It is times like this that I wish America would switch over to a system where blank media is taxed and they don't prosecute piracy.
Don't think that that one follows logically from the other. Blank media are taxed in the Netherlands, but our *iaa's are trying anything they can to get people into court. Currently the ISP's aren't playing along, but not too long ago UPC accidentally released personal information for two of its customers, leading to the first file sharing lawsuit of the Netherlands.
As another example the Dutch anti-software piracy body, up until a year ago, had the legal power to get a warrant and search businesses (and perhaps even people's homes).
The basic idea is that we are allowed to make backup copies of our media for ourselves, and only for ourselves. And for that marvelous privilege, we are taxed on blank media. The logic seems to be that the poor starving artists are missing out on sales because I'm not buying a copy of their cd for every cd-player I have.
I say, old bean, did you by any chance see this young girl? Name's Sarah Connor, you see, and I've no idea idea where I might find the little blighter. Quite the bind I'm in, I can tell you...
That's true (and Wikipedia sort of half-acknowledges it, by pointing searchers to google), but when it comes to searching Wikipedia, they have the upper hand. Google searches the internet, and that happens to work very well locally on Wikipedia too. Wikipedia searches just wikipedia. They don't have to worry about myspace showing up in the right place in the results, and not showing too many results from one domain, all they have to do is find the optimal retrieval model for wikipedia. Of course they don't have the resources that google does, but mediawiki is a fairly prestigious open source project. The promise that your code might power wikipedia might entice many a professor to try their new research on the mediawiki codebase with wikipedia as corpus. I guess what I'm saying is that mediawiki will slowly but steadily improve their search, and given enough time, they will surpass google, because google has a wider problem definition.
A limiting factor in this is of course hardware. The algorithm might improve, but it'll be a long time before the wikimedia foundation has anywhere near the kind of resources that google has. Which brings me back to my original point that google may have its reasons to hold back a little in providing support to Wikipedia.
Buy out? Wikipedia isn't something you can buy. It's backed by a foundation, which as far as I know, can't be bought, and even if it could, such a purchase would mean the instant end of the Wikipedia community (and the birth of Wikipedia 2.0, with new anti buying out protection).
Besides, I think Google has a dual position on Wikipedia. They like them because Wikipedia increases the usefulness of the internet, which improves Google's market. On the other hand, for 90% of my information needs, I check Wikipedia first, and Google second. I used find wikipedia pages through Google, but these days I just use the Firefox quicksearch plugin to search Wikipedia directly. If that sort of behavior catches on, it will make Google very unhappy, because the role of the search engine will decrease. I think that's the main reason why Google isn't supporting Wikipedia more actively (although they have helped out in the past with hardware donations).
I don't blame the guy for talking this way. He's honest. Their service deletes email permanently if someone doesn't log in for a time, and when something like that happens they can offer nothing further. He's just being honest about the service. Of course, with a service like that, brutal honesty isn't a good tactic, but whenever honesty becomes bad policy, you need to review your service, not the way you talk.
I guess the variance of one's altruisticness (altruity?), depends entirely on how it's represented. You could chose to transform it into a binary attribute, but you'd lose a lot. I do agree that the variances of the most meaningful representations are probably higher than of shoe sizes. But I expect that that's why they chose several methods of measuring it. If the results from their questionnaire did not correlate at all with those from the video game, they would have had to go back to the drawing board.
I agree with all your points in general, and I think they are very important points to understand if you want to interpret the results correctly (especially for the casual BBC/Slashdot reader), but there are ways around these problems. I have some faith in peer reviewed journals like this (not much, but those $30 have to be going somewhere), so I expect that if the research hadn't addressed these issues, the paper would have been rejected.
Thats a one-dimensional dataset where the sole (sorry) variable has a fairly high variance.
I don't know the details of their dataset, but I expect that before they let you use their very costly machinery for your research you have to be at the level where you can calculate (or estimate) the significance of your conclusion.
Using scanners like these is expensive, so you adapt your experiment to get the most out of a small sample. I doubt that 45 was an arbitrary choice. I guess that was just the smallest sample they could get away with for a minimum significance.
My guess is that they have forensic experts in their service, that help them research computer related crime, specifically internet related stuff (anything from rolling up zombie networks to ransom demands delivered over the internet). People whose job it is to find the very best of the black hats, I expect would have no problem getting into the machines of a bunch of politicians.
