For every "winning" design payout, there are 100 losers who worked for free in the *vain hope* of getting a payout. And what does the winner get? About 1/100th of the money he'd get freelancing.
Sure, it works well for small scales, but when design students leave college, they'll expect to make more than the pittance these sites are paying.
In short, it doesn't scale, and it isn't sustainable.
setting by underpaid flunkies who couldn't hack it in industry,
As someone with much experience in the industry, I find this rather amusing. Given the number of genuinely stupid people I see promoted to managerial positions in the industry, I'd say it's just the opposite: those who can't think creatively or logically *have* to find a job in industry, because it's the only place where lack of creativity and objectivity are an asset, rather than a liability. In academia, you could never get away with:
Reprimanding someone for coming up with a creative solution which reduced the amount of work necessary, simply because someone else had already decided to use a different method.
Imputing that the engineer is to blame for a late project when he wasn't allowed to start work on it until after the due date.
Insisting that everyone just works hard enough, a faulty design will somehow work correctly.
Industry does have challenges that academia does not, and is quite frequently years, even decades ahead of them, but there are so many opportunities for the lazy and incompetent that someone who can't hack it in industry won't be able to hack it in academia either.
Seriously. I see this all too often - the meme of the stupid idiot.
Honestly, it must be rather comforting for those with an inferiority complex to dismiss anyone with whom they disagree as a bumbling idiot. And studies like these only reinforce the notion that "other people" are wrong.
But these studies are hardly enlightening. It is well known that intelligence follows a bell-shaped curve, and no matter how many studies are done, there will *always* be people who won't change their opinion in light of contradictory evidence. But this is hardly indicative of the norm. In fact, the opposite is a much larger problem; the notion that AGW was faked has been repeated so often that people otherwise indifferent to the debate have now started to believe global warming was a hoax.
You can't have it both ways: either people change the opinion every time the "truth" changes and are subject to being fooled by anyone willing to tell a lie; or you have people who never change their opinion once formed, in spite of evidence to the contrary. The unfortunate reality is that because very few people can be experts in everything, the common man must form his opinions based on the statements made by others, and, quite frequently, those who articulate their opinions with the greatest eloquence are believed, as the common man lacks the expertise to form an opinion for himself.
What I believe is the more typical case is that people change their opinions slowly once formed. This is effectively a cerebral low-pass filter which eliminates noise from the equation. Thus, a person's opinion may not always reflect the immediate information they have about a topic, but rather, reflects the sum of the experiential knowledge. If the brain worked otherwise, people a block away would slam on their brakes the instant they saw a red light. By delaying the process of evaluation, the mind gathers more information than it would otherwise, and comes to a better conclusion.
There are many counterpoints, many hypotheses that would describe the behavior you described, but I'll leave just a few:
Children never victimized never develop empathy for others; hence, they see no issue, nor any moral problem with spending someone else's money.
Secure children have no reason to understand the world beyond what is told to them. Hence, because they've never experienced disappointment or loss, they are blissfully unaware that some people can't be trusted, and more easily manipulated. When told raising taxes to pay for social programs will eliminate poverty, they'll happily believe it, in spite of the fact that studies have shown otherwise.
Well adjusted students tend to be favored by authority; even when they make mistakes, they are often given a pass; hence, they never develop the sense of personal responsibility which leads them to consider the long term effects of legislation and the possibility that something which wins votes in the short term may actually be bad for their constituents in the long term.
I would not call it a megaphone. It's more like a narcissist's microphone. I had never heard of some of these blogs before the climategate scandal broke, due probably to the fact that most of them are so batshit-crazy-insane that they couldn't convince a reasonable person the sky was blue.
I'm not sure why any reasonable scientist would consider these bloggers their peers. They aren't. The only people who pay attention to the anti-AGW bloggers are the press, and only when they need a story to sell. Most people, even those skeptical of AGW (such as myself), do not consider any of the arguments bloggers put forth to be worth the time spent reading them. Even though there are merits to skepticism of AGW, you'll seldom find a reasonable, intelligent, or informed discussion in the blogosphere. For that, you actually have to read what the scientists have published, and work with the data yourself.
I do follow a blog. However, it's only because the blogger - Bruce Schneier, is already a recognized authority on security. Yet some people think if they post something online that:
It puts them on the same level as those who actually study the subject for a living (or work in the field), and
That others will care what they think. (Most don't. Even I could care less about someone ranting about project management practices; yes, I work in the field, I understand the factors, but most bloggers don't offer anything insightful or relevant.)
That they will be seen as an authority in their field.
I don't have a blog. I know better; I know there are problems and solutions in software engineering, and I like to think myself rather accomplished in the field. Yet for all this, I recognize that posting my day to day reflections on my experiences with software engineering, while perhaps entertaining, would bring very little new or insightful to the field. If I do have something insightful to say, I'll write a book and publish it. Maybe online. But honestly, nobody's going to think me an authority on software engineering because I complain about the same problems that have plagued the industry for years. When I have a solution, I'll let you know. Until then, I'm not going to waste your time. Yet the aforementioned points seem lost on most bloggers.
