On 9/13/13 6:11 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of
everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system
libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?)
Ok, criminal Justice is more like crude block-device virus scanning for
`bad' signatures. It doesn't prevent problems (stop the malware from
entering in the first place), it tries to mop up afterward. To me, the
debate about the FISA court & government overreach, is analogous to what
devices are allowed to be scanned what what signatures constitute
badness, and _who_ defines that. The NSA, not even metaphorically, is
concerned getting access to the space of physical memory to get
lookahead on badness, and our democracy says there there should be
protection rules on those pages. Law is about laying out how privilege
escalation in the operating system works, when exceptions can be issued
in user space (longjmp, signal handlers), and when they are issued to
processes or the kernel (NMIs, termination). And national security is
about keeping the machine room a reasonable temperature and ensuring
their is power!
But I don't agree that democracy is the act of writing code, in reality
it's more like `core war', a process of finding the best (or just
dominant) programs through competition. Everyone with influence wants
less competition, whether they are governing or not. That's the biggest
risk to finding the best programs IMO.
Marcus
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