I didn't see any 'facts' mentioning that the coal-burning electric plants in the US put out more nuclear radiation in a single day than the incident at 3 Mile Island did.
It might have been intentional but for what it's worth, your post doesn't have much to do with real science, either. Where's your source on this?
I'm not really too concerned about whether you're right or not, because you might be. But what you've said doesn't mean much, because radiation is simply the name for a particular method of energy transfer. It's completely possible that a lot of things release more radiation that the incident on 3 mile island, starting with the Sun... without whose radiated energy we'd all be dead.
The more important issue is whether or not the coal burning plant radiation is actually dangerous to people or the environment. Can you be more specific?
whenever a company gives you a chance to Opt Out, take it, no matter what the hassles.
I'm very conscious about being careful of my personal information and where it goes, but I disagree with this indiscriminate approach. Sometimes there actually is good will and you do lose something. Not every database is used for evil corporate data mining -- some of it's actually used to your advantage. Getting too paranoid can cost you.
I'm speaking from the perspective of having been a membership secretary of a small society for upwards of three years. Locally (it's New Zealand) we're required by law to ask permission before sharing people's contact information. Consequently, there's a question on the membership and renewal forms asking people if they want their contact details to be made available to other members of the society. It also indicated that we'd assume the answer was "no" if it wasn't explicitly "yes". (This is required by law, but we said it anyway.)
I made a proactive effort to make myself available for answering questions and concerns, but still a lot of people (maybe twenty percent) answered No. This is fine, as some people have good reasons for not wanting such details made available to others. The frustrating thing was that a much larger proportion of people didn't even bother to answer the question. Ironically, a couple of times when I chased up some of these people to make sure they knew they'd missed it, I was accused of trying to manipulate them into letting us do unspecified devious things with their personal information. (Keep in mind this is a small, social non-profit society.)
Later on we published a membership booklet (for members only) with a contact list, and about half the people were just listed with names and no contact details. Since it's a relatively small society (~150 people) in which people get the most from communicating, there were quite a few dissappointed members who simply weren't able to be contacted by others and therefore less able to participate because they either hadn't bothered to answer, or they'd been overly paranoid.
The most annoying part of this for me was that these people then wanted me to act as some kind of proxy for contacting other people. I'd have to contact an unlisted person, ask if they minded me passing on their details, and then deal with it from there. Most of the time it was more effort than I could be bothered with, so I just told them it was their own problem.
Now, Poon reports, "I'd say we get 10 positive responses for every negative one." Budget watchers were also pleased; the conversion, which will cost 4.5 million U.S. dollars, will save $1.3 million in electricity each year.
I've been a campaigner against light pollution in New Zealand over the last several years, mostly because of my strong interest in astronomy. I like to understand what I'm arguing though, and one common argument that I didn't understand was this one about saving energy and therefore saving money.
The basic argument says that by using more efficient lights that (among other things) direct light more intelligently, less energy is used, and the money spent on electricity goes down.
My problem with this is that people don't think about the cost of electricity when they pay for it. They think about the cost of being able to heat their home or the cost of being able to see what they're doing at night, and allocate a certain amount of money that they're prepared to pay for it. If the lighting equipment is cheaper to operate across the board (as is ultimately the goal of this campaigning) then it's just as likely that the price of electricity will be inflated by the power companies to fill whatever people are prepared to pay for those same goals. Net long term monetary savings == $0.
I was curious about this, and I asked about it on a light pollution campaigning forum. I was expecting to get a rational argument explaining how I was incorrect, but instead there was a barrage of frustrated complaints about the US Federal Government, and how it heavily promotes the excessive and inefficient use of energy as much as possible in order to keep the energy production industry strong. Presumably there's lobbying from congress reps on behalf of people's jobs and state economies, and so on.
The might have just been a rational argument that I missed, but the result appeared to be that American light pollution capaigners were just advertising to local governments about the energy savings because they know that the prospect of things changing across the board (which could cause prices to go up again) are virtually impossible for as long as the Federal government has a conflict of interests.
Anyway, I feel much better about my local understanding now, since New Zealand is a much smaller country that has a limited ability to generate electricity, and the national government is a lot more conscious about energy saving simply because of that.
AFAIK, civilian flight systems are three times redundant. Written by three different isolated teams in three different programming paradigms, from three different cultures to avoid similar faults due to "contamination" by other teams, or simlar faults due to similar paradigms.
Are you aware if there's any way to deal with the potential problem of faulty specifications being a new single point of failure?
Offhand I can't remember where, but I'm sure I've heard of cases in the past where this has been an issue. (Perhaps someone else could elaborate.) If the specs are broken then all the programming teams and paradigms in the world are at risk of creating identically faulty software.
As computers get cheaper - It's only a matter of time before a machine capable of doing decent websurfing and whatnot hits US$50 - they will become more popular in poorer nations, and those people won't want to pay more for a windows license than they are paying for a computer.
I'm partly guessing, but don't be too surprised if it were to turn out that US$50 could feed and clothe someone for six months in many developing countries.
