Ah, that answers my question why everyone's against HASBRO. They can't tell the difference between them being upset something is called something the same (trademark), and them trying to kill all Scrabble clones (IP). Thanks for clearing that up.
Here's the difference. In my example, our imaginary Cancer Cure Company A doesn't seem to mind if other people make similar cures for cancer - hence, IP is not really the issue. They're just asking that nobody calls it something that can be easily confused with the original product because if the new cure happens to kill people, they don't want it to affect their reputation (this is a trademark issue - big difference).
So then Company B comes in, makes something similar (which is OK) and then calls it something similar to the original product (not OK). Company A gets upset because they called it something similar. In my view, Company A has the perfect right to go "WTF, mate?" and do something about it. It's not about saving lives. It's just about someone apparently being unable to call their new cancer cure something sufficiently different than the original.
I don't see why everyone's against HASBRO. Yes, Scrabulous was much better. But if I created a cure for cancer called CanCure and didn't have issues with other people creating similar cures, I think I'd be on good ground being a little upset when someone comes up with CanCures which could obviously be confused with my original cure. The quality of their cure is irrelevant. They stole my trademarked name.
Even if they were technologically capable of detecting it easily, my guess is that if we do survive that long, it'll be because we've gotten smart enough to quit nuking stuff and have found better, cleaner methods than nuclear power.
If this is the case, it's not really reasonable to think they'll randomly expect that Vault 13 will suddenly have a giant radioactive thing glob right next to it a million feet underground. Expecting everyone to be carrying around detectors every time they built something or dug a big hole (for whatever reason they need big holes in the ground) would be like each of us to randomly be testing all the time for decayed loincloths carrying unexpectedly active 10,000 year-old strains of deadly viruses before we built a building.
Wikipedia has been shown to be at least as reliable as other encyclopedic sources. Why would this be different for genes?
I think the big fear is that genes are a highly specialized area, and I'd be very scared if a doctor of mine went on Wikipedia to try to cure a fatal genetic disease I had.
Doctors are pretty bright people, though, and my bet is they'll use it the same way as other bright researchers. They'll use it to discover possibilities, get an overview of something, or find further sources to explore. If they're not bright enough with that, I think you have more to worry about in your researcher/doctor/whatever than "Jane iz cute1!!" being in the middle of a DNA sequence.
I was going to RTFA, but the summary was already more that 140 characters...
Really, though, it seems to me this article is talking about intellectual laziness rather than stupidity. You can pretty much figure out most things within minutes with the net just by using Google, which makes you impatient when you actually have to read a book.
Of course, I guess you could say the same thing about books; before people had to actually figure everything out for themselves or talk to each other and then books came along and people got into the find-existing-stuff instead of figure-out-stuff mentality.
Guy might be right, but sometimes, laziness can be a force for efficiency. Which I've obviously not learned since I'm still writing essays instead of quick witty snippets:\
I'm pretty clueless about databases, but from a design point of view, a major concern might be how this will limit what you can do in the future. As you can't control how your client chooses to access things, if they end up automating anything for some reason, doing so much as changing a column named 'foo' to 'bar' will blow up everything and they'll complain - despite the fact what you name your columns shouldn't be their business. If you get a new client that, for some reason, requires new information that should not be accessed by this company but still needs to be put in the same place, it's a lot more work which could have otherwise easily been solved if there was a layer between them and the database. And once you give an inch, you can't take it back.
In place of a snarky comment, I actually have a question. How on earth did this come about, anyway?
It's not like you could just accidentally pack 3,000,000 ants into a crate without noticing, so somehow, they must have managed to pick up a queen that survived the whole trip. Except queens generally hang out deep in nests laying eggs and stuff and not crawling into random crates. I suppose it's possible they picked up one of the few fertile females intended to become queens, and also a bunch of male ants who then performed a mating flight after arrival, but it seems unlikely.
Whatever the cause, sounds like something that could seriously mess with the ecosystem's chi.
