Get the masses to play each other with computers providing assistance (depending on what sort of player you want). Top winner plays grandmaster/number 1 in the world. Genetic algorithm if you may.
Maybe the trick is to get the masses to play the opposite side, kind of a devil's advocate -- have the machine provide it's suggestions to the humans who then evaluate its options by playing against them. This feedback could be used to asses its own N+1 strategies and perhaps dismiss those that were blocked more easily or better anticpiate opponent moves that are "wildcat" moves that would otherwise be unexpected.
And rather than simple majority rule voting, perhaps a better idea would be a statistical scoring system which would enable the machine to track its human input and weight the choices over time in favor of those that worked better or contributed more to its strategy -- eliminating or discounting those that were less valuable.
Geeze, this is kind of fascinating. I should have played more chess or not switched to PoliSci from CompSci...
With all the stories about viruses (like MiMail) being backdoors for spammers, how likely is it that organized crime has gotten involved in the computer crime business? It fits their uh, business model, pretty well -- lots of opportunity for stealing credit card info, bank info, etc. And it's not like Tony Soprano has to learn Visual Basic, either -- there's plenty of people who would either do this on their own and sell stolen info to the Mob.
One of the things they could do is start a generic programming business and hire a dozen or so coders and have them start working on a fairly generic database system. Have a manager type get to know them and figure out which might have money problems, drug problems or some other vulnerability. Once you get them 'snared', you can get them to write a trojan app, phishing site, what have you -- the Mob maintains arm's length deniability and reaps the profits.
It's been widely reported that organized crime has been deeply entrenched in Wall Street and the securities industry -- how different is the securities boilerroom from a trojan/programming boilerroom? Maybe I'm naive and they've been at this since day one, but it wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't another white collar angle for organized crime.
The grandmaster provides strategy, and tells the computers which paths to look into. The computers provide search depth and protection against stupid mistakes.
This would be more interesting than a plain vote, which as you note would just aggregate mediocrity.
Rather than a grandmaster or other real expert, for which there are limited pools of, perhaps you could use a voting system with the computer(s) providing the choices, and the users voting on the choices the computer made? While this might be less intelligent than a true expert guiding what amounts to number crunching, it's more suggestive of a collaborative system that can provide a "thinking upgrade" to non-experts, which may have broader applications.
This way the machine is able to benefit from aggregated human choices without being a complete victim of mediocrity, and the humans are able to benefit from the machine's ability to eliminate choices through its inherent advantage, brute force. Perhaps it could be taken a step further, and give the machine the option of picking from the top two or three human choices.
I'm enough of a chess player to know how the pieces move but no more, so I don't know how important it is to stick to a strategy beginning to end or if its more important to be able to switch strategies in the middle.
But either way, the idea of using massive computing power to improve human decisionmaking is intriguing, particularly if you can have a collaborative process that raises the abilities of both non-experts and machines at the same time.
...other tech zealots. I don't have a preference for one or other other (my wife, however, has rejected satellite because of the dish on the roof..), but I seem to run into satellite zealots who insist that cable is always evil and inferior to satellite.
I'm not a cable fan, but Crime-Warner cable where I live is priced competitively with packages I've been able to compute for satellite, service has been good the two times it was needed (one time was when we buried our service), and I don't have to make an investment in hardware or fsck around with a satellite mount my other half doesn't want.
No, it's not elitist, these people can't keep track of files ("Where did I save this?"), they have trouble with running programs, lots of things. It's a big problem, as they feed the pipeline for production and it drives the production people batshit because they'll get print jobs from them that are broken and the creative people can't find the files, the CDs they burned are empty, it would be funny if it wasn't such a pain in the ass.
And I'm not sure Apple's solutions are any easier than Microsofts. I've been doing some testing with an iBook and wireless, and it's kind of astounding how many different dialog boxes I have to use to configure and manage a wireless connection and a vpn connection, but I think Apple's taken a beating from a lot of long-time MacOS fans over this kind of thing.
I think ultimately sticking your head in the sand and saying "I don't want to know about computers" and then wanting to use computers -- especially wanting to RELY on them for getting work done for money, ie in your job -- and then just grasping for a Mac just seems naive. A woman I worked with here, who was also a die-hard Mac user ended up quitting to deal with a sick husband. At home all she had was his Win2k PC and when I talked to her about six months after she left she actually apologized for being so rude about Macs.
