Yeah CCTV catches every nose pick, every ass scratch, every groin adjustment and potentially offers these images to the world
I personally think that this is a great idea-- make it all public!
I think Warren Ellis had a pretty awesome vision in Transmetropolitan when whatever happens in public spaces becomes accessible to anyone, at any time-- truly publicly available, as many of us want "public" data to be.
I used to work for a government data archive in the burgeoning days of the internet, and they didn't want to make data downloadable-- even though it had to be legally available to the public!-- because they didn't it want to be THAT public. People who didn't understand it, or people who had malicious intentions would have access to it. But you know what? Public is public is public, and technology keeps on making it easier for more and more people to see those public things. CC:TV footage should stream online, and soon there'll be a brigade of human eyes looking out for criminals (and for ways to exploit other people, and to police the police) through those electronic eyes. When they start putting CCTV in your living room, I say THEN you worry.
So yeah, the idea of "deception" is a human construct, as is the idea of "evil." And one could argue (as a previous poster did) that successive generations developing behaviors which are in their own self interest (so they get more food) but may (as a byproduct) be deleterious to others (since they get less food) is not a surprise. But extrapolate this to humans, and you get the kinds of behaviors that we call "deceptive" and, since we have ideas about the virtue of altruism, we call such behaviors "evil." This is experiment is definitely interesting in terms of group dynamics and behavior, and also because the novelty of the robots' solution to their problem is interesting-- two very different lines of thought. This kind of "deception" is one obvious and common solution to the problem of limited supply and competitive demand.
Deception is most interesting, I think, when you pair it with understanding of the "other" --that one is not merely making a strategy to get more food, but that in the process one is taking that food from others. So when humans and our closest relatives practice deceptive behaviors (which are surely-- and here demonstrably-- evolutionarily beneficial) it's complicated by our... moral sense? Altruistic tendencies? That's fascinating! When robots start to develop guilt complexes for their deceptive behaviors and guiltily hand over their food to others when caught in the act, I'll be impressed.
We are not using the term "deception" here in it's standard (moral) sense, which would indicate knowledge that another individual is being "fooled."
A friend of mine's mother passed away a few years ago, and before she died she told her daughter that she had left a very important letter for her. She said that her daughter would find it after she passed away. Well, my friend spent months tearing apart her mother's house and belongings, and never found the letter. Did her mother change her mind at the last minute? Did she hide it too well? Had she never gotten around to writing it? One thing that an email service has going for it is that the message is delivered. There is no finding involved. My friend will agonize about that letter for the rest of her life.
I can say this with experience that most of the grunts I have worked with have a reading / writing level of less an 8th grade student. Their ability to translate experience into the written word is often very poor, and hard to translate. (...) I wouldnt trust them to write a document I'm going to hand to fresh recruits. Thats work best left for the.
I am sure you know what you are talking about, and I have no military experience... but it appears that the reports you were reading were required of the squad and patrol readers.
One thing that wikis in general have going for them (and I would assume that the same principle applies here) is that contributors are self-selected. People tend to write if/when they have something they feel needs to be said, and people who choose to write often (not always, of course!) tend to be better equipped to do so than those who would rather not. Sometimes they're even concise. Hopefully this applies here, to the benefit of the military. Maybe people with something useful to say will have an easy way to make it heard.
I definitely don't think that they're robin hoods, nor do I doubt that such creative, motivated, successful people would have tons of other opportunities (where did you bring in opportunity and race?! That was NOWHERE in my post!) I simply point out that there are LOTS of different sets of "values" in the world, and that to call these guys unprincipled does not take into account the cultural context in which they are operating. Clearly, perpetrating one of these scams in this culture is NOT a deceitful act on par with our perception of Bernie Madoff in our culture-- there are popular pop songs about the practice for goodness sake! So before you call them "unprincipled," I simply say remember that there are other principles besides yours at work.
In other words: Try to have an open mind. That includes looking beyond your kneejerk reaction (racism?! What does that say about you?) and recognizing that not everyone thinks like you do, or values what you do.
