Their letters and journals make it clear that the founders knew that lobbyists would be a threat to the integrity of the republic, but they thought that all the competing interests would largely cancel each other out. They could have used a little game theory to show that wasn't the case, as it will always be far more profitable to be the aggressor than the defender. If I want to take a penny from every tax payer in the country, I'm far more motivated than you are to guard your one penny. Even if the tax base were to unite in opposition, I have an infinite number of opportunities to try again. Power words: MPAA, SOPA, PIPA, DMCA, Tipper Gore.
lol, the Internet Explorer school of thought. Sure, form a work group for an open init standard with systemd as the basis - chaired by people both inside and outside the systemd project. But before that, rent a home in Malibu and wire it for reality TV, because that would be the most entertaining WG ever.
One of these init systems is run by a guy that is openly hostile to POSIX, the other can be found on several different operating systems and has been around forever. hmmm...
I think we've got a pretty fundamental difference on what we're looking for in a community. But we seem to agree on one thing - the political dimension has worsened things (well beyond the point that I'd have thought would occur before a general outcry for a return to sanity curtailed the destruction). And to further extend that thought, I would certainly agree with anyone who suggested that commercial or otherwise centralized platforms are not only uniquely vulnerable to political shenanigans - but magnify the 2nd order damage. Things are going to be getting a lot worse on that front before they get any better. As someone who was involved with bitcoin when the community was 90% crypto-anarchists, I'm keenly aware of what a community looks like when it is tearing itself apart - and what it looks like when it is under assault. It'll be interesting to see how much further things go, because few people outside of the early crypto community have experienced de-banking, and socially conscious market indexes are being rolled out...
That is not a good talk unless you already advocate for abandoning standards, and celebrate Linux's growing power to dictate how the shrinking number of remaining OSes design things. You might easily miss it if you're already onboard with systemd, but in his point by point address of systemd's shortcomings - he repeatedly handwaves and redirects.
Systemd is a mess, which is an amazing accomplishment considering the fact that it is supposed to be this great unifying/simplifying layer. So awful that the DoD held out for the longest time in formalizing any kind of baseline security audit procedures that address it. Compare that to something like Solaris SMF. I've never had a problem with the rc system that made me blame the underlying design, but if I did - systemd would be at the bottom of a very long list of my potential solutions, right under 'Set the machine on fire and pickup a copy of "Industrial Society and Its Future"'.
I really like the guy running the OpenZFS project, but it is painfully obvious that it is only going to increasingly cater to Linux - and coincidentally a lot of the really annoying aspects of the project are a result of that. For example: that Rube Goldberg build system, with massive amounts of code duplication... that wouldn't be there if not for autotools and gnu export symbol games.
As somebody who fled Linux to FreeBSD in order to avoid systemd, the prospect of that happening again makes me a little sick to my stomach. Running out of places to go that aren't controlled by people who are openly hostile to POSIX standards.
Eh, my mother's conduct wasn't totally insane - I'd be a little displeased if my son not only selected a branch that prided itself on combat exposure (right as bombs started falling on Baghdad), but he also intentionally chose the one component of the Corps that guaranteed he'd be getting shot at for months on end. I wouldn't have taken it so personally, but I'd still be pretty irritated.
My youngest sister got married young and against the advice of everyone that loved her, more because the groom was a scumbag than the haste of the decision. Well she went full revenge mode and had to be totally cut off from the family once she and her husband started suing my parents. It really put my act of rebellion many years prior, joining the Marines, into perspective for my mother - who had until that point still carried hard feelings. The stereotype about women being irrationally vindictive doesn't come out of nowhere.
So I'll just assume that you intended to answer the question, and that your response contains your strongest argument. From what I can tell, the only complaint that makes sense is with regard to community building platforms splintering potential collaborators/readers. I can somewhat agree with that, but it has absolutely nothing to do with an attention economy or corporate market capture. I can't think of a time that I was searching for something related to an interest, but instead got trapped in a dead Yahoo discussion board - hypnotized by erectile dysfunction spam. I just blast right through and eventually end up on some dude's blog with a tilde in the url, on more than one occasion this has ended up as a back and forth over email where we both come out ahead. Now I'll admit that my interests aren't mainstream, and I may not be in touch with the average consumer... but their interests are mainstream - so they are by default already catered to.
Just people randomly stumbling in with zero interest in the subject? Or people who had previously been captured by a rival typeset historian backed by a powerful multinational commercial interest? Because one of those is a search engine problem and the other is a goofy attention economy based concern.
These rebuttals always sound like "But if I didn't pay AWS $1k/yr I wouldn't be able to host my family photo album powered by a 15 stack frame deep Nodejs nosql-backed container!"
> We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content.
We, huh? The most enriching content you've ever encountered on the web, was it churned out by the likes of about.com? The places you've had the most meaningful conversations, were they on platforms that regularly purge and actively censor content they deem not to be advertiser friendly? What you are describing sounds a lot more like network television to me. If you just want to zone out in front of the latest episode of "Dancing with the Stars", you already have that option.
I get the kneejerk assumption that if something even approaches the potential of being nostalgic, it must be the product of delusion. But that really isn't applicable here, as we all know the ways that technology and infrastructure has been twisted to benefit commercial interests at the expense of everyone else.
Well you're going to have a hard to reasoning about it when you stick with the predator/prey, attention economy, zero-sum game analogies. A man running a site cataloging ancient internally generated IBM typeset documents... what higher unstunted form is he aspiring to - despite the machinations of unshriveled fish?
That is debatable, but what isn't is the fact that the third option exists - which never gets mentioned in the tired old "If you don't disable that pesky adblocker - you'll be forced to pay!" posts.
heh, I had a little project hosted on an nslu2 wedged between the water heater and the wall of my utility closet. Never had a problem, even after several major sites picked up on it the same day, because responding to get requests for static files isn't hard. Thankfully, most sites only become hard to self host after they start doing annoying things - like dynamically generating oversized embedded junk.
I've been around long enough to remember a time when the web was full of content that didn't originate from profit motive. Just a bunch of people talking about their interests and sharing their creations. Even the stuff that was commercially motivated was largely innocuous, because they were focused more on brand awareness - which doesn't need a surveillance system. All that personal interest stuff is still out there, despite all the insistence that the only alternative to the ad-supported-spy-machine paradigm is a subscription model. I really wouldn't mind seeing all the click seeking platforms get wrecked, because they incentivize the most useless and annoying noise.
What effect did government backed student loans have on the tuition prices? Why were soldiers targeted by payday loan outfits? How are most lottery winners paid out? Answer any one of those questions and you'll answer your own question.
lol, if it is designed to stay a point above the Fed's intentionally set inflation targets - what do you think happens to interest rates? This is worse than printing money - it is more like printing money presses.
That might be a concern if you try to cram every possible property of the legal code into the blockchain. So maybe don't do that. But if you do, the whole thing is extensible - so it is possible. But don't.
Property deeds. It is amazing how bad counties are at such a simple charge, I know three people (in three different counties) who had to deal with the local government losing records - one of them only learning this after a neighbor tried to annex a chunk of his land.