By my totals 17 shot on Sunday, 7 of them in 011. With 11 more starting at midnight to 0800 monday morning. The blackberry was ringing all night. 2 of the "victims" dead so far.
Note the scare quotes on "victims." Our informant continues:
The city should embrace all the violence and make it a tourist attraction. See if you can come to Chicago and make it out alive! Have tour buses go through the ghetto and stop at all the crime scenes. Get your picture with the body! Only 20 bucks. Better make it 30, 10 goes to the alderman of the ward the body is in. That way the visitors can get a small taste of how business is conducted in Chicago. As a special treat you may also get robbed at gun point during your tour. And if you want to see the indigenous population acting normally in its own habitat start using your Iphones where you can be seen. But you will be charged extra if you get apple picked! End the tour with specially trade marked Chalkie shirts with all proceed going to hire some real leadership at the FOP so we don't get screwed on our contracts. And give one buck from each tour to a special fund for the kids. ITS FOR THE CHILDREN!!!
My 25 came from the same source: Second City Cop blog. They're a collection of anonymous Chicago police.
The scare quotes refer to gang shootings.
SCC tends strongly towards alarmism and, often, hyperbole. Your odds of getting shot in Chicago, even if you go to Woodlawn for Lem's barbeque, is extremely low. Unfortunately, your odds of getting shot if you're a kid living 24/7 in Englewood or Humboldt Park are unacceptably high. Also: lots of racist cops. Blue collar job.
Extremely low? Compared to what? What it should be? What should be your odds of being shot in a major city, anyway? San Francisco is extremely safer than Englewood, and earlier this year my wife and kids still found themselves in the middle of some kind of Norteno-Sureno shootout. They didn't get hit, though! So no harm, no foul.
Alarmist, certainly. Certainly alarmist compared to your normal Chicago sources of information, which as I recall insisted that the beaches on a certain day last summer were closed due to "temperatures in the '90s:"
It's a fact that I'm not a blue-collar fellow and I don't have a blue-collar job or a blue-collar family. And no, I don't think that if I were posting comments on SCC, I'd be quite as cavalier in referring to "the animal," "mutts," etc. It does get the point across, however.
"Moderate" is always relative to standard industry practice. If patent trolling isn't standard industry practice quite yet, it's fast getting there. "Don't be evil" is a lot harder when evil is the norm.
Human Smoke is brilliant. I had no idea that Roosevelt was a virulent anti-semite [1] or that starvation through blockade was a key part of allied strategy.[2]
And TIL that between 500 000 and 3 000 000 Germans are estimated to have died in the subsequent forced relocation back to German territory.[3]
A memoir of one soldier's experience in the Pacific which is along the same lines as the Atlantic article is Goodbye Darkness.[4] It's a hell of a read.
"Franklin's mother Sara shared anti-Semitic attitudes common among Americans at the time.[citation needed] Although anti-Semitism was common during the era, it is argued[citation needed] that FDR was not anti-Semitic. Some of his closest political associates, such as Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Baruch and Samuel I. Rosenman, were Jewish, and he happily cultivated the important Jewish vote in New York City. He appointed Henry Morgenthau, Jr. as the first Jewish Secretary of the Treasury and appointed Frankfurter to the Supreme Court. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin cites statistics showing that FDR’s high level executive appointments favored Jews (15% of his top appointments at a time when Jews represented 3% of the U.S. population) which subjected Roosevelt to frequent criticism. The August, 1936 edition of "The White Knight" published an article referring to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Pamphlets appeared such as "What Every Congressman Should Know" in 1940 (featuring a sketch of the Capitol building with a Star of David atop its dome) that proclaimed that the Jews were in control of the American government. Financier and FDR confidant Bernard Baruch was called the “Unofficial President” in the anti-Semitic literature of the time. The periodical Liberation, for example, accused FDR of loading his government with Jews.[2]
During his first term Roosevelt condemned Hitler's persecution of German Jews. As the Jewish exodus from Germany increased after 1937, Roosevelt was asked by American Jewish organizations and Congressmen to allow these refugees to settle in the U.S. At first he suggested that the Jewish refugees should be "resettled" elsewhere, and suggested Venezuela, Ethiopia or West Africa — anywhere but the U.S. Morgenthau, Ickes and Eleanor pressed him to adopt a more generous policy but he was afraid of provoking the men such as Charles Lindbergh who exploited anti-Semitism as a means of attacking Roosevelt's policies.
