This is more like banning you from copy/paste and re-posting 1/2 or the full article to karma-whore for a +5 Informative, "before the site is down".
Google does not have an AI that passes the Turing-test yet. They don't summarize, paraphrase, or otherwise reinterpret content.
They just extract and render pieces as-is - it's a direct quote. It falls into fair use only as long as Google doesn't karma-whore too obviously.
The discussion of 'rights' is silly anyway - they have every right to restrict crawlers (and users), if it is their content on their servers.
Technically they can do that already, and some of them have done so in the past (obviously not through robots.txt). They're not doing so because it is not in their best interests - how many competitive content sites still require authentication?
But they have a point - reliable content is not free-as-in-beer to produce, particularly news. From the article, it sounds like they just want a much more flexible robots.txt. That's not a bad thing - it would allow everyone to define a richer good-will contract if needed, rather than solve that through a maintenance/navigational hacky nightmare on the site.
Of course they're horribly optimistic about the rate of adoption of a new standard, and on how much they'd get away with in terms of restrictions while keeping their relevance. But that is a problem that the market will quickly correct, at their cost, as it has in the recent past.
Slashdot users (and many geek communities) do not really hold "being smart" in high regard at all.
They hold alpha geek-ness on their personal tech interests in very high regard, and THEN call that "being smart". That's totally different - and rather similar to other forms of pack behavior developed in high school psychology.
Just like the sports jocks, or any other clique, they arrogantly dismiss any other interest as irrelevant and somehow marking others as inferior. They also assume that the pinnacle of good will is to try to convert others to the same behavior - to 'educate' everyone else (e.g.: Linux is not just an OS alternative, it is the first step to becoming another expert in all things computational, which is an obvious improvement of whatever else your life is about right now).
Not that this is any more harmful than the sports-obsessed fan (and these days it IS more lucrative), but it is foolish to think it is fundamentally different, or necessarily 'smarter' for that matter.
You may not be 'forced' to get an ID, but your life is made pretty darn difficult. And the rest of society has significant trouble dealing with the exceptions - have you tried opening a bank account without a 'driver's license' at hand? Depending on the IQ of the clerk, convincing them of accepting other government-issued IDs (e.g.: passport) can be difficult / impossible.
Now, if that's a policy set by a private business, then you're right and there is no issue: just do business elsewhere, if you really need that product/service. But when the policy is a regulation by government or commerce authorities, you do not have that option - implicitly you are requiring the driver license for completely unrelated transactions.
At that point, you might just institute a national ID system and be done with it - or it just gets absurd and inefficient over time. The CC as age verification is just an example of how absurd it can get.
Regarding the CC verification concept:
My reference to credit-card verification was not to a specific business policy. I was referring to legislation (I think COPA is what I was thinking of) - where ALL businesses are required to deny you access to those services if you don't have a credit card. That codifies an assumption that if you do not have X-unrelated-transaction-token, you cannot engage into a set of Y,Z,... transactions. So you are forced to engage into X, as the set of Y, Z... grows over time. Of all possible X to depend on, credit just seems to me like a really bad choice.
Now I'm not familiar enough with it to say whether it was the congress, or the industry, who made stupendously stupid idea of requiring CC as the verification system, but I do remember back then in dot-com days how they both made a big deal of 'reaching a solution' that seemed remarkably absurd for the consumer.
The problems with CC verification are manifold - and you're correct that it doesn't even do what it is supposed to do - verify your age. But I have to admit among the problems I see the risk financial loss as a more concrete threat than the dangers of pr0n (or the hassle of getting a driver-license/ID, for that matter, which would at least do the job).
What always struck me as ridiculous is that it REQUIRES legal businesses to presents themselves as an obvious phishing / scam scenario, and therefore makes it more difficult for some consumers to identify the latter (i.e.: "Please enter your CC/personal information here - it is ONLY for legally required age verification. Seriously, you will not be charged, but we have to ask for this by law.")...
So for the sake of protecting the 17-year olds from the dangers of porn, we have inexperienced 18-year-olds with their first CC and bank account doing impulse buys with increased risk of CC fraud and identity theft.
I think the problem is that makes a huge assumption: if you are 17 ==> you have a driver license.
Other countries have national ID cards that also apply to minors, so it is reasonable to expect you have some state ID with you. But if there is no legal requirement an ID, and you have no need for a driver license (i.e.: you do not own/drive a car), assuming you magically have a driver license does not follow. For minors, that situation is far more likely.
Not sure it is a big deal - but it reminds me of the 'solution' that e-businesses came up of saying Adult Verification ==> Credit Card. Because obviously that did not introduce risks to a kids uneducated on financial responsability, and the concept of an adult citizen without a car, credit cards and a good amount of debt is unthinkable.
His entire point is questioning the "everybody knows what makes you fat" mentality about it.
Now, I'm not very convinced he's right on the effects of excercise, carbs or fat consumption... there were quite a few arguments that seemed oversimplified or unconvincing.
But I find your posting supports his argument quite a bit: the conclusion on what makes you fat, and what needs to be done, is taken for granted. But the information that is available, and the results, do not seem to warrant that confidence.
Now that may be ignorance at the layman's level, or perhaps just some of us are ignorant about the real data; but I at least have to be skeptical that the picture is that simple either way (admittedly, I'm also more skeptical about this guy's own simplified alternative explanation).
There just seem to be too many factors involved. In other countries I've seen quite a few of these factors (meat/fat-based diet, sedentary life with no excercise, etc.) without correlation to a real obesity problem. At least when excluding to extremes that do not conceivably map to average behavior. It seems to me there has to be a combination of those factors in the average life at least to actually explain an 'epidemic' across the general population.
I hadn't checked out Notpron before - for now, I gave up waaay before L21, but I anticipate I'll waste more than those 16 hours soon enough. Thanks a lot.
I found it both very challenging, and disappointingly honest.
I wonder how much of the popularity in Slashdot may be driven by those who hope, despite the name, there will be some pr0n reward somewhere in the hours upon houtd of nerd-challenge. I mean, traditional game design implies some reward mechanic... Who could be so heartless?
