It reminds me of one of the few solid things ever said by Michel Foucault: Centers of power are productive of truths. Control isn't about threatening punishment; it's about labeling things as right and wrong, natural and unnatural, holy and unholy, etc. Take the world, divide it up, stick self-serving and evaluative labels on everything, and make sure the masses think that your map of reality is logical, natural, and so on.
What really freaks me out is this: not only do corporations just buy out politicians, but corporate lackeys create the very knowledge base upon which politicians rely to understand issues and make decisions for many different areas of our society.
I can never find anyone who appreciates what awesome power that implies, but maybe here, through this one issue, someone else might appreciate it.
The struggle against corporations may be an important part of the defense of humanity, but some would argue that seemingly innocuous things are often just small, innocuous things, and that to go ape shit about them and blow them out of proportion is characteristic of small minds and spirits.
Some would also argue that getting hung up on the small things and seeing battles to be won therein is a good way to ensure that people never take on any large and not so seemingly innocuous issues, that they self indulgently imagine themselves to be revolutionaries fighting the good fight and propagating righteous and enlightened rhetoric.
And even if these people are totally wrong, it still doesn't excuse the ideologically loaded "classist sensibilities" bullshit. But I'm sure the original poser, err poster, feels good about his awesomeness.
Seriously people, I'm all for civil liberties, but theres nothing wrong with have a solid method of making sure people are who they say they are and verifying they are allowed to get the identification they are allowed to get.
I'm with you on this one. While I freak out at genuine attacks on my liberties, like unregulated credit agencies gathering my info and selling it to the government, which can't legally collect such info itself, I've been waiting for a secure and accurate identification system for some time.
Face it, you already need to provide a SSN and a birth certificate to register with the DMV (at least in California). All this does it check that you aren't committing perjury. You already have to show your state i.d. to the airport people, all this does is make sure it's a real i.d. There's nothing new here, except that what we already do has to be legit.
Might help purge some DMV corruption too. It's hard to sell fake I.D's out of your local office, when the Feds is checking applications against it's databases.
I also find the idea that databases will be cross-checked less terrifying than just sensible. How much govt stupidity is caused by one entity not communicating with another?
Everything you say is very true, although I do cut him a break for saying up front that it was a rant. As long as you admit that, you free yourself from the strictest requirements of argumentation.
Personally I get hung up on the conflict between asserting superior education on the one hand, and then going on about fighting skills on the other. But he's not me, and I don't know what demons he has to exorcise (and I'm not among those criticized )),so more power to him.
We're all entitled to vent now and again, I suppose.
What I really want to know is why TechCrunch did a piece on this.
To me, and this is probably the engineer in me speaking, the arbitrary designation of the end of the year as a time to make life adjustments is very odd. If there is a problem in your life or something that needs changing, it seems like you should work to correct that whenever you discover it. The big push for resolutions around new years seems counterproductive in that many people may wait to make changes until "the new year".
Well, it's not entirely arbitrary or useless. The holiday season provides more free time to think about the things one needs to do. Setting an end-of-holiday start date also takes some of the guilt out of holiday gluttony. Since our culture represents a change of year as significant, even if nothing much actually changes, it's easy to align planned change of oneself with it (why not file away a bad habit or two with the records of paid invoices for 2007?). It's also easy to track how long you've been sticking to your resolutions and seems somehow more significant, when you can call "this year" the year that you started doing things differently. It feels much more significant than telling yourself that you've been jogging since November 22. As far as delaying the onset, well, it can be useful to have a ramp up period. Besides, few people seriously conceive and postpone such resolutions in, say, July. Delaying something by one or two months won't make much of a difference, and you may even get an early start, so that when you officially begin, you start with an advantage.
Psychological problems just aren't engineering problems. You've got to motivate yourself, trick your yourself, bullshit yourself, whatever, to get the job done. Methods and solutions are not terribly clear, constants are few. You probably approach them as engineering problems for some of those very reasons. That approach gives you leverage, motivation, a conceptual framework, and confidence that you will get results.