In practice very few Jewish refugees came to the U.S. — only 22,000 German refugees were admitted in 1940, not all of them Jewish. The State Department official in charge of refugee issues, Breckinridge Long, insisted on following the highly restrictive immigration laws to the letter. As one example, in 1939, the State Department under Roosevelt did not allow a boat of Jews fleeing from the Nazis into the United States. When the passenger ship St. Louis approached the coast of Florida with nearly a thousand German Jews fleeing persecution by Hitler, Roosevelt did not respond to telegrams from passengers requesting asylum, and the State Department refused entry to the ship. Forced to return to Antwerp, many of the passengers eventually died in concentration camps.[3]
After 1942, when Roosevelt was made aware of the Nazi extermination of the Jews by Rabbi Stephen Wise, the Polish envoy Jan Karski and others, he told them that the best solution was to destroy Nazi Germany. At Casablanca in 1943 Roosevelt announced there would be no compromise whatever with Hitler. In May 1943 he wrote to Cordell Hull (whose wife was Jewish): "I do not think we can do other than strictly comply with the present immigration laws." In January 1944, however, Morgenthau succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to allow the creation of a War Refugee Board in the Treasury Department. This allowed an increasing number of Jews to enter the U.S. in 1944 and 1945. It also financed Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg's work in Budapest, where he and others helped to save 100,000+ Jews from deportation to death camps. By this time, however, the European Jewish communities had already been largely destroyed in Hitler's Holocaust.
In any case, after 1945 the focus of Jewish aspirations shifted from migration to the U.S. to settlement in British mandate of Palestine, where the Zionist movement hoped to create a Jewish state. Roosevelt was also opposed to this idea. When he met King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in February 1945, he assured him he did not support a Jewish state in British mandate of Palestine.[citation needed]"
When I first heard about the setuid patent, I thought it was pretty cool. That was, I don't know, 1989.
I think it was 1992 or so before it was really clear that patents were the true and final nemesis of my chosen profession. By "clear," I mean "obvious to anyone not in denial." Of course there's a lot of denial.
By 1999 I worked for a company that routinely filed what we called "linked list... on a phone!" patents. Unwired Planet - the geniuses behind WAP. In fact, I think there never would have been a WAP Forum if we hadn't muscled Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson with our HDML patents. (These crap patents probably provide most of the remaining market capitalization of UP's remnant, Openwave.)
Across this continuum, I have heard a continuous strand of discourse denying that there's a pit at the end of this tunnel. This discourse relies existentially on the belief that just because people could be evil, doesn't mean they will be evil. Which is true, but only in the short run. Facilis descensus Averni.
It is funny that the Unix team at Bell Labs ended up realizing the setuid was not such a good idea after all, and replaced it with a much better design in Plan 9 (meanwhile this has been pretty much ignored back in *nix land, where many limitations, like the lack of usable private namespaces, and security issues are due to setuid):
Somewhere there is a comment by Rob Pike (which I can't find now) about how it was ironic that the only thing patented in Unix early on turned out to be such a bad idea after all.
This historical notes aside, that we allow this software patent insanity to go on is scary and depressing. The billions of dollars being wasted (not to mention the amount of time and other precious resources) because of patents is staggering.
I think it was 1992 or so before it was really clear
that patents were the true and final nemesis of my
chosen profession.
The real issue is that patents favor large players (even if they are 'branching out' and aren't an incumbent in a particular area) to the detriment of smaller players.
I think the REAL issue, is that they lock up IDEAS. Ideas by themselves are inherently worthless. It's the EXECUTION that matters. Everyone has ideas. Some are great, some suck. The idea by itself is really meaningless until someone does something with it. Ideas, to me, are like knowledge. They should never be locked up, and should be freely shared.
Patents aren't supposed to lock up abstract ideas, they are supposed to unlock concrete implementations of ideas (unlock by giving details of the implementation to the public in exchange for a short-term monopoly).
There are good arguments either way for whether this is a good idea, but make the ideas far more abstract (like software) and add incredibly short technology cycles (like software), and there is no doubt it's a bad idea.
Patent trolling as a business, which IV has proven is viable, relies on a precondition: patent litigation must remain expensive. In specific, it must be prohibitively expensive to determine whether each and every asserted claim in each and every patent asserted against an "infringer" is valid. This determination can only be done via patent litigation.
What happens if this precondition does not exist?
The patent trolling business will fail.
This is because everyone knows most, maybe even all, of the claims in the patent portfolios the patent troll has amassed are not valid. They are potentially worthless. Companies simply do not know which ones are valid and which ones are not. And it's too expensive to find out. So companies are willing to negotiate instead of engaging in patent litigation.
If we were to make patent litigation so inexpensive that anyone could afford to "call the patent troll's bluff", these ridiculous patents would never be filed for much less asserted. In other words, if we could have an inexpensive determination of what claims are valid and which ones are not valid, we could separate the wheat from the chaff. And these enormous patent portfolios would shrink down to size. Just the wheat. If there is any. It would be difficult to make hollow threats and engage in IV-style extortion.
