Yeah, and the TV shows that were on when I was a kid weren't like the brainless trash that kids of today put up with. Blah blah blah.
Same ole', same ole' selection bias: You only remember the good ones from the past. Oddly enough, no matter how far we progress, the best of the past is always better than the worst of today. Go figure.
Honestly, how many times does the Internet have to put up with this exact parent post?
Let me guess, you like Torment but don't like Final Fantasy
Wrong. Like 'em both. Poor start.
In fact, in believe that in that you could compare Fallout to Final Fantasy X-2 (and this is based on hearsay, I haven't played it - X-2 that is, I have bought every Black Isle game and several copies of some for various reaons)
Nope. I've 100%'ed X-2 (and so far it's actually my favorite FF) and beaten both Fallouts several times. For a FF, X-2 is extremely open. But that's not saying much. You face all of one choice in the game (which do you support, the re-forming church or the youth rebellion), and the second ending is more Easter Egg than effect of playing the game. (You have to get 100%, meaningless in the game world, really, and at two widely separated points in the game you have to press X in a certain timeframe, and the 100% involves a lot of tedious crap that should never have an effect on the game world. Whether or not you watch a Chocobo wander by a camera should not magically affect how your game ends. No exaggeration; consult a X-2 100% FAQ and look for the list of stupid sphere movies you have to watch.)
Final Fantasies are an almost-always heavily cliched story, wrapped around a tolerably good combat simulator (missing the depth of a tactics game or war game), which somehow combines into an experience far greater than the sum of the parts.
The Black Isle games are very open, branching experiences, where the final game-ending sequence may be the same, but hell, even the way of beating those is as open-ended as the technology allows. Try talking the final boss into suicide in FFX, eh?
But here's the thing. You're ranting on about how wrong I am. But it's actually logically impossible for me to be wrong. I have created a definition of "open" vs. "closed" RPGs. I haven't actually laid it out, but I think you've got a good sense of what it is. It's YOUR stupid assumption that one MUST be "good" and one MUST be "bad", leading to your incorrect conclusion that I must also think one is "good" and one is "bad". My definition, which I understand quite well. This definition exists, and there's no question which side FF falls on (even X-2), and which side Fallout falls on.
You are free to feel that the definition has no use, just as you are free to say that "violet" is not a separate color from "purple" and thus not a useful concept. (This is not an random example; personally I don't draw a shade distinction there in the usual sense of the term ("red" "green" "yellow", etc., there are only 5-9 shades in this sense, there is actual science on this topic so if you feel like disputing the side point make sure you actually know what that is), though I can see the difference.) But you are not entitled to say no such distinction exists at all. That's imposing your own cognitive patterns on the rest of us. I think you'll find that the world's not going to get any less full of frustrating people who don't think exactly like you anytime soon if you insist on keeping that up.
I believe an adequate definition of "narrowmindedness" is the belief that only your own opinions matter on a topic. Pot, meet kettle.
(Oh, and to forestall the inevitable, definitions aren't opinions. Re-read the paragraph two previous very carefully if you think that I insisted my opinion is correct.)
Re:Again with the western vs easten
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Living In Oblivion
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· Score: 2, Insightful
and you mentioning Torment, a game heavily inspired by Final Fantasy...
First, you misspelled "Dungeons and Dragons", and you misspelled "based on". I can't imagine what influence you think comes from Final Fantasy moreso than D&D.
Second, you want to see difference? Load up FFX. Now, kill Yuna. I mean, actually kill her so she's gone, and no longer shows up in the cut scenes, not just "at 0 hitpoints and apparently just fine to get married, but too ill to fight".
Or decide that honestly, Seymour can just have that whiny little bitch.
Or that Yunalesca's speech makes a hell of a lot more sense than plunging the land into chaos, so let's just side with the establishment.
Now, pop open Planescape: Torment or a Fallout and try the equivalent. Quite a different outcome. Heck, in Fallout 2 you can sell your party members into slavery for money.
If you're complaining about "eastern vs. western" qua "eastern vs. western", you might have a point. Personally, I'd prefer "open" vs. "closed", or "interactive story" vs. "pre-determined story" or something. But "eastern vs. western" is pretty close to the truth; I'm aware of some "eastern" (closed) RPGs made by the west, but I'm not aware of any "western-style" (open) RPGs made by the east.
(Normally I'm the first to hate this sort of snotty answer, but in the case of "wanting more than you can afford", it's a necessary, if perhaps not sufficient, part of the solution.)
(I suppose, technically, "make more money" also works.)
Presumably the worry is that the degree of access given to the Black Box Voting inspectors is greater than a voter would have. Did they spend several hours taking the machine apart? Did they put it back together properly? A clerk might have noticed this happening on voting day.
But they should be given that much access. An attacker is unlikely to just be "A Voter". These sorts of things are often, if not usually, inside jobs. An attacker should be assumed to have volunteered to manage the vote (which I gather is easy to do since few people want to do it) and should be assumed to be able to spend hours with a machine, probably in the comfort of their own home, and with access to any number of helpful resources, including the full resources of the local political party apparatus or the mafia. That last one's no joke, either.
I'm not very worried about "A Voter", I'm worried about the entire system.
