Wow. A site that offers a range of formats and in some cases even lets the user decide what viewer to use. (Referring to the video gallery, of course.)
I wish every media provider was as flexible as this one. Someone out there likes me.:)
I think I can see what it's getting at, but there would still have to be lots of complications. Personally I don't have too much of a problem as long as the information is still used within the entire agreement that it was collected under.
The problem is exactly what the agreement said. How much was actually said against how much was implied? Did the original company actually state that it would not start sending mass spam mail about illegal money making schemes, or did it only imply that it it would only send regular news updates?
That said, as long as the "little-marketing.com" is still bound by the agreement with the customer and is not allowed to sell details to another "mass-spammer.com", it's presumably also bound by everything else in the agreement with the customer to provide all the same services that it was supposed to in exchange for the customers' information.
In other words, the clauses stating that "we will provide all these services that we said we would in exchange for your information", and "we will not send you marketing information unless you check this box" and so on.
Personally I think there should be some sort of law for situations like this where in every exchange, all customers have to be notified about the change of ownership and given the option to opt out.
Note that when a company is bankrupt, its assets are divided up and sold off according to what the court orders, and may not have much to do with what the company tried to promise.
I'm not a lawyer, but if the company was not legally able to sell someone's private details before it went bankrupt as per a privacy agreement, I can't see how it could be considered an asset. If anything, it's a liability because the information would have to be destroyed or withheld from people who wanted it illegally.
If this is true, how could any court treat it as such to be broken up and sold to pay creditors Isn't this whole thing more about what's in an original privacy agreement than what a court orders?
I've used ICQ for a couple of years now (not by choice but because it's the most convenient way to stay in touch with a lot of people I know.
The interface was a million times better before AOL took over. It was very intuitive, but after AOL took it they mostly seemed to bulk add space for advertising, a few extra redundant features as well as half-incorporating the web, and they didn't seem to care about code maintenance at all. The result was a buggy, horrible interface.
If you have to use ICQ, try to get either an older version of it (on the early side of 0.9x), or use an ICQ clone. There are lots of clones listed on freshmeat, but I'm not sure if many would compile for a Windows box. Alternatively you could try something like Odigo which talks to ICQ and looks quite cool. Last time I tried it it still crashed a bit and the window wasn't very resizable, but otherwise it was great.
I was arguing with a med student about a month ago about the possibility of robotic eyes. He was dead-set in the belief that it wasn't possible.
I'm fully aware that this isn't exactly it either, but it's close enough for what we were arguing about. How long until I get to shoot lethal concentrated laser beams from my eyes?:-P
I used to live in Wellington, New Zealand. And that's a nice city - but small, only 400K.
I wouldn't say it's incredible, but Wellington's been getting easier to live in in the last couple of years since Saturn's covered most of it with a decent cable network.
Also I think WETA has been taking on some people since they began work on all the Lord of the Rings movie effects. You'd normally have to be really well qualified and slightly lucky to get into it though.
FOr normal IT industry stuff I'd have to agree. I know a lot of people in NZ who've migrated to Australia for interesting IT work, and Melbourne seems to be quite popular.
I definitely agree. The art is as much of what goes into the story as into the visual effects in the game. I'm a great fan of a lot of adventure games, and even many platform games, because there's not much more they could do to draw people in than have a good story.
The stories in modern 3D games OTOH are getting thinner and thinner. Wolfenstein 3D was about the only one with a decent story before game developers decided to put as much effort into storylines as Bruce Willis beating up a killer asteroid. Instead there's more development emphasis on simply having better game engines and network-playability, and this gets really boring (for me) after a short time.
DOTT was cool, but I still don't think anything can beat the Monkey Island series. (It's no surprise that they're both Lucasarts.) The first time I saw it was when I admittedly pirated the EGA version from someone while I was in High School. This was about the same time as King's Quest 4. I enjoyed the story and the jokes a lot, and the modern intuitive interface was also a great new thing, unlike other adventure games that were still trying to use text game concepts in graphics mode.
Combined, the whole thing was awesome for the time. Today it's still awesome. This is nothing to do with the technology which has been cloned and reused and is everywhere now. It's to do with the story, which survived so well because it can't be cloned. I never play Doom anymore because it's been surpassed, but I'd still play The Secret of Monkey Island. Hell, I'd still play Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (ancient game from Apogee) because the story of the cute little alien stuck on Earth gives me such a kick.