I don't make New Year's Resolutions myself in any serious way, but I get why people do. I also try to separate the overemphasis junk t.v. places on the custom from the reality.
Anyway, the main point is leverage. One can start (and fail) something at any time, and the extent to which that intention produces serious discipline will vary greatly, as will the opportunities for creating some peer pressure to keep you on your toes. When you make official New Year's resolutions, you can exploit the custom to make things easier.
Remember, "eat less, exercise more" is, for example, a simple algorithm for losing weight, but doing those things isn't simple, like pressing a button. There are psychological problems to solve along the way. The bitch is, we can't see most of our programming.
You're obviously not in the right target demographics for them.
Now if you were gay or a chick or a teenager trying to be hip, that would be a different story.
I once went into one wearing my grubby leathers because I rode the bike that day, and I felt a little out of place too. Not that I'd buy a Mac or iPod anyway... Trying to be hip? Oh, there's no affectation in your "grubby leathers" self-representation, no. Yes, you're just so "real" and ungay.
No way, its a case of Congress spewing more feel-good crap. They target a highly-visible, but marginal power consumption source and everyone feels like they're doing something. Very true, as is the thing you write below about the Energy Bill supporting questionable, pork barrel projects.
The key thing to note, I think, is that Congress only sets meaningful standards for industries that don't own the government. If you try to do something more sensible, like have SUVs properly classified as trucks instead of cars, it won't go through. If you try to do anything with the energy or telecom companies, save giving them even more tax breaks, it won't go through. But light bulbs? They represent either a small division of a huge corporation, like GE, or smaller companies that haven't invested in their own senators or representatives.
And what if they've been recording those transmissions and sharing them with their friends - with only implied and not written consent? What if they found the musical recordings on Voyager and have been sharing those files?
I can see a whole fleet of RIAA Battle Cruisers in Earth's future. The brave heroes of legal departments worldwide launching themselves into space to protect our precious intellectual property.
Can someone enlighten me as to why the parent is flamebait? Idiotic, yes; flamebait, not so much.
Well, I imagine that the alternative, viz. accepting that people are that stupid and that prone to idiotic, ideologically blind, knee-jerk posts, is just too demoralizing to accept. So, people assume that the fool knows better and is just trying to be provocative.
Does this mean millions of lovesick teens will be arrested for making mix CDs for their girlfriends? "Baby, this music expresses how I feel. If you fell like I do, please write to me during the next ten years, while I'm in Music Pirate Prison (TM)."
Correction: Some non-native speakers of English are taught British English, not all. Moreover, British English has not been the standard worldwide for many years, so outside of Commonwealth countries and Europe, people do not, as a rule, gravitate towards British English.
And no, all this has nothing to do with which dialectic is better. It's just sociolinguistics. American English is the premier language of commerce and political power. It's also the medium of a huge amount of popular culture and marketing. Sooner or later, the prestige will shift elsewhere, just as it started to shift away from Britain after WW2. Sic transit gloria mundi.
We should also keep in mind that for some language groups, English s-plurals are particularly challenging, so the "maths" issue gets obscured by its similarity to a huge amount of genuine errors.
We'll see more women in game leadership positions. Games today are about artwork, social dynamics, and world design. The underlying technology isn't the limiting factor any more.
Ten years ago, consumer-grade graphics hardware was weak, frame rates were slow, people were struggling to get physics engines to work at all, network gaming was flakey, and attempts to build big worlds were choking on scaling problems. Now, that stuff just works.
The implications being that women are naturally better and more interested in art and social dynamics, while men are the people to deal with the real engineering?
You do realize that's what you just said, don't you? That men busted through all those tough engineering problems, and now the women can come in and improve the art and interpersonal experience.
Doesn't that sort of validate all the griping about women being stereotyped in engineering?
