This is not about technology. With new encoding schemes and whatnot, there is enough space to accomodate most uses. The problem is one of economics. First, entrenched infrastructure. It costs money to upgrade, as this whole "digital TV" transition proves (arguments about corruption aside). Also, in this country at least airwaves are sold off to the highest bidder, not necessarily the "Best interest" use of that spectrum. So we have technology from the 1940s working side-by-side with stuff that became out of date 3 years ago. The problem isn't spectrum allocation or encoding, or any fancy tech crap.
It's economics. And economics is about people. And the people in control of the airwaves are making a huge mess of things because they believe that highest bidder = most public good. You want to "untangle" the airwaves? You need to start by firing everyone on the board of the FCC, restructuring it, and then preparing to sink at least a hundred billion into retooling the infrastructure. Since nobody wants to do that... Get used to congestion, crap reception, and paying through the nose for basic services. Like your cell phone.
Sounds like Microsoft now has its fair share of shareholders with such a short-sighted vision that they are only interested in short-term profit at the expense of long-term growth. As hundreds of companies have discovered... The "democratic" approach of shareholding has its drawbacks. O_o
In China, forget about R&D unless you're willing to pay the police to go raid the counterfeiters for you.
As opposed to here in the United States, where taxpayers pay for the police to raid grandma who downloaded a "ZZ Top" song. I'm not seeing the Western Civilization Advantage Program(tm) working here.
They won't be able to move up the food chain until they get _some form_ of copyright/trademark/IP protection. There is no "code of law" there, anything they can replicate is fair game. Better make sure anything you produce can't be replicated or they'll undercut you fast.
That sounds like capitalism to me, and they seem to be raking in quite a bit of money for being at the "bottom" of the food chain. As to "some form of IP"; I disagree. They seem to be proving that the entire model of intellectual property is a fraud.
The problem is that local governments (municipalities, primarily) have signed exclusive agreements with these companies. Because laying wires requires approval of each municipality, installing new infrastructure literally requires tens of thousands of permits, applications, meetings, etc., to get anything worthwhile installed. Our "marble cake" form of government, creates a tangled mess of conflicting rules and legislation that create such a high cost to enter the market that $10 billion could easily be spent just negotiating. That money will largely dissipate the same way it vanished in Iraq -- because everyone believes they deserve part of the pie.
If you want options, two things need to happen. First, the infrastructure -- that is, the wires that carry the data, need to be owned and operated by an entity separate from the users of that system, and that exclusive contracts be ended immediately. Secondly, we need to eliminate municipality-level and move it to at least the county level. The fewer people that have a voice in the process, the less resources wasted dealing with them. Because city-level employees are amongst the most petty, corrupt, and difficult to work with of any class of government official in the Union.
So an entire community that emits no carbon dioxide. What are the inhabitants, vampires? Zombies? Undead "not otherwise specified"? This "green movement" is getting out of control when we turn to the dark powers.
By that reasoning, it's hard to see how it's irrelevant whether Google is censoring or not.
Whether google is censoring or not is irrelevant because it is difficult to prove censorship. And the determination of whether censorship is (or is not) occurring is immaterial to our response. And our response should be to copy and disseminate the allegedly censored information.
"Please stop." Please stop sharing information and doing collective investigation about censorship? Just fight back randomly against... everybody? Even those who don't censor? Work hard to find alternative means of distribution for... all speech? Even the stuff that hasn't been censored?
I was referring to the wasting of time and energy on guessing whether google is censoring or not absent hard evidence, not everything else you just mentioned. And as an aside, do you find it difficult to connect people's individual statements into a cohesive process? Because you seem to be taking the wrong interpretation to everything individually, which would not be happening if you could look at the larger statement being made.
It seems more constructive to focus efforts on actual censors and instances of actual censorship.
Somehow, I don't think a few hundred regular posters and a few thousand regular readers on slashdot will do what over 170 governments to date have been unable to do. But I am open to any argument on how to go after the top fifty thousand major censors in the world utilizing the power of... keystrokes.
The facts have to be established before anyone knows what action to take.
A group of people are marching down the street shooting at random passerbys. You are at the end of the street. Do you: a) Stop and ask who, how they are armed, why they are shooting, etc., or b) run like hell?
Whether this particular discussion should have made the front page of Slashdot before the facts were better established is another question (and IMHO the answer is "no.")
Nothing would make front page of Slashdot if we had to wait for all the facts to come in... Because nobody would read slashdot. Part of why slashdot is popular and exists is because it provides information quickly, not necessarily perfectly.