Also, maybe then people would not consider it weird or awkward when their friends asks them for a serious discussion and their intellectual opinion on an issue.
Perhaps people will even stop considering submitting their opinions to rational debate a sign of weakness and an "embarrassment" - which is a particularly disturbing trend.
My 2 bills of monopoly money:
- I really like the general idea, simply because intelligent argument is a valuable commodity. If that is the price of creating a transient forum with critical mass, having people take the discussion seriously, and not seeing it degenerate into highschool psychology, it seems pretty cheap.
- Even more valuable by far: friends who would not consider it weird that you want evaluate and improve your thought processes, at least not any weirder than sharing youtube links, jokes, and all the other less purposeful conversations that friends carry over all the time. Having someone open to a meaningful discussion who is willing to contradict you and tell you when you're wrong is not impolite; that is what friends are for. It may be the thing that makes the difference between 'friends' and 'long term acquaintances'.
This contemporary fear of argument is chilling, if it gets to the point that even publicly thinking through your opinions is a cause for embarrassment.
True, honesty has as much, if not more, value as measured reliability.
Haven't used DH, but from your description it'll go into my list of potential hosting providers now for whenever I need one. One of my last bad experiences with hosting was with actadivina - they just crashed in silence, and customers were left to speculate what happened to their site and their data, etc. At least for me (it was a hobby site), the lack of follow up was the worse part. Customers found their host provider went out of business by browsing forums on the web.
Sure, the reliability here is scary (what are the statistics for four repeated data robberies?).
But even if it were the first time, the "router failure" business raises MAJOR red flags all over the place.
The customers should have known the facts at once. No excuses. Even if there is any ambiguity over which data was compromised, they should be informed of the facts and the risks.
Depending on the type of data, those 2-3 days can be crucial on controlling / mitigating the damage. For businesses, they may have requirements to take specific measures and notify their own customers of any potentially stolen information.
It is one thing that being victim of a crime or accident unintentionally puts your client's data at risk. It is a very different thing when you intentionally put and keep them at risk, because you do not want to admit what happened.
I have to agree. Netflix gives a pretty good deal for rental, but the main benefit is that it is far from 'slim pickings'.
The mode of rental is very different, though - it just clicks once you build your queue and start getting films. It's not about dropping by on a random moment of ennui, to pick up a movie that is hopefully not horrid... it's about setting up your 'movie wish list', and knowing that practically anytime you want you will have a Good Movie (TM) you actually want to watch.
I haven't been as lucky as you - I've had my top picks being unavailable for a while. But since there's always a good movie in the 20+ queue of items I want to watch, it is quite irrelevant. The renting is not as time/opportunity sensitive as the retail model, because you'll never end up on the scenario of "wasted trip vs rent Armageddon".
Also their review / recommendation system is actually useful for foreign / indie movies. I've discovered a lot of great movies / directors on Netflix I'd never have seen otherwise, including most of my current favorite movies - something exceedingly rare in the retail world, where either the choices are limited or they're exceedingly bad.
Unlike in college, I'm far too busy to abuse their pricing model - but they're still my main source of new movies, and I haven't found a better deal for that.
Because typically an engineering or science degree requires that you learn some high-level math (whatever is applicable to your domain).
We do not require people to walk around with a bunch of law info on their heads. But we CERTAINLY require that from lawyers.
It all depends on what 'high level math' implies, but in the context of this article, the assumption is that the graduates in question have science / technical degrees, and if it affects their results at work for an entry-level position, it is normally expected to be within the superset of math education they should have received at college.
Maybe they're doing the selfish for-profit thing, which can very well be 'the right thing' for everyone else.
By putting their code back into the main branch, they do not have to carry the perpetual maintenance cost of the fork and get to distribute the development cost across the rest of the mysql devs/users.
You're correct, of course, but I was not claiming there is no difference at all between the US and Brazil. I was arguing that saying 'this is one of the most dangerous places in the world' is exaggerated, because AFAIK it is not even one of the most dangerous places in the region.
Yes, the US does have less kidnapping-for-ransom situations, for a lot of reasons. But compared with other places in Latin America (where kidnapping has been known to be a disturbingly common occurence), I am very skeptical about Brazil being so horribly dangerous in comparison to, say, Colombia, or even Argentina.
I am similarly skeptical about a false sense of security/insecurity because of the fear of kidnapping statistics.
Sure, you are more likely to be kidnapped for ransom outside of the US than inside. But you're also more likely to be robbed, carjacked, etc. AND those are the things one should worry about in terms of personal security. Like airplane crashses, it seems to me a fear out of proportion unless the problem is truly endemic.
In terms of not getting hurt/shot, I would not feel that much safer 'in a slum in the US' vs 'anywhere in Brazil at night'. Kidnapping would be low in my list of worries in either case.
Perhaps Brazil has really become one of the most insecure places in the world and has also developed an sizeable kidnapping industry, but I currently do not think so - as I said, I don't have better statistical data, it is just that the statistics seem naively interpreted, and in general impression of insecurity it has never rivaled, say, Colombia or other countries.
The rest of the world uses it quite correctly - they would apply it to former colonies of Spain which commonly use the spanish language, and would never apply it to Brazil.
I'm not surprised that you wouldn't hear it from Brazilians, since (with good reason) they could care less about the one label that does not apply to them within the continent. You might as well be talking about the CARICOM.
However I am quite surprised, if you live in Miami or surrounding areas, that you would not have heard it by now from any other part of the South American population. People don't go out of their way to use the label, but it is certainly part of the general culture and vocabulary, and geographical classification... e.g.: as a category in literature, or sport competitions.
Of course, you may want to ask your Brazilian friends. I'm certain that, as much as they consider the term irrelevant, they are well educated on the matter.
4) It is not correct to call Brazil part of "Latin America". Brazilians are part of a very different culture than the Spanish-speaking countries. (Brazilians speak Portuguese.)
Portuguese or Spanish, it matters not. Both are Romance languages (derived from Latin) so it is still correct to refer to it as part of Latin America.