No one cares to hear what I would post on a blog. No one cares about what you would post, either - unless, of course, you are already an authority in your field. A blog is much more often a sign of the author's personal narcissism than a medium for the intelligent exchange of ideas.
I, for one, hope the problem is very real. If so, my children will have no problem succeeding.
I'm surprised by my five year old - he learns things on his own, without being taught. Even though he has a limited vocabulary, he has, on several occasions, figured out from context clues what my wife and I were spelling. Even though he can't spell the word pizza, when she suggested we order a P-I-Z-Z-A, he jumps in immediately with, "Yeah, let's order pizza!" That which he doesn't know, he inately figures out. This is not something I or anyone else taught him. He just does it naturally.
He has lots of legos, but I'm the only one who builds the toy on the box. He takes it apart and builds what he wants. I built him an aircraft carrier out of legos; he modified it to include torpedo tubes. And now he's building functional dump trucks from them. As in, the back goes up and the gate opens to dump the cargo.
I think, if anything, creativity is something natural which is destroyed by our public education system. Should it survive that, there is no shortage of corporations with cultures for which creativity is seen as a liability, rather than an asset. The stupid person who works overtime on the boss's pet project is more highly esteemed than the creative genius who works banker's hours because he's figured out a better way of doing things.
The most pressing problem for our generation has been how do deal with the
Unethical,
Stupid,
Greedy,
Lazy,
Immoral,
Ignorant
management in Corporate America. Creativity means very little if your company is more concerned with: reducing cost rather than building revenues; the short term profit rather than long term viability; the politically correct instead of the provably correct. Seldom do companies fail because they lack creativity; most fail because their culture prohibits them from treating their customers and employees in a humane way. They literally *can't* do the smart thing, because it's not politically acceptable. So they don't. And we're buying Japaneses cars and Chinese electronics because of it.
I hold the (unpopular) view that Corporations have no moral obligations whatsoever.
Perhaps this isn't the way things should be. But it is the way things are, with few notable exceptions. When the public at large understands that a corporation *can't* possess a moral compass in the same way a human can, then we can have a productive debate on the value of capitalism, and the appropriate regulatory framework to prevent abuses from happening.
All too many people fail to realize that a corporation - especially a publicly traded one - is a profit-making machine, nothing more, nothing less.
Wasn't it Stalin who said, "The capitalists will sell us the rope we use to hang them."
Nice to know that Microsoft, after complaining for years that open source was insecure because anyone could see the code, is now providing same to Russia. Nothing quite like putting quarterly profits above national security.
What I wonder is, if your system is adopted, what is to stop a scalper from simply printing off a bunch of barcodes, selling them to the early birds, and letting the legitimate ticketholders duke it out with management because their barcode has already been scanned?
In such a scenario, only the real ticketholders lose.
I understand your point about nobody owning ideas, but consider that Native Americans took it one step further: they didn't understand how anyone could own *land*. Some didn't even have the concept of ownership of physical property.
Now imagine what it would be like if anyone could legally enter your house and take whatever they wanted, so long as you weren't "using it at the time".
The very notion of property ownership is itself a legal fiction. If ownership of physical items is good, why should it stop there? Why not extend it to something a person can *create*? Why must we limit ownership to only those things which exist in the material sense?
It's kind of odd that there are people who believe that if I buy a chunk of marble and carve a statue, that I can own that statue, and sell it for a profit, but to do the same thing electronically means I'm somehow obligated to give my work to the world for free. It seems that in their minds I'm only entitled to make a living if the product of my work is a physical object. Oddly, those who do produce physical objects for a living (i.e. factory workers, etc...) also find themselves hard pressed to make a living.
And lets make the distinction between ideas and works. Copyright protects works, not ideas. That is, merely having an idea is not enough, you must tranform it into something which can be represented in the physical world, i.e. notes on a page, bits on a platter, etc...
I see the analogy with physical objects repeated often, but it's a bad analogy. Every physical object owned by someone is owned because it has some use to the owner, not because it takes up physical space and cannot be trivially reproduced. Likewise, even intangible assets - such as software - have some use to the owner. Consequently, they have value, and if we thought of things in terms of their value, instead of their actual status as physical property, it would be easier to understand why copyright exists. It's not a matter of physical property, but of the value of the work one creates which entitles the worker to remuneration for their efforts. Copyright enables markets for intellectual property to exist, much the same way laws against theft allow markets for physical objects to exist. In the same way that removing a physical object from a shop deprives the shopkeeper of the profit made, so does copying deprive the author of their living. (Think about that for a moment: if one is caught shoplifting, they must pay the shopkeeper the restitution for the sale price, not the price the shopkeeper paid for the item. That is, profit is an implicit part of the value of an item. Why would copyright be any different?)