Developing countries often have a much lower cost of living and people get paid less to reflect this. Living off a much lower salary is perfectly okay until it comes to imports. The US has such a strong currency compared with other parts of the world that importing technology costs amounts that go through the roof compared with what most people earn.
Even in developed countries like New Zealand (where I live) and Australia, the cost of living is well below the US and Europe -- which is one of the reasons that it's extremely cheap for those countries' tourists to visit here. A good salary here would be less than half the amount of a good salary in the US. It's fine to live on if you're staying here, but most people touring overseas for long periods of time prefer to pick up employment in the places they visit.
The other idea's a really good one. Probably the easiest way to get decent technology into developing countries is for people to simply donate their old obsolete equipment to be re-used somewhere else where it may still have value. The bigger problem, I think, is getting lots of people skilled enough to put it all together in a working system.
I was experimenting with Zope last year and again during the first half of this year. It's definitely a cool product, but what threw me for now at least was that the documentation is abysmal, at least online.
From what I've been able to tell, there are several editions of the Zope book -- the only up-to-date version of which (currently 2.6) is still work in progress. The rest of the documentation is a mish-mash of user-written howto's, some of which are excellent, some of which are dupes of others, many of which are out of date, and others of which are just badly written. Searching the database of these is hard, and it's very difficult to distinguish well written old ones that are still relevant from newer ones that aren't very useful.
My main problem with it though is that although it focuses hugely on the differences between zope development and regular web development without seriously dealing with implementation examples of common tasks. On and off it took me about a month to figure out how to make a simple form-based login system (similar to slashdot's) and tie it into Zope's user folder system. Co-incidentally The only zope-based website I could find that actually did this was zope.org itself.
I really like Zope and I've shown off how it works to people many times over. But I'll only seriously consider using it more once the documentation is more coherent. At the moment I think that's one of the main places where itfalls over.
IMO, either the report is incorrect, or RTML isn't really a markup language but instead an XML crutch upon which a programming language is built.
I think I can understand what you're getting at, but I'm having trouble understanding why you're getting into such an uproar over it.
Unless you have additional information, the only information in the article is coming through the eyes of a journalist who's a science reporter for a space website. The likelihood that he's deeply familar with the internal semantics of computer science terminology isn't very high, and trying to judge the decisions of the RTML designers based on what's said in this article is very premature. We don't even know how the language works.
In addition, it's completely feasible to write programs without imperative commands. That's essentially what pure functional and logic languages are. (ie. Describe what should be done and let the computer figure out how to do it.) SQL, for example, doesn't tell the computer how to do something -- it just tells it what's wanted for the end result.
All that aside, who cares if they've built a programming language into an XML form, anyway? They've discovered a new use for something, and it works! If there was an officially accepted term by a standards body for using XML to describe imperative commands, would you have as much of a problem?
Meanwhile if you want to be really pedantic, you could say that it describes specifications of the imperative commands that a telescope should execute. If your original complaint was that XML elements shouldn't be verbs, this makes them nouns that describe the command-set verbs. It's still silly to argue over it, though.
That's my two cents, anyway. Perhaps I just disagree with you.
Slashdot is probably the most advanced of web-based fora,
Personally I think I prefer kuro5hin's comment moderation system. Slashdot does it with a serial system where a minority of selected users' votes are added together. K5 lets everyone vote in parallel and averages them. I think some people rate a lot, but most people rate to correct when they think something's been rated unfairly.
On the other hand k5 doesn't get nearly as much trolling, so I don't normally order the comments based on the ratings, anyway.
Says the story, 'Microsoft contends that setting [reliability] standards could stifle innovation, and the cost of litigation and damages could mean more expensive software.'
The story also specifically proposes holding vendors legally liable, and in some respects I half agree with Microsoft on this one. At the very least, any legislation would have to be very well designed.
If I write software freelance (as many people here do), I want to be able to give it to people and tell them to use it at their own risk, because with a complicated product I can't be bothered to go through all the rigours of testing every conceivable thing that could go wrong.
Unlike something like bridge building, software just hasn't reached the stage where anyone actually knows how to do it safely. Trying to force people to do it safely just isn't going to work in any feasible way.
If there's ever going to be legislation in place, I think it needs to begin by focusing on the methods that software vendors use to impose licenses on their customers. In the end, it's the shrink-wrap end-user licence agreements which customers have no say in that tell people they have no rights to expect anything from the software -- including what it's supposed to do, and even though they might have paid thousands of dollars for it.
Normally everyone has different requirements from a piece of software, and everyone has parts of it that they consider more important and mission-critical than others. Customers should be able to negotiate what's important to them with software vendors.
Exactly what the rights of an end consumer are regardless of the licence, and how much can be claimed under various circumstances, needs to be properly established. Just as importantly, businesses need to be stopped from putting silly and mis-leading agreements on their products.
E-Voting is a great idea, but it has immense limitations. Our Republic was designed to protect the minority (as small as one person) from a crazy majority.
For as much as I have a view on electronic voting and other parts of your post in general, I can't figure out how your reasoning is working here.