Anyway, I just wish that a lot of creatives wouldn't be so knee-jerk about Macs. I'd bet half of them would find a PC just fine, of if it was roughly equal from a functionality perspective, make a choice based on some other rational criteria like money or compatibility or whatever.
I work professionally with both platforms, and I think Apple appeals to creative types for stylistic and emotional reasons, not because it's always the best/cheapest product or technology for the job. Most of our creative types have weak computer skills and little technology "confidence" and tend to seek Apple solutions because the tiny computer skill they do have is with Macs. Since "everyone else" does this same thing, you get a herd mentality, coupled with fear and willful ignorance.
It's not that there aren't good reasons for desiring Apple stuff from a technology perspective, but I have seen few creatives able to do this.
There's starting to be a little turnaround -- a number of states' legislatures have introduced bills which would put the brakes on the offshoring of work associated with state contracts. It's hard to know if this is a meaningful thing, but it can have ripples in the way businesses that do business with the state are organized.
Exactly, that is what I was getting at. We as Americans need to utilize the dominant position we have been given/earned/lucked into and utilize it to bring up the less fortunate to our standards through smart use of incentives instead of allowing corporations to dictate short-sighted, self aggrandizing motives that solidify their power through the use of any means necessary, which generally means through corruption and other means that would be deemed immoral by US and progressive standards.
I that business will never allow for any kind of free trade agreement that mandates even US equivilent standards on the environment, labor organization (which is often analogous to political organization), wages and working conditions, and so on because the only reason the third world is cheaper to operate in is because they don't have any of those protections. If you mandated those things, those countries would probably end up being much more expensive to operate in because the necessary regulation and oversight would be far less efficient than it is in the US -- you can't start regulation overnight and expect it to work.
I think what needs to be published more often is not just US corporate profiteering on poor labor practices overseas, but the insidious relationship between US corporations and the fairly ugly, dictatorial and oppressive regeimes overseas, particularly of those that like to wrap a flag around themselves at home yet are willing to prop up dictators abroad when it's profitable. I can see a public service TV spot showing a group of dissidents being lined up and executed, and the camera turning towards the firing squad, dressed head-to-toe in clothing with US corporate logos on it.
This is exactly the problem w/ free trade. Conservatives want it for obvious reasons and progressives want it since they mistakenly believe it will bring up the standards of living in the target countries. Although it does (bring up the std of living), it does so through achieving equilibrium. The problem with that is to achieve equilibrium, two sides need to meet in the middle and that means decrease in the std of living for the higher income group. To prevent this it requires a smart plan, one which is sorely lacking in this case. In the absence of this plan, the only people who benefit from free trade are the really rich as they income gap increases.
True conservatives (not to be confused with some overlap with Bush Republicans) are actually opposed to widespread immigration and free trade, because true conservatives don't like the cultural or economic changes that go along with it. Conservatives prefer the status quo, or some recent history version of it. Bush Republicans, at least those that overlap less with true conservatives, tend to like free trade and immigration because it his immediate and obvious business value -- forces down US wages and working standards, and lowers short-term business operating costs. The impact it has on US workers or third world environments doesn't matter to them.
"Progressives", by which I think you mean those more oriented towards a left-wing set of solutions, do think it will improve third world countries through investment, and they also think that large-scale third world immigration is good for the US as well, since, at least since the 1970s, generally tends to "brown" the population which they naively see as an automatic political advantage to them since all "brown" people vote, act and think "left". Some old-line labor lefties have sounded some alarms about this, wisely seeing jobs leaving, low-wage workers coming and their traditional labor constituency getting undermined.
The big problem in improving third world living standards is that most of the time when jobs and industry are relocated, they are relocated to third world countries with no labor protections and no environmental standards. They're also extremely corrupt places, and its in the financial interest of multinationals to keep bribing officials into maintaining an artificially cheap place to do business -- government crackdowns on labor (or government turning its head when private goon squads do it), ignoring even illegal-by-local-standards pollution, all the usual things we've come to expect from dictatorships.
I've always though that Microsoft and Communist China were a lot alike. Both promote this kind of all-encompasing future, brook no dissent yet have virulent dissident groups. They both also look awkward and embarassed by high-profile public relations problems that directly contradict their propaganda systems.
Open relays, while enabling spamming, aren't the real problem. The real problem is the total unwillingness of the FTC to crack down on email based crime. Almost all spam is pretty much openly fraudulent -- either the products don't work, you don't get a product, or you're not supposed to get the product in the first place.
