Actually, there was a branching in the meaning of the word "liberal" after the first world war.
Libaral used to mean, for the most part, what American's call Libertarian. This is the classical liberal. The framers of the Constitution of the United States were liberals. After WWI, socialism really started to get a toehold on the politics of the day, and they resorted to all sorts of nasty propaganda and word twisting. (Even if you are a socialist today, you have to admitt that this did occur. The socialists back then were definitely not nice people.)
To the great dismay of the liberals of the day, the socialists took the words "liberal" and "freedom", twisted them well beyond their then-standard definitions, and applied them to themselves. This is a standard case of "Newspeak".
Now all that is long in the past, but the strange conflicting meanings of certain words presist in our language. Additionally, there is also a divide between the US meanings and those that are now standard in Europe. I might conjecture that this is because of the more pervasive influence of socialist thought in Europe.
If you want to look at original meanings for a guide to how a word should be used:
liberal or classical liberal - a person who believes in free trade and a limited government.
Libertarian - Here the Americans actually have the correct definition. The US Libertarian Party uses a classically proper application of the word.
I must point out that no matter how intelligent and level headed Bill Joy is, he is not an expert on biotech and nanotech. Neither am I, which is why I'm not writing letters about it to major newspapers.
One thing he leaves out of his analysis (at least as far as I can tell from the Washington Post article) is that these advances in technology are not moving only in the direction of weapons manufacture.
In addition, I'm not sure he really understands how complicated it is to make even the smallest change in the genetic material of even the most easily changable organism, or how unbelievably difficult it is to create even a system of gears on the nanotech scale.
Relating to the first point: Let's assume that the technology exists to create an incredibly distructive, self replicating virus or nanite that is also capable of evolving rapidly. This is, I should say, a very big assumption.
If the science and technology exists to do such a thing, I guarantee that the technology will be available to do a much simpler thing, such as create a defense against this attacking creature. It is much, much simpler to make a dumb little nanite or organism that only eats bad nanites and organisms.
Our situation is similar to some intelligent but uninformed man telling a preindustrial society "Someday they will create bulldozers and PC's. They will hook them up together and create an unstoppable swarm of city seeking bohemoths that could level the world. We will be defensless!"
Now to the second point and the question of how big an assumption we made up there.... Ah, what the futz. If you can't figure out how nearly impossible it would be to create an organism or nanite that could wipe out world, than any arguements I could make won't change your mind.
There is one point that I haven't seen anyone make. Perhaps I just missed it. It just seems pretty obvious to me.
If you build a computer to predict the market and then actively act upon that data, the computer will be influencing the market. If the computer influences the market, then to make any prediction the computer must predict its own behavior. I'm sure you see the recursive and impossible nature of this.
To answer one question I'm guessing some will present: No the computer can not just predict a bit of the market upon which it has not had recent influence. The market is extremely nonlinear. Even worse than billiard balls.
More impressive than the butterfly story: Say you have a frictionless billiards table on which billiard balls are bouncing, and these collisions are lossless (for simplicity). By classical dynamics you can completely determine the positions of the balls at any future time with exact knowledge of the initial positions. Now, if a friend walks into the room durring the experiment, the GRAVITATIONAL force of his body is enough to perturb the system such that your prediction will deviate significantly from reality within 10 collision times.
The market is much more nonlinear than a table full of balls. The point being that it is absolutely impossible to build a computer that would predict the market, and if you did, and used the data, it would no longer be an accurate prediction, because the computer can not take itself into account in the calculation.
You're not being overly cynical, you just don't understand economics. Sorry for the bluntness.
Ask anyone who works on Wall St. what the purpose of the stock market provides, and they will almost universally give you the same answer: liquidity.
The stock market moves money around the world to the places where it will find the most use. Without this, there would be significanly less innovation and a much lower standard of living in the long term.
You are also a bit wrong about the "Law of Conservation of Wealth" issue. The companies on the market have (mostly) finite amount of stock to sell, but the companies grow. This means that money is not conserved. There is more money and more value out there every day (on average.) This is the whole reason the market provides a rate of return at all.