1) What was probably meant was 'Hispano-America' rather than 'Latin-America'. There is some confusion in the US due to lack of education on international matters, but that's the term you would see applied in the rest of the world to mean 'former colonies of Spain', which is probably what was in mind of the writer. On the one hand, as both a Latin and a Hispano-American I want to get all irritated about it, but on the other hand, there are more significant information gaps to repair in US general education before we worry about such details:-)
2) Far more relevant: the cultures are not THAT different. Honestly, Brazil is far less different from their neighbors than they are from, say, Mexico or other Hispano-Americans countries.
Spanish and Portuguese languages and culture are not that different for historical and geographical reasons, for both their original sources and their colonies.
8) The Brazilian government is far from perfect, but is much less corrupt than the U.S. government. How many Iraqi civilians has the president of each country killed? George W. Bush: 1,000,000. Lula: 0. How many countries has each country invaded or bombed for oil or weapons or other profits since the end of the 2nd World War: United States: 24. Brazil: 0.
Yes, the US has had many armed conflicts since WWII, but so has every other country. Be it a war of aggression, a war of defense, a war of independence, or a war just for the hell of it, there is some sort of profit in it. You cannot judge a country by how many wars or how many kills, but the motives behind them. And yes, you can claim that the wars were for weapons or oil all you want, but that is an opinion, not a fact.
Yes. Corruption is pretty much unrelated by those metrics, which are at most applicable to foreign policy.
You can measure corruption engaged during foreign policy, but that would have to be by metrics appropriate to the concept of corruption: capital accumulated by illegal means, compromises to security/efficiency of government for personal profit, etc.
Well, when your country occupies a good chunk of both the population and the surface area of said continents, I don't think those statistics are that useful.
Maybe I'm not that informed, but as a Latin American (not Brazilian), I would warn you about insecurity and kidnappings in a lot of places before I point out Brazil.
The general advice is good anyway: don't dress and act out of place in general, and don't make it apparent that you are a tourist, for security concerns. The same applies to everywhere, though, not just Brazil. And I definitely would not say the same about feeling more secure in a US 'slum'... maybe it's just a matter of knowing which unwritten rules not to break.
No one is complaining that the blogger created the article. What they're complaining is about the relevance and editing of the item - is this front-page material or not? Is the headline accurate or not?
Slashdot was supposed to be "news for nerds, stuff that matters", and it is questionable whether every random blogger argument matters enough to be in the front page, with a headline that seems a categorical statement of fact.
If you want to use the open-source metaphor, that works too: not every random open source project appears in the front page, nor should they. Most projects (like most anything) do not matter that much; not until they acquire some traction and someone has put a good amount of effort and good code.
I see this as yet another 'editor complaint' - perhaps the article should not have gone to the front-page. Perhaps it should have been combined with other similar/related submissions to estimulate a discussion.
I personally would have been happy if Slashdot had not used a headline that, unlike the original blog's: - Claims X is better than Y as a fact - Gives an expectation of evidence
I don't care much about the subject either way (I'd like more phone and less net on my phone, thanks).
But I agree with the parent that the only difference between Slashdot and Digg is that there is an editorial staff which is supposed to filter 'what really matters', and provide context / research to the submissions where necessary. If there is no filtering and no editing, Slashdot might as well go with the Digg model and remove the 'editorial' process -let the masses and moderation systems deal with that.
I see BioShock more similar to DeusEx in its intention, and perhaps that is also why I enjoyed the game quite a bit, since by nature I do not think it could be as good as System Shock 2 on doing what SS2 did... but probably better at doing what DeusEx / Bioshock attempted (I still prefer Deus Ex, though).
System Shock 2 was fundamentally a thriller FPS - its design and its intention allowed it to be quite non-linear because, besides the atmosphere, it didn't have a narrative to tell. It felt to me that SS2 was mostly about playing a mood within an action game, rather than a story.
As an FPS, it was definitively better than Deus Ex (the best I've played, actually). But I'd be hard pressed to sustain a long narrative (e.g.: a novel) with its source material outside of an action game/movie...
Deus Ex was fundamentally an adventure game - the point was to tell a complex, rich story. Sure, it had an FPS interface, and RPG elements, but priority in the design to tell the complex story most effectively, and that typically requires constraining the player. That means your characters are, well, characters (have lots of baggage for the story), your events are more scripted, the plots and background story get more intrincate, and for the sake of narrative you have to limit the players actions and results a lot more.
As an adventure game, it was definitely better than SS2. It told a much richer story very effectively - you could sustain a novel or two with the same material, outside of the game. But it wasn't a very good, or even balanced, FPS.
That's one reason a 'spiritual sequel' makes sense for SS2, but wouldn't have done much for Deus Ex.
Bioshock itself is pretty good, but I do feel it is far more of an adventure game as well. It's great mostly for the story it has to tell, rather than the FPS game mechanics or its attempt to replicate something like the SS2 atmosphere, although it benefits from both. That means I cannot even talk about most of the things I enjoyed from the game without giving a spoiler - it's all about, and part of, the story it has to tell.
All three are among the best games I've played, but I wouldn't try to compare them side-by-side on the same genre, when they are not.
Obviously, I'm partial to games with something to say. It seems to me they're sadly absent these days - but I guess the same can be said about the rest of our popular media.
Because the onboard graphics adapter is still either AGP or PCI-e.
The bus defines that, and the onboard chip still uses either bus.
"Neither" is only a valid option if it is really old hardware and uses yet another bus (VESA? EISA?)... but I haven't seen those in... 10 years by now?
Hmm... I think you missed my main point, but you do bring up a perhaps more important issue, so I can't help but answer that first:-)
Sorry to disagree, but democracy IS the end we are looking for - there is nothing more we can do to make things better than to have a democracy. That's it. So voting, or choosing not to vote, is part of that - i.e. you don't have to vote (unless you're in Australia) - but most people in democratic countries know that if they voted or not they still have a chance of a say in how their country is run and therefore they have a moral investment in it; I guess that's why democracies have less violent protests and guerrilla movements (except where democracy has broken down and the populace feel disenfranchised).