I see a parallel here with the victims of Nigerian scammers, so recently discussed here. To what extent are the victims (perpetrators, in this case, of felonious acts; the mechanism by which they lose their own money in the other case) responsible for their own actions? To what extent is someone else responsible for bringing those actions about? A key difference here is that the Pranknet guys often rely on danger/panic scenarios: those situations when time wasted can be dangerous, and the guys at Pranknet were portraying themselves as helpers, whereas the scammers usually appeal to their victims for "help." I guess it's a difference of degree...
If anything, I suspect that the Nigerian scammers are, on the whole, smart, motivated and fairly unprincipled, guys working in a tough competitive market.
Why "unprincipled"? I mean, Robin Hood was principled... Maybe you just mean that they don't value your values.
Please learn the differences among "their" and "there" and "they're" before you decide you're going to tell us a thing or two. It's your native fucking language so quit being so silly.
Not that it matters much, but I am a stickler for good grammar but a poor editor-- I, at the last minute before submitting, changed "ARE there exceptions?" to "What ARE the exceptions?" (because surely there must be some)...except I failed to remove the "re" from the end of "there." I noticed it after I'd submitted, but figured I wouldn't trouble the overworked moderators with a dupe as well as a typo... so my apologies for having ruined your day.
On a side note, I was very tempted to change all of my "there"s to "their's" and "your" to "you're" just to provoke some more vitriol....and how do you know it's my native language? I spend more time speaking Spanish these days...
Kissing is not a solely human trait; many of our closest relatives also engage in kissing behavior. It's a trait we share with several other species of apes.
The currently popular theory of kissing's adaptive nature holds that kissing is a way to exchange (biochemical) information about hormone levels and immune system types, and also promotes emotional attachment towards pair bonding.
These researchers were definitely removing old errors to reactivate existing old material, as you say. But that does not mean that "junk" DNA is only useful when errors are removed and the code goes back to an "earlier" state. These sequences also recombine in new ways, and are incorporated into other areas of other sequences, and create new sequences, some of which prove to be useful-- recombination is one of the ways evolution new raw material to adopt or ignore.
Pseudogenes are one flavor of what is widely termed "junk DNA." There are several varieties of junk DNA including pseudogenes, introns, transposons and retroposons... and many pseudogenes, introns, transposons and retroposons are identified (and their functions better understood) regularly.
Not so much anymore; these days, it's more like it does not act in the simple, straightforward way that we expect genes to act. But then, genes don't seem to much, either. We're learning more and more about the many ways that "junk" DNA actually does play an active role in shaping human biology. (Original, more technical article.)
I've always been fascinated by "junk DNA." It *can't* be junk; there is so much we don't know here... In fact, the definition of "junk DNA" is something along the lines of "DNA we have not yet identified" Evolution would not have allowed for the repeated (and repeated and repeated) replication of so much code if it wouldn't have been more costly to simply ignore it. More and more researchers think that these are sequences which had a use in regulation, spacing, etc, and which can be put together in new ways to code for various enzyme complexes... the raw material that new genes can be built from; evolution's toolkit.
What I find really fascinating is this seeming reinforcement of that idea: researchers performing directed evolution, using nature's toolkit to put the raw materials together in useful new ways.
1. Sex in relationships often diminishes regardless of the honesty of the people involved mostly because the female does not have the same sex drive as the male. Other factors contribute to the decrease in sex...
I hate this. Yes, that's the stereotype: Men want sex all the time, women don't (and they want it less and less as time goes on! Middle-aged women, I've heard... they could totally live without sex!) Puh-lease.
There are two things I have to say to this.
1. Women and men (actually, partners in any relationship!) often want sex in different ways. Different things turn them on; different things turn them off. Often complaints about the other not wanting to have sex turn out to be complaints about the other not wanting to have sex YOUR WAY. Want her to have sex with you? Find out what makes her want to have sex with you, and do it! Ask her to do the same. It's called filling each other's needs. And yes, it changes over time and with stress, etc.-- keep revisiting the issue.
