That made me remember part of an interview done to Dennis Ritchie back in 2000:
When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go,
I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed
under the advice of a worldwide crowd. C is peculiar in a lot
of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a
certain unity of approach that stems from development in a
small group.
LinuxWorld.com: What is your advice to designers of new programming languages?
Dennis Ritchie: At least for the people who send me mail about a new language
that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to
write a compiler. Don't have any expectations that anyone will use it, unless
you hook up with some sort of organization in a position to push it hard.
It's a lottery, and some can buy a lot of the tickets. There are plenty of
beautiful languages (more beautiful than C) that didn't catch on. But someone
does win the lottery, and doing a language at least teaches you something.
Oh, by the way, if your new language does begin to grow in usage, it can
become really hard to fix early mistakes.[0]
That truly is a pressing challenge due to all these DNS related issues.
It makes me remember a short paper from 1977 by Carl A. Sunshine [0] where he proposed a network architecture with no global unique addressing, no global routing, and no global naming. These three major axis of modern Internet censorship would fall apart.
David P. Reed, the designer of UDP, tried to push for larger role of source routing in the then nascent Internet architecture. But, somehow, it didn't reach what he had envisioned.
The 70's were a very interesting era on the research of networking fundamentals and I find it sad that such important topics like source routing weren't investigated much further in the following decades.
Shouldn't we somehow return to the fundamentals of networking to try to find ways of dealing with the censorship by the status quo against the natural need of sharing our digital culture in a free and anonymous way?
What I see is that no amount of monitoring of the more radicalized elements of society will alter the deep and profound civilizational changes that are taking place in Europe.
This seems to be about the end of an era and the beginning of a whole new one. And nothing seems able to alter that course of History.
But I don't think we will see anything that doesn't have some kind of historical precedent. The thing is that nation state is changing. It is fundamental construct of European democracy and way of life. The options seem to be EU getting more power or EU disintegrating and current nation states finding new form. Both in identity and borders. New migration period vs. formation of Austrian empire. Speed of change can of course vary.
Neither seems nice. I never guessed I'd find myself to be conservative.
If we haven't been able to make our human civilizations sustainable here on
planet Earth (where we have the perfect conditions to do so), how will we
ever create sustainable environments in much harsher conditions such as on
the Moon or Mars ?
Simply because you have to in order to survive. On earth resources have often been seen as abundant and even though we know oil is running out we still undertake inefficient journeys in cars with a single person in because running out is sometime in the future. If you build on the moon it has to be sustainable from the outset, it isnt something you can set as a future goal because you need it to survive day one.
Yea, sustainability is largely a collective action problem, and it's quite difficult for 7 billion humans in hundreds of interacting societies, governments, and economies. Moreover, "sustainable" has a somewhat different meaning on Earth, which already had an enormously productive biosphere.
Lack of sustainability is more about lack of political will than technology and resources. A lunar colony presumably won't have any dipshits saying "Don't bother recycling the waste water, just dump it on the surface. I'm sure we'll find more somewhere."
Another good example is Lynn Conway [1][2], that together with Carver Mead wrote "Introduction to VLSI System Design" bestseller that would catalyze the Mead & Conway revolution [3] in VLSI design in late 70's, early 80's.
