DID the Sony rootkit thing ever get cleaned up? If you think so, why do you think so?
IMNHO, Sony never cleaned up the mess they made, millions of people were victimized, many totally unknowning about what happened, and Sony just swept the mess under the rug and waited for the fuss to die down.
That whole affair was Sony abusing their dominant position to inflict harm and suffering on other while suffering only negligible costs to themselves. If you trust them after that,... were I religious I'd say "God help you, because nobody else can."
OK. If they disclose what they're doing and what it means to all customers BEFORE they pay their money, then that's an acceptable answer. Otherwise not.
Presuming, as claimed, that this mechanism is undisclosed before purchase, and what it does is also undisclosed, then I hope the suit is both successful and expensive.
It wouldn't even work for THAT. See arguments posted earlier for one of several reasons why not.
This is just either security theater (as many have claimed) or a chance for somebody to get some money wasting your money. If it gets implemented, it will be because of the security theater aspect. Or possibly because it's easier to control a society if personal mobility is restricted, so it's desirable to make it inconvenient to travel.
I'm fine with this, if and only if they are using IPv6. Or behind a NAT + firewall.
In some ways I prefer the NAT wall. It's not at all clear that all these devices SHOULD be trusted, and I might well want to prevent them from network access outside of my local zone. Cisco routers, well, that's a different case, as often they naturally live outside the firewall...in that case what one wants to limit is their access to the internals.
I mean, I can think of all sorts of useful purposes that for this. The problem is, I can also think of lots of unpleasant uses.
That's the way it started. Lately they've been suing cities that didn't agree to their terms, and still wanted to offer the service, so tried to set it up themselves.
They don't deserve to have ANY slack cut for them. They are known abusers. Actually, they are known liars and thieves, as they took federal money to provide broadband service to everyone in the country, and have refused to deliver where it was "unprofitable" (not counting the money the feds gave them).
Does C have a BCD datatype? If not, then for financial calculations you are going to need something more complex.
You can't use floats for financial calculations with money (unless they've changed the rules). You need to use int-s and calculate the values in pennies, and then convert to float dollars for output. Not that this is horrendous, but it does add to the complexity. I remember a co-worker who fought furiously with a rounding problem in a financial calculation. He finally had to resort to a bucket-rounding approach. (He was using Fortran, but the same problem happens with most languages that aren't specialized for financial calculations...don't know how Cobol handles this kind of thing.)
OK. OpenGL wasn't included in my "good GUI packages", because when I've looked at it it looked too heavy and clumsy for what I wanted to do. And nothing that's "Windows only" is going to meet my needs.
I did look at using the POSIX package for Haskell, but that looked quite clumsy. (Well, I'm clearly not a Haskell programmer, so I could be wrong about that.)
I just now went to the Haskell code site mentioned elsewhere in this thread looking for I/O methods and found Couch. When I looked it up, it turns out it's a version 0.8 and has a known memory leak. There didn't seem to be anything else relevant. (Yeah, I know, POSIX exists, but it wasn't mentioned at that site.) I haven't looked at OCAML seriously in a couple of years, but I don't recall any graphics package catching my notice.
I'll grant that I'm not giving Haskell the kind of fair shake that I'd give to, say, Ada, but Haskell looks stranger, has less documentation, and is more difficult to translate the standard algorithms into. So it needs to offer something that's clearly superior enough to compensate for the deficiencies. I just couldn't find anything that looked even close to that. (Alice from Stanford came much closer, as did Mozart...but they weren't good enough either...though I can't remember in detail why I decided that. [Stanford's Alice compiles to ML, so it could be an efficiency thing.])
OK. Now I've looked at "Real World Haskell". It seems to answer many of my questions, the ones that were sufficient to cause me to stop looking back when I was choosing what language to study next. I've still got concerns about how one would deal with large programs, persistence, etc., but those were secondary, and I never got as far as checking them out the last time I looked at Haskell. I still don't see a place to find translations of the various standard algorithms, and that's a pretty big hurdle. I did notice that Gtk access is provided...at least via Glade, so most things of that nature that need to be done should be doable.
If you want to get programmers to use Haskell, you should make sure that they are exposed to that book. (I've only glanced through it, of course, but it does deal with many of the concerns that other sources of information left unanswered.)
Scala is one of the languages that looks interesting... but what implications does using the JVM have for using multiple processors?
