I was under the impression that most games do have playable female leads, atleast that's true for the games I tend to play, indeed there's some of them that have *only* playable female leads. (Beyond Good and Evil, for example) (and some have no characters at all: what sex is the lead in minesweeper?)
Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Dungeon Siege, Civ, They've all got female leads, indeed there's a balanced selection, and there's been put thought into romantic options for the female leads, hell some of these even have lesbian, bisexual or gay options for romance.
Furthermore: what's cause and what's effect ? If it's some sort of big conspiracy and an example of discrimination that games cather mostly to male buyers, is it then ALSO an example of discrimination and evidence of a big conspiracy that all my local shopping-centers have 75%+ of the clothes-shopping-area dedicated to selling female clothing ?
Women are *not* 50% of the market for non-casual games. The day they are, the games will adapt to this reality. Just like Men are *not* 50% of the market for clothing (and a long list of other products)
"can't be expressed" is overstating it, but there's concepts that have simple names in one language, and which would require essentially rewriting several paragraphs to convey in another language.
Yeah, it can be expressed, it's just a lot more hassle. Schadenfreude.
I don't have ears on my wrist, so why would it be practical to have a *watch* store and play my music ? You'd need a cable from the watch to the earbuds, and that sounds horribly impractical and dorky.
You could make the earbuds wireless, say bluetooth, but then they need their own independent powersupply and electronics anyway, so in that case, why not simply store the music in the earbuds themselves ? Why use watch+earbuds to solve a problem that earburds can solve alone ?
An average coin actually does -not- participate in "hundreds of thousands" of transactions. The average penny is in circulation slightly over ten years, and in that time takes part in a transaction aproximately once every week (some change hands 10 times in a day, others stay for a month or more in one place). This works out to less than thousand transactions on the average, a far cry from "hundreds of thousands".
A cent is a *tiny* value. Even 5 cent is a *small* value. The smallest coin in circulation in my jurisdiction is worth 10 cents, and I reckon even that will die in the not-very-distant future, leaving us with only the krone. (one krone is worth aproximately 20 cents)
I agree, spending a third of your after-tax income on housing, is a lot. But a fixed fraction makes no sense at all anyway. Because very obviously, you'll spend a higher fraction of your income, the lower your income is.
Offcourse if you're richer, you'll want to live more nicely, but that doesn't imply that earning twice the amount, it'd make sense to spend twice as much on housing. That would only make sense if you didn't want to spend *anything* on those things which the poor spend nothing on.
We're reasonably well off, with a household-income of 150% of the average for our city, and spend 20% of after-tax income on housing, and even that is spending a lot, it's only so high because we've prioritised having plenty of space since we're a 5-head family and with relatives from far away staying with us often it makes sense to have an extra bathroom and bedroom for guests.
In contrast, if you're poor, it's damn close to impossible to find acceptable living-quarters for 1/4 of your income, especially if you've got kids.
Good thinking ! But there's a fairly simple way around that. What you do is the following:
Person 1 uploads file A, you store hash(A), encrypt(A, randomkey), encrypt(randomkey, public_key_of_1)
Person 2 uploads file A, and as you correctly point out, at this point we're unable to find the randomkey used to encrypt that file. But we don't need it, we can do this instead:
encrypt(new_A, new_randomkey) store this block instead of the previous encrypt(A, randomkey). Now we know new_randomkey and can store both encrypt(new_randomkey, public_key_of_1) and encrypt(new_randomkey, public_key_of_2).
This means user 2 must *upload* the file, despite the file already being present in the cloud, which is a drawback as it amounts to wasted bandwith. But the -storage- advantages of storing the file only once, rather than twice, can still be realised.
Indeed, and it's one of those things it's hard to fathom if you're used to a more sane system. In contrast, here's how to qualify for full healthcare in Norway:
1) Be legally in Norway. 2) For a period (planned or actual) longer than a year.
If you fail to qualify, say because you're a tourist or an illegal immigrant, you still get basic healthcare, but not the full-spectrum.
That's it.
The interesting thing is that this appears to both work better, and be cheaper, than the US system. We spend less money on healthcare despite higher salaries for healthcare-employees, and we score significantly better on most healthcare-related statistics be it longevity or infant-survival or cancer-survival or doctor-availability or just about any other healthcare-stat I can think of.
