"New York", yeah right.. that's in "America", right?
Well *I* learned in school..
Amerika Gibt Es Nicht (Peter Bichsel; in German)
So who cares that these fictional peoples suffer from confirmation bias.
Do you think it would be of benefit to lobby for a law to mandate factories putting warning stickers "Warning! this is not a general purpose computing device!" on all computers that are sold to end users that have been tampered with so as to remove the 4 freedoms?
I think the law changes much more slowly than technology, therefore it's probably best to have a protective law in place before manufacturers try to "slowly boil the frog" and force first this new UEFI and later maybe even more onerous locked-down computer devices on us, all the while pretending they are similar or equal in value to the consumer as the regular "general purpose computers" we are used to buying today.
Here in the EU you can only sell chocolate labelled "chocolate" if it fulfils certain quality criteria, e.g. cocoa content, otherwise it should be labelled "cocoa fantasy" (Dutch example: Koetjesreep).
It would be very nice for all of us, not just the nerds, to be able to go to a computer shop and see quickly whether the device we want to buy is a "computer" (i.e. what we call general purpose computers today) or it has a label "fantasy computer", where the fantasy is that you own and control the device you paid for.
I once saw an advertisement for a protection service for MS IIS servers, to protect them from attack. (Sorry no link, I forgot, and it was years ago):
It was some kind of proxy that made it look as if the website was on Apache instead of IIS.
I'm not joking; it really seemed like a legit product, for money, that protected large banks etc. by making it appear as if they used Apache. So that attackers wouldn't bother trying to attack it.
To be honest,I have no experience with MS IIS, but to me that says that at least 10 years ago, the perception was that IIS was less secure than Apache, so much so that 3rd parties developed and marketed this kind of webserver shell around it.
Here's some history to illustrate your point: San Gimignano "della belle Torri". Watch the photo.The rich lived in "beautiful" towers high above the common people. Note that the towers had no windows. That was too dangerous. They hade some slits to be able to shoot arrows at attacking commoners. And first-floor walkways in case you wanted to visit another rich family, without having to risk walking outside amongst the people who hated your guts. I've been there, and it was very impressive, but I wouldn't want to live like that; would you?
The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace.
and:
Blogging for the New York Times, Jenna Wortham called GIFs "the perfect medium for the Olympics."
I wonder if these smart people are aware that GIFs don't actually carry sound. It's still picture or chunky animation, only. No sound.
Bit difficult to "GIF the highlights of the debate" of people sitting around a table watching their mouths move, unless they're using sign language:-)
(...) and assuming we could find 100,000 counters willing to put in a full days work for $30.
If you can't find 100 000 volunteers to put in a full days work for $30 every four years, in order to maintain and keep alive freedom and democracy in you country, then your country is FUCKED.
I'm going to assume that you're serious, and that you're male, and a student.
Did you know that half of the human population are women?
Make friends with the girls studying with you. They may have a slightly different perspective on everything around you.
Since you're lucky to be a student: go out for a dance every once in a while. Don't give a shit if people laugh at how you dance. Learn to cook well. Be brave: the advice is "do something every day that scares you".
I'm sure things are a lot better in this century, but I remember having a cow-orker decades ago who had studied computer science at a technical place, and he said with pride that there was one (1) girl in his entire year, and they pestered her so much that she had to leave.
(Did I mention with happiness that I never studied computer science except as an aside?)
Thank you fonske and cyphax for the interpretation; dear people, I honestly didn't mean to be cryptic or arrogant or elitist this time; it's just that sometimes things are easier to express in a short poem (I'm not a poet btw). Because you people actually responded to this ranting, I will try my best to explain what I think the poem means, though I could be wrong (I hadn't even thought of cyphax' interpretation:-) ).
If I understand the poem correctly (which is by no means guaranteed of course), the way it struck me was what fonske and cyphax have already explained; the grammatical error is the most important part of it.
By "you're now either annoyed..." I meant that some people (grammar nazis?) can get upset at seeing a grammatical mistake and therefore their focus wanders to the mistake rather than to the message the sender tried to convey. Especially specialists, experts, teachers, maybe people who in their fields are used to correct the mistakes and fuck-ups of their underlings, can get into this micro-management mood where their attention is drawn to the mistake instead of the project progress.
