One of the characters is raised by the N'th generation upgrade of his parent's pokemon data. They started on the Gameboy, transfered them to the N64, then the GameCube games, and then with Revolution, to the Nintendo servers, where the pokemon AI were continually upgraded until such an age where people purchased back the hosting of their pokemon, who were, at that point, highly intelligent creatures.
There is a religious group called "The Explainers," which is basically the organized scientific perspective of today, combined with a story describing the recognized myth of Prometheus, the Enlightenment, and a metaphysics of progress. They formed out the realization on behalf of scientists and the non-religious public, that they need to actively combat a growing religious throwback conservatism, that is aggressively using virtual reality technologies to keep our minds in the middle ages and the BCs.
But really, it's just incredibly difficult to write a story like this. The changes that we'll likely see in the next 20 years are, frankly, shocking. We will see sophisticated AIs, significantly easier programming, the merging of the online and offline worlds, people being turned into robots in the workplace, robots being able to do most every physical labor. No telling when we'll get the Augmented Realityvision displays: 10 years? 20 years? Probably not much longer than that, given that we already have displays based on projecting laser light directly into the eye.
And then there's the mass public organizing going on online, and all these changes in how we think about and organize information...
Really, it's very hard to just project 20 years into the future, let alone 50.
Music + DRM is basically music in a different format.
It's basically like saying: "Drat! I can't play my OGG files in the iPod!"
Or, to an extereme, in order to make the subtle difference more obvious: "Drat! I can't open this data file on my CD player! ''Damn The Man!''"
The idea is that if you have car stereos that can interpret the new format, then it should play fine. I think they would actually like people who make your car music player to support their format.
If they really wanted to screw you over, there are better ways than telling you how to circumvent their own protection mechanisms.
I think what they want here, is actually what they said: "It's designed to stop casual piracy... It's not saying you'll stop people from doing it, but it makes people stop and think."
"This is something I own. This is like putting a wall in front of what I own."
First: Do you really own it? If you or a friend made it, then presumably there are no DRM locks on it.
Second: This is in no way like putting a wall in front of the entrance to your house. This is more like putting a line of 9 inch diameter rocks in a row in front of your house. Rocks that you can easily step over.
The purpose of the rocks isn't to be an electric fence with razor wire. The purpose of the rocks is to be a warning sign: That this is (perhaps not) for you. But if it is for you, or even if it isn't, but for some circumstance, you think you should tresspass, you are supposed to be able to.
There's 3 feet deep and 9 feet tall of a difference between a solid wall and a little row of rocks.
Really: What do you want? How would you build a better system than this?
Let's say you believe copyrights are overblown. Let's say you are like me, and think that copyright should last roughly 17 years.
Even if copyrights last only 17 years, there's still enormous potential for piracy in those 17 years.
(I hope you do realize that: If most people pirate, than movie makers will stop making films, and most book writers will stop writing books.)
Okay, so we have 17 years where it is important that we protect the things they make.
The question is: How do we do it?
We could: (A) Do nothing. (B) Put in Soft Security, like is being done here. (C) Put in Hard Security, like most media groups want to do.
If we do (A) nothing, then we don't get to watch the Lord of the Rings. If we do (C), then we easily walk into totalitarianism, and all kinds of other nasty stuff.
If we do (B), then people can police themselves with their own conscience. You do realize that this is the only thing that says: "I trust you to think," and systematically asks you to do it, right? Because if you say (A), then there's no prompting to think. If you say (C), then you've removed all choice from the user. It's really (B) that gets people thinking:
"The manufacturers of this technology have effectively told me 'please don't do this, but we know there's situations where it is right for you to do so.' I'm about to copy a file so that I can play it in the car, as well as at home. Do I believe this is okay? Yes, so I will let this one go over." That is, they are forcing the decision on you. But it's a good decision to force on you. And it's much better than them making the decision for you. Especially since there's no way (that we like) such that they could reliably make the decision.
This is totally about trusting them trusting you, and I'm shocked at the negative response this has generated.
You should have to overcome some sort of speed bump, letting you know: "Hey, if you do this thing, you might be breaking the law. Think about it."
But you should still be able to overcome the hurdle. Because, "who knows?" You might actually have the right, it might actually be okay.