In Diebold's defense, any machine handed over to an investigator should not be trusted again, for the very same reasons. However, Diebold should allow any customer to randomly select a voting system to subject to any arbitrary analysis, and replace it at no (extra) charge.
You sue the users. Writing code covered by a patent without a license is illegal, but so is using it.
Of course you can also sue the coders, if you feel like it.
Patents are pretty broad. And of course ignorance isn't a defense, so you're legally obligated to have memorized all umpteen millions of existing patents so you can be sure you're not infringing on them.
(Sometimes I think that last point is the strongest anti-patent argument there is; the bar is set so low you're effectively guaranteed to be in violation, and what's the point of a patent law that everyone is in violation of?)
I don't know if I'll like it or not. I've never tried it. That's why I said my interest was piqued, not "Oh, wow, that's obviously a great idea!"
I've done the Squaresoft-esque thing, though. And while I know I like it, I also know it's a bit limiting and gets a bit old after a while. I also can't help but step back every once in a while, and realize how incredibly stupid the whole exercise is sometimes.
Most games are, ultimately. I'm up for a new brand of stupidity every once in a while.
The rest of us are quite proud of NASA and the accomplishments they have made to advance space exploration for all mankind.
Why does that imply that desiring private participation in space is somehow "trolling"?
I'm proud of NASA. I'm proud of its past accomplishments. I consider the odds of NASA getting a viable, long-term, self-sustaining human presence in space about zero, using the current effectively-monopolistic approach. Again, how is this "trolling"? I think it's a pretty clear-eyed view of the present state of NASA and space exploration, not trolling. I think you have to squint awfully damned hard, to the point of self-delusion, to believe anything else about the current state of NASA.
"Past performance may not be an indicator of future success", to borrow a phrase from the financial community.
All of you made the same assumption, which is that I have to know who I'm talking to to the point that the target has paid Verisign for an expensive certificate, taking a rather long time to obtain the certificate, and it's a pain to install, etc. That's not the only level of security by any means.
What y'all aren't taking into account is that I may be confident of the identity by means other than the certificate process. The certificate process is one way to be sure of identity, and I may need less assurance (an server for a business used only by employees of that business where "encryption" is enough security, man-in-the-middle doesn't really keep us up at night) or more assurance (as a certificate is not a guarantee of connection fidelity, only a fairly strong assurance that the middle is OK, so we need some "extra-certificate" mechanism anyhow).
Security is a continuum. It's not "certificate or no certificate", and by bundling up and conflating those two issues, you make it harder to understand and make valid choices along that continuum. And, going back to the original topic, it leads straight to the mistake made in browsers where the browsers don't see the need to show the details about the certificate to the user in an easy and obvious way, because "it's got a certificate, well, that proves everything, right?" No, because the user's security criteria may be very different than the certificate authority's security critiria, in either direction, and the user is both correct, and in need of the data to make the decision easily.
We made a mistake back in the day. Certificates are serving two purposes: One is to encrypt the data, one is to verify identity.
This makes it a major pain when you just want to encrypt data without claiming to be anyone in particular, since you have to jump through a lot of hoops both on server and client side to get it working. The browser gets bitchy about a certificate that isn't signed by any of its roots, even though it may very well be the case that nobody cares.
If we clearly thought about these two aspects, and separated them, it would become clear that A: we need a better way to just say "secure the damn connection" without claiming to be anybody and B: When a site is claiming to be somebody, it hardly makes sense to not show the claim clearly to the user. But since the concepts are all mushed up, you get a lock icon that sort of covers half the situation, mostly, and few people really realize there's a problem.
Which triggers this idea in my head, which is probably how I'd approach the problem. (This message is addressed to WorkinTooHard, not Jason Earl.)
Since you don't think that the management is committing anywhere near the necessary resources to this project, suggest shutting it down. The worst case scenario is to fritter away resources that could be better spent doing something useful and yet never having anything to show for it.
If they agree, there you go, problem solved. Seriously.
If they don't agree, take the opportunity to see what they want out of the website. You ought to already know, but if you don't, find out. Then, when you have a list of concrete needs, show why you can't attain them on your resources. Then, either revise the list or get more resources, and point out there's no third option in the real world.
Of course the second bit is standard requirements gathering methodology, but by opening by suggesting just canning the project you might shake things up enough to swing a transition into that domain.
You need to draw a contrast between what is desired and what you can produce. It's your responsibility to know both, and while you don't mention it, I'm going to hazard a guess you don't really have good, solid requirements, because that's the easiest way to get to where you are now.
The reality is, if an upper manager wants to block the new website, they have every right to do so. Your job is to go from an implicit "we don't want a new website" (as demonstrated by actions) to an explicit "we don't want a new website", so the "blame" can't be shifted to you.
To me, staring at a screen, typing every word that a prof says into a Word document is a stupid waste of technology.
It's a way to convince yourself that you're doing work, without actually doing work. Then, when you fail the course, you can whine about how much work you did, and how hard the course must be, and how evil the prof is, and how it's everybody but your fault. Not that that's the reason, of course, but it's one of the effects.
A lot of people confuse "work" with "progress". Not all work is equally valuable. Some, like what you mention, is downright worthless.