I'm going to assume that you're a cool person who doesn't necessarily believe all that, but it helps one see the sort of conceptual baggage we're carrying around.
Well, the problem is that we really don't have much of a definition of "intelligence." All we really have is general notion of "like us" mentally along with a few little traits that we figure go along with it. Why would anything not of this earth necessarily be like us at all? Does "intelligence" exist as a category beyond our own imaginations? Most people seem to assume that we've labeled some pre-existing category, but I'm not convinced.
For now at least, we're totally trapped within our own conceptual limitations. All we really know, when we reflect deeply, is that there are certain enabling conditions to our consciousness, and that we assume (for the sake of sanity?)that they are objective realities outside ourselves.
People like to go on about how ego-centric it is to think that we are all there is in the universe, but they conceptualize alterity in totally human terms.
It all reminds me of religious people who can't accept the idea of a universe without meaning, as if human meaningfulness were some objective idea and not a peculiar human delusion.
I think the simplest rule to cover people for whom ethics are unimportant is ensure that if a person abuses the information in one database or even one kind of database, they are barred from ever accessing it again. That can be a career killer.
The personal data I deal with isn't a big deal, just contact info, salary details, stuff like that for tens of thousands of people, but even that stuff I guard like a mint. It's personal data after all, and I fell my strength of character is at least as important as my skills.
Problem is, from what I have seen, the kinds of people hired to manage big financial databases and the like tend to include droves of people who hop from job to job. Big financial institutions tend to get what they pay for, but unfortunately the hidden cost of their budget crunching tends to be paid by consumers.
And yes, I know finance companies also employ some kick ass people (like the NYC Perl hackers), but several sections of their operations include what are essentially bargain basement oracle tweakers and nomadic qa consultants and the such.
As to the open API issue, all I can say is that Six Apart does have two specific Open API development positions right now. While I don't work directly for Six Apart anymore, I am involved in finding people for those positions, so I can't really say anything more than that, as far as I know.
Comments are all over the place, but then so is the summary. It would have been better to ask something like "why do games have zones that have to load?" Sometimes, the loading phenomenon is a matter of moving up a level in a game, and sometimes cut scenes are useful for a storyline or some such thing, but the actual issue is why we have wait and drum our fingers, when we want to keeping pwning orcs or zombies or whatever, and are merely moving between areas.
If you are talking about genuine level transitions, like the acts in Diablo 2, it really isn't an issue - it's a part of the game that makes sense and a necessity technically. In other circumstances, you might eat your mouse in frustration, because you can run from OG to Tanaris without loading, but you can't go from Freeport to Neriak without loading twice, which is just annoying.
So...I'd say the relevant comments below are the ones that discuss memory issues.
Yes, that's what "alien" means in the summary, but if you are a critical reader, you can see the rhetorical trick at the beginning, where extraterrestrial life and terrestrial "alien" life are brought into close contact conceptually. You don't have to say something explicitly to form connections in peoples' minds between two ideas like that and take the resulting umph to the hype bank.
What's the logic exactly? Scientists are increasingly sure that there must be life "out there." This life must be very different from what we know, or "alien." Let's start by looking for such different or "alien" life on earth. It doesn't add up. Just rhetorical bull. (Particularly when you consider that space aliens are most likely to be different, because they developed someplace different from earth.)
Actually, as long as we're talking about the FBI and bogus science, what bothers me more is that the FBI routinely uses Lie Detectors for "loyalty tests." They've been told time and again, even by the creator of the system they use, that they are not suited to such uses, but they still do it.
I'm fairly certain other federal law and intelligence agencies use them in the same way, but since I only know the details of the FBI's use, I won't generalize.