What I think this small poem tries to convey, is that this behaviour can trap you. It can distract you from constructing and updating the mental model of the larger project which you're responsible for.
If you strive for the ideal, you will of course never reach it. That's impossible. We're only human, and most of us not even *that* good at whatever we do at the best of times, let alone on an average work day.
However, often if you strive for an ideal project outcome, and you don't get distracted by minor flaws in the project execution, you will at least arrive *somewhere* having achieved an (of course imperfect) realization of (part of) your goal.
The trick then seems to be to distinguish between flaws, errors and deliberate grammar errors which can in time *derail* the project, and errors that merely *delay* the project somewhat from its ETA. For some people these all look the same; they care *too much* and get mired in the details.
So do your best "onbekommert", unenkumbert?, at your work, it's probably the best you can humanly achieve.
I hope that made more sense.. uses a lot more words though. I didn't get hvinciusg's truman quote.
I really really like that poem. I can recommend other (esp. political) posters by Loesje as well. They sell pocket books with them.
No, I'm sure in this case, he/she is referring to the last chapter of the Bible, which presumably St. John the Evangelist wrote after he had eaten bad mussels or something.. I encourage you to read it even if you're not a christian; it's very mystical and all. "Gyne peribeblene ton helion", and all that stuff (there's translations you don't have to read it in koinè).
Here's the quote; there's also an Iron Maiden song about it, if you're interested. Apokalyps 13 verse 15--18:
15 And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
(emphasis mine).
Although, if all school children have the number 666 transmitting on their subcutaneous RFID tags, how will they find out which ones are skyving and which ones are attending?
Hum.. after reading more of this Slashdot thread, I suddenly feel remorse for not putting tags around my poor joke about Austin Powers. Hello man_of_mr_e! Wherever your country's embassies are, they're probably safe from most Dutch! I was only kidding!!
(...) one of the first acts of worship will be to sacrifice over 95% of the world's population so that we can have a sustainable number of people on the planet.
We *SHALL* have a sustainable number of people on the planet. Whether you love or hate that "new world order", is immaterial.
I don't think you have thought through what that word "sustainable" in that sentence actually meant, before you wrote it. Maybe in your vocabulary it is a cuss-word.
Here's an odd factoid I read a while ago: before the industrial revolution, the population in rural France was more or less constant, for a few hundred years (excluding things like wars etc.). Now *that* is a "sustainable" population, implying also that the country was farmed in a more or less sustainable way.
Now I ask you, to use your common sense, nothing fancy or scientific beyond secondary school science, to imagine the factors that kept the population constant rather than exponentially growing. (Everybody can visualize for themselves the factor that caused exponential population growth in "la douce France"!). But what kept the population constant?
Famine. Despair (no point having kids if you can't feed 'em). Emigration (to the cities). Disease.
You'd better adapt to reality, because reality isn't going to adapt to fulfil your needs. Our blue marble planet is not a closed system, but the only incoming resource of any significance, is sunlight. Study some basic thermodynamics if you think I'm preaching "the religion of sustainability" here.
I think our generation will live to see the decline of the religion of "economic growth" when the "Peak Oil" downslope starts to become steeper. As the conservative US economist Herbert Stein said, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
WeWhat I find as proof of the douchebaggery of Linus, its the "I'd change nothing" avenue of thinking. There are ALWAYS things every last one of us would change about projects we have been involved in. We are human beings, nothing is ever perfect - but the almighty Linus thinks otherwise. Douche.
Well, that's how you read it, but I interpret it as something different: Linus has become so "wise" (I really think that's the correct word but I could be wrong!) in managing large-scale projects, that he sees that anything he'd have done differently wouldn't have ended up in a *significantly better* kernel development process.
You were the one who used the words "nothing is ever perfect - but the almighty Linus thinks otherwise", but I'm quite sure that he'd agree with the first part of your sentence, but that it doesn't matter.