To me, it seems a lot of the American debate is colored by knee-jerk reactions of the "that's socialist and thus EVIL" type.
That's a really dumb reaction, because the relevant question is not if a policy can be said to be socialist or not. The relevant question is if a certain policy in actual real world *works* better. For healthcare, that basically means providing the best possible healthcare to the largest possible fraction of the population for the lowest possible cost.
It should be possible to do global deduplication while still using encryption. You'd need to store (unencrypted) hashes of the files stored though.
What you typically do is encrypt a block with a random session-key, then you encrypt the key with the users public key, and store both. (the encrypted block, and the encrypted session-key), the legitimate user then retrieves the encrypted session-key, decrypts it with his private key and uses that to decrypt the encrypted block.
With this scheme, there's nothing stopping you from storing the session-key encrypted with *both* (or more than 2) private-keys.
This is the same thing GPG and friends do if you specify 2 or more recipients for the same message. They encrypt the actual message only once, with a one-time random key. Then they encrypt that *key* once for each recipient. This saves space 'cos the key is typically much smaller than the message.
You'd need the hashes unencrypted though, to be able to tell that two people have the same files -- even if you don't know what's in those files. And this does, offcourse, leak *some* of their privacy. (one could, for example answer the question: does person X have file Y, yes or no ?)
Exactly. Besides, it's the exception even for those over-50 too. There's *some* older folks with extensive libraries, but -most- older people have very few books and read even fewer.
SpiderOak is actually a lot more convenient than DropBox.
It's not open-source, but it has 3 other serious advantages. First it's based on a zero-knowledge architecture, this means that all your files are encrypted locally, before being put in the cloud, and the keys are handled (derived from a passphrase) in a way that ensures that nobody, not even employees of SpiderOak, can see your files. (for me this is an absolute requirement for storing files in the cloud)
Second, you can select more than one directory for backup/sync, which is a lot more flexible than the DropBox-thing where precisely *one* folder is synchronised to all devices.
Third, you can choose what to synch where, so you can, for example, backup and sync Pictures/ to the cloud, but synch only Pictures/2011 to the laptop (perhaps the laptop doesn't have enough disc to hold all your pictures)
Oh yeah, and it's half the price of DropBox. $100/year gives you 100GB rather than 50GB.
Indeed. What people don't get is that audio is -REALLY- low bandwith. You're talking of a frequency-band that is more narrow than 25Khz, and a data-rate on the order of one megabit/s.
That is beyond puny for the electronics of today - it wasn't a lot when CDs where introduced, but since then, electronics-performance has gone up by several orders of magnitude.
A darn-close-to-free DAC-chip can do this transform with a noise-floor low enough that it won't be the weakest link unless your speakers are excellent and your room suitable and very silent. (furthermore, it'd still be darn-close-to-free even if the bandwith and data-rate where both 3 orders of magnitude higher)
Sort of. Thing is, when you build something new, the unknown is one of the major risks. You don't -know- for sure how much it's gonna cost to build it, how long construction will take, how well it will perform, or how much and how expensive maintenance it will need over which timeframe.
Once a technology is mature, the answers to these questions are known (atleast aproximately), which makes it possible to make a sensible calculation as to if building a new plant is economically profitable or not.
But answering the questions has a value by itself ! If the answer is: these things are profitable, it's beneficial to society that we learn this answer as soon as possible. And even a negative result, teaches us something.
Furthermore, experience and learning tends to decrease the costs of subsequent plants - you sometimes do expensive mistakes when you're building something for the first time, many of those can be avoided when you know about them. Thus it can, and often is, the case that building the first of a certain kind of object, is a net-loss, yet the objects, including later models, as a whole are economically viable.
Funding research and development of promising new technologies ain't the dumbest way of spending tax-money. Sure, some of the time, the technologies funded end up going nowhere. That's just how research works: you don't *know* what's going to work, until you've tried it.
The trick ain't so much education as it's about attitude. School and life tells you to get a good education, and a good job, so as to earn a decent income and thus be wealthy.
But wealth is about making money work for you, instead of the opposite way. Too many even among those who have $150K in household income, also have a half-million mortgage and $151K expenses, which isn't helping them get wealthy.
The trick is to accumulate assets -- as in things that either generate passive income, or tend to grow in value over time.