(You also get a lot of people mixing up the two concepts when they talk about the "fairness" of MMORPGs. "Fair" becomes defined as everybody doing the same amount of work, not being able to make the same amount of progress. This is one concise way of expressing the fundamental flaw in nearly all current MMORPGs that makes me completely uninterested in them, because this is the root cause of the "grind". And I don't care how MM a game is, I've got way better things to do with my time than pay somebody for the ability to grind.)
No, it's more complicated than that, and it's very important that you, you the reader, realize this.
You ears, like your eyes, adjust to the ambient level of sound. Your ears are only slighty better at telling you the absolute volume of a sound that your eyes are at telling you the absolute brightness of a room.
(You think you're good at that? Ha! Get a real light meter and prepare to be amazed.)
Unlike your eyes, which are at least decent at telling you when something is too bright, your ears suck at telling you when something is too loud. By the time they hurt, you're doing major damage to them. It's very easy to do minor, long-term, continuous damage to them, and since your ear will adjust to the ambient noise level, you'll have no way of knowing.
Mere volume control isn't enough. We need direct feedback about the actual volume level, as compared to the level that will damage our ears, because our bodies won't do that for us. We need options in our music players that say "never play a sound loud enough to hurt my ears", and if the ambient environment is too loud to hear the music over the max volume level it then allows, consider that a hint!
For that matter, we need this option in our cell phones too, implemented in hardware, not software. (Twice now my cellphone has played its "I'm dying, come plug me in!" sound while I'm talking to somebody. Both times I've wanted to throttle the designer.)
You probably shouldn't read "Wiki" literally in the modern sense. Read it as "something like a Wiki, suitably modified for scientific application".
I think the key idea here isn't so much the "Wiki", but the idea that you can turn the fundamental unit of "science" away from "the paper" to something more dynamic and electronic. While you don't want to lower the standards (or at least less trustworthy material should be clearly labelled as such), this can correct some serious issues that "the paper" has:
Constrained by physical publishing. I'll admit I don't have much academic experience, but every published paper that I've seen the "inside" of, it turns out there's a lot more good material the research generated, there's just no space to publish it, and the author has to pick and choose.
Difficulty of publishing original data: A standardized way to post the source data would be useful.
Static: Once the paper is published, that's it. It would be nice that if somebody replicated the experiment, say, there would be a standardized way to "attach" that information to the original paper. Thus would each "paper" also become a statement of how thoroughly (or incompletely!) attested the result is. A paper could also play host to a "conversation" of sorts about the result, eventually resulting in further refinements and such.
All of these problems of course have some solutions in the current world (or so I would presume), but a (semi-)unified*, standardized system would make the current solutions look primitive and piecemeal.
And again, I emphasize that while it might not be all bad to allow "unverified" claims to be added by a broad crowd (perhaps not everyone), I would never suggest not using standards or peer review and clearly labelling what has been reviewed to what extent. However, the scientific process can benefit from borrowing from the Wiki, the discussion board, and a few other formalized, standardized pieces of the Internet and other electronic communication techniques without losing its essential nature, indeed, enhancing it.
(*: Personally, if I were designing this, I'd support a very distributed system that would only be "semi-unified", based on open protocols and data descriptions that would allow anyone to host their own "journal" (mostly universities and university departments), and to try to encourage people to be open with their data and such so that it would be easy to negotiate backup/mirror agreements and such, allowing one to do away with "the journals" while still being very aware that certain people and groups will have enhanced reputation and this would need to be dealt with directly. This would be a lot of fun to design.)
You're thinking of one of the alternate reality games. I give you a google link not to be a smartass, but because I really don't know much more than the fact that that's the keyword you'll want, so that should help you. They don't really appeal to me, so I don't pay much attention.
I read this title as "Holographic Novel In the Works". Now, that could be sorta cool.
(Although the classic Illuminatus Trilogy comes close, in that cutting the book in half loses surprisingly little information, which as you may recall is one of the characteristics of a hologram. But real holograms would be even cooler.)
Many distros are at this level, if you don't mind blowing away anything that's on the hard drive. Not quite literally, because one-click installation, while theoretically possible, is not feasible. While the cost/benefit curve of a given installation question slopes off sharply as the number of questions increases, there are some things that sometimes need to be asked. One of them, for instance, is "can I blow the contents of this hard drive away?" It really doesn't matter if a user doesn't understand what that means; there is no practical default that results both in a Linux system being installed and no grave data loss. Saving a windows installation takes more work because there are inherently decisions involved.
Still, there are many distros that are much easier than Windows if have common hardware, and you end up with a lot more after the installation is done. (Don't overestimate Window's hardware support, too.)
Be sure you try to install XP from scratch sometime for a fair comparision, too. I just did one a few weeks ago, and along with a number of questions the installer asks, you also have (IIRC) a minimum of three "Update, Install, Reboot" sequences before you're fully up to date. (Fortunately, they've done a bit of work to keep that down. I believe there was one time period when the minimum was four, late in the Service Pack 1 time frame.) And when you're done, all you have is Windows XP, and about all it can do on its own is browse the web. Wordpad's your document editor, Paint your graphics editor, and Solitaire your game.