My understand was the Java threads, like the Python GIL (global interpreter lock) imply that the program is running in only one processor. If this is incorrect, then that would be very interesting.
OK, but either they don't have any reasonable way to do I/O, or they don't have any decent documentation of it.
For that matter, most basic algorithms aren't findable in any of the functional languages, much less the ones that are both functional and lazy.
If I were to pick ONE of that set that was reasonable, I'd pick Erlang, which can definitely handle the parallelism. But Erlang is **S*L*O*W**. It's great for certain things, but in general....
When I look into a language, the first thing I check is "How do I do random IO to fixed size blocks on a disk file?" Most functional languages don't document any answer to that at all. (With Erlang it's "Use our custom database", so they've an answer, of sorts.) The second thing I look for is "How do I draw pictures on the screen, and get user responses?" Gtk is an acceptable answer. So is SDL. Erlang has a custom approach that is decent for drawing buttons in boxes, etc., but not really sufficient for what I want. Most functional languages don't seem to even consider the matter. (Perhaps they do, but it doesn't seem to appear in the documentation.)
So, not considering style, but merely easy capabilities, I don't think functional languages are likely to find much use from me.
OTOH, Ruby, Python, D, and probably lots of other more traditional languages have many of the capabilities of functional languages...if you can ever convince anyone to use them. LISP started off as a purely functional language...but it sure knew better than to remain one. Etc.
THAT said, some sort of handle on multiprocessor solutions is truly needed. I just don't think that functional languages are where the answer lies. Dataflow seems more reasonable, but I don't know of a decent dataflow language in existence. Prograf for the Mac used to be such a language, though it had many problems (such as not being able to create a text representation of a program). Unfortunately it died during the transition from the Mac to MSWind95. (As did a very interesting dialect of Forth...Kyria, as I remember. It was object oriented Forth was quite different from vanilla Forth. Enough different to actually be a decent language. And it DID have lazy evaluation. And, as Forth, it was "sort of" functional, but without divorcing itself from screen or disk interactions. But neither of these was designed with the concept of multi-processors in mind, so perhaps they couldn't have made a successful transition even had they survived.
Also, I have the suspicion that these functional lazy languages emit parallelism at the wrong level. If you create too much interprocess communication, then you dissipate most of your increased efficiency in interprocess communication. Of course the trade-off differs as machine architecture changes...but...
It's not for better or for worse, it's for better *and* for worse.
There were good effects and bad effects both, and we ended up with both of them. It's not always clear what dominated...or why.
OTOH, were I the descendant of a former slave, I'd be quite certain that the good effects were so dominant that the ill effects could reasonably be ignored. As it is, however, we are all left with an increasingly dominant central government, that may in time turn us all into serfs, slaves, or some equivalent not yet thought of.
OTTH, does anyone really think that we could have the current population density with the old weak central government? I think that current speedy transport alone would have kept that from working.
It doesn't really matter unless you are building a social model. We are here, and here is where we need to work from. But predicting future results of current policies is benefited by knowing what caused what in the past...and that seems hidden by historians exaggerating trivia for the glory of those temporarily in power (of some sort...not necessarily governmental). Certainly grade school histories are about as accurate as other hagiographical writing, and high school not much better. Some college history at least makes an attempt to do better...but not always even there.
For many things there are two choices: Corporations and government Of those two... Well, SOMETIMES corporations are more efficient than government. This is not, however, predictable in advance. And government often is more concerned with providing service...especially as it gets more local.
One of the prime functions of the larger layers of government that isn't often mentioned is to limit the abuses of the lower levels of government. It doesn't do all that good a job of it, but nobody else is even trying.
Another function that government is supposed to provide is honest justice. Sigh. If only government acted as it was supposed to instead of as it does.
The current government is clearly far overblown, and too costly. And it spends money improperly, and breaks its own rules to increase its power. And it doesn't provide justice. And the streets are falling apart....sometimes because the government doesn't care, and sometimes because the contractor is the brother-in-law of the head of the local city council. And that's just local. When you extrapolate to the higher levels (state and fed) things get worse. That's when money from large corporations becomes the dominant factor.
The problem is, what alternative do you propose, and how do you expect to achieve it? The extrapolated result for most answers to that question is considerably worse than the current state.