We keep seeing the same thing over and over again. They pull something like this which would cause peasants and pitchforks if they did it with snail mail or monitored all internet usage, or put tracking devices on people physically. So instead, they target one part where MOST people think they won't be affected, and it's for the children and all. So nobody complains because if you do, you're clearly supporting pedophiles or something.
One step forward for the Cardassian States of America. Next step: monitoring all searches 'for the children'. And then the internet. And then, you know, we might as well monitor the children themselves for the parents. And then we must monitor the parents, for the children. And why not snail mail too, since it's the same thing as the entire internet except slower, right? Heck, why not monitor everyone? It's for the good of the children. Handy we happen to get lots of power and money while we're at it, but that's just a side effect. We're really thinking of the children.
I'm (maybe) obviously exaggerating (only) slightly and I don't think every one of these is some conspiracy to control, but seriously, we're slowly giving up our rights little by little for stupid things. The founders of the US country took on their entire country and empire because they felt their rights were being trampled. The same thing's happening again, but now we have TV to distract us and nobody does anything to stop stuff that doesn't seem to directly affect them. So we have stuff like DRM, Patriot Acts, etc, etc. They had serious balls two centuries ago. We, however, have apparently lost them and are losing everything else inch by inch.
The flaw is that people keep confusing intelligence as being equivalent to being human. I can be a completely wooden, emotionless person and still be highly intelligent. Einstein was notoriously bad at lots of human stuff, or doing things like remembering his address, but nobody's going to claim he wasn't intelligent. I can also easily imagine some crazy advanced race popping in with FTL ships from the other end of the universe, which would, by itself, imply intelligence. But if we talked to them, they could just as well have reasoning and conversation styles so drastically different from humans that even if they spoke English, they'd fail the Turing Test. It'd be obviously flawed to claim they weren't intelligent because they didn't passed the Turing Test.
As far as humans go, if you list any attribute for intelligence, I can probably come up with someone with a mental problem who doesn't have it, but would still be considered an intelligent being. While we're at it, there's no way for me to tell any other human is really intelligent and not just some well-designed program. Actually, I can't tell that I am, either. Intelligence is hard to define since it's just the emergent property of lots of crazy awesome subatomic particles bouncing around in our skulls, and not a product of any one particular factor. Computers happen to also have subatomic particles bouncing around in ordered patterns, but they juts don't have that same nebulous emergent property yet. But in the end, if the results of intelligence (adaptability, innovation, whatever) are the same, it becomes just a matter of semantics, like that quote about whether submarines swim. Tomayto, tomahto. Who cares? But saying that the only way to be intelligent is to be some average human is a pretty poor measure. The average human isn't that intelligent. Half of them are dumber.
I see what I did wrong now. Sorry, forgot this was Slashdot. I used the wrong analogy. OK, let's say you have a car with the keys on the seat in a parking lot...
Kind of like how if I find boxes of books in front of a bookstore in a public area, I can take it so long as there aren't any signs saying not to? I mean, maybe they wanted to encourage literacy. No offense, but I'd hate to be your kid if you thought going through diaries was OK so long as there wasn't a big warning label on the front cover.
It should be equally obvious that a company who sells this stuff wouldn't randomly provide all of it for free at the same time with the exact same product, although admittedly, it is a bit less obvious with the site than with a pile of books in front of a bookstore, so I can at least partially agree on that point. Still clear, at least to me, though.
Regardless, I still think they're retards for putting it up on a public site.
Actually, it sort of is wrong in a moral sense, just like reading someone's diary is also wrong, even if they're extremely stupid, print it out in 100 pt font and leave it wide open in the middle of city square. The fact they did that doesn't change the fact you're reading something that you obviously should not be, or watching something that the owners clearly did not intend you to without paying.
That being said, anyone who decides to leave something that's supposed to be hidden in a place viewable by virtually the entire world is pretty stupid and should expect people to go there even if they aren't supposed to. Or especially because they aren't.