Unfortunately, the only way in which I can attempt to explain to you what I mean exactly, is by flinging an obscure bit of Dutch poetry at you. It's from the poets collective "Loesje". Here goes:
STREEFT ONBEKOMMERT NAAR HET IDEALE
If you read Dutch well, you're now either annoyed, or enlightened:-)
If your Dutch-fu is lacking, the subtlety of the poem will escape you.
HTH:-)
No, I think it would work, if you'd *split* the companies and nationalize the "outer-facing" half, rather than nationalizing all of them. So the long-distance stuff with expensive equipment and long stretches of glass fiber and massive routers (i.e. with a very high barrier to entry) is nationalized, and sells bandwidth equally to all the ISPs which do all the battling for customers and "the last mile" bits and bribing the city government or blowing up competing free municipal wifi projects, etc.
This is how it was done in the Netherlands with respect to electricity providers (ISPs are also utility companies, methinks): split them into a nationalized government-owned high-voltage-grid company (TenneT) and competing customer-facing utility companies. Of course they hated this, and the lawsuits haven't finished yet (now at ECJ level), but it seems to have payed off hugely in favour of the inhabitants of the country. (ZOMG SOCIALISM!11one!).
It is important to remember that the government makes the laws and the corporations obey it (begrudgingly), otherwise this can't work. So no idea if it would be applicable in the USA where corporations are people.
It is a software project, a spin-off of the "One Laptop per Child" XO computer project, but they develop not just for the special-purpose green XO laptops but also Asus EEE, Intel Classmate, and your PC: USB memory stick ("Sugar on a Stick"). I think it's basically a Linux distro derived from Fedora, with oodles of child friendly software:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities
IANATeacher, but they seem to focus especially on what is pedagogically OK for the kids, helping them to teach each other.
What if drastic climate change is *beneficial*? What if *without* drastic climate change, the world becomes a colder, darker place, with less plant life, less arable land, and a diminished biosphere?
Without drastic climate change, the world would presumably look like the 18th century, but without the abundant whale oil, and with six billion extra people.
I don't remember from my school history books that the world was "a colder, darker place, with less plant life, less arable land, and a diminished biosphere", as you put it. Unless you mean darker because of the lack of lantern posts, and less arable land because the tractor wasn't invented yet.
Think about it like natural selection- those with foresight and enough sense to listen to the experts can really put themselves in a good position for the future. This is the perfect time to hedge your bets and invest in various technologies and industries which will become much more valuable in the future.
Meanwhile, the deniers will continue based on the belief that it won't happen, and when it does happen they're the ones who will get the pointy end of the stick.
Sorry.. I think that's optimistic..
I can't help but think about what happened to those women who, 500 years ago, were experts in herbology, had sense enough to study medicine, and were known to be better informed than their fellow villagers.
They were either asked to go for a swim, or to join a bonfire as the guest of honour.. see also Malleus Maleficarum.
Who knows, some 21st century Tomás de Torquemada might want to re-print that disgusting book.. but now with "Those Evil Godless Marxist Hippy Scientists That Deny Us Our Economic Freedom" as the protagonists..
I found it interesting that the summary mentioned a solid-state quantum computer, since I (apparently incorrectly) believed that it consisted of teasing a cloud of Rubidium atoms to standstill in a near-vacuum and then shining lasers at them.
Solid-state sounds a lot cheaper.
Why would I want to deal with this instead of using the normal toilet? Assuming I still have access to the normal unit.
Chances are, that what you call a "normal toilet", is a device which uses 8 liters of flocculated, sedimented, filtered, disinfected, aerated potable water, and then you use this valuable liquid to flush your poo from location A to location B.
In 100 years, kids will be horrified to learn about our "normal toilets", I'd want to bet.
As a "gedankenexperiment", just imagine that you flush your toilet with beer every time you have had a poo, and when someone asks you in a horrified way "why the hell did you mix that beer with your poo and then threw it away down the drain", and you answer is "well, it's obvious; if you leave the poo in the toilet, it starts to smell bad and attract flies, so naturally we must flush it away with the beer!".