Every week now it seems there is a new target of our collective paranoia. So let's set the record straight for this and all future stories like this. First, the internet is global. The wires, routers, satellites, cables, and equipment are collectively owned by hundreds of companies, scattered throughout every country in the world. Each of those countries feels they have a right to censor or control, to varying degrees, what their citizens say and do. In each of those countries, there are states, counties, municipalities, cities, corporations, organizations, groups, and individuals, all of whom believe they are also entitled to the same thing. Their ideologies are varied, as are their methods, their targets, and their success.
People have been trying to shut other people up and control them since time began. And people have fought back. Whether Google is censoring or not is irrelevant. What matters is whether anyone fights back. All any of us can do is support anyone who does, and continue to provide the tools to ensure that anyone who wants to listen, can. So if you are one of those being censored by google, step forward, give us your message, and we will do our best to put it everywhere there is an audience for it. Otherwise, can it about the conspiracy theories. They have their laws, and we have ours.
You need to provide more information about your target audience. "16-18 year olds" is a pretty broad demographic. But let's say for the sake of discussion that you mean the average kid in the average high school math class. I can sum up your lesson ideas in a word: Practicality. For most people, mathematics is tiresome, and the majority of adults don't use it for anything more than figuring out if they got the right change at the drive-thru, not spending too much at the grocery store, and taxes (for those still doing it with pencil and paper). That's just the simple reality.
That said, if you want something engaging, give them a challenge and see what they come up with. Hands-on math, with a tangible goal. Don't make it one of those "Navigate this map to collect all the items" either, that's boring. I know that the school administrators would never approve this, but here's an idea -- why not give them a small trebucket, and throw watermelons at a designated target on a football field? Basic geometry. Assign them into teams. Or a large maze and an RC car, and they have to navigate the car to the "goal"... But without seeing the car on the track. ^_^ Hello vectors, and simple calculus. Give them a goal and let them figure out the math.
NEWS FLASH: Binary consists of 1 and 0. Either the answer is right, or it isn't. "probablistic computing" is another way of saying "sloppy engineering". There is no random, only Zuul!
My god, I love you and want to have your babies. ^_^ There is so much to be said for old school learning these days. Everybody thinks they can do better by making it more complicated. Nobody says "I can make it simple..." Not anymore. Simple is bad, and evil... Because it works, it never breaks, and corporations and management will stop employing us if we build ourselves out of a job. sigh.
Our culture has put such a premium on the price of goods, at the expense of quality, that it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone when (like all other resources), labor also finds itself subjugated to this rule. You are now on the dollar menu, Citizen. Ah, but let us rail against our evil corporate overlords instead--it's so much easier to blame anyone but ourselves for this. Labor is dead in this country. You've got "at will" employment, anti-union legislation, and did you know we are the only industrialized country on the planet without a Labor party? Our entire culture has been split up and sold off piece by piece thanks to "intellectual property". You don't own your car, your home, or anything that costs more than about $5,000 these days, stuck paying student loans for the next thirty years, with debt-collection law changes now on the books that make starting over an impossible proposition. We call ourselves a "capitalist" society where the individual has the power and the choice, but tell me dear reader, when was the last time you bought something that didn't come with a contract or a legal document stating what you could and could not do? Want to watch a movie? Read the FBI warning. Use a computer? Read the End User Licensing Agreement. Drive a car? You'll need insurance and a car loan for that. Live in a house? An apartment? Sign here please. You can't even enter a building without "giving consent to search", no cameras or recording devices please (except for us, see the black globes?). Freedom? Where, pray tell, is your freedom?
One Nation, Under Contract. Please sign on the dotted line.
Oh gee, look... Someone has changed the description of something and now it's completely new. It's not a file anymore, it's a persistent object. You know, I remember the day when they just called them files. Nice, simple. You could almost visualize it in your head. Files, you know, like what you put in cabinets. And there were folders too, and it made sense. Then Macintosh came along and, in order to make their mark in the world, we stopped talking about files and started talking about Resources. Well, they've added four more letters, bit harder to understand, a few more tech support calls to explain it. And then along comes the next iteration of this naming game, a persistent object. Now we're at five constants, we've added seven more letters, tech support can't explain it, and although everything looks the same, by golly it isn't. Next they'll be calling it a post-operation management data structure.
See, here's a problem in our community in plain sight but nobody's going to talk about it, and it's this: We make things unnecessarily complicated. And we buy into these complications, because we want to impress our other geek friends and cohorts with our impressive cutting-edge knowledge. So companies sell us an ever-enlarging and increasingly dense lexicon to obscure what are really simple, fundamental concepts. You know, it has taken me decades to learn even a tenth of what computers can really do. It's what has drawn me to them my whole life -- they are based on such amazingly simple principles but yet can so such incredibly complex things. Learning information technology is like peeling an onion. I never finish. And you know, truth be told I like the challenge.