And if they're in police service, they probably report all the way up the chain. At least two people above them will have the technical know-how to understand the report, so there'll be no keeping the backdoor open for yourself. I expect Blair can get access to those reports as well, so this particular leak will probably be plugged too. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they just used some basic social hacking tricks.
It's true that knowing what your kid is up to makes you a good parent (or adds to your goodness as a parent), but you kind of have to know without spying on them, otherwise it doesn't count. That way, the fact that you know where they are means that you trust them, when they told you. The fact that they told you means they trust you, and the fact that you can live with not being completely sure that they told you the truth means you have the emotional maturity and confidence in your children to give them that space. The key factor here is that one third of how good a parent you are, depends on the actions of your kids, not yours.
Once one of these three factors fails, the rest comes crumbling down with it. They don't tell you the truth, you lose your trust in them, you start spying on them. None of this makes you a good parent.
The best defense against this downward spiral is to realize that your kids lie to you. All kids, all the time. A common and mind-boggling scene in American sitcoms is the one where the parents are absolutely stunned and outraged that their kid lied to them, and by the end of the episode, thankfully, the matter is solved, and the child put right again. If that's the kind of view you have of parent-children relationships, it's no wonder you end up spying on them. Part of being a parent is realizing that children have their own lives, including private things that they won't tell you about.
So where does that leave us? You have to trust your children, but you need to realize that they're lying to you? The only way out of this is to raise them to know when to tell you the truth, and to know that given a certain severity, you'll won't punish them, but just help them with their situation. So, once you find out that they're spending all this time on myspace, find out what myspace is about, what the actual,dangers are talk to them about it, make sure they understand the dangers, and accept that there is a small risk that they will get hurt in some way whatever they do. Leave the spying to the FBI.
You do know that countries aren't people, right? And that a governmental process is very rarely the result of a single motivation or opinion? Sure, there are some people that supported Kyoto because it would actually benefit them in some selfish way. There are also people that supported Kyoto because it would get them voters. And I am even willing to believe that there are people out there, politicians even, that support Kyoto because it's good for the earth. It's a beautiful amalgamation of many forces, good and bad.
What counts is the action that a country takes. If you can hold a country responsible for something as an entity, it should be the action, and not the motivation. Despite the many motivations that countries may have had for ratifying it, the Kyoto protocol has a very strong single purpose. If the hundred highest politicians in a country unanimously vote against that, that is an action that you can judge the country on. The US is the biggest polluter, and the US showed absolutely no intention of making Kyoto work. I don't give a damn about why other countries may or may not have ratified Kyoto.
You say that Global Warming will only be addressed if there is a global government. What do you think Kyoto is? Treaties like this (especially treaties trying to restrict 'indulgent' behavior) are the first step along the way to international cooperation, and perhaps even an international government. The true results of Kyoto may be minimal, but to get the full international community behind something like this is no small task. This is a heavy animal, and it takes time and energy to gather momentum. Maybe some countries aren't meeting their quota, but the efforts are definitely there. And in ten or twenty years, when the trends start showing more clearly, and the evidence becomes increasingly difficult to deny, governments will get more serious and thing will start to pick up pace. I believe that at that point, even the US and Australia will ratify the protocols. And when it does get that urgent, countries that ratified in the first place will already have all the measures in place, those countries will already have an active emissions market, their companies will already be used to dealing with emission restrictions.
No, Kyoto is not the solution, and it will take time and energy before we can even see the solution, but there is no way any solution will happen without very careful and very small first steps. And while it may take time and energy to get a heavy animal to start moving, once it's running, it's equally difficult to stop it. And that's why the US deserves the blame, they're stopping a process that can become very powerful, and very good for both humanity, and our planet, and they're stopping it before it has any chance to gather steam.
It seems really strange now to hear well-off Americans complain that learning languages is "too hard" and requires special talent
It's not learning languages that's hard, it's teaching languages. By the time I was 10, my English was good enough to make myself relatively understandable. That was before I was ever taught any in school. I just picked it up from tv. From age 12 to 18, I had mandatory French and German in school, and I still can't read or write either because I never made any effort. If I'd tried to read a book or watch a movie without subtitles every now and then, I'm sure I would have been able to pick it up, but I was a teenager and all the horribly tedious lessons did was condition me against French and German, rather than encourage me to explore the languages for myself.