Assuming an e-voting system can be shown as authentic, what does the method of voting have to do with protecting the minority? You've already pointed out that the republic structure is designed to protect the minority.
Whether it's a democracy or a republic, the central idea is that everyone eligible is expected to vote, even if they choose not to. Once the republican government has been elected, what difference does it make whether it was by people walking into polling booths or people casting electronic votes?
Please explain, because to me it looks as if they're two unrelated issues.
Any library can archive their old papers for reference for all. Electronic media, as we're all aware, is subject to technology shifts, media that decays considerably faster than paper, and so on.
I can't speak for most libraries, but my local library stores all of the old newspapers on microfiche, along with many other old and rare documents that are difficult to get on paper. Keeping the paper copies in the first place simply isn't feasible. From what I understand, most of it comes through various services that archive the content and then pass it on to subscribing libraries.
I'm not as concerned at this point, because libraries generally have a lot of experience with archiving information. The methods they use are quite organised, and they're not going to go away without the information being able to be converted to whatever system takes over.
What I'd be more concerned about is if libraries will start properly archiving digital newspaper content at all. When the information is digital, it puts the archiving much more in the domain of the media companies that produce the newspapers -- I'm sure they'd prefer to charge users directly for access to the content than have their databases distributed to libraries. Even if libraries subscribe to the services so their users can access the database, it's still a single point of failure back at the media company where the main database is stored.
What I hope would happen is that the media companies will introduce local-media subscriptions for entities like libraries, where they'll periodically send out CD sets or DVD sets to the libraries that subscribe, with uncrippled information stored on them. At an appropriate time in the future once CD's and DVD's are no longer used, libraries would need to be able to access the information well enough to transfer it to whatever the new media format is, as they can currently.
As was said in the/. writeup (which was done by the submitter, and *not* the editor (so don't blame/.)
If that's the case then the editors may as well just shovel through everything that gets submitted whether it's justified and correct or not. In most publications, editors are supposed to filter out the crap, hence the name "editor".
I guess most people have come to expect this from slashdot, but it should be pointed out all the same. It's too bad everyone (me included) puts up with it.
From the slashdot writeup:
"Meanwhile, IBPhoenix, an organisation that supports the development of the Firebird database, has put up a protest page, encouraging people to spam the MozillaZine forums (even though MozillaZine had nothing to do with the decision) and send masses of email to many Mozilla developers (most of whom were not involved in selecting the new name). I find it rather hypocritical [--snip--]"
You might also send mail to the following people and groups:
Asa Dotzler - he made the announcement [..]
drivers@mozilla.org - drivers are the project managers of Mozilla [..]
These people are the technical project leaders of Mozilla. They too should be aware that the possibility for confusion exists. [--snip eight addresses--]
Listing the eight technical project leaders at the end might have been a tad excessive, but I'd hardly call that "encouraging people to spam the mozillazine forums" or harrassing mozilla developers in the way that slashdot makes out to be. It looks like an ordinary informational page to tell people how they can contact the people who are able to make a decision.
..not because of the spammers and junk mailers, but because of the legitimate businesses that you'll inevitibly be hurting.
What's the chance of setting up a perl script to automatically find Junk Mail Kings and sign them up for the service? I'm sure many of these 250,000 would be junk mail kings. Just set them on each other!
Despite the spammers, there are a lot of legitimate businesses and non-profit organisations out there that are trying to get people to sign up so they don't waste their time and money mailing people who have no interest in what they have to send.
Just because a business or organisation asks people for contact details to send mailouts doesn't mean that they're doing it maliciously. What you'll accomplish by scripting this is to give headaches to the people doing it correctly by polluting their mailing lists with people who don't want their mail. If anything, it'll have a negative effect on their customers or members who actually want to hear from them in the process, and it'll waste the resources of an organisation that often won't have a lot to waste.
So far there seem to have been a lot of replies complaining that it's silly to abandon research of dangerous topics, because if it's ignored then someone much worse will discover it first. I agree with this almost completely, but I think there are also times when it makes sense once a threshold has been reached where making things worse gains no strategic advantage.
The one I was thinking of was thermonuclear war. Before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan argued in The Demon Haunted World (and probably other places) that the development of the Hydrogen Bomb by the US was strategically pointless, because it didn't accomplish or deter anything that couldn't already be accomplished or deterred by existing nuclear weapons. On the other hand instead of simply destroying an enemy, a thermonuclear war would induce a nuclear winter and wipe out most of the world. Furthermore, there wasn't any intelligence that the USSR was developing it, nor that they would have if the USA hadn't started.
Apart from that I'm not familiar with the whole situation, so I won't go into it further. But I don't think the argument that it's necessary to research ultra-dangerous topics before an enemy does holds up all the time -- especially when the only advance from existing technology is that it leads to a lose-lose scenario instead of a win-lose scenario.
Under that definition, a cell phone number, business number, or telephone in a home with one person, qualifies as a name.
Exactly! A number can be a name, and it actually is in many telephone exchanges. But it's a really stupid sort of name for people to have to try and remember. Anything with more than seven discrete blocks of information is going to be infallible to short term memory.
