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Whether something has more of a cathedral or bazaar-style development is entirely orthogonal to whether it is free (libre) software. The FSF, for a long time, developed GCC in a cathedral style, and initially Mozilla was mostly cathedral (perhaps it is still). If we care mostly about the freedoms that the free software community cherishes, the way it is developed doesn't matter much. The Cathedral and the Bazaar are more caricatures or points in a space rather than a strict duality anyhow..

I'm not sure how Trusted Computing reintroduces trust to computing. Being able to prove that a file came from a particular computer doesn't prove much to me. Surely, we can do most of the nice things that is planned for TC with public key encryption - albeit without the dubious DRM benefits that the TC platform could potentially inflict upon us?

Those are great questions and I appreciate your open-minded spirit.

TC does far more than prove that a file came from a particular computer. It lets you securely verify that you are communicating with a particular program; potentially, one that you know the source code for. And it lets you know that the program runs in its own "jail" or partition, isolated from other programs and also from user actions. The program can store data such that no one else, no other program, no other user, no other operating system, can read it.

TC gives distributed software an unprecedented degree of autonomy and independence. It lets peer to peer software operate across a network with almost the same security as if each piece were running on a separate computer that no one could control. This is going to enable a whole new world of software development opportunities of which we can barely imagine the full implications.

A few obvious possibilities are distributed games, grid computing, internet voting, as well as privacy networks like Tor, anonymous remailers, anonymous chat, and many others. The ability to write software that can actually trust in the integrity and identity of its remote pieces will enable these and many more new developments.

IMO the reflexive opposition to Trusted Computing has been the biggest mistake the online community has ever made. It has turned this marvelous invention with all of its potential into a twisted caricature of itself, focusing on just one of its many possible uses.

Why did this happen? Ultimately, I am sorry to say, it was due to greed. Greed on the part of Internet users who fear only one thing above all else: that they may no longer be able to download music, movies and other content for free. The ironic thing is that TC probably wouldn't even do that much to stop content sharing, because these types of content can always be copied, at worst by putting microphones in front of speakers and video cameras in front of monitors. You'll always be able to take content. But fear of possible improvements in security technology enabled by Trusted Computing that could make content sharing somewhat more difficult has overridden all other responses.

The good thing is that Trusted Computing does not yet exist. I am doing my best to build Trusted Computer systems which will be used for "good" purposes and in that way to demonstrate that the common view of the technology is far too limited. I hope to have some demonstrations running within a few months.

Basically, avoid anything after the end of the Tamuli and you'll avoid having your memories of Eddings anally raped. Redemption of Althalus was pretty poor, and I only got about 100 pages in the first of the Elder Gods - it seems the trend is for the heroes to get smugger and more caricatured and their enemies to get dumber.

Don't forget that Erris and twitter are clearly trolls themselves. They absolutely adore the negative attention at least as much if not more than the positive attention and have admitted it numerous times.

A well-fed troll is a happy troll. I have to admit I almost feel guilty advocating the open-source software philosophy because of the divisive, alienating attitude in "their" posts. I know it's just a hideous caricature of how advocacy is typically done in the real world, but still...bleah.

You assume one way is better than another. How un-liberal of you.

How? Liberalism is a politico-economic belief system. People almost always believe that their system is more suited than others for dealing with the world. The only folks who believe that no one way is better than any other are the strawman caricatures of a "moral relativist" position appearing in conservative polemic.

Holy false dichotomy, Batman! While it's impossible to pin-down 100% of the requirements in advance (the so-called BDUF methodology) that doesn't mean you shouldn't be aiming at 90%, or that 0% is ideal. Let's say we were building an accounts system. It'd be good if we knew in advance whether it had to cover sales, purchases, or both.

If you let the users do detailed technical design you're hosed before you start. I could tell a hundred war stories about this. They rarely if ever have the knowledge or skills - but often think they do. They should be specifying what, not how.

well, they both have pretty much the same subject: HumanCondition

I don't see how you can learn anything about the human condition from either, considering that none of those things ever happened. Well ok, Brutus did kill Julius Caesar, but the details that would actually tell you something are made up. That's why we call it fiction. It doesn't really tell us about the human condition. At best, it tells us what Shakespeare thought about the human condition. Two entirely different things.