Besides: Some laws, you should be able to make the decision to break or not to break. Not all laws, but some laws. For the simple act of copying a file on your computer, you should be the person deciding what to do. But there should be some small barrier to transgress.
It's called Soft Security, and it works great. It's all about respecting people, and respecting boundaries. Most people are pretty respectful, and things seem to work. People talk, people have ideas about what is right and wrong, and people don't violate things just willy nilly, provided that there are some cues and attention.
Imagine that you have a million dollars to spend buying a vote in a key state. You can afford to buy some spies, full-time programmers, all sorts of stuff, with this much money.
Now you figure out where the code is being compiled. You do this with your plants in the process. You spend all your time figuring out: Where will they get the source code from. Where will they compile it. Where do they copy from. Etc., etc.,. Learn how that process works.
Now you have a way to find out where the compiler will come from. If some "Jim" somewhere is the person who will be compiling the code, figure out what processes will likely be followed by Jim. Is he going to get his compiler off of his own personal computer? Is he going to get a compiler from his work computer? Is he going to download a compiler fresh, and compile it himself? (If so, which compiler is he going to use to compile the compiler?) This is just detective work, and there are people you can pay to do it.
Now you have the source of the compiler. You pay a sympathetic programmer to analyze the public source code, and to build a bug into the compiler.
You don't worry about submitting an official commit. Rather, you make sure that you can hack into the compiler distribution site on the day that you need to put the code in. If Jim is going to compile it himself, the job is even easier: You only need to sneak in at night, replace his gcc with your bugged gcc, and then when he compiles the compiler with his bugged gcc, it will similarly infect the newly compiled gcc. Then when he downloads the squeaky clean publicly-approved source code, it will bug the output.
Really, this is very very simple. The only major costs are, I think, 6 months to develop and test the code, and the costs involved in spying, hacking, and deployment. None of these tasks are mysterious, and the working knowledge to do it is readily available. All you need is X dollars, and you can steal an election in this way.
The publicly visible source code is a slight of hand. The entire public watches the source code. "The source code is clean, the source code is public, we won the public source code, we know it's good because the source code is clean." You'll have armies of people studying, documenting, talking about, celebrating the source code.
That's all in the right hand.
In the left hand, you've got the compiler. Nobody cares about the compiler. Nobody talks about the compiler. Nobody thinks about the compiler.
It's way too easy.
Are people motivated to steal elections? You better believe it. Do people have the money to steal elections? You better believe that, too.
Using computers to count elections is the most dangerous way to do elections. We can use computers to good effect in elections, but it's not the way we think. Here's how to put computers to good use: Constantly recording count efforts.
That is: Video tape all access (save recording ballots, and the inside of the ballot shuffler) to the ballots. The whole way through. For every single vote. And as the votes are counted, record the whole process. Make the tapes available for study on the Internet. People can monitor the counting process from home. Every single check mark, human verified, as many times as anybody likes. Anybody can be a ballot counter at home, supervising the whole thing.
We can have the most trusted ballot system ever, if we do this.
I guess the thing is: What we're really concerned about here, (if I may project a little,) is voting software.
In those cases, they're probably not going to say, "download the compiler from a random site on the net." In fact, it's probably going to be very hard to control the people who compile the software, and even harder to control the people who compile the compiler. At some point, somebody's going to get the compiler, and they're going to get it from some specified place.
If it's a secret place, then the vote is determined by whoever controls that secret place. If it's a public place, well- that's something to think about.
Maybe we should have a Federal list of 100 places to get the compiler from. Or a thousand places. However it is done, we want to make it more expensive to buy the vote than the vote is worth.
I have never met a single programmer that understood configure scripts.
Of all the programmers I know who have understood configure scripts, they have all told me: "Oh, I just took someone else's configure script, and modified it a little. But I don't understand it."
Intel 2005 Keynote: x10-x100 cores by 2015
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
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· Score: 4, Informative
He shows demos and explains several driving forces:
voice interaction
visual interaction (face recognition, identifying shape, video analysis)
3D graphics
machine learning
An example of video analysis is demonstrated. You can get a stable image out of a cell phone, and get a much higher resolution to boot, simply by analyzing lots of images in sequence. Right now, it takes a lot of time to crank out the analysis. But the problem is parallelizable, and Intel thinks we'll have this sort of things in cell phones by 2015.
