Comment Re:Asimov was here (Score 1) 99
OK, good, someone beat me to it. I'd be disappointed otherwise.
OK, good, someone beat me to it. I'd be disappointed otherwise.
"Beware, oh ye sinners! You who consume the flesh of beasts, you who buy trinkets of little worth, you who defile and despoil the Earth! Beware! Your times of joy and revelry will end! Suffering shall come, and pain, and torment, lest ye repent your sinful ways! Repent! There is no salvation in the sun! There is no salvation in the tides! There is no salvation even in the poisonous fires of the atom itself! No, none! No salvation but the cessation of your sins!"
That is the article in a nutshell. I could point out all the false premises (the most key being that anyone, anywhere, claims that *infinite* growth is possible -- it self-evidently isn't, and no one, not even the most utopian, claims it is), or the coy dismissal of "kicking the can down the road" (Hint: That's how humans solve almost ALL problems. It's like saying, "Well, if you're hungry now, you can eat, but what does that do? Tomorrow you'll be hungry again! You're just putting off the problem, not solving it! Stop being hungry at all!"), but I'm pretty sure the umpteen-hundred other posters have already done this. Demanding a solution that will work for the projected lifespan of the universe, and for infinite growth of human consumption, is setting an impossible goal, and she knows it -- she just hopes the readers will be too busy shouting "Amen!" and "Preach it, Sister!" to notice.
This is simply a fanatical fundamentalist railing at sin, and should be taken as seriously as every other such preacher.
Or edit the timestamp so that the ATM camera shows you there at the time the cops know that the suspect in the "Chainsaw Castrator" case made a withdrawal. (No hackers involved, that I know of, but back in the early 1990s, the Daily News ran a front-page photo of the suspect in a serial rape case, based on ATM footage. Except, oops, the time stamp was wrong and the poor shmuck was completely innocent.) (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/16/nyregion/man-in-photo-is-not-a-suspect.html) Now, consider what could be done today with actual malice, by crooks or by the cops who just want to arrest *someone*.
....is a documentary, then. Who knew?
"Sure, if you are a biased moron and got all your information from
A base insult! I ALSO get my information from Fark headlines! So there!
Anyway;
a)Clinton tried to get the clipper chip, or its equivalent, through three times, at least accoding to Slashdot headlines. I'd normally use Fark headlines, but I don't think it existed back then.
b)While the Communications Act, as a whole, was pretty much a done deal, Clinton actually called out the portion of it that contained the CDA during the signing ceremony, taking special pride in that part of it. Granted, the DoJs defense of it was so pathetic that he could have given them orders to throw it -- but as Obama showed with DOMA, the Executive branch is not actually obliged to defend a law it considers unconstitutional at all, and he could have chosen to do that.
This assumes you can place the bomb where there is such a socket. Of course, if the lamp requires a socket, there goes THAT plan. Curses, foiled again!
Two words: Clipper Chip.
Some other words: He eagerly signed the CDA.
That's about all you need to know about Clinton and the Internet.
While it's not exactly the must-have tech toy of the century, I don't think its completely useless. Some suggestions:
a)Set up bomb triggered by photoelectric sensor.
b)Place lamp next to bomb.
c)Press button.
Someone's already mentioned the morse code use. Sure, the FBI is monitoring your tweets, but are they monitoring your, uhm, blinks?
It is worth noting that not everyone is always watching their IM, etc. A signal to people who are NOT online that your status has changed is not without its uses.
Add in some kind of color changing mechanism, so that you can sync colors, and you can send a large number of message. "Two blue blinks means the cops are on their way, clear out!", for example.
Heck, I HATE it when I am summoned from my home office for dinner by someone shouting down the stairs at me. It breaks my concentration hideously. Having a signaling device like this with no annoying vocal component would actually be useful to me. Others in my family aren't online all the time; they can't/won't just send me an email to let me know dinner is ready.
We live in the dying days of a great empire. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can change this -- not by individual or collective action. Thus, we should eat the bread and attend the circuses. Our descendants (well, your descendants, I'm not spawning) will envy us for having the kind of surplus resources that allows the creation of things like this. Enjoy it while you can; refusing to enjoy it won't change anything, except your happiness level.
Ah, someone else made the comment I was going to. ++.
