Markus...
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.
No... I still think it is like an exception detection/handling
process... enforcement is roughly detection and handling is roughly
courts and penal? Intelligence is more like virus-scanning...
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!
Yes, national (foreign and domestic) security is like malware scanning...
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.
Well, politics is like core-wars but democracy itself (writing your own
rules, including rules about how to write rules whether directly or by
proxy-representatives) still seems a lot like writing code to me. The
interpreters/compiler/system drivers may be a lot buggier than what we
are used to... but ... ?
Everyone with influence wants less competition, whether they are
governing or not. That's the biggest risk to finding the best
programs IMO.
So I guess I agree that "psuedo-democracy-as-we-practice-it" is very
much like self-modifying code, etc.
- Steve
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