Most issues should not be allowed on the ballot. If this truely is a violation of the freedom of speech (which it is only if the government is paying for the library), it should not be voted upon. If the government is bound to respect the rights of its citizens, it can not violate those rights even with the mandate of a majority.
Hayek said (paraphrased) "Democracies can vote themselves into a tyrany more absolute than can evolve by any other means."
What about that bug in the first release of Win98? I must have been blind and deaf not to hear about it at the time. I think I'm still running the first release of that OS. Scary.
Oddly, the author is using Bell's Theorem (which I'm pretty sure is really Bohm's Theorem.) This is a part of Bohmian Mechanics, the only formulation of quantum physics afaik that is deterministic. Bell was its biggest supporter, and is also the man credited with debunking it. Much to his chagrin.
Of course you have to swallow the nonlocality of space-time.
I don't know of any good references for this, you might have to search a bit.
I can see I'm really going to enjoy this discussion. Your post brought a smile to my face and lightness to my heart. I sincerely hope you reply to this.
"Thanks for telling us about yourself before diving into the real meat of your writing. You must idolize Katz."
You're welcome. No, I don't idolize Katz, but I do like the guy.
"What has Katz done to help the 'geek cause' (journalist buzzword)? Why don't you give examples? Is this really more than, say, Linus' contribution to 'geeks', or haven't you heard of him?"
I believe I mentioned that you should read the book. Linus gave a nice os to everyone, and for that I thank him from the bottom of my heart. It was a great thing, but that's wholly different from what I'm talking about (which I should think is rather obvious.) Katz has tried to help individual geeks by being a counselor of sorts to many, many people who wrote to him after the Littelton tragedy. In addition, his Hellmouth articles have done a great deal for the young geek community. Who has had a greater positive effect on the computer world? Linus, obviously. But that doesn't mean Katz's work is any less valuable.
"Spend a whole paragraph on a personal attack against FascDot and his karma? What a waste of time."
I was feeling a bit vitriolic. Perhaps that was overboard. I wrote that part because the reason Fascdot told us about his karma was so that we would all think his statement (and he, himself) was worthwhile. I believe he was also trying to garner some sentamental support for himself, like Jesus Christ betifically turning up his hands and saying "Look, I bleed."
"You *are* Jon Katz! Admit it! This is the whole reason Katz is rejected here. No programmers I know of run around yapping about 'geek culture'. I never even hear the word 'geek', except out of that lamo NT-hugging couldn't-write-Hello-World-in-BASIC-without-a-wiza rd guy down the street. Katz likes geek culture, and you like geek culture. Most programmers and people on/. just don't care."
Perhaps you should care. I'm a physicist by trade, and I'm personally watching the results of similar disinterest in the scientific community. Now we've got the religous right removing evolution from the school and replacing it with prayer sessions, and the postmodernists are doing some *really* horrendous things. I think there is hardly a single group of people more falsly portrayed and even demonized by the popular media than geeks and hackers. We need some language of discourse (and facility with that language) by which to describe and understand ourselves, or we can't even begin to hope to make others understand.
Additionally, I think your statement that "Most programmers and people on/. just don't care," is patently untrue. (You can make a bald assertion, so can I. Now where did it get us? Try to back up your statements with some reasoned arguement.)
"Who cares? Are you totally out of touch?. .."
Please try to follow along here. I in no way stated that "'Geek culture'" is about love. I said that picking on Katz, being a bully, will not make people love you. Groups often define themselves by who the exclude. They often feel cohesion only in that act. I was trying to say that this is not a healthy way to be. It does not achieve the ends it hopes for. Again, I should think that was obvious. Fascdot was picking on the "different" kid to gain the support of those in his community. Bad, bad Fascdot. He even commented on some of the people responsible for/.'s operation wholly because he knew that they would not retaliate, and he would gain some misdirected respect because of it.
Regarding the "goodbye 70 karma", see above.
I didn't start the off topic thread. I responded to it. I usually don't do that, but, as I said in the first paragraph of my original post, I felt it was necessary.