Sending a cease and desist letter is the equivalent of me then trying to stand around guarding my diary and then put restraining orders on everyone to keep them from reading it instead of realizing that hey, maybe I should do something like keep it under my bed instead or something.
They actually make this sort of thing official in some places. In the university I went to, they actually had a giant database of code turned in for any computer science project ever. Every time you turned something in, your code would get dumped in after it ran a check to look for identical code or a certain degree of similarity (how they did this, I don't have a clue and I didn't want to test this at the cost of my degree).
Problem was... it would also check your code against any other code you'd also written. There were people who reportedly got nailed for plagiarism because they reused code from other classes. I always thought code reuse was a good thing, but apparently not in ivory towers where you have to try to use 20 different ways to detect keyboard input just to make sure your code isn't TOO similar to your last one, which also took in keyboard input. Sometimes, they get so caught up in looking for cheating that they forget you can't really force someone to learn, and in the end, it'll bite them anyway (and if it doesn't, clearly they had no need to learn it). All you can do is do some reasonable precautions and then try to encourage them to want to learn instead of trying to stop them from not learning to a point people who do want to learn get hindered.
Umm... actually, yes, it's reasonable. If you have reason to believe that someone's about to reenact Columbine, you'd better believe they'd send in the SWAT team first. And I'd want them to.
Otherwise, next time it's going to be "HELP! SOME GUY'S SHOOTING PEOPLE! THERE'S HOSTAGES AND BLOOD AND-" *screams*
"Are you sure sir? Please wait while we consult our TinFoilSurveillance(TM) devices (5 minutes), send an officer (5 minutes) before we deploy real help (10 minutes) to ensure this is a real call. Thank you for your call. We appreciate your feedback on the state of society."
Yeah, that'd really fly.
I'm all for privacy. Which is why I think the guy is totally justified. If someone asked about MY contracts at work, I wouldn't feel that compelled to tell them, either. And I'd have no obligation to. It'd be different if he was actually working in the governmental capacity, because then the people are indirectly sorta the guy's boss. But when it's just him privately being hired, it's none of our business from any moral or legal obligation sort of standpoint.
Google, though, would do well from a PR standpoint to at least formulate a response explaining what seems like a very odd decision. I'd appreciate it at least, since this sort of thing makes me feel pretty nervous. I don't really search for anything more exotic than cake recipes, technical documentation, or going through Wiki adventures where you start with wondering what the actual difference between a vegetable and fruit is and end up reading about quantum physics for some reason, but government snooping through stuff without cause is a bad thing and quite against the constitution those cool guys 200 years ago wrote up. Google has a good track record for not doing evil things, but still...
The problem is you still have to define what is reasonable. If I mention to someone that they're very tall, because they happen to be and unknown to me, they are extremely sensitive about this and later, go psychotic and kill themselves that night, I don't think it's right that I now have murder on my record because someone else was excessively emotionally fragile.
As artists can't even agree on what is and isn't art when they're talking about art, it's unlikely we'll come to an agreement with games, but even if the vast majority of games are just there to be popular and fun, there will always be the Frank Millers and others who aren't as popular, but continue to create not because they just want the money, but because they want to actually create something artistic (choose some definition of art: your choice). Even if they don't sell as much, people have a natural inclination to search for what they consider beautiful, and that will always attract a decent amount to the good stuff, even if the rest has no more plot than Packman (even if they're fun).
As a medium, though, games actually have a vast amount of untapped potential, because they are so different from movies or books or paintings. When you start up Half-Life, you are IMMEDIATELY Gordon Freeman. When people talk to you, you have a direct connection to them and you're a part of things. You aren't just reading, "'...', said Gordon blankly." You get to be Gordon... err... blankly '...'ing. In a way, this is similar to interactive fiction. Check out Adam Cadre's IF for instance, which makes extensive use of using an immediate connection as a player to shape perspective. Photopia is an excellent example. It's a game with virtually no real gameplay, but it tells a story in a way no book or movie could. I think video games in general have this same potential. This potential is around storytelling and communicating ideas and emotions in a different, direct way than anything else - through experience rather than empathy or capturing a single moment. Whether it's art or not is irrelevant, though personally, I'd say that the quality and ability to communicate ideas and emotions is probably pretty important in the definition of art.
