We will be able to access health care remotely, from just about anywhere in the world.
Not even close
Well, the technology is there: a doctor/surgeon can access your medical records and give you treatment remotely. The main obstacle is actually getting the doctors to update your records.
Real-time speech translation—once a vision only in science fiction—will become the norm.
Some advances have been made, but nope
Agreed
There will be a 3D Internet.
Nope
They were a year or two off the mark, but you are right.
Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance.
Wow, not even sure what the fuck that was SUPPOSED to be about. Nanotech maybe??
Heh, I wonder if I'd ever see nanotechnology outside a lab, research papers, or/.
Our mobile phones will start to read our minds.
God help us.
Lol'd. Too broad to be of use. I guess it could refer to efforts like Google prioritizing your e-mail for you and stuff.
OTOH, if you really want to pull this off, I'm sure it will work only the first time. You can also profit by giving your customers the info they need on the exam.
Hey, asshole. Ever occurred to you that, given clava's high UID, he/she isn't a geek and don't know enough of Linux/technology to do this? Look at how this question was redacted: it's obvious that he/she is not in control of the system, and is looking for some info here, where people with knowledge gather. Just answer the question if you can help and don't be pompous.
Ha! My reaction is opposition, not really debate;) . Most rants are overreactions, so I don't take them seriously.
Of course I care about efficiency, and I can tell a software patch that brings O(n) to O(sqrt(n)) is instantaneously better and cheaper than spending extra bucks in chips and power.
My point still applies, though: adding horsepower to your machine can be a faster solution than optimizing your code, if you have the resources available and need a solution *today*. I did it one or two times, when I had deadlines. But, as I said, I'm not looking for a debate, just a little cynicism on the face of exaggeration.
So? Who cares how inefficient an app is, as long as it works? If better hardware, instead of better software, makes the switch from 10 seconds of swapping to just 1, the problem is solved.
Sorry, this is my knee-jerk reaction to rants...:P
I heard that in Valdes Peninsula, Argentina, there was once a project to build not one but two plants, one on each side of the isthmus. Would've been a huge source of power... but, as you said, it would have driven out the fauna, especially the whales (the noise would have been unbearable for them). So, in the end, the government decided it wasn't such a good idea after all..
I doubt it. Video streaming, at least for the next few years, won't replace a thing. Telcos aren't greedy bastards when they artificially slow broadband, throttle traffic, or impose monthly limits. I mean, sure, they are greedy, but there's a more plausible explanation: they don't have the infrastructure and can't admit it. It's understandable, really: putting these things up (more like lying these things down, the US is not Japan after all) is expensive as hell, and they can't/won't invest fast enough (there's a reason why there's only a few competitors, after all). If everyone moved to video streaming right now, the whole Internet would collapse. So they are doing this awful dance with their customers to have some extra time, see if someone comes up with a solution that's not so expensive for them, etc. . The net-neutrality thing, for them, was less about fostering innovation and more about giving an at-least mediocre service for most of their clients. They lied, yeah, but it's business as usual.
So, no, it's not a great idea for movies (especially HD), at least for a few extra years. It is, though, for music, books and other low-size content. We have big enough tubes for those to be hosted in the cloud..
You run against two problems if you don't interpret:
The human language is ambiguous.
You can't cover all possible scenarios.
So we pay all these lawyers and judges because they know the spirit of the law (what it's trying to accomplish), and they have the tools to make informed decisions on unforeseen cases. Just imagine a binding document from a few centuries ago. It's impossible that it could have foreseen virtual realities, GPS, pervasive drug traffic, or near-zero cost of duplicating information.
Anyway, the constitution is just a framework. We do need more laws because life is complex, new kind of agreements appear, and there's always someone with less power getting abused. Can you solve the issues of children of divorced parents without additional laws, just by resorting to the constitution? How about the issue of importing/exporting foreign species? You spoke of this "guilt", but what that means? After all, law should be impartial. How can you measure "guilt" in a case of murder? You eventually have to put additional clauses to further refine what murder means and how to allocate guilt... which are subject to interpretation because, as before, unexpected things are going to happen. The difference is that we had plenty of time to learn about murder, so we have pretty much everything covered... for now at least.