Uniqueness also isn't a huge issue, because there are other ways around it. For example, think about how many people in your circle of friends have the same name, and then think about how you distinguish them when they do.
Right.... [--snip--]
That's a very restrictive way to look at it. Numbers aren't necessary on the interface -- it's completely feasible to have an interface without them if technology's arranged the right way. "Bob who I met yesterday" or "Bob who was advertising on that commercial three minutes ago" should be perfectly okay. After all, how often do you care about Bob who lives on the other side of town whom you've never met nor have any relationship with? If you do need to contact that Bob for some reason, then resort to a directory similar to current day phone books.
On the other hand taking someone's x-digit phone number, remembering it and inputting it somewhere else, is a very inefficient use of the human brain. The only reason we have to do this is that technology is based on an industrial-aged idea that didn't involve digital technology. The idea of telephone numbers was developed for technology in 1879!
I often call a number and wish to speak to either member of a couple. Say I want to call Alice and Bob to let them know about the party this weekend - I don't care which one I speak to. This is hardly an exceptional case.
Good point. Adjust it to a system where you can call two people on one call when you like, and also so people who live or work together can easily set up a separate reference to call either or both of them. (I'm sure businesses would want something like this.)
Names are not unique identifiers. You want a name->number mapping, use a PDA or your phone's built-in number list. It's an extra-network affair.
I must really have been unclear, because three people including yourself have commented exactly the same so far. "Name" doesn't necessarily mean a person's direct name, and it doesn't necessarily even mean a word. A name is essentially something that can be used to map to a person or to something important. Uniqueness also isn't a huge issue, because there are other ways around it. For example, think about how many people in your circle of friends have the same name, and then think about how you distinguish them when they do.
I already have a name to number mapping system in my phone as I said in my original post, and I use it. My point was that I shouldn't have to deal with numbers at all, and I shouldn't need to care about updating my phone when someone's number changes.
The fact that so many businesses want phone numbers that can be dialed as words is an obvious reminder that long numbers are simply bad and inadequate for people to reliably deal with. Each digit is a separate unit of information that people need to remember separately, and making them longer to assist some sort of machine-centric way of dealing with things certainly isn't going to help people use it.
Plus there is too much overlap in names in the US to be considered a unique identifier... and good luck convincing congress that all parents must provide a unique and un-duplicated name for their children.
I might not have been clear enough, but when I said "name", I meant it more in the context of not-a-number.
The domain name system is a good example, because a domain name that points to me (or something I own) is incredibly easier to tell people about than an IP number. Within certain limitations, it's also possible to update a domain a point it to another address without having to care about people accessing it.
This whole discussion seems to be talking about the equivalent of replacing a static IP address system with a system that provides IP numbers with more digits that can dynamically update. It extends the current system, but it sacrifices other things, such as reliability of human memory, as a result.
Realistically, computers are easily advanced enough that the people on the end shouldn't need to deal with numbers at all.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough since you're not the only person to have brought that up.
Obviously people's first and last names don't provide a unique identifier, but that doesn't mean we should need to resort to an obscure technologically-generated number to identify a person.
DNS is a much better system than the phone system. People remember names instead of IP numbers. What this whole slashdot discussion seems to be promoting is replacing static IP addresses with some variant of a dynamic IP number that has more even digits and can move with people dynamically.
The fact that telephones have numbers at all in the digital age seems silly. Well established psychological research has shown a very long time ago that people's short term memory isn't good at dealing with big numbers. The whole concept of using phone numbers to call people goes against usability principles, yet there doesn't seem to be a serious effort to get rid of them in most places. It's not just legacy technology, it's legacy industrial age thinking.
Firstly, telephones shouldn't normally be the addressee. People should be the addressee. Secondly, people shouldn't have to have numbers, they should have names.
Many phones already try to emulate names by providing calling directories, and it's a real hack. I don't know the numbers for many of my friends because I rely on my phone to hide it, and I only interact with the names to call people. I hate to think what'd happen if I lost my phone, though. Also when someones phone number/address changes, it really messes things up for everyone who knows them.
So how long is it going to be before digital phones and digital networks actually do away with numbers altogether, in a way where other people can change their phone's address without everyone else having to know or care? Obviously there would be numbers in the system somewhere, but they shouldn't be needed in a user interface any more than the primary key of a typical database table is needed.
It's probably worth pointing out that Aardvark Daily, the "news and commentary site" being linked to by slashdot, is sponsored by Ihug -- a rival ISP here in New Zealand. It's hardly an independant media source.
There are absolutely massive numbers involved that it's difficult to realistically comprehend them let alone compare them meaningfully.
Co-incidentally, I worked out for someone tonight that if the Sun and the Earth were 5 centimetres apart (that's a couple of inches), then the Andromeda galaxy would be roughly 6.7 million kilometres down the road. (About 4 million miles.) And Andromeda's one of the closest of what was most recently estimated to be around 80 billion galaxies.
Unless I specify otherwise, any communication I send you is intended for you, and you only. If you forward it to someone else, or, say, post it online for all to read, I can sue you. It's quite similar to how you may not tape-record a conversation without my permission.