It is only the expense of finding out whether a claim is valid (through litigation) that makes patent trolling a viable business.
Maybe patent lawyers managed to get the best of Myrvold while he was a CTO, and he believes by opening the gates for a vibrant patent trolling industry, he will make life easier for every technology company in the future. All they have to do is pay some protection money and their worries will be gone.
"the belief that just because people could be evil, doesn't mean they will be evil"
You might attribute the problem to immaturity. Behold the attitude in this thread: finger-pointing.
A patent is not a right or an obligation to produce anything.
In truth, it is a right to sue others.
But surely, that is not how most patent applicants think about patents when they apply for them. We expect they are have intentions to produce something. We expect they will have products or services to sell or license.
People on the web discussing patents are apt to mention government-granted monopolies and pull out quotes from the US Constitution about promoting the progress of useful science and the arts.
Clearly, these people are not just thinking about patents as rights to sue: "If I obtain a lot of patents I can start threatening to sue other companies." They are thinking about companies that are planning to produce something and bring it to the marketplace, and the competition those companies might face.
But the IT industry is showing us that indeed there are people who are thinking of patents as rights to sue. Thye even think this somehow constitutes a legtimate "business". Because that is the ONLY way they are using patents. "Patent troll" is a term coined by someone in the IT industry. That's where it was born. It's proliferation as a "business model" is being led by a former Microsoft employee.
As is true of technology, a patent portfolio is not inherently "evil". It depends on how it is used. The IT industry is showing us how to use patents in the very worst way.
I call it immaturity. Steve Jobs throwing a hissy fit and calling Eric Schmidt from Burning Man about Android.
The problem is not patents. It is how the IT industry is using them.
I find it distressing that even PT has succumbed to this Orwellian use of the word "clean." CO2 isn't dirt.
The human instinct for hygiene is one of our most basic. When, as a calculated public-relations maneuver, you connect a scientific hypothesis (such as a climate model) to this instinct, you'd better make damn sure you're doing the right thing in every way, shape or form. I hope those models are well validated.
I get the feeling PT isn't a big believer in global warming, but the accepted term for those kinds of investments is "cleantech". If he called it "CO2-reducing technology investments", he'd sound like a curmudgeon who's more interested in being pedantic on the internet than being understood. ;-)
Sure. I wasn't harshing on PT - I'm a huge fan like all decent and reasonable people :-) In fact I'd be careful about attributing any kind of controversial position to him, but I must say defining thorium fission as "cleantech" is pretty clever - talk about dirt!
Stross answers his own question - he just doesn't want to go there. Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. Until the 21st century can accomplish this, it'll stay a tired, stale clone of the 20th.
SF and even fantasy are existentially dependent on plausibility. The more rules you break, the more you have to obey the ones you don't break. How can anyone find Enlightenment values plausible in 2012? What Enlightenment experiment hasn't been tried? Which one succeeded?
There's a lovely bit of counterreality in one of the original Gibson novels - Count Zero I think - in which US housing projects (UK: "council housing") have become dynamic centers of green innovation, with windmills on the roof and everything. Could you believe this in 1983? Just barely. From 2010, the reality:
Don't miss the arguments (between cops!) about whether or not it was safe to take the elevators. What do your Enlightenment values have to say about that?
The next century (or two) will be about figuring out how to either (a) change human beings into something else, or (b) reconcile technical change with the grim, unspeakable reality of the human condition. That's a condition human beings understood much better before the Enlightenment. You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...
Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values.
I think that would make for some interesting stories. I could imagine the adventures of, say, a Bayesian Conspiracy surrounded by a burgeoning idiocracy that was largely sexting in class while the Enlightenment was being covered in history. (So it's not so much that society turns their back, they just don't get it in the first place.) This would be kind of an update of Larry Niven's Fallen Angels.
You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...
Are you really claiming that slums entirely arose in the 3 to 4 generations prior to the revolution? Was there a huge pre-industrial revolution shift of population from rural to urban accompanied by huge sovereign debt? (This could be, I just don't remember enough about demographics.)
I would point out that he presided over a country where slavery was legal. (Though in his attempt at reform, he mandated that only Roman Catholics could own them and that slaves should be baptized.)
Concentration camps and gulags excluded, I don't think there has ever been a human society - anywhen, anywhere - as degraded as the 20th-century tower block/project, a pure product of Enlightenment thought.
It's useful to go back and compare apples to apples when we compare the 19th-century "slum" to the 20th-century slum. You can read Robert Roberts on the Edwardian slum, for instance - a world which he grew up in:
Roberts: However, approximately sixty years after Engels wrote his book, Roberts described the working class as almost being obsessed with cleanliness. A dirty home or even a front step meant lower social status. Roberts wrote “Most people kept what they possessed clean in spite of squalor and ever-invading dirt. Some houses sparkled.”