2. Don't generalize. Women have just as much variety in their libidos as men do-- there are men who are less sexual, and women who are incredibly sexual. There are sexual relationships in which a woman wants sex more often or in more varied ways than a man does (I've been in some of those) and there are sexual relationships in which a man wants sex more often or in more varied ways than a woman does (I've been in some of those, too.) It's about the individual, and more than that it's about the couple. If you are in a relationship where you are sexually frustrated and your spouse isn't interested in you sexually-- that doesn't mean you're a man and she's a woman, it means that you have problems in your relationship, and I suggest talking about your frustrations and needs, and maybe enacting some fantasies. Hers AND yours.
... Unfortunately, at least one of these has undesirable long term side-effects...
Most of them have undesirable side-effects. In the malarial area where I work, the choices are effectively doxycycline or chloroquine. In both cases, you start dosing some time before possible exposure to malaria, and continue to take the drug for quite some time after last possible exposure. Doxycycline has to be taken every day, and most people I know who take it have stomach aches and/or nausea for a couple of hours after they take it, each time. (A couple of hours of nausea! Every day!
To not have to take a prophylactic drug to protect against malaria would be truly awesome.
I found this pretty interesting: "Authentication [across the Web] would be really nice," says Tunkelang. "The anonymity of the Internet, as valuable as it is, is also the source of many of these ills." Having to register an e-mail before you can comment on a blog is a step in this direction, he says, as is Twitter's recent addition of a "verified" label next to profiles it has authenticated."
The idea of universal authentication has been tossed around for a while. I feel like the biggest drawback is privacy (we'd have to trust some universal authentication system to hold onto some identifier even if posting anonymously) and the biggest obstacle is the need for universal participation. It's kind of too late to make an opt-in system. But I've liked the idea ever since early sci-fi interwebs (read: Ender's Game) had SOME kind of authentication.
Nah it goes much higher than 10%. It seems to depend on the culture/social status of the mother but 30% isn't at all uncommon. To be honest the numbers are such that paternity should really be checked as a matter of routine.
Why? Why should paternity be checked as a matter of routine? This system seems to have been functioning for centuries-- it seems that many (most?) men and women have sex outside of their marriage at one point or another, and most of the time it goes unnoticed by their partners, and children are raised by their mother and her partner. If this is so pervasive, so inherent to human nature; and if our social system of paired parenting is so pervasive, so inherent to human cultures... why rock the boat?
* Disclaimer: I do not condone cheating and would dump my partner if he did. I am, however, an anthropologist, and I know that what we think of as normal or right in a culture isn't usually what actually happens in that culture. And that most of the time we are happier not acknowledging the difference.
Although all this stuff is a matter of public record, most of it isn't readily accessible. The internet changes the whole meaning of public. We're talking about institutions which have existed for decades if not centuries, and for them the internet is still new.
I worked at a data archive under the Department of Justice and the FBI in the late 90s/early 00s, and they were just making a switch to dowloads from distributing CDs full of data for the cost of the CD plus shipping. You see, the data was supposed to be a matter of public record. But if they wanted a copy, once upon a time it meant many, many days with a mimeograph. Or a punchcard machine. Or waiting for (and paying for) a CD to arrive in the mail. (All of these changes over the course of 20 years, after many decades of needing to visit!)
People finally had the bandwith to download. The biggest issue people at the archive struggled with? If it's too easy to use, any schmuck who wants to can get a copy. In the past you had to go to great, or at least greater, lengths to get the information. There was more resistance than you can imagine to making the website user friendly as opposed to intentional obfuscation(!) simply because "a matter of public record" has a very, very different meaning now than it did twenty years ago.
If the FBI wants your mother's maiden name (or diary) and have filled out all the appropriate paperwork, they can find out whether they have to go to the local archive (or your bedroom) or not. But if Joe Schmoe wants your mother's maiden name (or your diary), there's a difference between him making a special trip to an archive (or visiting your bedroom) and him typing your name into Google.
Which is not to say I don't think that "matter of public record" information shouldn't be on the internet. It should be. Information wants to be free and all that... but lots of very stupid people are going to suffer because they didn't realize that their blog wasn't private, and lots and lots of smart people are going to suffer because some credit companies only allow people to use things that are a matter of public record as passwords. It's going to take a while for people-- and especially for institutions-- to get used to the idea that public has a whole new meaning; that accessible is the new last word in privacy.
