better a game's graphics are, the more let-down I am when I see the embarrassing signs of a fake, computer-rendered scene.
With a non-graphical game, it's plainly obvious that what I'm looking at isn't supposed to trick me into thinking it's real. Because of this, I'm not limited to interpreting what's displayed on the screen - I can imagine my own environment, and every detail they add to the game
I do like pretty games and play them, but I think the role of suspension of disbelief and visual imagination that were so key to enjoy older forms of entertainment are rapidly atrophying with the influx of cheap hyper-realistic computer graphics in movies and games. Kids these days (hah!) consume media that is so realistic-seeming that it demands nothing from their imaginations, and so tasks which do require imagination may someday be rejected as not engaging or entertaining enough. After all, what kid wants to dream up new inventions when you can just pop in a disc and see them already working in all their hi-def anti-aliased glory?
;
...
Pick an object.
@ a human or elf (human geek called xappax)
Hm...still ambiguous...
^x
Base Attributes
Starting
name : xappax
race : human
role : Geek
gender : male
alignment : neutral
Current
race : human
role : Geek
gender : male
alignment : neutral
Ah HAH!
The idea that there is a net benefit for a group from the collective selfish actions of individual actors is closer to what this article is describing as swarm theory.
Actually, the article doesn't say anything about the collective selfish actions of anybody. In fact, in almost all the examples given, the actors are behaving unselfishly. The ants don't know exactly why they should go out and follow a given trail, the bees don't really understand why they should choose one nest over another - even a protester wasn't aware of how their movement to a particular street would help overwhelm police.
There is no apparent benefit to any of the individuals in doing any of that. In fact, I daresay that a "free market" ant wouldn't follow any trails, wouldn't bother to smell any pheromones, it would just chill in the nest and eat what the other ants brought, expending the minimum effort for the maximum gain. And free market ants certainly wouldn't automatically tell everyone else where the food-jackpot was that one of them had personally worked to find.
So I agree that swarms are unlike authoritarian communism. They're unlike authoritarian anything, simply because swarms are anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchial - any structure involving a boss or a "chain of command" cannot function as a swarm. However, they're definitely not behaving the way a free market does, either. The key thing to understand is that the actors in a swarm are voluntarily doing non-selfish things because those things, when done by a lot of actors all together, will result in a net benefit for all the actors.
So, swarms definitely have a sort of collectivist, socialist tinge to them, because they require all the actors to base their actions on what will benefit and sustain the group - not them personally. However, because of the lack of authority, swarms are sort of a more pure form of socialism that is inherently resistant to the corruption and oppression by things like governments or leaders.
I think swarms are one of the most important trends in society, because they're the one thing that terrifies all people in power - capitalist CEOs and communist dictators alike.
If that is what you are saying, move to the Muslim region of the world, after-all the Quraan forbids lending/borrowing/gaining interest in a bank-account.
All major religions have been opposed to "usury", or the practice of making a profit by doing nothing more than having money. Islam is not unique in this way.
Investment has created a good-deal of the worlds wealth
So has slavery. So has genocide. Just because something increases your standard of living doesn't mean it's automatically good. You're allowed to enjoy and take advantage of modern technologies without uncritically endorsing every action that led up to their creation.
You set up a situation where the person MUST gold farm to have enough money to eat and you say you will NOT support the system
By your logic, the workers in the sweatshop are like hostages and the company can say "If you don't support our company, these poor people will STARVE to death! You don't want that, do you? So give us your business!", meanwhile skimming off a huge percentage for their own non-starving asses.
It's like saying during slavery that Northerners should have preferentially bought goods from slave plantations, because otherwise the slavemasters wouldn't be able to give the slaves new blankets in the winter, and they'd freeze. "Oh, you're boycotting slave-picked cotton? Black people are freezing to death because of you!" No, black people are freezing because they're being exploited by heartless bastards who will always give their laborers as little as they can get away with, no matter how much profit is being generated from their labor. I'm boycotting those heartless bastards.
maybe I got this wrong: situation 1: no job, no money: good situation 2: a job, some money: bad is this right ?
