Static typing in OO languages isn’t the solution to software complexity, rather it’s an enabler of it. Static typing is like giving a drunk a bunch of breath mints and saying “Don’t drive drunk. But if you must, use these breath mints in case you get pulled over.”

I’m still trying to make sense of a world gone schemaless. I love ducktyping in python, but a ducktyped database? Blasphemy! Beautiful, beautiful blasphemy!

No mas. Having played around with CouchDB for a few hours I’m satisfied enough to say with certainty: damn! this is the future!

Forgetting all the geeky bonafides like Erlang, its ReSTful interface, native JSON, blah blah blah — those are great, but just icing. It’s the query paradigm using javascript (or python, or anything) functions to build map-reduce indexes that is sheer brilliance. It can handle everything I’ve been dreaming up over the last year…elegantly.

I’ve still got quite a bit of experimenting in front of me to really feel out how best to interact with it (there is such a thing as an over-abundance of choice!), but I’m going to see if I can’t write a decent music library app or something to at least finally get 0ff the ground with this.

Good software design papers don’t try to compare software development with civil engineering because (from reading the article):

• The architect frequently fails to design something interesting that can actually be built, on the first draft
• Commercial buildings are frequently reused in ways not envisioned by the original developer/builder
• Single family dwellings frequently get the room scale off so that the house may only hold 4 people, but it has three bathrooms, making a regular cleaning nightmare
• Apartment buildings are built cheap and with little care for inter-apartment noise separation
• Builders make lots of mistakes and take many shortcuts because they know that by the time you look inside the wall, you’ll never see that they didn’t put insulation where they should have and you’re stuck with a cold wall, or that a concrete storm drain was improperly substituted for currogated plastic
• Principles for building things from wood or brick haven’t really changed in a hundred years - slightly greater precision and a few new building materials don’t change the fact that carpentry skills learned as a kid are very applicable today
• Principles for steam houses, steel structures, etc. haven’t changed in over 50 years
• Single family dwellings are frequently built all alike for a few dozen or more houses, removing all real engineering from the problem

People who do construction live in a very slow moving world.

• I learned C++ in college before STL and try/catch blocks
• Guys 7 years my senior never even got to learn C++ in college
• My tools to build my software (IDEs, compilers, debuggers, optimizers, static analyzers, etc) change in dramatic ways every two to three years
• Places my software is expected to work changes every year
• If somebody breaks into my house, I buy an off-the-shelf countermeasure, but if someone breaks into my software I purchased, I frequently just have to wait for the developer/vendor to close it
• Construction people don’t visit my house every six months and make improvements - which is good - but I’m expected to provide profitable upgrades every 6 months or less to include new features at the least

The list goes on, and is actually rather obvious in many cases. One thing that architects and software developers have in common though: If the customer writing the requirements is an idiot, or worse an idiot who is dead set that they know better than you, then you can rest assured you will never deliver a satisfactory product.

[via /.]

1. Continuous integration
2. A large and useful suite of tests that are run during #1
3. A principal or group of principals who care about the future of the software and is active in its development
4. A manager who understands the full software development life cycle
5. Developers who understand the business domain and problem the software is designed to solve

[via /.]

While their platform of choice, at least to start, seems to be a spar, a brief passage about using cargo containers or large gas tanks caught my attention…

One nice characteristic of this design is that it can be easily purchased, stored on inexpensive property during conversion, converted, and then shipped off to an ocean deployment location. Freight containers are designed to be moved around, so it is relatively easy and inexpensive to do so. Ballasting may need to weight until the final site, as it will make the container heavy and unbalanced.

Other than the inadvertent ballast/weight pun, this passage jumped out at me because of some similar ideas I’d been toying with a few months back. I was picturing a vertical, cylindrical housing that could act as a safe harbor of sorts, as well as a bedroom, dry storage, etc. for individual “seasteaders” living on what they’re calling a simple platform.