This is also the technology behind automatic construction of 3D from images. This is where you pull your cell phone out, walk around, waving it around the room, and get back a 3D model of the room.
People ask: "Do we really need all this computing power?" Yes, yes we do. There's plenty of stuff to do with it.
Scott talks about sitting in front of the computer, and not needing to log in, because the computer knows who you are by your face.
Can you point to a specific idea in the book that will help? What I understand about the book is that it is about small-is-good and Capitalism. Colombia is hyper-capitalist. You can set up a disco in your house, and your neighbors can't complain. Hey, you can hire your own military, or get hit jobs in the paper. It's so regulation free, David Friedman would love it.
The problem is corruption, law, and rebellion.
There's no easy target that I can make out. Simply getting rid of the FARC won't work. Simply saying, "capitalism," won't work. It's already capitalist.
So- maybe I've misinterpreted your post- if there are specific ideas in there that we should know about, please tell them. Get me excited about this book. I'll read it if you can give me a quick sample of helpful ideas from the book.
Unions report that 3 out of 5 union deaths in the world are in Colombia. Colombia is an extremely violent place. The Colombian government works together with the large land owners' paramilitary forces, there's a revolving door between Colombian government military and the paramilitary. They are both working against the FARC; It's hard to believe that the Unions are not considered a tentacle of the FARC. In Colombia, the rule is: Go home, be quiet, be with your family, obey whatever rules authorities give you, whoever the authorities are.
My girlfriend was raised in Colombia, as was her sister. I know about Colombia from what they have said, what a pen-pal in Colombia has said, and from what I have researched on my own.
It's entirely believable to me that Coka-Cola works hard (probably violently, perhaps indirectly) against union workers in Colombia. That place is freaking nuts. Many communities rely on the local mob to build their schools.
I like to tell fellow programmers: "You thought Snow-Crash was the kind of place you wanted to live? Well, you can experience a lower-tech version of it right now: Go To Colombia."
As for how people get involved with protests, even when they don't know all the facts themselves, I refer you to the two-step flow of mass media communication. (This link provides a very helpful picture.) Basically, she grew up with people she trusts and loves. One (or a very few) of these people make it their business to keep informed on the subject. She trusts this person, and is convinced (probably legitimately) by this person. This is the person you need her to refer you to, and this is the person you need to argue with. It is legitimate to act on behalf of anothers thinking, if you can trust that the person is paying attention.
Not only did they explain why, they even said, "If you have any questions or concerns, or if we have contacted the wrong people, please feel free to contact me directly."
That is, they said: We will listen to you if you have something to say in response.
What interested me most about Symphony OS is that he put togther a bunch of mock-ops and explanations about how things worked, before coding.
It seems to me that we're moving towards a specification-based development model. Even some of the GNOME guys are talking about making GNOME a ''specification,'' rather than a particular ''implementation.''
If we can do this, then it's a great thing, because it means we'll have the basis of a not-just-coders development model. We'll have something where the body of developers are separate from the body of designers. This leads the way for even more decentralization, which is exactly what we need: Right now, the developers are the bottleneck in pretty much all operation. There is very little separation of work, except for website maintenance.
The more we can make clusters of people working on specific tasks, with well defined roles, the greater we can scale this Free Software thing.
Bloody Rayne: Not especially terrified; There are plenty of goths in the world, and I wouldn't be frightened if my daughter were one.
Rachael: Typed in "Rachael Ninja Gaiden" into google image search, didn't find anything.
I've met many people in life, who dressed in goth style, but were friendly, interesting, and capable. And I've met many people who dressed "well," but were contemptuous, boring, and incapable.
On the whole, very few people live the way I believe in living. But of those who do, I find more variety in dress. This isn't to say everyone I know dresses strange, but: I think that, on the whole, the people I like are more willing to dress out of mainstream bounds, than I see day-to-day on the street. Unless, of course, you're in a college district.
Unless my daughter were hanging out with cruel kids or drug addicts, I would interpret her dress as a sign of independence, freedom, and conformity to an free spirit.
I wish there were more variety in the way people dress.
I'm not exactly one to speak though; I'm more of a t-shirt and blue jeans kind of coder.
If you take this argument further, you get something that looks a little like this. You're going to have to scroll down a ways to part 2: Hive Mind Independence, which takes place somewhere between 2013-2023 by the scenario timeline.