A few years later I saw the VGA edition of MI1 in the shops, bought it up instantly and played it many times all over again. The two sequels haven't been any worse, because the same artistic story and visual effort's been put in by the development team.
I guess I'm mostly uninformed on this besides the press release, but it seems that all they've given in it is the wingspan. Is there a reason that the solar array couldn't have also have been made wider than originally planned?
The article suggests that it is difficult to track the asteriods and see if there is a chance they could hit Earth. Isn't this something that could be done SETI@home style ? I'd much rather be looking for asteriods that could kill millions of people than looking for aliens.
I think the main problem that the article refers to is that there are various issues related to chaos theory that mean we just can't track the orbits so far into the future.
For one thing, the measurements we get aren't accurate enough. Also there are tiny outside influences that add given enough time. These would include gravity from other objects, maybe small collisions and so on. Most of these influences can't be taken into account because we don't know about them, or the effect is just too small. No matter how accurate the original prediction is, the orbit would change over time.
Compare it with trying to predict the exact weather in every part of the Earth a year from now. It can't be done unless you know the state of every molecule on Earth to an infinitely small measure, and even this doesn't take into account the influences form outside the planet.
We have to track it, but it can't be done in the long term with computers because we simply can't get accurate enough starting data.
If you put hardware in a science fiction type replicator and simply copied the hardware, that would be illegal. But studying how the hardware works and reacts in order to design and build something that does the same thing is not illegal.
Just as it's not illegal to write an operating system that copies and acts the same way as UNIX.
I think text files are just better in general for any sort of development. Code is written in text files and using them to define how to work on the code makes things much easier.
If a unix type of development environment doesn't support a wanted feature, it's usually quite simple to plug in a new utility that does exactly what is wanted. If anyone has done anything similar, that utility is probably freely available, provided completely independently by a third party. Alternatively you could write your own, or even just make a utility by piping generic text processing commands.
This simply can't be done with most Windows environments because propriety methods of storing all the meta information about design and code make it so difficult for other people to expand on where the company left something out. (It's just a general open source advantage applied to the development of the developing environment.)
Even if this freedom to expand the environment can be done in Windows, it usually would need some real understanding of the development environments attributes and how it works.
I really don't see what the government can have against Napster. THEY don't actually distribute MP3s, they just connect users, much like ICQ. What if people start distributing MP3s through ICQ en masse, will Mirabilis be sued? The most I could really see happening is a strange type of accessory to the fact. In summary, I don't see that the Napster people actually did anything illegal, it's the users connected to their servers passing files illegally between each other.
I hope Napster wins this case because I think they're easily right on all sorts of technicalities. If Napster doesn't win, it could be really bad for other projects. But I'm also getting really sick of Napster's attitude to the whole thing.
Napster runs it's business and makes money from a system that was obviously only ever going to work by encouraging piracy and spreading other poeple's work illegally without their permission. Once Napster wins (assuming it does), people a few years from now will be looking back at it seeing the weak but technically correct whinging excuse of "it wasn't our fault - it's the 99.9% of users who are breaking the law."
Doesn't anyone else think that the open source community is disadvantaging its own reputation when so many of us openly support what Napster does? (Yes I'm aware that not everyone does, and I'm one of the people who doesn't like it.)
From everything I understood until this came along, the open source attitude was that if something's not free, then make a new one that is free. The Napster attitude is that if it's not free, we'll just take it anyway without anyone's permission and argue that it should be free because it's so easy to get away with it.
Imagine the SAMBA team breaking into Microsoft HQ and stealing the Windows source code. They wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court. (No I'm not sugguesting any sane person would want to steal Windows source code.)
"Liberating information" in this way just doesn't strike me as anything to do with the open source concept. All it's ever going to do is turn the ignorant non-differentiating world against people who use completely legal methods such as reverse engineering to accomplish what we're doing so well.
Already three quarters of the developed world probably don't know the difference between Napster piracy and decss reverse engineering case. The decss case strikes me as something much more critical to open source in the future.