Note that a large part of our civilizations mentality is derived from centrally distributed water and electricity. If you (as in a city or local area rather than an individual) intend to revolt other than through approved channels, then be prepared to do without either water or electricity. Nice trap, huh? Of course it only works as long as local water distribution remains reliable. (Local electric generation at reduced power levels is quite feasible. But it would require considerable advance preparation.)
That's quite a large site you've linked to, and I didn't pick out exactly which article you were responding to.
OTOH, this is a point were professional physicists disagree. As such, you certainly have the right to select the interpretation which agrees with your psychic disposition. (This confirms the point I was making.)
Also, if I accept that you are correct, that invalidates the analogy, but not the point that I was attempting to make with it. The world is a complex entity, and in any situation certain events will be noticed by some people and other events will be noticed by other people, depending in a non-random way on their initial belief status. These observations will then be fit into some model that the particular observer finds compatible with their prior observations. These models may well be disjoint over much of their space of predictions. (E.g., an engineer and a politician don't generally make the same deductions after observing an event... but both may make valid deductions.)
Please remember that it has been proven that a model of reasonable complexity cannot be both complete and consistent. Also that most systems of logic require a potentially infinite number of axioms to pin down all free variables. Then remember how mathematical physics is, and that we tend to insist that it be consistent.
Because of this, it is possible to predict from first principles that physics is not a complete system.
That's actually been reported done as a repeated experiment.
According to the results there *IS* a baud rate, but the rate is *VERY* low. And it's a highly noisy channel.
I believe that they transmitted a 12 digit number over a period of around a month...though not constantly, of course. But a couple of hours every night. And no intermediate results.
OTOH, I don't know very much about the experiment. It was reportedly done in Czechoslovakia during the 1960's or 70's. Well, there's no way I could read the original research reports...so the report I saw could have been highly garbled and colored, and I'd never know.
Still, it fits in with my other results when investigating "psychic" stuff. There's something there, but it seems to be useless. It certainly doesn't match our fantasy desires. And you get lots better "thought transmission" using a mobile phone.
OTOH, it poses problems to current physics theories...if you accept it. Almost nobody does, and it's not surprising. Why accept something useless that challenges your model of the world? But it causes me to have a bit of dubiousity when some physics theory is expounded as "The REAL truth". It's great as a "This is the best description of how the world works that we can make at the moment.", but not as "This is how things are."
Still, *I'm* not the person trying to build new "Grand Theory Of Everything"s. I can understand that that's a lot of work, and if you work hard on a project you can come to love it. And mathematicians frequently consider numbers and patterns of same to be the only reality. Not the best description of reality, but the only actual reality. All else is epiphenomena. And programmers tend to think of everything as being a program. This is a description of psychology, not of reality.
Of course, to the extent that various descriptive viewpoints on the universe are consistent, they can be seen as interpretations of the same underlying reality. But I've not seen much effort devoted to demonstrating that, indeed, the various viewpoints are, indeed, consistent. What seems to be done is to show that the common use-cases overlap consistently. This is a far more limited proof... and poses extremely fewer constraints on the nature of the underlying reality.
P.S.: Please remember the quantum demonstration that whether a quantum packet is a particle or a wave depends on how you measure it. Then consider that this same principle may analogize to the macro level. An engineer may get different results from his measurements than an artist, even though they are measuring an underlying state that would have appeared identical if you could apply "dark measurement" to it. (Dark measurement means something analogous to measuring the state of a quantum system without the actual transmission of a photon. And I don't really understand how it works, but theory says it should. And perhaps experiments have been done to confirm it.)
I apologize that this comes uncomfortably close to solipsism, but that's not what I mean...though I couldn't be clearer without a lot of thought and a large number more words.
When I was in college I decided that I wouldn't assume that things were true or false on the basis of authority, so I started checking out psychics, ritual magic, etc.... and astrology, pyramid power, etc.
As far as I can tell, the actual psychics have very weak and unreliable powers. Sometimes things happen. I've observed a few, but they were rarely the one's that there was an attempt to demonstrate. And the conditions weren't controllable enough to count as "proof".
This shouldn't really be very surprising, if you're willing to consider that "psychic powers" of some sort actually exist. Consider the old joke about not thinking of a pink hippopotamus. It tells an important truth about how much control people have over their mental processes.
OTOH, if you are publicly psychic, then you will be called upon to perform...which you can't reliably do. So either you'll resort to fakery, or you'll stop being a public psychic. I've known people who made both choices.