But what I don't like is having to learn an ever-changing lexicon just to have a conversation with someone, when we both understand the concepts and principles already. Why should we, as a community, constantly have to re-learn the same things over and over and over again? We need to stop doing this. We are wasting more and more of our time just trying to keep up with the language, instead of actually working the problems. And before I get the petty intellectuals to jump on my case for "dumbing things down", I'd just like to say anyone can make things more complicated but it takes true genius to make things simple. So there, I've said my peace. Bring on the rebuttals.
I agree, it could have been more explicit in giving a brief description, but was it really that difficult to glean what it does from the summary?
So they spent $5 million to build a SELECT query? Maybe they have a future in government contract work. More seriously, this is like saying that NASA develops space technologies, space vehicles and is ranked amongst the top five space research agencies. What does that really say? Nothing. The terms are so broad as to offer zero technical insight. I mean, I could interpret my description of NASA to mean they build portable storage pods.
I don't think many people would jump on Target for wanting to do this, rather, the assholes like you who actually do.
Yeah, because busting shoplifters to keep prices low (a benefit to you, the customer) is an activity that should be condemned. In other news, if you have a problem with it you should take it up with your elected officials and make sure that the technology's use is restricted only to activities you do not find morally objectionable. Or, you could blame the engineer, just like people blame gun manufacturers because people use them to commit crimes. But you should know that blaming others, like prayer, has a zero percent success rate in fixing the problem.
Nice press release but.. what does it do? O_o Five million dollars and they couldn't even buy a one sentence description of their product. Standards are slipping.
and last but not least: a link to Stallman's personal page.
Yeah. The only guy NOT selling something. Maybe he'll be a public service announcement. Richard's picture, and the caption underneath "This is your life. This is your life on x86 assembly. Any questions?" Or maybe as a pro-choice advertisement... *ducks*
This is marketing gone too far, but not for the reasons you're thinking. Technology is being misused here because this is profiling in a pretty mask. This very same technology is used in airports, trying to identify people's emotions, their age, ethnicity, gender, and every other physical attribute we can categorize and has at least a minimal social meaning. And although the argument for harm here is greatly diminished (I get an advertisement not meant for me versus an unsolicited gloved finger, optional lube), it's still non-zero.
As an aside, things that were unimaginable even ten years ago for surveillance are now commonplace. Did you know that every almost Target store in the United States is being fitted (or retrofitted) with Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems? In english, they tag you to your car. And in another five years or so, likely your face, credit card number, and possibly driver's license information, all together. The technology is already installed, it just needs a software update. And I should know -- I pushed those updates and worked with the guys who managed the camera installations. And before you jump on Target for this -- thousands of businesses are doing the same thing. And some of them are sharing their data, creating black lists and more. It won't be long before no matter where you go, you're being weighed, measured, and found wanting. And you were worried about black helicopters and guys in suits with no sense of humor? At least the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other three-letter acronym'd agencies have laws, rules, procedures, and professional codes of conduct to uphold. And appeals processes. Good luck getting out of Target's system... You'll still be there, long after your body has decomposed in a hole somewhere. All you geeks dreamed of an interconnected world; Everything is part of the 'net. Well, it is. And what a hell it is.
But back to the topic at hand... Even people can't guess gender, ethnicity, or age with a high degree of accuracy. A computer, by necessity, will be far worse at this. And I have a very good idea of how that's going to go over. See, my gender is difficult to tell. At the drive-thru or on the phone, I am a "ma'am". At the post office service desk, I'm usually a "sir". On the bus, I get eyes from creepy old guys and straight girls. And both lesbians and gays, amusingly enough. My life is full of delicious ambiguity. My friend's ethnicity, because of a delicate balance of traits, is taken for whatever race the person looking at her happens to be. It has led to some VERY interesting social engagements.
But as amusing as it is most of the time, it has been dangerous and frustrating at other times. I was once refused admission to an urgent care on the grounds that my medical card had the right name on it, but the wrong gender. That made for an expensive and unnecessary trip to ER. I've called my bank before and been told that I couldn't access my account (despite giving all the requisite details) -- same reason. My friend was nearly jumped for wearing "gang colors" -- a situation that my white friends have never experienced. Getting these "little" social details wrong can have severe consequences for a person.
And to bring it all home, imagine walking by one of these machines and having it spring to life, point to you and say in a loud booming voice -- "You should try our new maxi pads, miss!" if you're a guy. Or getting a "Gilette! The best a man can get!" commercial if you're a girl. Oops. The possibilities for embarrassment are endless... and you'd better believe someone's going to sue over this. And rightfully so.