You said "unless they can implement some kind of effective computerized filtering, they're never going to stop uploads; they'd have to hire an small army."
Even if they can implement some kind of effective computerized filtering, how long will it stay effective? Even the article admits that "protecting copyrighted material is likely to involve an endless cat-and-mouse game to keep pace with hackers bent on breaking such security tools." So yeah, this quote takes a criminal-element view of hackers, but the fact remains that any technology will have to constantly evolve to remain effective, and that non-automated filtering (making them sift through every single video to identify copyrighted content, bless their souls) will probably be the only way.
In my opinion, either they don't let everyone upload (the extreme top-down control method; bad for business if you're YouTube; bad for the free-as-in-speech AND the free-as-in-beer sets) and copyrighted content is not as widely accessible (less recognition, less money for the little guys; more money for the big guys; the RIAA is the real winner)...or they let everyone upload, and the [few] concerned parties have to look out for their own interests. Maybe they'll have to resort to watching all of the uploaded content, if they can manage to find the manpower.
When I was a preteen girl I loved books by William Sleator. It was only years later that I realized how technologically/scientifically advanced they were-- at the time I just loved the stories. My favorites were The Boy Who Reversed Himself (which to this day shapes how I think about 4+ dimensional geometry) and House of Stairs (which I forgot about completely until I was in Psych 101 and then had to track it down and reread it), though they were all good; great plots and characters and cool SciFi. I can't vouch for anything written after about 1990.
It depends in the area and quite frankly in certain cases the age of the users.
It also depends on geography. Here in the US, or in much of the US, it does seem to depend on age-- but it's really just about groups. Groups of different sizes made up of different people in different places use different services. I have a big group of friends in the US and Canada, and most of them use AIM and some use Yahoo! or ICQ, if ICQ still counts. And I have a big group of friends in Latin America, and all of them use MSN. When I travel between the US and Latin America, I plan to start using Google TALK! whenever I can find compatability. Gaim or Trillian has been the only way for me to go for a while now.
I did this in a less extreme, more repeatable way.
I quit my job. I go to southern Mexico, where I never have the option of going near "public cameras" or using anything BUT cash for 1 to 10 months a year. While there, I rarely log onto the internet because it is virtually unavailable. I contact friends and family through Mexican payphones with disposable national calling cards (I highly doubt that this is tracable, and its the cheapest and easiest way to get in touch internationally.) When I'm not in Mexico, I am in the US taking classes, teaching or working on my dissertation. Soon it will be teaching or working on other research. [For those who don't know, many PhD programs pay YOU to go to school, unlike Masters, business, law and MD programs.] This way I do not have to empty my bank account.
This way I can step off the grid and into the jungle regularly, travel, have major adventures (the PhD is in archaeology, specialty Maya, area northern Chiapas, Mexico). I'm traceable and contactable when I'm in the US, and "off the grid" when I'm there (though I do tell people where I'll be; in case of emergency, it'd take news a while to reach me, but someone who I've talked to, who speaks Spanish and has financial resources, could accomplish it in a few days).
Want a way to get off the grid for a while without completely emptying your bank account? Volunteer for an archaeological project. Many projects will pay for your food and lodging-- and sometimes an actual salary, too-- for as long as you stay there and work.
Want a way to get off the grid regularly for the rest of your career? Quit that office job and go into an academic field in which research requires travel to remote places. Like archaeology.
At least some of this you can already do on Google Maps. Try typing "coffee shops in Philadelphia" and you get everything listed in the phone book, links, directions, etc. I don't see traffic built in, but I LOVE being able to find every blockbuster video in Oakland, etc. It's so convenient.
Interesting and Creative Use Department: A friend who is moving to Pittsburgh is looking at house listings and doesn't know where various neighborhoods in Pittsburgh are located. She searches Google Maps for Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh or for Bloomfield, Pittsburgh and she gets a good rough idea of the location and extent of a NEIGBORHOOD. Now that's cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah CCTV catches every nose pick, every ass scratch, every groin adjustment and potentially offers these images to the world
I personally think that this is a great idea-- make it all public!