The point is that to learn a language, you need to be in contact with it. If you're trying to learn French in America, two hours per week will not do it. You'll have to read books and watch movies, and you have to do it more than just your homework. But then, what teenager is going to voluntarily watch 'Trois Couleurs' if they're being forced to memorize fifty French words each week? I spent about two hours per week in French class, for six years. If, instead, I had used those 480 hours to watch 240 French movies, I would now be able to have a conversation in French, and I would be able to read relatively simple French books. The only thing I have now, is some vague idea of how the grammar works, and a vocabulary of about 25 words.
What scares me is the wellbeing of the animal. Evolution isn't a process that guarantees particularly happy or pain-free animals, but it will guarantee that organisms are free enough of pain and misery to continue doing what is necessary to survive. And the system that these safeguards are implemented in (mainly the nervous system) is hideously complex, completely intertwined with the rest of the organism and not at all understood properly by us). Currently chickens are so overbred that if they aren't slaughtered at the intended age they break the bones in their legs purely from the weight of the fat. We can get more fat into one chicken, but we can't insure that the rest of their body can handle it (and if we could it would be to expensive). Imagine how much worse that's going to get when we can speed up evolution even more, by stripping out more of the safeguards. Cows are already ridiculous caricatures of the original animals, we can push them even further. Stretch their utters or increase their body fat. We don't need them to be able to stand up, live out their full lives, or even be able to eat naturally (there's tubes for that). And even if they still look normal on the outside, our cloning controlled breeding can probably lead to some torturous internal physiology, that we simply can't detect (or don't care enough about to look for it). I will admit to a certain amount of hyperbole, but what really irks me about this is the cause. We're not curing cancer or diabetes here, we're not even trying to create some exquisite supermeat, the main reason that the bio-industry is so happy about this is that they can provide a stable quality. All this effort and risk is just to ensure that your third big-mac tastes exactly the same as the previous two. To me that's a horrible way to look at food, and especially meat. I don't care that people eat meat, I don't want to make the whole world vegetarian, but it scares me how much meat has become a commodity. Meat is something special, it won't always taste the same, and that should be part of the attraction.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, grampa... We'd really prefer if you didn't babysit anymore.
Thanks for the spoiler!
I'm rewriting my application server for it as we speak. How do you call an LDAP directory from Flash?
Don't think that that one follows logically from the other. Blank media are taxed in the Netherlands, but our *iaa's are trying anything they can to get people into court. Currently the ISP's aren't playing along, but not too long ago UPC accidentally released personal information for two of its customers, leading to the first file sharing lawsuit of the Netherlands.
As another example the Dutch anti-software piracy body, up until a year ago, had the legal power to get a warrant and search businesses (and perhaps even people's homes).
The basic idea is that we are allowed to make backup copies of our media for ourselves, and only for ourselves. And for that marvelous privilege, we are taxed on blank media. The logic seems to be that the poor starving artists are missing out on sales because I'm not buying a copy of their cd for every cd-player I have.
I say, old bean, did you by any chance see this young girl? Name's Sarah Connor, you see, and I've no idea idea where I might find the little blighter. Quite the bind I'm in, I can tell you...
I think it would work.
That's true (and Wikipedia sort of half-acknowledges it, by pointing searchers to google), but when it comes to searching Wikipedia, they have the upper hand. Google searches the internet, and that happens to work very well locally on Wikipedia too. Wikipedia searches just wikipedia. They don't have to worry about myspace showing up in the right place in the results, and not showing too many results from one domain, all they have to do is find the optimal retrieval model for wikipedia. Of course they don't have the resources that google does, but mediawiki is a fairly prestigious open source project. The promise that your code might power wikipedia might entice many a professor to try their new research on the mediawiki codebase with wikipedia as corpus. I guess what I'm saying is that mediawiki will slowly but steadily improve their search, and given enough time, they will surpass google, because google has a wider problem definition.
A limiting factor in this is of course hardware. The algorithm might improve, but it'll be a long time before the wikimedia foundation has anywhere near the kind of resources that google has. Which brings me back to my original point that google may have its reasons to hold back a little in providing support to Wikipedia.
Buy out? Wikipedia isn't something you can buy. It's backed by a foundation, which as far as I know, can't be bought, and even if it could, such a purchase would mean the instant end of the Wikipedia community (and the birth of Wikipedia 2.0, with new anti buying out protection).