You want the same people who will be hopping around in their underwear, half-drunk, screaming at a television screen this sunday to be involved in how our roads are designed, our bus schedules, rail lines, and more? Allow me to interject some reality here -- there's a reason the public sector only allows people with the word "Engineer" in the job title to work on these projects. They cost millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, they effect millions of people, and a screw-up can cost lives or be a logistical nightmare for decades to come. Just think about your morning commute now, and then realize that this situation was created by some of the brightest and most educated minds we have in society today. These people model these problems on supercomputers, applying sophisticated algorithms and methodology that takes months, sometimes years, of slaving at a desk every day, 9 to 5, to effect a merely "acceptable" solution.
Of course, try telling this to the average driver and you're likely to get a string of obscenities and an "I could do better attitude." With all respect, no sir you cannot. Not anymore than how most of the population thinks they'd be a better president, or a better quarter back, or much of anything else. There are some classes of problems that cannot be solved by simply throwing more people at it. A thousand people working on a problem isn't necessarily likely to come up with a better solution than a hundred, or even ten people, working on the same problem. It's about suitable labor, which is a quality issue, not a quantity one.
You people should know better than to suggest this. I do not want Joe Average doing urban development, especially when he has enough trouble just getting through rush hour traffic without going postal on someone. And so we come to the part of the discussion where rationality ends and zealotry begins. There are some things that open source methodology will be suboptimal for. Specifically, things that require extreme specialization and/or have exacting standards generally won't have a healthy community of open source developers. There's only so many people in the world with the time, resources, and dedication to perform a given task, and open source development requires a certain critical mass to be reached to succeed.
Plot a supply and demand curve and if you find those people come at a very high cost any open source development will be labored and frustrated. All open source does is severely cut the labor cost. It does NOT solve the problem of lack of suitable labor resources. This is why open source excels at general purpose systems and applications. Open source is (as a rule) quite flexible. Which is also exactly why it's ill-suited for highly specialized systems with exacting standards -- there are few labor resources in the market to support it. Ergo, those resources are at a premium. Open Source as a broad concept takes under- or un-utilized labor and creates goods and services from it. You won't find much open source development from resources that are being heavily utilized. Or, in plain-english -- college students, the unemployed, part-time workers, etc. That is your labor capital for open source. Not the engineer making $150k a year designing fire-control systems under contract for the military. Chances are, the more established and well-paid you are in the field, the less likely you are to be investing in open source projects.
So there you have it. Before you hit reply, I just want to remind you that these are general statements, so before you present your edge case in some half-hearted attempt to prove the entire argument wrong, please consider the bigger picture.
I pay for my movie tickets but that doesn't give me the right to harass others.
You are not allowed to discuss your personal opinion of the movie to anyone inside or outside the theatre for a period of one (1) year after its theatrical release date in your locality without the prior written consent of the copyright owner. If you fail to comply, you may be fined not less than $1,000, and/or jailed for a period of up to three (3) years. Enjoy the show, and buy our overpriced popcorn.
Sites like Thepiratebay don't generally have people hired by the entertainment industry writing favorable reviews about, say, Snakes on a Plane. There are advantages to buying, selling, and aquiring things illegally. People don't lie -- after all, their reputations are on the line. And depending on what's being bought and sold, sometimes quite a bit more.
There's an irony that illegal business is the most honest kind.
So we're going to lynch them for being open and honest that their drives have a problem and they're doing everything possible to minimize the harm to their customers? My, my, how progressive of us all. We're going to rail on them because they only made a firmware patcher for Windows. Well -- color me silly here but this is an emergency patch. It's an issue that's been discovered fairly recently and so they haven't yet made a firmware loader for other operating systems that makeup Help your community instead of bemoaning your minority status. I've never understood why a community of technical people can be so smart except when it comes to their choice of operating system, where they promptly start screaming "help, help, I'm being repressed!" This behavior is tolerated inside the linux/free software community and I'm at a loss for why... At least in the GLBT community, we tend to give these people a loving, but firm kick in the ass, not indulge them. You all could learn from the example.
Because, after all, what kind of evidence does imply causation? Don't all experiments, because of their own nature, demonstrate nothing more than correlation?)
I'm pretty sure if I drop an apple a thousand times, it will hit the ground a thousand times. Correlation is not the right word for something that happens (very almost) 100% of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
This wouldn't be a problem if you lived in Australia. When it is night in the USA it is daylight there.
I think I see a flaw in your cunning plan: They don't sell 4,000 mile long extension cords at Home Depot.