My personal decision was that "psychic powers" are useless, and methods for developing them to be reliable don't work. OTOH, for years I had a case hardened file that had been bent. It had been in the room when a "psychic" had been attempting to bend a spoon...and did it, probably by fakery. But she never touched or saw the file. And case hardened file steel breaks rather than bends. You decide how the file got bent. I never came up with a better answer than "psychic powers are real, but uncontrolled".
OTOH, I certainly don't have an acceptable answer to how they could work...other than "we're living in a virtual reality", which is possible, but rather useless.
So I'm skeptical about the skeptics...and about the psychics.
OK, the quoted comments are a MS manager speaking. Believe it if you want to.
That said, even if true, this is a description of current practices, not a promise of future practice.
The difference between Google and MS is that I don't trust Google, and I do trust MS. But what it trust MS to do isn't something that I want to have done.
And what was said may not be a lie about current practice. This doesn't mean that I would find it acceptable. (Not that it matters, as I'm a *very* unlikely customer. The last EULA from MS that I read assured that it would be the last EULA from MS that I read. From now on I don't even consider installing MS software. That was back around 2000.)
I believe that MS will sporadically and unpredictably attempt to hold you to promises that they have coerced out of you. I don't believe that you can count on them adhering to promises that they have offered to you as enticements. There are several unpleasant experiences behind these beliefs...fortunately the worst of them were not personally experienced.
I *was* an Apple supporter, though with strong reservations, all the way from the Apple ][ to a few years ago. (I didn't really like the way they managed the conversion from OS 9.x to OS X... but I still considered them a good choice for non-technical users.)
A year or so ago I had occasion to notice that they had changed their EULA, adding in the phrase from MS (paraphrased)"We have the right to add, delete, modify, copy, or remove any file on your computer." From that point on I have not felt that they could be recommended to anyone for any purpose.
This is more of the same. Apple has always, even back in the Apple ][ days, had a tendency towards DRM. (Consider how difficult it was to get a text copy of an AppleBasic program. You could do it, but it was lots of extra work. It couldn't be stored on a diskette in text form. This was quite unlike CP/M running on the same machine. [I had an add-in z-80 board.]) I'd hoped that it (the tendency toward DRM) had gotten less intense generally at Apple, but apparently not.
It is still to be said in Apple's favor that they do prefer technical excellence over kludges. This isn't sufficient to allow me to recommend them for anything, but it's sufficient for me to think of them as "Not as bad as MS".
Then there needs to be a way to prove that the source code provided matches the binary code being executed. But if they can't provide the source code, then there's no reason at all to believe that it's honest.
I don't know what criminal charges could be brought, but I think there are probably grounds for either slander or libel suits by the people the company has accused. (Caution: IANAL. If not, there OUGHT to be.) And possibly "interference with the performance of an officer in performance of his duties" could provide some grounds for the government to proceed, also.
But contempt of court might be a lot easier to get.
You've never heard of PhotoShop or The Gimp? It's pretty easy to fake things well enough that only with careful study can they be shown to be fake...then you save it, print it, and scan it at reduced precision (as happens automatically with scanning) and it can be impossible to tell that the "copy of a photo" is a fake.
Producing a good quality fake can take a bit of time, but it's do-able. If you do it right, then an observer can't be sure it's a fake unless they were there...all they can be sure of is that it's not a high quality photo. (With more work, you can turn out a better quality photo...but it doesn't scale linearly.)
P.S.: Unless this is done by an expert, an expert can tell that this has been done by analyzing how shadows fall, etc. But *I* can't...not if it's done well, and I doubt that you could. So we're then taking the word of an expert, which could be a lie.
P.P.S.: Pictures of WHAT?? Not only aren't pictures proof, but it's hard to know what you are asking for pictures *of*. There have definitely already been pictures of "unmanned flying drone"s (which I believe because it's plausible, as much as because of the pictures). This may be implausible, but I still don't know what you want pictures of.
Slashdot Mirror
DID the Sony rootkit thing ever get cleaned up?
If you think so, why do you think so?
IMNHO, Sony never cleaned up the mess they made, millions of people were victimized, many totally unknowning about what happened, and Sony just swept the mess under the rug and waited for the fuss to die down.