Now this isn't to say that there have been abuses - just as with physical property, the owners of intellectual property can abuse their position in particularly egregious ways. But copyright is unfortunately the best system available at the current time, and unfortunately, for all the brainpower on./, no one has come up with a better system which rewards creators in proportion to the value of their work, while at the same time allowing unlimited copying.
The problem every politician faces is that without some mind-gripping fear, for which the politician has *The Answer*, it is hard to unseat an incumbent. Cyber warfare is the New Fear.
Without the prospect of CYBER WARFARE, the critical infrastructure on which our political process takes place can remain controlled by private parties, some of whom are legitimately indifferent to the political process, even to the point where they are non-partisan, so long as the politician elect can be bought. This is clearly a problem for political parties, especially those in power, who have a vested interest in controlling political debate. Without control over the public square - that is, the means by which public debate happens - they have no reasonable assurance of controlling the debate itself. You see, there are *certain things* about which you aren't supposed to talk. The political debate has to be controlled in such a manner to keep people thinking about those ethereal fears which allow politicians to get elected.
And the problem with the Internet is that it can't be controlled by the party elect. Free debate happens - on any subject, mind you! And this is a real problem, especially if you need to control the thoughts of your subjects, er - citizens. Enter CYBER WARFARE: a threat, that if real, can be used as justification for grabbing "emergency" control of our public square should the natives become restless. Surely no one would argue against NATIONAL SECURITY. Hence, the effort to conflate the internet with being vital to national security, and to conflate cyber warfare with a legitimate threat to the national security of this nation. Once this lie is believed by the public at large, any *problematic* groups developing a political following can be neutralized in the name of protecting the nation.
This is not new, folks. There were power grabs under the notion of national security long before the Internet became the dominant means of public debate. During the civil rights era, the police broke up political protests and gatherings in the name of "law and order". This is no different - an attempt by the incumbents to retain their control over the political process. Every red-blooded American should reject this mindless fear-mongering, and those who mention "cyber warfare" should be upbraided as ignorant fools, preferably in as public a manner as possible, to "encourage the others".
Now this is not to say that there are real threats with vital systems connected to the internet, but this is a matter of engineering standards and ethics, not of actual national security. The distinction is important.
There are (or were) several well publicized incidents where cryptographic keys were discovered because the programmer left them on the stack. Putting them in the executable code sections would have mitigated this risk.
Java made DEP pretty much irrelevant to everyone except those few programmers trying to write secure code where protecting the algorithm itself is an important trade secret. While no algorithm executing on your machine is theoretically impossible to discover, DEP makes it easier for the reverse engineer. In the 3 to 6 month development timeframe for most consumer electronics, this can be a significant liability.
While DEP does prevent stack overflow types of attacks, it also complicates writing high security software. The inability to execute data means:
You can't run self-decrypting programs.
You can't alter instructions at runtime to fool debuggers.
You can't place keys in executable code sections at runtime, making it much easier for someone to stop your program and dump the keys out of the memory image.
DEP actually makes attacks against cryptographic software *easier* to implement. And the problem it addresses - mainly the stack overflow - is such a well-known vulnerability that only the most negligent of programmers are ignorant of it, and most companies use tools to detect and prevent these sorts of defects. (Granted, Microsoft is a glaring exception, but they are hardly considered a secure software vendor). Finally, DEP is a historical accident - it was so easily implemented in hardware that it was adopted by UNIX systems long before stack-checking utilities and stack canaries had become commonplace. It offers little, if any, more security than a security-conscious developer using modern stack-overflow checking tools would accomplish.
You might want to consider this very thing was done with the likes of MPEGII-TS, ISDB-T, DVB-H etc... more than 5 years ago. You don't need to invent a new standard, but merely use the ones already in existence. And these standards are already open, implemented, and well understood.
The SD specification is worse than being undocumented: it's proprietary, and disclosed only under NDA. If the SD foundation ever goes bankrupt or gets bought by ${EVIL COMPANY}, the likelihood of obtaining a copy is rather small.
They see the.xxx domain as government legitimization of pornography, and
They fear that they would be forced to use a.xxx domain if they discussed the moral aspects of sex. That is, government censors would force a sermon expounding the evils of sex outside of marriage to be posted to a.xxx address rather than the regular church website.
Whether Congress gave the President the authority to enact a moratorium is beside the point. Yes, there's a legal issue there wrt to executive power, but from BP's perspective, it doesn't matter.
The President is in charge of Customs Enforcement. The President determines who represents a "security threat" to the nation. In the first case, he could make life very difficult for companies trying to get oil from the drill sites to the refineries. With respect to the second, if he determined that oil drilling constituted a serious threat to the security of the United States, he is authorized to use military force to prevent it from happening. And since most of these are in international waters, there is little that BP or any other company could do. It's not as if the British Navy will start duking it out with the US over drilling sites. Especially considering the vulnerability of oil platforms to things like naval guns and smart bombs.