In short: I was not writing about myself, I only offered an explaination intended to turn aside some of the arguements you made before you made them. Katz's "benevolence" (not my word at all) claim was not unsupported. I told you to read the book. I feel a little silly talking about the things he's done, because it made me feel that I was supporting him too much. I was trying to defend a good man, not betify him.
Usually I just ignore people with bad attitudes. Really, I don't feel it's my place to butt into other peoples' lives to tell them that their behavior is inappropriate. Sometimes, however, it is necessary.
Your comments about Katz are completely out of line. He has done more to help geeks and the "geek cause" than anyone I've ever heard of. Read his latest book when it comes out (_Geeks_). Even if you disagree with his view of tech culture, you should at least be able to admit that he deserves more respect than you've shown him in these posts.
In addition, CmdrTaco and Hemos also deserve more respect. Your 70+ karma is nothing compared to what they've done. They help run/., and if that isn't enough for you, they are also better geeks who truly contribute to the community. I should also point out that a high karma achieved by the high volume, low quality posting you do is not much to be proud of. I've even looked at your high moderation posts and found that they are almost uniformly examples of the problems with the moderation system.
I don't know CmdrTaco and Hemos, but I have a passing acquaintance with Katz, and I do not find him to be a pseudo- anything. He is an intelligent author and a worthwhile conversationalist. If you don't see that from his posts, you should at least let what respect you have for the/. bunch guide you with regard to your evaluation of his character and intelligence, since they know him much better than you do. Ah, I forgot, you don't seem to have much respect for those who run/.
Now I've had another glimpse into the dark side of the geek. All I see is a bunch of angry adolescents who improperly focus their pain on aggression against those who are slightly different then they are. It is sickening and fascinating that the same childish impulse to hurt and exclude others that in the vast majority of cases forced geeks to become geeks shows up again in the geek community it created.
I think you'll find killing Piggy doesn't make people love you. Of course this time Piggy has the high ground. It speaks well for him that he doesn't choose to take advantage of it.
For some reason, my post above came under the name "Anonymous Coward." It was in fact from Andy Burlingame. If it's below your threshold, it said that _Children of the Stars_ isn't the right book. As far as I have read, the concept was first mentioned in _Orphans of the Sky_ by Heinlein.
No I did not have "Post Anonymously" checked. Maybe I somehow got loged out before sendig?
Hmmm. An interesting point. I've already admitted that this isn't my speciality, so go easy, eh?
Somehow I think you fail to grasp the incredible difficulty of transmitting one time keys using polarized photons. We can now do this over a few kilometers using a fiber optic line that is very, very stable. Also no material is completely transparent. You just can't send a bunch of photons from one place and expect the same photons to appear half way around the world. If there is any signal amplification on the line, or you change the signal to an electronic one in a switch and back to light again, you've lost the key. There may be ways around this, but I don't think the infrastructure will be placed to allow quantum cryptography to be used on any significant scale for a long, long time. The government and big corporations will certainly have quantum computers long before there will be significant market pressure to get the telecoms to completely replace an otherwise adaquate infrastructure.
I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional crypto." Are you suggesting that one time pads are not traditional? They've been around quite a bit longer than public keys.
For some reason, my last post came up under the name "Anonymous Coward." If that happens this time. I am Andy Burlingame. (cburling@princeton.edu,/.hegemon)
The infocalypse is a bit like Brazil. (paraphrased quote: "Brazil is and always will be the country of the future.") It's the underachiever of the doomsday prophesies.
The nature of the exponential growth of tech is that tech begets tech. Similarly, tech helps us to deal with tech. People had a hard time dealing with the industrial revolution, which had a much slower pace. How can it be that we are managing to keep up with the extraordinarily fast paced information revolution? I believe that socialization has changed to better equip us to deal with change, and in addition that much of the tech we have been creating helps us to filter information. Information technologies may in fact be a tremendous boon to us as we face later revolutions. We will have the tools to deal with an ever increasing amount of information.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there was a branching in the meaning of the word "liberal" after the first world war.