The basic idea is this: What if the smart mobs take over? Not just software, but everything?
We see these open developments happening first in software, then elsewhere.
First Open Source software, then Open Source encyclopedia, then Open Source manufacturing, etc., etc.,. It does not seem unreasonable to me to believe that more and more work will develop on top of the network of relationships and trusts that arise from open development.
I always suspect that, if we "met" aliens, they'd be so far beyond us, we'd have essentially nothing to say to them.
I wouldn't fear that they'd take our homes. I'd fear that they would find us a nuisance.
I mean, how often do you dream about taking the ant's home from them, so you can use up all their resources and suck them dry?
You don't. We don't care about ant homes. We don't care about stealing their babies from their mothers. We don't think any of those things, that we fear so much from "the aliens."
They probably don't need our precious Earth. If they can make it all the way out here, they've probably got something else going on such that anything Earth would give them is totally irrelevant. They're probably cyborgs, or computers, or cross-dimensional beings, or something like that.
No. What I fear is annoying the hell out of them. I fear being termites, or ants that are going after scraps too aggressively, or something like that.
Because when people get mad at the termites, they really go after the termites.
There's a thread over here that talks more about this. The guy is basically saying, "Yes, I've talked with women about this, and they don't really feel that way."
And, further, I have met many women who play games, and they're not thinking the way the article writer thinks. I hope I didn't give the impression that it was just my girlfriend and daughter. Almost all women I have known who play games- they are not feeling objectified. They actually like playing as the attractive characters.
Now, it could still be that the ones who don't play games, that they don't play because of the dress. And I would bet that is true, in part. Again: the conservative Christian woman probably isn't going to get too much into it, I'm guessing.
But there again, we go back to the younger generation being the one that matters here. From where I stand, the population of girls that play games seems large (and growing,) and I don't see any objectification in the charicatures.
Well, that's not entirely true. We are all objects, in a way, after all. And we follow role scripts, and "objectify" ourselves with simplifying ideas about who we are and what not. But, not in the sense that the article writer is concerned about, and certainly not in a way that is frightening away the younger generation.
My guess is that women would be bored if most women were drawn conservatively in games. They'd go, "Damn, why are the male characters so flashy and cool. It's like we have to wear a veil of boringness. These games are terrible."
To see the evidence first-hand, through deviant art, gamer girl circles, anime circles. Look at cosplay, look at what these people are dressing in, look at what characters these women are sympathetic to.
And, I think you'll find that, in this population, women are not turned off by the portrayals of women that the article writer thinks they would be turned off by.
The author wrote that there is something wrong with the way that heroines are designed. He said that he thought it made women feel objectified, and that this was turning them away from games.
I disagree, because my girlfriend (29) and daughter (4) love the outlandish clothes women wear in games.
Three games that we are playing right now are: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy: Chrystal Chronicles, and Xenosaga (ep 1.)
Pretty much all of these feature pretty outlandish clothing. We talk about it. We think it's cool.
I don't know about Ms. Floss, (pictured in the article,) but I suspect my girlfriend would think it was cool, and have no problem playing her. My daughter seems sort of blase, ("Do you like it?" "Yeah..,") but she's more focused on kicking robot ass in Xenosaga right now.
Our daughter regularly tells us, "I want to be Lulu," by which she means: "I want to dress like Lulu." She earnestly likes all these images. We let her cut and paster her old clothing, to make the outfits.
Nobody finds it particularly offensive that Lulu has big breasts.
So, I'm going to have to say: I think that one's right off the mark.
Maybe some women won't find the images appealing. Maybe a conservative christian women won't find it appealing. People who have strong ideas about what people should be, how they should dress- obviously, they're not going to like it.
But, there's a lot of women who like these kinds of things.
When I went to college, interest in anime was mostly a male thing. (Or, perhaps it was that I just went to a school that is mostly male.) But I've heard from the anime that in the younger croud, I'm guessing people aged 15-20 right now, that a lot of girls are into anime- that the ratio is even. I strongly suspect that almost all of those girls will feel comfortable with Ms. Floss.
Look at the movies that are coming out: Sin City, X-Men, - it's like we're going on a comic book fashion rampage. I don't think this is a bad thing.
It may offend more traditional sensibilities. Women from particular backgrounds may feel objectified. But: I think if we're talking about the growth of games, it makes sense to look at what this younger generation is doing and thinking.
