Maybe politicians are figuring out that you need evidence to prove their points.
What politicians need, if they want to pass a feel-good law like this, is a law that passes First Amendment muster. It can be based on a theory of Evil Fairies penetrating the minds of unsuspecting young teens and corrupting their precious bodily fluids, and it'll hold up, as long as it passes First Amendment muster, and all other relevant criteria. No amount of scientific studies demonstrating the evils of video games will help with that, because we have no criteria about laws being scientifically sound. (For better or worse, probably mostly better, but that's a separate argument.)
Thank you. It doesn't surprise me you need a high-end system.
People like to bitch, but if you listen to nothing but people bitching and only consider the negatives you get anything but an accurate view of the situation.
Here's a metric for you to use: If it were that easy, somebody would have done it.
We're talking almost-guaranteed-Nobel Prize work here.
Not to mention every damn time the speed of light comes up on Slashdot, somebody babbles about entangled particles. Again... if it were that easy, it would have been done.
With all these performance-improving things, shouldn't performance actually, you know, be improved?
Many have fallen into the trap of building "intelligent" cache systems that perform worse than the "dumb" cache systems. Remember, every MB of RAM caching an app that you might use is not caching part of the photo that you are editing; caching is subtle work.
So, as I have not used Vista and have no plans to (I'm with Linux), a question: Can anybody tell me that they put Vista on their computer and things are now noticably faster? I've heard from people with the opposite experience, now I'm soliciting evidence that all these Ready* things actually help people.
The side effect of the Christmas frenzy is an inevitable post-Christmas drought. Anything that could possibly have come out in early December did. Even if it meant shipping it two months before it was really ready. What we get out now is just the dregs.
It starts picking up again here in a bit.
Note that logic is system independent, in the mathematical sense, so it holds for each equally, old or new, console or portable.
This stuff is a big deal, and the Great Filter paper actually manages to draw some useful concrete conclusions from the question, or at least useful concrete questions.
Also related, albeit a little more tangentially, is "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?". "We're in a simulation and there are no extraterrestrials in the simulation" must be considered one of the leading possible answers. (I'm not advocating it either way, I don't have an answer. Nor do I consider this post anywhere near a complete list, just some relevant pointers.)
Well, the real advantage to this argument tack is that it is way more useful and productive than any conceivable (Yet Another...) discussion of Relativity could have been on Slashdot.
(If you want to understand Relativity and not just trade misconceptions, consider reading Reflections on Relativity, which can't be beaten for an online book. Bring your brain.)
Re:The most likely scenario
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As long as you're extrapolating technology, go all the way. There's no reason that uploaded human-level entities (or beyond) are running on a nano-machine-based self-replicating substrate. Remember, our human bodies are nothing more and nothing less than a machine for running a human-level intelligence on a self-replicating substrate, so it's only a question of how much better we can make such things, not whether we can make such things.
The idea of sending out huge spaceships populated with actual, factual meat-bodies is as out-of-date as expecting to meet Venusian swamp dwellers. The whole space travel situation improves when you're sending a ten-or-twenty kilogram seed package containing a few million beings and enough self-replicating machinery and knowledge to turn the entire system into a Matrioshka Brain within a thousand years, possibly much faster.
The only thing physically implausible about this scenario is the Fermi Paradox (that is, if intelligence is anything less than almost impossible, why hasn't our system already been eaten by an intelligence?). Otherwise, the only real question is how quickly this could be done to a solar system, and how thoroughly, not whether it could be done.
Maybe this is a dumb heuristic, but: When have politicians, the media, and the elite class ever come together to correctly say something about science?
Every time it has happened, it has been both wrong, and disastrous.
If we're getting to the point where we're seriously talking about ecologically engineering cooling, we're getting uncomfortably close to "disastrous". I'm way more afraid of global cooling than global warming (one is, for all the propaganda, inconvenient, the other renders the globe truly uninhabitable), and it'd be so very much fun if our 1% cooling solution turned into a 10% cooling solution accidentally. Oops.