Why hasn't the government initiated a crackdown on the crime WITHIN the spam? Why is their such a willingness to accept that but be mad that someone is spamming about it? I sometimes wonder if most Americans (and I'm one as well) don't have some kind of built-in huckster or a total absence of ethics that they don't have a problem with the fact people are committing fraud.
If the government would bother following the money trail over some spam transactions, they'd not only get a much better idea what's "behind" spam (my theory is a fairly small number of people are responsible for a lot of it), as well as catch the same people comitting the same fraud, over and over, which becomes a possible RICO prosecution -- lots of jail time for anyone even tangentally involved. Which might actually do more to end spam by getting rid of its clients than some lame relay closing enterprise -- haven't they moved a lot of their operations to zombies and cracked proxies anyway?
Make them stop lying and tell the truth
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
No, really. Marketing is all fine and dandy, but too often -- increasingly WAY TOO OFTEN -- it's used as an excuse to cheat people by thinking they're getting something they're not. These can be direct lies (battery runtime you get with a brand-new battery for a week, "120 megabytes") and they can be lies of omisssion (product does some task X, but only on Sundays or with the purchase of another product).
Unfortunately I don't have any realistic solutions, but the increasingly acceptable combination of "totally unethical" and "within the letter of the law" is the reason for much of this. It's not that manufacturers always make bad products or that they're always hard to use. They're just too often described as doing more, more easily, than they actually do.
I can appreciate having a higher level OS or OS 2nd stage components in an erasable ROM, but wouldn't it stand to reason that you'd want a basic "rescue" OS with capabilities for controlling the computer in a totally novolatile storage? So that in case of corruption of writable memories you could get into a basic debug mode for reloading OS or otherwise fixing your higher level environment?
I'm not a rocket scientist either, but it strikes me that you'd want a real failsafe for fixing the computer stored in the most permanent memory possible, and kept with the lowest set of features necessary so it could be thoroughly debugged prior to being made.
But, as these things go, greater minds have thought of this I'm sure.
With a little detective work, MWD will eventually discover that the signal is a directional transmission from the camera to a local TV station that features the feed on its website and in its nightly newscast.
So really the trick is to override their feed during the nightly news with more provocative content. It might be amusing to be real subtle about it, such as periodically putting footage from the wrong season or another time of day, CGI-ing the skyline (burning buildings, missing buildings, buildings that aren't really there, etc), using a different city skyline, etc. Just putting the goatse guy on would be a little less interesting.
Ideally you'd have a reachable PC generating the video, with the ability to remotely switch between the real camera's feed and your feed to keep 'em guessing.
All the more ironic that "The Conversation" was filmed in SF.
Re:what makes you think that people in Russia
on
More MyDoom Gloom
·
· Score: 1
In pleasant terms, the editors are concerned that the respect for international conventions, especially the rule of law and criminal justice in Russia isn't exactly strong.
In unpleasant terms, the editors think Russia is dictatorship run by the mafia and the security service with zero concern for international law or control over its criminal element.
It's usually portrayed that way in the US news (which for me is the New York Times regularly and the Economist occasionally -- I'd do better, but that's about the best I can do reliably and conveniently here in Minnesota). Putin's moves against the chairman of the oil company certainly look dictatorial and evidence of his KGB pedigree.
Russia's problems with organized crime are well known, and while the impact on every day citizens may be less than we think, it really does have the appearance of being out of control.
There have been cross-cultural studies that have demonstrated certain basic sex characteristics such as bust/hips ratio have deep human appeal. This has been used to push the hypothesis that "sex appeal" based on looks has some instinctual relationship to reproduction (ie, a woman with a specific bust/hip ratio may be more sucessful at birthing and nursing a child, ensuring offspring, etc etc).
Perhaps the movie industry isn't really recycling personae, but just reflecting the variance of this basic reproductive "advantage". Britney Spears, likable or not as a musician, certainly has a desirable bosom and hip ratio from a reproductive standpoint.
No offense to Eno (whose music I like) and Gabriel (whose music I'm indifferent to) fans, but in order for something like this to be a success, for better or for worse, you need loud participation from musicians who haven't plateaued caereer-wise and are bigger-name "pop" musicians.
The former provides more financial clout and the latter more name recognition and clout. Of course it stands to reason that wildly popular pop musicians are likely to think that the current system works since they're benefitting from it (despite the longer-term consequences) or lack the business savvy or "political" interest to do so.