And concerning Shakespeare's view of the human condition, it's a pretty grotesque caricature. I mean think about Lady MacBeth's nightmare, or Brutus talking to Caesar's ghost. Those things don't happen, and I don't understand how they can be used as a guide for understanding peoples motivations.

If you want to learn about the human condition, that's what the field of psychology is for.

So, this is saying if you join a community/website then you are probably inclined to be interested or involved in whatever the subject matter that site is.

Actually, it's describing a caricature of each site's target audience. It's more of a humor piece than anything else.

There are places which sanctified the worst caricature of the waterfall model, but again, in a form that actually is worse than no design.

the requirement that a form has to be saved in the database each time the user leaves a field or switches tabs on a tabbed pane

He just wanted that the data doesn't disappear from his form when he switches tabs.

If you let the users do detailed technical design you're hosed before you start. I could tell a hundred war stories about this. They rarely if ever have the knowledge or skills - but often think they do. They should be specifying what, not how.

Well, you bring an insightful point into how that goes downhill, but that's exactly what makes me wonder.

Engineering used to be about starting from a problem and figuring out the best solution. Well, best within the limits of your knowledge and abilities.

E.g., let's say you have to get people from A to B across a river. You'd start from that problem and figure out a solution, and not from "but I wanna build a cantilever bridge, 'cause it's the latest buzzword" and find a river in the middle of nowhere. Or dig a canal if you don't have a river for your buzzword bridge.

Then you'd look at the exact data your problem is based on. How wide is that river? What kind of traffic you expect over it? Is there barge traffic on the river that you'd have to deal with?

Then you'd look at the alternatives: do you need a bridge? Maybe a ferry is enough? How about a tunnel under it? If you decided on a bridge, should it be cantilever, suspension, or what? There is no free meal. Each option has its own advantages, but, and here's the important part, also its disadvantages and limitations.

And I think that's exactly what's missing in most of "software engineering" today. People start from what's the latest buzzword, and then work backwards to try to find some problem (even imaginary) to apply it to. They'll build a bridge in the middle of nowhere, in the style of 19'th century follies, just because they want a cantilever truss bridge, everything else be damned.

(Except the 19'th century follies were actually known to be follies, and built as a fucked-up form of social security in times of crisis. The laissez faire doctrine said that it's wrong to (A) just give people unemployment benefits, since supposedly that would have turned everyone into parasites, and/or (B) to use them to build something useful, since that would have competed with private initiative. So they built roads in the middle of a field, towers in the middle of nowhere, etc, instead. Whereas today's programs don't even have that excuse.)

And while it's fun to blame monolythic programs written by monkeys, I'll go and blame the opposite too: people who do basically an overblown cargo-cult design.

(Cargo cults happened on some islands in the Pacific when some supplies were supposedly paradropped to troops fighting there, but instead landed on some local tribe. The aborigines then proceeded to worship the big birds that dropped those, and pray that they come drop some more of that stuff. And when they didn't come back, they sculpted airplanes out of wood, and kept hoping that those'll drop some food and tools.)

People who don't understand what a singleton, or a factory, or a decorator pattern, or a manager pattern are, or when they're used, go ahead and created tons of them just because they got told that that's good programming practice. Everything has to go through layers upon layers of decorators, built by a factory, which is a singleton, registered with a manager, etc. They don't understand what those are or when or why they're used, so they effectively went and sculpted their own useless wooden factory, like the tribes in the Pacific.

So maybe just telling people about some "best practices" isn't everything. Some people _will_ manage to turn any best practice into the worst nightmare. Maybe what's really needed is to remind more people what engineering used to mean.

The same goes for design before implementation. There are places which sanctified the worst caricature of the waterfall model, but again, in a form that actually is worse than no design. Places where you have to spend two years (don't laugh, I know of a team which had to do just that) getting formal specs out of every single user (who hasn't even seen a mock-up yet, and some don't even understand what the techies actually want), then have an architect design an overblown framework that does everything except what the users actually wanted, then get on with the coding, then they have 1 month allocated for tests and debugging at the end

After getting into a conversation with coworkers about Robotech, I Ebayed the DVDs and have started rewatching the series last week. While some of dialog is cheesy, the relationship conflicts and the political intrigue is pretty mature. It's also a pretty unique take on the "alien invaders" genre. The characters are still sympathetic and way more complex than sitcom caricatures. I just hope that they don't infect the story with the typical blockbuster tripe.