I think Warren Ellis had a pretty awesome vision in Transmetropolitan when whatever happens in public spaces becomes accessible to anyone, at any time-- truly publicly available, as many of us want "public" data to be.
I used to work for a government data archive in the burgeoning days of the internet, and they didn't want to make data downloadable-- even though it had to be legally available to the public!-- because they didn't it want to be THAT public. People who didn't understand it, or people who had malicious intentions would have access to it. But you know what? Public is public is public, and technology keeps on making it easier for more and more people to see those public things. CC:TV footage should stream online, and soon there'll be a brigade of human eyes looking out for criminals (and for ways to exploit other people, and to police the police) through those electronic eyes. When they start putting CCTV in your living room, I say THEN you worry.
So yeah, the idea of "deception" is a human construct, as is the idea of "evil." And one could argue (as a previous poster did) that successive generations developing behaviors which are in their own self interest (so they get more food) but may (as a byproduct) be deleterious to others (since they get less food) is not a surprise. But extrapolate this to humans, and you get the kinds of behaviors that we call "deceptive" and, since we have ideas about the virtue of altruism, we call such behaviors "evil." This is experiment is definitely interesting in terms of group dynamics and behavior, and also because the novelty of the robots' solution to their problem is interesting-- two very different lines of thought. This kind of "deception" is one obvious and common solution to the problem of limited supply and competitive demand.
Deception is most interesting, I think, when you pair it with understanding of the "other" --that one is not merely making a strategy to get more food, but that in the process one is taking that food from others. So when humans and our closest relatives practice deceptive behaviors (which are surely-- and here demonstrably-- evolutionarily beneficial) it's complicated by our... moral sense? Altruistic tendencies? That's fascinating! When robots start to develop guilt complexes for their deceptive behaviors and guiltily hand over their food to others when caught in the act, I'll be impressed.
We are not using the term "deception" here in it's standard (moral) sense, which would indicate knowledge that another individual is being "fooled."
A friend of mine's mother passed away a few years ago, and before she died she told her daughter that she had left a very important letter for her. She said that her daughter would find it after she passed away. Well, my friend spent months tearing apart her mother's house and belongings, and never found the letter. Did her mother change her mind at the last minute? Did she hide it too well? Had she never gotten around to writing it? One thing that an email service has going for it is that the message is delivered. There is no finding involved. My friend will agonize about that letter for the rest of her life.
I can say this with experience that most of the grunts I have worked with have a reading / writing level of less an 8th grade student. Their ability to translate experience into the written word is often very poor, and hard to translate. (...) I wouldnt trust them to write a document I'm going to hand to fresh recruits. Thats work best left for the.
I am sure you know what you are talking about, and I have no military experience... but it appears that the reports you were reading were required of the squad and patrol readers.
One thing that wikis in general have going for them (and I would assume that the same principle applies here) is that contributors are self-selected. People tend to write if/when they have something they feel needs to be said, and people who choose to write often (not always, of course!) tend to be better equipped to do so than those who would rather not. Sometimes they're even concise. Hopefully this applies here, to the benefit of the military. Maybe people with something useful to say will have an easy way to make it heard.
I definitely don't think that they're robin hoods, nor do I doubt that such creative, motivated, successful people would have tons of other opportunities (where did you bring in opportunity and race?! That was NOWHERE in my post!) I simply point out that there are LOTS of different sets of "values" in the world, and that to call these guys unprincipled does not take into account the cultural context in which they are operating. Clearly, perpetrating one of these scams in this culture is NOT a deceitful act on par with our perception of Bernie Madoff in our culture-- there are popular pop songs about the practice for goodness sake! So before you call them "unprincipled," I simply say remember that there are other principles besides yours at work.
In other words: Try to have an open mind. That includes looking beyond your kneejerk reaction (racism?! What does that say about you?) and recognizing that not everyone thinks like you do, or values what you do.