But I don't think a poorly named initiative by two musicians whose careers, however successful, are largely over and done, is going to do much, since these artists aren't as much of a PR or business influence on the industry. But I do applaud the idea behind it, and think that they'd probably be better off funding a PR campaign hilighting the RIAAs bullshit accounting and police-state tacticts towards old ladies with iMacs.
It's an interesting legal/philosophical question, but the answer (not flippantly, either) is probably NASA only, due to its connections with the government and military. Even in international waters, military and space vehicle stuff isn't up for salvage, unless (A) you have better weapons than the US Navy and (B) you can grab it and get away with it before they do.
In reality, it's salvagable by whoever gets their and can grab it without the military getting it first and without a whole shedload of US diplomatic pressure to give it back. Since we're talking Mars, and not some Pacific atoll or the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, I'd wager that the rights don't matter -- barring some major innovation, it's sitting there for a few decades at least.
I think you're right. In the late 90s, everyone I met asked me what certifications I had -- I told them none other than a Big 10 University degree (not in CS), although I had taken a few classes from the vendor-labeled certification "programs" to get myself up to speed (with the Cisco routing classes being the most useful in a general sense). They were often horrified, but that was the only standard they had to judge people on. I kind of felt awkward, but I'd look at the certification programs and wonder what a waste it all was, especially since some really wanted classroom hours PLUS the tests, and it all cost more than *I* was willing to pay or manegement would pay.
Now I'm glad -- I met plenty of morons with certs who really didn't belong in their jobs. I feel bad for the guys who are really good with no college, a pile of certs and no job -- the market will be hard on them, if only because many employers make a college degree a required prerequisite in addition to experience.
You could have spared me the pedantic lecture on X, I've built and run many systems that use it, even though I don't like it. I think getting a desktop environment on most workstation type machines using X is just too much work, too many components and too much bullshit. I generally don't build it for most of the FreeBSD systems IO make as its too much overhead for too little benefit in a server environment.
Maybe X needs to continue for the small percentage of people that really do need to display Sun X applications on their PCs or whatever, but perhaps that just means an alternative system with fewer internal layers and fewer depedencies for the huge majority of people who aren't that interested in remote displaying applications, and who could live with a less sophisticated remote display technology.
It's not that what X does isn't valuable, it's that desktops built in an X environment have just too much overhead associated with them. I'm glad you like it. I think you're one of the few.
The modular approach of X is one of its great strengths, not weaknesses. The same specification (X11R6) has scaled well enough that it hasn't needed reworking in over a decade.
X itself isn't a complete desktop environment. In the past ten years, it's taken the ADDITION of a huge number of things to make a usable GUI desktop environment. X alone didn't do it. X alone didn't "scale" (which I think is a misnomer), a bunch of other stuff largely nonexistant 10 years ago to make X into some of the more usable desktop.
X's lack of change is more likely due to the fact that it IS so modular; changing X in significant ways would break a ton of stuff in so many ways that the changes are likely impossible. This is where too much modularity is a problem.
Personally I can't stand X because of its insane amount of modularity and dependencies. I do think that a new system that re-thinks X's goals and perhaps more efficiently integrates the desktop and the GUI and the video interface into a more coherent environment would result in better performance and wider acceptance of a UNIX desktop.
And if X is so hot, why doesn't Apple run their GUI under X? Clearly they saw the limitations of it and decided to do something else.
Yay, I'm supposed to work for less money so I can be competitive with guys living in India, China and other third world countries. It's good for business, I'm told.
But if I try to turn the tables and expand my purchasing power and buy from those same countries I'm not allowed to because its not good for business.
What the *fuck*? Why they hell can't I "compete" globally where it benefits me? Why is only business and its fat-cat corporate honchos allowed to exploit global discounts, but the rest of are forced to pay sky-high local prices but get paid third-world wages?
There's too much behind-the-scenes profiteering from spam, and ISPs or others who turn a blind eye or practice willful ignorance are part of the problem. Getting their wider netblocks listed forces them to at least pay better attention to the networks if not forcing them to clean up their business practices.
It'd be nice to know which major banks are willfully providing credit card merchant services to spammers as well so we could boycott and publicize their sleaze as well.
You could argue that what they were really opposed to was the kind of legalized extortion that a lot of small businesses get exposed to. What they failed to mention was that most businesses exposed to that kind of situation have it happen through no fault of their own, whereas fax.com brought it on themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Get the masses to play each other with computers providing assistance (depending on what sort of player you want). Top winner plays grandmaster/number 1 in the world. Genetic algorithm if you may.