You might be interested in something I'm working on.
I want it to be easy to use bookmarks in speech, not just keep them in a file.
You can see this in wiki- in wiki, if you use a [[special link syntax,]] it'll automatically link the text.
I want that for everything.
If I'm writing in Slashdot, I shouldn't have to write out less-than a href=quote (lookup-and-paste-URL-here) greater-than blah blah less-than/a greater-than, to tell you about "blah blah." I'd much rather just type [[blah blah,]] and have slashdot look up my link from my namespace.
Just like in wiki. But it should be possible from any text medium, and it should be able to link to anything with a URL.
Check out our project if you're interested. We've got a timeline on the scale of a year right now, we've written a bunch of software. We've just formalized our Store spec (so that Firefox and other tools can communicate with a names store in a standard way,) and are in process of formalizing our query spec, so that our name servers all talk the same language. We're about to embark on our Firefox plugin, so you can just name a page as you see it. We have a del.icio.us script as well, that can autogenerate namespace descriptions from del.icio.us XML.
Does del.icio.us (or the lesser known Open Source de.lirio.us) feature spammer protection? Or technorati tags, for that matter? How do people filter out spammers?
I keep thinking: "One of these days, the spammers are going to mess up this system."
Slashdot Mirror
...to imagine a world of 2050.
It's not easy.
However, I have some puzzle pieces.
One of the characters is raised by the N'th generation upgrade of his parent's pokemon data. They started on the Gameboy, transfered them to the N64, then the GameCube games, and then with Revolution, to the Nintendo servers, where the pokemon AI were continually upgraded until such an age where people purchased back the hosting of their pokemon, who were, at that point, highly intelligent creatures.
There is a religious group called "The Explainers," which is basically the organized scientific perspective of today, combined with a story describing the recognized myth of Prometheus, the Enlightenment, and a metaphysics of progress. They formed out the realization on behalf of scientists and the non-religious public, that they need to actively combat a growing religious throwback conservatism, that is aggressively using virtual reality technologies to keep our minds in the middle ages and the BCs.
But really, it's just incredibly difficult to write a story like this. The changes that we'll likely see in the next 20 years are, frankly, shocking. We will see sophisticated AIs, significantly easier programming, the merging of the online and offline worlds, people being turned into robots in the workplace, robots being able to do most every physical labor. No telling when we'll get the Augmented Reality vision displays: 10 years? 20 years? Probably not much longer than that, given that we already have displays based on projecting laser light directly into the eye.
And then there's the mass public organizing going on online, and all these changes in how we think about and organize information...
Really, it's very hard to just project 20 years into the future, let alone 50.
Music + DRM is basically music in a different format.
... It's not saying you'll stop people from doing it, but it makes people stop and think."
It's basically like saying: "Drat! I can't play my OGG files in the iPod!"
Or, to an extereme, in order to make the subtle difference more obvious: "Drat! I can't open this data file on my CD player! ''Damn The Man!''"
The idea is that if you have car stereos that can interpret the new format, then it should play fine. I think they would actually like people who make your car music player to support their format.
If they really wanted to screw you over, there are better ways than telling you how to circumvent their own protection mechanisms.
I think what they want here, is actually what they said: "It's designed to stop casual piracy
Let me see if I understand your argument right:
"This is something I own. This is like putting a wall in front of what I own."
First: Do you really own it? If you or a friend made it, then presumably there are no DRM locks on it.
Second: This is in no way like putting a wall in front of the entrance to your house. This is more like putting a line of 9 inch diameter rocks in a row in front of your house. Rocks that you can easily step over.
The purpose of the rocks isn't to be an electric fence with razor wire. The purpose of the rocks is to be a warning sign: That this is (perhaps not) for you. But if it is for you, or even if it isn't, but for some circumstance, you think you should tresspass, you are supposed to be able to.
There's 3 feet deep and 9 feet tall of a difference between a solid wall and a little row of rocks.
Really: What do you want? How would you build a better system than this?
Let's say you believe copyrights are overblown. Let's say you are like me, and think that copyright should last roughly 17 years.
Even if copyrights last only 17 years, there's still enormous potential for piracy in those 17 years.
(I hope you do realize that: If most people pirate, than movie makers will stop making films, and most book writers will stop writing books.)