That whole affair was Sony abusing their dominant position to inflict harm and suffering on other while suffering only negligible costs to themselves. If you trust them after that, ... were I religious I'd say "God help you, because nobody else can."
OK. If they disclose what they're doing and what it means to all customers BEFORE they pay their money, then that's an acceptable answer. Otherwise not.
Presuming, as claimed, that this mechanism is undisclosed before purchase, and what it does is also undisclosed, then I hope the suit is both successful and expensive.
No. We got those Diebold voting machines because the president of Diebold promised the he would get Bush elected.
It wouldn't even work for THAT. See arguments posted earlier for one of several reasons why not.
This is just either security theater (as many have claimed) or a chance for somebody to get some money wasting your money. If it gets implemented, it will be because of the security theater aspect. Or possibly because it's easier to control a society if personal mobility is restricted, so it's desirable to make it inconvenient to travel.
I'm fine with this, if and only if they are using IPv6. Or behind a NAT + firewall.
In some ways I prefer the NAT wall. It's not at all clear that all these devices SHOULD be trusted, and I might well want to prevent them from network access outside of my local zone. Cisco routers, well, that's a different case, as often they naturally live outside the firewall...in that case what one wants to limit is their access to the internals.
I mean, I can think of all sorts of useful purposes that for this. The problem is, I can also think of lots of unpleasant uses.
That's the way it started. Lately they've been suing cities that didn't agree to their terms, and still wanted to offer the service, so tried to set it up themselves.
They don't deserve to have ANY slack cut for them. They are known abusers. Actually, they are known liars and thieves, as they took federal money to provide broadband service to everyone in the country, and have refused to deliver where it was "unprofitable" (not counting the money the feds gave them).
So what you do is get a civilian version to use as a game controller. Then by the time you draft them, they're already trained.
Does C have a BCD datatype? If not, then for financial calculations you are going to need something more complex.
You can't use floats for financial calculations with money (unless they've changed the rules). You need to use int-s and calculate the values in pennies, and then convert to float dollars for output. Not that this is horrendous, but it does add to the complexity. I remember a co-worker who fought furiously with a rounding problem in a financial calculation. He finally had to resort to a bucket-rounding approach. (He was using Fortran, but the same problem happens with most languages that aren't specialized for financial calculations...don't know how Cobol handles this kind of thing.)
Any suggestions as to a good book to learn it from?
Read the MSWind EULA again. It wouldn't be a good deal if the PAID you $50. Or $500.
OK. OpenGL wasn't included in my "good GUI packages", because when I've looked at it it looked too heavy and clumsy for what I wanted to do. And nothing that's "Windows only" is going to meet my needs.
I did look at using the POSIX package for Haskell, but that looked quite clumsy. (Well, I'm clearly not a Haskell programmer, so I could be wrong about that.)
I just now went to the Haskell code site mentioned elsewhere in this thread looking for I/O methods and found Couch. When I looked it up, it turns out it's a version 0.8 and has a known memory leak. There didn't seem to be anything else relevant. (Yeah, I know, POSIX exists, but it wasn't mentioned at that site.) I haven't looked at OCAML seriously in a couple of years, but I don't recall any graphics package catching my notice.
I'll grant that I'm not giving Haskell the kind of fair shake that I'd give to, say, Ada, but Haskell looks stranger, has less documentation, and is more difficult to translate the standard algorithms into. So it needs to offer something that's clearly superior enough to compensate for the deficiencies. I just couldn't find anything that looked even close to that. (Alice from Stanford came much closer, as did Mozart...but they weren't good enough either...though I can't remember in detail why I decided that. [Stanford's Alice compiles to ML, so it could be an efficiency thing.])
OK. Now I've looked at "Real World Haskell". It seems to answer many of my questions, the ones that were sufficient to cause me to stop looking back when I was choosing what language to study next. I've still got concerns about how one would deal with large programs, persistence, etc., but those were secondary, and I never got as far as checking them out the last time I looked at Haskell. I still don't see a place to find translations of the various standard algorithms, and that's a pretty big hurdle. I did notice that Gtk access is provided...at least via Glade, so most things of that nature that need to be done should be doable.
If you want to get programmers to use Haskell, you should make sure that they are exposed to that book. (I've only glanced through it, of course, but it does deal with many of the concerns that other sources of information left unanswered.)
Scala is one of the languages that looks interesting... but what implications does using the JVM have for using multiple processors?