Maybe the trick is to get the masses to play the opposite side, kind of a devil's advocate -- have the machine provide it's suggestions to the humans who then evaluate its options by playing against them. This feedback could be used to asses its own N+1 strategies and perhaps dismiss those that were blocked more easily or better anticpiate opponent moves that are "wildcat" moves that would otherwise be unexpected.
And rather than simple majority rule voting, perhaps a better idea would be a statistical scoring system which would enable the machine to track its human input and weight the choices over time in favor of those that worked better or contributed more to its strategy -- eliminating or discounting those that were less valuable.
Geeze, this is kind of fascinating. I should have played more chess or not switched to PoliSci from CompSci...
maybe he just got an offer he couldn't refuse...
With all the stories about viruses (like MiMail) being backdoors for spammers, how likely is it that organized crime has gotten involved in the computer crime business? It fits their uh, business model, pretty well -- lots of opportunity for stealing credit card info, bank info, etc. And it's not like Tony Soprano has to learn Visual Basic, either -- there's plenty of people who would either do this on their own and sell stolen info to the Mob.
One of the things they could do is start a generic programming business and hire a dozen or so coders and have them start working on a fairly generic database system. Have a manager type get to know them and figure out which might have money problems, drug problems or some other vulnerability. Once you get them 'snared', you can get them to write a trojan app, phishing site, what have you -- the Mob maintains arm's length deniability and reaps the profits.
It's been widely reported that organized crime has been deeply entrenched in Wall Street and the securities industry -- how different is the securities boilerroom from a trojan/programming boilerroom? Maybe I'm naive and they've been at this since day one, but it wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't another white collar angle for organized crime.
The grandmaster provides strategy, and tells the computers which paths to look into. The computers provide search depth and protection against stupid mistakes.
This would be more interesting than a plain vote, which as you note would just aggregate mediocrity.
Rather than a grandmaster or other real expert, for which there are limited pools of, perhaps you could use a voting system with the computer(s) providing the choices, and the users voting on the choices the computer made? While this might be less intelligent than a true expert guiding what amounts to number crunching, it's more suggestive of a collaborative system that can provide a "thinking upgrade" to non-experts, which may have broader applications.
This way the machine is able to benefit from aggregated human choices without being a complete victim of mediocrity, and the humans are able to benefit from the machine's ability to eliminate choices through its inherent advantage, brute force. Perhaps it could be taken a step further, and give the machine the option of picking from the top two or three human choices.
I'm enough of a chess player to know how the pieces move but no more, so I don't know how important it is to stick to a strategy beginning to end or if its more important to be able to switch strategies in the middle.
But either way, the idea of using massive computing power to improve human decisionmaking is intriguing, particularly if you can have a collaborative process that raises the abilities of both non-experts and machines at the same time.
...other tech zealots. I don't have a preference for one or other other (my wife, however, has rejected satellite because of the dish on the roof..), but I seem to run into satellite zealots who insist that cable is always evil and inferior to satellite.
I'm not a cable fan, but Crime-Warner cable where I live is priced competitively with packages I've been able to compute for satellite, service has been good the two times it was needed (one time was when we buried our service), and I don't have to make an investment in hardware or fsck around with a satellite mount my other half doesn't want.
No, it's not elitist, these people can't keep track of files ("Where did I save this?"), they have trouble with running programs, lots of things. It's a big problem, as they feed the pipeline for production and it drives the production people batshit because they'll get print jobs from them that are broken and the creative people can't find the files, the CDs they burned are empty, it would be funny if it wasn't such a pain in the ass.
And I'm not sure Apple's solutions are any easier than Microsofts. I've been doing some testing with an iBook and wireless, and it's kind of astounding how many different dialog boxes I have to use to configure and manage a wireless connection and a vpn connection, but I think Apple's taken a beating from a lot of long-time MacOS fans over this kind of thing.
I think ultimately sticking your head in the sand and saying "I don't want to know about computers" and then wanting to use computers -- especially wanting to RELY on them for getting work done for money, ie in your job -- and then just grasping for a Mac just seems naive. A woman I worked with here, who was also a die-hard Mac user ended up quitting to deal with a sick husband. At home all she had was his Win2k PC and when I talked to her about six months after she left she actually apologized for being so rude about Macs.
Anyway, I just wish that a lot of creatives wouldn't be so knee-jerk about Macs. I'd bet half of them would find a PC just fine, of if it was roughly equal from a functionality perspective, make a choice based on some other rational criteria like money or compatibility or whatever.