I'm not completely clear about how the whole thing will work after reading the article, but it seems there's some sort of mechanism to promote competition between articles (whether it's just ratings or something bigger). An obviously biased article by the same group it's talking about will likely not win against one that is informative and more neutral... well, assuming people judge stuff by how much it provides useful knowledge as opposed to how much they agree with the opinions therein.
That may, of course, be a problem, especially on more controversial topics.
Regardless, they'll be staking their reputation on the line if, say, the *INSERT SUBJECT'S POLITICAL PARTY HERE* party posts a ton of propaganda instead of facts, like they always do, and people call them on it.
Actually, it's not such a bad idea. I wouldn't want some random guy who doesn't even use the internet deciding whether the internet should be censored. The people who will be affected should decide.
Not that this is really anything more than some random, inaccurate poll that will be forgotten in a few days, but I'm just saying...
Compared to claims of averting wars, I guess you can't offer much against that. Still, while I'm not a linguist, it strikes me that language not only reflects how we think, but shapes how we think. Take the E Prime syntax as a random example of the possibility (English without the to-be verb). Perhaps having a greater variety of languages encourages different viewpoints, which ultimately, while it may cause wars, helps us to adapt to whatever comes and overcome whatever obstacles may come. Complete uniformity is a weakness. Then again, so is so much diversity nothing can emerge from the chaos. Maybe somehow having less, but vastly different languages could be a good thing.
While it can be argued the best ideas will emerge in whatever new language evolves, and that bad unusable ideas may fall out, I think people get the wrong idea about how evolution works. It isn't about reaching the pinnacle of success and perfection. It's about who can adapt the best when things change. Just a thought.
A lot of these thoughts are quite interesting, and tactically, you're certainly right. The problem is that most people are cowards who will just sit there doing nothing in an emegency and they aren't trained to listen to people like flight attendant who suddenly are acting like commanding officers. There is no way 6 people can kung fu their way through an entire plane full of people if everyone was actually standing in their way. The problem is if you take a box cutter and threaten one child, most people won't do anything. Even if you didn't, many people won't do much.
I do think that arming the flight attendants and certainly the pilots is a good idea as a middle ground, though. I mean, if all else fails, taser everyone and even if the terrorists get a hold of the non-lethal weapons, you still have more armed people. The solution I think is personally best is to arm everyone. Or at least allow everyone to carry small firearms. There's good reasons you shouldn't shoot an AK47 full auto in the middle of a plane under any circumstances, but if the terrorists have an unknown (and likely superior) number of armed civilians that are already surrounding them by the nature of the layout of the plane, and it's impossible to know who is and isn't armed, so you can't use a hostage and demand weapons reliably, and it only takes one copetent individual to take one or more of them down, it becomes much, much more difficult to repeat 9/11 - even if they're armed themselves. Yes, this solution would cause casualties and there would be accidents when no terrorists were around, and that one nutcase could suddenly open fire on people (before getting shot soon after), but if the belief is that terrorists are a great threat, we've got more to worry about than just one plane of people when they try to do stuff. And likely, you'd save the plane with this strategy anyway.
The man has a point, only it has not been taken far enough. He's targeted the wrong people. This needs to be taken higher up. We should all sue God because what we peceive as a color is really a combination of three types of cones of DIFFERENT COLORS firing off, which then lies to us and makes it seem like there is a single different color. This is clear misrepresentation of the facts and we should not let this kind of thing slide.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, that answers my question why everyone's against HASBRO. They can't tell the difference between them being upset something is called something the same (trademark), and them trying to kill all Scrabble clones (IP). Thanks for clearing that up.