We've known for a long time that humans can affect not only weather, but climate. Since the 60's, we've known that clouds seeded with silver nitrate will produce precipitation. IIRC, the same was demonstrated with chips of solid carbon dioxide. However, that said -
We still do not have enough evidence to prove that burning fossil fuels will produce global warming. Now before I continue, let me just get this out of the way: there is a difference between someone who believes global warming *can't* be true in the religious sense, and someone who recognizes that climate is a difficult subject for which we just don't have the answers now. There will always be anti-AGW folks around regardless of where the science goes and what happens to the climate. That said, the AGW theories have these difficulties:
The first is political: the fallout from the IPCC scandal is going to take years before the public will believe them again. But it hardly matters because,
Global temperatures have been on the decline for the last decade, much as they did during the turn of the century 100 years ago.
We can probably agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas; what we can't explain is why increased generation of CO2 hasn't resulted in a proportionate increase in the atmospheric CO2 levels. Some say it is being absorbed by the oceans (possibly correct) and will acidify them. (Also possibly true, however, a great deal of CO2 will be necessary to sufficiently alter the pH enough to matter.)
At this point, we simply don't have the scientific certainty to claim AGW is happening, and that it will be catastrophic. Even were we to accept the AGW theories at face value, they are so filled with qualifying factors that we could not conclude that we are in imminent danger. We could say that change is going to come, but we can't quantify the impact. Given the timescales on which climate changes, it would hardly be an unmitigated disaster on a global level. Even if the direst of predictions proved true, we'd have more than ample time to adapt. (Keep in mind the US sustained not one, but two wars in the Middle East, at the cost of trillions of dollars. Imagine what the same could do to relocate US cities inland, if necessary.)
The simple fact of the matter is, though, that we're well past peak oil, and AGW or not, we're going to stop burning it someday. So it only makes sense to buy into renewable energy technologies while they're cheap than wait for the oil to run out and be put over a barrel (no pun intended) by the solar power companies. If you want people to stop burning fossil fuels, you just have to give them a cheaper alternative. You don't have to lie to them about global warming.
The whole problem I have with sites like Facebook isn't that they exist, but that people treat them as if a conversation on FB is no different than one in person. There are a lot of differences:
On FB, everything you post is recorded for later reference by the authorities. Yet people post as if it was a private conversation between their friends.
There's no social context on the net. A joke lampooning racists can be easily misinterpreted or misconstrued as supporting racism; a serious discussion about the difficulties faced by the disabled can be made to look as if one is making fun of them. It's not just a matter of privacy - there just isn't the social context, the non-verbal cues, etc... present in normal conversation which keep face to face conversations from being misinterpreted. A light-hearted jest, "better luck next time!" after winning a tennis match could be easily misconstrued as serious rivalry or hatred, especially in the event of the untimely death of the loser. Said face to face, nothing would come of it, and even should someone overhear, it would be inadmissable in court as hearsay. However, post the same thing on FB, and suddenly a prosecutor has a motive for murder.
Because of #1 above, there are limits to what can be said on FB. Certain types of discussions just can't happen because there isn't any real anonymity. People with unpopular viewpoints, or subject to unfortunate circumstances find that, unlike a personal conversation, they can't discuss what's really on their mind. Instead, they have to suppress their speech and dumb-down their banter to the same inane level as everyone else on FB. While the typical conversation with a friend might involve trivial personal matters, there are times when a heartfelt discussion is needed. By making FB the "normal" means of communication, we lose a certain amount of our ability to relate to others as human beings.
I probably post more than I should on FB, but not nearly as much as some of my colleagues. The real problem with something like FB is that it gives any prosecuting attorney a mountain of evidence on which to have you tried should you ever become *problematic* to those in power. It's a website for the unwashed, insignificant masses ruled by the upper classes. For those fighting injustice and oppression, who have the guts to speak up for what is right, it's just another liability.
You write so poorly that at first I thought you were trolling. But if you're going to argue against my post, you can at least refrain from contradicting yourself:
In point 4, you admonish me for not knowing the beliefs of the Chinese (which is irrelevant, because I was discussing the government position, not the citizens' beliefs...), but yet in point 2 you claim the US is not a Christian nation. Had you even checked Wikipedia, you'd know that, "According to a 2007 survey, 78.4% of adults identified themselves as Christian..." So according to your logic, China is not atheist because the majority are not atheist, but the US isn't Christian in spite of the fact that the majority are Christian. When you make such contradictory statements, you tar all atheists with the brush of cognitive dissonance. (And as a side point, I understand there are intellectually honest arguments in defense of atheism, but you aren't making them.)