This is not about technology. With new encoding schemes and whatnot, there is enough space to accomodate most uses. The problem is one of economics. First, entrenched infrastructure. It costs money to upgrade, as this whole "digital TV" transition proves (arguments about corruption aside). Also, in this country at least airwaves are sold off to the highest bidder, not necessarily the "Best interest" use of that spectrum. So we have technology from the 1940s working side-by-side with stuff that became out of date 3 years ago. The problem isn't spectrum allocation or encoding, or any fancy tech crap.
It's economics. And economics is about people. And the people in control of the airwaves are making a huge mess of things because they believe that highest bidder = most public good. You want to "untangle" the airwaves? You need to start by firing everyone on the board of the FCC, restructuring it, and then preparing to sink at least a hundred billion into retooling the infrastructure. Since nobody wants to do that... Get used to congestion, crap reception, and paying through the nose for basic services. Like your cell phone.
Sounds like Microsoft now has its fair share of shareholders with such a short-sighted vision that they are only interested in short-term profit at the expense of long-term growth. As hundreds of companies have discovered... The "democratic" approach of shareholding has its drawbacks. O_o
In China, forget about R&D unless you're willing to pay the police to go raid the counterfeiters for you.
As opposed to here in the United States, where taxpayers pay for the police to raid grandma who downloaded a "ZZ Top" song. I'm not seeing the Western Civilization Advantage Program(tm) working here.
They won't be able to move up the food chain until they get _some form_ of copyright/trademark/IP protection. There is no "code of law" there, anything they can replicate is fair game. Better make sure anything you produce can't be replicated or they'll undercut you fast.
That sounds like capitalism to me, and they seem to be raking in quite a bit of money for being at the "bottom" of the food chain. As to "some form of IP"; I disagree. They seem to be proving that the entire model of intellectual property is a fraud.
None of the Asian tigers has replaced the US as a center of innovation.
They don't have to. Our own intellectual property laws have strangled innovation in this country.
The problem is that local governments (municipalities, primarily) have signed exclusive agreements with these companies. Because laying wires requires approval of each municipality, installing new infrastructure literally requires tens of thousands of permits, applications, meetings, etc., to get anything worthwhile installed. Our "marble cake" form of government, creates a tangled mess of conflicting rules and legislation that create such a high cost to enter the market that $10 billion could easily be spent just negotiating. That money will largely dissipate the same way it vanished in Iraq -- because everyone believes they deserve part of the pie.
If you want options, two things need to happen. First, the infrastructure -- that is, the wires that carry the data, need to be owned and operated by an entity separate from the users of that system, and that exclusive contracts be ended immediately. Secondly, we need to eliminate municipality-level and move it to at least the county level. The fewer people that have a voice in the process, the less resources wasted dealing with them. Because city-level employees are amongst the most petty, corrupt, and difficult to work with of any class of government official in the Union.
So an entire community that emits no carbon dioxide. What are the inhabitants, vampires? Zombies? Undead "not otherwise specified"? This "green movement" is getting out of control when we turn to the dark powers.
By that reasoning, it's hard to see how it's irrelevant whether Google is censoring or not.
Whether google is censoring or not is irrelevant because it is difficult to prove censorship. And the determination of whether censorship is (or is not) occurring is immaterial to our response. And our response should be to copy and disseminate the allegedly censored information.
"Please stop." Please stop sharing information and doing collective investigation about censorship? Just fight back randomly against... everybody? Even those who don't censor? Work hard to find alternative means of distribution for... all speech? Even the stuff that hasn't been censored?
I was referring to the wasting of time and energy on guessing whether google is censoring or not absent hard evidence, not everything else you just mentioned. And as an aside, do you find it difficult to connect people's individual statements into a cohesive process? Because you seem to be taking the wrong interpretation to everything individually, which would not be happening if you could look at the larger statement being made.
It seems more constructive to focus efforts on actual censors and instances of actual censorship.
Somehow, I don't think a few hundred regular posters and a few thousand regular readers on slashdot will do what over 170 governments to date have been unable to do. But I am open to any argument on how to go after the top fifty thousand major censors in the world utilizing the power of... keystrokes.
The facts have to be established before anyone knows what action to take.
A group of people are marching down the street shooting at random passerbys. You are at the end of the street. Do you: a) Stop and ask who, how they are armed, why they are shooting, etc., or b) run like hell?
Whether this particular discussion should have made the front page of Slashdot before the facts were better established is another question (and IMHO the answer is "no.")
Nothing would make front page of Slashdot if we had to wait for all the facts to come in... Because nobody would read slashdot. Part of why slashdot is popular and exists is because it provides information quickly, not necessarily perfectly.
Every week now it seems there is a new target of our collective paranoia. So let's set the record straight for this and all future stories like this. First, the internet is global. The wires, routers, satellites, cables, and equipment are collectively owned by hundreds of companies, scattered throughout every country in the world. Each of those countries feels they have a right to censor or control, to varying degrees, what their citizens say and do. In each of those countries, there are states, counties, municipalities, cities, corporations, organizations, groups, and individuals, all of whom believe they are also entitled to the same thing. Their ideologies are varied, as are their methods, their targets, and their success.
People have been trying to shut other people up and control them since time began. And people have fought back. Whether Google is censoring or not is irrelevant. What matters is whether anyone fights back. All any of us can do is support anyone who does, and continue to provide the tools to ensure that anyone who wants to listen, can. So if you are one of those being censored by google, step forward, give us your message, and we will do our best to put it everywhere there is an audience for it. Otherwise, can it about the conspiracy theories. They have their laws, and we have ours.
You need to provide more information about your target audience. "16-18 year olds" is a pretty broad demographic. But let's say for the sake of discussion that you mean the average kid in the average high school math class. I can sum up your lesson ideas in a word: Practicality. For most people, mathematics is tiresome, and the majority of adults don't use it for anything more than figuring out if they got the right change at the drive-thru, not spending too much at the grocery store, and taxes (for those still doing it with pencil and paper). That's just the simple reality.
That said, if you want something engaging, give them a challenge and see what they come up with. Hands-on math, with a tangible goal. Don't make it one of those "Navigate this map to collect all the items" either, that's boring. I know that the school administrators would never approve this, but here's an idea -- why not give them a small trebucket, and throw watermelons at a designated target on a football field? Basic geometry. Assign them into teams. Or a large maze and an RC car, and they have to navigate the car to the "goal"... But without seeing the car on the track. ^_^ Hello vectors, and simple calculus. Give them a goal and let them figure out the math.
NEWS FLASH: Binary consists of 1 and 0. Either the answer is right, or it isn't. "probablistic computing" is another way of saying "sloppy engineering". There is no random, only Zuul!
My god, I love you and want to have your babies. ^_^ There is so much to be said for old school learning these days. Everybody thinks they can do better by making it more complicated. Nobody says "I can make it simple..." Not anymore. Simple is bad, and evil... Because it works, it never breaks, and corporations and management will stop employing us if we build ourselves out of a job. sigh.
Our culture has put such a premium on the price of goods, at the expense of quality, that it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone when (like all other resources), labor also finds itself subjugated to this rule. You are now on the dollar menu, Citizen. Ah, but let us rail against our evil corporate overlords instead--it's so much easier to blame anyone but ourselves for this. Labor is dead in this country. You've got "at will" employment, anti-union legislation, and did you know we are the only industrialized country on the planet without a Labor party? Our entire culture has been split up and sold off piece by piece thanks to "intellectual property". You don't own your car, your home, or anything that costs more than about $5,000 these days, stuck paying student loans for the next thirty years, with debt-collection law changes now on the books that make starting over an impossible proposition. We call ourselves a "capitalist" society where the individual has the power and the choice, but tell me dear reader, when was the last time you bought something that didn't come with a contract or a legal document stating what you could and could not do? Want to watch a movie? Read the FBI warning. Use a computer? Read the End User Licensing Agreement. Drive a car? You'll need insurance and a car loan for that. Live in a house? An apartment? Sign here please. You can't even enter a building without "giving consent to search", no cameras or recording devices please (except for us, see the black globes?). Freedom? Where, pray tell, is your freedom?
One Nation, Under Contract. Please sign on the dotted line.
Onion peeling analogy fail. ;) Or parent never finishes cooking a meal with onions in it.
I actually like onions and cook with them frequently. But it's the best analogy I could come up with. Besides, it's just slashdot...
Oh gee, look... Someone has changed the description of something and now it's completely new. It's not a file anymore, it's a persistent object. You know, I remember the day when they just called them files. Nice, simple. You could almost visualize it in your head. Files, you know, like what you put in cabinets. And there were folders too, and it made sense. Then Macintosh came along and, in order to make their mark in the world, we stopped talking about files and started talking about Resources. Well, they've added four more letters, bit harder to understand, a few more tech support calls to explain it. And then along comes the next iteration of this naming game, a persistent object. Now we're at five constants, we've added seven more letters, tech support can't explain it, and although everything looks the same, by golly it isn't. Next they'll be calling it a post-operation management data structure.
See, here's a problem in our community in plain sight but nobody's going to talk about it, and it's this: We make things unnecessarily complicated. And we buy into these complications, because we want to impress our other geek friends and cohorts with our impressive cutting-edge knowledge. So companies sell us an ever-enlarging and increasingly dense lexicon to obscure what are really simple, fundamental concepts. You know, it has taken me decades to learn even a tenth of what computers can really do. It's what has drawn me to them my whole life -- they are based on such amazingly simple principles but yet can so such incredibly complex things. Learning information technology is like peeling an onion. I never finish. And you know, truth be told I like the challenge.
But what I don't like is having to learn an ever-changing lexicon just to have a conversation with someone, when we both understand the concepts and principles already. Why should we, as a community, constantly have to re-learn the same things over and over and over again? We need to stop doing this. We are wasting more and more of our time just trying to keep up with the language, instead of actually working the problems. And before I get the petty intellectuals to jump on my case for "dumbing things down", I'd just like to say anyone can make things more complicated but it takes true genius to make things simple. So there, I've said my peace. Bring on the rebuttals.
I agree, it could have been more explicit in giving a brief description, but was it really that difficult to glean what it does from the summary?
So they spent $5 million to build a SELECT query? Maybe they have a future in government contract work. More seriously, this is like saying that NASA develops space technologies, space vehicles and is ranked amongst the top five space research agencies. What does that really say? Nothing. The terms are so broad as to offer zero technical insight. I mean, I could interpret my description of NASA to mean they build portable storage pods.
I don't think many people would jump on Target for wanting to do this, rather, the assholes like you who actually do.
Yeah, because busting shoplifters to keep prices low (a benefit to you, the customer) is an activity that should be condemned. In other news, if you have a problem with it you should take it up with your elected officials and make sure that the technology's use is restricted only to activities you do not find morally objectionable. Or, you could blame the engineer, just like people blame gun manufacturers because people use them to commit crimes. But you should know that blaming others, like prayer, has a zero percent success rate in fixing the problem.
Nice press release but.. what does it do? O_o Five million dollars and they couldn't even buy a one sentence description of their product. Standards are slipping.
and last but not least: a link to Stallman's personal page.
Yeah. The only guy NOT selling something. Maybe he'll be a public service announcement. Richard's picture, and the caption underneath "This is your life. This is your life on x86 assembly. Any questions?" Or maybe as a pro-choice advertisement... *ducks*
This is marketing gone too far, but not for the reasons you're thinking. Technology is being misused here because this is profiling in a pretty mask. This very same technology is used in airports, trying to identify people's emotions, their age, ethnicity, gender, and every other physical attribute we can categorize and has at least a minimal social meaning. And although the argument for harm here is greatly diminished (I get an advertisement not meant for me versus an unsolicited gloved finger, optional lube), it's still non-zero.
As an aside, things that were unimaginable even ten years ago for surveillance are now commonplace. Did you know that every almost Target store in the United States is being fitted (or retrofitted) with Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems? In english, they tag you to your car. And in another five years or so, likely your face, credit card number, and possibly driver's license information, all together. The technology is already installed, it just needs a software update. And I should know -- I pushed those updates and worked with the guys who managed the camera installations. And before you jump on Target for this -- thousands of businesses are doing the same thing. And some of them are sharing their data, creating black lists and more. It won't be long before no matter where you go, you're being weighed, measured, and found wanting. And you were worried about black helicopters and guys in suits with no sense of humor? At least the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other three-letter acronym'd agencies have laws, rules, procedures, and professional codes of conduct to uphold. And appeals processes. Good luck getting out of Target's system... You'll still be there, long after your body has decomposed in a hole somewhere. All you geeks dreamed of an interconnected world; Everything is part of the 'net. Well, it is. And what a hell it is.
But back to the topic at hand... Even people can't guess gender, ethnicity, or age with a high degree of accuracy. A computer, by necessity, will be far worse at this. And I have a very good idea of how that's going to go over. See, my gender is difficult to tell. At the drive-thru or on the phone, I am a "ma'am". At the post office service desk, I'm usually a "sir". On the bus, I get eyes from creepy old guys and straight girls. And both lesbians and gays, amusingly enough. My life is full of delicious ambiguity. My friend's ethnicity, because of a delicate balance of traits, is taken for whatever race the person looking at her happens to be. It has led to some VERY interesting social engagements.
But as amusing as it is most of the time, it has been dangerous and frustrating at other times. I was once refused admission to an urgent care on the grounds that my medical card had the right name on it, but the wrong gender. That made for an expensive and unnecessary trip to ER. I've called my bank before and been told that I couldn't access my account (despite giving all the requisite details) -- same reason. My friend was nearly jumped for wearing "gang colors" -- a situation that my white friends have never experienced. Getting these "little" social details wrong can have severe consequences for a person.