I think we'd both agree that modern democracies are the best we've found. And I don't know of a better alternative to achieve and preserve prosperity and freedom for its population, while preventing abuses of power.
But I have to disagree strongly with the idea that "this is it".
Particularly when it is not clear what "this" is: we'd need to narrow it down to the characteristics of a 'good democracy', because all modern successful democracies are impure in some way or another. The very concept of 'checks and balances' is a modern imposition that limits democratic power - yet a concept that I see as vital. The Athenians had no such obstacles when condemning Socrates to death.
Democracy as an end by itself is a very dangerous concept: it lacks consensus on its concrete meaning, it provides no good measure or metric of success, and it infuses the word with the magical, sanctifying effect of an absolute good. Democracy is a popular word, even (particularly!) in the most oppresive regime, because it is the political equivalent of papal infallibility.
Tyrannies tend to have democratic roots; a tyrant acquires power in two ways: by convincing the people to freely give it away, or by intervention by force from an external power. History has a very good record of the first case.
I'm a bit surprised at your statement that democracies have less political instability, though... care to elaborate on that? That doesn't really match my impression; I haven't done a through research or a scientific comparison - but I'd have a hard time coming up with more than a few active guerilla/protest movements in non-democratic societies in recent times, while for democratic nations, just in Latin America I'd have a hard time just deciding where to start.
Ok, now back to the original point:-)
Oh, and there's nothing "aristocratic" about thinking about 'higher, greater things' - we can all do it, even a pleb like me;)... but I'm surprised you don't see how that will allow the populace to think of "higher, greater things".
I never said that democracy does not allow people to think of "higher things".
I said:
a) It does not lead them to those priorities
b) It does lead political decisions away from those priorities.
Why?
The point on a) is where I see a leap of logic, for the reasons described in the original post.
The reason for b) is quite simple: individuals are free to worry and think of 'higher things', but the majority of the people (by human nature) will look out for their self-interest first, and their immediate needs or desires as a priority. We have a long way to go before removing the long list of material needs from the priority queue... but even then, prosperous nations spend more resources on the most trivial hedonism than on any higher ideal.
This narrow self-interest is one of the basis of our modern democracies, since the population needs to demand their welfare from their government and be vigilant against misuse/abuse of power.
In the end, the qualities of democracy do allow individuals to accomplish a great many 'higher, great things'. Prosperity and freedom of action and expression are very effective on allowing that. But this is independent from the general democratic will.
It should be clear to any human being in this world that democracy (and the rule of secular law), though not perfect by any means, leads to a populace who have a moral investment in the country in which they live - and this leads them to think of greater things, such as science, and not the day-to-day issues like how to not be killed for wearing the wrong clothes
Whoa. This is a logic leap of Olympic proportions.
Democracy is a powerful means to its ends (e.g.: those typically described in democratic constitutions), but it inherited the lamentable romantic habit of taking strong assertions for rational arguments.
- Democracy does not, per se, lead to a moral investment of the population in politics. It's remarkably difficult to get even minimal participation (voting on the most important elections) on mature democracies, much less 'moral investment'.
- Democracy does not lead the population to think of 'higher, greater things'. On the contrary, participatory government focuses on concrete improvements to the way of life of the constituents. That IS one its main virtues - the resources of the state are to be invested into the happiness of the population, rather than the aspirations (however idealistic) of an autocrat.
- Democracies tend to worry, more than anything, about day-to-day issues. Not being killed for wearing the wrong clothes is a central preocupation of citizens and politicians on most modern democracies - personal security is expensive to maintain, and a function of prosperity, not (directly) of constitutional freedom. Even if the most secure and prosperous democracies, day-to-day issues are the center of popular thought and political action. People worry more about their job security, schools for their children, their parking situation, or whether there is too much fat in french fries.
Historically, worrying about "greater things" rather than the menial day-to-day problems of life is a very aristocratic feeling, not a democratic one; and the romantic rethoric of democratic documents has a lot to do with the aristocratic antecedents of those who wrote the seminal documents, and rethorical tradition.
Even when democratic nations do spend great effort and emotional investment in a "greater thing" (e.g.: space exploration, fundamental scientific research, solving world hunger, etc) it is typically a result of unilateral top-down leadership, whether motivated by national needs (war, foreign competition, etc) or by a strong push from a charismatic executive leadership. In other words, the efforts are fundamentally 'dictatorial', in the original Roman sense of the word.
The causal chain that leads democracy to achieve 'greater things' is powerful but indirect. Leisure is the parent of such worries, and prosperity leads to leisure. The power of democratic societies lies on their capacity to best achieve and sustain prosperity, and reduce the number of worries of survival a citizen needs to deal with daily. But it is human nature that, for the overwhelming majority of the population, even the most menial daily worries will take a higher priority than "greater things" in their political opinion.
Is a nerd's time somehow less intrinsically less valuable? Or does 'the context of a slashdot article/submission' intrinsically mean that the nerd in question does not have a 'job in the real world' and therefore has infinite amounts of free time to use the most complex tool for the simplest job?
Granted, it looks really cool and fascinating, and likely it is perfect for a specific type of software development, but one might as well ask 'Why not use Mathematica instead of a spreadsheet?'. Ultimately, there is no shortage of Turing-complete languages, runtime systems and programming environments on which to reinvent the wheel and print tables and paint pretty graphs.
Spreadsheets are a powerful and simple tool - and have been for a long time before computers came into the picture. The whole point of the hyper-spreadsheet is that is IS still a spreadsheet application... i.e.: it has the general (well-proven) advantages of that UI and type of application, while bringing in the power of a programming environment in a very nice model.
The reason RDBMS even come into the conversation is because it has become simple to connect a modern DBMS to a modern spreadsheet application... for reasons of its obvious usefulness, and of stopping people from using a spreadsheet as a datastore instead of a view of the data.
Weird... I haven't been part of the US high-school system, but I have to admit the first time I heard of the Bell curve as a grading method was in college.