The kids in 100 years must think that we were very rich, to live like this.
Slashdot Mirror
"New York", yeah right.. that's in "America", right?
Well *I* learned in school..
Amerika Gibt Es Nicht (Peter Bichsel; in German)
So who cares that these fictional peoples suffer from confirmation bias.
Dear mr. Stallman,
Do you think it would be of benefit to lobby for a law to mandate factories putting warning stickers "Warning! this is not a general purpose computing device!" on all computers that are sold to end users that have been tampered with so as to remove the 4 freedoms?
I think the law changes much more slowly than technology, therefore it's probably best to have a protective law in place before manufacturers try to "slowly boil the frog" and force first this new UEFI and later maybe even more onerous locked-down computer devices on us, all the while pretending they are similar or equal in value to the consumer as the regular "general purpose computers" we are used to buying today.
Here in the EU you can only sell chocolate labelled "chocolate" if it fulfils certain quality criteria, e.g. cocoa content, otherwise it should be labelled "cocoa fantasy" (Dutch example: Koetjesreep).
It would be very nice for all of us, not just the nerds, to be able to go to a computer shop and see quickly whether the device we want to buy is a "computer" (i.e. what we call general purpose computers today) or it has a label "fantasy computer", where the fantasy is that you own and control the device you paid for.
LOL
"I know this! It's a Gopher system! (hold off those velociraptors while I navigate the 11 billion node hierarchical tree)."
I once saw an advertisement for a protection service for MS IIS servers, to protect them from attack. (Sorry no link, I forgot, and it was years ago):
:-)
It was some kind of proxy that made it look as if the website was on Apache instead of IIS.
I'm not joking; it really seemed like a legit product, for money, that protected large banks etc. by making it appear as if they used Apache. So that attackers wouldn't bother trying to attack it.
To be honest,I have no experience with MS IIS, but to me that says that at least 10 years ago, the perception was that IIS was less secure than Apache, so much so that 3rd parties developed and marketed this kind of webserver shell around it.
Call it "Mimicry"; protective coloration
Mod up; That is spot on.
Here's some history to illustrate your point: San Gimignano "della belle Torri". Watch the photo.The rich lived in "beautiful" towers high above the common people. Note that the towers had no windows. That was too dangerous. They hade some slits to be able to shoot arrows at attacking commoners. And first-floor walkways in case you wanted to visit another rich family, without having to risk walking outside amongst the people who hated your guts.
I've been there, and it was very impressive, but I wouldn't want to live like that; would you?
, and:
and:
I wonder if these smart people are aware that GIFs don't actually carry sound. It's still picture or chunky animation, only. :-)
No sound.
Bit difficult to "GIF the highlights of the debate" of people sitting around a table watching their mouths move, unless they're using sign language
If you can't find 100 000 volunteers to put in a full days work for $30 every four years, in order to maintain and keep alive freedom and democracy in you country, then your country is FUCKED.
I'm going to assume that you're serious, and that you're male, and a student.
Did you know that half of the human population are women?
Make friends with the girls studying with you. They may have a slightly different perspective on everything around you.
Since you're lucky to be a student: go out for a dance every once in a while. Don't give a shit if people laugh at how you dance. Learn to cook well. Be brave: the advice is "do something every day that scares you".
I'm sure things are a lot better in this century, but I remember having a cow-orker decades ago who had studied computer science at a technical place, and he said with pride that there was one (1) girl in his entire year, and they pestered her so much that she had to leave.
(Did I mention with happiness that I never studied computer science except as an aside?)
Good luck living your life to the full!!!!
Thank you fonske and cyphax for the interpretation; dear people, I honestly didn't mean to be cryptic or arrogant or elitist this time; it's just that sometimes things are easier to express in a short poem (I'm not a poet btw). Because you people actually responded to this ranting, I will try my best to explain what I think the poem means, though I could be wrong (I hadn't even thought of cyphax' interpretation :-) ).