It never ceased to amaze me how the people could live like that~dirty diapers & sanitary napkins in the hallways, urine & feces everywhere, cockroaches scurrying from one apartment to the other and when you had the unfortunate luck of answering a call on the 11th floor of one of these hell-holes was horrifying! Just going in to see the "moving walls" and the chicken bones on the floor, the stove on for heat even though it was already 140 degrees in there and the stained couches & dirty mattresses on the floor where at least three or four little kids were napping with the roaches! Good times...
Lack of nice material things is one thing. Even in Cabrini-Green they had PlayStations. Louis XIV didn't have no PlayStation. Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)
Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)
I see where you're coming from. That's hardly a reason to throw out all of the >values< of the Enlightenment, however. I doubt Catherine the Great would've approved of Cabrini Green, and none of the Enlightenment experiments would've been conducted the same way had people in the past known what we know now about economics and game theory. On the other hand, we know these things. We have decades additional history about the pitfalls of unintended consequences.
In any case, I think this is a bit underhanded, if unintentionally so. First comes the implicit assumption of a not-widely understood interpretation of "Enlightenment" followed by the attachment of horrors of unintended consequences to the term.
It's fallacy to attach unintended consequences a set of values, absent an analysis of implementation.
Is this going to turn into another Libertarian flame-fest?
Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values. Note that libertarianism is an Enlightenment ideology too, just an older one (19th-century liberalism).
We know these things, so what are we doing about them? Replacing projects with Section 8? That would be fine if the problem was architecture, not Enlightenment ideology. If you read that cop thread you'll see what they think of Section 8. Here's what the Atlantic thinks:
It's best to examine all these Enlightenment experiments from the standpoint of the debate between their critics and proponents before the experiment was tried.
If the results bear out the critics, not the proponents, what on earth are we doing when we persist with the experiment? Was it really an experiment at all? Scientific thinking may be better than nonscientific thinking, but nonscientific thinking is better than pseudoscientific thinking...
Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values.
So then 911 invalidates all the teachings of Islam. The children's crusade invalidates all of christianity? Ridiculous, and hardly examples of careful reasoning.
It's best to examine all these Enlightenment experiments from the standpoint of the debate between their critics and proponents before the experiment was tried.
Why? I suspect it's best for you and the particular axe you have to grind.
If the results bear out the critics...
The results always bear out the critics. The question is really how many ways of ruling a country have been tried, and what has there been to show for it. As far as that goes, everything has been a mishmash.
Scientific thinking may be better than nonscientific thinking, but nonscientific thinking is better than pseudoscientific thinking...
If you'd be sincere in this, then please be clearer about causality and causal relationships specifically with respect to >values<. I find your posts remarkably devoid of the specifics here. If you don't have concrete causal relationships, then your argument is just emotional manipulation by trying to link horrible things to ideology you oppose.
In general, meddlers with too much power who are too sure of themselves have caused untold misery, and it gets worse as technology amplifies our power. I'm not so sure particular ideologies are to blame so much as that general circumstance.
"Christianity" and "Islam" are historical clades of theological doctrine, not "value systems" in the same sense as "left" versus "right" or "revolutionary" and "conservative." For instance, Christianity contains both the Anabaptist republic of Thomas Muenzer and the Spanish Inquisition. These can be classified as left and right extremes just as easily as Stalin and Hitler.
Left-right polarity is also seen in historical Islam (9/11 is not a product of Islam, but of Western revolutionary nationalism with a thin Islamic veneer), as well as even more divergent histories (eg, classical Korea). I have no doubt that if there are intelligent, gregarious aliens anywhere in the galaxy, they divide themselves into revolutionaries and conservatives.
There are only three ways of ruling a country. Aristotle, who had access to the histories of hundreds if not thousands of classical city-states whose annals are now of course lost, described them: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy.
Monarchy is the null hypothesis. The vast majority of historical governments have been primarily monarchical, often with some admixture of aristocracy. Pure aristocracy is much rarer. Democracy is difficult to even define (most nominal democracies, certainly including ours, are in fact aristocratic), extremely rare if it does exist, and commonly associated (as in the Greek case) with national if not civilizational decay in the near future.
An example of thinking about causality would be the French decision to cede Saint-Domingue its independence. Critics (inherently conservative) of this decision would postulate one kind of future for the new Haiti; proponents (inherently revolutionary) would postulate quite another. Of course, at the time this or any similar such decision had large numbers of very eloquent critics and proponents; so their arguments are easily discovered, if not obvious already.
(Or if you'd prefer to think in terms of Cabrini-Green, it's really not difficult to imagine what Elizabethan intellectuals would make of Cabrini-Green.)
Obviously, this historiographic practice accords with the basic scientific principle of judging an experiment by criteria established in advance.