I find it strange and a bit scary that it would be the norm on a primary education environment.
In my schools, grades were based on absolute achievement for precisely the same reasons described above. This didn't mean students were expected to be overcompetitive or cut-throat - the matter of calibration is independent from the absolute-vs-relative question, and teachers were responsible for figuring out an adequate calibration.
After all, if a teacher fails most of the class consistently on elementary/high-school education, at least one of two things need to be fixed ASAP in the picture: the Grading or the Teaching. Both of these are her/his responsability.
No classes ever became 'cut-throat', but it wasn't unheard of that for some of the most challenging teachers/classes there would be no A's or even B+'s (or the equivalent) for the year.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not think your comparison is valid.
This is more like banning you from copy/paste and re-posting 1/2 or the full article to karma-whore for a +5 Informative, "before the site is down".
Google does not have an AI that passes the Turing-test yet. They don't summarize, paraphrase, or otherwise reinterpret content.
They just extract and render pieces as-is - it's a direct quote.
It falls into fair use only as long as Google doesn't karma-whore too obviously.
The discussion of 'rights' is silly anyway - they have every right to restrict crawlers (and users), if it is their content on their servers.
Technically they can do that already, and some of them have done so in the past (obviously not through robots.txt). They're not doing so because it is not in their best interests - how many competitive content sites still require authentication?
But they have a point - reliable content is not free-as-in-beer to produce, particularly news.
From the article, it sounds like they just want a much more flexible robots.txt. That's not a bad thing - it would allow everyone to define a richer good-will contract if needed, rather than solve that through a maintenance/navigational hacky nightmare on the site.
Of course they're horribly optimistic about the rate of adoption of a new standard, and on how much they'd get away with in terms of restrictions while keeping their relevance. But that is a problem that the market will quickly correct, at their cost, as it has in the recent past.
Slashdot users (and many geek communities) do not really hold "being smart" in high regard at all.
They hold alpha geek-ness on their personal tech interests in very high regard, and THEN call that "being smart".
That's totally different - and rather similar to other forms of pack behavior developed in high school psychology.
Just like the sports jocks, or any other clique, they arrogantly dismiss any other interest as irrelevant and somehow marking others as inferior. They also assume that the pinnacle of good will is to try to convert others to the same behavior - to 'educate' everyone else (e.g.: Linux is not just an OS alternative, it is the first step to becoming another expert in all things computational, which is an obvious improvement of whatever else your life is about right now).
Not that this is any more harmful than the sports-obsessed fan (and these days it IS more lucrative), but it is foolish to think it is fundamentally different, or necessarily 'smarter' for that matter.
You may not be 'forced' to get an ID, but your life is made pretty darn difficult.
And the rest of society has significant trouble dealing with the exceptions - have you tried opening a bank account without a 'driver's license' at hand? Depending on the IQ of the clerk, convincing them of accepting other government-issued IDs (e.g.: passport) can be difficult / impossible.
Now, if that's a policy set by a private business, then you're right and there is no issue: just do business elsewhere, if you really need that product/service.
But when the policy is a regulation by government or commerce authorities, you do not have that option - implicitly you are requiring the driver license for completely unrelated transactions.
At that point, you might just institute a national ID system and be done with it - or it just gets absurd and inefficient over time. The CC as age verification is just an example of how absurd it can get.
Regarding the CC verification concept:
My reference to credit-card verification was not to a specific business policy. I was referring to legislation (I think COPA is what I was thinking of) - where ALL businesses are required to deny you access to those services if you don't have a credit card.
That codifies an assumption that if you do not have X-unrelated-transaction-token, you cannot engage into a set of Y,Z,... transactions. So you are forced to engage into X, as the set of Y, Z... grows over time. Of all possible X to depend on, credit just seems to me like a really bad choice.
Now I'm not familiar enough with it to say whether it was the congress, or the industry, who made stupendously stupid idea of requiring CC as the verification system, but I do remember back then in dot-com days how they both made a big deal of 'reaching a solution' that seemed remarkably absurd for the consumer.
The problems with CC verification are manifold - and you're correct that it doesn't even do what it is supposed to do - verify your age. But I have to admit among the problems I see the risk financial loss as a more concrete threat than the dangers of pr0n (or the hassle of getting a driver-license/ID, for that matter, which would at least do the job).
What always struck me as ridiculous is that it REQUIRES legal businesses to presents themselves as an obvious phishing / scam scenario, and therefore makes it more difficult for some consumers to identify the latter (i.e.: "Please enter your CC/personal information here - it is ONLY for legally required age verification. Seriously, you will not be charged, but we have to ask for this by law.")...
So for the sake of protecting the 17-year olds from the dangers of porn, we have inexperienced 18-year-olds with their first CC and bank account doing impulse buys with increased risk of CC fraud and identity theft.
I think the problem is that makes a huge assumption: if you are 17 ==> you have a driver license.
Other countries have national ID cards that also apply to minors, so it is reasonable to expect you have some state ID with you.
But if there is no legal requirement an ID, and you have no need for a driver license (i.e.: you do not own/drive a car), assuming you magically have a driver license does not follow. For minors, that situation is far more likely.
Not sure it is a big deal - but it reminds me of the 'solution' that e-businesses came up of saying Adult Verification ==> Credit Card. Because obviously that did not introduce risks to a kids uneducated on financial responsability, and the concept of an adult citizen without a car, credit cards and a good amount of debt is unthinkable.
His entire point is questioning the "everybody knows what makes you fat" mentality about it.
Now, I'm not very convinced he's right on the effects of excercise, carbs or fat consumption... there were quite a few arguments that seemed oversimplified or unconvincing.
But I find your posting supports his argument quite a bit: the conclusion on what makes you fat, and what needs to be done, is taken for granted. But the information that is available, and the results, do not seem to warrant that confidence.
Now that may be ignorance at the layman's level, or perhaps just some of us are ignorant about the real data; but I at least have to be skeptical that the picture is that simple either way (admittedly, I'm also more skeptical about this guy's own simplified alternative explanation).