As for ballasting, I ended up wondering if some sort of durable flywheel positioned at the base of one of these containers or tanks wouldn’t make an excellent ballast? Bonus points for cheap and easy energy storage and a helpful gyroscopic effect that should further dampen horizontal rocking.

I did a little research but didn’t turn up any kind of flywheel that would be fit for this cause, but this idea still strikes me as serviceable…

“There is not a bit of evidence that Al Qaeda or any of the Islamic terrorist groups are trying to undermine America by eroding our civil liberties.”

Actually yes, there is.

As your post correctly says, it would be ridiculous to suggest they directly care about or are motivated by any issue of our civil liberties. However they do indeed consider it part of a means to an end.

From Sun Tzu’s Art of War:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Bush (and his entire administration) has a simplistic cartoon image of the enemy. The administration has declared that any coverage of what bin Laden as been saying is giving him free airtime and is giving aid to terrorists, has even played any such coverage carring coded instructions for an attack. And thus the media has been cowed into self censoring any such coverage. No coverage of what he’s actually saying and no media analysis of what he actually wants and no media analysis of the terrorist whys and hows.

This is why The War On Terror has been so badly botched. The administration has a cartoon image of the enemy, and the public has little-to-no understanding of the enemy. Bush blindly did exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do.

Why did bin Laden instigate the 9/11 attack? What was the logic behind it?

Most people can’t answer that. Saying bin Laden is evil is a hollow cartoon explanation, that evil people do evil things is a useless insightless answer. Saying “They hate our freedom” is a total fiction, a convenient administration soundbite to rally the public.

There was a chain of logic behind 9/11. It was an evil and tortured logic, but an identifiable and comprehensible logic. One must understand that logic to properly understand and fight that enemy, to understand not to unwittingly do what the enemy is hoping you to do.

First, what do bin Laden his cohorts ultimately want? What is the ultimate intent? A pan-Arab Caliphate. To unite the entire Arab world under one Islamic theocracy. That is bin Laden’s utopia, that is his perfect answer that will supposed solve all the problems he sees of the world. bin Laden fundamentally doesn’t give a shit about the Western World, he’s perfectly happy for the rest of us to (figuratively and literally) go to hell.

So bin Laden’s notion is that with the aid of Allah all Muslims should and would rise up and overthrow all of the corrupt Arab governments (and yeah those governments are generally pretty corrupt) to institute one unified Islamic rule. Of course bin Laden has gotten nowhere with that, and he decides that the only reason this plan has fails is because the Evil Western Nations have been protecting and propping up those corrupt Arab governments. And yeah, we have been protecting and propping up the Saudi Royal Family. And yeah, Saddam Hussein was all ours, he was a brutal dictator but he was a completely secular ruler and we gave him HUGE material support as a counter point to Iran. And we have been propping up other such governments for oil stability and other strategic interests. He doesn’t “hate our freedoms”, he hates us for stabilizing the Mideast and for working to keep Arab governments from collapsing in chaos, because he has the notion that such collapses and chaos would lead to an Islamic Utopia.

bin Laden’s tactical and strategic ideas are based on his Afghanistan fighting against Russia, and his view of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. His view on rallying fighters to the cause is to provoke the enemy to overreact, to provoke the enemy to brutality, so that the enemy loses support and so that the enemy creates bin Laden’s army for him. What is the purpose of the terrorist attacks on Israel? To provoke Israel to strike against the terrorists, and to provoke the inevitable incidental civilian casualties from such Israeli attacks, and to use those attacks and those Palestinian women and children casualties as propaganda to enrage the Palestinian population to join Hamas, to provoke the entire Palestinan population into an “army” dedicated to the destruction of Israel. And yes, to provoke an increasingly iron fisted domestic crackdown by the Israeli government as well.

bin Laden effectively defeated the might of the Russian army in Afghanistan with his rag-tag militia of goat herders and farmers, largely with terrorist attacks to provoke Russia to be more brutal and hated by the entire Afghani population. Hatred turning the entire population into bin Laden’s army.