That's right kids - we're one step away from failing to have the ability to sort by color and shape.
As it has been pointed out, many other cities (including New York) had these installations, and completely correctly handled them.
Yet you focus on the one example that was handled incorrectly, and generalize from that to "we're one step away from failing to have the ability to sort by color and shape".
The fashionable cynicism on Slashdot gets more repulsive to me every year, because this process isn't just the primary fuel for that cynicism, it's almost the sole fuel. Look, dumb things happen, but if all you look at is the dumb stuff, you'll get an almost unspeakably skewed view of things.
There are six billion people in this world. If even only.1% of them are evil and stupid (hopelessly optimistic!), those six million people would keep us in Darwin awards, stupid overreactions, and other bad news aplenty. But that doesn't show the real nature of the world, which is that every day, 99.9% of the other people were just getting along, maybe even doing some good. That is, even if 99.9% of the world were perfect angels, you'd still have as much evidence as you do now that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, because it'd still be getting pumped out 24/7 on CNN.
You're just allowing yourself to be manipulated by a sensationalistic media if you think this is representative of all humanity, along with all the other pointless bad news you see on the news. Ultimately, if you do this, you are no different than the PEAR group at Princeton featured today on Slashdot, combing through mounds and mounds of data for the small nuggets that confirm your negative worldview, the only difference being that somebody else is doing the combing for you.
Are you sure we have a problem? Because what I see is a number of cities handling this perfectly capably, and one group of people in Boston that may very well have contained no more than three or four people that overreacted just long enough for the media to become involved, at which point even if they recanted it would have been too late.
All it takes is one person calling the police saying "I see a bomb!" without giving a description, and the police being a little too credulous. It's easy to construct the Boston scenario with only a small number of idiots involved and everybody else correctly doing their jobs with the information they had; with just a bit of bad luck all you needed was that initial phone caller being stupid.
I hardly think that a mere handful of stupid people getting unlucky and making national news constitutes proof of government conspiracies to scare people. We don't need government conspiracies, we have a news media that gets paid by the number of people watching them. That's plenty of motivation to be as sensationalistic as possible, and if people get scared as a side effect, well, who cares?
For as long as I can remember I've had a subtle effect on machines. I've heard similar things described here many times, in many discussions. When friends and relatives ask me to fix something, and I come over to help them out, the thing just starts working. Mostly it's with computers.
I've seen people with the opposite story; electronics would just "spontaneously" stop working around them, "spontaneously" break, etc. In fact, for a while I was even one of those people (although I never thought it was magic).
Usually it's a static buildup. A discharge you can't feel can, over time, destroy electronics. I've found, for instance, that certain shoes I've bought seem more prone to giving me a static charge than others. As I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, I actually initially got a wireless router because I was tired of killing my wired routers every time I plugged in my laptop.
As others have pointed out, you might be having perfectly predictable psychological effects on others, or there may be other explanations. "There must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this!" is a cliche in Hollywood that there isn't, but in the real world, that heuristic works pretty well.
The problem isn't that people don't have "unexplainable" properties or capabilities, the problem is that leaping to the conclusion that they must be of a psychic nature is unjustified. It took me a while to figure out that I was shocking things, but I never needed to claim I was actually, factually cursed or anything.
By this definition (which is a a reasonable one, I'm not trying to attack that), we basically have ESP.
The first animal to use light sensitivity has "ESP" from the point of view of every other animal at the time. (Substitute "animal" with the appropriate term if it is not applicable.)
Compared to creatures that do not communicate to each other vocally, those that do have telepathy. And from the point of view of deer or buffalo or other big game, which do communicate vocally, our speech is a much higher grade telepathy; where they can say "RUN LIKE HELL!" and "OW I HURT!" and all that much else, we can co-ordinate our activities and pull off much higher-grade strategies.