That sounds absolutely incorrect. Have you ever heard of investigative journalism?
I don't know what the exact state of the law is in the US, but certainly where I am (New Zealand) it's fully legal to record and/or disclose a private conversation as long as at least one of the participants is aware that it's happening. The exception is if there's a legally binding agreement between the parties that restricts disclosure.
Having said that, I agree that it's not very polite to disclose the name of the Microsoft employee on these emails. There's no need in this case except to embarass someone who probably doesn't deserve to be embarassed.
One thing I'm having problems understanding is Why should I even need a number visible on my phone at all? A phone number is an address, not a name, and that's why everyone's having these problems.
Labelling people with numbers is such a machine-centric view of the world, and with today's technology it shouldn't be necessary. The only reason it's still done is because legacy phone companies use legacy technology and their customers don't know enough about what's possible to demand better.
Realistically though if I want to phone my friend, I shouldn't need to remember some complex number, the length of which is beyond the borderline of the seven discrete blocks of information that psychological research has shown can comfortably be remembered by short term memory. For this reason, making a remappable name that looks like a number is almost as silly. I should be able to dial someone up by the name, if not something even easier, and it should work.
For a long time now, phones have been emulating this behaviour by having their own call directories where it's possible to store names and numbers. It's a horribly kludgey way to do things though because there's so much duplication of information with no clean way of synchronising it all. As soon as a person's address-number changes, everyone's phone is out of date.
Forget about the number remapping between phone companies for a moment, how long until we get some real improvements in the phone system?
Slashdot Mirror
It might have been intentional but for what it's worth, your post doesn't have much to do with real science, either. Where's your source on this?
I'm not really too concerned about whether you're right or not, because you might be. But what you've said doesn't mean much, because radiation is simply the name for a particular method of energy transfer. It's completely possible that a lot of things release more radiation that the incident on 3 mile island, starting with the Sun... without whose radiated energy we'd all be dead.
The more important issue is whether or not the coal burning plant radiation is actually dangerous to people or the environment. Can you be more specific?
I'm very conscious about being careful of my personal information and where it goes, but I disagree with this indiscriminate approach. Sometimes there actually is good will and you do lose something. Not every database is used for evil corporate data mining -- some of it's actually used to your advantage. Getting too paranoid can cost you.
I'm speaking from the perspective of having been a membership secretary of a small society for upwards of three years. Locally (it's New Zealand) we're required by law to ask permission before sharing people's contact information. Consequently, there's a question on the membership and renewal forms asking people if they want their contact details to be made available to other members of the society. It also indicated that we'd assume the answer was "no" if it wasn't explicitly "yes". (This is required by law, but we said it anyway.)
I made a proactive effort to make myself available for answering questions and concerns, but still a lot of people (maybe twenty percent) answered No. This is fine, as some people have good reasons for not wanting such details made available to others. The frustrating thing was that a much larger proportion of people didn't even bother to answer the question. Ironically, a couple of times when I chased up some of these people to make sure they knew they'd missed it, I was accused of trying to manipulate them into letting us do unspecified devious things with their personal information. (Keep in mind this is a small, social non-profit society.)
Later on we published a membership booklet (for members only) with a contact list, and about half the people were just listed with names and no contact details. Since it's a relatively small society (~150 people) in which people get the most from communicating, there were quite a few dissappointed members who simply weren't able to be contacted by others and therefore less able to participate because they either hadn't bothered to answer, or they'd been overly paranoid.
The most annoying part of this for me was that these people then wanted me to act as some kind of proxy for contacting other people. I'd have to contact an unlisted person, ask if they minded me passing on their details, and then deal with it from there. Most of the time it was more effort than I could be bothered with, so I just told them it was their own problem.
I've been a campaigner against light pollution in New Zealand over the last several years, mostly because of my strong interest in astronomy. I like to understand what I'm arguing though, and one common argument that I didn't understand was this one about saving energy and therefore saving money.
The basic argument says that by using more efficient lights that (among other things) direct light more intelligently, less energy is used, and the money spent on electricity goes down.
My problem with this is that people don't think about the cost of electricity when they pay for it. They think about the cost of being able to heat their home or the cost of being able to see what they're doing at night, and allocate a certain amount of money that they're prepared to pay for it. If the lighting equipment is cheaper to operate across the board (as is ultimately the goal of this campaigning) then it's just as likely that the price of electricity will be inflated by the power companies to fill whatever people are prepared to pay for those same goals. Net long term monetary savings == $0.
I was curious about this, and I asked about it on a light pollution campaigning forum. I was expecting to get a rational argument explaining how I was incorrect, but instead there was a barrage of frustrated complaints about the US Federal Government, and how it heavily promotes the excessive and inefficient use of energy as much as possible in order to keep the energy production industry strong. Presumably there's lobbying from congress reps on behalf of people's jobs and state economies, and so on.
The might have just been a rational argument that I missed, but the result appeared to be that American light pollution capaigners were just advertising to local governments about the energy savings because they know that the prospect of things changing across the board (which could cause prices to go up again) are virtually impossible for as long as the Federal government has a conflict of interests.