There just seem to be too many factors involved. In other countries I've seen quite a few of these factors (meat/fat-based diet, sedentary life with no excercise, etc.) without correlation to a real obesity problem. At least when excluding to extremes that do not conceivably map to average behavior. It seems to me there has to be a combination of those factors in the average life at least to actually explain an 'epidemic' across the general population.
One project aims at fighting stupidity; another successfully engineers it.
Great, "thanks" for pointing that out.
Now we're going to get a book and a movie about "The Animal House Code" to go along with the other nonsense.
I hadn't checked out Notpron before - for now, I gave up waaay before L21, but I anticipate I'll waste more than those 16 hours soon enough. Thanks a lot.
I found it both very challenging, and disappointingly honest.
I wonder how much of the popularity in Slashdot may be driven by those who hope, despite the name, there will be some pr0n reward somewhere in the hours upon houtd of nerd-challenge. I mean, traditional game design implies some reward mechanic... Who could be so heartless?
Also, maybe then people would not consider it weird or awkward when their friends asks them for a serious discussion and their intellectual opinion on an issue.
Perhaps people will even stop considering submitting their opinions to rational debate a sign of weakness and an "embarrassment" - which is a particularly disturbing trend.
My 2 bills of monopoly money:
- I really like the general idea, simply because intelligent argument is a valuable commodity.
If that is the price of creating a transient forum with critical mass, having people take the discussion seriously, and not seeing it degenerate into highschool psychology, it seems pretty cheap.
- Even more valuable by far: friends who would not consider it weird that you want evaluate and improve your thought processes, at least not any weirder than sharing youtube links, jokes, and all the other less purposeful conversations that friends carry over all the time.
Having someone open to a meaningful discussion who is willing to contradict you and tell you when you're wrong is not impolite; that is what friends are for.
It may be the thing that makes the difference between 'friends' and 'long term acquaintances'.
This contemporary fear of argument is chilling, if it gets to the point that even publicly thinking through your opinions is a cause for embarrassment.
True, honesty has as much, if not more, value as measured reliability.
Haven't used DH, but from your description it'll go into my list of potential hosting providers now for whenever I need one.
One of my last bad experiences with hosting was with actadivina - they just crashed in silence, and customers were left to speculate what happened to their site and their data, etc.
At least for me (it was a hobby site), the lack of follow up was the worse part. Customers found their host provider went out of business by browsing forums on the web.
Sure, the reliability here is scary (what are the statistics for four repeated data robberies?).
But even if it were the first time, the "router failure" business raises MAJOR red flags all over the place.
The customers should have known the facts at once. No excuses. Even if there is any ambiguity over which data was compromised, they should be informed of the facts and the risks.
Depending on the type of data, those 2-3 days can be crucial on controlling / mitigating the damage. For businesses, they may have requirements to take specific measures and notify their own customers of any potentially stolen information.
It is one thing that being victim of a crime or accident unintentionally puts your client's data at risk.
It is a very different thing when you intentionally put and keep them at risk, because you do not want to admit what happened.
I have to agree. Netflix gives a pretty good deal for rental, but the main benefit is that it is far from 'slim pickings'.
The mode of rental is very different, though - it just clicks once you build your queue and start getting films.
It's not about dropping by on a random moment of ennui, to pick up a movie that is hopefully not horrid... it's about setting up your 'movie wish list', and knowing that practically anytime you want you will have a Good Movie (TM) you actually want to watch.
I haven't been as lucky as you - I've had my top picks being unavailable for a while. But since there's always a good movie in the 20+ queue of items I want to watch, it is quite irrelevant. The renting is not as time/opportunity sensitive as the retail model, because you'll never end up on the scenario of "wasted trip vs rent Armageddon".
Also their review / recommendation system is actually useful for foreign / indie movies.
I've discovered a lot of great movies / directors on Netflix I'd never have seen otherwise, including most of my current favorite movies - something exceedingly rare in the retail world, where either the choices are limited or they're exceedingly bad.
Unlike in college, I'm far too busy to abuse their pricing model - but they're still my main source of new movies, and I haven't found a better deal for that.
Yeah, it's amazing how people have different expectations about the vulnerability of property vs untraceable cash.
I've even seen 30K+ vehicles parked on the street for HOURS, where anyone could pick them up with some minimal effort!
Because typically an engineering or science degree requires that you learn some high-level math (whatever is applicable to your domain).
We do not require people to walk around with a bunch of law info on their heads. But we CERTAINLY require that from lawyers.
It all depends on what 'high level math' implies, but in the context of this article, the assumption is that the graduates in question have science / technical degrees, and if it affects their results at work for an entry-level position, it is normally expected to be within the superset of math education they should have received at college.
Maybe they're doing the selfish for-profit thing, which can very well be 'the right thing' for everyone else.
By putting their code back into the main branch, they do not have to carry the perpetual maintenance cost of the fork and get to distribute the development cost across the rest of the mysql devs/users.
You're correct, of course, but I was not claiming there is no difference at all between the US and Brazil.
I was arguing that saying 'this is one of the most dangerous places in the world' is exaggerated, because AFAIK it is not even one of the most dangerous places in the region.
Yes, the US does have less kidnapping-for-ransom situations, for a lot of reasons.
But compared with other places in Latin America (where kidnapping has been known to be a disturbingly common occurence), I am very skeptical about Brazil being so horribly dangerous in comparison to, say, Colombia, or even Argentina.
I am similarly skeptical about a false sense of security/insecurity because of the fear of kidnapping statistics.
Sure, you are more likely to be kidnapped for ransom outside of the US than inside. But you're also more likely to be robbed, carjacked, etc. AND those are the things one should worry about in terms of personal security. Like airplane crashses, it seems to me a fear out of proportion unless the problem is truly endemic.
In terms of not getting hurt/shot, I would not feel that much safer 'in a slum in the US' vs 'anywhere in Brazil at night'. Kidnapping would be low in my list of worries in either case.
Perhaps Brazil has really become one of the most insecure places in the world and has also developed an sizeable kidnapping industry, but I currently do not think so - as I said, I don't have better statistical data, it is just that the statistics seem naively interpreted, and in general impression of insecurity it has never rivaled, say, Colombia or other countries.