My understand was the Java threads, like the Python GIL (global interpreter lock) imply that the program is running in only one processor. If this is incorrect, then that would be very interesting.
OK, but either they don't have any reasonable way to do I/O, or they don't have any decent documentation of it.
For that matter, most basic algorithms aren't findable in any of the functional languages, much less the ones that are both functional and lazy.
If I were to pick ONE of that set that was reasonable, I'd pick Erlang, which can definitely handle the parallelism. But Erlang is **S*L*O*W**. It's great for certain things, but in general....
When I look into a language, the first thing I check is "How do I do random IO to fixed size blocks on a disk file?" Most functional languages don't document any answer to that at all. (With Erlang it's "Use our custom database", so they've an answer, of sorts.) The second thing I look for is "How do I draw pictures on the screen, and get user responses?" Gtk is an acceptable answer. So is SDL. Erlang has a custom approach that is decent for drawing buttons in boxes, etc., but not really sufficient for what I want. Most functional languages don't seem to even consider the matter. (Perhaps they do, but it doesn't seem to appear in the documentation.)
So, not considering style, but merely easy capabilities, I don't think functional languages are likely to find much use from me.
OTOH, Ruby, Python, D, and probably lots of other more traditional languages have many of the capabilities of functional languages...if you can ever convince anyone to use them. LISP started off as a purely functional language...but it sure knew better than to remain one. Etc.
THAT said, some sort of handle on multiprocessor solutions is truly needed. I just don't think that functional languages are where the answer lies. Dataflow seems more reasonable, but I don't know of a decent dataflow language in existence. Prograf for the Mac used to be such a language, though it had many problems (such as not being able to create a text representation of a program). Unfortunately it died during the transition from the Mac to MSWind95. (As did a very interesting dialect of Forth...Kyria, as I remember. It was object oriented Forth was quite different from vanilla Forth. Enough different to actually be a decent language. And it DID have lazy evaluation. And, as Forth, it was "sort of" functional, but without divorcing itself from screen or disk interactions. But neither of these was designed with the concept of multi-processors in mind, so perhaps they couldn't have made a successful transition even had they survived.
Also, I have the suspicion that these functional lazy languages emit parallelism at the wrong level. If you create too much interprocess communication, then you dissipate most of your increased efficiency in interprocess communication. Of course the trade-off differs as machine architecture changes...but ...
It's not for better or for worse, it's for better *and* for worse.
There were good effects and bad effects both, and we ended up with both of them. It's not always clear what dominated...or why.
OTOH, were I the descendant of a former slave, I'd be quite certain that the good effects were so dominant that the ill effects could reasonably be ignored. As it is, however, we are all left with an increasingly dominant central government, that may in time turn us all into serfs, slaves, or some equivalent not yet thought of.
OTTH, does anyone really think that we could have the current population density with the old weak central government? I think that current speedy transport alone would have kept that from working.
It doesn't really matter unless you are building a social model. We are here, and here is where we need to work from. But predicting future results of current policies is benefited by knowing what caused what in the past...and that seems hidden by historians exaggerating trivia for the glory of those temporarily in power (of some sort...not necessarily governmental). Certainly grade school histories are about as accurate as other hagiographical writing, and high school not much better. Some college history at least makes an attempt to do better...but not always even there.
The constitution doesn't claim to apply to citizens, it claims to apply to people on turf controlled by the US govt.
If you doubt this, read the constitution again. It's not that long.
For many things there are two choices:
Corporations and government
Of those two...
Well, SOMETIMES corporations are more efficient than government. This is not, however, predictable in advance. And government often is more concerned with providing service...especially as it gets more local.
One of the prime functions of the larger layers of government that isn't often mentioned is to limit the abuses of the lower levels of government. It doesn't do all that good a job of it, but nobody else is even trying.
Another function that government is supposed to provide is honest justice. Sigh. If only government acted as it was supposed to instead of as it does.
The current government is clearly far overblown, and too costly. And it spends money improperly, and breaks its own rules to increase its power. And it doesn't provide justice. And the streets are falling apart....sometimes because the government doesn't care, and sometimes because the contractor is the brother-in-law of the head of the local city council. And that's just local. When you extrapolate to the higher levels (state and fed) things get worse. That's when money from large corporations becomes the dominant factor.