Even with an average income, you've got a good chance of becoming wealthy by using 10% or 20% of your income to buy income-generating assets such as index-funds or stocks or real estate.
Some renewables are able to be regulated by demand too - notably hydroelectric power can ramp up and down production in about a minute, and are unaffected by short-term swings in weather.
Furthermore, even those renewables who are weather-dependant, tend to average out to a significant degree. A single windmill is highly variable in its production. A 1000 of them spread out over an entire country is still variable, but less so than the single one.
And a mix of many different renewables spread out over an entire continent, is a lot less variable. Sometimes it's dry. Sometimes there's no wind. Sometimes it's not raining. Sometimes the tides are just turning. But these things tend to not happen at the same time and everywhere at once.
The smart thing to do, is to produce whatever you can from variable sources, such as wind and sun, then fill in the rest with those sources that are adjustable, such as hydroelectric, biomass and energy-storing plants of different sorts.
But it's not quite that clear. A key aspect of murder is that the murderer is the one pulling the trigger, and it happens against the victims wish. Both of these are significant factors.
It's legal to sell someone a gun. If they go home and blow their head off with it, you'd not convince the guy selling the gun of murder. (would you consider it murder if the guy selling the gun had reason to believe that the buyer was planning suicide?)
Does it change the ethics of it that the person contemplating suicide has a incurable disease and that all that's awaiting him if he does not suicide, is a period of ever-growing suffering for himself and his family until he finally dies ?
Assisted suicide, like what dignitas offers is a less-messy parallell to selling a gun to a suicidal terminally ill patient.
Same-sex marriage is a battle that's essentially won in the west. Sure, some countries with a strong religious conservative population aren't -entirely- there yet, but you only have to plot the percentage of people who support it over time to see clear as day that it's just a matter of time.
Will some of the young people become more conservative as they mature ? Yes, certainly. But will more than half of the people in the 18-29 age-group change their mind by the time they're 60, to become as conservative as todays 60-year-olds ? No way !
Offcourse this trend parallells diminishing influence from religion, there's a pretty clear correlation between high support of same-sex marriage, and low importance placed on religion.
50 years is pessimistic, you're forgetting that research is going faster and faster -- we research much more stuff in a decade now than we did a century ago.
This is less and less the case. Wages are so high, relative to technology-costs that the amateur has tools closer and closer in quality to those of the professional.
It used to be that a good-quality studio for recording sound, good photographic equipment, workstation-class computers etc cost a years salary (give or take).
Today you get reasonably pro equipment in each of these fields for something more like a months salary. (infact the computer-setup that most professional programmers here in Norway use is closer to a weeks pay than to a months pay in value)
What are the real odds that applying your best guess as to the aproximate content of (for example) a movie or a video-game are horribly far off ?
Furthermore, what are the real consequences likely to be of an occasional slip-up ? (let's say your 12 year old kid ends up seeing a few movies that you'd have only allowed from 15 if you knew the content well)
I'd say, most movies and games, your best guess would be reasonable just from looking the cover over, for those where you're in doubt, 30 seconds with imdb or gamefaqs will tell you a lot more about the content than the ratings ever would.
And the occasional miss, isn't going to matter.
People should be less panicky, and more involved. It's not that hard. Having an idea about the content in the movies games and other stuff your kids consume does NOT require you to see the entire movie or play the entire game yourself first. Instead, it requires on the order of a minute or two of research for those cases where you're in doubt. (and you'll -not- be in doubt about the huge majority of cases)
Encryption works fine for protecting from snooping. Unfortunately, it also prevents you from -doing- much of anything with the data, thus having encrypted data in the cloud, can be a reasonable way of doing backup, but not much more.
Your keylength statement indicates pretty clearly that you're not even aware of the distinction between public-key schemes and symetric encryption, I think it'd be clever to learn a little more before making bombastic statements as to the security of encryption. (hint: the key-sizes for the two are very different, and there's good reasons for that)
Agreed. If you can know with reasonable accuracy how many copies of Windows was sold, and how many was installed - then you can make a reasonably good estimate of piracy.
But it's -real- tricky to estimate economic losses. The maximum is easy, that's just the standard retail price times the count of pirated copies.
The minimum however, is negative. It's entirely possible that if everyone had to pay full price, the result would be that Windows lost it's dominant position as an OS, and thus that sales would be lower. than they are with piracy.