Napster on the other hand is just a system that's trying to change the law by encouraging other people to break it. It abuses legal technicalities that might eventually be closed, blocking off other people who could have used them with much more honest intent.
I think it would be nicest if the whole system was simplified.
At the moment the main model (commercial/propriety or not) is that the one system does everything. It registers people's online state, stores undelivered messages, stores people's personal details, performs searches, etc etc.
Some systems use client-to-client protocols to lower the load on the server and that's great, but IMHO it'd be even better if the services were completely separate. All that the main system would ever need to do is register whether people were online or not, and dictate who was allowed to know about who else was on.
Having different servers implementing standardised protocols for every service and letting the clients decide which ones they're going to use would make the whole thing much easier to extend. (Even if the services were all provided by the same provider.)
Splitting them up and modulising would also give providers and users the freedom to choose what services they wanted, and it'd generally make it easier for each module to be developed separately. If the original system didn't support server-server communication, someone could quite easily write a new one that did.
We need governments to realize that, with 6 billion people on the earth, that we don't have the resources to maintain an acceptable standard of living infinitely.
I've always thought space travel will turn out to be beneficial when it's done right. But I still fail to see what shunting a few people off Earth to some distant location where they can multiply on their own will do to solve any overpopulation problem we might have.
Ever heard of asymptotic complexity? O(n^2) - O(n) = O(n^2). ie. Moving a few people away from Earth won't make the slightest long term difference to the rate of multiplication.
I haven't done any research (feedback welcome) but if it's like anything else, don't be surprised if Earth's population flattens out when it hits a comfortable limit. One major reason the population is going up right now is because society still has room to expand.
Fast forward to early 2001. The United States Supreme Court has just upheld the breakup of Microsoft.
Do you really think Microsoft lawyers will fold so quickly?
They don't just get paid to win, they get paid to play it out as long as they possibly can in case they don't win. It could take years for anything to happen.
There's a really interesting website that aims to give an objective, unbiased-as-possible description of all sorts of different religions, including history and beliefs.
Some particularly interesting interpretations and descriptions are:
There are lots and lots of others. Personally I found the whole site really interesting when I first came accross it, because it's so objective.
The satanism essay is especially interesting since it argues about how there are lots of different forms of satanism, not all negative.
There's also a section in the scientology essay, about 2/3 of the way down, talking about attacks from Internet free speech advocates. (This essay also has a disclaimer pointing out that with so much controversy, truth is often difficult to separate from propaganda.)
The mobile phone thing looks interesting, but the main thing I'm wondering about is how much will this cost for the average person to run it head to head?
So if someone gets attacked on the streets by a hidden sniper, the most appropiate reaction, for the majority, would be to execute the victim. That's your best shot at stopping the sniper??
Um, no. I don't think I ever said that. I only said that never giving in is, if anything, an equally baseless way to look at it. Your solution on the other hand is to sacrifice the future of the street and all the shops and people living on it so other streets can survive. Oh how valiant. It makes sense if you don't live on the street, but that's not what's happening here.
In the long term of course not giving in is a better idea as far as the rest of the world is concerned. But it's not the rest of the world who's making the decision. Why should you expect a private company consider the long term benefits of everyone else when it'll be dead tommorrow?
It's the ISP making the decision here - not some enormous entity that will be around afterwards whatever happens. They wouldn't be sacrificing part of themselves so the rest of can survive. They'd be committing suicide so the competition can take all their customers. When there's a gun pointed at someone's head like this, you just can't expect them to consider society first. Every so often there will be a special case, but don't count on it.
The "never give in to terrorists" policy makes much more sense on a large government scale. On a smaller scale, for example, banks don't get anywhere by ordering tellers not to hand over cash in robberies - they only get dead employees. The better long term course of action is either to remove the gun, or make it so people can't as easily wave it around like a psychotic 5 year old throwing a tantrum.
Taking better technical security measures to prevent DoS attacks from happening in the first place is a good start for removing the gun. (See other threads.) The disincentive part is harder and less likely to be successful with so much anonymity available to people. I'm not in favour of reducing anonymity on the net, but it could at least be done in other ways (although without much success).
Just like the worst response to real terrorism is to give in to the terrorists, the worst response to virtual terrorism is to give in to the terrorists.