Here's the difference. In my example, our imaginary Cancer Cure Company A doesn't seem to mind if other people make similar cures for cancer - hence, IP is not really the issue. They're just asking that nobody calls it something that can be easily confused with the original product because if the new cure happens to kill people, they don't want it to affect their reputation (this is a trademark issue - big difference).
So then Company B comes in, makes something similar (which is OK) and then calls it something similar to the original product (not OK). Company A gets upset because they called it something similar. In my view, Company A has the perfect right to go "WTF, mate?" and do something about it. It's not about saving lives. It's just about someone apparently being unable to call their new cancer cure something sufficiently different than the original.
I don't see why everyone's against HASBRO. Yes, Scrabulous was much better. But if I created a cure for cancer called CanCure and didn't have issues with other people creating similar cures, I think I'd be on good ground being a little upset when someone comes up with CanCures which could obviously be confused with my original cure. The quality of their cure is irrelevant. They stole my trademarked name.
Even if they were technologically capable of detecting it easily, my guess is that if we do survive that long, it'll be because we've gotten smart enough to quit nuking stuff and have found better, cleaner methods than nuclear power.
If this is the case, it's not really reasonable to think they'll randomly expect that Vault 13 will suddenly have a giant radioactive thing glob right next to it a million feet underground. Expecting everyone to be carrying around detectors every time they built something or dug a big hole (for whatever reason they need big holes in the ground) would be like each of us to randomly be testing all the time for decayed loincloths carrying unexpectedly active 10,000 year-old strains of deadly viruses before we built a building.
Yeah, but after a few people died, they'd figure out pretty fast that when we say, "Get off my lawn!" we really mean it.
Wikipedia has been shown to be at least as reliable as other encyclopedic sources. Why would this be different for genes?
I think the big fear is that genes are a highly specialized area, and I'd be very scared if a doctor of mine went on Wikipedia to try to cure a fatal genetic disease I had.
Doctors are pretty bright people, though, and my bet is they'll use it the same way as other bright researchers. They'll use it to discover possibilities, get an overview of something, or find further sources to explore. If they're not bright enough with that, I think you have more to worry about in your researcher/doctor/whatever than "Jane iz cute1!!" being in the middle of a DNA sequence.
Linux Developers Urge Nokia to see figure 1.
I was going to RTFA, but the summary was already more that 140 characters...
:\
Really, though, it seems to me this article is talking about intellectual laziness rather than stupidity. You can pretty much figure out most things within minutes with the net just by using Google, which makes you impatient when you actually have to read a book.
Of course, I guess you could say the same thing about books; before people had to actually figure everything out for themselves or talk to each other and then books came along and people got into the find-existing-stuff instead of figure-out-stuff mentality.
Guy might be right, but sometimes, laziness can be a force for efficiency. Which I've obviously not learned since I'm still writing essays instead of quick witty snippets
I'm pretty clueless about databases, but from a design point of view, a major concern might be how this will limit what you can do in the future. As you can't control how your client chooses to access things, if they end up automating anything for some reason, doing so much as changing a column named 'foo' to 'bar' will blow up everything and they'll complain - despite the fact what you name your columns shouldn't be their business. If you get a new client that, for some reason, requires new information that should not be accessed by this company but still needs to be put in the same place, it's a lot more work which could have otherwise easily been solved if there was a layer between them and the database. And once you give an inch, you can't take it back.
In place of a snarky comment, I actually have a question. How on earth did this come about, anyway?
It's not like you could just accidentally pack 3,000,000 ants into a crate without noticing, so somehow, they must have managed to pick up a queen that survived the whole trip. Except queens generally hang out deep in nests laying eggs and stuff and not crawling into random crates. I suppose it's possible they picked up one of the few fertile females intended to become queens, and also a bunch of male ants who then performed a mating flight after arrival, but it seems unlikely.