The true hardcore gamers like the constant stream of high-end content to be played through and defeated. That's what they enjoy. Your argument that there is "only" two months between completing the end-game instances and the next expansion in a sibling post is the exact opposite of the complaints levelled by the hardcore gamers who complete this content and complain that there is nothing left for them to do for months.

Similarly, the really casual players don't care that there's this high-end content that they're missing out on, since they're still enjoying fighting hordies for common quest spots in Stranglethorn Vale and such things. Many of them probably wouldn't know who Illidan was if he came up and bit them on the ass. This group is also almost certainly not going to care that nobody is going to be running MC when they hit 60, or SSC when they hit 70 - if they ever do.

You fall into a gap in between these groups - but why do you think this means that nobody can enjoy WoW, and so around telling people they're wrong to play it the way they enjoy by painting bizzare caricatures of the game?

after a few years with no TV (meaning nothing on the TV other than occasional DVDs, none of which are of TV shows) is that TV writing is execrably bad. It's to the point that, if I find myself somewhere where a sitcom (that Raymond show comes to mind) is on, I actually wonder if it's bad writing, or a caricature of bad writing. Is there a meta-joke here that I'm almost getting? Are they satirizing bad writing? I can't tell the difference between satire and what passes for creative TV writing. And don't get me started on the news. Fox News is the most egregious, but that's like saying Hitler is worse than Pol Pot.

I'm just quoting some numbers. I definitely don't blame US soldiers and I don't feel in any way that a US life is any less valuable (which I believe I make clear in the body of my text). The impact is the same on both sides. What I am saying is that the original posters caricaturization of Muslims was a little off balance when you take current events into account. Despite the fact that we've been meddling in their affairs since the oil boom, replacing entire regimes when deemed necessary most Muslims are no more likely to adopt violence then most other people. Most attacks on American soil have been American extremists. So I find it understandable that they might be sensitive if we demonize them. In some instance even persecute them. The Jewish people didn't like it. Neither did the Christians. Why would they?

I don't think intent impacts the outcome. That's why I think the Army is wasting their money on this. From everything I've read - I've never played the game - the degree of accurate detail is low. I don't see how it could be any other way due to the limitations of the platform if nothing else.

It's not about intent, it's about the connection between in-game actions and real-world actions. Conditioning occurs between a person's actions and the consequences. Without any connection to reality, video game consequences can only condition video game actions. It is when the video game consequences is paralleled with real world consequences that real-world actions are affected. A soldier is told that their training simulations represent the same things they will be doing in real life -- killing people. A crazy person believes that GTA is like real life. One is intentional, one not, but the point is that in both cases the person sees a connection between their video-game actions and real-life actions and thus psychological conditioning can occur. The Army knows this and uses this to train soldiers to be able to kill people.

The degree of detail doesn't really matter -- when the army switched from square targets to torso-shaped targets there certainly wasn't any detail at all, just a flat green board in a bathroom-door caricature of a man. Yet despite the fact that the only realistic part of this exercise -- the actual firing of the rifle -- was the same, training with torso-shaped targets resulted in a greater portion of soldiers firing on live human targets when the time came. Because due to the explicit connection between the cardboard torso and their goal of firing on real people, they were able to condition themselves to do so.

I don't think AA is all that successful as a recruitment tool, but I really don't know what metrics they use and what kind of return they expected. I'm just addressing your original point -- that saying AA could affect people means that GTA could too. I'm saying that doesn't follow, because there is a huge difference between AA and GTA, specifically the explicit and government-sanctioned intention for players to want to translate the in-game actions into real-life actions. There is a connection to reality in AA that simply doesn't exist in any other game.

That's part of the reason it's so hard to have a debate on the subject. It's difficult to even get to the subject, because you have to wade through so many absurd assumptions about what evolution is (meaning--what the scientific theory is) before you can argue about whether it's right or wrong. Usually we never get to that point, because people don't want to give up their cherished illusions that Darwinism is best summed up by stuff like "Frog+time=prince."

It would be like me arguing against voting Republican because they eat babies. They don't eat babies, but if I couldn't give up that caricature, we could never get to the point of talking about their actual platform or policies.

Yeah, so why not try to defend their position. If it's a reasonable position, why should that be hard to do? Are these "commenters" so mentally incompetent that they can only resort to mocking?

Ah, one of the central mythologies of atheism: Religious people essentially inherit their religion, and those who don't... well, it's best to pretend they don't exist.