What do you mean by 'misused' in this case?
The rest of the world uses it quite correctly - they would apply it to former colonies of Spain which commonly use the spanish language, and would never apply it to Brazil.
I'm not surprised that you wouldn't hear it from Brazilians, since (with good reason) they could care less about the one label that does not apply to them within the continent. You might as well be talking about the CARICOM.
However I am quite surprised, if you live in Miami or surrounding areas, that you would not have heard it by now from any other part of the South American population. People don't go out of their way to use the label, but it is certainly part of the general culture and vocabulary, and geographical classification... e.g.: as a category in literature, or sport competitions.
But hey, this is Slashdot! We must resort to at least one wikipedia link to prove something exists, right? http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanoamerica
Of course, you may want to ask your Brazilian friends. I'm certain that, as much as they consider the term irrelevant, they are well educated on the matter.
1) What was probably meant was 'Hispano-America' rather than 'Latin-America'.
There is some confusion in the US due to lack of education on international matters, but that's the term you would see applied in the rest of the world to mean 'former colonies of Spain', which is probably what was in mind of the writer.
On the one hand, as both a Latin and a Hispano-American I want to get all irritated about it, but on the other hand, there are more significant information gaps to repair in US general education before we worry about such details
2) Far more relevant: the cultures are not THAT different. Honestly, Brazil is far less different from their neighbors than they are from, say, Mexico or other Hispano-Americans countries.
Spanish and Portuguese languages and culture are not that different for historical and geographical reasons, for both their original sources and their colonies.
Yes. Corruption is pretty much unrelated by those metrics, which are at most applicable to foreign policy.
You can measure corruption engaged during foreign policy, but that would have to be by metrics appropriate to the concept of corruption: capital accumulated by illegal means, compromises to security/efficiency of government for personal profit, etc.
Well, when your country occupies a good chunk of both the population and the surface area of said continents, I don't think those statistics are that useful.
Maybe I'm not that informed, but as a Latin American (not Brazilian), I would warn you about insecurity and kidnappings in a lot of places before I point out Brazil.
The general advice is good anyway: don't dress and act out of place in general, and don't make it apparent that you are a tourist, for security concerns. The same applies to everywhere, though, not just Brazil. And I definitely would not say the same about feeling more secure in a US 'slum'... maybe it's just a matter of knowing which unwritten rules not to break.
No one is complaining that the blogger created the article.
What they're complaining is about the relevance and editing of the item - is this front-page material or not? Is the headline accurate or not?
Slashdot was supposed to be "news for nerds, stuff that matters", and it is questionable whether every random blogger argument matters enough to be in the front page, with a headline that seems a categorical statement of fact.
If you want to use the open-source metaphor, that works too: not every random open source project appears in the front page, nor should they. Most projects (like most anything) do not matter that much; not until they acquire some traction and someone has put a good amount of effort and good code.
I see this as yet another 'editor complaint' - perhaps the article should not have gone to the front-page. Perhaps it should have been combined with other similar/related submissions to estimulate a discussion.
I personally would have been happy if Slashdot had not used a headline that, unlike the original blog's:
- Claims X is better than Y as a fact
- Gives an expectation of evidence
I don't care much about the subject either way (I'd like more phone and less net on my phone, thanks).
But I agree with the parent that the only difference between Slashdot and Digg is that there is an editorial staff which is supposed to filter 'what really matters', and provide context / research to the submissions where necessary.
If there is no filtering and no editing, Slashdot might as well go with the Digg model and remove the 'editorial' process -let the masses and moderation systems deal with that.
Interesting...
I see BioShock more similar to DeusEx in its intention, and perhaps that is also why I enjoyed the game quite a bit, since by nature I do not think it could be as good as System Shock 2 on doing what SS2 did... but probably better at doing what DeusEx / Bioshock attempted (I still prefer Deus Ex, though).
System Shock 2 was fundamentally a thriller FPS - its design and its intention allowed it to be quite non-linear because, besides the atmosphere, it didn't have a narrative to tell. It felt to me that SS2 was mostly about playing a mood within an action game, rather than a story.
As an FPS, it was definitively better than Deus Ex (the best I've played, actually).
But I'd be hard pressed to sustain a long narrative (e.g.: a novel) with its source material outside of an action game/movie...
Deus Ex was fundamentally an adventure game - the point was to tell a complex, rich story. Sure, it had an FPS interface, and RPG elements, but priority in the design to tell the complex story most effectively, and that typically requires constraining the player.
That means your characters are, well, characters (have lots of baggage for the story), your events are more scripted, the plots and background story get more intrincate, and for the sake of narrative you have to limit the players actions and results a lot more.
As an adventure game, it was definitely better than SS2. It told a much richer story very effectively - you could sustain a novel or two with the same material, outside of the game. But it wasn't a very good, or even balanced, FPS.
That's one reason a 'spiritual sequel' makes sense for SS2, but wouldn't have done much for Deus Ex.
Bioshock itself is pretty good, but I do feel it is far more of an adventure game as well.
It's great mostly for the story it has to tell, rather than the FPS game mechanics or its attempt to replicate something like the SS2 atmosphere, although it benefits from both.
That means I cannot even talk about most of the things I enjoyed from the game without giving a spoiler - it's all about, and part of, the story it has to tell.
All three are among the best games I've played, but I wouldn't try to compare them side-by-side on the same genre, when they are not.
Obviously, I'm partial to games with something to say.
It seems to me they're sadly absent these days - but I guess the same can be said about the rest of our popular media.
Because the onboard graphics adapter is still either AGP or PCI-e.
The bus defines that, and the onboard chip still uses either bus.
"Neither" is only a valid option if it is really old hardware and uses yet another bus (VESA? EISA?)... but I haven't seen those in... 10 years by now?
I think we'd both agree that modern democracies are the best we've found. And I don't know of a better alternative to achieve and preserve prosperity and freedom for its population, while preventing abuses of power.