Okay, so we have 17 years where it is important that we protect the things they make.
The question is: How do we do it?
We could: (A) Do nothing. (B) Put in Soft Security, like is being done here. (C) Put in Hard Security, like most media groups want to do.
If we do (A) nothing, then we don't get to watch the Lord of the Rings. If we do (C), then we easily walk into totalitarianism, and all kinds of other nasty stuff.
If we do (B), then people can police themselves with their own conscience. You do realize that this is the only thing that says: "I trust you to think," and systematically asks you to do it, right? Because if you say (A), then there's no prompting to think. If you say (C), then you've removed all choice from the user. It's really (B) that gets people thinking:
"The manufacturers of this technology have effectively told me 'please don't do this, but we know there's situations where it is right for you to do so.' I'm about to copy a file so that I can play it in the car, as well as at home. Do I believe this is okay? Yes, so I will let this one go over." That is, they are forcing the decision on you. But it's a good decision to force on you. And it's much better than them making the decision for you. Especially since there's no way (that we like) such that they could reliably make the decision.
This is totally about trusting them trusting you, and I'm shocked at the negative response this has generated.
No, this is exactly right!
You should have to overcome some sort of speed bump, letting you know: "Hey, if you do this thing, you might be breaking the law. Think about it."
But you should still be able to overcome the hurdle. Because, "who knows?" You might actually have the right, it might actually be okay.
Besides: Some laws, you should be able to make the decision to break or not to break. Not all laws, but some laws. For the simple act of copying a file on your computer, you should be the person deciding what to do. But there should be some small barrier to transgress.
It's like the line of rocks on the side of the road at the park. "Please don't cross over this," it tells you. You can, and some do, but most don't.
It's called Soft Security, and it works great. It's all about respecting people, and respecting boundaries. Most people are pretty respectful, and things seem to work. People talk, people have ideas about what is right and wrong, and people don't violate things just willy nilly, provided that there are some cues and attention.
I think I can think of easier ways.
Imagine that you have a million dollars to spend buying a vote in a key state. You can afford to buy some spies, full-time programmers, all sorts of stuff, with this much money.
Now you figure out where the code is being compiled. You do this with your plants in the process. You spend all your time figuring out: Where will they get the source code from. Where will they compile it. Where do they copy from. Etc., etc.,. Learn how that process works.
Now you have a way to find out where the compiler will come from. If some "Jim" somewhere is the person who will be compiling the code, figure out what processes will likely be followed by Jim. Is he going to get his compiler off of his own personal computer? Is he going to get a compiler from his work computer? Is he going to download a compiler fresh, and compile it himself? (If so, which compiler is he going to use to compile the compiler?) This is just detective work, and there are people you can pay to do it.
Now you have the source of the compiler. You pay a sympathetic programmer to analyze the public source code, and to build a bug into the compiler.
You don't worry about submitting an official commit. Rather, you make sure that you can hack into the compiler distribution site on the day that you need to put the code in. If Jim is going to compile it himself, the job is even easier: You only need to sneak in at night, replace his gcc with your bugged gcc, and then when he compiles the compiler with his bugged gcc, it will similarly infect the newly compiled gcc. Then when he downloads the squeaky clean publicly-approved source code, it will bug the output.
Really, this is very very simple. The only major costs are, I think, 6 months to develop and test the code, and the costs involved in spying, hacking, and deployment. None of these tasks are mysterious, and the working knowledge to do it is readily available. All you need is X dollars, and you can steal an election in this way.
The publicly visible source code is a slight of hand. The entire public watches the source code. "The source code is clean, the source code is public, we won the public source code, we know it's good because the source code is clean." You'll have armies of people studying, documenting, talking about, celebrating the source code.
That's all in the right hand.
In the left hand, you've got the compiler. Nobody cares about the compiler. Nobody talks about the compiler. Nobody thinks about the compiler.
It's way too easy.
Are people motivated to steal elections? You better believe it. Do people have the money to steal elections? You better believe that, too.
Using computers to count elections is the most dangerous way to do elections. We can use computers to good effect in elections, but it's not the way we think. Here's how to put computers to good use: Constantly recording count efforts.
That is: Video tape all access (save recording ballots, and the inside of the ballot shuffler) to the ballots. The whole way through. For every single vote. And as the votes are counted, record the whole process. Make the tapes available for study on the Internet. People can monitor the counting process from home. Every single check mark, human verified, as many times as anybody likes. Anybody can be a ballot counter at home, supervising the whole thing.