Anyway, I feel much better about my local understanding now, since New Zealand is a much smaller country that has a limited ability to generate electricity, and the national government is a lot more conscious about energy saving simply because of that.
Are you aware if there's any way to deal with the potential problem of faulty specifications being a new single point of failure?
Offhand I can't remember where, but I'm sure I've heard of cases in the past where this has been an issue. (Perhaps someone else could elaborate.) If the specs are broken then all the programming teams and paradigms in the world are at risk of creating identically faulty software.
I'm partly guessing, but don't be too surprised if it were to turn out that US$50 could feed and clothe someone for six months in many developing countries.
Developing countries often have a much lower cost of living and people get paid less to reflect this. Living off a much lower salary is perfectly okay until it comes to imports. The US has such a strong currency compared with other parts of the world that importing technology costs amounts that go through the roof compared with what most people earn.
Even in developed countries like New Zealand (where I live) and Australia, the cost of living is well below the US and Europe -- which is one of the reasons that it's extremely cheap for those countries' tourists to visit here. A good salary here would be less than half the amount of a good salary in the US. It's fine to live on if you're staying here, but most people touring overseas for long periods of time prefer to pick up employment in the places they visit.
The other idea's a really good one. Probably the easiest way to get decent technology into developing countries is for people to simply donate their old obsolete equipment to be re-used somewhere else where it may still have value. The bigger problem, I think, is getting lots of people skilled enough to put it all together in a working system.
I was experimenting with Zope last year and again during the first half of this year. It's definitely a cool product, but what threw me for now at least was that the documentation is abysmal, at least online.
From what I've been able to tell, there are several editions of the Zope book -- the only up-to-date version of which (currently 2.6) is still work in progress. The rest of the documentation is a mish-mash of user-written howto's, some of which are excellent, some of which are dupes of others, many of which are out of date, and others of which are just badly written. Searching the database of these is hard, and it's very difficult to distinguish well written old ones that are still relevant from newer ones that aren't very useful.
My main problem with it though is that although it focuses hugely on the differences between zope development and regular web development without seriously dealing with implementation examples of common tasks. On and off it took me about a month to figure out how to make a simple form-based login system (similar to slashdot's) and tie it into Zope's user folder system. Co-incidentally The only zope-based website I could find that actually did this was zope.org itself.
I really like Zope and I've shown off how it works to people many times over. But I'll only seriously consider using it more once the documentation is more coherent. At the moment I think that's one of the main places where itfalls over.
I think I can understand what you're getting at, but I'm having trouble understanding why you're getting into such an uproar over it.
Unless you have additional information, the only information in the article is coming through the eyes of a journalist who's a science reporter for a space website. The likelihood that he's deeply familar with the internal semantics of computer science terminology isn't very high, and trying to judge the decisions of the RTML designers based on what's said in this article is very premature. We don't even know how the language works.
In addition, it's completely feasible to write programs without imperative commands. That's essentially what pure functional and logic languages are. (ie. Describe what should be done and let the computer figure out how to do it.) SQL, for example, doesn't tell the computer how to do something -- it just tells it what's wanted for the end result.
All that aside, who cares if they've built a programming language into an XML form, anyway? They've discovered a new use for something, and it works! If there was an officially accepted term by a standards body for using XML to describe imperative commands, would you have as much of a problem?
Meanwhile if you want to be really pedantic, you could say that it describes specifications of the imperative commands that a telescope should execute. If your original complaint was that XML elements shouldn't be verbs, this makes them nouns that describe the command-set verbs. It's still silly to argue over it, though.
That's my two cents, anyway. Perhaps I just disagree with you.
Personally I think I prefer kuro5hin's comment moderation system. Slashdot does it with a serial system where a minority of selected users' votes are added together. K5 lets everyone vote in parallel and averages them. I think some people rate a lot, but most people rate to correct when they think something's been rated unfairly.
On the other hand k5 doesn't get nearly as much trolling, so I don't normally order the comments based on the ratings, anyway.
The story also specifically proposes holding vendors legally liable, and in some respects I half agree with Microsoft on this one. At the very least, any legislation would have to be very well designed.
If I write software freelance (as many people here do), I want to be able to give it to people and tell them to use it at their own risk, because with a complicated product I can't be bothered to go through all the rigours of testing every conceivable thing that could go wrong.
Unlike something like bridge building, software just hasn't reached the stage where anyone actually knows how to do it safely. Trying to force people to do it safely just isn't going to work in any feasible way.
If there's ever going to be legislation in place, I think it needs to begin by focusing on the methods that software vendors use to impose licenses on their customers. In the end, it's the shrink-wrap end-user licence agreements which customers have no say in that tell people they have no rights to expect anything from the software -- including what it's supposed to do, and even though they might have paid thousands of dollars for it.
Normally everyone has different requirements from a piece of software, and everyone has parts of it that they consider more important and mission-critical than others. Customers should be able to negotiate what's important to them with software vendors.