In this sense, we have ESP and we have evolutionarily exploited it. If you follow this argument to its logical conclusion, traditional ESP becomes something very hard to pin a definition on. If we did develop "telekinesis", would we still call it ESP once we understood it, and had "telekinesis" machines? (In fact, our machines have better "telekinesis" than we do, thanks to the magic of magnets.) Would telepathy still be "telepathy" if it just turned out that somebody's brain evolved to include radio receivers and senders? A lot of people's definition of ESP seem to critically involve not being materially explainable, which, given our much better understanding of the real world, is a much taller bar than it was in 1800.
I didn't intend it as a criticism of your usage, just a point that people were talking about and you provided a clean segue into without me writing another post.
A humidifier can be a very good investment if this is happening to you a lot. Along with the moderate health benefits and snoring benefits (at least round these parts), you're less likely to throw an electronic-frying shock. The humidifier only has to save one item to be worthwhile.
I've lucked out with my computers pretty much despite shocking the hell out of quite a few of them, but I used to go through network hubs in about three months in the winter, progressive blowing out the sockets as I hooked up my laptop. I eventually went wireless for this reason, not because wireless is cool, but because it has no wires to transmit shocks back to the base station.
Also, as long as I'm replying, I'd point out there's a world of difference between transient shocking, and being grounded into a circuit with the power outlet. If you get briefly shocked when you touch something, that's static. It's a bad thing for the electronics and if you get a lot of static, you should do something about the circumstances generating the shocks. But if the shock is continuous, you're part of a circuit, and that can be really bad. Along with potentially frying circuits and such, you're also running the risk of someday having a lower resistance than you do now, and getting significantly more current than you did the previous times, such as by having wet fingers. For consumer devices, it's probably a low-probability event, but it's not a risk worth taking, since the risk is also accompanied by a lot of other higher-probability problems like damaging the electronics.
This isn't really a YRO issue. Felons having reduced rights is a long-standing tradition, and I for one wouldn't care to give it up. There are some obivous attack avenues we need to watch (like making sure that laws don't get written that make everyone felons; this is not an exhaustive list), but the principle is sound.
In a US context, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the low bar of "sex offender", but all in all, this isn't much different than the other things sex offenders are already obligated to do, and it's already the offender's responsibility to do things like update their address, so even complaints that this isn't perfectly enforceable are pretty silly.
Besides, when did perfect enforceability become some sort of golden standard for the viability of a law? Can you draw a distinction between this unenforceable law, and the even-more unenforceable laws against murder?
(And how many people complaining about how this isn't perfectly enforceable would turn right around and bitch even louder if laws actually were perfectly enforceable? Nigh unto 100%, I'd guess.)
Re:Becuase People don't know what they want!
on
Why Software is Hard
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I say, if you want to see the silliness of the venerable Construction metaphor, show how we'd really build houses if we built houses the way we built software.
First, building a house is a solved problem, so you'd never hire an architect or builders. You'd go down to Best Buy and buy Microsoft House for $89.95. Any reasonable requirement you can think of is covered by Microsoft House; you have to really try to throw it for a loop.
Microsoft House is guaranteed to conform to all building codes in all jurisdictions in the United States and outlying territories.
(You could also just download GnuHouse, which has some more geek-appealing features, but has less style, since nobody could afford to hire the best designers. Also, no warranty.)
You wouldn't spend time building the house, either. You'd fire up the Wizard, which in a matter of minutes would build you a basic house. A real house, mind you, one that you can walk through, look at, get a sense of how it fits in with the land, that sort of thing. No simulations. Just like the default website setup for IIS, which may not be super spectacular awesome, but serves static pages just fine, you know? Working website, working house.
You'd incrementally modify your house in real time, playing with the color schemes and features, adding in the furniture, saving your progress and returning to it later if you didn't like it, etc. All without committing to any resource expenditures until you decide what to "keep".