Not that I don't agree with it being a dangerous response, but I think something needs to be worked into the analogy for all the other customers of the ISP who will be inconvenienced, and for the ISP itself when all those customers start to leave.
An ISP is not a government. Giving in is definitely bad, but without giving in it could simply die. An ISP doesn't have the position, power and authority of a government to force it's citizens/users to remain with it and support it if it can't immediately provide the service that they want.
The only interest of a commercial company is self-interest. Self-interest equals profit. Unless protecting my privacy becomes profitable, companies will sell my details to the highest bidder.
Protecting people's privacy is profitible for a lot of companies. If it doesn't declare that it will protect your personal details, simply don't give them away.
I think the biggest danger with self regulation is motivation for security - not honesty. Companies might promise not to give away details, but often there's no real way to guarantee that they're actually taking reasonable steps to protect it.
As the general population gets more net-experience and starts to realise that one of the main sources of unwanted spam is themselves giving away their details so easily (especially email addresses), they'll become more conscious of actually checking the privacy policy.
Voluntary privacy declarations will probably turn into a major marketing strategy over time.
I wasn't really thinking about whether there's life on it or not. I'm not going to glorify any extintion of the human race, and I also agree with most of the points you've brought up.
My main gripe is that it's situation where people discover that as soon as they can do something, the macho cavalry ride in armed with stereotypical science fiction novels and TV shows, and simply do it because it seems like the obvious thing to do.
Mars as it is right now is a bit of history that's almost completely untouched by us. (Not just the possibility of life, but everything else.) Yes there are very likely billions and billions of planets out there, but it's unlikely we'll ever see something (in detail) outside the Solar System for an incredibly long time. Before anyone has a chance to learn anything useful from it, some lunetic's going to drive in to Mars with a giant vacuum cleaner and destroy everything that's evolved so they can build expensive apartment blocks.
I don't have any problem with colonising Mars either, but saying now that terraforming the planet is definite progress seems like too much of an assumption before we even know what we're getting into. I just hope that people have properly been there, studied it and know exactly what we get and what we lose before someone makes a popularity and politically motivated short-term gain decision that terraforming is the way to go.
On a side note, I heard somewhere that it's theoretically more efficient to build and pack people into giant space stations than terraform and colonise a new planet. Does anyone know anything about this?
There are lots of people in this discussion who have started talking about maybe terraforming Mars. Most of it seems to be based on whether or not we can, but I think it's at least as important to think about whether or not we should.
Mars might actually be okay the way it is. Humans have a history of marching to new places, filling them with people and destroying the existing environment without a second thought. This time we're not just talking about chopping down trees, though. It's indiscriminately turning the environment of an entire planet on it's head.
The most obvious metaphor for this that I can think of is when the commercial world finally got hold of the Internet. Suddenly ignorant government officials and others are trying to control it and change it from what they don't understand to what they want. Why? Because it's there, and they don't have direct control of it. By walking in and terraforming Mars we'd be doing exactly the same thing. It's nothing more than a destructive power statement.
For the metaphor, it would make much more sense for governments and populations to adapt themselves train themselves about the internet. It would make much more sense for us to adapt ourselves to Mars, instead of trying to force it to change.
People can live there easier, but people can live anywhere given enough determination. Mars as a piece of history would be destroyed. Ironically, all this destruction would be to make it look as much as possible like something we already have.
Population-wise, there's no evidence to suggest that shunting a few people away from Earth would do anything to help overpopulation. It would only provide more space to expand, and a few years later we have exactly the same problem all over again.
So anyway, enjoy the view of Mars while it still looks as red as it has for hundreds of millions of years. Take photographs while you still can, because like flipping an irreversable light switch, it could easily be a different colour a couple of centuries from now. Colonists will be looking back at what they've managed to mess up for their own benefit, not as if that's anything unusual for the human race.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. A site that offers a range of formats and in some cases even lets the user decide what viewer to use. (Referring to the video gallery, of course.)
I wish every media provider was as flexible as this one. Someone out there likes me. :)
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I think I can see what it's getting at, but there would still have to be lots of complications. Personally I don't have too much of a problem as long as the information is still used within the entire agreement that it was collected under.