Besides, I think Google has a dual position on Wikipedia. They like them because Wikipedia increases the usefulness of the internet, which improves Google's market. On the other hand, for 90% of my information needs, I check Wikipedia first, and Google second. I used find wikipedia pages through Google, but these days I just use the Firefox quicksearch plugin to search Wikipedia directly. If that sort of behavior catches on, it will make Google very unhappy, because the role of the search engine will decrease. I think that's the main reason why Google isn't supporting Wikipedia more actively (although they have helped out in the past with hardware donations).
You must be so popular...
I don't blame the guy for talking this way. He's honest. Their service deletes email permanently if someone doesn't log in for a time, and when something like that happens they can offer nothing further. He's just being honest about the service. Of course, with a service like that, brutal honesty isn't a good tactic, but whenever honesty becomes bad policy, you need to review your service, not the way you talk.
Remember, they're trying to convince Bush. I think they're just shaving of syllables where they can.
I guess the variance of one's altruisticness (altruity?), depends entirely on how it's represented. You could chose to transform it into a binary attribute, but you'd lose a lot. I do agree that the variances of the most meaningful representations are probably higher than of shoe sizes. But I expect that that's why they chose several methods of measuring it. If the results from their questionnaire did not correlate at all with those from the video game, they would have had to go back to the drawing board.
I agree with all your points in general, and I think they are very important points to understand if you want to interpret the results correctly (especially for the casual BBC/Slashdot reader), but there are ways around these problems. I have some faith in peer reviewed journals like this (not much, but those $30 have to be going somewhere), so I expect that if the research hadn't addressed these issues, the paper would have been rejected.
Thats a one-dimensional dataset where the sole (sorry) variable has a fairly high variance.
I don't know the details of their dataset, but I expect that before they let you use their very costly machinery for your research you have to be at the level where you can calculate (or estimate) the significance of your conclusion.
Using scanners like these is expensive, so you adapt your experiment to get the most out of a small sample. I doubt that 45 was an arbitrary choice. I guess that was just the smallest sample they could get away with for a minimum significance.
My guess is that they have forensic experts in their service, that help them research computer related crime, specifically internet related stuff (anything from rolling up zombie networks to ransom demands delivered over the internet). People whose job it is to find the very best of the black hats, I expect would have no problem getting into the machines of a bunch of politicians.
And if they're in police service, they probably report all the way up the chain. At least two people above them will have the technical know-how to understand the report, so there'll be no keeping the backdoor open for yourself. I expect Blair can get access to those reports as well, so this particular leak will probably be plugged too. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they just used some basic social hacking tricks.
It's true that knowing what your kid is up to makes you a good parent (or adds to your goodness as a parent), but you kind of have to know without spying on them, otherwise it doesn't count. That way, the fact that you know where they are means that you trust them, when they told you. The fact that they told you means they trust you, and the fact that you can live with not being completely sure that they told you the truth means you have the emotional maturity and confidence in your children to give them that space. The key factor here is that one third of how good a parent you are, depends on the actions of your kids, not yours.
,dangers are talk to them about it, make sure they understand the dangers, and accept that there is a small risk that they will get hurt in some way whatever they do. Leave the spying to the FBI.
Once one of these three factors fails, the rest comes crumbling down with it. They don't tell you the truth, you lose your trust in them, you start spying on them. None of this makes you a good parent.
The best defense against this downward spiral is to realize that your kids lie to you. All kids, all the time. A common and mind-boggling scene in American sitcoms is the one where the parents are absolutely stunned and outraged that their kid lied to them, and by the end of the episode, thankfully, the matter is solved, and the child put right again. If that's the kind of view you have of parent-children relationships, it's no wonder you end up spying on them. Part of being a parent is realizing that children have their own lives, including private things that they won't tell you about.