Libaral used to mean, for the most part, what American's call Libertarian. This is the classical liberal. The framers of the Constitution of the United States were liberals. After WWI, socialism really started to get a toehold on the politics of the day, and they resorted to all sorts of nasty propaganda and word twisting. (Even if you are a socialist today, you have to admitt that this did occur. The socialists back then were definitely not nice people.)
To the great dismay of the liberals of the day, the socialists took the words "liberal" and "freedom", twisted them well beyond their then-standard definitions, and applied them to themselves. This is a standard case of "Newspeak".
Now all that is long in the past, but the strange conflicting meanings of certain words presist in our language. Additionally, there is also a divide between the US meanings and those that are now standard in Europe. I might conjecture that this is because of the more pervasive influence of socialist thought in Europe.
If you want to look at original meanings for a guide to how a word should be used:
liberal or classical liberal - a person who believes in free trade and a limited government.
Libertarian - Here the Americans actually have the correct definition. The US Libertarian Party uses a classically proper application of the word.
I must point out that no matter how intelligent and level headed Bill Joy is, he is not an expert on biotech and nanotech. Neither am I, which is why I'm not writing letters about it to major newspapers.
... Ah, what the futz. If you can't figure out how nearly impossible it would be to create an organism or nanite that could wipe out world, than any arguements I could make won't change your mind.
One thing he leaves out of his analysis (at least as far as I can tell from the Washington Post article) is that these advances in technology are not moving only in the direction of weapons manufacture.
In addition, I'm not sure he really understands how complicated it is to make even the smallest change in the genetic material of even the most easily changable organism, or how unbelievably difficult it is to create even a system of gears on the nanotech scale.
Relating to the first point: Let's assume that the technology exists to create an incredibly distructive, self replicating virus or nanite that is also capable of evolving rapidly. This is, I should say, a very big assumption.
If the science and technology exists to do such a thing, I guarantee that the technology will be available to do a much simpler thing, such as create a defense against this attacking creature. It is much, much simpler to make a dumb little nanite or organism that only eats bad nanites and organisms.
Our situation is similar to some intelligent but uninformed man telling a preindustrial society "Someday they will create bulldozers and PC's. They will hook them up together and create an unstoppable swarm of city seeking bohemoths that could level the world. We will be defensless!"
Now to the second point and the question of how big an assumption we made up there.
There is one point that I haven't seen anyone make. Perhaps I just missed it. It just seems pretty obvious to me.
If you build a computer to predict the market and then actively act upon that data, the computer will be influencing the market. If the computer influences the market, then to make any prediction the computer must predict its own behavior. I'm sure you see the recursive and impossible nature of this.
To answer one question I'm guessing some will present: No the computer can not just predict a bit of the market upon which it has not had recent influence. The market is extremely nonlinear. Even worse than billiard balls.
More impressive than the butterfly story: Say you have a frictionless billiards table on which billiard balls are bouncing, and these collisions are lossless (for simplicity). By classical dynamics you can completely determine the positions of the balls at any future time with exact knowledge of the initial positions. Now, if a friend walks into the room durring the experiment, the GRAVITATIONAL force of his body is enough to perturb the system such that your prediction will deviate significantly from reality within 10 collision times.
The market is much more nonlinear than a table full of balls. The point being that it is absolutely impossible to build a computer that would predict the market, and if you did, and used the data, it would no longer be an accurate prediction, because the computer can not take itself into account in the calculation.
You're not being overly cynical, you just don't understand economics. Sorry for the bluntness.
Ask anyone who works on Wall St. what the purpose of the stock market provides, and they will almost universally give you the same answer: liquidity.
The stock market moves money around the world to the places where it will find the most use. Without this, there would be significanly less innovation and a much lower standard of living in the long term.
You are also a bit wrong about the "Law of Conservation of Wealth" issue. The companies on the market have (mostly) finite amount of stock to sell, but the companies grow. This means that money is not conserved. There is more money and more value out there every day (on average.) This is the whole reason the market provides a rate of return at all.
