There used to be a site: shouldexist.org, there were plenty of ideas there - some obvious, some not so obvious. I submitted quite a few.
Personally I don't think people who come up with brilliant ideas should automatically be rewarded a monopoly over them - it just doesn't scale. If we ever get to trillions of human beings such monopolies won't scale gracefully.
Trademarks remain a good idea, perhaps if we scale to star systems a trademark might have to only be "system wide", maybe you'd need enough people to vote that a particular trademark can be considered "universal" - not enough people interested too bad.
1) Dubai is not in India. 2) Seems like lots of people in the USA "can barely understand english and manage to speak only partial sentences". Just a look at Slashdot and you'll find that many have literacy problems and lack basic math skills (see "Slashdot Editor" for examples). Remember many of these people a) can barely figure out how to vote properly, b) voted for GW Bush twice. Yahoo, Slashdot etc wouldn't have that many users if the captchas used were too hard. 3) When I last checked your demo has forty spelt incorrectly as fourty. Tsk tsk.
"it actually makes sense to maximize one's own pleasure in this short life, with total disregard for others' pleasure."
Even if nothing matters outside of your own pleasure/happiness, it's known and scientifically proven that a lot of people feel happy when they make other people happy. Such is the lot of the nonsociopaths in this world...
As for the sociopaths, assuming 1,2,3,4 and if nothing else matters outside of their own happiness, why not just be the equivalent of a wirehead and get "maximum happiness" instead of wasting time trying to do stuff?
Doing stuff makes you happy? Why? A sense of achievement? Satisfaction? So what is your goal really? Raw pleasure or something else?
So if you want a sense of achievement why not train yourself to be happy in making others happy? It should be about as meaningful/worthy a life goal as making 1 billion dollars to a sociopath.
Hey if you want the easy route just earn some money and then drug yourself silly, or stick wires in your head to stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain. You don't really need that much money to do that.
Or maybe combine everything and start selling "wirehead" devices. Make Happiness Fast, "how to enhance your/her pleasure"... and sell them with spam.
Then you can be an evil spammer sociopath that's trying to make everyone happy... How's that for leaving a unique mark in history!
After all mass murder/genocide has already been done to death.;)
Well I spend about 150 yen on lunch every day (colleagues tend to spend less tho). But I'm not in Tokyo or even Japan. So you are relatively rich already;).
If I were running a country and this kid did what he did, I'd arrest him, extract as much "tax/fines" from him (without causing the cow to kick...), and then offer him a conditional working permit to keep doing whatever it is he is doing, as long as it is still legal (for a normal resident), and he pays the necessary taxes. It'll be great if he sells the stuff to people overseas. After X years if he looks like he's significantly above the average citizen (good behaviour, contributes to society, pays taxes etc), offer him citizenship.
BTW in the linked article I see no mention of "deported", Slashdot is maintaining some standards I guess;).
Anyway you can turn on the preview feature for tinyurl - so it displays the url first without taking you straight to it. I recommend that.
But the other url shortening services may not have such a feature.
Anyway, if you do the attack mentioned in the article it might be a good idea to use tinyurl or other similar sites, so that it is google and friends that expand the resulting url, so it is harder for the victim to figure out who hosted the original shortened url - since they only have to expanded url to work with. Unless perhaps google sends the url of the referring page?
I'm not sure if Google will display/store the resulting url from a 302 redirect or it will display/store the original url which could look very harmless and changed to be harmless AFTER the attack has occurred.
e.g.
The whenever something tries to access http://attackers.website/myphotos/ They get a list of thumbnails, one which loads: http://intermediate.website/images/thumbnail.gif Which 302 redirects to http://victims.website/buggycgi?param=payload&boom
But the second time round everyone just gets a thumbnail pic.
So it will be hard to prove who was the culprit.
BTW there are plenty of other things you can do with url shortening services. Many of these allow you to add stuff to the end of the urls which will be readded after the url is expanded!
For example: http://tinyurl.com/8hw would take you to slashdot and
http://tinyurl.com/8hw/my/logout would log you out from slashdot.
You can use this feature for sites that require you to submit urls that end with a jpg or gif - e.g. avatar image or something like that.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out more stuff they can do with such things...;)
So far everyone seems to be focusing on "input" and forgetting about "output", or even mixing the two.