The problem is exactly what the agreement said. How much was actually said against how much was implied? Did the original company actually state that it would not start sending mass spam mail about illegal money making schemes, or did it only imply that it it would only send regular news updates?
That said, as long as the "little-marketing.com" is still bound by the agreement with the customer and is not allowed to sell details to another "mass-spammer.com", it's presumably also bound by everything else in the agreement with the customer to provide all the same services that it was supposed to in exchange for the customers' information.
In other words, the clauses stating that "we will provide all these services that we said we would in exchange for your information", and "we will not send you marketing information unless you check this box" and so on.
Personally I think there should be some sort of law for situations like this where in every exchange, all customers have to be notified about the change of ownership and given the option to opt out.
Note that when a company is bankrupt, its assets are divided up and sold off according to what the court orders, and may not have much to do with what the company tried to promise.
I'm not a lawyer, but if the company was not legally able to sell someone's private details before it went bankrupt as per a privacy agreement, I can't see how it could be considered an asset. If anything, it's a liability because the information would have to be destroyed or withheld from people who wanted it illegally.
If this is true, how could any court treat it as such to be broken up and sold to pay creditors Isn't this whole thing more about what's in an original privacy agreement than what a court orders?
I've used ICQ for a couple of years now (not by choice but because it's the most convenient way to stay in touch with a lot of people I know.
The interface was a million times better before AOL took over. It was very intuitive, but after AOL took it they mostly seemed to bulk add space for advertising, a few extra redundant features as well as half-incorporating the web, and they didn't seem to care about code maintenance at all. The result was a buggy, horrible interface.
If you have to use ICQ, try to get either an older version of it (on the early side of 0.9x), or use an ICQ clone. There are lots of clones listed on freshmeat, but I'm not sure if many would compile for a Windows box. Alternatively you could try something like Odigo which talks to ICQ and looks quite cool. Last time I tried it it still crashed a bit and the window wasn't very resizable, but otherwise it was great.
I was arguing with a med student about a month ago about the possibility of robotic eyes. He was dead-set in the belief that it wasn't possible.
I'm fully aware that this isn't exactly it either, but it's close enough for what we were arguing about. How long until I get to shoot lethal concentrated laser beams from my eyes? :-P
I used to live in Wellington, New Zealand. And that's a nice city - but small, only 400K.
I wouldn't say it's incredible, but Wellington's been getting easier to live in in the last couple of years since Saturn's covered most of it with a decent cable network.
Also I think WETA has been taking on some people since they began work on all the Lord of the Rings movie effects. You'd normally have to be really well qualified and slightly lucky to get into it though.
FOr normal IT industry stuff I'd have to agree. I know a lot of people in NZ who've migrated to Australia for interesting IT work, and Melbourne seems to be quite popular.
I definitely agree. The art is as much of what goes into the story as into the visual effects in the game. I'm a great fan of a lot of adventure games, and even many platform games, because there's not much more they could do to draw people in than have a good story.
The stories in modern 3D games OTOH are getting thinner and thinner. Wolfenstein 3D was about the only one with a decent story before game developers decided to put as much effort into storylines as Bruce Willis beating up a killer asteroid. Instead there's more development emphasis on simply having better game engines and network-playability, and this gets really boring (for me) after a short time.
DOTT was cool, but I still don't think anything can beat the Monkey Island series. (It's no surprise that they're both Lucasarts.) The first time I saw it was when I admittedly pirated the EGA version from someone while I was in High School. This was about the same time as King's Quest 4. I enjoyed the story and the jokes a lot, and the modern intuitive interface was also a great new thing, unlike other adventure games that were still trying to use text game concepts in graphics mode.
Combined, the whole thing was awesome for the time. Today it's still awesome. This is nothing to do with the technology which has been cloned and reused and is everywhere now. It's to do with the story, which survived so well because it can't be cloned. I never play Doom anymore because it's been surpassed, but I'd still play The Secret of Monkey Island. Hell, I'd still play Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (ancient game from Apogee) because the story of the cute little alien stuck on Earth gives me such a kick.
A few years later I saw the VGA edition of MI1 in the shops, bought it up instantly and played it many times all over again. The two sequels haven't been any worse, because the same artistic story and visual effort's been put in by the development team.