It's a shame most people don't decide what historical ideologies are "discredited" by a rigorous and objective standard such as this. Instead, the standard is the inevitable one: the winner is always right. This is the simple, yet remarkably practical, basis on which our supposedly rational faith in the Enlightenment rests.
"Christianity" and "Islam" are historical clades of theological doctrine
What's wrong with historical clades of doctrine? How is that different from "Enlightenment values?" (Other than one having a theological origin.)
An example of thinking about causality would be the French decision to cede Saint-Domingue its independence. Critics (inherently conservative) of this decision would postulate one kind of future for the new Haiti; proponents (inherently revolutionary) would postulate quite another. Of course, at the time this or any similar such decision had large numbers of very eloquent critics and proponents; so their arguments are easily discovered, if not obvious already.
So their arguments establishing a causal chain back to a certain system of values is too long to summarize here? I think you'd be able to explain, or I've caught you out with a fallacious tactic for winning forum arguments by tarring opponents with Cabrini Green.
So as far as I can tell, you claim to determined that either revolutionaries or conservatives are simply bad news and you're promulgating a historical science that shows this. I'm still not clear on where the causal chain is established in all this back to a certain set of values.
It's a shame most people don't decide what historical ideologies are "discredited" by a rigorous and objective standard such as this.
I still don't see what's rigorous and objective yet. There's almost always a significant difference between people's stated values and their practiced values. This has often been noted by anthropologists.
Instead, the standard is the inevitable one: the winner is always right. This is the simple, yet remarkably practical, basis on which our supposedly rational faith in the Enlightenment rests.
Why is the standard the inevitable one? I think it's partly because it's all a chaotic mishmash. Almost no one lives up to their stated values, especially those who govern, and most of the evil that happens is rooted in great part in basic human nature.
So their arguments establishing a causal chain back to a certain system of values is too long to summarize here?
Um, too obvious to summarize here? I really find it difficult to believe you're this obtuse. You seem quite adept with words but I'm not sure you're saying much.
Do you really find it difficult to get from the Enlightenment beliefs that all men are born equally free, equally good and equally talented, to Cabrini-Green?
If all men were equally noble, a social system that treats all men as nobles - that is, by making them financially independent and (pretty much) free of external government - would create a "vertical community" full of noblemen. Indeed this very thought is found in all sorts of 19th-century reformers (and 18th and 20th). Google "and above this ridge new peaks will rise."
Instead, every time the experiment is tried - in both the modern and antique worlds - we get Cabrini-Green or something like it. The epitome not of nobility, but of ignobility.
Proving no more than the basic counter-Enlightenment reality that the poor are not (on average) natural noblemen, and need for the sake of their own humanity to be forced to work if they want to eat. (Actually, this is true of most of the non-poor as well.) Whether this compulsion is implemented by an overseer with a whip, or by impersonal economic forces, is not terribly meaningful on an individual basis.
Um, too obvious to summarize here? I really find it difficult to believe you're this obtuse. You seem quite adept with words but I'm not sure you're saying much.
If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correlation and not causation.
Proving no more than the basic counter-Enlightenment reality that the poor are not (on average) natural noblemen, and need for the sake of their own humanity to be forced to work if they want to eat.
So, just have less than perfect people on average, but keep the rest of the Enlightenment values. I don't see any problem with amending those with what we now know about human nature. (I think if one examines noblemen close enough, one finds a few impure motivations here and there.) This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.
If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correlation and not causation.
You can't "accurately quantify" anything significant in human affairs. This is why history is an art, not a science. So is government. (So is running a startup.)
This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.
The folks over at lesswrong.com seem to exist in a bizarre philosophical and historical vacuum in which they're the only intelligent people who ever lived. All of them, Eliezer not at all excepted, could benefit greatly from exposure to the thought of other times and places. Especially Victorian thought, which has the great advantage that (a) it's written in English and (b) universally available for free.
Part of the problem is that the contemporary "humanities" are so empty, sterile, and meretricious that it's really tempting to behave as if no one else has ever had anything interesting to say, ever. But this is a disorder of the present, not the past.
I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are;
Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around and now using a couple of hundred megawatts for a an individual a month isn't out of the ordinary. How does that change things? Imagine that you can install giant chillers in the ocean and regulate its temperature regardless of surface air temperature.
Unlimited Biology - lets say we actually figure out how cells work, right down to every single chemical, its role, its action, its reaction. We gain the ability to arbitrarily rewrite every cell in our bodies, ok so perfect health for everyone, no more 'genetic disease', no more 'aging'. What is the world like in that scenario? Do we stay human formed? Do we keep our emotions? Things that we evolved for use as cave people, do they still serve us? Fight or flight instinct?