Whatever the cause, sounds like something that could seriously mess with the ecosystem's chi.
We keep seeing the same thing over and over again. They pull something like this which would cause peasants and pitchforks if they did it with snail mail or monitored all internet usage, or put tracking devices on people physically. So instead, they target one part where MOST people think they won't be affected, and it's for the children and all. So nobody complains because if you do, you're clearly supporting pedophiles or something.
One step forward for the Cardassian States of America. Next step: monitoring all searches 'for the children'. And then the internet. And then, you know, we might as well monitor the children themselves for the parents. And then we must monitor the parents, for the children. And why not snail mail too, since it's the same thing as the entire internet except slower, right? Heck, why not monitor everyone? It's for the good of the children. Handy we happen to get lots of power and money while we're at it, but that's just a side effect. We're really thinking of the children.
I'm (maybe) obviously exaggerating (only) slightly and I don't think every one of these is some conspiracy to control, but seriously, we're slowly giving up our rights little by little for stupid things. The founders of the US country took on their entire country and empire because they felt their rights were being trampled. The same thing's happening again, but now we have TV to distract us and nobody does anything to stop stuff that doesn't seem to directly affect them. So we have stuff like DRM, Patriot Acts, etc, etc. They had serious balls two centuries ago. We, however, have apparently lost them and are losing everything else inch by inch.
The flaw is that people keep confusing intelligence as being equivalent to being human. I can be a completely wooden, emotionless person and still be highly intelligent. Einstein was notoriously bad at lots of human stuff, or doing things like remembering his address, but nobody's going to claim he wasn't intelligent. I can also easily imagine some crazy advanced race popping in with FTL ships from the other end of the universe, which would, by itself, imply intelligence. But if we talked to them, they could just as well have reasoning and conversation styles so drastically different from humans that even if they spoke English, they'd fail the Turing Test. It'd be obviously flawed to claim they weren't intelligent because they didn't passed the Turing Test.
As far as humans go, if you list any attribute for intelligence, I can probably come up with someone with a mental problem who doesn't have it, but would still be considered an intelligent being. While we're at it, there's no way for me to tell any other human is really intelligent and not just some well-designed program. Actually, I can't tell that I am, either. Intelligence is hard to define since it's just the emergent property of lots of crazy awesome subatomic particles bouncing around in our skulls, and not a product of any one particular factor. Computers happen to also have subatomic particles bouncing around in ordered patterns, but they juts don't have that same nebulous emergent property yet. But in the end, if the results of intelligence (adaptability, innovation, whatever) are the same, it becomes just a matter of semantics, like that quote about whether submarines swim. Tomayto, tomahto. Who cares? But saying that the only way to be intelligent is to be some average human is a pretty poor measure. The average human isn't that intelligent. Half of them are dumber.
I see what I did wrong now. Sorry, forgot this was Slashdot. I used the wrong analogy. OK, let's say you have a car with the keys on the seat in a parking lot...
Kind of like how if I find boxes of books in front of a bookstore in a public area, I can take it so long as there aren't any signs saying not to? I mean, maybe they wanted to encourage literacy. No offense, but I'd hate to be your kid if you thought going through diaries was OK so long as there wasn't a big warning label on the front cover.
It should be equally obvious that a company who sells this stuff wouldn't randomly provide all of it for free at the same time with the exact same product, although admittedly, it is a bit less obvious with the site than with a pile of books in front of a bookstore, so I can at least partially agree on that point. Still clear, at least to me, though.
Regardless, I still think they're retards for putting it up on a public site.
Actually, it sort of is wrong in a moral sense, just like reading someone's diary is also wrong, even if they're extremely stupid, print it out in 100 pt font and leave it wide open in the middle of city square. The fact they did that doesn't change the fact you're reading something that you obviously should not be, or watching something that the owners clearly did not intend you to without paying.