Every time I read one of these articles, I sense this bizarre attitude that getting 25,000 signatures somehow means that a law will be passed or that something meaningful has been accomplished or that it's important to sign/not sign whatever bit of garbage is being bandied about at the moment. The "We The People" site is about as important, useful, or relevant as a pop-up poll promising you a free iPad for responding. The "response" from the White House is virtually always "We've read your stupid petition. Here's your response: It's stupid.". Laws are not passed in America by direct democracy, and, even if they were, you'd need about a hundred million votes, give or take, not 25,000. 25,000 signatures -- in a population of 300+ million -- are nothing. You can get 25,000 people to sign virtually anything. To get a law to the President's desk, you need to convince 50% of Congress to do something -- actually, more than 50%, given the many procedural obstructions that exist. Absolutely NO MEANINGFUL, CONCRETE, OR SIGNIFICANT ACTION WILL EVER BE TAKEN SOLELY AS A RESULT OF A PETITION ON THAT WEB SITE. Every time a web site or news service acts as if signing a petition on "We The People" is somehow different from writing "I wish the magic fairies would give me a pony!" on a scrap of paper and then keeping it under your pillow, it adds to the "slacktivism" of the American people and undermines any actual progress towards any desired goal, regardless of your political leanings. THE SITE IS A JOKE. It means NOTHING. It will not influence a single vote in Congress. It will not cause the President to take any action he was otherwise not going to take. Every moment wasted signing a petition, asking someone else to sign a petition, asking someone NOT to sign a petition, etc, is a moment wasted from your life (yes, like the moments I wasted writing this). You would accomplish more for yourself watching "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo", because at least you'd be entertained. (I assume, I've never actually watched it. If I want to see drunken redneck idiots, I can drive a mile to my local Wal Mart.)
The definition of "free and open source software" doesn't/shouldn't include any limits on what that software DOES. Wouldn't saying, "You can use this code, but not if you write programs that do something I don't like with it!" violate the fundamental principles of open software? How about, "Here's my code for a really great FTP implementation, but you can't use it, or any program including it, to download copyrighted movies." Wouldn't fly, would it?
I understand that the open source coding community also includes a lot of shared cultural values, but the more it becomes just another means of distributing code, the less those shared cultural values are, erm, shared. RMS certainly has the right to speak out against things he find abhorrent, and to encourage people to not support them, as everyone does. As is so often the case, "The right to do something" is not the same as "The right thing to do." I think by trying to link his personal views on what's good, right, proper, etc, to the concept of open source itself, which is utterly apolitical, damages open source and would make people worry that, by using it, they are implicitly accepting or supporting ethical/political ideas they disagree with. (I have seen tons of open source code, esp. Apache, used by people and companies whose goals and values are at extreme odds with the generic "open source" culture.)
Actually, I would say that a society ruled by "empathy" would quickly collapse, as the people in charge would be unable to make decisions based on an objective cost/benefit analysis, but instead would be paralyzed by emotional concerns. It's a common cliche that "you can't put a price on human life", but every modern society does, constantly, and if a society's leaders can't do this, the society will fail.
To use a highly oversimplified example: Let's assume that we can prevent 50% of automobile related deaths by imposing a regulation that increases the cost of a car by $1.00. Most people would say that would be worthwhile. To prevent 50% of the remaining deaths, we can increase the cost of a car by $100.00. To prevent 50% of the remaining deaths (this report was commissioned by Zeno, by the way), the cost increases by $1000.00. And so on. There is a point where someone must say, "Yeah, the harm done by increasing costs that much outweighs the value of the lives saved." An "empathic" person would be unable to draw that line, as he'd be unable to say "Some known percentage of people will die in accidents, people who COULD have been saved if we'd spent more money." This carries across many different fields and areas of human activity, from drug trials to engineering. There's a point where some level of risk must be deemed "acceptable". The more empathic someone is, the more difficult it will be for them to consciously allow a certain number of probable deaths or injuries.
Emotions are easy to manipulate. I show you (generic you, not you personally) a bunch of pictures, along with heart-wrenching stories, of Palestinean children killed by Israeli bombs. "How can we support such murderers?", you ask. Then I show you heart-wrenching stories of Israeli children killed by Palestinean bombs. "We have to protect these people!", you cry. If your decision is based on how much you CARE, you can't make a decision. You have to step back and evaluate which side, if either, is more useful to support for reasons totally irrelevant to how many children are getting killed. You have to reduce people to numbers and statistics -- or you can't decide, and meanwhile, even more people die while you waffle.
More abstractly, there will always be more problems than there are resources to solve them. Someone has to decide whose suffering to alleviate, and whose to ignore. People who are too empathic can't; at best, they'll make decisions based on whichever crisis is most heart-touching to them (usually determined by which one has the best propaganda), not on other considerations.
Most of our society, at all levels, can only function if we set aside our feelings and focus on facts. An umpire shouldn't make calls based on which team he wants to win, even if his motivation is sympathy for the feelings of the team that keeps losing all the time. A boss shouldn't fire or hire people based on who he likes more, but on job performance. We disdain those who show favoritism to friends and relatives, but it is psychologically normal to be more sympathetic to those closest to you. It is psychologically *abnormal* to make decisions without regard to your emotional connections to people -- but people in power are expected, even required by law, to do precisely that, to decide things without consulting their feelings.
Thus, it is inevitable that those with the least empathy will rise to positions of power, because those with the most can't do the job.
(I've run into a depressing number of people who are convinced this is not the way the world is; that if only we all CARED enough, there'd never be a need for hard decisions, because everyone would just do the right thing, all the time.)
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah
