In blackjack the rules for how the casino plays is pre-determined. So even if the casino know the players cards it wont affect what happens in a hand. The casino has to act the same way anyhow.
Not entirely true. The dealer isn't a robot, but a human. While they're supposed to operate within certain rules, they don't have to. So it is possible that if the casino suspects someone of, say, card counting, they could instruct the dealer to change their behavior to limit the losses until it could be proven or at least be reasonably certain. Remember -- all they can usually do is throw you out and ban you. They can't seize anything on your person, like say, a fuck ton of ill-gotten money. While many casinos now use RFID-enabled chips that can be de-activated (thus those big pile of chips you haven't yet cashed are worthless), if a friend goes to the window and exchanges them, that money is lost.
There always have been. We're social creatures. Try living in total isolation from society in, say, the 1800s. It was hard to completely disappear even then. Someone always knew your whereabouts even then. That's the reality of social existance. Schneier has long had a problem of being too conventional -- he sees what is, not what can be. The problem isn't that we can be tracked, the problem is who is doing the tracking, and the length of time that data is stored, and to what purpose it is put.
These are things that can be resolved through responsible legislation and public education. The fact that so far, it has been highly irresponsible legislation due in part to a total lack of education, and in part due to rampant greed, is a social problem.
The problem is social. The solution must be as well. Schneier is quite correct in his characterization of how things are now. He is not correct in concluding this is how it must remain.
There may in fact be some, but it doesn't seem like that's what you were talking about.
Those frequencies can't be used except by licensed pilots. That's why the OP suggested getting an airplane license; It would then allow the use of those frequencies legally. However, getting that license means you have to be flying an airplane, not a space ship. It was a not-so-clever attempt at bypassing existing regulations in an attempt to achieve the objective: Access to wireless communications necessary for safe flight.
That particular approach is flawed; At least based on present-day law, it cannot succeed.
I'm shocked and dismayed that nobody has mentioned Minecraft. With a 3D printer, you can print anything made in the game out. And anyone in this field who asks what the "best" of something is, is probably a n00b. Why are we suggesting state of the art tech that most people need several years' training in a technical school to use effectively when there's a perfectly good game you can download that'll do the same?:/
It *is* an airplane, it's not really a spacecraft since it's at most, a hop.
An airplane is defined as "a heavier-than-air aircraft kept aloft by the upward thrust exerted by the passing air on its fixed wings and driven by propellers, jet propulsion, etc." If any portion of your flight profile includes a portion where the control surfaces of the wings are ineffectual or lift is generated by means other than air passing over the wings, it is not an airplane.
I'm sorry, it was a really good idea, but wordipulation will not avail you here. Gandalf said so. In other news, an experimental aircraft license does not allow passengers or cargo. You can't do commercial flights in an experimental airplane.
and a big "fuck you" to whomever called 911 with his phone number faked as the calling number.
Of course, this begs the question of why our emergency services and others who's lives depend on the accuracy of this information, do not have the capability to authenticate whether a phone call actually originated from a specific phone, and what its location is. Land lines, cell phones, all of these are required by FCC laws passed over a decade ago now to be accurate enough to tell which side of the road your crashed car is on.
If our infrastructure is so easily compromised by pranksters, then what the hell did we spend all those billions of dollars in "Homeland security" for? I don't know about you but if I get a phone call that says "HOLY FUCK THEY HAVE A DIRTY BOMB IN THE BASEMENT!"... I wanna know which basement, and who's on the other end of that call, pretty fucking quick and unambiguously.
In other news... If this information isn't completely reliable, then why are we kicking down doors and murdering innocent people in their own homes? "Hello? Why yes, I'd like to order a Murder with cheese please. Yes, with extra SWAT."
Honestly, someone smarter than I am could probably turn all of the esoteric things found in IT into a major world religion and make serious bank doing so.
While I can't speak on behalf of everyone smarter than you, in my own case, I wouldn't do it because, like most of my intelligent friends, the more we learn, the less we wish to use our knowledge and learning for personal gain at the expense of others. It seems that the desire for power is inversely proportional to the desire for knowledge. It's not often you find the two together... and even when you do, it's usually for a specific goal, rather than sought after in its own right. Most often, the highly knowledgeable consider the journey to acquiring that understanding of the world to be its own reward.
I might perhaps go even farther and suggest that human intelligence, in and of itself, is intrinsically social, which is why people who are anti-social tend to be of low general intelligence. Note that by saying it's inherently social, I do not mean intelligent people are inherently sociable, or that you can't be both highly intelligent and have all the personality of a doorstop. What I mean is, intelligence compels us to seek cooperative enterprise with others.
Stuxnet, discovered in 2010, was hardly the first salvo to be fired.
It was the first one to be noticed by the mainstream media and the peripheral bloggers. Yes, those of us who have been here, in the industry, know better. But then, we still consider hacker to be a term worthy of respect... not synonymous with electronic terrorism. What our community knows and understands, and what the larger society knows and understands, with regard to our community and the study and practice of our art, is worlds apart.
I'm deeply troubled by the lack of understanding that most major world governments have regarding information technology. These are people who still believe copying a file is theft, that the internet and the world wide web are synonymous, and that using encryption must mean you're a criminal. As they do not understand many of the fundamentals of information technology, how can we expect them to make reasonable and informed decisions about the use of the military in response to threats against that infrastructure?
We have had a disasterous serious of wars starting with Vietnam due to a lack of understanding (or willful ignorance) by politicians, leading to massive loss of life because they completely lacked situational awareness. In Iraq, the picture of Bush sitting in front of his "Mission: Accomplished" banner is a running joke even to this day, not because we didn't "beat" Iraq, but because we got stuck in a quagmire of tribal politics, shifting political opinions at home, and soldiers that were not trained for the new paradigm of urban warfare. Our military has traditionally not been a police force, and yet increasingly that's what we're using it for, with disasterous results. The road has not been smooth. I mean no disrespect to our military, or any of the militaries of the world in this, but it's something that institutionally has taken a long time to even approach this point.
When we look at this in a historical context, it becomes clear exactly just how dangerous a military response to an IT crisis would be. The President is talking about an "internet kill switch", as are many other governments. This kind of thinking is wrong-headed and shows a remarkable lack of understanding of both the economic and sociopolical consequences of such a thing, let alone were it even technologically feasible without a massive outlay of funds in the middle of a global recession.
The notion that we need to protect ourselves from foreign powers attacking our critical electronic, financial, and informational assets is unquestionably sound. But tasking the military with this protection, with the current command staff and structure, is intrinsically dangerous. In layman's terms, they don't know what they're doing.
There needs to be a radical paradigm shift in military doctrine to even approach this new battlefield, let alone participate responsibly and meaningfully in it. In this field, the idea of units, divisions, generals, etc., have no analogue. Amongst our senior and most capable information technology assets, peer collaboration and decentralized information gathering and sharing is vastly more effective than the traditional military hierarchy. We need the capability to tear down and rebuild teams as needed, in a fluid and dynamic environment where individual soldier-actors within it are afforded a wide degree of freedom to make individual judgement calls. This is not a battlefield that is amiable to traditional tactics like "Throw 10,000 people at it. Stop when it dies."
What I've seen so far is that the people who would call upon these military assets are completely uninformed about what they are realistically capable of, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the costs and risks involved. Most of the people in the military are underinformed about this as well, but they are improving at (for an institution) a remarkable rate. They are still far behind.
In light of all of this... I have serious reservations about going offensive. We're not even sure what we're defending yet, or how, or why. It's all shades of grey, and when we're talking about taking military action, grey isn't tolerable.
Hell, it's hardly even worth the risk in North America...
In North America, everything is illegal, off limits, or for authorized personnel only, and with rather stiff consequences if you're caught. We have a higher incarceration rate than China. So I say, if you're really going to have the democratic spirit...
But very few are going as far as having their military actively conduct heavy corporate espionage to benefit their native companies.
France does that. They even have a name for it: "the last century." The reality is most sovereign powers do this. The problem isn't that this happens, the problem is that we're reframing this as a matter of national security and using the military in what is essentially a private-sector enterprise.
What this means is, a teenager who hacks a website for lulz may now be considered an unlawful combatant and disappeared or military force used against them, whereas before this would be merely a criminal matter, with all the trappings of due process, etc., that entails. The military has no such restrictions. If you threaten an asset, they can use any justifiable means to remove you; Including, for example, drone strikes on citizens or assassination.
I do not feel the protection of the internet is something the military should be involved in. While it is a strategic asset and vital to the security of every nation that connects to it, it is also much like international waters: No one country can, or should, be able to exert unilateral control over it, or resort to military options on the open sea anymore than they can on the open net.
If the target is a military or government asset, those need to be clearly delineated on the network, in much the same way an aircraft carrier doesn't need to explain to a fishing boat, "Yo, don't mess with me." Right now, they aren't. It's a marble-cake of networks, and someone can quite honestly stumble into a military asset without knowing it. Likewise, private-sector assets need to be protected by private-sector institutions, such as law enforcement. While yes, I can see there would be overlap, this is what interagency cooperation and laisons are for: Sharing information, but with clear jurisdictional limits.
That's one of the biggest problems I have with the Bush and Obama administrations: They're turning everything into the military. Soon there won't be a delineation between law enforcement and the military, and that merging has led to the death of democracy in every country that's gone down this road. I do not think my country is so special as to avoid this fate.
The web pay is about money directly. So substituting something else does, necessarily, change the results.
The original poster stated that this test would yield no experimentally useful data because the environment was simulated instead of actual. That argument is bogus: Simulations can and usually do yield useful results. I said nothing about role play, substitution, etc., that's all you. All I have said is this simulation will yield experimentally useful data. It may not yield the kind and quality of data you want, but it is still scientifically useful.
The first step in any scientific endeavor is the collection of data with an eye towards testing a hypothesis. I do not see the problem with the author's test. does it matter if 1%, 10%, or 99% of the people who go to the website would do the same if "real" money was involved? Not necessarily. If a data plot shows the same relationships, but on a different scale, then this large-scale test without money could be very useful in a small-scale test with money. It could be used to validate certain models of human behavior, or rule out others.
Of course, inductive reasoning ability amongst slashdotters has been falling like a rock for some time, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see such a poorly-reasoned reply getting moderated up... -_-
It is not a valid experiment exactly because it is artificial and no real money is involved. The results will tell us nothing of value about the question.
Yes, in exactly the same way the Stanford Prison Experiment didn't teach us anything about human behavior because it wasn't a real prison...
Companies won't hear that. If their numbers don't suck, abusing the customers is vindicated.
Amazon pulled SimCity from its store due to poor customer reception. That means zero sales from one of the largest online stores worldwide. Call me crazy, but I think their numbers might go down because of that.
So the world is becoming more green due to global warming?
Part of the world, traditionally far more white, is becoming green. You'd know that if you'd read the article.
I'm confused, is this good or bad?
That depends entirely on where you live. If you're in an area that's already too warm for comfort... it's bad. If you live in an area that's an arctic wasteland however, you can look forward to rising property values, more temperate winters, and the occasional need to hop up on the roof and pick off refugees with your gatling gun as they seek shelter from the long tracts of desert that is slowly swallowing our largest cities. Okay, well, maybe not you, but plan ahead, and your great grandchildren will be.
If water becomes scarce enough in heavily populated areas to justify transporting it continental distances, I very much doubt anyone is going to be interested in protecting your property rights. You'll be trampled by a flood of refugees fleeing the drought.
Fifty to one odds you're American. Anywhere else, and you'd know what's going on outside your borders. Let's look at a place where there's already large amounts of desert, limited water resources, and tons of refugees. There's an entire continent with these problems called Africa. And would you know what -- there's property rights there. If there's one thing you can learn from them, it's that bullets are cheap. You have nothing to worry about on that front.
The other thing is, you make it sound like tomorrow the equatorial region of the planet's going to suddenly go apocalyptic and everyone will be rushing out of there overnight. Dude, this isn't Hollywood. Even at the incredible speed at which global warming is occuring, we're still talking about something that's happening at a speed unlikely to significantly change the environment you're living in within your lifetime. When I say significant, I mean "I lived in a lush forest when I was born, and now it's an apocalyptic desert where no rain falls." It just isn't happening that quickly. It's devastating, and very bad for us as a species, but it's not happening quickly.
Which means such an exodus would happen in small enough numbers that it'd be less like Army of Darkness and more like 28 Days. Large tracts of nothingness, the occasional person... nothing you can't handle with a high power rifle and some explosives, dear.
I've played Sim Earth. I know what happens with global warming... the equator becomes a giant desert, but the temperate regions all become tropical. If you ask me, now's the time to buy land farther north. It's only going to go up in value as natural resources like water become scarce in heavily populated areas. In the not too distant future, water pipelines will be more valued than oil.
Prosecutors should be barred from piling on an unreasonable number of charges just to scare the defendant into plea bargain.
While we're at it, let's also make sure he has to be nice to the defendant, and tell him he's a pretty defendant, and a good defendant. Gimmie a break, it's his job to be a hard-ass. If you think you can win on the merits of your case, then tell him to eat a bag of dicks, and have your public defender loaded for bear. Nobody's saying you can't have your day in court, and nobody says the prosecutor has to offer you anything but that. Bargaining before the trial is optional -- you have no right to it.
People have funny ideas about how the justice system works. As if offering someone a bad deal is somehow a crime! Hey, I wanna sell my crappy car for one billion dollars, arrest me! Or you know, just don't buy my car for a billion dollars. That's how bargaining works -- you start high and work your way down. Admittedly, most people start off a less than 10,000% above the actual value, but there's nothing against you or I making ludicrious demands at the bargaining table, so why them?
You have no right to a plea bargain, but you do have the right to a jury of your peers. If you think 12 other people are going to call bullshit on the prosecution, then rock on with your socks on. But don't bitch that you didn't get a sweet deal from the prosecutor... he doesn't have to offer it.
Plea bargains are an abomination of US justice system whose only purpose is to blackmail people into forfeiting their constitutional rights.
Show me the part of the constitution where it says "And the state shall not do anything that might make administration of the judicial process cheaper, faster, and more efficient." There's no depriving of due process, there's nothing saying the defendant can't have the right not to self-incriminate. Plea bargaining is just that: Bargaining. And there's nothing in the constitution that says you can't bargain with the prosecutor, or vice versa.
But by all means, beat your chest and rip up the grass thinking people are being "blackmailed" to give up their non-existant non-rights. This is the internet afterall, where everyone's an armchair constitutional scholar!
You can see the problem here, he's arguing that the guy's rights are dependent on him pleading guilty. He should have been charged with a crime that had a 6 month sentence, but instead they charge him with crimes which would have locked him away for most of his life, in ORDER TO FORCE HIM TO SKIP THE TRIAL AND PLEAD GUILTY.
Tell me, do you sell your car for what it's actually worth, or do you add a little bit extra to negotiate down from? Same thing. Admittedly, most people add 10--15%, not 1000%...
"Guantanamo Bay called sir, something about not being on the radar? They say we're routinely torturing the shit out of hundreds of people for years at a go, and they are kept on suicide watch all the time because if they had the chance, every single one of them would kill themselves in moments."
DOJ: "I thought I told you I wanted a LIGHTLY toasted bagel! Wait, what were you saying again?"
Slashdot Mirror
In blackjack the rules for how the casino plays is pre-determined. So even if the casino know the players cards it wont affect what happens in a hand. The casino has to act the same way anyhow.
Not entirely true. The dealer isn't a robot, but a human. While they're supposed to operate within certain rules, they don't have to. So it is possible that if the casino suspects someone of, say, card counting, they could instruct the dealer to change their behavior to limit the losses until it could be proven or at least be reasonably certain. Remember -- all they can usually do is throw you out and ban you. They can't seize anything on your person, like say, a fuck ton of ill-gotten money. While many casinos now use RFID-enabled chips that can be de-activated (thus those big pile of chips you haven't yet cashed are worthless), if a friend goes to the window and exchanges them, that money is lost.
There are simply too many ways to be tracked."
There always have been. We're social creatures. Try living in total isolation from society in, say, the 1800s. It was hard to completely disappear even then. Someone always knew your whereabouts even then. That's the reality of social existance. Schneier has long had a problem of being too conventional -- he sees what is, not what can be. The problem isn't that we can be tracked, the problem is who is doing the tracking, and the length of time that data is stored, and to what purpose it is put.
These are things that can be resolved through responsible legislation and public education. The fact that so far, it has been highly irresponsible legislation due in part to a total lack of education, and in part due to rampant greed, is a social problem.
The problem is social. The solution must be as well. Schneier is quite correct in his characterization of how things are now. He is not correct in concluding this is how it must remain.
There may in fact be some, but it doesn't seem like that's what you were talking about.
Those frequencies can't be used except by licensed pilots. That's why the OP suggested getting an airplane license; It would then allow the use of those frequencies legally. However, getting that license means you have to be flying an airplane, not a space ship. It was a not-so-clever attempt at bypassing existing regulations in an attempt to achieve the objective: Access to wireless communications necessary for safe flight.
That particular approach is flawed; At least based on present-day law, it cannot succeed.
I'm shocked and dismayed that nobody has mentioned Minecraft. With a 3D printer, you can print anything made in the game out. And anyone in this field who asks what the "best" of something is, is probably a n00b. Why are we suggesting state of the art tech that most people need several years' training in a technical school to use effectively when there's a perfectly good game you can download that'll do the same? :/
It *is* an airplane, it's not really a spacecraft since it's at most, a hop.
An airplane is defined as "a heavier-than-air aircraft kept aloft by the upward thrust exerted by the passing air on its fixed wings and driven by propellers, jet propulsion, etc." If any portion of your flight profile includes a portion where the control surfaces of the wings are ineffectual or lift is generated by means other than air passing over the wings, it is not an airplane.
I'm sorry, it was a really good idea, but wordipulation will not avail you here. Gandalf said so. In other news, an experimental aircraft license does not allow passengers or cargo. You can't do commercial flights in an experimental airplane.
and a big "fuck you" to whomever called 911 with his phone number faked as the calling number.
Of course, this begs the question of why our emergency services and others who's lives depend on the accuracy of this information, do not have the capability to authenticate whether a phone call actually originated from a specific phone, and what its location is. Land lines, cell phones, all of these are required by FCC laws passed over a decade ago now to be accurate enough to tell which side of the road your crashed car is on.
If our infrastructure is so easily compromised by pranksters, then what the hell did we spend all those billions of dollars in "Homeland security" for? I don't know about you but if I get a phone call that says "HOLY FUCK THEY HAVE A DIRTY BOMB IN THE BASEMENT!" ... I wanna know which basement, and who's on the other end of that call, pretty fucking quick and unambiguously.
In other news... If this information isn't completely reliable, then why are we kicking down doors and murdering innocent people in their own homes? "Hello? Why yes, I'd like to order a Murder with cheese please. Yes, with extra SWAT."
Take turns making it alternately look like Anon or Isreal.
Isreal is totally a real country. Israel is just a typo.
Honestly, someone smarter than I am could probably turn all of the esoteric things found in IT into a major world religion and make serious bank doing so.
While I can't speak on behalf of everyone smarter than you, in my own case, I wouldn't do it because, like most of my intelligent friends, the more we learn, the less we wish to use our knowledge and learning for personal gain at the expense of others. It seems that the desire for power is inversely proportional to the desire for knowledge. It's not often you find the two together... and even when you do, it's usually for a specific goal, rather than sought after in its own right. Most often, the highly knowledgeable consider the journey to acquiring that understanding of the world to be its own reward.
I might perhaps go even farther and suggest that human intelligence, in and of itself, is intrinsically social, which is why people who are anti-social tend to be of low general intelligence. Note that by saying it's inherently social, I do not mean intelligent people are inherently sociable, or that you can't be both highly intelligent and have all the personality of a doorstop. What I mean is, intelligence compels us to seek cooperative enterprise with others.
Stuxnet, discovered in 2010, was hardly the first salvo to be fired.
It was the first one to be noticed by the mainstream media and the peripheral bloggers. Yes, those of us who have been here, in the industry, know better. But then, we still consider hacker to be a term worthy of respect... not synonymous with electronic terrorism. What our community knows and understands, and what the larger society knows and understands, with regard to our community and the study and practice of our art, is worlds apart.
I'm deeply troubled by the lack of understanding that most major world governments have regarding information technology. These are people who still believe copying a file is theft, that the internet and the world wide web are synonymous, and that using encryption must mean you're a criminal. As they do not understand many of the fundamentals of information technology, how can we expect them to make reasonable and informed decisions about the use of the military in response to threats against that infrastructure?
We have had a disasterous serious of wars starting with Vietnam due to a lack of understanding (or willful ignorance) by politicians, leading to massive loss of life because they completely lacked situational awareness. In Iraq, the picture of Bush sitting in front of his "Mission: Accomplished" banner is a running joke even to this day, not because we didn't "beat" Iraq, but because we got stuck in a quagmire of tribal politics, shifting political opinions at home, and soldiers that were not trained for the new paradigm of urban warfare. Our military has traditionally not been a police force, and yet increasingly that's what we're using it for, with disasterous results. The road has not been smooth. I mean no disrespect to our military, or any of the militaries of the world in this, but it's something that institutionally has taken a long time to even approach this point.
When we look at this in a historical context, it becomes clear exactly just how dangerous a military response to an IT crisis would be. The President is talking about an "internet kill switch", as are many other governments. This kind of thinking is wrong-headed and shows a remarkable lack of understanding of both the economic and sociopolical consequences of such a thing, let alone were it even technologically feasible without a massive outlay of funds in the middle of a global recession.
The notion that we need to protect ourselves from foreign powers attacking our critical electronic, financial, and informational assets is unquestionably sound. But tasking the military with this protection, with the current command staff and structure, is intrinsically dangerous. In layman's terms, they don't know what they're doing.
There needs to be a radical paradigm shift in military doctrine to even approach this new battlefield, let alone participate responsibly and meaningfully in it. In this field, the idea of units, divisions, generals, etc., have no analogue. Amongst our senior and most capable information technology assets, peer collaboration and decentralized information gathering and sharing is vastly more effective than the traditional military hierarchy. We need the capability to tear down and rebuild teams as needed, in a fluid and dynamic environment where individual soldier-actors within it are afforded a wide degree of freedom to make individual judgement calls. This is not a battlefield that is amiable to traditional tactics like "Throw 10,000 people at it. Stop when it dies."
What I've seen so far is that the people who would call upon these military assets are completely uninformed about what they are realistically capable of, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the costs and risks involved. Most of the people in the military are underinformed about this as well, but they are improving at (for an institution) a remarkable rate. They are still far behind.
In light of all of this... I have serious reservations about going offensive. We're not even sure what we're defending yet, or how, or why. It's all shades of grey, and when we're talking about taking military action, grey isn't tolerable.
The good news? At least there is one team out there that gets it!
*cough* Two.
Hell, it's hardly even worth the risk in North America...
In North America, everything is illegal, off limits, or for authorized personnel only, and with rather stiff consequences if you're caught. We have a higher incarceration rate than China. So I say, if you're really going to have the democratic spirit...
Ignore all that shit, and do it anyway.
But very few are going as far as having their military actively conduct heavy corporate espionage to benefit their native companies.
France does that. They even have a name for it: "the last century." The reality is most sovereign powers do this. The problem isn't that this happens, the problem is that we're reframing this as a matter of national security and using the military in what is essentially a private-sector enterprise.
What this means is, a teenager who hacks a website for lulz may now be considered an unlawful combatant and disappeared or military force used against them, whereas before this would be merely a criminal matter, with all the trappings of due process, etc., that entails. The military has no such restrictions. If you threaten an asset, they can use any justifiable means to remove you; Including, for example, drone strikes on citizens or assassination.
I do not feel the protection of the internet is something the military should be involved in. While it is a strategic asset and vital to the security of every nation that connects to it, it is also much like international waters: No one country can, or should, be able to exert unilateral control over it, or resort to military options on the open sea anymore than they can on the open net.
If the target is a military or government asset, those need to be clearly delineated on the network, in much the same way an aircraft carrier doesn't need to explain to a fishing boat, "Yo, don't mess with me." Right now, they aren't. It's a marble-cake of networks, and someone can quite honestly stumble into a military asset without knowing it. Likewise, private-sector assets need to be protected by private-sector institutions, such as law enforcement. While yes, I can see there would be overlap, this is what interagency cooperation and laisons are for: Sharing information, but with clear jurisdictional limits.
That's one of the biggest problems I have with the Bush and Obama administrations: They're turning everything into the military. Soon there won't be a delineation between law enforcement and the military, and that merging has led to the death of democracy in every country that's gone down this road. I do not think my country is so special as to avoid this fate.
I am, but it also usually doesn't take a clue-by-four to the face before someone realizes their attempt at jumping the tracks was violently ignored.
You missed my point.
No, I'm choosing not to address it because it's unrelated to the original poster's comment, or my own rebuttal to it.
Whether money does or doesn't exist is materially linked to the value of that money. That's the difference. I read, you did not.
Whether the money is simulated or actual doesn't matter. That's the non-difference. I wrote, you did not read.
The web pay is about money directly. So substituting something else does, necessarily, change the results.
The original poster stated that this test would yield no experimentally useful data because the environment was simulated instead of actual. That argument is bogus: Simulations can and usually do yield useful results. I said nothing about role play, substitution, etc., that's all you. All I have said is this simulation will yield experimentally useful data. It may not yield the kind and quality of data you want, but it is still scientifically useful.
The first step in any scientific endeavor is the collection of data with an eye towards testing a hypothesis. I do not see the problem with the author's test. does it matter if 1%, 10%, or 99% of the people who go to the website would do the same if "real" money was involved? Not necessarily. If a data plot shows the same relationships, but on a different scale, then this large-scale test without money could be very useful in a small-scale test with money. It could be used to validate certain models of human behavior, or rule out others.
Of course, inductive reasoning ability amongst slashdotters has been falling like a rock for some time, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see such a poorly-reasoned reply getting moderated up... -_-
It is not a valid experiment exactly because it is artificial and no real money is involved. The results will tell us nothing of value about the question.
Yes, in exactly the same way the Stanford Prison Experiment didn't teach us anything about human behavior because it wasn't a real prison...
Companies won't hear that. If their numbers don't suck, abusing the customers is vindicated.
Amazon pulled SimCity from its store due to poor customer reception. That means zero sales from one of the largest online stores worldwide. Call me crazy, but I think their numbers might go down because of that.
So the world is becoming more green due to global warming?
Part of the world, traditionally far more white, is becoming green. You'd know that if you'd read the article.
I'm confused, is this good or bad?
That depends entirely on where you live. If you're in an area that's already too warm for comfort... it's bad. If you live in an area that's an arctic wasteland however, you can look forward to rising property values, more temperate winters, and the occasional need to hop up on the roof and pick off refugees with your gatling gun as they seek shelter from the long tracts of desert that is slowly swallowing our largest cities. Okay, well, maybe not you, but plan ahead, and your great grandchildren will be.
If water becomes scarce enough in heavily populated areas to justify transporting it continental distances, I very much doubt anyone is going to be interested in protecting your property rights. You'll be trampled by a flood of refugees fleeing the drought.