And happily belonging to none of the mentioned countries but likely to benefit lots all the same, I'm proud to be providing moral support.
Yeah! Go ISS! =P
Did he mean a factor of 2 by length or by area?
I guess I'm mostly uninformed on this besides the press release, but it seems that all they've given in it is the wingspan. Is there a reason that the solar array couldn't have also have been made wider than originally planned?
The article suggests that it is difficult to track the asteriods and see if there is a chance they could hit Earth. Isn't this something that could be done SETI@home style ? I'd much rather be looking for asteriods that could kill millions of people than looking for aliens.
I think the main problem that the article refers to is that there are various issues related to chaos theory that mean we just can't track the orbits so far into the future.
For one thing, the measurements we get aren't accurate enough. Also there are tiny outside influences that add given enough time. These would include gravity from other objects, maybe small collisions and so on. Most of these influences can't be taken into account because we don't know about them, or the effect is just too small. No matter how accurate the original prediction is, the orbit would change over time.
Compare it with trying to predict the exact weather in every part of the Earth a year from now. It can't be done unless you know the state of every molecule on Earth to an infinitely small measure, and even this doesn't take into account the influences form outside the planet.
We have to track it, but it can't be done in the long term with computers because we simply can't get accurate enough starting data.
If you put hardware in a science fiction type replicator and simply copied the hardware, that would be illegal. But studying how the hardware works and reacts in order to design and build something that does the same thing is not illegal.
Just as it's not illegal to write an operating system that copies and acts the same way as UNIX.
I think text files are just better in general for any sort of development. Code is written in text files and using them to define how to work on the code makes things much easier.
If a unix type of development environment doesn't support a wanted feature, it's usually quite simple to plug in a new utility that does exactly what is wanted. If anyone has done anything similar, that utility is probably freely available, provided completely independently by a third party. Alternatively you could write your own, or even just make a utility by piping generic text processing commands.
This simply can't be done with most Windows environments because propriety methods of storing all the meta information about design and code make it so difficult for other people to expand on where the company left something out. (It's just a general open source advantage applied to the development of the developing environment.)
Even if this freedom to expand the environment can be done in Windows, it usually would need some real understanding of the development environments attributes and how it works.
I really don't see what the government can have against Napster. THEY don't actually distribute MP3s, they just connect users, much like ICQ. What if people start distributing MP3s through ICQ en masse, will Mirabilis be sued? The most I could really see happening is a strange type of accessory to the fact. In summary, I don't see that the Napster people actually did anything illegal, it's the users connected to their servers passing files illegally between each other.
I hope Napster wins this case because I think they're easily right on all sorts of technicalities. If Napster doesn't win, it could be really bad for other projects. But I'm also getting really sick of Napster's attitude to the whole thing.
Napster runs it's business and makes money from a system that was obviously only ever going to work by encouraging piracy and spreading other poeple's work illegally without their permission. Once Napster wins (assuming it does), people a few years from now will be looking back at it seeing the weak but technically correct whinging excuse of "it wasn't our fault - it's the 99.9% of users who are breaking the law."
Doesn't anyone else think that the open source community is disadvantaging its own reputation when so many of us openly support what Napster does? (Yes I'm aware that not everyone does, and I'm one of the people who doesn't like it.)
From everything I understood until this came along, the open source attitude was that if something's not free, then make a new one that is free. The Napster attitude is that if it's not free, we'll just take it anyway without anyone's permission and argue that it should be free because it's so easy to get away with it.
Imagine the SAMBA team breaking into Microsoft HQ and stealing the Windows source code. They wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court. (No I'm not sugguesting any sane person would want to steal Windows source code.)
"Liberating information" in this way just doesn't strike me as anything to do with the open source concept. All it's ever going to do is turn the ignorant non-differentiating world against people who use completely legal methods such as reverse engineering to accomplish what we're doing so well.
Already three quarters of the developed world probably don't know the difference between Napster piracy and decss reverse engineering case. The decss case strikes me as something much more critical to open source in the future.
Napster on the other hand is just a system that's trying to change the law by encouraging other people to break it. It abuses legal technicalities that might eventually be closed, blocking off other people who could have used them with much more honest intent.
An American man will soon become the first "space tourist" by paying $20 Million to get one week aboard Mir.