You're assuming a much smaller time scale than I am. Ultimately, intelligence will beat microbes, in the sense that we will use them and they won't be able to harm us. Failing to specify what you mean by "significance" is disingenuous here. The idea that they are infinitely adaptable has attained "dogma" status... but it's not true. They have limits, and those limits are less than the limits of intelligence.
We completely depend on microscopic life to LIVE.
We won't be. At least not bacteria we don't intimately control every abspect of, in pontential if not in fact. As our knowledge frontier advances, we are increasingly less tolerant of anything that can reach out and smack us unexpectedly. This trend will not cease anytime soon.
Besides, "mass" is an incredibly stupid measurement, chose deliberately with agenda-a-forethought to downplay the significance of humans, not because it actually means anything. You want to play with "mass", well, I'll trump you and point out life is an anamoly; non-living mass grossly outweighs living mass. But... who gives a shit about that measurement? Are bacteria our masters because they're going to smother us or something?
I suppose I'll apologize to our bacterial overlords when they get around to asking for one.
All macroscopic life is an evolutionary abberation.
If you get right down to it, "evolutionary abberation" is either an oxymoron, or redundant, depending on your definition of abberation, but at no point is that a useful statement.
It's important to realize that humans aren't the absolute unparalled masters of the living world in every conceivable manner. It's equally important not to make the opposite error. Macroscopic life is Mother Earth's only significant hope of actually getting off the planet on a big scale, for instance, and "macroscopic life" is only a hair's breadth on the cosmic scale from effectively enslaving microscopic life. (Even if we humans muck it up, I'd bet somebody or something cracks the problem before the sun wipes life from the planet.)
That should be "mere tiny 4 to the power of hundreds of thousands or millions". Which is still a darned sight smaller than a million to the power of a million to the power of a million, which is probably still a breathtaking underestimate.
This doesn't apply so simply to microbes - they can evolve very fast indeed and in big jumps by DNA exchange.
This is why I left the definition of "suitable distance" a little fuzzy; that wasn't oversight, that was purposeful. You probably know that the more mutations an organism acquires at once, the more likely it is to simply die. That's because the organism tried to jump too far in the "real" state space.
You can reverse the logic with reasonable effectiveness; if the organism doesn't die after a seemingly "massive" exchange, than in reality, it didn't traverse very far.
While there may seem to be an organism with a radically different gene state than any previous one after such an exchange, it's "just" a recombination of existing, "known-good" genes that existed in the gene pool (we call it that for a reason), and by the fact that it worked at all, there must be some method to the madness.
In survival terms, it may be a massive leap. In terms of exploring the state space, the new organism is very, very firmly "nothing new".
It may help to realize that the "state space" in question is easily the kind of thing you measure with things to the power of things to the power of thing to the power of things, and beyond. If you think the set of "all [practically] possible genomes" is large (mere hundreds of thousands or millions to the power of tiny little 4), it's nothing next to the set of "all possible lifeforms". Shuffling up a known-good set of genes is piddly.
Remember the context I'm putting this in: Arguing that if grey goo were possible, it would have necessarily evolved by now. In practice, we only care about the DNA space, and there your microbe example does at least represent a much larger leap than us macroscopic organisms seem to be able to pull off safely. But against the backdrop of quasi-infinite possibility, it's small potatoes.
Presumably due to heavy Irish immigration during the Potato famine, that word is definitely in the US vocabulary, too. I have no idea what crack they were smoking for that name, because there's just no way nobody involved knew what it meant.
I honestly said out loud when I saw this story on the frontpage, "Is this a joke?"
Incidentally, a lot of words survive in English primarily as part of a phrase, with their older, original meanings lost. In a way, the phrase is the word. For example, "hither and yon"; neither word is in common or even uncommon use anymore on its own, but the phrase is still used uncommonly. While "scamp" has not descended to this level, there is a phrase associated with it in my mind that may outlast the word itself: 'a scamp and a scoundrel' (and note we don't much use "scoundrel" anymore either), as in "he's a scamp and a scoundrel".
So again, what crack were these people smoking? I mean, I know we like to bag on marketters around here, but there is a certain level of skill involved...
If that were possible, don't you think that evolution would have come up with it already?
The rest of your argument is good, but this is not a valid point. Evolution can only progress from point to point in the space of possible life forms in very small increments, when measured appropriately. (Earth evolution only, for instance, uses DNA, so Earth evolution can be measured fairly accurately by "DNA distance", but technically that's just a small part of the life-form space.)
There are, presumably, life forms that are possible, but can not be evolved to, because there is no path from any feasible starting life form to the life form in question by a series of small steps. Presumably, given the huge space of "possible life forms", the vast majority in fact belong to this class, just as the vast majority of "numbers" aren't integers (although not with the same ratio; presumably the set of viable life forms is finite, if fuzzy).
It is entirely possible that a "grey goo" machine, which would fulfill most definitions of life, can't be incrementally evolved to, yet it could still exist. It is also possible that it could be evolved to, but simply hasn't yet.