The problem is, what alternative do you propose, and how do you expect to achieve it? The extrapolated result for most answers to that question is considerably worse than the current state.
Note that a large part of our civilizations mentality is derived from centrally distributed water and electricity. If you (as in a city or local area rather than an individual) intend to revolt other than through approved channels, then be prepared to do without either water or electricity. Nice trap, huh? Of course it only works as long as local water distribution remains reliable. (Local electric generation at reduced power levels is quite feasible. But it would require considerable advance preparation.)
That's quite a large site you've linked to, and I didn't pick out exactly which article you were responding to.
OTOH, this is a point were professional physicists disagree. As such, you certainly have the right to select the interpretation which agrees with your psychic disposition. (This confirms the point I was making.)
Also, if I accept that you are correct, that invalidates the analogy, but not the point that I was attempting to make with it. The world is a complex entity, and in any situation certain events will be noticed by some people and other events will be noticed by other people, depending in a non-random way on their initial belief status. These observations will then be fit into some model that the particular observer finds compatible with their prior observations. These models may well be disjoint over much of their space of predictions. (E.g., an engineer and a politician don't generally make the same deductions after observing an event ... but both may make valid deductions.)
Please remember that it has been proven that a model of reasonable complexity cannot be both complete and consistent. Also that most systems of logic require a potentially infinite number of axioms to pin down all free variables. Then remember how mathematical physics is, and that we tend to insist that it be consistent.
Because of this, it is possible to predict from first principles that physics is not a complete system.
That's actually been reported done as a repeated experiment.
According to the results there *IS* a baud rate, but the rate is *VERY* low. And it's a highly noisy channel.
I believe that they transmitted a 12 digit number over a period of around a month...though not constantly, of course. But a couple of hours every night. And no intermediate results.
OTOH, I don't know very much about the experiment. It was reportedly done in Czechoslovakia during the 1960's or 70's. Well, there's no way I could read the original research reports...so the report I saw could have been highly garbled and colored, and I'd never know.
Still, it fits in with my other results when investigating "psychic" stuff. There's something there, but it seems to be useless. It certainly doesn't match our fantasy desires. And you get lots better "thought transmission" using a mobile phone.
OTOH, it poses problems to current physics theories...if you accept it. Almost nobody does, and it's not surprising. Why accept something useless that challenges your model of the world? But it causes me to have a bit of dubiousity when some physics theory is expounded as "The REAL truth". It's great as a "This is the best description of how the world works that we can make at the moment.", but not as "This is how things are."
Still, *I'm* not the person trying to build new "Grand Theory Of Everything"s. I can understand that that's a lot of work, and if you work hard on a project you can come to love it. And mathematicians frequently consider numbers and patterns of same to be the only reality. Not the best description of reality, but the only actual reality. All else is epiphenomena. And programmers tend to think of everything as being a program. This is a description of psychology, not of reality.
Of course, to the extent that various descriptive viewpoints on the universe are consistent, they can be seen as interpretations of the same underlying reality. But I've not seen much effort devoted to demonstrating that, indeed, the various viewpoints are, indeed, consistent. What seems to be done is to show that the common use-cases overlap consistently. This is a far more limited proof ... and poses extremely fewer constraints on the nature of the underlying reality.
P.S.: Please remember the quantum demonstration that whether a quantum packet is a particle or a wave depends on how you measure it. Then consider that this same principle may analogize to the macro level. An engineer may get different results from his measurements than an artist, even though they are measuring an underlying state that would have appeared identical if you could apply "dark measurement" to it. (Dark measurement means something analogous to measuring the state of a quantum system without the actual transmission of a photon. And I don't really understand how it works, but theory says it should. And perhaps experiments have been done to confirm it.)
I apologize that this comes uncomfortably close to solipsism, but that's not what I mean...though I couldn't be clearer without a lot of thought and a large number more words.
When I was in college I decided that I wouldn't assume that things were true or false on the basis of authority, so I started checking out psychics, ritual magic, etc. ... and astrology, pyramid power, etc.
As far as I can tell, the actual psychics have very weak and unreliable powers. Sometimes things happen. I've observed a few, but they were rarely the one's that there was an attempt to demonstrate. And the conditions weren't controllable enough to count as "proof".
This shouldn't really be very surprising, if you're willing to consider that "psychic powers" of some sort actually exist. Consider the old joke about not thinking of a pink hippopotamus. It tells an important truth about how much control people have over their mental processes.