That being said, anyone who decides to leave something that's supposed to be hidden in a place viewable by virtually the entire world is pretty stupid and should expect people to go there even if they aren't supposed to. Or especially because they aren't.
Sending a cease and desist letter is the equivalent of me then trying to stand around guarding my diary and then put restraining orders on everyone to keep them from reading it instead of realizing that hey, maybe I should do something like keep it under my bed instead or something.
They actually make this sort of thing official in some places. In the university I went to, they actually had a giant database of code turned in for any computer science project ever. Every time you turned something in, your code would get dumped in after it ran a check to look for identical code or a certain degree of similarity (how they did this, I don't have a clue and I didn't want to test this at the cost of my degree).
Problem was... it would also check your code against any other code you'd also written. There were people who reportedly got nailed for plagiarism because they reused code from other classes. I always thought code reuse was a good thing, but apparently not in ivory towers where you have to try to use 20 different ways to detect keyboard input just to make sure your code isn't TOO similar to your last one, which also took in keyboard input. Sometimes, they get so caught up in looking for cheating that they forget you can't really force someone to learn, and in the end, it'll bite them anyway (and if it doesn't, clearly they had no need to learn it). All you can do is do some reasonable precautions and then try to encourage them to want to learn instead of trying to stop them from not learning to a point people who do want to learn get hindered.
It's kind of like DRM, I guess.
Umm... actually, yes, it's reasonable. If you have reason to believe that someone's about to reenact Columbine, you'd better believe they'd send in the SWAT team first. And I'd want them to. Otherwise, next time it's going to be "HELP! SOME GUY'S SHOOTING PEOPLE! THERE'S HOSTAGES AND BLOOD AND-" *screams* "Are you sure sir? Please wait while we consult our TinFoilSurveillance(TM) devices (5 minutes), send an officer (5 minutes) before we deploy real help (10 minutes) to ensure this is a real call. Thank you for your call. We appreciate your feedback on the state of society." Yeah, that'd really fly.
I'm all for privacy. Which is why I think the guy is totally justified. If someone asked about MY contracts at work, I wouldn't feel that compelled to tell them, either. And I'd have no obligation to. It'd be different if he was actually working in the governmental capacity, because then the people are indirectly sorta the guy's boss. But when it's just him privately being hired, it's none of our business from any moral or legal obligation sort of standpoint.
Google, though, would do well from a PR standpoint to at least formulate a response explaining what seems like a very odd decision. I'd appreciate it at least, since this sort of thing makes me feel pretty nervous. I don't really search for anything more exotic than cake recipes, technical documentation, or going through Wiki adventures where you start with wondering what the actual difference between a vegetable and fruit is and end up reading about quantum physics for some reason, but government snooping through stuff without cause is a bad thing and quite against the constitution those cool guys 200 years ago wrote up. Google has a good track record for not doing evil things, but still...
The problem is you still have to define what is reasonable. If I mention to someone that they're very tall, because they happen to be and unknown to me, they are extremely sensitive about this and later, go psychotic and kill themselves that night, I don't think it's right that I now have murder on my record because someone else was excessively emotionally fragile.
As artists can't even agree on what is and isn't art when they're talking about art, it's unlikely we'll come to an agreement with games, but even if the vast majority of games are just there to be popular and fun, there will always be the Frank Millers and others who aren't as popular, but continue to create not because they just want the money, but because they want to actually create something artistic (choose some definition of art: your choice). Even if they don't sell as much, people have a natural inclination to search for what they consider beautiful, and that will always attract a decent amount to the good stuff, even if the rest has no more plot than Packman (even if they're fun).