Its 'easier' in some ways to start from 'now' and delete things and write about their loss than to add new things. Its the latter stuff we don't see as much in SF.
I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are;
- Unlimited energy
- Unlimited Biology
These both have big potentials for bad thing happening as well. I think Unlimited Biology has already been done a lot, however. I think it's so prone to weirdness that it tends toward dystopian visions. Also, a lot of this territory was covered in the 20th century.
Perhaps there's inspiration to be drawn from good stuff happening despite the tremendous potential for bad?
Perhaps the challenge then is to imagine the mechanism / property by which the bad thing is averted and the good succeeds. In a classical twist one would have the protagonist struggle against the bad thing, nearly lose, and then through a series of heroic actions over come to achieve goodness.
For me, that has been one of the interesting parts of SF is to see how people imagine we might over come either a temptation to do evil, or intrinsic evil.
If you have nigh-unlimited energy -- and crazy people do too -- then planets become remarkably big targets. And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian.
What do you mean by "nigh-unlimited?" Even if you have a store of energy that doesn't run out, thermodynamics will bite you if you try to use too much of it at once.
planets become remarkably big targets.
Even 1970's tech has access to huge amounts of energy for targeting planets from space, if all you want to do is to destroy stuff.
And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian
"Burning Man in the Oort Cloud" has been done. There's still a lot of potential there, though.
"Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around and now using a couple of hundred megawatts for a an individual a month isn't out of the ordinary. How does that change things? Imagine that you can install giant chillers in the ocean and regulate its temperature regardless of surface air temperature."
This is the wrong question. Energy isn't limited any more than any other industrial product; the cheaper it is to manufacturer physical things, the cheaper it is to harness energy (and the cheaper it becomes). And conversely, in most uses of energy, you have a lot more "work" to do assembling whatever it is that uses the energy, than whatever harnesses it. It's really a problem of industry itself; and the more efficient that gets (in a fully-automated, AI-controlled industry -- many orders of magnitude), the more available it becomes. To get abundant energy you need industrial wealth (and vice versa); energy isn't an isolated problem and isn't the important one.
And on this note, there's practically no magic in fusion power. They can't drastically undercut "primitive" fission reactors, because much their infrastruture would be identical (heat exchangers, steam generators, power generation, the power grid...) Add up the costs of modern power, and fusion also carries most of them. It's like a "factor-of-two" miracle in the most optimistic fantasy -- not an order-of-magnitude, not earth-shattering magic. (Less optimistically, I don't see how anything like tokamaks or laser ICF machines can be anything but more complicated and costly than conventional power, and I haven't see any physically-sound alternatives.)
Sure, the fuel is "cheap and abundant" (if you fantasize D+D fusion becoming technically viable -- it's not so if you try the far-easier D+T using lithium-bred tritium) -- but that's exactly the wrong solution, because again, the costs are all elsewhere, on the physically-building-things part of the equation.
Heat rejection can be very serious. The current world looks like ~10^13 watts direct, anthropogenic heating (basically "energy use"), compared to a radiative forcing of ~10^15 W of anthropogenic global warming (closest figure of merit I believe) and ~10^17 W total terrestrial irradiation. (N.B. the greenhouse effect is a pretty huge "amplifier" of anthropogenic heating -- burning a ton of coal yields a certain amount of heat directly, but some 5 orders of magnitude more heat indirectly through AGW (if you integrate over the 10^3-10^4 year atmospheric residence time... don't quote me on this, I'm unsure)). Greenhouse heating is solvable, but at a couple orders of magnitude higher power consumption (say 10^15 W -- 100x present, think 10^10 people at 100 kW(th)), anthropogenic heating becomes a comparable climate issue. Approaching 10^17 W (think 10^10 @ 10 MW, if it goes there) you need geoengineering -- blocking parts of the sun (cliche), or increasing the emissivity of large swaths of the surface.
Beyond 10^17 watts you can't keep the earth anything like its natural state: even you completely block out the sun, you more than make up for it with the heat you generate on earth. The only way to dissipate heat from the earth ultimately is into space (forget ocean chillers at this point!), and the only way to do that is the way it's being done now -- radiatively. (Modulo material properties, emissivity/abosprtivity) the power you can dissipate per area goes as he 4th power of temperature (T^4) in absolute units (rel. absolute zero). So there's exactly two options: one, to drastically increase the surface area, which will look like "moving into space" -- creating a habitable world far larger in aggregate surface area than the earth (though not in mass). The other is fairly dystopian, to heat up the earth's surface beyond the habitable point -- e.g. moving into refrigerated underground cities (this is thermodynamically sound). With this insanity you could dissipate 10^22 W with a solid-carbon surface around 4000 Kelvin -- about 50,000x the current solar budget or 10 million times the current anthropogenic budget. Maybe you could still run computers at this temperature.
