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Comment Re:Civilization collapse (Score 1) 95

Jane Jacobs wrote a great book on civilization collapse in 2004 titled "Dark Age Ahead":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."

She makes many good points. That said, like John Gardner wrote in the 1964, "Every generation must learn for themselves what the words on the monuments mean":
"Self-renewal : the individual and the innovative society"
https://archive.org/details/se...
        "The only stability possible is stability in motion."--John William Gardner
        In his classic treatise Self-Renewal, John W. Gardner examines why great societies thrive and die. He argues that it is dynamism, not decay, that is dramatically altering the landscape of American society. The twentieth century has brought about change more rapidly than any previous era, and with that came advancements, challenges, and often destruction. Gardner cautions that "a society must court the kinds of change that will enrich and strengthen it, rather than the kind of change that will fragment and destroy it."
        A society's ability to renew itself hinges upon its individuals. Gardner reasons that it is the waning of the heart and spirit--not a lack of material might--that threatens American society. Young countries, businesses, and humans have several key commonalities: they are flexible, eager, open, curious, unafraid, and willing to take risks. These conditions lead to success. However, as time passes, so too comes complacency, apathy, and rigidity, causing motivation to plummet. It is at this junction that great civilizations fall, businesses go bankrupt, and life stagnates. Gardner asserts that the individual's role in social renewal requires each person to face and look beyond imminent threats.
        Ultimately, we need a vision that there is something worth saving. Through this vision, Gardner argues, society will begin to renew itself, not permanently, but past its average lifespan, and it will at once become enriched and rejuvenated."

Also on ideas from that book: https://fluidself.org/books/ps...
        "Every individual, organization or society must mature, but much depends on how this maturing takes place. A society whose maturing consists simply of acquiring more firmly established ways of doing things is headed for the graveyard--even if it learns to do these things with greater and greater skill. In the ever-renewing society what matures is a system or framework within which continuous innovation, renewal and rebirth can occur.
        Our thinking about growth and decay is dominated by the image of a single life-span, animal or vegetable. Seedling, full flower and death. "The flower that once has blown forever dies." But for an ever-renewing society the appropriate image is a total garden, a balanced aquarium or other ecological system. Some things are being born, other things are flourishing, still other things are dying--but the system lives on. ..."

For example, as I wrote elsewhere on July 4th, even as the USA is facing political issues, the internet has become a place where people provide each other support about health issues in a Patch-Adams-style participatory wellness community. That is an amazing revolution in itself. As Patch Adams said: "The most revolutionary act one can commit in our world is to be happy. (Patch Adams)" Or, I'd add, to help others be happy too.
https://soylentnews.org/commen...

I think a big part of self-renewal in our society may come from both humans and their AIs learning to laugh at the irony in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Comment Re:Wrong conclusion. (Score 1) 56

Utilities are heavily regulated because they need to be. They have demonstrated it time and again. PGE in particular has proven it several well-publicized times that you surely have heard of.

The upshot of these regulations is that utilities including PGE only really make money from new generation projects, so they certainly would like to engage in them. But the longer they run, the more they cost, and the more PGE can charge as a result. This also motivates them to build the least cost-effective options.

Comment Re:macOs no more? (Score 1, Informative) 9

There is a light version of the patch that only does fixes. If you want all of the content you will have to run Windows, or run the Windows version in some kind of VM. You can use protontricks or steamtinkerlaunch to install the provided openjdk and the required windows runtime and then run the jarfile installer, and copy the 4gb patch into the Apps directory alongside the game executable and run

wine 4gb_patch.exe "SimCity 4.exe"

To install the 4GB patch to a clean install.

I am running SC4 in dwproton.

Comment Re:Firewall? (Score 3, Informative) 41

Would a properly installed firewall stop someone from accessing this via the IP?

The short answer is yes, but the longer answer is it's complicated.

Devices with back doors may also dial out from your network. It's common for devices to phone home to check for updates and such so such activity is not necessarily even seen as suspicious, though of course in an enterprise context you should be disabling automatic updates and/or reconfiguring them to use internal servers.

Devices which might be malicious should be segregated onto their own physically isolated networks connected only through firewalls with policies for both ingress and egress so that you can control both types of threat. But it's better still when your software and firmware is OSS, and you build your own images and deploy them to the hardware yourself to have the best chance to avoid the possibility in the first place. Even this doesn't completely preclude such attacks, but it does offer some protection (mostly in proportion to the level at which you're auditing the source files, and the percentage of OSS.)

TL;DR: It's smartest to segregate and whitelist traffic in both directions for sketchy devices.

Comment Re:a path-traversal attack (Score 1) 74

I don't know that it's really "the EEs" that caused the problem. I suspect it's "the regular programmers who found themselves doing embedded programming jobs". They didn't care how it could be made to work, they just wanted it to work. Most of these haven't even been on USB until recently, they were all on I2C or SPI. However there ARE some standards now and corporations should just use them like everyone else. Since they don't, the semi-pro level stuff is superior, I'm pretty sure the RGB controller I'm using is put out by a one-person company.

I do not understand the point of colorful lights in keyboards and the like. But then, I am not mentally 5 years old.

Sorry your heart is dead, but a lot of us still understand fun.

Comment Re:Wrong conclusion. (Score 2) 56

More important than breaking up PGE, we should nationalize the distribution infrastructure. PGE has demonstrated time and again that they lack the necessary responsibility. I refer again to burning down much of Paradise, CA by skipping maintenance, as the fire was caused by a line falling because a hook wore through due to being in service for 99 years. Surely they could have caught that with an inspection any time over several decades as the wear would have been easily visible long before failure, if only they had actually done inspections.

PGE is in fact now complaining that they cannot reasonably maintain some of the primary infrastructure we depend on for literally our entire society to function, so we should reasonably just take them at their word and take it away from them. They have been poor stewards at best.

Comment Re:That's just it, it's a tool. (Score 1) 57

It can recognize and even simulate emotion, but it doesn't *need* it as a cognitive crutch the way we do.

It can't simulate emotion. It can simulate an emotional response. The difference is critical and every human who gets emotionally involved with AI is making the same mistake.

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