I work professionally with both platforms, and I think Apple appeals to creative types for stylistic and emotional reasons, not because it's always the best/cheapest product or technology for the job. Most of our creative types have weak computer skills and little technology "confidence" and tend to seek Apple solutions because the tiny computer skill they do have is with Macs. Since "everyone else" does this same thing, you get a herd mentality, coupled with fear and willful ignorance.
It's not that there aren't good reasons for desiring Apple stuff from a technology perspective, but I have seen few creatives able to do this.
There's starting to be a little turnaround -- a number of states' legislatures have introduced bills which would put the brakes on the offshoring of work associated with state contracts. It's hard to know if this is a meaningful thing, but it can have ripples in the way businesses that do business with the state are organized.
Exactly, that is what I was getting at. We as Americans need to utilize the dominant position we have been given/earned/lucked into and utilize it to bring up the less fortunate to our standards through smart use of incentives instead of allowing corporations to dictate short-sighted, self aggrandizing motives that solidify their power through the use of any means necessary, which generally means through corruption and other means that would be deemed immoral by US and progressive standards.
I that business will never allow for any kind of free trade agreement that mandates even US equivilent standards on the environment, labor organization (which is often analogous to political organization), wages and working conditions, and so on because the only reason the third world is cheaper to operate in is because they don't have any of those protections. If you mandated those things, those countries would probably end up being much more expensive to operate in because the necessary regulation and oversight would be far less efficient than it is in the US -- you can't start regulation overnight and expect it to work.
I think what needs to be published more often is not just US corporate profiteering on poor labor practices overseas, but the insidious relationship between US corporations and the fairly ugly, dictatorial and oppressive regeimes overseas, particularly of those that like to wrap a flag around themselves at home yet are willing to prop up dictators abroad when it's profitable. I can see a public service TV spot showing a group of dissidents being lined up and executed, and the camera turning towards the firing squad, dressed head-to-toe in clothing with US corporate logos on it.
This is exactly the problem w/ free trade. Conservatives want it for obvious reasons and progressives want it since they mistakenly believe it will bring up the standards of living in the target countries. Although it does (bring up the std of living), it does so through achieving equilibrium. The problem with that is to achieve equilibrium, two sides need to meet in the middle and that means decrease in the std of living for the higher income group. To prevent this it requires a smart plan, one which is sorely lacking in this case. In the absence of this plan, the only people who benefit from free trade are the really rich as they income gap increases.
True conservatives (not to be confused with some overlap with Bush Republicans) are actually opposed to widespread immigration and free trade, because true conservatives don't like the cultural or economic changes that go along with it. Conservatives prefer the status quo, or some recent history version of it. Bush Republicans, at least those that overlap less with true conservatives, tend to like free trade and immigration because it his immediate and obvious business value -- forces down US wages and working standards, and lowers short-term business operating costs. The impact it has on US workers or third world environments doesn't matter to them.
"Progressives", by which I think you mean those more oriented towards a left-wing set of solutions, do think it will improve third world countries through investment, and they also think that large-scale third world immigration is good for the US as well, since, at least since the 1970s, generally tends to "brown" the population which they naively see as an automatic political advantage to them since all "brown" people vote, act and think "left". Some old-line labor lefties have sounded some alarms about this, wisely seeing jobs leaving, low-wage workers coming and their traditional labor constituency getting undermined.
The big problem in improving third world living standards is that most of the time when jobs and industry are relocated, they are relocated to third world countries with no labor protections and no environmental standards. They're also extremely corrupt places, and its in the financial interest of multinationals to keep bribing officials into maintaining an artificially cheap place to do business -- government crackdowns on labor (or government turning its head when private goon squads do it), ignoring even illegal-by-local-standards pollution, all the usual things we've come to expect from dictatorships.
I've always though that Microsoft and Communist China were a lot alike. Both promote this kind of all-encompasing future, brook no dissent yet have virulent dissident groups. They both also look awkward and embarassed by high-profile public relations problems that directly contradict their propaganda systems.
Open relays, while enabling spamming, aren't the real problem. The real problem is the total unwillingness of the FTC to crack down on email based crime. Almost all spam is pretty much openly fraudulent -- either the products don't work, you don't get a product, or you're not supposed to get the product in the first place.
Why hasn't the government initiated a crackdown on the crime WITHIN the spam? Why is their such a willingness to accept that but be mad that someone is spamming about it? I sometimes wonder if most Americans (and I'm one as well) don't have some kind of built-in huckster or a total absence of ethics that they don't have a problem with the fact people are committing fraud.