For all the complexity that evolution has popped out, it has explored an incomprehensibly small portion of the space of possible life forms.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and the TV shows that were on when I was a kid weren't like the brainless trash that kids of today put up with. Blah blah blah.
Same ole', same ole' selection bias: You only remember the good ones from the past. Oddly enough, no matter how far we progress, the best of the past is always better than the worst of today. Go figure.
Honestly, how many times does the Internet have to put up with this exact parent post?
Let me guess, you like Torment but don't like Final Fantasy
Wrong. Like 'em both. Poor start.
In fact, in believe that in that you could compare Fallout to Final Fantasy X-2 (and this is based on hearsay, I haven't played it - X-2 that is, I have bought every Black Isle game and several copies of some for various reaons)
Nope. I've 100%'ed X-2 (and so far it's actually my favorite FF) and beaten both Fallouts several times. For a FF, X-2 is extremely open. But that's not saying much. You face all of one choice in the game (which do you support, the re-forming church or the youth rebellion), and the second ending is more Easter Egg than effect of playing the game. (You have to get 100%, meaningless in the game world, really, and at two widely separated points in the game you have to press X in a certain timeframe, and the 100% involves a lot of tedious crap that should never have an effect on the game world. Whether or not you watch a Chocobo wander by a camera should not magically affect how your game ends. No exaggeration; consult a X-2 100% FAQ and look for the list of stupid sphere movies you have to watch.)
Final Fantasies are an almost-always heavily cliched story, wrapped around a tolerably good combat simulator (missing the depth of a tactics game or war game), which somehow combines into an experience far greater than the sum of the parts.
The Black Isle games are very open, branching experiences, where the final game-ending sequence may be the same, but hell, even the way of beating those is as open-ended as the technology allows. Try talking the final boss into suicide in FFX, eh?
But here's the thing. You're ranting on about how wrong I am. But it's actually logically impossible for me to be wrong. I have created a definition of "open" vs. "closed" RPGs. I haven't actually laid it out, but I think you've got a good sense of what it is. It's YOUR stupid assumption that one MUST be "good" and one MUST be "bad", leading to your incorrect conclusion that I must also think one is "good" and one is "bad". My definition, which I understand quite well. This definition exists, and there's no question which side FF falls on (even X-2), and which side Fallout falls on.
You are free to feel that the definition has no use, just as you are free to say that "violet" is not a separate color from "purple" and thus not a useful concept. (This is not an random example; personally I don't draw a shade distinction there in the usual sense of the term ("red" "green" "yellow", etc., there are only 5-9 shades in this sense, there is actual science on this topic so if you feel like disputing the side point make sure you actually know what that is), though I can see the difference.) But you are not entitled to say no such distinction exists at all. That's imposing your own cognitive patterns on the rest of us. I think you'll find that the world's not going to get any less full of frustrating people who don't think exactly like you anytime soon if you insist on keeping that up.
I believe an adequate definition of "narrowmindedness" is the belief that only your own opinions matter on a topic. Pot, meet kettle.
(Oh, and to forestall the inevitable, definitions aren't opinions. Re-read the paragraph two previous very carefully if you think that I insisted my opinion is correct.)
and you mentioning Torment, a game heavily inspired by Final Fantasy...
First, you misspelled "Dungeons and Dragons", and you misspelled "based on". I can't imagine what influence you think comes from Final Fantasy moreso than D&D.
Second, you want to see difference? Load up FFX. Now, kill Yuna. I mean, actually kill her so she's gone, and no longer shows up in the cut scenes, not just "at 0 hitpoints and apparently just fine to get married, but too ill to fight".
Or decide that honestly, Seymour can just have that whiny little bitch.
Or that Yunalesca's speech makes a hell of a lot more sense than plunging the land into chaos, so let's just side with the establishment.
Now, pop open Planescape: Torment or a Fallout and try the equivalent. Quite a different outcome. Heck, in Fallout 2 you can sell your party members into slavery for money.
If you're complaining about "eastern vs. western" qua "eastern vs. western", you might have a point. Personally, I'd prefer "open" vs. "closed", or "interactive story" vs. "pre-determined story" or something. But "eastern vs. western" is pretty close to the truth; I'm aware of some "eastern" (closed) RPGs made by the west, but I'm not aware of any "western-style" (open) RPGs made by the east.
Want less.
(Normally I'm the first to hate this sort of snotty answer, but in the case of "wanting more than you can afford", it's a necessary, if perhaps not sufficient, part of the solution.)
(I suppose, technically, "make more money" also works.)
Presumably the worry is that the degree of access given to the Black Box Voting inspectors is greater than a voter would have. Did they spend several hours taking the machine apart? Did they put it back together properly? A clerk might have noticed this happening on voting day.
But they should be given that much access. An attacker is unlikely to just be "A Voter". These sorts of things are often, if not usually, inside jobs. An attacker should be assumed to have volunteered to manage the vote (which I gather is easy to do since few people want to do it) and should be assumed to be able to spend hours with a machine, probably in the comfort of their own home, and with access to any number of helpful resources, including the full resources of the local political party apparatus or the mafia. That last one's no joke, either.
I'm not very worried about "A Voter", I'm worried about the entire system.