Does he get his money back if they can't bring him back down for two years?
I think it would be nicest if the whole system was simplified.
At the moment the main model (commercial/propriety or not) is that the one system does everything. It registers people's online state, stores undelivered messages, stores people's personal details, performs searches, etc etc.
Some systems use client-to-client protocols to lower the load on the server and that's great, but IMHO it'd be even better if the services were completely separate. All that the main system would ever need to do is register whether people were online or not, and dictate who was allowed to know about who else was on.
Having different servers implementing standardised protocols for every service and letting the clients decide which ones they're going to use would make the whole thing much easier to extend. (Even if the services were all provided by the same provider.)
Splitting them up and modulising would also give providers and users the freedom to choose what services they wanted, and it'd generally make it easier for each module to be developed separately. If the original system didn't support server-server communication, someone could quite easily write a new one that did.
We need governments to realize that, with 6 billion people on the earth, that we don't have the resources to maintain an acceptable standard of living infinitely.
I've always thought space travel will turn out to be beneficial when it's done right. But I still fail to see what shunting a few people off Earth to some distant location where they can multiply on their own will do to solve any overpopulation problem we might have.
Ever heard of asymptotic complexity? O(n^2) - O(n) = O(n^2). ie. Moving a few people away from Earth won't make the slightest long term difference to the rate of multiplication.
I haven't done any research (feedback welcome) but if it's like anything else, don't be surprised if Earth's population flattens out when it hits a comfortable limit. One major reason the population is going up right now is because society still has room to expand.
Sponsors give money for two main reasons:
In this case it was the latter, and it means they're effectively buying a service from Harvard.
Why should they give money to an entity that isn't indicating in return that they're fully behind the sponsor?
Harvard is benefitting from the money. If it doesn't like those terms, there's nothing whatsoever to stop it from accepting the money.
Harvard has obviously done a cost/benefit analysis of selling this part of their reputation, but blame Harvard - not Intel.
Fast forward to early 2001. The United States Supreme Court has just upheld the breakup of Microsoft.
Do you really think Microsoft lawyers will fold so quickly?
They don't just get paid to win, they get paid to play it out as long as they possibly can in case they don't win. It could take years for anything to happen.
There's a really interesting website that aims to give an objective, unbiased-as-possible description of all sorts of different religions, including history and beliefs.
Some particularly interesting interpretations and descriptions are:
There are lots and lots of others. Personally I found the whole site really interesting when I first came accross it, because it's so objective.
The satanism essay is especially interesting since it argues about how there are lots of different forms of satanism, not all negative.
There's also a section in the scientology essay, about 2/3 of the way down, talking about attacks from Internet free speech advocates. (This essay also has a disclaimer pointing out that with so much controversy, truth is often difficult to separate from propaganda.)
The mobile phone thing looks interesting, but the main thing I'm wondering about is how much will this cost for the average person to run it head to head?
What's their target market?
So if someone gets attacked on the streets by a hidden sniper, the most appropiate reaction, for the majority, would be to execute the victim. That's your best shot at stopping the sniper??
Um, no. I don't think I ever said that. I only said that never giving in is, if anything, an equally baseless way to look at it. Your solution on the other hand is to sacrifice the future of the street and all the shops and people living on it so other streets can survive. Oh how valiant. It makes sense if you don't live on the street, but that's not what's happening here.
In the long term of course not giving in is a better idea as far as the rest of the world is concerned. But it's not the rest of the world who's making the decision. Why should you expect a private company consider the long term benefits of everyone else when it'll be dead tommorrow?
It's the ISP making the decision here - not some enormous entity that will be around afterwards whatever happens. They wouldn't be sacrificing part of themselves so the rest of can survive. They'd be committing suicide so the competition can take all their customers. When there's a gun pointed at someone's head like this, you just can't expect them to consider society first. Every so often there will be a special case, but don't count on it.
The "never give in to terrorists" policy makes much more sense on a large government scale. On a smaller scale, for example, banks don't get anywhere by ordering tellers not to hand over cash in robberies - they only get dead employees. The better long term course of action is either to remove the gun, or make it so people can't as easily wave it around like a psychotic 5 year old throwing a tantrum.
