Cold Constructs Blog

Leapfrogging. WC loves it, others not so much. I define leapfrogging as “disruptive advancement”, and I think in general it is dangerous, but there are some instances where it’s helpful.

Let’s look at Africa. The Industrial Revolution in England gave her great power and wealth. She traded with many nations across the world and exponetially advanced the technology of primitives everywhere. Africans only had blades as weapons but soon had machines of all kinds. They were thrown into a whirlwind of miracles, when the only miracle that ever happened was Earth’s orbit. A few grabbed the right tools were able to subdue the others and upset the balance of power. Now it’s easy for a small group of guerrillas to obtain AK-47s and slaughter thousands upon thousands with a twitch of a finger. Africa is now the bloodiest continent on Earth.

You can’t shove advanced technology onto others who don’t know how to bear it. The results are, as I have just shown, quite horrible.

There are two kinds of advanced tech. One is incredibly complex and takes a fucking super power to build and maintain it. This includes things from guns to cell phones. The other is brilliant in its simplicity. The watercone is an example of this, as is some kinds of solar tech.

You can’t say “all leapfrogging is awesome for everybody”. That’s naive. It’s more complex than that. The only kind of “good” leapfrogging is when you pass along a “simple” advanced tech that can be understood by the receiving party. By “understood” I mean that they will be able to build it from scratch once they get knowledge (blueprints, samples) of it.

If a group of people don’t understand exactly how the tech they’re using works, then they don’t deserve it. It doesn’t matter what the benefits are. It’d be like giving fire to a baby. They’d burn themselves. Only with societies, there will be collateral damage, such as genocide (as the case was with Africa).

We don’t need to conquer the world. We don’t need to kill people in other countries.

We can learn from history. The Swiss didn’t have a standing army–they had an armed citizenry. Every man was issued an assault rifle which he used to shoot as many bullseyes on paper targets as quickly as possible at sporting competitions. They managed to not get conquered during both world wars because they had this brilliant idea to stay neutral. Plus they were known to be excellent marksmen, resilient, and numerous (every man had a gun). Despite the fantastic resources the Swiss controlled, Hitler wasn’t about to mess with an armed citizenry.

Know this: the day you let others protect you is the day you lose your freedom. Now they control you, and you have no means to defend yourself from them.

Besides, what does any government agency care for your freedom? They care, by their very nature, for their power and their ability to increase that power. We put too much trust in these men who learn the motto of “Duty, Honor, Country” at West Point yet produce no men who will refuse an illegal order.

The result of this process is that we as a country have become the arms merchants our grandparents hated so much that after the First World War they called them “merchants of death.” When you wonder why the mythical “peace process” does not work in the Middle East just think about what kinds of weapons the various armies are using. The Russians can no longer keep up and their weapons showed up poorly in the Persian Gulf War so now it’s time for guns, tanks and planes stamped “Made in USA.” We are sponsoring the very wars about which our political leaders and diplomats claim to be so “concerned.” We are responsible in fact, for murder on a global scale.

Source. He gets a little carried away in the end, but nevertheless I stand by his words as truth. The articles I linked to said what I wanted to, so read them. Here’s more info on the Swiss and their citizenry.

Our forefathers knew that every nation that disarmed its citizens, and who ceased to depend upon militias for its defense, relying instead upon standing armies, inevitably embarked upon an imperialistic policy abroad and authoritarian rule at home, and eventually destroyed itself. [Another good read.]

If you like quotes from our founding fathers, check out what Jefferson thought: There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army.

The one issue Digital Rights Management is about is simply unauthorized copying of digital content. A content creator has an idea of how she wants her content to appear to the user. Fantastic. The user wants to use it differently. Fantastic? Not so much. No matter how hard you try, the jello will seep through your fingers. So don’t try. Hold it gently so that most of it will stay in your control. Most users (the jello) will do what you tell them to (the hand). Hard-code a file creation scheme that, when one is created, gives the creator the option of restricting the distribution of that file. This might be circumvented (you can only hold jello for so long), but most users will go with it, and that’s the best we can do.

But first, a tangent. Is copying a digital product you bought stealing? Yes. You paid for one product (one game, one CD, etc). If you want more, you have to buy more. If you don’t pay the creators for that new copy, you’re stealing. It’s not your traditional kind of stealing, but digital content isn’t exactly traditional. New game, new rules. (Same rules, actually, just adapted to the new game.) Moving on…

Let’s say I painted an image in Photoshop, and I don’t want people to steal it. When I go to save the image, in the same window that has the “File name:” field and Save button, there’s two additional drop-down menus. The first is by the phrase “Users have permission to:”. This should be self-explanatory (as all things should be, bitch). The options would be “view only” and “alter freely”.

The other menu is placed below this (see the photoshopped pic of the photoshop “Save As” dialog box), and is next to the words “Distribution rights:”. The default will be “unlimited”. Clicking anywhere on the drop-down menu will show the user the other option: “move only”, which means just that–no copies can be made, just a single file going from one machine to another.

In order for this to work, every system the file touches needs this scheme already built-in. However, every company alive wants something that works for them, but so far they’ve only come up with solutions that work just for them. But not only does my idea work for them, it gives independent creators control over their content as well–no need to pay extra for extra software.

So with the support of independents and the corporate world, this solution will find its way to every computing device capable of using the files. We just have to get the meme out.