bin Laden miscalculated in that 9/11 was so insanely obscene that the entire world - and even the overall Arab/Muslim public opinion - supported the invasion of Afghanistan. It didn’t create the Arab outrage, uprising, and general population army that bin Laden hoped to create. We had effectively WON the War On Terror at that point. bin Laden’s organization was destroyed, the Taliban was struck down, and the general Arab public opinion was to reject such terrorist tactics and was to oppose and turn in terrorist groups. Majority Muslims didn’t see it as a Western War Against Islam, they saw us as the Good Guys. Majority mainstream Muslims saw the Taliban and radical violent Islamists as the Bad Guys, as their own enemy. Terrorist groups don’t survive without recruits from the general population and the support and protection of the cover population. After Afghanistan the ordinary police and the general community would have hunted down and ratted out any terrorist groups and terrorist supporters.

However Bush took that victory and turned it around into defeat. Bush did exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do. Bush went ahead and became the hated villain exactly as bin Laden wanted. Bush invaded Iraq and himself fictitiously cast it as part of the War On Terror. This did fuel the propaganda line of a Western War Against The Islamic World, did fuel hatred of the US and of the West, did create the flood of support for bin Laden he wanted to created, to create the flood of fighters bin Laden wanted to create. Essentially none of the fighters in Iraq were terrorists or in any way any sort of threat before we invaded.

Obviously bin Laden’s not about to get the Islamic Utopia he imagined, but he certainly succeeded in manufacturing an Israel-Palestinian style situation of hatred and fanatical fighter recruits and creating substantial Arab community sympathy, support, and cover for such groups and for such fighters.

And in a limited sense he was sort of successful in the US domestic situation. Bush and mostly the Republican party did organize into an abusive iron fisted domestic rule, cracking down on political dissent and cracking down on civil liberties and provoking substantial unrest and even hatred against that government. However bin Laden surely doesn’t understand Democratic systems, that for use it is almost a complete non-issue for us to overthrow our own government. That it is pretty much an every day occurrence for us “overthrow” own government each election. In the 2006 election the Republican party lost many congressional seats explicitly on the issue of throwing the Bush-government out of power, and even the Republican party sees the next presidential election in terms of running away from the current administration. So in a sense bin Laden succeeded in destabilizing and toppling the current “regime” in the US, but obviously not in any way that will substantially change our support for the stability of non-Islamist governments in the Mideast.

The best advantage small organizations have over their larger counterparts is, parodoxically, the one feature they do their damndest to hide; to cover up like a scar until healed by the bloat new revenue might bring. Size is not a prerequesite for professionalism.

And for good measure, the cologne…

A Reagan reprimand, as seen on Slashdot:

“What I’m attempting to highlight is the idea that the Republican party would “naturally” tend toward this behaviour. 30 years ago? No, more like 20 AT THE MOST. Sure, the Regan [sic] and Bush I administrations were a betrayal of limited government conservatism, but they absolutely pale in comparison to the current incumbent. He makes them look like libertarians.”

No, you’re wrong. Bush has yet to surpass Reagan as the leader of the largest growth of the US government in history.
His war on drugs destroyed the 4th amendment. His corporate welfare programs haven’t been matched by Bush. Bush’s crimes against this nation are just the next step in the progression that Reagan pushed. He does not make them look like Libertarians, he makes them look just like he does. The problem isn’t that Bush is worse than Reagan, it’s that the Reagan cultists refuse to look deeper into the issue and spout nonsense like “Bush isn’t a Republican”. He’s exactly what a Republican is. The rejection of the real Republican Barry Goldwater in favor of the fascist Ronald Reagan was the turning point at which Republicans completely rejected their stated platform in favor of the biggest government that they could get. Ron Paul was a last ditch effort at bringing that party back to its stated ideals and it turned out the same.