Taking better technical security measures to prevent DoS attacks from happening in the first place is a good start for removing the gun. (See other threads.) The disincentive part is harder and less likely to be successful with so much anonymity available to people. I'm not in favour of reducing anonymity on the net, but it could at least be done in other ways (although without much success).
Just like the worst response to real terrorism is to give in to the terrorists, the worst response to virtual terrorism is to give in to the terrorists.
Not that I don't agree with it being a dangerous response, but I think something needs to be worked into the analogy for all the other customers of the ISP who will be inconvenienced, and for the ISP itself when all those customers start to leave.
An ISP is not a government. Giving in is definitely bad, but without giving in it could simply die. An ISP doesn't have the position, power and authority of a government to force it's citizens/users to remain with it and support it if it can't immediately provide the service that they want.
The only interest of a commercial company is self-interest. Self-interest equals profit. Unless protecting my privacy becomes profitable, companies will sell my details to the highest bidder.
Protecting people's privacy is profitible for a lot of companies. If it doesn't declare that it will protect your personal details, simply don't give them away.
I think the biggest danger with self regulation is motivation for security - not honesty. Companies might promise not to give away details, but often there's no real way to guarantee that they're actually taking reasonable steps to protect it.
As the general population gets more net-experience and starts to realise that one of the main sources of unwanted spam is themselves giving away their details so easily (especially email addresses), they'll become more conscious of actually checking the privacy policy.
Voluntary privacy declarations will probably turn into a major marketing strategy over time.
I wasn't really thinking about whether there's life on it or not. I'm not going to glorify any extintion of the human race, and I also agree with most of the points you've brought up.
My main gripe is that it's situation where people discover that as soon as they can do something, the macho cavalry ride in armed with stereotypical science fiction novels and TV shows, and simply do it because it seems like the obvious thing to do.
Mars as it is right now is a bit of history that's almost completely untouched by us. (Not just the possibility of life, but everything else.) Yes there are very likely billions and billions of planets out there, but it's unlikely we'll ever see something (in detail) outside the Solar System for an incredibly long time. Before anyone has a chance to learn anything useful from it, some lunetic's going to drive in to Mars with a giant vacuum cleaner and destroy everything that's evolved so they can build expensive apartment blocks.
I don't have any problem with colonising Mars either, but saying now that terraforming the planet is definite progress seems like too much of an assumption before we even know what we're getting into. I just hope that people have properly been there, studied it and know exactly what we get and what we lose before someone makes a popularity and politically motivated short-term gain decision that terraforming is the way to go.
On a side note, I heard somewhere that it's theoretically more efficient to build and pack people into giant space stations than terraform and colonise a new planet. Does anyone know anything about this?
There are lots of people in this discussion who have started talking about maybe terraforming Mars. Most of it seems to be based on whether or not we can, but I think it's at least as important to think about whether or not we should.
Mars might actually be okay the way it is. Humans have a history of marching to new places, filling them with people and destroying the existing environment without a second thought. This time we're not just talking about chopping down trees, though. It's indiscriminately turning the environment of an entire planet on it's head.
The most obvious metaphor for this that I can think of is when the commercial world finally got hold of the Internet. Suddenly ignorant government officials and others are trying to control it and change it from what they don't understand to what they want. Why? Because it's there, and they don't have direct control of it. By walking in and terraforming Mars we'd be doing exactly the same thing. It's nothing more than a destructive power statement.
For the metaphor, it would make much more sense for governments and populations to adapt themselves train themselves about the internet. It would make much more sense for us to adapt ourselves to Mars, instead of trying to force it to change.
People can live there easier, but people can live anywhere given enough determination. Mars as a piece of history would be destroyed. Ironically, all this destruction would be to make it look as much as possible like something we already have.
Population-wise, there's no evidence to suggest that shunting a few people away from Earth would do anything to help overpopulation. It would only provide more space to expand, and a few years later we have exactly the same problem all over again.
So anyway, enjoy the view of Mars while it still looks as red as it has for hundreds of millions of years. Take photographs while you still can, because like flipping an irreversable light switch, it could easily be a different colour a couple of centuries from now. Colonists will be looking back at what they've managed to mess up for their own benefit, not as if that's anything unusual for the human race.