That works fine for the trivial cases - but what happens when you want to do something normal like, say search the database for authors whose names start with "Adam", list all the books of an author by publication-year, or anything at all that requires looking at the data beyond equality.
Furthermore, it's not secure - you cannot encrypt the keys or foreign-keys if you want a relational database to work, and thus the relations among the data-items are visible. This is in many cases more than enough information to identify records, even encrypted.
Consider a simple database containing authors and books, and relationships between these. Just knowing that "this record refers to an author who published 17 books, 14 of them alone, 2 of them together with a person who wrote 1 other book and 1 of them together with someone who wrote 51 books" tell you a LOT about which author that record refers to. (I'd bet that the above is sufficient to narrow the field by 5 orders of magnitude or more)
traffic-analysis works for relational databases too...
The interesting thing is that more liberal countries have a lot LESS abortions, not more like the christian right in USA claim would be the consequence.
Teenage pregnancies are several times higher in USA than in Scandinavia, for example. The reason is primarily that when people panic and go into denial mode, teenagers get the picture and stop talking to their parents about sex at all. (or taking advice - if the only advice you're gonna get is "stay a virgin until you're 30!" who would listen?)
Which teenager has the best chance of practicing safe sex ?
The one who's scared, drunk at a party, or in the back-seat of some car, with parents that'd panic if they found condoms or other contraceptives.
Or the one who has parents who are reasonable. Who accept that their daughter is a sexual being. Who let's boyfriends sleep over, and makes sure that the daughter knows which drawer has condoms in it. Who is able to talk about these things in a non-panicked way. "Now that Eivind is sleeping over here sort of regularily, do you think we should schedule an appointment at the doc's for you to clear any questions you may have and get contraceptive pills, if that's what you want?"
You don't have to guess at the answer - you just have to compare the stats on teenage-pregnancies or abortions.
Scandinavia wins 8:1 on either. (as in has -less- of them)
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that most games do have playable female leads, atleast that's true for the games I tend to play, indeed there's some of them that have *only* playable female leads. (Beyond Good and Evil, for example) (and some have no characters at all: what sex is the lead in minesweeper?)
Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Dungeon Siege, Civ, They've all got female leads, indeed there's a balanced selection, and there's been put thought into romantic options for the female leads, hell some of these even have lesbian, bisexual or gay options for romance.
Furthermore: what's cause and what's effect ? If it's some sort of big conspiracy and an example of discrimination that games cather mostly to male buyers, is it then ALSO an example of discrimination and evidence of a big conspiracy that all my local shopping-centers have 75%+ of the clothes-shopping-area dedicated to selling female clothing ?
Women are *not* 50% of the market for non-casual games. The day they are, the games will adapt to this reality. Just like Men are *not* 50% of the market for clothing (and a long list of other products)
"can't be expressed" is overstating it, but there's concepts that have simple names in one language, and which would require essentially rewriting several paragraphs to convey in another language.
Yeah, it can be expressed, it's just a lot more hassle. Schadenfreude.
The thing is, often there's no point.
I don't have ears on my wrist, so why would it be practical to have a *watch* store and play my music ? You'd need a cable from the watch to the earbuds, and that sounds horribly impractical and dorky.
You could make the earbuds wireless, say bluetooth, but then they need their own independent powersupply and electronics anyway, so in that case, why not simply store the music in the earbuds themselves ? Why use watch+earbuds to solve a problem that earburds can solve alone ?
An average coin actually does -not- participate in "hundreds of thousands" of transactions. The average penny is in circulation slightly over ten years, and in that time takes part in a transaction aproximately once every week (some change hands 10 times in a day, others stay for a month or more in one place). This works out to less than thousand transactions on the average, a far cry from "hundreds of thousands".
A cent is a *tiny* value. Even 5 cent is a *small* value. The smallest coin in circulation in my jurisdiction is worth 10 cents, and I reckon even that will die in the not-very-distant future, leaving us with only the krone. (one krone is worth aproximately 20 cents)
I agree, spending a third of your after-tax income on housing, is a lot. But a fixed fraction makes no sense at all anyway. Because very obviously, you'll spend a higher fraction of your income, the lower your income is.
Offcourse if you're richer, you'll want to live more nicely, but that doesn't imply that earning twice the amount, it'd make sense to spend twice as much on housing. That would only make sense if you didn't want to spend *anything* on those things which the poor spend nothing on.