In Diebold's defense, any machine handed over to an investigator should not be trusted again, for the very same reasons. However, Diebold should allow any customer to randomly select a voting system to subject to any arbitrary analysis, and replace it at no (extra) charge.
You sue the users. Writing code covered by a patent without a license is illegal, but so is using it.
Of course you can also sue the coders, if you feel like it.
Patents are pretty broad. And of course ignorance isn't a defense, so you're legally obligated to have memorized all umpteen millions of existing patents so you can be sure you're not infringing on them.
(Sometimes I think that last point is the strongest anti-patent argument there is; the bar is set so low you're effectively guaranteed to be in violation, and what's the point of a patent law that everyone is in violation of?)
I don't know if I'll like it or not. I've never tried it. That's why I said my interest was piqued, not "Oh, wow, that's obviously a great idea!"
I've done the Squaresoft-esque thing, though. And while I know I like it, I also know it's a bit limiting and gets a bit old after a while. I also can't help but step back every once in a while, and realize how incredibly stupid the whole exercise is sometimes.
Most games are, ultimately. I'm up for a new brand of stupidity every once in a while.
Thank you. Excellent answer. Now you've piqued my interest.
The rest of us are quite proud of NASA and the accomplishments they have made to advance space exploration for all mankind.
Why does that imply that desiring private participation in space is somehow "trolling"?
I'm proud of NASA. I'm proud of its past accomplishments. I consider the odds of NASA getting a viable, long-term, self-sustaining human presence in space about zero, using the current effectively-monopolistic approach. Again, how is this "trolling"? I think it's a pretty clear-eyed view of the present state of NASA and space exploration, not trolling. I think you have to squint awfully damned hard, to the point of self-delusion, to believe anything else about the current state of NASA.
"Past performance may not be an indicator of future success", to borrow a phrase from the financial community.
If improving your stats improves your enemies proportionally, what's the point of improving your stats?
Serious question, no sarcasm.
All of you made the same assumption, which is that I have to know who I'm talking to to the point that the target has paid Verisign for an expensive certificate, taking a rather long time to obtain the certificate, and it's a pain to install, etc. That's not the only level of security by any means.
What y'all aren't taking into account is that I may be confident of the identity by means other than the certificate process. The certificate process is one way to be sure of identity, and I may need less assurance (an server for a business used only by employees of that business where "encryption" is enough security, man-in-the-middle doesn't really keep us up at night) or more assurance (as a certificate is not a guarantee of connection fidelity, only a fairly strong assurance that the middle is OK, so we need some "extra-certificate" mechanism anyhow).
Security is a continuum. It's not "certificate or no certificate", and by bundling up and conflating those two issues, you make it harder to understand and make valid choices along that continuum. And, going back to the original topic, it leads straight to the mistake made in browsers where the browsers don't see the need to show the details about the certificate to the user in an easy and obvious way, because "it's got a certificate, well, that proves everything, right?" No, because the user's security criteria may be very different than the certificate authority's security critiria, in either direction, and the user is both correct, and in need of the data to make the decision easily.
We made a mistake back in the day. Certificates are serving two purposes: One is to encrypt the data, one is to verify identity.
This makes it a major pain when you just want to encrypt data without claiming to be anyone in particular, since you have to jump through a lot of hoops both on server and client side to get it working. The browser gets bitchy about a certificate that isn't signed by any of its roots, even though it may very well be the case that nobody cares.
If we clearly thought about these two aspects, and separated them, it would become clear that A: we need a better way to just say "secure the damn connection" without claiming to be anybody and B: When a site is claiming to be somebody, it hardly makes sense to not show the claim clearly to the user. But since the concepts are all mushed up, you get a lock icon that sort of covers half the situation, mostly, and few people really realize there's a problem.
Which triggers this idea in my head, which is probably how I'd approach the problem. (This message is addressed to WorkinTooHard, not Jason Earl.)
Since you don't think that the management is committing anywhere near the necessary resources to this project, suggest shutting it down. The worst case scenario is to fritter away resources that could be better spent doing something useful and yet never having anything to show for it.
If they agree, there you go, problem solved. Seriously.
If they don't agree, take the opportunity to see what they want out of the website. You ought to already know, but if you don't, find out. Then, when you have a list of concrete needs, show why you can't attain them on your resources. Then, either revise the list or get more resources, and point out there's no third option in the real world.
Of course the second bit is standard requirements gathering methodology, but by opening by suggesting just canning the project you might shake things up enough to swing a transition into that domain.
You need to draw a contrast between what is desired and what you can produce. It's your responsibility to know both, and while you don't mention it, I'm going to hazard a guess you don't really have good, solid requirements, because that's the easiest way to get to where you are now.
The reality is, if an upper manager wants to block the new website, they have every right to do so. Your job is to go from an implicit "we don't want a new website" (as demonstrated by actions) to an explicit "we don't want a new website", so the "blame" can't be shifted to you.
To me, staring at a screen, typing every word that a prof says into a Word document is a stupid waste of technology.
It's a way to convince yourself that you're doing work, without actually doing work. Then, when you fail the course, you can whine about how much work you did, and how hard the course must be, and how evil the prof is, and how it's everybody but your fault. Not that that's the reason, of course, but it's one of the effects.