In point 5, you simply ignore the fact that the Chinese treatment of Catholics is so bad the Vatican does not recognize the ecclesial authority of priests ordained by the Chinese government church. While "not Christian" does not equal "anti-Christian", the Chinese have a long track record of persecuting religious minorities, including Christians.
In point 3, you seem to imply there's something immoral about pornography - why would you mention the moral angle, otherwise? Yet in point 7, you claim there's nothing wrong with pornography. Okay, fine, I can accept that you're an atheist, and you believe there's nothing wrong with porn. But then explain to me why, as I originally asked, an atheist government is banning porn. It seems inconsistent with atheism to ban pornography, as your point 7 implies.
And lastly, with respect to point 6, I am part of a faith tradition which extends back about three to four thousand years. The spiritual issues surrounding the "lusts of the flesh" haven't changed during that time. From a spiritual and moral perspective, lust is a relatively well-understood phenomena. You may not care about the spiritual consequences of pornography - fine - but with respect to morality, it is opposed by almost every religion which takes a position on the issue. You may not agree with them. But that's irrelevant to my point: if you don't know *why* pornography is wrong, why would you ban it, except for ulterior motives?
Now I don't like debate which is pointless. You've contradicted yourself multiple times in the above post, and if you continue to do so, you'll probably find someone who dismisses your arguments on that basis alone. If you're going to contribute to the discussion, going to enlighten someone, checking your post for logical consistency is a must to avoid a rash of "GOSH - you contradicted yourself!" replies which neither refute the points you make, nor add nothing to the discussion.
As for trolling, I'd say you're doing good work. Your post is worded so well it's honestly difficult to determine if you're really a passionate, but stupid atheist, or merely trying to make both atheists and Christians alike appear ignorant.
I suppose someone else would justify responding to what they knew to be a troll, but I could honestly care less.
Growing up Christian, I understood well why a *Christian* nation would want to eliminate pornography. Banning pornography seemed to fit well with the sixth commandment. It didn't seem at all out of the ordinary that law reflected the derision of most of the voters.
But why is China blocking porn? They aren't a traditionally Christian country - they're decidedly atheist, and actively prosecute Christians. They haven't a clue why (philosophically, at least) sexual morality matters. It seems remarkably odd that a country decidedly anti-Christian is enforcing a ban on pornography, and one more restrictive than America (which is supposedly a Christian nation (or was)).
What possible reason could they have for doing this, aside from the outright malevolent oppression of their citizens. They don't even know *why* porn is wrong, yet they outlaw it.
Slashdot Mirror
For every "winning" design payout, there are 100 losers who worked for free in the *vain hope* of getting a payout. And what does the winner get? About 1/100th of the money he'd get freelancing.
Sure, it works well for small scales, but when design students leave college, they'll expect to make more than the pittance these sites are paying.
In short, it doesn't scale, and it isn't sustainable.
Binary for two year olds? YES, and NO.
Do they understand YES? Probably.
Do they understand NO? Not likely, though it's possible.
setting by underpaid flunkies who couldn't hack it in industry,
As someone with much experience in the industry, I find this rather amusing. Given the number of genuinely stupid people I see promoted to managerial positions in the industry, I'd say it's just the opposite: those who can't think creatively or logically *have* to find a job in industry, because it's the only place where lack of creativity and objectivity are an asset, rather than a liability. In academia, you could never get away with:
Industry does have challenges that academia does not, and is quite frequently years, even decades ahead of them, but there are so many opportunities for the lazy and incompetent that someone who can't hack it in industry won't be able to hack it in academia either.
What gave birth to that egg was not 100% chicken.. So Say I.
Yeah, but I bet still tasted like chicken.
Seriously. I see this all too often - the meme of the stupid idiot.
Honestly, it must be rather comforting for those with an inferiority complex to dismiss anyone with whom they disagree as a bumbling idiot. And studies like these only reinforce the notion that "other people" are wrong.
But these studies are hardly enlightening. It is well known that intelligence follows a bell-shaped curve, and no matter how many studies are done, there will *always* be people who won't change their opinion in light of contradictory evidence. But this is hardly indicative of the norm. In fact, the opposite is a much larger problem; the notion that AGW was faked has been repeated so often that people otherwise indifferent to the debate have now started to believe global warming was a hoax.
You can't have it both ways: either people change the opinion every time the "truth" changes and are subject to being fooled by anyone willing to tell a lie; or you have people who never change their opinion once formed, in spite of evidence to the contrary. The unfortunate reality is that because very few people can be experts in everything, the common man must form his opinions based on the statements made by others, and, quite frequently, those who articulate their opinions with the greatest eloquence are believed, as the common man lacks the expertise to form an opinion for himself.
What I believe is the more typical case is that people change their opinions slowly once formed. This is effectively a cerebral low-pass filter which eliminates noise from the equation. Thus, a person's opinion may not always reflect the immediate information they have about a topic, but rather, reflects the sum of the experiential knowledge. If the brain worked otherwise, people a block away would slam on their brakes the instant they saw a red light. By delaying the process of evaluation, the mind gathers more information than it would otherwise, and comes to a better conclusion.