We're reasonably well off, with a household-income of 150% of the average for our city, and spend 20% of after-tax income on housing, and even that is spending a lot, it's only so high because we've prioritised having plenty of space since we're a 5-head family and with relatives from far away staying with us often it makes sense to have an extra bathroom and bedroom for guests.
In contrast, if you're poor, it's damn close to impossible to find acceptable living-quarters for 1/4 of your income, especially if you've got kids.
Good thinking ! But there's a fairly simple way around that. What you do is the following:
Person 1 uploads file A, you store hash(A), encrypt(A, randomkey), encrypt(randomkey, public_key_of_1)
Person 2 uploads file A, and as you correctly point out, at this point we're unable to find the randomkey used to encrypt that file. But we don't need it, we can do this instead:
encrypt(new_A, new_randomkey) store this block instead of the previous encrypt(A, randomkey). Now we know new_randomkey and can store both encrypt(new_randomkey, public_key_of_1) and encrypt(new_randomkey, public_key_of_2).
This means user 2 must *upload* the file, despite the file already being present in the cloud, which is a drawback as it amounts to wasted bandwith. But the -storage- advantages of storing the file only once, rather than twice, can still be realised.
Indeed, and it's one of those things it's hard to fathom if you're used to a more sane system. In contrast, here's how to qualify for full healthcare in Norway:
1) Be legally in Norway.
2) For a period (planned or actual) longer than a year.
If you fail to qualify, say because you're a tourist or an illegal immigrant, you still get basic healthcare, but not the full-spectrum.
That's it.
The interesting thing is that this appears to both work better, and be cheaper, than the US system. We spend less money on healthcare despite higher salaries for healthcare-employees, and we score significantly better on most healthcare-related statistics be it longevity or infant-survival or cancer-survival or doctor-availability or just about any other healthcare-stat I can think of.
To me, it seems a lot of the American debate is colored by knee-jerk reactions of the "that's socialist and thus EVIL" type.
That's a really dumb reaction, because the relevant question is not if a policy can be said to be socialist or not. The relevant question is if a certain policy in actual real world *works* better. For healthcare, that basically means providing the best possible healthcare to the largest possible fraction of the population for the lowest possible cost.
It should be possible to do global deduplication while still using encryption. You'd need to store (unencrypted) hashes of the files stored though.
What you typically do is encrypt a block with a random session-key, then you encrypt the key with the users public key, and store both. (the encrypted block, and the encrypted session-key), the legitimate user then retrieves the encrypted session-key, decrypts it with his private key and uses that to decrypt the encrypted block.
With this scheme, there's nothing stopping you from storing the session-key encrypted with *both* (or more than 2) private-keys.
This is the same thing GPG and friends do if you specify 2 or more recipients for the same message. They encrypt the actual message only once, with a one-time random key. Then they encrypt that *key* once for each recipient. This saves space 'cos the key is typically much smaller than the message.
You'd need the hashes unencrypted though, to be able to tell that two people have the same files -- even if you don't know what's in those files. And this does, offcourse, leak *some* of their privacy. (one could, for example answer the question: does person X have file Y, yes or no ?)
Exactly. Besides, it's the exception even for those over-50 too. There's *some* older folks with extensive libraries, but -most- older people have very few books and read even fewer.
No problem, I've got 3 of those in my own house, none of them are even 15.
Many young people do not read books at all.
Those who do, tend to have a lot of paperbooks, even the ones who read most of their books electronically.
SpiderOak is actually a lot more convenient than DropBox.
It's not open-source, but it has 3 other serious advantages. First it's based on a zero-knowledge architecture, this means that all your files are encrypted locally, before being put in the cloud, and the keys are handled (derived from a passphrase) in a way that ensures that nobody, not even employees of SpiderOak, can see your files. (for me this is an absolute requirement for storing files in the cloud)
Second, you can select more than one directory for backup/sync, which is a lot more flexible than the DropBox-thing where precisely *one* folder is synchronised to all devices.
Third, you can choose what to synch where, so you can, for example, backup and sync Pictures/ to the cloud, but synch only Pictures/2011 to the laptop (perhaps the laptop doesn't have enough disc to hold all your pictures)
Oh yeah, and it's half the price of DropBox. $100/year gives you 100GB rather than 50GB.