So where does that leave us? You have to trust your children, but you need to realize that they're lying to you? The only way out of this is to raise them to know when to tell you the truth, and to know that given a certain severity, you'll won't punish them, but just help them with their situation. So, once you find out that they're spending all this time on myspace, find out what myspace is about, what the actual
You do know that countries aren't people, right? And that a governmental process is very rarely the result of a single motivation or opinion? Sure, there are some people that supported Kyoto because it would actually benefit them in some selfish way. There are also people that supported Kyoto because it would get them voters. And I am even willing to believe that there are people out there, politicians even, that support Kyoto because it's good for the earth. It's a beautiful amalgamation of many forces, good and bad. What counts is the action that a country takes. If you can hold a country responsible for something as an entity, it should be the action, and not the motivation. Despite the many motivations that countries may have had for ratifying it, the Kyoto protocol has a very strong single purpose. If the hundred highest politicians in a country unanimously vote against that, that is an action that you can judge the country on. The US is the biggest polluter, and the US showed absolutely no intention of making Kyoto work. I don't give a damn about why other countries may or may not have ratified Kyoto. You say that Global Warming will only be addressed if there is a global government. What do you think Kyoto is? Treaties like this (especially treaties trying to restrict 'indulgent' behavior) are the first step along the way to international cooperation, and perhaps even an international government. The true results of Kyoto may be minimal, but to get the full international community behind something like this is no small task. This is a heavy animal, and it takes time and energy to gather momentum. Maybe some countries aren't meeting their quota, but the efforts are definitely there. And in ten or twenty years, when the trends start showing more clearly, and the evidence becomes increasingly difficult to deny, governments will get more serious and thing will start to pick up pace. I believe that at that point, even the US and Australia will ratify the protocols. And when it does get that urgent, countries that ratified in the first place will already have all the measures in place, those countries will already have an active emissions market, their companies will already be used to dealing with emission restrictions. No, Kyoto is not the solution, and it will take time and energy before we can even see the solution, but there is no way any solution will happen without very careful and very small first steps. And while it may take time and energy to get a heavy animal to start moving, once it's running, it's equally difficult to stop it. And that's why the US deserves the blame, they're stopping a process that can become very powerful, and very good for both humanity, and our planet, and they're stopping it before it has any chance to gather steam.
It's not learning languages that's hard, it's teaching languages. By the time I was 10, my English was good enough to make myself relatively understandable. That was before I was ever taught any in school. I just picked it up from tv. From age 12 to 18, I had mandatory French and German in school, and I still can't read or write either because I never made any effort. If I'd tried to read a book or watch a movie without subtitles every now and then, I'm sure I would have been able to pick it up, but I was a teenager and all the horribly tedious lessons did was condition me against French and German, rather than encourage me to explore the languages for myself.
The point is that to learn a language, you need to be in contact with it. If you're trying to learn French in America, two hours per week will not do it. You'll have to read books and watch movies, and you have to do it more than just your homework. But then, what teenager is going to voluntarily watch 'Trois Couleurs' if they're being forced to memorize fifty French words each week? I spent about two hours per week in French class, for six years. If, instead, I had used those 480 hours to watch 240 French movies, I would now be able to have a conversation in French, and I would be able to read relatively simple French books. The only thing I have now, is some vague idea of how the grammar works, and a vocabulary of about 25 words.
Yeah, except that one never happened: Microwaved Pet Legend
Wow, a sample of two. How thorough.
Must be Friday...
What scares me is the wellbeing of the animal. Evolution isn't a process that guarantees particularly happy or pain-free animals, but it will guarantee that organisms are free enough of pain and misery to continue doing what is necessary to survive. And the system that these safeguards are implemented in (mainly the nervous system) is hideously complex, completely intertwined with the rest of the organism and not at all understood properly by us).
Currently chickens are so overbred that if they aren't slaughtered at the intended age they break the bones in their legs purely from the weight of the fat. We can get more fat into one chicken, but we can't insure that the rest of their body can handle it (and if we could it would be to expensive).
Imagine how much worse that's going to get when we can speed up evolution even more, by stripping out more of the safeguards. Cows are already ridiculous caricatures of the original animals, we can push them even further. Stretch their utters or increase their body fat. We don't need them to be able to stand up, live out their full lives, or even be able to eat naturally (there's tubes for that). And even if they still look normal on the outside, our cloning controlled breeding can probably lead to some torturous internal physiology, that we simply can't detect (or don't care enough about to look for it).
I will admit to a certain amount of hyperbole, but what really irks me about this is the cause. We're not curing cancer or diabetes here, we're not even trying to create some exquisite supermeat, the main reason that the bio-industry is so happy about this is that they can provide a stable quality. All this effort and risk is just to ensure that your third big-mac tastes exactly the same as the previous two. To me that's a horrible way to look at food, and especially meat. I don't care that people eat meat, I don't want to make the whole world vegetarian, but it scares me how much meat has become a commodity. Meat is something special, it won't always taste the same, and that should be part of the attraction.
I am instantly reminded of the docking sequence from 2001.
My doctor told me that he was going to put his little snake down my throat when I was a kid, and he lost his license for it.
I guess robotic surgery was a much bigger taboo back then. Times sure have changed...