There are many counterpoints, many hypotheses that would describe the behavior you described, but I'll leave just a few:
I would not call it a megaphone. It's more like a narcissist's microphone. I had never heard of some of these blogs before the climategate scandal broke, due probably to the fact that most of them are so batshit-crazy-insane that they couldn't convince a reasonable person the sky was blue.
I'm not sure why any reasonable scientist would consider these bloggers their peers. They aren't. The only people who pay attention to the anti-AGW bloggers are the press, and only when they need a story to sell. Most people, even those skeptical of AGW (such as myself), do not consider any of the arguments bloggers put forth to be worth the time spent reading them. Even though there are merits to skepticism of AGW, you'll seldom find a reasonable, intelligent, or informed discussion in the blogosphere. For that, you actually have to read what the scientists have published, and work with the data yourself.
I do follow a blog. However, it's only because the blogger - Bruce Schneier, is already a recognized authority on security. Yet some people think if they post something online that:
I don't have a blog. I know better; I know there are problems and solutions in software engineering, and I like to think myself rather accomplished in the field. Yet for all this, I recognize that posting my day to day reflections on my experiences with software engineering, while perhaps entertaining, would bring very little new or insightful to the field. If I do have something insightful to say, I'll write a book and publish it. Maybe online. But honestly, nobody's going to think me an authority on software engineering because I complain about the same problems that have plagued the industry for years. When I have a solution, I'll let you know. Until then, I'm not going to waste your time. Yet the aforementioned points seem lost on most bloggers.
No one cares to hear what I would post on a blog. No one cares about what you would post, either - unless, of course, you are already an authority in your field. A blog is much more often a sign of the author's personal narcissism than a medium for the intelligent exchange of ideas.
I, for one, hope the problem is very real. If so, my children will have no problem succeeding.
I'm surprised by my five year old - he learns things on his own, without being taught. Even though he has a limited vocabulary, he has, on several occasions, figured out from context clues what my wife and I were spelling. Even though he can't spell the word pizza, when she suggested we order a P-I-Z-Z-A, he jumps in immediately with, "Yeah, let's order pizza!" That which he doesn't know, he inately figures out. This is not something I or anyone else taught him. He just does it naturally.
He has lots of legos, but I'm the only one who builds the toy on the box. He takes it apart and builds what he wants. I built him an aircraft carrier out of legos; he modified it to include torpedo tubes. And now he's building functional dump trucks from them. As in, the back goes up and the gate opens to dump the cargo.
I think, if anything, creativity is something natural which is destroyed by our public education system. Should it survive that, there is no shortage of corporations with cultures for which creativity is seen as a liability, rather than an asset. The stupid person who works overtime on the boss's pet project is more highly esteemed than the creative genius who works banker's hours because he's figured out a better way of doing things.
The most pressing problem for our generation has been how do deal with the
management in Corporate America. Creativity means very little if your company is more concerned with: reducing cost rather than building revenues; the short term profit rather than long term viability; the politically correct instead of the provably correct. Seldom do companies fail because they lack creativity; most fail because their culture prohibits them from treating their customers and employees in a humane way. They literally *can't* do the smart thing, because it's not politically acceptable. So they don't. And we're buying Japaneses cars and Chinese electronics because of it.
I hold the (unpopular) view that Corporations have no moral obligations whatsoever.
Perhaps this isn't the way things should be. But it is the way things are, with few notable exceptions. When the public at large understands that a corporation *can't* possess a moral compass in the same way a human can, then we can have a productive debate on the value of capitalism, and the appropriate regulatory framework to prevent abuses from happening.
All too many people fail to realize that a corporation - especially a publicly traded one - is a profit-making machine, nothing more, nothing less.
Wasn't it Stalin who said, "The capitalists will sell us the rope we use to hang them."
Nice to know that Microsoft, after complaining for years that open source was insecure because anyone could see the code, is now providing same to Russia. Nothing quite like putting quarterly profits above national security.
What I wonder is, if your system is adopted, what is to stop a scalper from simply printing off a bunch of barcodes, selling them to the early birds, and letting the legitimate ticketholders duke it out with management because their barcode has already been scanned?
In such a scenario, only the real ticketholders lose.
I know its OT, but he could have spared the General his job. I don't consider the sensationalist, unsubstantiated style to be professional journalism:
The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs
Nope, nothing but the facts there.
I understand your point about nobody owning ideas, but consider that Native Americans took it one step further: they didn't understand how anyone could own *land*. Some didn't even have the concept of ownership of physical property.
Now imagine what it would be like if anyone could legally enter your house and take whatever they wanted, so long as you weren't "using it at the time".
The very notion of property ownership is itself a legal fiction. If ownership of physical items is good, why should it stop there? Why not extend it to something a person can *create*? Why must we limit ownership to only those things which exist in the material sense?