Indeed. What people don't get is that audio is -REALLY- low bandwith. You're talking of a frequency-band that is more narrow than 25Khz, and a data-rate on the order of one megabit/s.
That is beyond puny for the electronics of today - it wasn't a lot when CDs where introduced, but since then, electronics-performance has gone up by several orders of magnitude.
A darn-close-to-free DAC-chip can do this transform with a noise-floor low enough that it won't be the weakest link unless your speakers are excellent and your room suitable and very silent. (furthermore, it'd still be darn-close-to-free even if the bandwith and data-rate where both 3 orders of magnitude higher)
Sort of. Thing is, when you build something new, the unknown is one of the major risks. You don't -know- for sure how much it's gonna cost to build it, how long construction will take, how well it will perform, or how much and how expensive maintenance it will need over which timeframe.
Once a technology is mature, the answers to these questions are known (atleast aproximately), which makes it possible to make a sensible calculation as to if building a new plant is economically profitable or not.
But answering the questions has a value by itself ! If the answer is: these things are profitable, it's beneficial to society that we learn this answer as soon as possible. And even a negative result, teaches us something.
Furthermore, experience and learning tends to decrease the costs of subsequent plants - you sometimes do expensive mistakes when you're building something for the first time, many of those can be avoided when you know about them. Thus it can, and often is, the case that building the first of a certain kind of object, is a net-loss, yet the objects, including later models, as a whole are economically viable.
Funding research and development of promising new technologies ain't the dumbest way of spending tax-money. Sure, some of the time, the technologies funded end up going nowhere. That's just how research works: you don't *know* what's going to work, until you've tried it.
The trick ain't so much education as it's about attitude. School and life tells you to get a good education, and a good job, so as to earn a decent income and thus be wealthy.
But wealth is about making money work for you, instead of the opposite way. Too many even among those who have $150K in household income, also have a half-million mortgage and $151K expenses, which isn't helping them get wealthy.
The trick is to accumulate assets -- as in things that either generate passive income, or tend to grow in value over time.
Even with an average income, you've got a good chance of becoming wealthy by using 10% or 20% of your income to buy income-generating assets such as index-funds or stocks or real estate.
Some renewables are able to be regulated by demand too - notably hydroelectric power can ramp up and down production in about a minute, and are unaffected by short-term swings in weather.
Furthermore, even those renewables who are weather-dependant, tend to average out to a significant degree. A single windmill is highly variable in its production. A 1000 of them spread out over an entire country is still variable, but less so than the single one.
And a mix of many different renewables spread out over an entire continent, is a lot less variable. Sometimes it's dry. Sometimes there's no wind. Sometimes it's not raining. Sometimes the tides are just turning. But these things tend to not happen at the same time and everywhere at once.
The smart thing to do, is to produce whatever you can from variable sources, such as wind and sun, then fill in the rest with those sources that are adjustable, such as hydroelectric, biomass and energy-storing plants of different sorts.
But it's not quite that clear. A key aspect of murder is that the murderer is the one pulling the trigger, and it happens against the victims wish. Both of these are significant factors.
It's legal to sell someone a gun. If they go home and blow their head off with it, you'd not convince the guy selling the gun of murder. (would you consider it murder if the guy selling the gun had reason to believe that the buyer was planning suicide?)
Does it change the ethics of it that the person contemplating suicide has a incurable disease and that all that's awaiting him if he does not suicide, is a period of ever-growing suffering for himself and his family until he finally dies ?
Assisted suicide, like what dignitas offers is a less-messy parallell to selling a gun to a suicidal terminally ill patient.
Same-sex marriage is a battle that's essentially won in the west. Sure, some countries with a strong religious conservative population aren't -entirely- there yet, but you only have to plot the percentage of people who support it over time to see clear as day that it's just a matter of time.
Look at this for example: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/06/future_trends_f_1.html
Will some of the young people become more conservative as they mature ? Yes, certainly. But will more than half of the people in the 18-29 age-group change their mind by the time they're 60, to become as conservative as todays 60-year-olds ? No way !
Offcourse this trend parallells diminishing influence from religion, there's a pretty clear correlation between high support of same-sex marriage, and low importance placed on religion.
50 years is pessimistic, you're forgetting that research is going faster and faster -- we research much more stuff in a decade now than we did a century ago.