Do you really think there shouldn't be any new laws after this whole financial fiasco? They gamed the system because they were allowed to, and the constitution couldn't possibly have expected this kind of things.
P.S.: Your analogy is incorrect. Laws are ways to regulate society and, in general, guidances on how to live a good life; natural laws are just descriptions we have on how the world works. It's no wonder that both change rather frequently. Today, we don't think certain situations are un/acceptable anymore (e.g. same-sex marriage and pedophilia), and today our understanding of the physical world has changed (a few years ago, neutrinos didn't have mass; now, they do and may even travel FTL).
Well, after reading your response, my mind is at ease (I also took a nap and reached my WHO-recommended 6 hours of sleep:P ).
On the question of how easy it is to verify, I really don't know. Not because I can't come up with ideas, but because I don't know what the Average Joes and Janes would find acceptable. Maybe distributing a photo of all the motherboards involved, and using acrylic cases to display them on election day, is enough to earn their trusts. Of course, it won't do for us, tech-savvy people, and maybe nothing will. E.g., you may have ROMs that display the SHA-1 of their contents, but someone will say "How do you know that those ROMs are legit?", and so, and so, ad infinitum.
It was not your post what I thought as group-think, but Dr_Barnowl's. Your comment is actually what I would like to hear more in these debates. Most of the discussions I have with my colleagues focus on security and how at the Nth level of verifications they fail: basically they become security-related arguments in which I have to justify the mere presence of any machine more powerful than a wood stick with graphite inside. In the worst cases, they just parrot whatever the official position of the FSF equivalent in this area. Instead, I'd like to talk about what kind of things we can accomplish using electronic ballots and how. For you, it would mean true verification. For me, it would mean that the preliminary counting I saw for my ballot box will never again throw a difference between votes casted and people voting of 10% backwards (less people than votes... don't ask).
I guess I should close this with a successful experience, provided by an Estonian acquaintance: People in Estonia don't have trouble voting on the internet. I think it's crazy, even more so if you vote with your smartphone, but hey, it's a trust issue, not a technological one:).
4) let everybody carrying on as they have before. In a large group, whatever non-standard behaviour will be distributed more or less evenly across the two groups
Those are your a prioris. The whole point I and scamper_22 are trying to convey: you must assume that non-standard behavior will be evenly distributed. And... why would you? Karl Popper has already worked on this issue: you can't expect people to carry on as before. If I say to you "I'm going to inject you something that may or may not protect you from HIV", I have tainted your behavior and can't expect you to act as you have before: maybe you'll be more aware and cautious, maybe you'll think you have a greater probability of not getting infected and be more promiscuous. To expect these behaviors to even out is fallacious: the bank's self-fulfilling prophecy (any SFP, as a matter of fact) is a nice counterexample. The only proper way to do this is by excluding human behavior somehow... which evokes coercion, uninformed decision, and unethical human experimentation.
As GGP said, just saying it's a test on HIV will definitely alter the results: they'll make people more cautious or promiscuous, blasting the test to hell. A double-blind test, and placebos, can't work in this scenario.
The only way to accurately test this is with a Mengele-style test (with the techniques you mentioned), with actual HIV injection on real humans. This is because we still have trouble finding reliable animal models for HIV infections.
Let's be honest: the average man can't audit anything. In the end, it's more about trust than technology.
Can I trust that no one will fold the ballot in a certain, unique way that would allow someone to tell it apart? Can I trust that no one will add a doodle that will equally provide a "signature"? If I can't, then I must admit there are ways to prove how someone voted.
Can I trust that no one will use the signatures describe above to identify a voter and pay/coerce? Can I trust that everyone will uphold the secrecy? If I can't, then I must admit that votes may be up for sale or manipulation.
Can I trust that no one will miscount? Can I trust that the people counting are impartial and not subject to coercion? Can I trust that, even if I'll never be present at the counting and audit the system myself, it will be carried out perfectly? If I can't, then I must admit that the whole counting thing will eventually be rigged.
There's only one reason an average man on the street trusts the system (if he does): it's familiar. Just like his trust on https, credit cards, or the expiration date of his food. Regulations for voting give trust to Average Joes and Janes because they are familiar with those measures and can somewhat understand how are they supposed to prevent rigging, not because they are effective (this is true for a lot of situations, TSA comes to mind). If people trust electronic voting systems, then they'll become the appropriate technology.