It's kind of odd that there are people who believe that if I buy a chunk of marble and carve a statue, that I can own that statue, and sell it for a profit, but to do the same thing electronically means I'm somehow obligated to give my work to the world for free. It seems that in their minds I'm only entitled to make a living if the product of my work is a physical object. Oddly, those who do produce physical objects for a living (i.e. factory workers, etc...) also find themselves hard pressed to make a living.
And lets make the distinction between ideas and works. Copyright protects works, not ideas. That is, merely having an idea is not enough, you must tranform it into something which can be represented in the physical world, i.e. notes on a page, bits on a platter, etc...
I see the analogy with physical objects repeated often, but it's a bad analogy. Every physical object owned by someone is owned because it has some use to the owner, not because it takes up physical space and cannot be trivially reproduced. Likewise, even intangible assets - such as software - have some use to the owner. Consequently, they have value, and if we thought of things in terms of their value, instead of their actual status as physical property, it would be easier to understand why copyright exists. It's not a matter of physical property, but of the value of the work one creates which entitles the worker to remuneration for their efforts. Copyright enables markets for intellectual property to exist, much the same way laws against theft allow markets for physical objects to exist. In the same way that removing a physical object from a shop deprives the shopkeeper of the profit made, so does copying deprive the author of their living. (Think about that for a moment: if one is caught shoplifting, they must pay the shopkeeper the restitution for the sale price, not the price the shopkeeper paid for the item. That is, profit is an implicit part of the value of an item. Why would copyright be any different?)
Now this isn't to say that there have been abuses - just as with physical property, the owners of intellectual property can abuse their position in particularly egregious ways. But copyright is unfortunately the best system available at the current time, and unfortunately, for all the brainpower on ./, no one has come up with a better system which rewards creators in proportion to the value of their work, while at the same time allowing unlimited copying.
The problem every politician faces is that without some mind-gripping fear, for which the politician has *The Answer*, it is hard to unseat an incumbent. Cyber warfare is the New Fear.
Without the prospect of CYBER WARFARE, the critical infrastructure on which our political process takes place can remain controlled by private parties, some of whom are legitimately indifferent to the political process, even to the point where they are non-partisan, so long as the politician elect can be bought. This is clearly a problem for political parties, especially those in power, who have a vested interest in controlling political debate. Without control over the public square - that is, the means by which public debate happens - they have no reasonable assurance of controlling the debate itself. You see, there are *certain things* about which you aren't supposed to talk. The political debate has to be controlled in such a manner to keep people thinking about those ethereal fears which allow politicians to get elected.
And the problem with the Internet is that it can't be controlled by the party elect. Free debate happens - on any subject, mind you! And this is a real problem, especially if you need to control the thoughts of your subjects, er - citizens. Enter CYBER WARFARE: a threat, that if real, can be used as justification for grabbing "emergency" control of our public square should the natives become restless. Surely no one would argue against NATIONAL SECURITY. Hence, the effort to conflate the internet with being vital to national security, and to conflate cyber warfare with a legitimate threat to the national security of this nation. Once this lie is believed by the public at large, any *problematic* groups developing a political following can be neutralized in the name of protecting the nation.
This is not new, folks. There were power grabs under the notion of national security long before the Internet became the dominant means of public debate. During the civil rights era, the police broke up political protests and gatherings in the name of "law and order". This is no different - an attempt by the incumbents to retain their control over the political process. Every red-blooded American should reject this mindless fear-mongering, and those who mention "cyber warfare" should be upbraided as ignorant fools, preferably in as public a manner as possible, to "encourage the others".
Now this is not to say that there are real threats with vital systems connected to the internet, but this is a matter of engineering standards and ethics, not of actual national security. The distinction is important.
There are (or were) several well publicized incidents where cryptographic keys were discovered because the programmer left them on the stack. Putting them in the executable code sections would have mitigated this risk.
Java made DEP pretty much irrelevant to everyone except those few programmers trying to write secure code where protecting the algorithm itself is an important trade secret. While no algorithm executing on your machine is theoretically impossible to discover, DEP makes it easier for the reverse engineer. In the 3 to 6 month development timeframe for most consumer electronics, this can be a significant liability.
While DEP does prevent stack overflow types of attacks, it also complicates writing high security software. The inability to execute data means:
DEP actually makes attacks against cryptographic software *easier* to implement. And the problem it addresses - mainly the stack overflow - is such a well-known vulnerability that only the most negligent of programmers are ignorant of it, and most companies use tools to detect and prevent these sorts of defects. (Granted, Microsoft is a glaring exception, but they are hardly considered a secure software vendor). Finally, DEP is a historical accident - it was so easily implemented in hardware that it was adopted by UNIX systems long before stack-checking utilities and stack canaries had become commonplace. It offers little, if any, more security than a security-conscious developer using modern stack-overflow checking tools would accomplish.