Anyway, 10^8 watts per capita => 10^18+ watts is no longer an "earth" solution -- you either push it off-earth, or alter the earth beyond recongition to solve heat dissipation.
(I'm actually not imaginative enough to figure out how to spend 10^8 watts. That's the order of the (average) power of launching a space shuttle once per day -- and you could probably fit a hundred people in something on that size, 1 MW per person. Even rocket-powered spaceplanes at Mach 20 aren't that costly...)
This is science fiction we're talking about here, keep that in mind.
I disagree with your assertion that unlimited energy is the 'wrong question'. Consider the scenario that energy is created from the destruction of matter (vs oxidizing it) and we switch the entire planet to that energy source, we eliminate all green house gases associated with energy production and a big chunk of those associated with transport (all cars/trucks/trains become electric, no more coal or fossile fueled power plants, we burn hydrogen/oxygen in planes perhaps. So on the climate change front at least we can revert the human contribution of CO2 back to prehistoric levels.
Ok so then there is the question of actively regulating the temperature of the ocean (which we might want to do for other reasons like food production). One might speculate on using the planet mantle as a ginormous heat sink. It has a fairly large heat carrying capacity over all.
See when you're writing science fiction you don't run into this bump:
"And on this note, there's practically no magic in fusion power. They can't drastically undercut "primitive" fission reactors, because much their infrastruture would be identical (heat exchangers, steam generators, power generation, the power grid...) Add up the costs of modern power, and fusion also carries most of them. It's like a "factor-of-two" miracle in the most optimistic fantasy -- not an order-of-magnitude, not earth-shattering magic. (Less optimistically, I don't see how anything like tokamaks or laser ICF machines can be anything but more complicated and costly than conventional power, and I haven't see any physically-sound alternatives.)"
You are extrapolating on existing fusion principles and getting stuck. Gene Roddenberry invented "warp engines" which provided the energy in limitless quantities, and then went on to think about "Ok given some reason why X is true, now what?" kind of stories.
My take on Stross' essay is that we don't really do enough of that. And that is in part because our technology is 'close enough' these days that writers fall into the pit that you just stepped in, reality, aka 'non-fiction.' (I really liked the cyberpunk examples in this regard) So getting one's thought process out ahead of that can be quite challenging. (Easier if your fiction it more fantasy oriented, since you make a hard break with reality)
"Ok so then there is the question of actively regulating the temperature of the ocean (which we might want to do for other reasons like food production). One might speculate on using the planet mantle as a ginormous heat sink. It has a fairly large heat carrying capacity over all."
Not on these scales. At 10^18 W (your 100 MW person * 10 billion people) -- about 5x the current solar budget or Kardashev I -- you could heat the entire oceans 10 °C in about a year, or the entire earth's crust 10 °C in about 100 years. (Oceans are about 10^21 kg [1], crust is between 10^23 - 10^24 kg [2]; I'm using the specific heat value for granite here [3]).
But I'm curious about this equation, interesting == effective == intricate. Intricate == complex, right? So, the exploit certainly reveals that Chrome's security model is complex. And this is supposed to be a good thing? Seems like a good thing, if you're Pinkie Pie...
I too am bullish on sandboxing, but I suspect, like all security boundaries that have come before it, that it will be secure in inverse proportion to the amount of functionality that is allowed to pass through it. App developers will poke more and more holes through the sandbox to enable new ways to cater to users. E.g. the WebGL^H^H^H^H^HGPU command buffers channel leveraged by PinkiePie.
Well yeah WebGL is a freaking good target. And NaCl is too.
In fact, when I look at Chrome I look at NaCl and WebGL first. Because they're typical targets.
Chrome did make a good attempt at securing their browser and it works well. Unfortunately it seems that devs write slightly more sloppy code (i mean some of the exploits used are kind of basic, as if they just didn't care all that much because there's a sandbox).
That's my take tho, and it's very arguable.
I like memory-safe based OSes with secure message passing for such reasons. Singularity by Microsoft is a pretty neat implementation for such a concept. While it's not bullet proof it's simple yet (way) more powerful than the hacks we've to go through to sandbox apps on various OSes today.
Here's a catchy name for the ad bubble - we could call it "advertising-supported software." Or, for short, ASS.
Google isn't ASS, because Google ads aren't really ads. They're more like the shelf slots that Safeway sells to food vendors. Google is a store - the world's biggest store, browsed by full-text search.
(In fact, if I was Goog, I'd separate the UI into two intents, with a radiobutton or something: either you're shopping, or you're searching for information. The latter is a free, spamless service that supports the former.)
I think FB will have to learn to make its money the old-fashioned way - by providing valuable services. FB is a valuable service - it makes $5 per user a year, from ads. How many FB users would drop the service if they had to pay $5 a year? And how many other services can FB add? Dropbox anyone? Dropbox isn't ASS...