Exactly what the rights of an end consumer are regardless of the licence, and how much can be claimed under various circumstances, needs to be properly established. Just as importantly, businesses need to be stopped from putting silly and mis-leading agreements on their products.
For as much as I have a view on electronic voting and other parts of your post in general, I can't figure out how your reasoning is working here.
Assuming an e-voting system can be shown as authentic, what does the method of voting have to do with protecting the minority? You've already pointed out that the republic structure is designed to protect the minority.
Whether it's a democracy or a republic, the central idea is that everyone eligible is expected to vote, even if they choose not to. Once the republican government has been elected, what difference does it make whether it was by people walking into polling booths or people casting electronic votes?
Please explain, because to me it looks as if they're two unrelated issues.
(And rising every second.) I guess slashdot hasn't quite kicked into top gear yet, then. :)
I can't speak for most libraries, but my local library stores all of the old newspapers on microfiche, along with many other old and rare documents that are difficult to get on paper. Keeping the paper copies in the first place simply isn't feasible. From what I understand, most of it comes through various services that archive the content and then pass it on to subscribing libraries.
I'm not as concerned at this point, because libraries generally have a lot of experience with archiving information. The methods they use are quite organised, and they're not going to go away without the information being able to be converted to whatever system takes over.
What I'd be more concerned about is if libraries will start properly archiving digital newspaper content at all. When the information is digital, it puts the archiving much more in the domain of the media companies that produce the newspapers -- I'm sure they'd prefer to charge users directly for access to the content than have their databases distributed to libraries. Even if libraries subscribe to the services so their users can access the database, it's still a single point of failure back at the media company where the main database is stored.
What I hope would happen is that the media companies will introduce local-media subscriptions for entities like libraries, where they'll periodically send out CD sets or DVD sets to the libraries that subscribe, with uncrippled information stored on them. At an appropriate time in the future once CD's and DVD's are no longer used, libraries would need to be able to access the information well enough to transfer it to whatever the new media format is, as they can currently.
If that's the case then the editors may as well just shovel through everything that gets submitted whether it's justified and correct or not. In most publications, editors are supposed to filter out the crap, hence the name "editor".
I guess most people have come to expect this from slashdot, but it should be pointed out all the same. It's too bad everyone (me included) puts up with it.
From the slashdot writeup:
From the linked article (slightly summarised):
Listing the eight technical project leaders at the end might have been a tad excessive, but I'd hardly call that "encouraging people to spam the mozillazine forums" or harrassing mozilla developers in the way that slashdot makes out to be. It looks like an ordinary informational page to tell people how they can contact the people who are able to make a decision.
Despite the spammers, there are a lot of legitimate businesses and non-profit organisations out there that are trying to get people to sign up so they don't waste their time and money mailing people who have no interest in what they have to send.
Just because a business or organisation asks people for contact details to send mailouts doesn't mean that they're doing it maliciously. What you'll accomplish by scripting this is to give headaches to the people doing it correctly by polluting their mailing lists with people who don't want their mail. If anything, it'll have a negative effect on their customers or members who actually want to hear from them in the process, and it'll waste the resources of an organisation that often won't have a lot to waste.
So far there seem to have been a lot of replies complaining that it's silly to abandon research of dangerous topics, because if it's ignored then someone much worse will discover it first. I agree with this almost completely, but I think there are also times when it makes sense once a threshold has been reached where making things worse gains no strategic advantage.
The one I was thinking of was thermonuclear war. Before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan argued in The Demon Haunted World (and probably other places) that the development of the Hydrogen Bomb by the US was strategically pointless, because it didn't accomplish or deter anything that couldn't already be accomplished or deterred by existing nuclear weapons. On the other hand instead of simply destroying an enemy, a thermonuclear war would induce a nuclear winter and wipe out most of the world. Furthermore, there wasn't any intelligence that the USSR was developing it, nor that they would have if the USA hadn't started.
Apart from that I'm not familiar with the whole situation, so I won't go into it further. But I don't think the argument that it's necessary to research ultra-dangerous topics before an enemy does holds up all the time -- especially when the only advance from existing technology is that it leads to a lose-lose scenario instead of a win-lose scenario.
Exactly! A number can be a name, and it actually is in many telephone exchanges. But it's a really stupid sort of name for people to have to try and remember. Anything with more than seven discrete blocks of information is going to be infallible to short term memory.
That's a very restrictive way to look at it. Numbers aren't necessary on the interface -- it's completely feasible to have an interface without them if technology's arranged the right way. "Bob who I met yesterday" or "Bob who was advertising on that commercial three minutes ago" should be perfectly okay. After all, how often do you care about Bob who lives on the other side of town whom you've never met nor have any relationship with? If you do need to contact that Bob for some reason, then resort to a directory similar to current day phone books.
On the other hand taking someone's x-digit phone number, remembering it and inputting it somewhere else, is a very inefficient use of the human brain. The only reason we have to do this is that technology is based on an industrial-aged idea that didn't involve digital technology. The idea of telephone numbers was developed for technology in 1879!