Anyway, my suggestion has always been to do something like the following:
Inputs to your program ||| Corresponding Input filters ||| Your program ||| Corresponding Output filters ||| Outputs from your program ||| Stuff receiving the outputs
You have a different "input filter" for each class of input so that your program can handle those inputs correctly.
Then you have a different output filter (e.g. SQL bind vars, HTML, XML) so that the stuff receiving your outputs (browser, database, viewer, etc) will handle them correctly.
NEVER do stuff like magic quotes (PHP is one of the worst and most braindead language in popular use) - mixing input and output filtering is so wrong it isn't funny (there are so many other things PHP does wrong that it's almost criminal).
Depending on the circumstances your program could output a single quote ' differently e.g. %27 for a cgi parameter, '' for Oracle data and \' for MySQL data (BTW MySQL is the PHP of databases). So it should be obvious that "one size fits all" doesn't work.
By filtering I mean quoting/encoding sanity checking etc - whatever it takes to get the data in a suitable form (with hopefully minimal data loss/corruption).
Sure, but the proposed explanation for sleep as "so that mammals would be still" is still ridiculous. Why not be still and fairly alert?
It is obvious that sleep is important enough for birds, dolphins etc to do it, and even workaround the requirement by having different parts of their brains take turns to sleep.
Also look up on sleep and migratory birds. Many don't sleep while flying at night, researchers have found that some seem to take micro naps during the day to make up for it (they might take micro naps while flying too but I haven't seen research on that yet ).
Basically all these animals work out a way to get some sleep, they haven't managed to work out a way to do _without_ sleep.
So I'd be surprised if humans will be able to do ok without sleep at all.
I could easily say the flavour xurgle exists at least for me, disprove it. You may not be able to experience it, but that's your loss/gain.
Money exists, but only because enough people believe in it. Same goes for a particular currency.
Who knows, maybe God has put himself in a quantum superposition in this Universe and also put a bit of himself in at least some of his creatures, resulting in a pattern of constructive and destructive interference.
Well I'm probably wrong about that;). But my point is I doubt the universe is as simple as what a lot of people seem to make it out to be.
If there were a God and he created the universe, it'll be kinda unimpressive and boring if it were that simple eh?
As it is scientists don't even know what 70-90% of the universe is made of.
"computational neuroscience and a number of other disciplines that you just cannot understand if you believe in a human soul"
I believe there is a flavour that most people call "vanilla", and something called colour, and plenty of other things - love, faith, kindness etc.
I see no contradiction or incompatibility in my belief in the existence of such things, and my belief that there are neurons and other stuff in my brain that somehow play a part in all these things.
Yes you can say vanillin is the molecule involved in vanilla. But there's still a LOT more going on. You can have the flavour without the molecule being present to trigger it.
So I think you are missing a lot if you believe it's all just computational neuroscience. An MMORPG being played by millions of people is not _just_ ones and zeros being processed or just Computer Science. It involves ones and zeroes, but is not just ones and zeroes.
Scientists haven't explained the very first observation that all of them should have made.
If you can explain the very first observation you ever made then you would be far ahead of most humans.
To conclusively say whether we are or aren't like animals with respect to souls and spirits seems to be just as much a leap of faith at this point.
Sure we are animals. But what makes you so sure that we are JUST animals? Or that at least some animals aren't "special" too?
We are a bunch of molecules but I doubt you'd say we are JUST a bunch of molecules not much different from the rest of the stuff the solar system is made of.
Of course alien creatures made of whatever it is the 70 to 90% of the universe is made of could have a different opinion from their point of view - since we and the planet could be categorized as "strange/rare stuff" to them. Then again "point of view" could even be irrelevant/inapplicable to some of them.
His BIG mistake was to propose violence as a generally acceptable means for achieve his proposed goals. This in my opinion is a terrible design flaw.
When violence is regarded as acceptable, the ones capable and willing to produce the most violence either directly or through others are far more likely to rise to the top.
How would you overthrow such people once they get to the top? Either you wait for them to die or suddenly change their ways or you use yet more violence which is likely to create the same problem again.
If a country is fairly peaceful, violence should be far from an acceptable means for its transformation.
Sure you can get lucky, and you probably will after a while, but don't be surprised if it takes generations - just look at the various countries around the world and their histories.
Might be impressive for a 8 or 9 year old but he's 17.