Once you decide you're done, Microsoft House automatically imports all your old possessions and does some reasonable default thing with them.
Now, you can make the easy +5 Funny jokes about Microsoft House, but for most people, most needs, most of the time, it would work and work fine. (Don't stretch the metaphor too far. After all, my entire point is this metaphor sucks. So, no need to sketch out house-based spyware.)
So... does this look anything like a real construction project? Or, is software development so different from construction that we should just retire the metaphor?
The present is freaking awesome. There are entire new categories of awesomeness that didn't even exist a hundred years ago, and it's getting better all the time. If I even started listing them, I'd sound utopian, even though it's not an unrealized future I'm describing, but the actual present. There is no-when I'd rather live, if I can only select from the past, and assuming I don't get to chose who I'd end up as (an assumption that people frequently sneak in; are you sure you want to live in 1500 if you are almost certain to end up a dirt-poor peasant somewhere or other?).
But since the present actually exists, we can see its problems. As freaking awesome as it is, it is still far from perfect.
But the future doesn't actually exist as anything but our dreams. So, natually, it has no problems. So the future is even awesomer, and the present sucks to the extent that it doesn't live up to my awesome future dreams.
People who have actually taken a look at the future in a clear-eyed way say it'll still have problems, and it's still anybody's guess as to whether they'll be bigger or smaller than the problems of today. Still, since staying in the present doesn't really seem to be an option, it seems we'll find out. One thing's for sure, we won't be jumping straight to a mystical paradise anytime soon.
In the meantime... enjoy what is here and what you have. If you're certain the present sucks, it will... for you. Why add the misery of thinking everything sucks more than it actually does to the still-real misery that life often offers you?
Prescription drugs are a bit different from other advertised products in that the people who are convinced to buy them are not the ones who actually pay for them. The cost is shared by everyone in the form of higher medical insurance premiums and taxes.
That's much more reasonable. Especially the latter points towards an interest in a government-based solution, as long as the government is involved as deeply as it is with Healthcare anyhow. (Medicare/Medicaid is probably enough to give it an interest. Whether Medicare/Medicaid should exist is another debate entirely; today it does so the interest is there.)
What I am saying is that it's harder than you think.
For instance, your proposed solution has serious problems with false positives that would render it useless in practice. Unfortunately, you can't "just try" that solution so easily.
Out of curiosity, is there anything in the Windows world that can connect to an Exchange server and read Outlook folders, without using Outlook? Preferably without Outlook even being installed on the client machine.
I'm not in the Windows world enough to know.
If not, you're asking for something in the Linux world that doesn't exist in the Windows world, either: Non-Outlook Exchange connectivity. Framed this way, I think it's pretty clear that it's not "Linux's" fault for not having this; in fact it's a minor miracle that it has any Exchange functionality at all.
Hint: If you don't even have any options on Windows, it's probably not the OS's "fault".
Slashdot Mirror
"Big words" like "plasma" scare folk. Look! Six! As you all know, we can only read words of five or less. More and we just get scared.
I hope that last word didn't blow your stack, but when you need a "big word", you need a "big word".
(Wow, this is hard. How did he manage this? It would take me a year, I swear, and I used five, not just four.)
You are confusing your desires with reality.
Thank you. It doesn't surprise me you need a high-end system.
People like to bitch, but if you listen to nothing but people bitching and only consider the negatives you get anything but an accurate view of the situation.
Here's a metric for you to use: If it were that easy, somebody would have done it.
We're talking almost-guaranteed-Nobel Prize work here.
Not to mention every damn time the speed of light comes up on Slashdot, somebody babbles about entangled particles. Again... if it were that easy, it would have been done.
Google for why it's not possible.
With all these performance-improving things, shouldn't performance actually, you know, be improved?
Many have fallen into the trap of building "intelligent" cache systems that perform worse than the "dumb" cache systems. Remember, every MB of RAM caching an app that you might use is not caching part of the photo that you are editing; caching is subtle work.