Advertising is a crappy way of funding services. It chiefly exists because of payment friction. Startups are supposed to be the future. Is crap the future? Is your project ASS? Great, but have a plan to exit before the ASS bubble pops. Some of us remember the first era of "eyeball valuation"...
Every other week, he teaches his adoring young undergrads to understand Rudolph's subtle, nuanced position on the sanctity of human life... not.
FWIW, both Kaczynski's and Rudolph's philosophical opinions are worthy of debate. Their persons, however, are icky. Icky rubs off - even if you're a professor.
I disagree with both their motives and actions but I still don't "see it easily". OK, it's the right thing to do to lock these people away for the rest of their lives. But if there's some intellectual profit to be gained in corresponding with them, I see no harm in doing so. Your conception of "icky" is reminiscent of that of a five-year-old, and has all the intellectual and moral sophistication of the same.
> If not: you don't agree that this remarkable tolerance for violent right-wing extremism is unusual among your social and intellectual peers?
I don't worry about being unusual, I worry about being right. Lots of people are intellectual and emotional five-year-olds. That's not my problem, but whether I'm one of them is my problem.
It's pretty simple - Anglophone North America is a left-wing polity and always has been, its deviant and extinct Confederate branch aside. You won't find a single leftist trope that isn't repeated over and over again in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As Earl Browder put it, "Communism is 20th-century Americanism."
This is why we're all supposed to be all nuanced and shit when it comes to Communist atrocities, but when it's time for the Fascist atrocities everyone has to stand up and yell HITLER HITLER HITLER. Precisely like a five-year-old.
It's just a sort of national lookin' after #1. We naturally ignore the sins closest to us and focus on those of others. Left is "self" and right is "other." Otherwise, we would need to express genuine collective guilt rather than dime-a-dozen collective contempt.
I understand why left-wing violence, lawlesness, etc are tolerated or encouraged - I'm asking why you think corresponding with Kaczynski does not bring the same scorn upon a person as corresponding with Rudolph would. Is it because people don't understand Kaczynski's intentions/thoughts (indeed, as reading the comments on this post would easily demonstrate)? Is it because they fundamentally agree with him, regardless of his contempt for liberals? After all, destruction of technology / industry has traditionally been a left-wing project in the U.S.
The first half of your first sentence answers the second, doesn't it? You could ask exactly the same questions with regard to John Brown - another classic American figure.
The supposed distinction between the "moderate" and "extremist" left is wildly overblown. There's no social exclusion, etc, in either direction. Nobody cares or is surprised about President Obama's association with Bill Ayers. Or, for that matter, Thoreau's with John Brown. Again, there's really nothing new here.
(I do think it's appropriate that in the nation of John Brown, we all need to walk through metal detectors to get on an airplane. Nothing could be more American than terrorism.)
Define "murderers". Depending on how widely you spread that blanket you could cover every government employee in the world. Include "or through inaction" as a modifier to your definition and you and I are just as guilty.
Murder almost always is defined to include premeditation (malice aforethought). So you're in the clear, along with most every government employee in the world.
I'm assuming you refer to the teacher's ongoing correspondence with Kaczynski which one imagines means a lot to the prisoner, and could be seen as some form of 'comfort'.
Do you see the need to examine the arguments at all? Would it be ok for the teacher to discuss the manifesto as a text without the dialogue with Kaczynski?
As far as I can tell, there is a simple and elegant explanation for the discrepancy: Rudolph (and Breivik, and most of the present crop of right-wing terrorists) is an intellectual zero while Kaczynski is not.
If Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer had left behind something like Kaczynski's manifesto (and later prison essays), some respectable intellectuals would pinch their noses and study them.
By my totals 17 shot on Sunday, 7 of them in 011. With 11 more starting at midnight to 0800 monday morning. The blackberry was ringing all night. 2 of the "victims" dead so far.
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-one-shooting-s...
Note the scare quotes on "victims." Our informant continues:
The city should embrace all the violence and make it a tourist attraction. See if you can come to Chicago and make it out alive! Have tour buses go through the ghetto and stop at all the crime scenes. Get your picture with the body! Only 20 bucks. Better make it 30, 10 goes to the alderman of the ward the body is in. That way the visitors can get a small taste of how business is conducted in Chicago. As a special treat you may also get robbed at gun point during your tour. And if you want to see the indigenous population acting normally in its own habitat start using your Iphones where you can be seen. But you will be charged extra if you get apple picked! End the tour with specially trade marked Chalkie shirts with all proceed going to hire some real leadership at the FOP so we don't get screwed on our contracts. And give one buck from each tour to a special fund for the kids. ITS FOR THE CHILDREN!!!
God I love the Internets...