As a medium, though, games actually have a vast amount of untapped potential, because they are so different from movies or books or paintings. When you start up Half-Life, you are IMMEDIATELY Gordon Freeman. When people talk to you, you have a direct connection to them and you're a part of things. You aren't just reading, "'...', said Gordon blankly." You get to be Gordon... err... blankly '...'ing. In a way, this is similar to interactive fiction. Check out Adam Cadre's IF for instance, which makes extensive use of using an immediate connection as a player to shape perspective. Photopia is an excellent example. It's a game with virtually no real gameplay, but it tells a story in a way no book or movie could. I think video games in general have this same potential. This potential is around storytelling and communicating ideas and emotions in a different, direct way than anything else - through experience rather than empathy or capturing a single moment. Whether it's art or not is irrelevant, though personally, I'd say that the quality and ability to communicate ideas and emotions is probably pretty important in the definition of art.
I'm not completely clear about how the whole thing will work after reading the article, but it seems there's some sort of mechanism to promote competition between articles (whether it's just ratings or something bigger). An obviously biased article by the same group it's talking about will likely not win against one that is informative and more neutral... well, assuming people judge stuff by how much it provides useful knowledge as opposed to how much they agree with the opinions therein.
That may, of course, be a problem, especially on more controversial topics.
Regardless, they'll be staking their reputation on the line if, say, the *INSERT SUBJECT'S POLITICAL PARTY HERE* party posts a ton of propaganda instead of facts, like they always do, and people call them on it.
Shakespeare Programming Language
Actually, it's not such a bad idea. I wouldn't want some random guy who doesn't even use the internet deciding whether the internet should be censored. The people who will be affected should decide. Not that this is really anything more than some random, inaccurate poll that will be forgotten in a few days, but I'm just saying...
Compared to claims of averting wars, I guess you can't offer much against that. Still, while I'm not a linguist, it strikes me that language not only reflects how we think, but shapes how we think. Take the E Prime syntax as a random example of the possibility (English without the to-be verb). Perhaps having a greater variety of languages encourages different viewpoints, which ultimately, while it may cause wars, helps us to adapt to whatever comes and overcome whatever obstacles may come. Complete uniformity is a weakness. Then again, so is so much diversity nothing can emerge from the chaos. Maybe somehow having less, but vastly different languages could be a good thing. While it can be argued the best ideas will emerge in whatever new language evolves, and that bad unusable ideas may fall out, I think people get the wrong idea about how evolution works. It isn't about reaching the pinnacle of success and perfection. It's about who can adapt the best when things change. Just a thought.
A lot of these thoughts are quite interesting, and tactically, you're certainly right. The problem is that most people are cowards who will just sit there doing nothing in an emegency and they aren't trained to listen to people like flight attendant who suddenly are acting like commanding officers. There is no way 6 people can kung fu their way through an entire plane full of people if everyone was actually standing in their way. The problem is if you take a box cutter and threaten one child, most people won't do anything. Even if you didn't, many people won't do much.
I do think that arming the flight attendants and certainly the pilots is a good idea as a middle ground, though. I mean, if all else fails, taser everyone and even if the terrorists get a hold of the non-lethal weapons, you still have more armed people. The solution I think is personally best is to arm everyone. Or at least allow everyone to carry small firearms. There's good reasons you shouldn't shoot an AK47 full auto in the middle of a plane under any circumstances, but if the terrorists have an unknown (and likely superior) number of armed civilians that are already surrounding them by the nature of the layout of the plane, and it's impossible to know who is and isn't armed, so you can't use a hostage and demand weapons reliably, and it only takes one copetent individual to take one or more of them down, it becomes much, much more difficult to repeat 9/11 - even if they're armed themselves. Yes, this solution would cause casualties and there would be accidents when no terrorists were around, and that one nutcase could suddenly open fire on people (before getting shot soon after), but if the belief is that terrorists are a great threat, we've got more to worry about than just one plane of people when they try to do stuff. And likely, you'd save the plane with this strategy anyway.
The man has a point, only it has not been taken far enough. He's targeted the wrong people. This needs to be taken higher up. We should all sue God because what we peceive as a color is really a combination of three types of cones of DIFFERENT COLORS firing off, which then lies to us and makes it seem like there is a single different color. This is clear misrepresentation of the facts and we should not let this kind of thing slide.