I'm sick and tired of hearing "You can't be 100% sure of X with electronic voting systems! The whole system is crap!" or "Aha! The 7th step in your chain of validations can be manipulated! The whole system is crap!". Well, it isn't. Look at elections worldwide: they are done in P&P, yet everyone says they are rigged, regardless of international (and supposedly impartial) auditing. Regardless of analysis. Just because people don't have trust in it.
We can't, therefore, judge a voting system just on how inexpugnable they are: the only thing we can do is put enough checks and barriers to make it really hard to break the main requirements, we do enough information campaigns to explain in layman terms what's going on, and we friggin' trust on the outcome. We are losing some great stuff (i.e. precision and accuracy) just because we demand things we never had and never will.
Now, let the/. crowd proceed to mod me down. But before that, my ad hominem. Your comment is group-think at its finest. Only a few people bring nice arguments to the/. table nowadays; the rest just repeats whatever the consensus is and are happy to maintain the status quo. Use your friggin' brain and don't follow the herd.
Scientific method, when people's behaviors are involved, has always been a touchy subject. There's a whole set of problems that you have to take into account, e.g. self-fulfilling prophecies and the Pigmalion Effect.
they can't attach a zero day SSH exploit if the only hole is port 80 to Apache.
What about the edge cases where you're running something other than a vanilla web server?
As in "any server that can be sysadmin'ed remotely"?:)
About half of the system administrators I know don't work on-site. A few use VPNs + ssh; the rest uses plain ssh. Either way, it's more than a single port 80.
If the world's economic growth is constant around 3%, then it's quadratical growth, not exponential. The difference is a few extra decades, how many are left as an exercise for the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not futile: it's Congress spurring innovation! Yeah, on workarounds for the law, but innovation nonetheless.
We will be able to access health care remotely, from just about anywhere in the world.
Not even close
Well, the technology is there: a doctor/surgeon can access your medical records and give you treatment remotely. The main obstacle is actually getting the doctors to update your records.
Real-time speech translation—once a vision only in science fiction—will become the norm.
Some advances have been made, but nope
Agreed
There will be a 3D Internet.
Nope
They were a year or two off the mark, but you are right.
Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance.
Wow, not even sure what the fuck that was SUPPOSED to be about. Nanotech maybe??
Heh, I wonder if I'd ever see nanotechnology outside a lab, research papers, or /.
Our mobile phones will start to read our minds.
God help us.
Lol'd. Too broad to be of use. I guess it could refer to efforts like Google prioritizing your e-mail for you and stuff.
And, unlike Gore, Glorious Leader at least put his money where his mouth was on global warming.
But not so much as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, world leader in renewable energy.
Engineering over politics, that's the spirit! High five!
I'm sure it was satirical. ;)
OTOH, if you really want to pull this off, I'm sure it will work only the first time. You can also profit by giving your customers the info they need on the exam.
Btw, is it Tom, Barbara, or both?
This post is full of WIN!
Hey, asshole. Ever occurred to you that, given clava's high UID, he/she isn't a geek and don't know enough of Linux/technology to do this? Look at how this question was redacted: it's obvious that he/she is not in control of the system, and is looking for some info here, where people with knowledge gather. Just answer the question if you can help and don't be pompous.
Ha! My reaction is opposition, not really debate ;) . Most rants are overreactions, so I don't take them seriously.
Of course I care about efficiency, and I can tell a software patch that brings O(n) to O(sqrt(n)) is instantaneously better and cheaper than spending extra bucks in chips and power.
My point still applies, though: adding horsepower to your machine can be a faster solution than optimizing your code, if you have the resources available and need a solution *today*. I did it one or two times, when I had deadlines. But, as I said, I'm not looking for a debate, just a little cynicism on the face of exaggeration.
So? Who cares how inefficient an app is, as long as it works? If better hardware, instead of better software, makes the switch from 10 seconds of swapping to just 1, the problem is solved.
Sorry, this is my knee-jerk reaction to rants... :P
I heard that in Valdes Peninsula, Argentina, there was once a project to build not one but two plants, one on each side of the isthmus. Would've been a huge source of power... but, as you said, it would have driven out the fauna, especially the whales (the noise would have been unbearable for them). So, in the end, the government decided it wasn't such a good idea after all..