We at Slashdot love our analogies, so check this one out: International sweatshop operators are to third-world peasants as drug pushers are to junkies.
Let me elaborate. Before a person becomes a hopeless drug addict, they usually have a pretty crappy life. They may be poor, or extremely depressed, or otherwise unhappy. They're functioning, but their life does suck pretty bad. The drug dealer comes along and gives these people drugs, which make them happy and give them new purpose in their lives - they actually have something to look forward to every day. But because the drug has become the best source of happiness in their life, everything else drops away. People lose their jobs, friends, all other support that was helping them to barely function before. Now they only have the drug to make them happy, and they're even more dependent on it than before, because they no longer have anything to go back to.
Similarly, most pre-sweatshop third world communities suck pretty bad, but they are functional. There are local craftspeople, and villagers pay each other to provide services and goods to each other. People live in pretty bad poverty, but they are getting by. Then, the sweatshop shows up, where everyone can earn "big bucks". Everyone goes to work there, and since it's by far the best way to earn money, all the other enterprises drop away. None of the villagers bother to make shoes or bread anymore, because working in the sweatshop is more profitable. Now, the community has only one way to make money, and they're even more dependent on it before, because they no longer have anything to go back to.
In these situations, the dealer/owner starts out by offering something that seems like a solution to a lot of really bad problems, but they end up having almost complete control over the junkies/villagers because they've become so dependent on his services. At this point, the dealer/owner can tighten the screws as much as they want. A dealer can make junkies far more unhappy than they would have been without the drug by cutting them off or jacking up the price. A sweatshop owner can make people far more impoverished than they'd have otherwise been by firing them, or lowering their wages.
To sum things up: Sweatshops may seem like a great way to give more people jobs and help them rise out of poverty, but they're created with the intention of creating an employment monopoly, which will allow them to pay extremely low wages without workers leaving. And that results in third world people staying impoverished forever, even though they may be employed. The point of a sweatshop is to make sure that your workers can never save up enough money or acquire enough skills to be able to leave, because then you'd have to pay those workers more in order to keep them around.
If you are going to argue exploitation in the case of gold farming companies, you had better start arguing exploitation in the case of every single company in existence.
If the controllers of company sell the goods created by their employees for significantly higher than it cost to produce and distribute them, that's exploitive. That's like the definition of exploitive. A middleman sees the fact that there are poor people who will do shit jobs for almost no money, and exploits this situation to buy very cheap goods or services from them. He then sells those goods/services for a reasonably high price, and even though the profit generated is far more than his expenses and a fair compensation for his labor as a middleman, he pockets it all rather than passing some of the profit on to those who produced the good.
People or institutions who exploit the fact that others are in a weaker position than them, in order to rip those people off are, as you said, very common, so common that they even rip off people like you and me.
The net result, of course, would firmly label you as a communist.
Call me whatever you like. If you depend on loaded labels to avoid real debate, however, I'm not sure you have much more to contribute to the discussion.
I think you may be right about it being from the 90's, but somehow it still seems relevant on Slashdot, considering the preponderance of high-brow and obviously completely theoretical (not going to result in any action) discussions about anarchism and radical politics in general. You know how people sometimes talk about politics or how much activism they've done just to score "radical points"? Well with 'karma' on Slashdot, those points are literal! :)
Anyway, the main point I wanted to get across is that almost everybody isn't down with every aspect of your (our?) platform, and they never will be, period. Therefore, it's much better to work with people on the radical issues that they are on the same page about than to distance and alienate ourselves from them because of the issues we disagree on. More broadly, when we stop waxing academic about the finer points of theory and take some actual actions, it's surprising how many people who have no clue what a "deconstructive anti-authoritarian analysis" is will join in the fight.
Even looking at the early Anarchists of the 19th century, Proudhon's Property is Theft! certainly upholds its title's point, but Proudhon also admits that private property is inherently anarchistic, saying "The absolute right of the State is in conflict with the absolute right of the property owner."
I love you guys, but come on. Anarchist, anarcho-capitalist, libertarian, crypto-eco-anarcho-socialist... who cares? Are they fighting for the power or against it? Your politics are boring as fuck.