A lot of people confuse "work" with "progress". Not all work is equally valuable. Some, like what you mention, is downright worthless.
(You also get a lot of people mixing up the two concepts when they talk about the "fairness" of MMORPGs. "Fair" becomes defined as everybody doing the same amount of work, not being able to make the same amount of progress. This is one concise way of expressing the fundamental flaw in nearly all current MMORPGs that makes me completely uninterested in them, because this is the root cause of the "grind". And I don't care how MM a game is, I've got way better things to do with my time than pay somebody for the ability to grind.)
No, it's more complicated than that, and it's very important that you, you the reader, realize this.
You ears, like your eyes, adjust to the ambient level of sound. Your ears are only slighty better at telling you the absolute volume of a sound that your eyes are at telling you the absolute brightness of a room.
(You think you're good at that? Ha! Get a real light meter and prepare to be amazed.)
Unlike your eyes, which are at least decent at telling you when something is too bright, your ears suck at telling you when something is too loud. By the time they hurt, you're doing major damage to them. It's very easy to do minor, long-term, continuous damage to them, and since your ear will adjust to the ambient noise level, you'll have no way of knowing.
Mere volume control isn't enough. We need direct feedback about the actual volume level, as compared to the level that will damage our ears, because our bodies won't do that for us. We need options in our music players that say "never play a sound loud enough to hurt my ears", and if the ambient environment is too loud to hear the music over the max volume level it then allows, consider that a hint!
For that matter, we need this option in our cell phones too, implemented in hardware, not software. (Twice now my cellphone has played its "I'm dying, come plug me in!" sound while I'm talking to somebody. Both times I've wanted to throttle the designer.)
I think the key idea here isn't so much the "Wiki", but the idea that you can turn the fundamental unit of "science" away from "the paper" to something more dynamic and electronic. While you don't want to lower the standards (or at least less trustworthy material should be clearly labelled as such), this can correct some serious issues that "the paper" has:
- Constrained by physical publishing. I'll admit I don't have much academic experience, but every published paper that I've seen the "inside" of, it turns out there's a lot more good material the research generated, there's just no space to publish it, and the author has to pick and choose.
- Difficulty of publishing original data: A standardized way to post the source data would be useful.
- Static: Once the paper is published, that's it. It would be nice that if somebody replicated the experiment, say, there would be a standardized way to "attach" that information to the original paper. Thus would each "paper" also become a statement of how thoroughly (or incompletely!) attested the result is. A paper could also play host to a "conversation" of sorts about the result, eventually resulting in further refinements and such.
All of these problems of course have some solutions in the current world (or so I would presume), but a (semi-)unified*, standardized system would make the current solutions look primitive and piecemeal.And again, I emphasize that while it might not be all bad to allow "unverified" claims to be added by a broad crowd (perhaps not everyone), I would never suggest not using standards or peer review and clearly labelling what has been reviewed to what extent. However, the scientific process can benefit from borrowing from the Wiki, the discussion board, and a few other formalized, standardized pieces of the Internet and other electronic communication techniques without losing its essential nature, indeed, enhancing it.
(*: Personally, if I were designing this, I'd support a very distributed system that would only be "semi-unified", based on open protocols and data descriptions that would allow anyone to host their own "journal" (mostly universities and university departments), and to try to encourage people to be open with their data and such so that it would be easy to negotiate backup/mirror agreements and such, allowing one to do away with "the journals" while still being very aware that certain people and groups will have enhanced reputation and this would need to be dealt with directly. This would be a lot of fun to design.)
You're thinking of one of the alternate reality games. I give you a google link not to be a smartass, but because I really don't know much more than the fact that that's the keyword you'll want, so that should help you. They don't really appeal to me, so I don't pay much attention.
I read this title as "Holographic Novel In the Works". Now, that could be sorta cool.
(Although the classic Illuminatus Trilogy comes close, in that cutting the book in half loses surprisingly little information, which as you may recall is one of the characteristics of a hologram. But real holograms would be even cooler.)
Many distros are at this level, if you don't mind blowing away anything that's on the hard drive. Not quite literally, because one-click installation, while theoretically possible, is not feasible. While the cost/benefit curve of a given installation question slopes off sharply as the number of questions increases, there are some things that sometimes need to be asked. One of them, for instance, is "can I blow the contents of this hard drive away?" It really doesn't matter if a user doesn't understand what that means; there is no practical default that results both in a Linux system being installed and no grave data loss. Saving a windows installation takes more work because there are inherently decisions involved.
Still, there are many distros that are much easier than Windows if have common hardware, and you end up with a lot more after the installation is done. (Don't overestimate Window's hardware support, too.)
Be sure you try to install XP from scratch sometime for a fair comparision, too. I just did one a few weeks ago, and along with a number of questions the installer asks, you also have (IIRC) a minimum of three "Update, Install, Reboot" sequences before you're fully up to date. (Fortunately, they've done a bit of work to keep that down. I believe there was one time period when the minimum was four, late in the Service Pack 1 time frame.) And when you're done, all you have is Windows XP, and about all it can do on its own is browse the web. Wordpad's your document editor, Paint your graphics editor, and Solitaire your game.