Fifty to one odds you're American. Anywhere else, and you'd know what's going on outside your borders. Let's look at a place where there's already large amounts of desert, limited water resources, and tons of refugees. There's an entire continent with these problems called Africa. And would you know what -- there's property rights there. If there's one thing you can learn from them, it's that bullets are cheap. You have nothing to worry about on that front.
The other thing is, you make it sound like tomorrow the equatorial region of the planet's going to suddenly go apocalyptic and everyone will be rushing out of there overnight. Dude, this isn't Hollywood. Even at the incredible speed at which global warming is occuring, we're still talking about something that's happening at a speed unlikely to significantly change the environment you're living in within your lifetime. When I say significant, I mean "I lived in a lush forest when I was born, and now it's an apocalyptic desert where no rain falls." It just isn't happening that quickly. It's devastating, and very bad for us as a species, but it's not happening quickly.
Which means such an exodus would happen in small enough numbers that it'd be less like Army of Darkness and more like 28 Days. Large tracts of nothingness, the occasional person... nothing you can't handle with a high power rifle and some explosives, dear.
I've played Sim Earth. I know what happens with global warming... the equator becomes a giant desert, but the temperate regions all become tropical. If you ask me, now's the time to buy land farther north. It's only going to go up in value as natural resources like water become scarce in heavily populated areas. In the not too distant future, water pipelines will be more valued than oil.
Prosecutors should be barred from piling on an unreasonable number of charges just to scare the defendant into plea bargain.
While we're at it, let's also make sure he has to be nice to the defendant, and tell him he's a pretty defendant, and a good defendant. Gimmie a break, it's his job to be a hard-ass. If you think you can win on the merits of your case, then tell him to eat a bag of dicks, and have your public defender loaded for bear. Nobody's saying you can't have your day in court, and nobody says the prosecutor has to offer you anything but that. Bargaining before the trial is optional -- you have no right to it.
People have funny ideas about how the justice system works. As if offering someone a bad deal is somehow a crime! Hey, I wanna sell my crappy car for one billion dollars, arrest me! Or you know, just don't buy my car for a billion dollars. That's how bargaining works -- you start high and work your way down. Admittedly, most people start off a less than 10,000% above the actual value, but there's nothing against you or I making ludicrious demands at the bargaining table, so why them?
You have no right to a plea bargain, but you do have the right to a jury of your peers. If you think 12 other people are going to call bullshit on the prosecution, then rock on with your socks on. But don't bitch that you didn't get a sweet deal from the prosecutor... he doesn't have to offer it.
Plea bargains are an abomination of US justice system whose only purpose is to blackmail people into forfeiting their constitutional rights.
Show me the part of the constitution where it says "And the state shall not do anything that might make administration of the judicial process cheaper, faster, and more efficient." There's no depriving of due process, there's nothing saying the defendant can't have the right not to self-incriminate. Plea bargaining is just that: Bargaining. And there's nothing in the constitution that says you can't bargain with the prosecutor, or vice versa.
But by all means, beat your chest and rip up the grass thinking people are being "blackmailed" to give up their non-existant non-rights. This is the internet afterall, where everyone's an armchair constitutional scholar!
You can see the problem here, he's arguing that the guy's rights are dependent on him pleading guilty. He should have been charged with a crime that had a 6 month sentence, but instead they charge him with crimes which would have locked him away for most of his life, in ORDER TO FORCE HIM TO SKIP THE TRIAL AND PLEAD GUILTY.
Tell me, do you sell your car for what it's actually worth, or do you add a little bit extra to negotiate down from? Same thing. Admittedly, most people add 10--15%, not 1000%...
This won't even be a blip on the DOJ's radar.,
"Guantanamo Bay called sir, something about not being on the radar? They say we're routinely torturing the shit out of hundreds of people for years at a go, and they are kept on suicide watch all the time because if they had the chance, every single one of them would kill themselves in moments."
DOJ: "I thought I told you I wanted a LIGHTLY toasted bagel! Wait, what were you saying again?"