So, as I have not used Vista and have no plans to (I'm with Linux), a question: Can anybody tell me that they put Vista on their computer and things are now noticably faster? I've heard from people with the opposite experience, now I'm soliciting evidence that all these Ready* things actually help people.
The side effect of the Christmas frenzy is an inevitable post-Christmas drought. Anything that could possibly have come out in early December did. Even if it meant shipping it two months before it was really ready. What we get out now is just the dregs.
It starts picking up again here in a bit.
Note that logic is system independent, in the mathematical sense, so it holds for each equally, old or new, console or portable.
For what I consider a much better treatment of this topic, see: The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?
This stuff is a big deal, and the Great Filter paper actually manages to draw some useful concrete conclusions from the question, or at least useful concrete questions.
Also related, albeit a little more tangentially, is "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?". "We're in a simulation and there are no extraterrestrials in the simulation" must be considered one of the leading possible answers. (I'm not advocating it either way, I don't have an answer. Nor do I consider this post anywhere near a complete list, just some relevant pointers.)
Well, the real advantage to this argument tack is that it is way more useful and productive than any conceivable (Yet Another...) discussion of Relativity could have been on Slashdot.
(If you want to understand Relativity and not just trade misconceptions, consider reading Reflections on Relativity, which can't be beaten for an online book. Bring your brain.)
As long as you're extrapolating technology, go all the way. There's no reason that uploaded human-level entities (or beyond) are running on a nano-machine-based self-replicating substrate. Remember, our human bodies are nothing more and nothing less than a machine for running a human-level intelligence on a self-replicating substrate, so it's only a question of how much better we can make such things, not whether we can make such things.
The idea of sending out huge spaceships populated with actual, factual meat-bodies is as out-of-date as expecting to meet Venusian swamp dwellers. The whole space travel situation improves when you're sending a ten-or-twenty kilogram seed package containing a few million beings and enough self-replicating machinery and knowledge to turn the entire system into a Matrioshka Brain within a thousand years, possibly much faster.
The only thing physically implausible about this scenario is the Fermi Paradox (that is, if intelligence is anything less than almost impossible, why hasn't our system already been eaten by an intelligence?). Otherwise, the only real question is how quickly this could be done to a solar system, and how thoroughly, not whether it could be done.
This changes the population density distribution of Canada how?
I think considering the seeking out of hard data "lame" goes right into "stupid".
Why speculate when three minute's Googling gets you an answer?
That's a strange definition of "decentralized".
Compare with: United States Population Density Map.
Canada is far more centralized than the United States.
Maybe this is a dumb heuristic, but: When have politicians, the media, and the elite class ever come together to correctly say something about science?
Every time it has happened, it has been both wrong, and disastrous.
If we're getting to the point where we're seriously talking about ecologically engineering cooling, we're getting uncomfortably close to "disastrous". I'm way more afraid of global cooling than global warming (one is, for all the propaganda, inconvenient, the other renders the globe truly uninhabitable), and it'd be so very much fun if our 1% cooling solution turned into a 10% cooling solution accidentally. Oops.
Yet you focus on the one example that was handled incorrectly, and generalize from that to "we're one step away from failing to have the ability to sort by color and shape".
The fashionable cynicism on Slashdot gets more repulsive to me every year, because this process isn't just the primary fuel for that cynicism, it's almost the sole fuel. Look, dumb things happen, but if all you look at is the dumb stuff, you'll get an almost unspeakably skewed view of things.
There are six billion people in this world. If even only
You're just allowing yourself to be manipulated by a sensationalistic media if you think this is representative of all humanity, along with all the other pointless bad news you see on the news. Ultimately, if you do this, you are no different than the PEAR group at Princeton featured today on Slashdot, combing through mounds and mounds of data for the small nuggets that confirm your negative worldview, the only difference being that somebody else is doing the combing for you.