Especially nowadays when you are just a google search away from _existing_ plans for building such stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if some high school projects involved the building of one.
So it'll only be impressive if he worked out a way to do more than "break even" - doesn't even have to build it - just have to come up with a viable design.
OR, come up with a novel use for it, other than just making a glowing ball. Or becomes rich by marketing and selling thousands of them like that "lava lamp" fad;).
I recall a fair number of teenagers _inventing_ interesting/useful stuff. Those deserve their 15 minutes or more of fame.
In my opinion the responsibility of Government is not to prevent change (which is impossible), but:
1) Try to achieve the best or least evil change for its citizens 2) Try to keep the change at rate/speed that citizens can cope with.
However the US gov seems more interested in serving entities other than its citizens.
But the US citizens seem to be quite clueless.
So I guess you could say I partly agree with the Tech Czar on the problem. I don't agree with the solution though.
Lastly: immigration is actually a good thing - it is the main way you get to pick your citizens and other people living in your country. You want immigration not of the cheapest, but of the best. Spend your time figuring out what the criteria for "best" is for long term.
Once you get enough of the "best" people, even if the rest of your system/stuff is crap a lot of the best will still want to apply to get in.
Slashdot Mirror
There used to be a site: shouldexist.org, there were plenty of ideas there - some obvious, some not so obvious. I submitted quite a few.
Personally I don't think people who come up with brilliant ideas should automatically be rewarded a monopoly over them - it just doesn't scale. If we ever get to trillions of human beings such monopolies won't scale gracefully.
Trademarks remain a good idea, perhaps if we scale to star systems a trademark might have to only be "system wide", maybe you'd need enough people to vote that a particular trademark can be considered "universal" - not enough people interested too bad.
But patents and copyright?
Well, if a US Supreme Court Judge finds it obvious after a relatively short time then that's obvious ;).
There aren't that many US Supreme Court judges available for patent testing, but I figure we can workaround that problem.
Why not just put knoppix etc on a CD-RW. Then you can make it a blank if you really need a blank ;).
Anyway, I have Knoppix and the "reset windows password" boot cd in my bag.
Used to also carry around ClusterKnoppix and Knoppix STD.
Why don't ships put their propellers in the front like most planes?
I can understand jetboats having their jets at the back, but propellers?
1) Dubai is not in India.
2) Seems like lots of people in the USA "can barely understand english and manage to speak only partial sentences". Just a look at Slashdot and you'll find that many have literacy problems and lack basic math skills (see "Slashdot Editor" for examples). Remember many of these people a) can barely figure out how to vote properly, b) voted for GW Bush twice. Yahoo, Slashdot etc wouldn't have that many users if the captchas used were too hard.
3) When I last checked your demo has forty spelt incorrectly as fourty. Tsk tsk.
"it actually makes sense to maximize one's own pleasure in this short life, with total disregard for others' pleasure."
;)
Even if nothing matters outside of your own pleasure/happiness, it's known and scientifically proven that a lot of people feel happy when they make other people happy. Such is the lot of the nonsociopaths in this world...
As for the sociopaths, assuming 1,2,3,4 and if nothing else matters outside of their own happiness, why not just be the equivalent of a wirehead and get "maximum happiness" instead of wasting time trying to do stuff?
Doing stuff makes you happy? Why? A sense of achievement? Satisfaction? So what is your goal really? Raw pleasure or something else?
So if you want a sense of achievement why not train yourself to be happy in making others happy? It should be about as meaningful/worthy a life goal as making 1 billion dollars to a sociopath.
Hey if you want the easy route just earn some money and then drug yourself silly, or stick wires in your head to stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain. You don't really need that much money to do that.
Or maybe combine everything and start selling "wirehead" devices. Make Happiness Fast, "how to enhance your/her pleasure"... and sell them with spam.
Then you can be an evil spammer sociopath that's trying to make everyone happy... How's that for leaving a unique mark in history!
After all mass murder/genocide has already been done to death.
Well I spend about 150 yen on lunch every day (colleagues tend to spend less tho). But I'm not in Tokyo or even Japan. So you are relatively rich already ;).
;).
If I were running a country and this kid did what he did, I'd arrest him, extract as much "tax/fines" from him (without causing the cow to kick...), and then offer him a conditional working permit to keep doing whatever it is he is doing, as long as it is still legal (for a normal resident), and he pays the necessary taxes. It'll be great if he sells the stuff to people overseas. After X years if he looks like he's significantly above the average citizen (good behaviour, contributes to society, pays taxes etc), offer him citizenship.