If the government would bother following the money trail over some spam transactions, they'd not only get a much better idea what's "behind" spam (my theory is a fairly small number of people are responsible for a lot of it), as well as catch the same people comitting the same fraud, over and over, which becomes a possible RICO prosecution -- lots of jail time for anyone even tangentally involved. Which might actually do more to end spam by getting rid of its clients than some lame relay closing enterprise -- haven't they moved a lot of their operations to zombies and cracked proxies anyway?
No, really. Marketing is all fine and dandy, but too often -- increasingly WAY TOO OFTEN -- it's used as an excuse to cheat people by thinking they're getting something they're not. These can be direct lies (battery runtime you get with a brand-new battery for a week, "120 megabytes") and they can be lies of omisssion (product does some task X, but only on Sundays or with the purchase of another product).
Unfortunately I don't have any realistic solutions, but the increasingly acceptable combination of "totally unethical" and "within the letter of the law" is the reason for much of this. It's not that manufacturers always make bad products or that they're always hard to use. They're just too often described as doing more, more easily, than they actually do.
I can appreciate having a higher level OS or OS 2nd stage components in an erasable ROM, but wouldn't it stand to reason that you'd want a basic "rescue" OS with capabilities for controlling the computer in a totally novolatile storage? So that in case of corruption of writable memories you could get into a basic debug mode for reloading OS or otherwise fixing your higher level environment?
I'm not a rocket scientist either, but it strikes me that you'd want a real failsafe for fixing the computer stored in the most permanent memory possible, and kept with the lowest set of features necessary so it could be thoroughly debugged prior to being made.
But, as these things go, greater minds have thought of this I'm sure.
With a little detective work, MWD will eventually discover that the signal is a directional transmission from the camera to a local TV station that features the feed on its website and in its nightly newscast.
So really the trick is to override their feed during the nightly news with more provocative content. It might be amusing to be real subtle about it, such as periodically putting footage from the wrong season or another time of day, CGI-ing the skyline (burning buildings, missing buildings, buildings that aren't really there, etc), using a different city skyline, etc. Just putting the goatse guy on would be a little less interesting.
Ideally you'd have a reachable PC generating the video, with the ability to remotely switch between the real camera's feed and your feed to keep 'em guessing.
All the more ironic that "The Conversation" was filmed in SF.
In pleasant terms, the editors are concerned that the respect for international conventions, especially the rule of law and criminal justice in Russia isn't exactly strong.
In unpleasant terms, the editors think Russia is dictatorship run by the mafia and the security service with zero concern for international law or control over its criminal element.
It's usually portrayed that way in the US news (which for me is the New York Times regularly and the Economist occasionally -- I'd do better, but that's about the best I can do reliably and conveniently here in Minnesota). Putin's moves against the chairman of the oil company certainly look dictatorial and evidence of his KGB pedigree.
Russia's problems with organized crime are well known, and while the impact on every day citizens may be less than we think, it really does have the appearance of being out of control.
There have been cross-cultural studies that have demonstrated certain basic sex characteristics such as bust/hips ratio have deep human appeal. This has been used to push the hypothesis that "sex appeal" based on looks has some instinctual relationship to reproduction (ie, a woman with a specific bust/hip ratio may be more sucessful at birthing and nursing a child, ensuring offspring, etc etc).
Perhaps the movie industry isn't really recycling personae, but just reflecting the variance of this basic reproductive "advantage". Britney Spears, likable or not as a musician, certainly has a desirable bosom and hip ratio from a reproductive standpoint.
Just a guess.
No offense to Eno (whose music I like) and Gabriel (whose music I'm indifferent to) fans, but in order for something like this to be a success, for better or for worse, you need loud participation from musicians who haven't plateaued caereer-wise and are bigger-name "pop" musicians.
The former provides more financial clout and the latter more name recognition and clout. Of course it stands to reason that wildly popular pop musicians are likely to think that the current system works since they're benefitting from it (despite the longer-term consequences) or lack the business savvy or "political" interest to do so.
But I don't think a poorly named initiative by two musicians whose careers, however successful, are largely over and done, is going to do much, since these artists aren't as much of a PR or business influence on the industry. But I do applaud the idea behind it, and think that they'd probably be better off funding a PR campaign hilighting the RIAAs bullshit accounting and police-state tacticts towards old ladies with iMacs.
Who has salvage rights to that stuff?