Are you sure we have a problem? Because what I see is a number of cities handling this perfectly capably, and one group of people in Boston that may very well have contained no more than three or four people that overreacted just long enough for the media to become involved, at which point even if they recanted it would have been too late.
All it takes is one person calling the police saying "I see a bomb!" without giving a description, and the police being a little too credulous. It's easy to construct the Boston scenario with only a small number of idiots involved and everybody else correctly doing their jobs with the information they had; with just a bit of bad luck all you needed was that initial phone caller being stupid.
I hardly think that a mere handful of stupid people getting unlucky and making national news constitutes proof of government conspiracies to scare people. We don't need government conspiracies, we have a news media that gets paid by the number of people watching them. That's plenty of motivation to be as sensationalistic as possible, and if people get scared as a side effect, well, who cares?
Usually it's a static buildup. A discharge you can't feel can, over time, destroy electronics. I've found, for instance, that certain shoes I've bought seem more prone to giving me a static charge than others. As I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, I actually initially got a wireless router because I was tired of killing my wired routers every time I plugged in my laptop.
As others have pointed out, you might be having perfectly predictable psychological effects on others, or there may be other explanations. "There must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this!" is a cliche in Hollywood that there isn't, but in the real world, that heuristic works pretty well.
The problem isn't that people don't have "unexplainable" properties or capabilities, the problem is that leaping to the conclusion that they must be of a psychic nature is unjustified. It took me a while to figure out that I was shocking things, but I never needed to claim I was actually, factually cursed or anything.
By this definition (which is a a reasonable one, I'm not trying to attack that), we basically have ESP.
The first animal to use light sensitivity has "ESP" from the point of view of every other animal at the time. (Substitute "animal" with the appropriate term if it is not applicable.)
Compared to creatures that do not communicate to each other vocally, those that do have telepathy. And from the point of view of deer or buffalo or other big game, which do communicate vocally, our speech is a much higher grade telepathy; where they can say "RUN LIKE HELL!" and "OW I HURT!" and all that much else, we can co-ordinate our activities and pull off much higher-grade strategies.
In this sense, we have ESP and we have evolutionarily exploited it. If you follow this argument to its logical conclusion, traditional ESP becomes something very hard to pin a definition on. If we did develop "telekinesis", would we still call it ESP once we understood it, and had "telekinesis" machines? (In fact, our machines have better "telekinesis" than we do, thanks to the magic of magnets.) Would telepathy still be "telepathy" if it just turned out that somebody's brain evolved to include radio receivers and senders? A lot of people's definition of ESP seem to critically involve not being materially explainable, which, given our much better understanding of the real world, is a much taller bar than it was in 1800.
A humidifier can be a very good investment if this is happening to you a lot. Along with the moderate health benefits and snoring benefits (at least round these parts), you're less likely to throw an electronic-frying shock. The humidifier only has to save one item to be worthwhile.
I've lucked out with my computers pretty much despite shocking the hell out of quite a few of them, but I used to go through network hubs in about three months in the winter, progressive blowing out the sockets as I hooked up my laptop. I eventually went wireless for this reason, not because wireless is cool, but because it has no wires to transmit shocks back to the base station.
Also, as long as I'm replying, I'd point out there's a world of difference between transient shocking, and being grounded into a circuit with the power outlet. If you get briefly shocked when you touch something, that's static. It's a bad thing for the electronics and if you get a lot of static, you should do something about the circumstances generating the shocks. But if the shock is continuous, you're part of a circuit, and that can be really bad. Along with potentially frying circuits and such, you're also running the risk of someday having a lower resistance than you do now, and getting significantly more current than you did the previous times, such as by having wet fingers. For consumer devices, it's probably a low-probability event, but it's not a risk worth taking, since the risk is also accompanied by a lot of other higher-probability problems like damaging the electronics.
This isn't really a YRO issue. Felons having reduced rights is a long-standing tradition, and I for one wouldn't care to give it up. There are some obivous attack avenues we need to watch (like making sure that laws don't get written that make everyone felons; this is not an exhaustive list), but the principle is sound.