“So, because I believe in a smaller federal government I’m a “wingnut extremist”? Wow. I suppose the other “wingnut extremists” include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, and a host of others of similar reputation?”

No, if you believe in a smaller federal government and you support the Republicans, then you’re a fool. You’re a fool in that situation because there is no evidence backing up that link and all evidence points to the contrary.

I believe in a smaller federal government, but I’m not stupid enough to believe that supporting the (current) party of biggest, most invasive government is a rational choice. Thomas Jefferson is spinning in his grave at the idea of religious extremists (hell any religious people) destroying his careful construction. That you would dare to invoke the man who said “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”, in defense of unrestrained military spending at the benefit of said banking institutions *often in other countries*, demonstrates nothing but contempt for yourself, Thomas Jefferson, and everyone around you who’s stuck footing the bill for your willful ignorance.

“20 years wasn’t that long ago. That’s my point. It’s not ancient history or something.”

Like I said, 1980 was 28 years ago, and that’s discounting the excesses of Nixon and Eisenhower. I’ll ignore them in favor of simple rounding.
30 years is a long time. People born 30 years ago could vote for 12 years. That’s 3 presidential election cycles. It’s been a progression, and it started long before Reagan.

So, repeating nonsense that was already nonsense 30 years ago is ignorant, and it doesn’t require the history to be ancient, recent, or modern. All it requires is for you to put a little thought and research into the matter rather than repeating old lies as if the mere repeating of them could make them true.

The Bipolar Lisp Programmer, an essay posted to comp.lang.lisp by Mark Tarver, brilliantly sums up many of my worst traits. Of course, I never realized quite how many BBMs there must be out there. If only one of us could work up the kind of sustained execution that would be required to organize them all, we could make one hell of an R&D outfit…

[via /.]

In my proposal of a social file system, I hinted at a simple revision primitive that could add some wiki magic to an otherwise normal set of objects, but I really ought to clarify my thoughts on the design. I haven’t given too much thought to what these simple revision capabilities would enable long term, but I suspect it’s pretty huge. So here’s a sketch of how I think this VersionProxy could work.

First, a little background: while the ultimate goal is to represent higher-order objects other than plain old inodes (the files and folders we all know and kinda love), first I need to describe the base type that can be all of these things. To my mind, Resource is a more semantic name for this base class than inode, because these objects can be a lot more than just inodes.

So in this base Resource class there is a default hashing behavior (take an SHA hash of the contents attribute). Any time the contents of a Resource change, the modified properties of that Resource (modified_at, modified_by) get cycled and the hash gets updated. If the Resource is a collection (the contents attribute is list-like, containing child Resources), the hash is an SHA of the children’s concatenated hashes. When this change event fires, the parent (if it exists) should have its modified properties cycled as well. This cascades all change metadata upstream to the root Resource.

All Resources inherit this default behavior, but of course the hashing properties can be overridden, and will often need to be. What constitutes a modification can vary amongst object types. For a plain old file, “title” is just metadata, but for something like a blog post or wiki page, a change to its title is a noteworthy change to the content of the object itself.

When an object gets associated with a VersionProxy, these modification properties become quite significant. A change in hash means a new version of the object. This should be completely transparent to the caller. When calling a version-proxies object, what gets returned is the current version of the object, instrumented (like SQL Alchemy) to intercept committed changes to the object (though otherwise identical).

Because this means a lot of retired objects will be hanging around, some hacking on SQL Alchemy’s facilities to grab an object will be required — probably by chaining a filter onto the query object that filters out all inactive versionables. New methods will also have to be written to accommodate querying through these stored versions of an object.

Versioning one object, then, is relatively straightforward. It gets a bit less so when considering versioning a collection — or an object representing a collection, like a Folder. A Folder whose contents are tracked recursively with every update to any child can be called by another name: a VCS. And there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel here — many of the problems and corner cases associated with this approach have been rehashed over and over through the years. We are throwing one particular twist into the mix, though — we’re not just versioning plain old inodes but higher-order objects. But this fact can be neatly encapsulated, hidden away as an implementation detail.