It's an interesting legal/philosophical question, but the answer (not flippantly, either) is probably NASA only, due to its connections with the government and military. Even in international waters, military and space vehicle stuff isn't up for salvage, unless (A) you have better weapons than the US Navy and (B) you can grab it and get away with it before they do.
In reality, it's salvagable by whoever gets their and can grab it without the military getting it first and without a whole shedload of US diplomatic pressure to give it back. Since we're talking Mars, and not some Pacific atoll or the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, I'd wager that the rights don't matter -- barring some major innovation, it's sitting there for a few decades at least.
I think you're right. In the late 90s, everyone I met asked me what certifications I had -- I told them none other than a Big 10 University degree (not in CS), although I had taken a few classes from the vendor-labeled certification "programs" to get myself up to speed (with the Cisco routing classes being the most useful in a general sense). They were often horrified, but that was the only standard they had to judge people on. I kind of felt awkward, but I'd look at the certification programs and wonder what a waste it all was, especially since some really wanted classroom hours PLUS the tests, and it all cost more than *I* was willing to pay or manegement would pay.
Now I'm glad -- I met plenty of morons with certs who really didn't belong in their jobs. I feel bad for the guys who are really good with no college, a pile of certs and no job -- the market will be hard on them, if only because many employers make a college degree a required prerequisite in addition to experience.
You could have spared me the pedantic lecture on X, I've built and run many systems that use it, even though I don't like it. I think getting a desktop environment on most workstation type machines using X is just too much work, too many components and too much bullshit. I generally don't build it for most of the FreeBSD systems IO make as its too much overhead for too little benefit in a server environment.
Maybe X needs to continue for the small percentage of people that really do need to display Sun X applications on their PCs or whatever, but perhaps that just means an alternative system with fewer internal layers and fewer depedencies for the huge majority of people who aren't that interested in remote displaying applications, and who could live with a less sophisticated remote display technology.
It's not that what X does isn't valuable, it's that desktops built in an X environment have just too much overhead associated with them. I'm glad you like it. I think you're one of the few.
Have you also noticed that all the raids police and the military usually perform are "Pre-Dawn Raids"?
The modular approach of X is one of its great strengths, not weaknesses. The same specification (X11R6) has scaled well enough that it hasn't needed reworking in over a decade.
X itself isn't a complete desktop environment. In the past ten years, it's taken the ADDITION of a huge number of things to make a usable GUI desktop environment. X alone didn't do it. X alone didn't "scale" (which I think is a misnomer), a bunch of other stuff largely nonexistant 10 years ago to make X into some of the more usable desktop.
X's lack of change is more likely due to the fact that it IS so modular; changing X in significant ways would break a ton of stuff in so many ways that the changes are likely impossible. This is where too much modularity is a problem.
Personally I can't stand X because of its insane amount of modularity and dependencies. I do think that a new system that re-thinks X's goals and perhaps more efficiently integrates the desktop and the GUI and the video interface into a more coherent environment would result in better performance and wider acceptance of a UNIX desktop.
And if X is so hot, why doesn't Apple run their GUI under X? Clearly they saw the limitations of it and decided to do something else.
Yay, I'm supposed to work for less money so I can be competitive with guys living in India, China and other third world countries. It's good for business, I'm told.
But if I try to turn the tables and expand my purchasing power and buy from those same countries I'm not allowed to because its not good for business.
What the *fuck*? Why they hell can't I "compete" globally where it benefits me? Why is only business and its fat-cat corporate honchos allowed to exploit global discounts, but the rest of are forced to pay sky-high local prices but get paid third-world wages?
Working in an illegal diamond mine. Hot as hell, hard to breathe, little food, you get shot if you don't find anything or enough.
Sounds like a "weekend" field office upgrade.
90+ degrees, 30 hours of work, little food, and you get fired if you don't have the upgrade completed by Monday morning.
There's too much behind-the-scenes profiteering from spam, and ISPs or others who turn a blind eye or practice willful ignorance are part of the problem. Getting their wider netblocks listed forces them to at least pay better attention to the networks if not forcing them to clean up their business practices.
It'd be nice to know which major banks are willfully providing credit card merchant services to spammers as well so we could boycott and publicize their sleaze as well.
You could argue that what they were really opposed to was the kind of legalized extortion that a lot of small businesses get exposed to. What they failed to mention was that most businesses exposed to that kind of situation have it happen through no fault of their own, whereas fax.com brought it on themselves.
Duh.