No, actually, there are not. That's my point. There is virtually nothing on the subject except childishness. I'm writing to advocate for reasoned discourse, as well as for a modicum of civility.

Are you serious? I say that these people "seem to be capable of thinking about nothing else," and you believe yourself to have "shown that I was talking nonsense," by pointing out that they do at times think of other things? Really? Maybe English is your second language, in which case you might want to read up on usage and rhetorical style most common to the language. You might find idiom, figure of speech, metaphor, and hyperbole of interest.

Unreal -- the first one -- surprisingly had lots of really scary moments. In the first few areas, there's a place where you have to shut the power down. You start hearing a loud 'thunk' noise, but it's hard to tell where it's coming from. When you start to leave, the way is barred, and you start wondering if you took a wrong turn.

Then the light start going out.

Pretty soon, you're in the dark, and you realize that there's no music or sound or anything. If you've still got your wits about you, you'll toss a couple of flares out, but man, who remembers to do that the first time.

Then the emergency lights come on, the music and sound start pounding, and there's a green thing leaping out of the wall at you and you flail around and blast away blast away oh god what the hell is it dead?

Then the lights come on and you reload the game so you can do it again without losing half your life, but DAMN, that was a hell of a thing.

System Shock 2 was creepy as hell; I couldn't finish it. BioShock is many kinds of awesome.

The thing that all the games have in common is ATMOSPHERE. They've got a particular kind of ambiance that really draws you in. The music and the sounds are all part of it. Water drips, things are in disarray, and you're constantly set upon by low moaning caricatures of humanity. Hearing a zombie in SS2 moan, "I'm sorry," before clubbing you is creepy. Hearing a slicer mumble to himself about how he JUST NEEDS SOMEONE TO TALK TO is really creepy.

The whole package is amazing if it's put together right. The visuals, setting, and sound all come together and leave you to fill in the action. How in the world could a movie be as scary? It's not you being attacked. Your own self-preservation kicks in because you're role-playing someone in a desperate situation.

It's fantastic. I'm so glad BioShock came out. I'm gonna play it to death.

I did... and a very large scale roll-out of wind and solar would yield significant amounts of energy (albeit not at a high energy density). Honestly, outside of nuclear power, it's not clear what other "high yielding, carbon-free energy sources" there are. Hydroelectric? Fine, but most of the places where you could put a dam, already have a dam... there isn't much room for growth there.

Right, because if I disagree with you on environmental policy, obviously I must find Bush convincing.

No, but since you've pre-determined that most environmentalists are control freaks with an ulterior motive, I needed to find someone who is clearly not an environmentalist to present the opposing view... otherwise you'd just dismiss it our of hand as a sinister attempt to control your life. So, does Bush's position have merit, or does it not?

For someone critical of caricatures, you'd do well not to attribute to me the position that fission is "perfectly safe". More generally, you should recognize that nothing is perfectly safe, and by holding any technology you already decided you don't like, to that standard, you are becoming the caricature.

You're right, the actual question is: is it "safe enough" for people to want to use it? Between the potential for nuclear proliferation, the potential for nuclear terrorism, the potential for nuclear accidents, and the problems with safe long-term storage of radioactive waste, the answer IMHO is "only as a last resort".

However, if we are to take a more common sense view of what you meant, such as "the overwhelming majority of environmentalists" or "the most visible, credible environmental groups", then I believe my statement holds. Can you name even one notable environmentalist who thinks any amount of carbon emissions is okay, as long as the emitter pays to have it sunk? No? Then you agree that for most of them, controlling others is more important than protecting the environment.

Here you go: Environmental Defense Praises Carbon Sequestration Incentive Act

As far as "any amount" of carbon emissions, that's an ambiguous phrase. Are you asking about whether it's okay to sequester any carbon at all (i.e. greater than zero), or a potentially infinite amount? If the former, I doubt you'd find many environmentalists who didn't approve, as long as the sequestration process is effective at keeping the carbon out of the atmosphere. (your challenge: find me a significant environmentalist who wants to outlaw carbon sequestration. No? Then you agree that most environmentalists are concerned with -- gasp -- protecting the environment.... and that your paranoia is unjustified). If the latter, then it's a silly question to ask: nobody is going to say "yes, I hereby give you the okay to emit an infinite amount of carbon forever, regardless of the consequences".