I see a parallel here with the victims of Nigerian scammers, so recently discussed here. To what extent are the victims (perpetrators, in this case, of felonious acts; the mechanism by which they lose their own money in the other case) responsible for their own actions? To what extent is someone else responsible for bringing those actions about? A key difference here is that the Pranknet guys often rely on danger/panic scenarios: those situations when time wasted can be dangerous, and the guys at Pranknet were portraying themselves as helpers, whereas the scammers usually appeal to their victims for "help." I guess it's a difference of degree...
If anything, I suspect that the Nigerian scammers are, on the whole, smart, motivated and fairly unprincipled, guys working in a tough competitive market.
Why "unprincipled"? I mean, Robin Hood was principled... Maybe you just mean that they don't value your values.
Please learn the differences among "their" and "there" and "they're" before you decide you're going to tell us a thing or two. It's your native fucking language so quit being so silly.
Not that it matters much, but I am a stickler for good grammar but a poor editor-- I, at the last minute before submitting, changed "ARE there exceptions?" to "What ARE the exceptions?" (because surely there must be some) ...except I failed to remove the "re" from the end of "there." I noticed it after I'd submitted, but figured I wouldn't trouble the overworked moderators with a dupe as well as a typo... so my apologies for having ruined your day.
On a side note, I was very tempted to change all of my "there"s to "their's" and "your" to "you're" just to provoke some more vitriol. ...and how do you know it's my native language? I spend more time speaking Spanish these days...
Kissing is not a solely human trait; many of our closest relatives also engage in kissing behavior. It's a trait we share with several other species of apes.
The currently popular theory of kissing's adaptive nature holds that kissing is a way to exchange (biochemical) information about hormone levels and immune system types, and also promotes emotional attachment towards pair bonding.
These researchers were definitely removing old errors to reactivate existing old material, as you say. But that does not mean that "junk" DNA is only useful when errors are removed and the code goes back to an "earlier" state. These sequences also recombine in new ways, and are incorporated into other areas of other sequences, and create new sequences, some of which prove to be useful-- recombination is one of the ways evolution new raw material to adopt or ignore.
Pseudogenes are one flavor of what is widely termed "junk DNA." There are several varieties of junk DNA including pseudogenes, introns, transposons and retroposons... and many pseudogenes, introns, transposons and retroposons are identified (and their functions better understood) regularly.
Junk DNA = We don't really know what it does
Not so much anymore; these days, it's more like it does not act in the simple, straightforward way that we expect genes to act. But then, genes don't seem to much, either. We're learning more and more about the many ways that "junk" DNA actually does play an active role in shaping human biology. (Original, more technical article.)
The PLoS article
I've always been fascinated by "junk DNA." It *can't* be junk; there is so much we don't know here... In fact, the definition of "junk DNA" is something along the lines of "DNA we have not yet identified" Evolution would not have allowed for the repeated (and repeated and repeated) replication of so much code if it wouldn't have been more costly to simply ignore it. More and more researchers think that these are sequences which had a use in regulation, spacing, etc, and which can be put together in new ways to code for various enzyme complexes... the raw material that new genes can be built from; evolution's toolkit.
What I find really fascinating is this seeming reinforcement of that idea: researchers performing directed evolution, using nature's toolkit to put the raw materials together in useful new ways.
1. Sex in relationships often diminishes regardless of the honesty of the people involved mostly because the female does not have the same sex drive as the male. Other factors contribute to the decrease in sex...
I hate this. Yes, that's the stereotype: Men want sex all the time, women don't (and they want it less and less as time goes on! Middle-aged women, I've heard... they could totally live without sex!) Puh-lease.
There are two things I have to say to this.
1. Women and men (actually, partners in any relationship!) often want sex in different ways. Different things turn them on; different things turn them off. Often complaints about the other not wanting to have sex turn out to be complaints about the other not wanting to have sex YOUR WAY. Want her to have sex with you? Find out what makes her want to have sex with you, and do it! Ask her to do the same. It's called filling each other's needs. And yes, it changes over time and with stress, etc.-- keep revisiting the issue.