..." I meant that some people (grammar nazis?) can get upset at seeing a grammatical mistake and therefore their focus wanders to the mistake rather than to the message the sender tried to convey. Especially specialists, experts, teachers, maybe people who in their fields are used to correct the mistakes and fuck-ups of their underlings, can get into this micro-management mood where their attention is drawn to the mistake instead of the project progress.
If I understand the poem correctly (which is by no means guaranteed of course), the way it struck me was what fonske and cyphax have already explained; the grammatical error is the most important part of it.
By "you're now either annoyed
What I think this small poem tries to convey, is that this behaviour can trap you. It can distract you from constructing and updating the mental model of the larger project which you're responsible for.
If you strive for the ideal, you will of course never reach it. That's impossible. We're only human, and most of us not even *that* good at whatever we do at the best of times, let alone on an average work day.
However, often if you strive for an ideal project outcome, and you don't get distracted by minor flaws in the project execution, you will at least arrive *somewhere* having achieved an (of course imperfect) realization of (part of) your goal.
The trick then seems to be to distinguish between flaws, errors and deliberate grammar errors which can in time *derail* the project, and errors that merely *delay* the project somewhat from its ETA. For some people these all look the same; they care *too much* and get mired in the details.
So do your best "onbekommert", unenkumbert?, at your work, it's probably the best you can humanly achieve.
I hope that made more sense.. uses a lot more words though. I didn't get hvinciusg's truman quote.
I really really like that poem. I can recommend other (esp. political) posters by Loesje as well. They sell pocket books with them.
No, I'm sure in this case, he/she is referring to the last chapter of the Bible, which presumably St. John the Evangelist wrote after he had eaten bad mussels or something.. I encourage you to read it even if you're not a christian; it's very mystical and all. "Gyne peribeblene ton helion", and all that stuff (there's translations you don't have to read it in koinè).
Here's the quote; there's also an Iron Maiden song about it, if you're interested. Apokalyps 13 verse 15--18:
(emphasis mine).
Although, if all school children have the number 666 transmitting on their subcutaneous RFID tags, how will they find out which ones are skyving and which ones are attending?
Hum.. after reading more of this Slashdot thread, I suddenly feel remorse for not putting tags around my poor joke about Austin Powers. Hello man_of_mr_e! Wherever your country's embassies are, they're probably safe from most Dutch! I was only kidding!!
We *SHALL* have a sustainable number of people on the planet. Whether you love or hate that "new world order", is immaterial.
I don't think you have thought through what that word "sustainable" in that sentence actually meant, before you wrote it. Maybe in your vocabulary it is a cuss-word.
Here's an odd factoid I read a while ago: before the industrial revolution, the population in rural France was more or less constant, for a few hundred years (excluding things like wars etc.). Now *that* is a "sustainable" population, implying also that the country was farmed in a more or less sustainable way.
Now I ask you, to use your common sense, nothing fancy or scientific beyond secondary school science, to imagine the factors that kept the population constant rather than exponentially growing. (Everybody can visualize for themselves the factor that caused exponential population growth in "la douce France"!). But what kept the population constant?
Famine. Despair (no point having kids if you can't feed 'em). Emigration (to the cities). Disease.
You'd better adapt to reality, because reality isn't going to adapt to fulfil your needs. Our blue marble planet is not a closed system, but the only incoming resource of any significance, is sunlight. Study some basic thermodynamics if you think I'm preaching "the religion of sustainability" here.
I think our generation will live to see the decline of the religion of "economic growth" when the "Peak Oil" downslope starts to become steeper. As the conservative US economist Herbert Stein said, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
Can we just storm man_of_mr_e's embassy because he didn't properly attribute his quote to father Powers?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ882QYzr-M
You forgot one:
Step 0 - INVENT unnecessary, but scarce and highly desired items. See also: Software Patents, Indulgences, etc.
Well, that's how you read it, but I interpret it as something different: Linus has become so "wise" (I really think that's the correct word but I could be wrong!) in managing large-scale projects, that he sees that anything he'd have done differently wouldn't have ended up in a *significantly better* kernel development process.
You were the one who used the words "nothing is ever perfect - but the almighty Linus thinks otherwise", but I'm quite sure that he'd agree with the first part of your sentence, but that it doesn't matter.