You're assuming a much smaller time scale than I am. Ultimately, intelligence will beat microbes, in the sense that we will use them and they won't be able to harm us. Failing to specify what you mean by "significance" is disingenuous here. The idea that they are infinitely adaptable has attained "dogma" status... but it's not true. They have limits, and those limits are less than the limits of intelligence.
We completely depend on microscopic life to LIVE.
We won't be. At least not bacteria we don't intimately control every abspect of, in pontential if not in fact. As our knowledge frontier advances, we are increasingly less tolerant of anything that can reach out and smack us unexpectedly. This trend will not cease anytime soon.
Besides, "mass" is an incredibly stupid measurement, chose deliberately with agenda-a-forethought to downplay the significance of humans, not because it actually means anything. You want to play with "mass", well, I'll trump you and point out life is an anamoly; non-living mass grossly outweighs living mass. But... who gives a shit about that measurement? Are bacteria our masters because they're going to smother us or something?
I suppose I'll apologize to our bacterial overlords when they get around to asking for one.
All macroscopic life is an evolutionary abberation.
If you get right down to it, "evolutionary abberation" is either an oxymoron, or redundant, depending on your definition of abberation, but at no point is that a useful statement.
It's important to realize that humans aren't the absolute unparalled masters of the living world in every conceivable manner. It's equally important not to make the opposite error. Macroscopic life is Mother Earth's only significant hope of actually getting off the planet on a big scale, for instance, and "macroscopic life" is only a hair's breadth on the cosmic scale from effectively enslaving microscopic life. (Even if we humans muck it up, I'd bet somebody or something cracks the problem before the sun wipes life from the planet.)
Macroscopic life exists because it works.
That should be "mere tiny 4 to the power of hundreds of thousands or millions". Which is still a darned sight smaller than a million to the power of a million to the power of a million, which is probably still a breathtaking underestimate.
This doesn't apply so simply to microbes - they can evolve very fast indeed and in big jumps by DNA exchange.
This is why I left the definition of "suitable distance" a little fuzzy; that wasn't oversight, that was purposeful. You probably know that the more mutations an organism acquires at once, the more likely it is to simply die. That's because the organism tried to jump too far in the "real" state space.
You can reverse the logic with reasonable effectiveness; if the organism doesn't die after a seemingly "massive" exchange, than in reality, it didn't traverse very far.
While there may seem to be an organism with a radically different gene state than any previous one after such an exchange, it's "just" a recombination of existing, "known-good" genes that existed in the gene pool (we call it that for a reason), and by the fact that it worked at all, there must be some method to the madness.
In survival terms, it may be a massive leap. In terms of exploring the state space, the new organism is very, very firmly "nothing new".
It may help to realize that the "state space" in question is easily the kind of thing you measure with things to the power of things to the power of thing to the power of things, and beyond. If you think the set of "all [practically] possible genomes" is large (mere hundreds of thousands or millions to the power of tiny little 4), it's nothing next to the set of "all possible lifeforms". Shuffling up a known-good set of genes is piddly.
Remember the context I'm putting this in: Arguing that if grey goo were possible, it would have necessarily evolved by now. In practice, we only care about the DNA space, and there your microbe example does at least represent a much larger leap than us macroscopic organisms seem to be able to pull off safely. But against the backdrop of quasi-infinite possibility, it's small potatoes.
Presumably due to heavy Irish immigration during the Potato famine, that word is definitely in the US vocabulary, too. I have no idea what crack they were smoking for that name, because there's just no way nobody involved knew what it meant.
I honestly said out loud when I saw this story on the frontpage, "Is this a joke?"
Incidentally, a lot of words survive in English primarily as part of a phrase, with their older, original meanings lost. In a way, the phrase is the word. For example, "hither and yon"; neither word is in common or even uncommon use anymore on its own, but the phrase is still used uncommonly. While "scamp" has not descended to this level, there is a phrase associated with it in my mind that may outlast the word itself: 'a scamp and a scoundrel' (and note we don't much use "scoundrel" anymore either), as in "he's a scamp and a scoundrel".
So again, what crack were these people smoking? I mean, I know we like to bag on marketters around here, but there is a certain level of skill involved...
If that were possible, don't you think that evolution would have come up with it already?
The rest of your argument is good, but this is not a valid point. Evolution can only progress from point to point in the space of possible life forms in very small increments, when measured appropriately. (Earth evolution only, for instance, uses DNA, so Earth evolution can be measured fairly accurately by "DNA distance", but technically that's just a small part of the life-form space.)
There are, presumably, life forms that are possible, but can not be evolved to, because there is no path from any feasible starting life form to the life form in question by a series of small steps. Presumably, given the huge space of "possible life forms", the vast majority in fact belong to this class, just as the vast majority of "numbers" aren't integers (although not with the same ratio; presumably the set of viable life forms is finite, if fuzzy).
It is entirely possible that a "grey goo" machine, which would fulfill most definitions of life, can't be incrementally evolved to, yet it could still exist. It is also possible that it could be evolved to, but simply hasn't yet.
For all the complexity that evolution has popped out, it has explored an incomprehensibly small portion of the space of possible life forms.