But I have to disagree strongly with the idea that "this is it".
Particularly when it is not clear what "this" is: we'd need to narrow it down to the characteristics of a 'good democracy', because all modern successful democracies are impure in some way or another.
The very concept of 'checks and balances' is a modern imposition that limits democratic power - yet a concept that I see as vital. The Athenians had no such obstacles when condemning Socrates to death.
Democracy as an end by itself is a very dangerous concept: it lacks consensus on its concrete meaning, it provides no good measure or metric of success, and it infuses the word with the magical, sanctifying effect of an absolute good. Democracy is a popular word, even (particularly!) in the most oppresive regime, because it is the political equivalent of papal infallibility.
Tyrannies tend to have democratic roots; a tyrant acquires power in two ways: by convincing the people to freely give it away, or by intervention by force from an external power. History has a very good record of the first case.
I'm a bit surprised at your statement that democracies have less political instability, though... care to elaborate on that?
That doesn't really match my impression; I haven't done a through research or a scientific comparison - but I'd have a hard time coming up with more than a few active guerilla/protest movements in non-democratic societies in recent times, while for democratic nations, just in Latin America I'd have a hard time just deciding where to start.
Ok, now back to the original point
I never said that democracy does not allow people to think of "higher things".
I said:
a) It does not lead them to those priorities
b) It does lead political decisions away from those priorities.
Why?
The point on a) is where I see a leap of logic, for the reasons described in the original post.
The reason for b) is quite simple: individuals are free to worry and think of 'higher things', but the majority of the people (by human nature) will look out for their self-interest first, and their immediate needs or desires as a priority. We have a long way to go before removing the long list of material needs from the priority queue... but even then, prosperous nations spend more resources on the most trivial hedonism than on any higher ideal.
This narrow self-interest is one of the basis of our modern democracies, since the population needs to demand their welfare from their government and be vigilant against misuse/abuse of power.
In the end, the qualities of democracy do allow individuals to accomplish a great many 'higher, great things'. Prosperity and freedom of action and expression are very effective on allowing that. But this is independent from the general democratic will.
Whoa. This is a logic leap of Olympic proportions.
Democracy is a powerful means to its ends (e.g.: those typically described in democratic constitutions), but it inherited the lamentable romantic habit of taking strong assertions for rational arguments.
- Democracy does not, per se, lead to a moral investment of the population in politics.
It's remarkably difficult to get even minimal participation (voting on the most important elections) on mature democracies, much less 'moral investment'.
- Democracy does not lead the population to think of 'higher, greater things'.
On the contrary, participatory government focuses on concrete improvements to the way of life of the constituents. That IS one its main virtues - the resources of the state are to be invested into the happiness of the population, rather than the aspirations (however idealistic) of an autocrat.
- Democracies tend to worry, more than anything, about day-to-day issues.
Not being killed for wearing the wrong clothes is a central preocupation of citizens and politicians on most modern democracies - personal security is expensive to maintain, and a function of prosperity, not (directly) of constitutional freedom.
Even if the most secure and prosperous democracies, day-to-day issues are the center of popular thought and political action. People worry more about their job security, schools for their children, their parking situation, or whether there is too much fat in french fries.
Historically, worrying about "greater things" rather than the menial day-to-day problems of life is a very aristocratic feeling, not a democratic one; and the romantic rethoric of democratic documents has a lot to do with the aristocratic antecedents of those who wrote the seminal documents, and rethorical tradition.
Even when democratic nations do spend great effort and emotional investment in a "greater thing" (e.g.: space exploration, fundamental scientific research, solving world hunger, etc) it is typically a result of unilateral top-down leadership, whether motivated by national needs (war, foreign competition, etc) or by a strong push from a charismatic executive leadership.
In other words, the efforts are fundamentally 'dictatorial', in the original Roman sense of the word.
The causal chain that leads democracy to achieve 'greater things' is powerful but indirect. Leisure is the parent of such worries, and prosperity leads to leisure. The power of democratic societies lies on their capacity to best achieve and sustain prosperity, and reduce the number of worries of survival a citizen needs to deal with daily.
But it is human nature that, for the overwhelming majority of the population, even the most menial daily worries will take a higher priority than "greater things" in their political opinion.
The parent's post still applies:
Is a nerd's time somehow less intrinsically less valuable?
Or does 'the context of a slashdot article/submission' intrinsically mean that the nerd in question does not have a 'job in the real world' and therefore has infinite amounts of free time to use the most complex tool for the simplest job?
Granted, it looks really cool and fascinating, and likely it is perfect for a specific type of software development, but one might as well ask 'Why not use Mathematica instead of a spreadsheet?'. Ultimately, there is no shortage of Turing-complete languages, runtime systems and programming environments on which to reinvent the wheel and print tables and paint pretty graphs.
Spreadsheets are a powerful and simple tool - and have been for a long time before computers came into the picture.
The whole point of the hyper-spreadsheet is that is IS still a spreadsheet application... i.e.: it has the general (well-proven) advantages of that UI and type of application, while bringing in the power of a programming environment in a very nice model.
The reason RDBMS even come into the conversation is because it has become simple to connect a modern DBMS to a modern spreadsheet application... for reasons of its obvious usefulness, and of stopping people from using a spreadsheet as a datastore instead of a view of the data.
Weird... I haven't been part of the US high-school system, but I have to admit the first time I heard of the Bell curve as a grading method was in college.
I find it strange and a bit scary that it would be the norm on a primary education environment.
In my schools, grades were based on absolute achievement for precisely the same reasons described above.
This didn't mean students were expected to be overcompetitive or cut-throat - the matter of calibration is independent from the absolute-vs-relative question, and teachers were responsible for figuring out an adequate calibration.
After all, if a teacher fails most of the class consistently on elementary/high-school education, at least one of two things need to be fixed ASAP in the picture: the Grading or the Teaching. Both of these are her/his responsability.
No classes ever became 'cut-throat', but it wasn't unheard of that for some of the most challenging teachers/classes there would be no A's or even B+'s (or the equivalent) for the year.