Unfortunately, the only way in which I can attempt to explain to you what I mean exactly, is by flinging an obscure bit of Dutch poetry at you. It's from the poets collective "Loesje". Here goes:
If you read Dutch well, you're now either annoyed, or enlightened :-)
:-)
If your Dutch-fu is lacking, the subtlety of the poem will escape you.
HTH
No, I think it would work, if you'd *split* the companies and nationalize the "outer-facing" half, rather than nationalizing all of them. So the long-distance stuff with expensive equipment and long stretches of glass fiber and massive routers (i.e. with a very high barrier to entry) is nationalized, and sells bandwidth equally to all the ISPs which do all the battling for customers and "the last mile" bits and bribing the city government or blowing up competing free municipal wifi projects, etc.
Exactly.
This is how it was done in the Netherlands with respect to electricity providers (ISPs are also utility companies, methinks): split them into a nationalized government-owned high-voltage-grid company (TenneT) and competing customer-facing utility companies. Of course they hated this, and the lawsuits haven't finished yet (now at ECJ level), but it seems to have payed off hugely in favour of the inhabitants of the country. (ZOMG SOCIALISM!11one!).
Legal article (in Dutch): http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_onafhankelijk_netbeheer.
It is important to remember that the government makes the laws and the corporations obey it (begrudgingly), otherwise this can't work. So no idea if it would be applicable in the USA where corporations are people.
(replying to my own post)
Check out the "Measure" activity: it doesn't get much geekier than this!
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Measure.
This is a charity which is definitely geeky: Sugar Labs http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Main_Page
It is a software project, a spin-off of the "One Laptop per Child" XO computer project, but they develop not just for the special-purpose green XO laptops but also Asus EEE, Intel Classmate, and your PC: USB memory stick ("Sugar on a Stick"). I think it's basically a Linux distro derived from Fedora, with oodles of child friendly software: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities
IANATeacher, but they seem to focus especially on what is pedagogically OK for the kids, helping them to teach each other.
You want the Orvillecopter ("Artists catcopter causes a stir") to rotate really really fast, like a feline shuriken with outstretched claws? That's sick...
Also, in the picture it looks like Orville's rotors are attached to his claws, so your patented invention wouldn't work.
Without drastic climate change, the world would presumably look like the 18th century, but without the abundant whale oil, and with six billion extra people.
I don't remember from my school history books that the world was "a colder, darker place, with less plant life, less arable land, and a diminished biosphere", as you put it. Unless you mean darker because of the lack of lantern posts, and less arable land because the tractor wasn't invented yet.
Sorry.. I think that's optimistic..
I can't help but think about what happened to those women who, 500 years ago, were experts in herbology, had sense enough to study medicine, and were known to be better informed than their fellow villagers.
They were either asked to go for a swim, or to join a bonfire as the guest of honour.. see also Malleus Maleficarum .
Who knows, some 21st century Tomás de Torquemada might want to re-print that disgusting book.. but now with "Those Evil Godless Marxist Hippy Scientists That Deny Us Our Economic Freedom" as the protagonists..
I found it interesting that the summary mentioned a solid-state quantum computer, since I (apparently incorrectly) believed that it consisted of teasing a cloud of Rubidium atoms to standstill in a near-vacuum and then shining lasers at them.
Solid-state sounds a lot cheaper.
"Asplode" is a perfectly cromulent English word, dontcherknow?
Chances are, that what you call a "normal toilet", is a device which uses 8 liters of flocculated, sedimented, filtered, disinfected, aerated potable water, and then you use this valuable liquid to flush your poo from location A to location B.
In 100 years, kids will be horrified to learn about our "normal toilets", I'd want to bet.
As a "gedankenexperiment", just imagine that you flush your toilet with beer every time you have had a poo, and when someone asks you in a horrified way "why the hell did you mix that beer with your poo and then threw it away down the drain", and you answer is "well, it's obvious; if you leave the poo in the toilet, it starts to smell bad and attract flies, so naturally we must flush it away with the beer!".
The kids in 100 years must think that we were very rich, to live like this.