OTOH, if you are publicly psychic, then you will be called upon to perform...which you can't reliably do. So either you'll resort to fakery, or you'll stop being a public psychic. I've known people who made both choices.
My personal decision was that "psychic powers" are useless, and methods for developing them to be reliable don't work. OTOH, for years I had a case hardened file that had been bent. It had been in the room when a "psychic" had been attempting to bend a spoon...and did it, probably by fakery. But she never touched or saw the file. And case hardened file steel breaks rather than bends. You decide how the file got bent. I never came up with a better answer than "psychic powers are real, but uncontrolled".
OTOH, I certainly don't have an acceptable answer to how they could work...other than "we're living in a virtual reality", which is possible, but rather useless.
So I'm skeptical about the skeptics...and about the psychics.
OK, the quoted comments are a MS manager speaking. Believe it if you want to.
That said, even if true, this is a description of current practices, not a promise of future practice.
The difference between Google and MS is that I don't trust Google, and I do trust MS. But what it trust MS to do isn't something that I want to have done.
And what was said may not be a lie about current practice. This doesn't mean that I would find it acceptable. (Not that it matters, as I'm a *very* unlikely customer. The last EULA from MS that I read assured that it would be the last EULA from MS that I read. From now on I don't even consider installing MS software. That was back around 2000.)
I believe that MS will sporadically and unpredictably attempt to hold you to promises that they have coerced out of you. I don't believe that you can count on them adhering to promises that they have offered to you as enticements. There are several unpleasant experiences behind these beliefs...fortunately the worst of them were not personally experienced.
I *was* an Apple supporter, though with strong reservations, all the way from the Apple ][ to a few years ago. (I didn't really like the way they managed the conversion from OS 9.x to OS X ... but I still considered them a good choice for non-technical users.)
A year or so ago I had occasion to notice that they had changed their EULA, adding in the phrase from MS (paraphrased)"We have the right to add, delete, modify, copy, or remove any file on your computer." From that point on I have not felt that they could be recommended to anyone for any purpose.
This is more of the same. Apple has always, even back in the Apple ][ days, had a tendency towards DRM. (Consider how difficult it was to get a text copy of an AppleBasic program. You could do it, but it was lots of extra work. It couldn't be stored on a diskette in text form. This was quite unlike CP/M running on the same machine. [I had an add-in z-80 board.]) I'd hoped that it (the tendency toward DRM) had gotten less intense generally at Apple, but apparently not.
It is still to be said in Apple's favor that they do prefer technical excellence over kludges. This isn't sufficient to allow me to recommend them for anything, but it's sufficient for me to think of them as "Not as bad as MS".
I'm not sure which is more ridiculous - the patent application or the fact that there's an iPod link in a shoe.
How else are you going to Get Smart?
Then there needs to be a way to prove that the source code provided matches the binary code being executed. But if they can't provide the source code, then there's no reason at all to believe that it's honest.
I don't know what criminal charges could be brought, but I think there are probably grounds for either slander or libel suits by the people the company has accused. (Caution: IANAL. If not, there OUGHT to be.) And possibly "interference with the performance of an officer in performance of his duties" could provide some grounds for the government to proceed, also.
But contempt of court might be a lot easier to get.
You've never heard of PhotoShop or The Gimp? It's pretty easy to fake things well enough that only with careful study can they be shown to be fake...then you save it, print it, and scan it at reduced precision (as happens automatically with scanning) and it can be impossible to tell that the "copy of a photo" is a fake.
Producing a good quality fake can take a bit of time, but it's do-able. If you do it right, then an observer can't be sure it's a fake unless they were there...all they can be sure of is that it's not a high quality photo. (With more work, you can turn out a better quality photo...but it doesn't scale linearly.)
P.S.: Unless this is done by an expert, an expert can tell that this has been done by analyzing how shadows fall, etc. But *I* can't...not if it's done well, and I doubt that you could. So we're then taking the word of an expert, which could be a lie.
P.P.S.: Pictures of WHAT?? Not only aren't pictures proof, but it's hard to know what you are asking for pictures *of*. There have definitely already been pictures of "unmanned flying drone"s (which I believe because it's plausible, as much as because of the pictures). This may be implausible, but I still don't know what you want pictures of.