This is less and less the case. Wages are so high, relative to technology-costs that the amateur has tools closer and closer in quality to those of the professional.
It used to be that a good-quality studio for recording sound, good photographic equipment, workstation-class computers etc cost a years salary (give or take).
Today you get reasonably pro equipment in each of these fields for something more like a months salary. (infact the computer-setup that most professional programmers here in Norway use is closer to a weeks pay than to a months pay in value)
But is that required ?
What are the real odds that applying your best guess as to the aproximate content of (for example) a movie or a video-game are horribly far off ?
Furthermore, what are the real consequences likely to be of an occasional slip-up ? (let's say your 12 year old kid ends up seeing a few movies that you'd have only allowed from 15 if you knew the content well)
I'd say, most movies and games, your best guess would be reasonable just from looking the cover over, for those where you're in doubt, 30 seconds with imdb or gamefaqs will tell you a lot more about the content than the ratings ever would.
And the occasional miss, isn't going to matter.
People should be less panicky, and more involved. It's not that hard. Having an idea about the content in the movies games and other stuff your kids consume does NOT require you to see the entire movie or play the entire game yourself first. Instead, it requires on the order of a minute or two of research for those cases where you're in doubt. (and you'll -not- be in doubt about the huge majority of cases)
Encryption works fine for protecting from snooping. Unfortunately, it also prevents you from -doing- much of anything with the data, thus having encrypted data in the cloud, can be a reasonable way of doing backup, but not much more.
Your keylength statement indicates pretty clearly that you're not even aware of the distinction between public-key schemes and symetric encryption, I think it'd be clever to learn a little more before making bombastic statements as to the security of encryption. (hint: the key-sizes for the two are very different, and there's good reasons for that)
Agreed. If you can know with reasonable accuracy how many copies of Windows was sold, and how many was installed - then you can make a reasonably good estimate of piracy.
But it's -real- tricky to estimate economic losses. The maximum is easy, that's just the standard retail price times the count of pirated copies.
The minimum however, is negative. It's entirely possible that if everyone had to pay full price, the result would be that Windows lost it's dominant position as an OS, and thus that sales would be lower. than they are with piracy.
Reality, is somewhere in between.
Where, exactly, is anybodys guess.
That works fine for the trivial cases - but what happens when you want to do something normal like, say search the database for authors whose names start with "Adam", list all the books of an author by publication-year, or anything at all that requires looking at the data beyond equality.
Furthermore, it's not secure - you cannot encrypt the keys or foreign-keys if you want a relational database to work, and thus the relations among the data-items are visible. This is in many cases more than enough information to identify records, even encrypted.
Consider a simple database containing authors and books, and relationships between these. Just knowing that "this record refers to an author who published 17 books, 14 of them alone, 2 of them together with a person who wrote 1 other book and 1 of them together with someone who wrote 51 books" tell you a LOT about which author that record refers to. (I'd bet that the above is sufficient to narrow the field by 5 orders of magnitude or more)
traffic-analysis works for relational databases too ...
The interesting thing is that more liberal countries have a lot LESS abortions, not more like the christian right in USA claim would be the consequence.
Teenage pregnancies are several times higher in USA than in Scandinavia, for example. The reason is primarily that when people panic and go into denial mode, teenagers get the picture and stop talking to their parents about sex at all. (or taking advice - if the only advice you're gonna get is "stay a virgin until you're 30!" who would listen?)
Which teenager has the best chance of practicing safe sex ?
The one who's scared, drunk at a party, or in the back-seat of some car, with parents that'd panic if they found condoms or other contraceptives.
Or the one who has parents who are reasonable. Who accept that their daughter is a sexual being. Who let's boyfriends sleep over, and makes sure that the daughter knows which drawer has condoms in it. Who is able to talk about these things in a non-panicked way. "Now that Eivind is sleeping over here sort of regularily, do you think we should schedule an appointment at the doc's for you to clear any questions you may have and get contraceptive pills, if that's what you want?"
You don't have to guess at the answer - you just have to compare the stats on teenage-pregnancies or abortions.
Scandinavia wins 8:1 on either. (as in has -less- of them)
Agreed. Which is why it's smarter to educate them.
Educated people get less kids *and* they are, on the average, better equipped to solve their own damn problems.
Plus, it tends to be inheritable: educated parents tend to, themselves, choose to educate their kids.