Most issues should not be allowed on the ballot. If this truely is a violation of the freedom of speech (which it is only if the government is paying for the library), it should not be voted upon. If the government is bound to respect the rights of its citizens, it can not violate those rights even with the mandate of a majority.
Hayek said (paraphrased) "Democracies can vote themselves into a tyrany more absolute than can evolve by any other means."
What about that bug in the first release of Win98? I must have been blind and deaf not to hear about it at the time. I think I'm still running the first release of that OS. Scary.
Oddly, the author is using Bell's Theorem (which I'm pretty sure is really Bohm's Theorem.) This is a part of Bohmian Mechanics, the only formulation of quantum physics afaik that is deterministic. Bell was its biggest supporter, and is also the man credited with debunking it. Much to his chagrin.
Of course you have to swallow the nonlocality of space-time.
I don't know of any good references for this, you might have to search a bit.
I can see I'm really going to enjoy this discussion. Your post brought a smile to my face and lightness to my heart. I sincerely hope you reply to this.
a rd guy down the street. /. just don't care."
/. just don't care," is patently untrue. (You can make a bald assertion, so can I. Now where did it get us? Try to back up your statements with some reasoned arguement.)
."
/.'s operation wholly because he knew that they would not retaliate, and he would gain some misdirected respect because of it.
"Thanks for telling us about yourself before diving into the real meat of your writing. You must idolize Katz."
You're welcome. No, I don't idolize Katz, but I do like the guy.
"What has Katz done to help the 'geek cause' (journalist buzzword)? Why don't you give examples? Is this really more than, say, Linus' contribution to 'geeks', or haven't you heard of him?"
I believe I mentioned that you should read the book. Linus gave a nice os to everyone, and for that I thank him from the bottom of my heart. It was a great thing, but that's wholly different from what I'm talking about (which I should think is rather obvious.) Katz has tried to help individual geeks by being a counselor of sorts to many, many people who wrote to him after the Littelton tragedy. In addition, his Hellmouth articles have done a great deal for the young geek community. Who has had a greater positive effect on the computer world? Linus, obviously. But that doesn't mean Katz's work is any less valuable.
"Spend a whole paragraph on a personal attack against FascDot and his karma? What a waste of time."
I was feeling a bit vitriolic. Perhaps that was overboard. I wrote that part because the reason Fascdot told us about his karma was so that we would all think his statement (and he, himself) was worthwhile. I believe he was also trying to garner some sentamental support for himself, like Jesus Christ betifically turning up his hands and saying "Look, I bleed."
"You *are* Jon Katz! Admit it!
This is the whole reason Katz is rejected here. No programmers I know of run around yapping about 'geek culture'. I never even hear the word 'geek', except out of that lamo NT-hugging couldn't-write-Hello-World-in-BASIC-without-a-wiz
Katz likes geek culture, and you like geek culture. Most programmers and people on
Perhaps you should care. I'm a physicist by trade, and I'm personally watching the results of similar disinterest in the scientific community. Now we've got the religous right removing evolution from the school and replacing it with prayer sessions, and the postmodernists are doing some *really* horrendous things. I think there is hardly a single group of people more falsly portrayed and even demonized by the popular media than geeks and hackers. We need some language of discourse (and facility with that language) by which to describe and understand ourselves, or we can't even begin to hope to make others understand.
Additionally, I think your statement that "Most programmers and people on
"Who cares? Are you totally out of touch?. .
Please try to follow along here. I in no way stated that "'Geek culture'" is about love. I said that picking on Katz, being a bully, will not make people love you. Groups often define themselves by who the exclude. They often feel cohesion only in that act. I was trying to say that this is not a healthy way to be. It does not achieve the ends it hopes for. Again, I should think that was obvious. Fascdot was picking on the "different" kid to gain the support of those in his community. Bad, bad Fascdot. He even commented on some of the people responsible for
Regarding the "goodbye 70 karma", see above.
I didn't start the off topic thread. I responded to it. I usually don't do that, but, as I said in the first paragraph of my original post, I felt it was necessary.