My birthday is today, and it's a Tuesday.
What are the odds this post will be modded up?
You might want to consider this very thing was done with the likes of MPEGII-TS, ISDB-T, DVB-H etc... more than 5 years ago. You don't need to invent a new standard, but merely use the ones already in existence. And these standards are already open, implemented, and well understood.
Nobody wants a BBC-only internet tv.
The SD specification is worse than being undocumented: it's proprietary, and disclosed only under NDA. If the SD foundation ever goes bankrupt or gets bought by ${EVIL COMPANY}, the likelihood of obtaining a copy is rather small.
The Religious Right opposes it because:
Whether Congress gave the President the authority to enact a moratorium is beside the point. Yes, there's a legal issue there wrt to executive power, but from BP's perspective, it doesn't matter.
The President is in charge of Customs Enforcement. The President determines who represents a "security threat" to the nation. In the first case, he could make life very difficult for companies trying to get oil from the drill sites to the refineries. With respect to the second, if he determined that oil drilling constituted a serious threat to the security of the United States, he is authorized to use military force to prevent it from happening. And since most of these are in international waters, there is little that BP or any other company could do. It's not as if the British Navy will start duking it out with the US over drilling sites. Especially considering the vulnerability of oil platforms to things like naval guns and smart bombs.
We've known for a long time that humans can affect not only weather, but climate. Since the 60's, we've known that clouds seeded with silver nitrate will produce precipitation. IIRC, the same was demonstrated with chips of solid carbon dioxide. However, that said -
We still do not have enough evidence to prove that burning fossil fuels will produce global warming. Now before I continue, let me just get this out of the way: there is a difference between someone who believes global warming *can't* be true in the religious sense, and someone who recognizes that climate is a difficult subject for which we just don't have the answers now. There will always be anti-AGW folks around regardless of where the science goes and what happens to the climate. That said, the AGW theories have these difficulties:
At this point, we simply don't have the scientific certainty to claim AGW is happening, and that it will be catastrophic. Even were we to accept the AGW theories at face value, they are so filled with qualifying factors that we could not conclude that we are in imminent danger. We could say that change is going to come, but we can't quantify the impact. Given the timescales on which climate changes, it would hardly be an unmitigated disaster on a global level. Even if the direst of predictions proved true, we'd have more than ample time to adapt. (Keep in mind the US sustained not one, but two wars in the Middle East, at the cost of trillions of dollars. Imagine what the same could do to relocate US cities inland, if necessary.)
The simple fact of the matter is, though, that we're well past peak oil, and AGW or not, we're going to stop burning it someday. So it only makes sense to buy into renewable energy technologies while they're cheap than wait for the oil to run out and be put over a barrel (no pun intended) by the solar power companies. If you want people to stop burning fossil fuels, you just have to give them a cheaper alternative. You don't have to lie to them about global warming.
Face Book Incorporated
The whole problem I have with sites like Facebook isn't that they exist, but that people treat them as if a conversation on FB is no different than one in person. There are a lot of differences:
I probably post more than I should on FB, but not nearly as much as some of my colleagues. The real problem with something like FB is that it gives any prosecuting attorney a mountain of evidence on which to have you tried should you ever become *problematic* to those in power. It's a website for the unwashed, insignificant masses ruled by the upper classes. For those fighting injustice and oppression, who have the guts to speak up for what is right, it's just another liability.
You write so poorly that at first I thought you were trolling. But if you're going to argue against my post, you can at least refrain from contradicting yourself:
Now I don't like debate which is pointless. You've contradicted yourself multiple times in the above post, and if you continue to do so, you'll probably find someone who dismisses your arguments on that basis alone. If you're going to contribute to the discussion, going to enlighten someone, checking your post for logical consistency is a must to avoid a rash of "GOSH - you contradicted yourself!" replies which neither refute the points you make, nor add nothing to the discussion.
As for trolling, I'd say you're doing good work. Your post is worded so well it's honestly difficult to determine if you're really a passionate, but stupid atheist, or merely trying to make both atheists and Christians alike appear ignorant.
I suppose someone else would justify responding to what they knew to be a troll, but I could honestly care less.
Growing up Christian, I understood well why a *Christian* nation would want to eliminate pornography. Banning pornography seemed to fit well with the sixth commandment. It didn't seem at all out of the ordinary that law reflected the derision of most of the voters.
But why is China blocking porn? They aren't a traditionally Christian country - they're decidedly atheist, and actively prosecute Christians. They haven't a clue why (philosophically, at least) sexual morality matters. It seems remarkably odd that a country decidedly anti-Christian is enforcing a ban on pornography, and one more restrictive than America (which is supposedly a Christian nation (or was)).
What possible reason could they have for doing this, aside from the outright malevolent oppression of their citizens. They don't even know *why* porn is wrong, yet they outlaw it.