2. Don't generalize. Women have just as much variety in their libidos as men do-- there are men who are less sexual, and women who are incredibly sexual. There are sexual relationships in which a woman wants sex more often or in more varied ways than a man does (I've been in some of those) and there are sexual relationships in which a man wants sex more often or in more varied ways than a woman does (I've been in some of those, too.) It's about the individual, and more than that it's about the couple. If you are in a relationship where you are sexually frustrated and your spouse isn't interested in you sexually-- that doesn't mean you're a man and she's a woman, it means that you have problems in your relationship, and I suggest talking about your frustrations and needs, and maybe enacting some fantasies. Hers AND yours.
... Unfortunately, at least one of these has undesirable long term side-effects...
Most of them have undesirable side-effects. In the malarial area where I work, the choices are effectively doxycycline or chloroquine. In both cases, you start dosing some time before possible exposure to malaria, and continue to take the drug for quite some time after last possible exposure. Doxycycline has to be taken every day, and most people I know who take it have stomach aches and/or nausea for a couple of hours after they take it, each time. (A couple of hours of nausea! Every day!
To not have to take a prophylactic drug to protect against malaria would be truly awesome.
which is definitely worth checking out. Really amazing stuff!
The BBC story also has some interesting points about why jellyfish in particular are being looked at.
I found this pretty interesting: "Authentication [across the Web] would be really nice," says Tunkelang. "The anonymity of the Internet, as valuable as it is, is also the source of many of these ills." Having to register an e-mail before you can comment on a blog is a step in this direction, he says, as is Twitter's recent addition of a "verified" label next to profiles it has authenticated."
The idea of universal authentication has been tossed around for a while. I feel like the biggest drawback is privacy (we'd have to trust some universal authentication system to hold onto some identifier even if posting anonymously) and the biggest obstacle is the need for universal participation. It's kind of too late to make an opt-in system. But I've liked the idea ever since early sci-fi interwebs (read: Ender's Game) had SOME kind of authentication.
Nah it goes much higher than 10%. It seems to depend on the culture/social status of the mother but 30% isn't at all uncommon. To be honest the numbers are such that paternity should really be checked as a matter of routine.
Why? Why should paternity be checked as a matter of routine? This system seems to have been functioning for centuries-- it seems that many (most?) men and women have sex outside of their marriage at one point or another, and most of the time it goes unnoticed by their partners, and children are raised by their mother and her partner. If this is so pervasive, so inherent to human nature; and if our social system of paired parenting is so pervasive, so inherent to human cultures... why rock the boat?
* Disclaimer: I do not condone cheating and would dump my partner if he did. I am, however, an anthropologist, and I know that what we think of as normal or right in a culture isn't usually what actually happens in that culture. And that most of the time we are happier not acknowledging the difference.
Although all this stuff is a matter of public record, most of it isn't readily accessible. The internet changes the whole meaning of public. We're talking about institutions which have existed for decades if not centuries, and for them the internet is still new.
I worked at a data archive under the Department of Justice and the FBI in the late 90s/early 00s, and they were just making a switch to dowloads from distributing CDs full of data for the cost of the CD plus shipping. You see, the data was supposed to be a matter of public record. But if they wanted a copy, once upon a time it meant many, many days with a mimeograph. Or a punchcard machine. Or waiting for (and paying for) a CD to arrive in the mail. (All of these changes over the course of 20 years, after many decades of needing to visit!)
People finally had the bandwith to download. The biggest issue people at the archive struggled with? If it's too easy to use, any schmuck who wants to can get a copy. In the past you had to go to great, or at least greater, lengths to get the information. There was more resistance than you can imagine to making the website user friendly as opposed to intentional obfuscation(!) simply because "a matter of public record" has a very, very different meaning now than it did twenty years ago.
If the FBI wants your mother's maiden name (or diary) and have filled out all the appropriate paperwork, they can find out whether they have to go to the local archive (or your bedroom) or not. But if Joe Schmoe wants your mother's maiden name (or your diary), there's a difference between him making a special trip to an archive (or visiting your bedroom) and him typing your name into Google.
Which is not to say I don't think that "matter of public record" information shouldn't be on the internet. It should be. Information wants to be free and all that... but lots of very stupid people are going to suffer because they didn't realize that their blog wasn't private, and lots and lots of smart people are going to suffer because some credit companies only allow people to use things that are a matter of public record as passwords. It's going to take a while for people-- and especially for institutions-- to get used to the idea that public has a whole new meaning; that accessible is the new last word in privacy.