I doubt it. Video streaming, at least for the next few years, won't replace a thing. Telcos aren't greedy bastards when they artificially slow broadband, throttle traffic, or impose monthly limits. I mean, sure, they are greedy, but there's a more plausible explanation: they don't have the infrastructure and can't admit it. It's understandable, really: putting these things up (more like lying these things down, the US is not Japan after all) is expensive as hell, and they can't/won't invest fast enough (there's a reason why there's only a few competitors, after all). If everyone moved to video streaming right now, the whole Internet would collapse. So they are doing this awful dance with their customers to have some extra time, see if someone comes up with a solution that's not so expensive for them, etc. . The net-neutrality thing, for them, was less about fostering innovation and more about giving an at-least mediocre service for most of their clients. They lied, yeah, but it's business as usual.
So, no, it's not a great idea for movies (especially HD), at least for a few extra years. It is, though, for music, books and other low-size content. We have big enough tubes for those to be hosted in the cloud..
Looks like we should use some juice too!
You are informative, yet you got a +5 Interesting. Ah well, close enough. :P
If you had shared those links, insulting everyone's intelligence, actually you would've been moderated +5 Informative. ;)
He specifically said it's too expensive. RTFQ :P
You run against two problems if you don't interpret:
So we pay all these lawyers and judges because they know the spirit of the law (what it's trying to accomplish), and they have the tools to make informed decisions on unforeseen cases. Just imagine a binding document from a few centuries ago. It's impossible that it could have foreseen virtual realities, GPS, pervasive drug traffic, or near-zero cost of duplicating information.
Anyway, the constitution is just a framework. We do need more laws because life is complex, new kind of agreements appear, and there's always someone with less power getting abused. Can you solve the issues of children of divorced parents without additional laws, just by resorting to the constitution? How about the issue of importing/exporting foreign species? You spoke of this "guilt", but what that means? After all, law should be impartial. How can you measure "guilt" in a case of murder? You eventually have to put additional clauses to further refine what murder means and how to allocate guilt... which are subject to interpretation because, as before, unexpected things are going to happen. The difference is that we had plenty of time to learn about murder, so we have pretty much everything covered... for now at least.
Do you really think there shouldn't be any new laws after this whole financial fiasco? They gamed the system because they were allowed to, and the constitution couldn't possibly have expected this kind of things.
P.S.: Your analogy is incorrect. Laws are ways to regulate society and, in general, guidances on how to live a good life; natural laws are just descriptions we have on how the world works. It's no wonder that both change rather frequently. Today, we don't think certain situations are un/acceptable anymore (e.g. same-sex marriage and pedophilia), and today our understanding of the physical world has changed (a few years ago, neutrinos didn't have mass; now, they do and may even travel FTL).
Well, after reading your response, my mind is at ease (I also took a nap and reached my WHO-recommended 6 hours of sleep :P ).
On the question of how easy it is to verify, I really don't know. Not because I can't come up with ideas, but because I don't know what the Average Joes and Janes would find acceptable. Maybe distributing a photo of all the motherboards involved, and using acrylic cases to display them on election day, is enough to earn their trusts. Of course, it won't do for us, tech-savvy people, and maybe nothing will. E.g., you may have ROMs that display the SHA-1 of their contents, but someone will say "How do you know that those ROMs are legit?", and so, and so, ad infinitum.
It was not your post what I thought as group-think, but Dr_Barnowl's. Your comment is actually what I would like to hear more in these debates. Most of the discussions I have with my colleagues focus on security and how at the Nth level of verifications they fail: basically they become security-related arguments in which I have to justify the mere presence of any machine more powerful than a wood stick with graphite inside. In the worst cases, they just parrot whatever the official position of the FSF equivalent in this area. Instead, I'd like to talk about what kind of things we can accomplish using electronic ballots and how. For you, it would mean true verification. For me, it would mean that the preliminary counting I saw for my ballot box will never again throw a difference between votes casted and people voting of 10% backwards (less people than votes... don't ask).
I guess I should close this with a successful experience, provided by an Estonian acquaintance: People in Estonia don't have trouble voting on the internet. I think it's crazy, even more so if you vote with your smartphone, but hey, it's a trust issue, not a technological one :) .