I'm glad someone made a note of this. Here's the crux of the matter. You see how he and many others love contrasting "reality" with the lay person's misconception thereof? Unfortunately, far too many people who have dedicated their lives to certain subjects don't understand that, when it comes to non-technical matters, they are themselves "lay people." You see so many absurd, ignorant, overly simplistic, and methodologically juvenile theories about society, history, religion, natural language, etc. from certain quarters of the professional world. Not that there are not plenty of sensible people, but sensible people aren't usually so in love with their own ideas that others are make aware of them regularly.
No one is saying that Free Speech as a guaranteed right is being infringed. Free Speech is also a valued idea and practice in our society. No private entity must allow freedom of expression, but they can certainly come under criticism for not doing so, particularly when they market themselves as venues for self-expression.
Like many people with a narrow view of the world, you don't seem to get that the Constitution is a small document that has some things to say on some large issues antecedent to and vaster than the document itself. It only circumscribes the meaning of ideas like free speech or privacy or whatnot, when in a court. These ideas and the discourse upon them have a much wider existence.
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of one of the few solid things ever said by Michel Foucault: Centers of power are productive of truths. Control isn't about threatening punishment; it's about labeling things as right and wrong, natural and unnatural, holy and unholy, etc. Take the world, divide it up, stick self-serving and evaluative labels on everything, and make sure the masses think that your map of reality is logical, natural, and so on.
What really freaks me out is this: not only do corporations just buy out politicians, but corporate lackeys create the very knowledge base upon which politicians rely to understand issues and make decisions for many different areas of our society.
I can never find anyone who appreciates what awesome power that implies, but maybe here, through this one issue, someone else might appreciate it.
I can imagine that some seriously expanded programming may be needed, if malls in certain areas are staffed by robots.
Sir, you appear to be defecating in public, may I direct you to a restroom?
Could go a long way towards making certain major cities less...err...aesthetically unpleasing.
The struggle against corporations may be an important part of the defense of humanity, but some would argue that seemingly innocuous things are often just small, innocuous things, and that to go ape shit about them and blow them out of proportion is characteristic of small minds and spirits.
Some would also argue that getting hung up on the small things and seeing battles to be won therein is a good way to ensure that people never take on any large and not so seemingly innocuous issues, that they self indulgently imagine themselves to be revolutionaries fighting the good fight and propagating righteous and enlightened rhetoric.
And even if these people are totally wrong, it still doesn't excuse the ideologically loaded "classist sensibilities" bullshit. But I'm sure the original poser, err poster, feels good about his awesomeness.
I'm with you on this one. While I freak out at genuine attacks on my liberties, like unregulated credit agencies gathering my info and selling it to the government, which can't legally collect such info itself, I've been waiting for a secure and accurate identification system for some time.
Face it, you already need to provide a SSN and a birth certificate to register with the DMV (at least in California). All this does it check that you aren't committing perjury. You already have to show your state i.d. to the airport people, all this does is make sure it's a real i.d. There's nothing new here, except that what we already do has to be legit.
Might help purge some DMV corruption too. It's hard to sell fake I.D's out of your local office, when the Feds is checking applications against it's databases.
I also find the idea that databases will be cross-checked less terrifying than just sensible. How much govt stupidity is caused by one entity not communicating with another?
Everything you say is very true, although I do cut him a break for saying up front that it was a rant. As long as you admit that, you free yourself from the strictest requirements of argumentation.
Personally I get hung up on the conflict between asserting superior education on the one hand, and then going on about fighting skills on the other. But he's not me, and I don't know what demons he has to exorcise (and I'm not among those criticized )),so more power to him.
We're all entitled to vent now and again, I suppose.
What I really want to know is why TechCrunch did a piece on this.