BTW in the linked article I see no mention of "deported", Slashdot is maintaining some standards I guess
I thought you had laws regarding trespassing, destruction or theft of stuff that is not yours in the USA.
Maybe you have so many laws that your lawyers and judges can't find those.
Actually, I think you need fewer laws, and better judges.
I'd rather be in the house that's still standing 400 years after I was standing in it ;).
Hey good thing you both found out early that you were incompatible.
"Money is an awfully effective invention for distributing wealth"
;).
Yes, but it is even more effective at concentrating wealth.
There are just so many cows and sheep you can accumulate and keep
And that's why immigration done well is good.
It's one of the ways a country gets to choose its citizens.
Unfortunately my country (not USA) is picking crap for potential citizens and turning away most of the good ones.
Well he lied. That has to be dealt with. So what lesson do you want to be taught to the kids who know he lied?
"Web-Based Assistant Changes the Face of Dutch Politics"
In Soviet Russia, politics changes your face! (In Ukraine too I hear).
In USA the "Voting Assistant" changes the votes of US citizens.
Or should I say the tools "help" the tools vote for more tools.
Postpone migration long enough and you could be running your enterprise legacy app on MAME ;).
Heh I was expecting goatse.cx
m
;)
Anyway you can turn on the preview feature for tinyurl - so it displays the url first without taking you straight to it. I recommend that.
But the other url shortening services may not have such a feature.
Anyway, if you do the attack mentioned in the article it might be a good idea to use tinyurl or other similar sites, so that it is google and friends that expand the resulting url, so it is harder for the victim to figure out who hosted the original shortened url - since they only have to expanded url to work with. Unless perhaps google sends the url of the referring page?
I'm not sure if Google will display/store the resulting url from a 302 redirect or it will display/store the original url which could look very harmless and changed to be harmless AFTER the attack has occurred.
e.g.
The whenever something tries to access http://attackers.website/myphotos/
They get a list of thumbnails, one which loads:
http://intermediate.website/images/thumbnail.gif
Which 302 redirects to http://victims.website/buggycgi?param=payload&boo
But the second time round everyone just gets a thumbnail pic.
So it will be hard to prove who was the culprit.
BTW there are plenty of other things you can do with url shortening services. Many of these allow you to add stuff to the end of the urls which will be readded after the url is expanded!
For example: http://tinyurl.com/8hw would take you to slashdot and
http://tinyurl.com/8hw/my/logout would log you out from slashdot.
You can use this feature for sites that require you to submit urls that end with a jpg or gif - e.g. avatar image or something like that.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out more stuff they can do with such things...
So far everyone seems to be focusing on "input" and forgetting about "output", or even mixing the two.
Anyway, my suggestion has always been to do something like the following:
Inputs to your program
|||
Corresponding Input filters
|||
Your program
|||
Corresponding Output filters
|||
Outputs from your program
|||
Stuff receiving the outputs
You have a different "input filter" for each class of input so that your program can handle those inputs correctly.
Then you have a different output filter (e.g. SQL bind vars, HTML, XML) so that the stuff receiving your outputs (browser, database, viewer, etc) will handle them correctly.
NEVER do stuff like magic quotes (PHP is one of the worst and most braindead language in popular use) - mixing input and output filtering is so wrong it isn't funny (there are so many other things PHP does wrong that it's almost criminal).
Depending on the circumstances your program could output a single quote ' differently e.g. %27 for a cgi parameter, '' for Oracle data and \' for MySQL data (BTW MySQL is the PHP of databases). So it should be obvious that "one size fits all" doesn't work.
By filtering I mean quoting/encoding sanity checking etc - whatever it takes to get the data in a suitable form (with hopefully minimal data loss/corruption).
Sure, but the proposed explanation for sleep as "so that mammals would be still" is still ridiculous. Why not be still and fairly alert?
It is obvious that sleep is important enough for birds, dolphins etc to do it, and even workaround the requirement by having different parts of their brains take turns to sleep.
Also look up on sleep and migratory birds. Many don't sleep while flying at night, researchers have found that some seem to take micro naps during the day to make up for it (they might take micro naps while flying too but I haven't seen research on that yet ).