In short: I was not writing about myself, I only offered an explaination intended to turn aside some of the arguements you made before you made them. Katz's "benevolence" (not my word at all) claim was not unsupported. I told you to read the book. I feel a little silly talking about the things he's done, because it made me feel that I was supporting him too much. I was trying to defend a good man, not betify him.
Usually I just ignore people with bad attitudes. Really, I don't feel it's my place to butt into other peoples' lives to tell them that their behavior is inappropriate. Sometimes, however, it is necessary.
/., and if that isn't enough for you, they are also better geeks who truly contribute to the community. I should also point out that a high karma achieved by the high volume, low quality posting you do is not
/. bunch guide you with regard to your evaluation of his character and intelligence, since they know him much better than you do. Ah, I forgot, you don't seem to have much respect for those who run /.
Your comments about Katz are completely out of line. He has done more to help geeks and the "geek cause" than anyone I've ever heard of. Read his latest book when it comes out (_Geeks_). Even if you disagree with his view of tech culture, you should at least be able to admit that he deserves more respect than you've shown him in these posts.
In addition, CmdrTaco and Hemos also deserve more respect. Your 70+ karma is nothing compared to what they've done. They help run
much to be proud of. I've even looked at your high moderation posts and found that they are almost uniformly examples of the problems with the moderation system.
I don't know CmdrTaco and Hemos, but I have a passing acquaintance with Katz, and I do not find him to be a pseudo- anything. He is an intelligent author and a worthwhile conversationalist. If you don't see that from his
posts, you should at least let what respect you have for the
Now I've had another glimpse into the dark side of the geek. All I see is a bunch of angry adolescents who improperly focus their pain on aggression against those who are slightly different then they are. It is sickening and
fascinating that the same childish impulse to hurt and exclude others that in the vast majority of cases forced geeks to become geeks shows up again in the geek community it created.
I think you'll find killing Piggy doesn't make people love you. Of course this time Piggy has the high ground. It speaks well for him that he doesn't choose to take advantage of it.
For some reason, my post above came under the name "Anonymous Coward." It was in fact from Andy Burlingame. If it's below your threshold, it said that _Children of the Stars_ isn't the right book. As far as I have read, the concept was first mentioned in _Orphans of the Sky_ by Heinlein.
No I did not have "Post Anonymously" checked. Maybe I somehow got loged out before sendig?
Hmmm. An interesting point. I've already admitted that this isn't my speciality, so go easy, eh?
/.hegemon)
Somehow I think you fail to grasp the incredible difficulty of transmitting one time keys using polarized photons. We can now do this over a few kilometers using a fiber optic line that is very, very stable. Also no material is completely transparent. You just can't send a bunch of photons from one place and expect the same photons to appear half way around the world. If there is any signal amplification on the line, or you change the signal to an electronic one in a switch and back to light again, you've lost the key. There may be ways around this, but I don't think the infrastructure will be placed to allow quantum cryptography to be used on any significant scale for a long, long time. The government and big corporations will certainly have quantum computers long before there will be significant market pressure to get the telecoms to completely replace an otherwise adaquate infrastructure.
I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional crypto." Are you suggesting that one time pads are not traditional? They've been around quite a bit longer than public keys.
For some reason, my last post came up under the name "Anonymous Coward." If that happens this time. I am Andy Burlingame. (cburling@princeton.edu,
The infocalypse is a bit like Brazil. (paraphrased quote: "Brazil is and always will be the country of the future.") It's the underachiever of the doomsday prophesies.
The nature of the exponential growth of tech is that tech begets tech. Similarly, tech helps us to deal with tech. People had a hard time dealing with the industrial revolution, which had a much slower pace. How can it be that we are managing to keep up with the extraordinarily fast paced information revolution? I believe that socialization has changed to better equip us to deal with change, and in addition that much of the tech we have been creating helps us to filter information. Information technologies may in fact be a tremendous boon to us as we face later revolutions. We will have the tools to deal with an ever increasing amount of information.