Well, it's not entirely arbitrary or useless. The holiday season provides more free time to think about the things one needs to do. Setting an end-of-holiday start date also takes some of the guilt out of holiday gluttony. Since our culture represents a change of year as significant, even if nothing much actually changes, it's easy to align planned change of oneself with it (why not file away a bad habit or two with the records of paid invoices for 2007?). It's also easy to track how long you've been sticking to your resolutions and seems somehow more significant, when you can call "this year" the year that you started doing things differently. It feels much more significant than telling yourself that you've been jogging since November 22. As far as delaying the onset, well, it can be useful to have a ramp up period. Besides, few people seriously conceive and postpone such resolutions in, say, July. Delaying something by one or two months won't make much of a difference, and you may even get an early start, so that when you officially begin, you start with an advantage.
Psychological problems just aren't engineering problems. You've got to motivate yourself, trick your yourself, bullshit yourself, whatever, to get the job done. Methods and solutions are not terribly clear, constants are few. You probably approach them as engineering problems for some of those very reasons. That approach gives you leverage, motivation, a conceptual framework, and confidence that you will get results.
I don't make New Year's Resolutions myself in any serious way, but I get why people do. I also try to separate the overemphasis junk t.v. places on the custom from the reality.
Anyway, the main point is leverage. One can start (and fail) something at any time, and the extent to which that intention produces serious discipline will vary greatly, as will the opportunities for creating some peer pressure to keep you on your toes. When you make official New Year's resolutions, you can exploit the custom to make things easier.
Remember, "eat less, exercise more" is, for example, a simple algorithm for losing weight, but doing those things isn't simple, like pressing a button. There are psychological problems to solve along the way. The bitch is, we can't see most of our programming.
Enough of my babble.
And what if they've been recording those transmissions and sharing them with their friends - with only implied and not written consent? What if they found the musical recordings on Voyager and have been sharing those files?
I can see a whole fleet of RIAA Battle Cruisers in Earth's future. The brave heroes of legal departments worldwide launching themselves into space to protect our precious intellectual property.
Well, I imagine that the alternative, viz. accepting that people are that stupid and that prone to idiotic, ideologically blind, knee-jerk posts, is just too demoralizing to accept. So, people assume that the fool knows better and is just trying to be provocative.
Does this mean millions of lovesick teens will be arrested for making mix CDs for their girlfriends? "Baby, this music expresses how I feel. If you fell like I do, please write to me during the next ten years, while I'm in Music Pirate Prison (TM)."
Correction: Some non-native speakers of English are taught British English, not all. Moreover, British English has not been the standard worldwide for many years, so outside of Commonwealth countries and Europe, people do not, as a rule, gravitate towards British English.
And no, all this has nothing to do with which dialectic is better. It's just sociolinguistics. American English is the premier language of commerce and political power. It's also the medium of a huge amount of popular culture and marketing. Sooner or later, the prestige will shift elsewhere, just as it started to shift away from Britain after WW2. Sic transit gloria mundi.
We should also keep in mind that for some language groups, English s-plurals are particularly challenging, so the "maths" issue gets obscured by its similarity to a huge amount of genuine errors.
The implications being that women are naturally better and more interested in art and social dynamics, while men are the people to deal with the real engineering?
You do realize that's what you just said, don't you? That men busted through all those tough engineering problems, and now the women can come in and improve the art and interpersonal experience.
Doesn't that sort of validate all the griping about women being stereotyped in engineering?
I'm going to assume that you're a cool person who doesn't necessarily believe all that, but it helps one see the sort of conceptual baggage we're carrying around.
Well, the problem is that we really don't have much of a definition of "intelligence." All we really have is general notion of "like us" mentally along with a few little traits that we figure go along with it. Why would anything not of this earth necessarily be like us at all? Does "intelligence" exist as a category beyond our own imaginations? Most people seem to assume that we've labeled some pre-existing category, but I'm not convinced. For now at least, we're totally trapped within our own conceptual limitations. All we really know, when we reflect deeply, is that there are certain enabling conditions to our consciousness, and that we assume (for the sake of sanity?)that they are objective realities outside ourselves. People like to go on about how ego-centric it is to think that we are all there is in the universe, but they conceptualize alterity in totally human terms. It all reminds me of religious people who can't accept the idea of a universe without meaning, as if human meaningfulness were some objective idea and not a peculiar human delusion.