Basically all these animals work out a way to get some sleep, they haven't managed to work out a way to do _without_ sleep.
So I'd be surprised if humans will be able to do ok without sleep at all.
Uh birds sleep too.
Most creatures with enough of a brain need sleep.
I could easily say the flavour xurgle exists at least for me, disprove it. You may not be able to experience it, but that's your loss/gain.
;). But my point is I doubt the universe is as simple as what a lot of people seem to make it out to be.
Money exists, but only because enough people believe in it. Same goes for a particular currency.
Who knows, maybe God has put himself in a quantum superposition in this Universe and also put a bit of himself in at least some of his creatures, resulting in a pattern of constructive and destructive interference.
Well I'm probably wrong about that
If there were a God and he created the universe, it'll be kinda unimpressive and boring if it were that simple eh?
As it is scientists don't even know what 70-90% of the universe is made of.
"computational neuroscience and a number of other disciplines that you just cannot understand if you believe in a human soul"
I believe there is a flavour that most people call "vanilla", and something called colour, and plenty of other things - love, faith, kindness etc.
I see no contradiction or incompatibility in my belief in the existence of such things, and my belief that there are neurons and other stuff in my brain that somehow play a part in all these things.
Yes you can say vanillin is the molecule involved in vanilla. But there's still a LOT more going on. You can have the flavour without the molecule being present to trigger it.
So I think you are missing a lot if you believe it's all just computational neuroscience. An MMORPG being played by millions of people is not _just_ ones and zeros being processed or just Computer Science. It involves ones and zeroes, but is not just ones and zeroes.
Scientists haven't explained the very first observation that all of them should have made.
If you can explain the very first observation you ever made then you would be far ahead of most humans.
To conclusively say whether we are or aren't like animals with respect to souls and spirits seems to be just as much a leap of faith at this point.
Sure we are animals. But what makes you so sure that we are JUST animals? Or that at least some animals aren't "special" too?
We are a bunch of molecules but I doubt you'd say we are JUST a bunch of molecules not much different from the rest of the stuff the solar system is made of.
Of course alien creatures made of whatever it is the 70 to 90% of the universe is made of could have a different opinion from their point of view - since we and the planet could be categorized as "strange/rare stuff" to them. Then again "point of view" could even be irrelevant/inapplicable to some of them.
That is definitely not his only mistake.
His BIG mistake was to propose violence as a generally acceptable means for achieve his proposed goals. This in my opinion is a terrible design flaw.
When violence is regarded as acceptable, the ones capable and willing to produce the most violence either directly or through others are far more likely to rise to the top.
How would you overthrow such people once they get to the top? Either you wait for them to die or suddenly change their ways or you use yet more violence which is likely to create the same problem again.
If a country is fairly peaceful, violence should be far from an acceptable means for its transformation.
Sure you can get lucky, and you probably will after a while, but don't be surprised if it takes generations - just look at the various countries around the world and their histories.
Might be impressive for a 8 or 9 year old but he's 17.
;).
Especially nowadays when you are just a google search away from _existing_ plans for building such stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if some high school projects involved the building of one.
So it'll only be impressive if he worked out a way to do more than "break even" - doesn't even have to build it - just have to come up with a viable design.
OR, come up with a novel use for it, other than just making a glowing ball. Or becomes rich by marketing and selling thousands of them like that "lava lamp" fad
I recall a fair number of teenagers _inventing_ interesting/useful stuff. Those deserve their 15 minutes or more of fame.
In my opinion the responsibility of Government is not to prevent change (which is impossible), but:
1) Try to achieve the best or least evil change for its citizens
2) Try to keep the change at rate/speed that citizens can cope with.
However the US gov seems more interested in serving entities other than its citizens.
But the US citizens seem to be quite clueless.
So I guess you could say I partly agree with the Tech Czar on the problem. I don't agree with the solution though.
Lastly: immigration is actually a good thing - it is the main way you get to pick your citizens and other people living in your country. You want immigration not of the cheapest, but of the best. Spend your time figuring out what the criteria for "best" is for long term.
Once you get enough of the "best" people, even if the rest of your system/stuff is crap a lot of the best will still want to apply to get in.
Uh, I thought BASIC was the language that was accused of crippling minds? ;)
Anyway, for CS it would probably be better to cover the major types of languages - machine code, functional, imperative, etc.