And to bring it all home, imagine walking by one of these machines and having it spring to life, point to you and say in a loud booming voice -- "You should try our new maxi pads, miss!" if you're a guy. Or getting a "Gilette! The best a man can get!" commercial if you're a girl. Oops. The possibilities for embarrassment are endless... and you'd better believe someone's going to sue over this. And rightfully so.
You want the same people who will be hopping around in their underwear, half-drunk, screaming at a television screen this sunday to be involved in how our roads are designed, our bus schedules, rail lines, and more? Allow me to interject some reality here -- there's a reason the public sector only allows people with the word "Engineer" in the job title to work on these projects. They cost millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, they effect millions of people, and a screw-up can cost lives or be a logistical nightmare for decades to come. Just think about your morning commute now, and then realize that this situation was created by some of the brightest and most educated minds we have in society today. These people model these problems on supercomputers, applying sophisticated algorithms and methodology that takes months, sometimes years, of slaving at a desk every day, 9 to 5, to effect a merely "acceptable" solution.
Of course, try telling this to the average driver and you're likely to get a string of obscenities and an "I could do better attitude." With all respect, no sir you cannot. Not anymore than how most of the population thinks they'd be a better president, or a better quarter back, or much of anything else. There are some classes of problems that cannot be solved by simply throwing more people at it. A thousand people working on a problem isn't necessarily likely to come up with a better solution than a hundred, or even ten people, working on the same problem. It's about suitable labor, which is a quality issue, not a quantity one.
You people should know better than to suggest this. I do not want Joe Average doing urban development, especially when he has enough trouble just getting through rush hour traffic without going postal on someone. And so we come to the part of the discussion where rationality ends and zealotry begins. There are some things that open source methodology will be suboptimal for. Specifically, things that require extreme specialization and/or have exacting standards generally won't have a healthy community of open source developers. There's only so many people in the world with the time, resources, and dedication to perform a given task, and open source development requires a certain critical mass to be reached to succeed.
Plot a supply and demand curve and if you find those people come at a very high cost any open source development will be labored and frustrated. All open source does is severely cut the labor cost. It does NOT solve the problem of lack of suitable labor resources. This is why open source excels at general purpose systems and applications. Open source is (as a rule) quite flexible. Which is also exactly why it's ill-suited for highly specialized systems with exacting standards -- there are few labor resources in the market to support it. Ergo, those resources are at a premium. Open Source as a broad concept takes under- or un-utilized labor and creates goods and services from it. You won't find much open source development from resources that are being heavily utilized. Or, in plain-english -- college students, the unemployed, part-time workers, etc. That is your labor capital for open source. Not the engineer making $150k a year designing fire-control systems under contract for the military. Chances are, the more established and well-paid you are in the field, the less likely you are to be investing in open source projects.
So there you have it. Before you hit reply, I just want to remind you that these are general statements, so before you present your edge case in some half-hearted attempt to prove the entire argument wrong, please consider the bigger picture.
I pay for my movie tickets but that doesn't give me the right to harass others.
You are not allowed to discuss your personal opinion of the movie to anyone inside or outside the theatre for a period of one (1) year after its theatrical release date in your locality without the prior written consent of the copyright owner. If you fail to comply, you may be fined not less than $1,000, and/or jailed for a period of up to three (3) years. Enjoy the show, and buy our overpriced popcorn.
Sites like Thepiratebay don't generally have people hired by the entertainment industry writing favorable reviews about, say, Snakes on a Plane. There are advantages to buying, selling, and aquiring things illegally. People don't lie -- after all, their reputations are on the line. And depending on what's being bought and sold, sometimes quite a bit more.
There's an irony that illegal business is the most honest kind.
So we're going to lynch them for being open and honest that their drives have a problem and they're doing everything possible to minimize the harm to their customers? My, my, how progressive of us all. We're going to rail on them because they only made a firmware patcher for Windows. Well -- color me silly here but this is an emergency patch. It's an issue that's been discovered fairly recently and so they haven't yet made a firmware loader for other operating systems that makeup Help your community instead of bemoaning your minority status. I've never understood why a community of technical people can be so smart except when it comes to their choice of operating system, where they promptly start screaming "help, help, I'm being repressed!" This behavior is tolerated inside the linux/free software community and I'm at a loss for why... At least in the GLBT community, we tend to give these people a loving, but firm kick in the ass, not indulge them. You all could learn from the example.
Because, after all, what kind of evidence does imply causation? Don't all experiments, because of their own nature, demonstrate nothing more than correlation?)
I'm pretty sure if I drop an apple a thousand times, it will hit the ground a thousand times. Correlation is not the right word for something that happens (very almost) 100% of the time.