Good point. Adjust it to a system where you can call two people on one call when you like, and also so people who live or work together can easily set up a separate reference to call either or both of them. (I'm sure businesses would want something like this.)
I must really have been unclear, because three people including yourself have commented exactly the same so far. "Name" doesn't necessarily mean a person's direct name, and it doesn't necessarily even mean a word. A name is essentially something that can be used to map to a person or to something important. Uniqueness also isn't a huge issue, because there are other ways around it. For example, think about how many people in your circle of friends have the same name, and then think about how you distinguish them when they do.
I already have a name to number mapping system in my phone as I said in my original post, and I use it. My point was that I shouldn't have to deal with numbers at all, and I shouldn't need to care about updating my phone when someone's number changes.
The fact that so many businesses want phone numbers that can be dialed as words is an obvious reminder that long numbers are simply bad and inadequate for people to reliably deal with. Each digit is a separate unit of information that people need to remember separately, and making them longer to assist some sort of machine-centric way of dealing with things certainly isn't going to help people use it.
I might not have been clear enough, but when I said "name", I meant it more in the context of not-a-number.
The domain name system is a good example, because a domain name that points to me (or something I own) is incredibly easier to tell people about than an IP number. Within certain limitations, it's also possible to update a domain a point it to another address without having to care about people accessing it.
This whole discussion seems to be talking about the equivalent of replacing a static IP address system with a system that provides IP numbers with more digits that can dynamically update. It extends the current system, but it sacrifices other things, such as reliability of human memory, as a result.
Realistically, computers are easily advanced enough that the people on the end shouldn't need to deal with numbers at all.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough since you're not the only person to have brought that up.
Obviously people's first and last names don't provide a unique identifier, but that doesn't mean we should need to resort to an obscure technologically-generated number to identify a person.
DNS is a much better system than the phone system. People remember names instead of IP numbers. What this whole slashdot discussion seems to be promoting is replacing static IP addresses with some variant of a dynamic IP number that has more even digits and can move with people dynamically.
The fact that telephones have numbers at all in the digital age seems silly. Well established psychological research has shown a very long time ago that people's short term memory isn't good at dealing with big numbers. The whole concept of using phone numbers to call people goes against usability principles, yet there doesn't seem to be a serious effort to get rid of them in most places. It's not just legacy technology, it's legacy industrial age thinking.
Firstly, telephones shouldn't normally be the addressee. People should be the addressee. Secondly, people shouldn't have to have numbers, they should have names.
Many phones already try to emulate names by providing calling directories, and it's a real hack. I don't know the numbers for many of my friends because I rely on my phone to hide it, and I only interact with the names to call people. I hate to think what'd happen if I lost my phone, though. Also when someones phone number/address changes, it really messes things up for everyone who knows them.
So how long is it going to be before digital phones and digital networks actually do away with numbers altogether, in a way where other people can change their phone's address without everyone else having to know or care? Obviously there would be numbers in the system somewhere, but they shouldn't be needed in a user interface any more than the primary key of a typical database table is needed.
It's probably worth pointing out that Aardvark Daily, the "news and commentary site" being linked to by slashdot, is sponsored by Ihug -- a rival ISP here in New Zealand. It's hardly an independant media source.
There are absolutely massive numbers involved that it's difficult to realistically comprehend them let alone compare them meaningfully.
Co-incidentally, I worked out for someone tonight that if the Sun and the Earth were 5 centimetres apart (that's a couple of inches), then the Andromeda galaxy would be roughly 6.7 million kilometres down the road. (About 4 million miles.) And Andromeda's one of the closest of what was most recently estimated to be around 80 billion galaxies.
That sounds absolutely incorrect. Have you ever heard of investigative journalism?
I don't know what the exact state of the law is in the US, but certainly where I am (New Zealand) it's fully legal to record and/or disclose a private conversation as long as at least one of the participants is aware that it's happening. The exception is if there's a legally binding agreement between the parties that restricts disclosure.
Having said that, I agree that it's not very polite to disclose the name of the Microsoft employee on these emails. There's no need in this case except to embarass someone who probably doesn't deserve to be embarassed.
One thing I'm having problems understanding is Why should I even need a number visible on my phone at all? A phone number is an address, not a name, and that's why everyone's having these problems.
Labelling people with numbers is such a machine-centric view of the world, and with today's technology it shouldn't be necessary. The only reason it's still done is because legacy phone companies use legacy technology and their customers don't know enough about what's possible to demand better.
Realistically though if I want to phone my friend, I shouldn't need to remember some complex number, the length of which is beyond the borderline of the seven discrete blocks of information that psychological research has shown can comfortably be remembered by short term memory. For this reason, making a remappable name that looks like a number is almost as silly. I should be able to dial someone up by the name, if not something even easier, and it should work.
For a long time now, phones have been emulating this behaviour by having their own call directories where it's possible to store names and numbers. It's a horribly kludgey way to do things though because there's so much duplication of information with no clean way of synchronising it all. As soon as a person's address-number changes, everyone's phone is out of date.
Forget about the number remapping between phone companies for a moment, how long until we get some real improvements in the phone system?