I think the simplest rule to cover people for whom ethics are unimportant is ensure that if a person abuses the information in one database or even one kind of database, they are barred from ever accessing it again. That can be a career killer. The personal data I deal with isn't a big deal, just contact info, salary details, stuff like that for tens of thousands of people, but even that stuff I guard like a mint. It's personal data after all, and I fell my strength of character is at least as important as my skills. Problem is, from what I have seen, the kinds of people hired to manage big financial databases and the like tend to include droves of people who hop from job to job. Big financial institutions tend to get what they pay for, but unfortunately the hidden cost of their budget crunching tends to be paid by consumers. And yes, I know finance companies also employ some kick ass people (like the NYC Perl hackers), but several sections of their operations include what are essentially bargain basement oracle tweakers and nomadic qa consultants and the such.
As to the open API issue, all I can say is that Six Apart does have two specific Open API development positions right now. While I don't work directly for Six Apart anymore, I am involved in finding people for those positions, so I can't really say anything more than that, as far as I know.
Comments are all over the place, but then so is the summary. It would have been better to ask something like "why do games have zones that have to load?" Sometimes, the loading phenomenon is a matter of moving up a level in a game, and sometimes cut scenes are useful for a storyline or some such thing, but the actual issue is why we have wait and drum our fingers, when we want to keeping pwning orcs or zombies or whatever, and are merely moving between areas. If you are talking about genuine level transitions, like the acts in Diablo 2, it really isn't an issue - it's a part of the game that makes sense and a necessity technically. In other circumstances, you might eat your mouse in frustration, because you can run from OG to Tanaris without loading, but you can't go from Freeport to Neriak without loading twice, which is just annoying. So...I'd say the relevant comments below are the ones that discuss memory issues.
Yes, that's what "alien" means in the summary, but if you are a critical reader, you can see the rhetorical trick at the beginning, where extraterrestrial life and terrestrial "alien" life are brought into close contact conceptually. You don't have to say something explicitly to form connections in peoples' minds between two ideas like that and take the resulting umph to the hype bank. What's the logic exactly? Scientists are increasingly sure that there must be life "out there." This life must be very different from what we know, or "alien." Let's start by looking for such different or "alien" life on earth. It doesn't add up. Just rhetorical bull. (Particularly when you consider that space aliens are most likely to be different, because they developed someplace different from earth.)
Actually, as long as we're talking about the FBI and bogus science, what bothers me more is that the FBI routinely uses Lie Detectors for "loyalty tests." They've been told time and again, even by the creator of the system they use, that they are not suited to such uses, but they still do it. I'm fairly certain other federal law and intelligence agencies use them in the same way, but since I only know the details of the FBI's use, I won't generalize.
I'm glad someone made a note of this. Here's the crux of the matter. You see how he and many others love contrasting "reality" with the lay person's misconception thereof? Unfortunately, far too many people who have dedicated their lives to certain subjects don't understand that, when it comes to non-technical matters, they are themselves "lay people." You see so many absurd, ignorant, overly simplistic, and methodologically juvenile theories about society, history, religion, natural language, etc. from certain quarters of the professional world. Not that there are not plenty of sensible people, but sensible people aren't usually so in love with their own ideas that others are make aware of them regularly.
No one is saying that Free Speech as a guaranteed right is being infringed. Free Speech is also a valued idea and practice in our society. No private entity must allow freedom of expression, but they can certainly come under criticism for not doing so, particularly when they market themselves as venues for self-expression. Like many people with a narrow view of the world, you don't seem to get that the Constitution is a small document that has some things to say on some large issues antecedent to and vaster than the document itself. It only circumscribes the meaning of ideas like free speech or privacy or whatnot, when in a court. These ideas and the discourse upon them have a much wider existence.