In a US context, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the low bar of "sex offender", but all in all, this isn't much different than the other things sex offenders are already obligated to do, and it's already the offender's responsibility to do things like update their address, so even complaints that this isn't perfectly enforceable are pretty silly.
Besides, when did perfect enforceability become some sort of golden standard for the viability of a law? Can you draw a distinction between this unenforceable law, and the even-more unenforceable laws against murder?
(And how many people complaining about how this isn't perfectly enforceable would turn right around and bitch even louder if laws actually were perfectly enforceable? Nigh unto 100%, I'd guess.)
Actually, I say, if you want to see the silliness of the venerable Construction metaphor, show how we'd really build houses if we built houses the way we built software.
First, building a house is a solved problem, so you'd never hire an architect or builders. You'd go down to Best Buy and buy Microsoft House for $89.95. Any reasonable requirement you can think of is covered by Microsoft House; you have to really try to throw it for a loop.
Microsoft House is guaranteed to conform to all building codes in all jurisdictions in the United States and outlying territories.
(You could also just download GnuHouse, which has some more geek-appealing features, but has less style, since nobody could afford to hire the best designers. Also, no warranty.)
You wouldn't spend time building the house, either. You'd fire up the Wizard, which in a matter of minutes would build you a basic house. A real house, mind you, one that you can walk through, look at, get a sense of how it fits in with the land, that sort of thing. No simulations. Just like the default website setup for IIS, which may not be super spectacular awesome, but serves static pages just fine, you know? Working website, working house.
You'd incrementally modify your house in real time, playing with the color schemes and features, adding in the furniture, saving your progress and returning to it later if you didn't like it, etc. All without committing to any resource expenditures until you decide what to "keep".
Once you decide you're done, Microsoft House automatically imports all your old possessions and does some reasonable default thing with them.
Now, you can make the easy +5 Funny jokes about Microsoft House, but for most people, most needs, most of the time, it would work and work fine. (Don't stretch the metaphor too far. After all, my entire point is this metaphor sucks. So, no need to sketch out house-based spyware.)
So... does this look anything like a real construction project? Or, is software development so different from construction that we should just retire the metaphor?
But since the present actually exists, we can see its problems. As freaking awesome as it is, it is still far from perfect.
But the future doesn't actually exist as anything but our dreams. So, natually, it has no problems. So the future is even awesomer, and the present sucks to the extent that it doesn't live up to my awesome future dreams.
People who have actually taken a look at the future in a clear-eyed way say it'll still have problems, and it's still anybody's guess as to whether they'll be bigger or smaller than the problems of today. Still, since staying in the present doesn't really seem to be an option, it seems we'll find out. One thing's for sure, we won't be jumping straight to a mystical paradise anytime soon.
In the meantime... enjoy what is here and what you have. If you're certain the present sucks, it will... for you. Why add the misery of thinking everything sucks more than it actually does to the still-real misery that life often offers you?
Who says I don't think there's a solution?
What I am saying is that it's harder than you think.
For instance, your proposed solution has serious problems with false positives that would render it useless in practice. Unfortunately, you can't "just try" that solution so easily.
Out of curiosity, is there anything in the Windows world that can connect to an Exchange server and read Outlook folders, without using Outlook? Preferably without Outlook even being installed on the client machine.
I'm not in the Windows world enough to know.
If not, you're asking for something in the Linux world that doesn't exist in the Windows world, either: Non-Outlook Exchange connectivity. Framed this way, I think it's pretty clear that it's not "Linux's" fault for not having this; in fact it's a minor miracle that it has any Exchange functionality at all.
Hint: If you don't even have any options on Windows, it's probably not the OS's "fault".
The free speech implications of this don't bother you?
Or, more likely, there's some more logical premises that you believe in that you aren't expressing here. Care to try to explicitly express them?