Just like when versioning a single object, when versioning a collection it is critical to know what constitutes a change, complicated further by the requirement that it be aware of all child changes. One solution to this is to simply version-proxy all child objects recursively. When a change to any one or more children is committed this leads to its hash being recalculated, then to a call to the part container to do the same. And so on and so forth until the root is updated.

It gets more complex when trying to consider version numbers. Say we have a folder structure like:


A
|
----B1
----B2
    |
    ----C1


When a change is made to B1, this leads to a new hash and modified date, and the call to parent A to do the same. That leaves us with two versions of B1 and A, let’s call them B1r1 and B1r2 and Ar1 and Ar2, respectively. Now if we make another change, this time two nodes: B1 and C1. This leaves us with three B1s, three As, two B2s and two C1s. It should be guaranteed algorithmically that committing multiple changes at the same time only leaves us with one new version of the root.

As mentioned before, operating on revision-proxied objects is transparent through the standard methods — proxied and non-proxied objects look the same. So there needs to be a VersionProxy-specific API to gain access to the different versions, as well as other niceties having to do with revisions (e.g. a diff tool, perhaps specific to each object type, a patch tool and other VCS features).

Another nice thing about having something like VersionProxy above your objects is that data retention features are built right in. Kill all old versions over one year old? No problem. One common data retention strategy, logarithmic history purging, could be made even more effective by having access to class-specific diff data, allowing a programmatic assessment to determine things like major/minor changes, lending more intelligence for selecting purge points.

Obviously tagging would be possible too, in both the “web2.0″ sense and the SVN sense. A version number is no more than a special tag of a particular release number.

There’s so much more here, but I’ve already rambled on for pages. Thoughts? Ideas? If you’ve read this far, let me know what you think. I promise to push what code I have into the google code repo. It’s not going to be much more than a specific SQL Alchemy model broken out into modules. There’s some interesting microformat output filters just for good measure. I’m thinking about writing a few hooks into particular APIs (Google’s Contact API, for instance), but I have to get the data model right first.

For anyone trying to offset your carbon footprint: Get a shovel, dig a hole, and bury yourself. I’ll take volunteers to do this first and I will document the whole process from start to near finish.

Plus, as noted by South Park, it has the added bonus of keeping you from ever seeing anything potentially offensive!

In Rubberhose the number of encrypted aspects (deniable “virtual” partitions) defaults to 16 (although is theoretically unlimited). As soon as you have over 4 pass-phrases, the excuse “I can’t recall” or “there’s nothing else there” starts to sound highly plausible.

Ordinarily best strategy for the rubber-hose wielder is to keep on beating keys out of (let us say, Alice) indefinitely until there are no keys left. However, and importantly, in Rubberhose, Alice can never prove that she has handed over the last key. As Alice hands over more and more keys, her attackers can make observations like “the keys Alice has divulged correspond to 85% of the bits”. However at no point can her attackers prove that the remaining 15% don’t simply pertain to unallocated space, and at no point can Alice, even if she wants to, divulge keys to 100% of the bits, in order to bring the undivulged portion down to 0%. An obvious point to make here is that fraction-of-total-data divulged is essentially meaningless, and both parties know it - the launch code aspect may only take up .01% of the total bit-space.

What I find interesting, is how this constraint on Alice’s behavior actually protects her from revealing her own keys, because each party, at the outset can make the following observations:

Rubber-hose-squad: We will never be able to show that Alice has revealed the last of her keys. Further, even if Alice has co-operated fully and has revealed all of her keys, she will not be able to prove it. Therefor, we must assume that at every stage that Alice has kept secret information from us, and continue to beat her, even though she may have revealed the last of her keys. But the whole time we will feel uneasy about this because Alice may have co-operated fully. Alice will have realized this though, and so presumably it’s going to be very hard to get keys out of her at all.

