Look at Open Town Meetings as an example. It is one of the most democratic and empowering form of governments in practice and it exists without a secret ballot for most matters.
The town meeting works only if everyone is willing to play by the rules. It is not particularly good at protecting minority interests, and can be quite short-sighted, stupid and irresponsible when emotions are running high, no matter how trivial the issue.
In fact, the 3 laws were a convenient plot device to show how those 3 laws would break down.
I don't believe Asimov himself ever treated them as anything other than a plot device to explore the topic.
In-universe, the 3 Laws began as a PR gimmick to promote public acceptance of robots. Robert Heinlein, no fan of the 3 Laws, made short work of them in "Friday."
It's jarring --- but perfectly consistent --- to see how often Asimov used the word "boy" (=black=slave) in summoning a robot in his early stories. The 3 laws can be used to define a relationship that is neither healthy or informed on either side,
The scratching sound of a quill pen against paper - done in by the typewriter
The modern fountain pen came into general use about the same time as the typewriter.
It was only after three key inventions were in place that the fountain pen became a widely popular writing instrument. Those were the iridium-tipped gold nib, hard rubber, and free-flowing ink.
The first fountain pens making use of all these key ingredients appeared in the 1850s. In the 1870s Duncan MacKinnon, a Canadian living in New York City, and Alonzo T. Cross of Providence, Rhode Island, created stylographic pens with a hollow, tubular nib and a wire acting as a valve. Stylographic pens are now used mostly for drafting and technical drawing but were very popular in the decade beginning in 1875. In the 1880s the era of the mass-produced fountain pen finally began. The dominant American producers in this pioneer era were Waterman, of New York City, and Wirt, based in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Waterman soon outstripped Wirt, along with many companies that sprang up to fill the new and growing fountain pen market. Waterman remained the market leader until the early 1920s.
Elegant or practical, the fountain pen is a survivor.
1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.
This is the rock where Freenet comes to grief.
The corporate data service can bury its servers in a salt mine or cavern tucked away somewhere deep in the Appalachians. When ISIS or the Feds are breaking down the doors, on-site physical security becomes their problem, not yours, or your family's.
The geek can become obsessed with the notion of "plausible deniability." [Not so much with thinking clearly about what is actually plausible, but that is another story.] The problem is finding someone who gives a damn one way or the other. "Tag. You're It!"
This is very old news.
The PS3 was sold below cost to built market share as a video game console.
It could be a purchased at an ever greater discount in wholesale lots. Taking thousands of units out of retail distribution. Meaning that your HPC was being subsidized by Sony and ultimately by the PS3 gamer.
Exit the "Other OS" in a firmware update for the PS3. Exit HPC-friendly Cell processors in the PS4.
It's a scam as uch as any cryptocurrency is a scam; ie. essentially a pyramid-scheme. But then, so is the current market economy system
Market economies are built on the hard realities of finance, trade and production. The pyramid scheme is a something-from nothing, get-rich-quick, fantasy.
In theory a society rich enough to afford it would have moved to the oft-fictionalised post work utopia that you sometimes see in things like Star Trek.
But all you ever really see in Star Trek is life as viewed through the lens of the Starfleet officer. Utopian societies always look plausible when viewed from a height --- and you can't get much higher than a starship.
Looking back upon Slashdot history (you know, back when it was News for Nerds), I'd say it's about as clear as fucking mud.
That line you attempt to draw between relevance (Freedom of Speech issue) and Slashdot is practically anorexic.
Having been around here awhile ---
I'd say that "News For Nerds" becomes an issue only when a story takes a geek outside his comfort zone, which seems to shrink a little faster each year. When the talk turns to gender issues in tech, for example, you can see him circling the wagons.
Leaving a TV prop replica sitting in your driveway is douchey. Store it in the garage, or your storage shed, or the back yard, or a storage facility.
This thing looks big enough to be a problem for our local zoning board. Basically a full-sized shed or playhouse more less permanently installed on your front yard --- which is not a particularly good idea for any number of reasons.
The fact that we accept something won't pass despite it being universally wanted by "the people" (not pronounced "corporations")
The geek's first mistake in politics is to begin by assuming that everyone wants what he wants.
The second is to forget that people outside his own group may be actually and quite naturally aligned with the interests and values with whatever corporate entity he chooses to demonize.
Net neutrality is a distant, ill-defined abstraction.
What you see at ground level are the tens of millions of users drawn to add-supported and subscription media services like Netflix. This isn't how the geek expected the Internet to evolve or the purposes it would serve. But good luck trying to put the genii back into the bottle.
It does not require the massive infrastructure that starts with Western toilets to solve this problem. It can be done with wood and stone and gravity, assembled using nothing more than muscle power.
The essential requirement was a constant flow of fresh water in roughly the same volume as consumed daily by a modern European city.
There were eleven aqueducts supplying water to Rome that --- after serving drinking, bathing, sanitation and other needs --- was flushed through the sewers.
Over time, the Romans expanded the network of sewers that ran through the city and linked most of them, including some drains, to the Cloaca Maxima, which emptied into the Tiber River. Sanitation in ancient Rome
Is it necessary to add that flooding the Tiber with raw sewage is not the same as sewage treatment?
Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity?
Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren't properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.
If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.
Western toilets aren't the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn't feasible in many poor countries.
One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I've written about before.
Another idea is to reinvent the sewage treatment plant.
Today, in many places without modern sewage systems, truckers take the waste from latrines and dump it into the nearest river or the ocean --- or at a treatment facility that doesn't actually treat the sewage. Either way, it often ends up in the water supply. If they took it to the Omniprocessor instead, it would be burned safely. The machine runs at such a high temperature (1000 degrees Celsius) that there's no nasty smell; in fact it meets all the emissions standards set by the U.S. government.
Before we even started the tour, I had a question: Don't modern sewage plants already incinerate waste? I learned that some just turn the waste into solids that are stored in the desert. Others burn it using diesel or some other fuel that they buy. That means they use a lot of energy, which makes them impractical in most poor countries.
The Omniprocessor solves that problem. Through the ingenious use of a steam engine, it produces more than enough energy to burn the next batch of waste. In other words, it powers itself, with electricity to spare. The next-generation processor, more advanced than the one I saw, will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity.
From Poop To Potable: This Ingenious Machine Turns Feces Into Drinking Water
I mean the guy already excelled at selling SHIT to people for years...
Cheap shot gets an instant mod-up, to "Insightful," no surprise there.
correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIR the US justice system, It is up to the prosecution side to prove there was evidence on teh HD, not on the side of the defense there was not.
In the real world of the courtroom, the burden of proof is constantly shifting back-and-forth.
The destruction or disappearance of records under circumstances which are wildly improbable, suspiciously well-timed, or very unusual, to say the least, raises questions that the defense cannot afford to ignore.
It's the defendant's behavior that jury is examining here, not the contents of his files.
The geek in court tends to think that he holds the jury spellbound by his intellectual superiority and technical genius. He'll spin a yarn that stretches probability to the breaking-point and beyond in the absolute certainty that they can't possibly vote to convict.
"Reasonable doubt" and all that.
When it comes out, be sure and get it before it is sued out of existence by someone who ate something that was accidentally recognized as edible
I have no need for an app that can't be trusted to do its job. Least of all when a mistake can be lethal.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