You said "unless they can implement some kind of effective computerized filtering, they're never going to stop uploads; they'd have to hire an small army."
...or they let everyone upload, and the [few] concerned parties have to look out for their own interests. Maybe they'll have to resort to watching all of the uploaded content, if they can manage to find the manpower.
Even if they can implement some kind of effective computerized filtering, how long will it stay effective? Even the article admits that "protecting copyrighted material is likely to involve an endless cat-and-mouse game to keep pace with hackers bent on breaking such security tools." So yeah, this quote takes a criminal-element view of hackers, but the fact remains that any technology will have to constantly evolve to remain effective, and that non-automated filtering (making them sift through every single video to identify copyrighted content, bless their souls) will probably be the only way.
In my opinion, either they don't let everyone upload (the extreme top-down control method; bad for business if you're YouTube; bad for the free-as-in-speech AND the free-as-in-beer sets) and copyrighted content is not as widely accessible (less recognition, less money for the little guys; more money for the big guys; the RIAA is the real winner)
When I was a preteen girl I loved books by William Sleator. It was only years later that I realized how technologically/scientifically advanced they were-- at the time I just loved the stories. My favorites were The Boy Who Reversed Himself (which to this day shapes how I think about 4+ dimensional geometry) and House of Stairs (which I forgot about completely until I was in Psych 101 and then had to track it down and reread it), though they were all good; great plots and characters and cool SciFi. I can't vouch for anything written after about 1990.
It depends in the area and quite frankly in certain cases the age of the users.
It also depends on geography. Here in the US, or in much of the US, it does seem to depend on age-- but it's really just about groups. Groups of different sizes made up of different people in different places use different services. I have a big group of friends in the US and Canada, and most of them use AIM and some use Yahoo! or ICQ, if ICQ still counts. And I have a big group of friends in Latin America, and all of them use MSN. When I travel between the US and Latin America, I plan to start using Google TALK! whenever I can find compatability. Gaim or Trillian has been the only way for me to go for a while now.
I did this in a less extreme, more repeatable way.
I quit my job.
I go to southern Mexico, where I never have the option of going near "public cameras" or using anything BUT cash for 1 to 10 months a year.
While there, I rarely log onto the internet because it is virtually unavailable.
I contact friends and family through Mexican payphones with disposable national calling cards (I highly doubt that this is tracable, and its the cheapest and easiest way to get in touch internationally.)
When I'm not in Mexico, I am in the US taking classes, teaching or working on my dissertation. Soon it will be teaching or working on other research. [For those who don't know, many PhD programs pay YOU to go to school, unlike Masters, business, law and MD programs.]
This way I do not have to empty my bank account.
This way I can step off the grid and into the jungle regularly, travel, have major adventures (the PhD is in archaeology, specialty Maya, area northern Chiapas, Mexico). I'm traceable and contactable when I'm in the US, and "off the grid" when I'm there (though I do tell people where I'll be; in case of emergency, it'd take news a while to reach me, but someone who I've talked to, who speaks Spanish and has financial resources, could accomplish it in a few days).
Want a way to get off the grid for a while without completely emptying your bank account? Volunteer for an archaeological project. Many projects will pay for your food and lodging-- and sometimes an actual salary, too-- for as long as you stay there and work.
Want a way to get off the grid regularly for the rest of your career? Quit that office job and go into an academic field in which research requires travel to remote places. Like archaeology.
I did. I love it! Life's short. Enjoy it.
At least some of this you can already do on Google Maps. Try typing "coffee shops in Philadelphia" and you get everything listed in the phone book, links, directions, etc. I don't see traffic built in, but I LOVE being able to find every blockbuster video in Oakland, etc. It's so convenient.
Interesting and Creative Use Department: A friend who is moving to Pittsburgh is looking at house listings and doesn't know where various neighborhoods in Pittsburgh are located. She searches Google Maps for Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh or for Bloomfield, Pittsburgh and she gets a good rough idea of the location and extent of a NEIGBORHOOD. Now that's cool.