Alice: (Having realized the above) I can never prove that I have revealed the last of my keys. In the end I’m bound for continued beating, even if I can buy brief respites by coughing up keys from time to time. Therefor, it would be foolish to divulge my most sensitive keys, because (a) I’ll be that much closer to the stage where I have nothing left to divulge at all (it’s interesting to note that this seemingly illogical, yet entirely valid argument of Alice’s can protect the most sensitive of Alice’s keys the “whole way though”, like a form mathematical induction), and (b) the taste of truly secret information will only serve to make my aggressors come to the view that there is even higher quality information yet to come, re-doubling their beating efforts to get at it, even if I have revealed all. Therefor, my best strategy would be to (a) reveal no keys at all or (b) depending on the nature of the aggressors, and the psychology of the situation, very slowly reveal my “duress” and other low-sensitivity keys.

Alice certainly isn’t in for a very nice time of it (although she she’s far more likely to protect her data).

On the individual level, you would have to question whether you might want to be able to prove that, yes, in fact you really have surrendered the last remaining key, at the cost of a far greater likelihood that you will. It really depends on the nature of your opponents. Are they intelligent enough understand the deniable aspect of the crypto system and come up with the above strategy? Determined to the aspect they are willing to invest the time and effort in wresting the last key out of you? Ruthless - do they say “Please”, hand you a Court Order, or is it more of a Room 101 affair?

But there’s more to the story.

Organizations and groups may have quite different strategic goals in terms of key retention vs torture relief to the individuals that comprise them, even if their views are otherwise co-aligned. A simple democratic union of two or more people will exhibit this behavior.

When a member of a group, who uses conventional cryptography to protect group secrets is rubber-hosed, they have two choices (1) defecting (by divulging keys) in order to save themselves, at the cost of selling the other individuals in the group down the river or (2) staying loyal, protecting the group and in the process subjugating themselves to continued torture.

With Rubberhose-style deniable cryptography, the benefits to a group member from choosing tactic 1 (defection). are subdued, because they will never be able to convince their interrogators that they have defected. Rational individuals that are otherwise loyal to the group, will realize the minimal gains to be made in choosing defection and choose tactic 2 (loyalty), instead.

Presumably most people in the group do not want to be forced to give up their ability to choose defection. On the other hand, no one in the group wants anyone (other than themselves) in the group to be given the option of defecting against the group (and thus the person making the observation). Provided no individual is certain* they are to be rubber-hosed, every individual will support the adoption of a group-wide Rubberhose-style cryptographically deniable crypto-system. This property is communitive, while the individual’s desire to be able to choose defection is not. The former every group member wants for every other group member, but not themselves. The latter each group member wants only for themselves.

* “certain” is a little misleading. Each individual has a threshold which is not only proportional to the the perceived likely hood of being rubberhosed over ones dislike of it, but also includes the number of individuals in the group, the damage caused by a typical defection to the other members of the group etc.

Of all the spy agencies in the world, can it be that none of them have thought of this? That none of them are tempted by being able to comb through a large fraction of the world’s disk drives, looking for both bad guys and doing plain old espionage?

That’s hard to fathom. The question is, how would we detect it? And if it’s true, could it mean that spies funded (as a cover story) the world’s spamming infrastructure?

Thank god for Firefox and crash recovery — I had dozens of tabs open. Of course, as soon as the Silverlight page loads: crash. Fail.

I killed my session and started from scratch — no tabs, no Silverlight, just me and the ol’ Google search box: crash. Fail.

It’s uninstalled now and all is right with the world. But wow! I’m sure people would love to say that perhaps Microsoft is being shady with Firefox but no, this is a pretty cut and dry case of Hanlon’s Razor and shitty engineering.