4) let everybody carrying on as they have before. In a large group, whatever non-standard behaviour will be distributed more or less evenly across the two groups
Those are your a prioris. The whole point I and scamper_22 are trying to convey: you must assume that non-standard behavior will be evenly distributed. And... why would you? Karl Popper has already worked on this issue: you can't expect people to carry on as before. If I say to you "I'm going to inject you something that may or may not protect you from HIV", I have tainted your behavior and can't expect you to act as you have before: maybe you'll be more aware and cautious, maybe you'll think you have a greater probability of not getting infected and be more promiscuous. To expect these behaviors to even out is fallacious: the bank's self-fulfilling prophecy (any SFP, as a matter of fact) is a nice counterexample. The only proper way to do this is by excluding human behavior somehow... which evokes coercion, uninformed decision, and unethical human experimentation.
As GGP said, just saying it's a test on HIV will definitely alter the results: they'll make people more cautious or promiscuous, blasting the test to hell. A double-blind test, and placebos, can't work in this scenario.
The only way to accurately test this is with a Mengele-style test (with the techniques you mentioned), with actual HIV injection on real humans. This is because we still have trouble finding reliable animal models for HIV infections.
Let's be honest: the average man can't audit anything. In the end, it's more about trust than technology.
Can I trust that no one will fold the ballot in a certain, unique way that would allow someone to tell it apart? Can I trust that no one will add a doodle that will equally provide a "signature"? If I can't, then I must admit there are ways to prove how someone voted.
Can I trust that no one will use the signatures describe above to identify a voter and pay/coerce? Can I trust that everyone will uphold the secrecy? If I can't, then I must admit that votes may be up for sale or manipulation.
Can I trust that no one will miscount? Can I trust that the people counting are impartial and not subject to coercion? Can I trust that, even if I'll never be present at the counting and audit the system myself, it will be carried out perfectly? If I can't, then I must admit that the whole counting thing will eventually be rigged.
There's only one reason an average man on the street trusts the system (if he does): it's familiar. Just like his trust on https, credit cards, or the expiration date of his food. Regulations for voting give trust to Average Joes and Janes because they are familiar with those measures and can somewhat understand how are they supposed to prevent rigging, not because they are effective (this is true for a lot of situations, TSA comes to mind). If people trust electronic voting systems, then they'll become the appropriate technology.
I'm sick and tired of hearing "You can't be 100% sure of X with electronic voting systems! The whole system is crap!" or "Aha! The 7th step in your chain of validations can be manipulated! The whole system is crap!". Well, it isn't. Look at elections worldwide: they are done in P&P, yet everyone says they are rigged, regardless of international (and supposedly impartial) auditing. Regardless of analysis. Just because people don't have trust in it.
We can't, therefore, judge a voting system just on how inexpugnable they are: the only thing we can do is put enough checks and barriers to make it really hard to break the main requirements, we do enough information campaigns to explain in layman terms what's going on, and we friggin' trust on the outcome. We are losing some great stuff (i.e. precision and accuracy) just because we demand things we never had and never will.
Now, let the /. crowd proceed to mod me down. But before that, my ad hominem. Your comment is group-think at its finest. Only a few people bring nice arguments to the /. table nowadays; the rest just repeats whatever the consensus is and are happy to maintain the status quo. Use your friggin' brain and don't follow the herd.
Scientific method, when people's behaviors are involved, has always been a touchy subject. There's a whole set of problems that you have to take into account, e.g. self-fulfilling prophecies and the Pigmalion Effect.
they can't attach a zero day SSH exploit if the only hole is port 80 to Apache.
What about the edge cases where you're running something other than a vanilla web server?
As in "any server that can be sysadmin'ed remotely"? :)
About half of the system administrators I know don't work on-site. A few use VPNs + ssh; the rest uses plain ssh. Either way, it's more than a single port 80.
That may be true, but I don't like the idea of "stronger" meaning "those that can survive super-influenza".
If the world's economic growth is constant around 3%, then it's quadratical growth, not exponential. The difference is a few extra decades, how many are left as an exercise for the reader.
We are the pariahs of Slashdot: we RTFAs. :P