Stallman similarly called a Windows port of Sugar “not a good thing to do”. Here’s the thing: such a port is only a waste of time if free software is not the means here, but an end…

A Windows-compatible Sugar would bring its rich learning vision to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of children all over the world whose parents already own a Windows computer, be it laptop or desktop. To suggest this is a bad course of action because it’s philosophically impure is downright evil.

And I have to agree. Of course, motives of the Free Software advocates are certainly understandable — advocates advocate. But Negroponte…

Now, pay close attention: while I’m unequivocally enthusiastic about Sugar being ported to every OS out there, I’m absolutely opposed to Windows as the single OS that OLPC offers for the XO. The two matters are completely orthogonal, and Nicholas’ attempt to conflate them by calling the open source community “fundamentalists” (and watching the community foam at the mouth instead of picking apart his logic) is just another bit of misdirection. Not that anyone should really feel offended, since he’s made it a habit to call his employees terrorists.

But this isn’t about Free software…

The whole “we’re investing into Sugar, it’ll just run on Windows” gambit is sheer nonsense. Nicholas knows quite well that Sugar won’t magically become better simply by virtue of running on Windows rather than Linux. In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He’s told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its “availability” as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster.

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yeah, I’m not sure what that leaves either.

So it was all a lie…

That OLPC was never serious about solving deployment, and that it seems to no longer be interested in even trying, is criminal. Left uncorrected, it will turn the project into a historical information technology fuckup unparalleled in scale.

I really need to get back to work, but this is like staring at the Sun…

Paradoxically, the battle for food, energy and low-impact industries is still at the center of this future. But this is not a battle of farmers versus nomads anymore: we will always need farmers and we will always need nomads; only this time, this is up to the nomads to lead the way. If they succeed our society will be able to transition towards a new age, a new way to live (in peace) together. Finally, the only really unknown parameter is that of time:

Can nomads bring us the hope of a self-organized hyper-democracy before the collapse of the post-industrial world as we know it?

Yes.

What? Too optimistic?

Either vote up, or don’t vote at all. As your mother may once have told you; if you’ve not got something nice to say, don’t say anything.

At first blush this struck me as equivalent to calls for teachers to ditch their red pens when grading papers, and I believe it would be equally silly. But reading further there’s a deeper rationale…

The main problem with down-voting is that it is lazy feedback. The kind of people that down-vote are often the kind of people that do not leave a comment on why they down-vote. They just down-vote and move on. They down-vote because it’s easy. They down-vote because they can. It’s a lot easier to say to yourself “pft, that’s rubbish” and down-vote, than it is to take the time to compose constructive feedback. In a lot of cases, if the down-vote button wasn’t there, the user wouldn’t bother doing anything at all. Commenting takes effort, clicking down doesn’t.

This is an interesting point. Of course, this assumes that people who vote up have a valid non-tribalist reason to. I’m sure many do, but we all know what a big pile of trolls and flames, shit and spam many comment threads are — so if anything, aren’t many of the down votes just as valid? But I agree, drive-by voting strikes me as flippant — democracy at its worst. So why not force the feedback to be less lazy? If you want to vote, up or down, you have to leave a comment about why. It could be a short slashdot-esque moderation qualifier (+1 Insightful; -1 Troll). Even better, you could expound on why — and if your reasons stink or your motivations are suspect, others can thrash your comment, burying your vote.

This is still subject to abuse of course, so I’d have to think it through further. But I can’t help but believe there’s something to this notion that for a vote to really matter, it ought to be more than a superficial click.

They concluded that the decisive resistance to vouchers had come from suburban voters who feared that the programs would take money away from local schools and worried about the arrival of lower-income and minority students in their children’s classrooms.

Or as Tim Lee puts it…

To put this a little more starkly: suburban white people oppose vouchers because they understand it would make the education system more egalitarian. And they’re right. Which is precisely why liberals should favor them. Yet bizarrely, the author of this article, Greg Anrig, seems to regard this as an argument against them.

My head hurts.