We can have the most trusted ballot system ever, if we do this.
Yes, quite right.
I guess the thing is: What we're really concerned about here, (if I may project a little,) is voting software.
In those cases, they're probably not going to say, "download the compiler from a random site on the net." In fact, it's probably going to be very hard to control the people who compile the software, and even harder to control the people who compile the compiler. At some point, somebody's going to get the compiler, and they're going to get it from some specified place.
If it's a secret place, then the vote is determined by whoever controls that secret place. If it's a public place, well- that's something to think about.
Maybe we should have a Federal list of 100 places to get the compiler from. Or a thousand places. However it is done, we want to make it more expensive to buy the vote than the vote is worth.
I have never met a single programmer that understood configure scripts.
Of all the programmers I know who have understood configure scripts, they have all told me: "Oh, I just took someone else's configure script, and modified it a little. But I don't understand it."
He shows demos and explains several driving forces:
An example of video analysis is demonstrated. You can get a stable image out of a cell phone, and get a much higher resolution to boot, simply by analyzing lots of images in sequence. Right now, it takes a lot of time to crank out the analysis. But the problem is parallelizable, and Intel thinks we'll have this sort of things in cell phones by 2015.
This is also the technology behind automatic construction of 3D from images. This is where you pull your cell phone out, walk around, waving it around the room, and get back a 3D model of the room.
People ask: "Do we really need all this computing power?" Yes, yes we do. There's plenty of stuff to do with it.
Scott talks about sitting in front of the computer, and not needing to log in, because the computer knows who you are by your face.
There's all kinds of stuff to do with it.
Why attack the source code when you can instead attack the compiler?
You need only attack the compiler, or the linker, or the interpreter.
Can you point to a specific idea in the book that will help? What I understand about the book is that it is about small-is-good and Capitalism. Colombia is hyper-capitalist. You can set up a disco in your house, and your neighbors can't complain. Hey, you can hire your own military, or get hit jobs in the paper. It's so regulation free, David Friedman would love it.
The problem is corruption, law, and rebellion.
There's no easy target that I can make out. Simply getting rid of the FARC won't work. Simply saying, "capitalism," won't work. It's already capitalist.
So- maybe I've misinterpreted your post- if there are specific ideas in there that we should know about, please tell them. Get me excited about this book. I'll read it if you can give me a quick sample of helpful ideas from the book.
Unions report that 3 out of 5 union deaths in the world are in Colombia. Colombia is an extremely violent place. The Colombian government works together with the large land owners' paramilitary forces, there's a revolving door between Colombian government military and the paramilitary. They are both working against the FARC; It's hard to believe that the Unions are not considered a tentacle of the FARC. In Colombia, the rule is: Go home, be quiet, be with your family, obey whatever rules authorities give you, whoever the authorities are.
My girlfriend was raised in Colombia, as was her sister. I know about Colombia from what they have said, what a pen-pal in Colombia has said, and from what I have researched on my own.
It's entirely believable to me that Coka-Cola works hard (probably violently, perhaps indirectly) against union workers in Colombia. That place is freaking nuts. Many communities rely on the local mob to build their schools.
I like to tell fellow programmers: "You thought Snow-Crash was the kind of place you wanted to live? Well, you can experience a lower-tech version of it right now: Go To Colombia."
As for how people get involved with protests, even when they don't know all the facts themselves, I refer you to the two-step flow of mass media communication. (This link provides a very helpful picture.) Basically, she grew up with people she trusts and loves. One (or a very few) of these people make it their business to keep informed on the subject. She trusts this person, and is convinced (probably legitimately) by this person. This is the person you need her to refer you to, and this is the person you need to argue with. It is legitimate to act on behalf of anothers thinking, if you can trust that the person is paying attention.
I don't understand: What does it say about my post?
Not only did they explain why, they even said, "If you have any questions or concerns, or if we have contacted the wrong people, please feel free to contact me directly."
That is, they said: We will listen to you if you have something to say in response.
Whoah!
What interested me most about Symphony OS is that he put togther a bunch of mock-ops and explanations about how things worked, before coding.
It seems to me that we're moving towards a specification-based development model. Even some of the GNOME guys are talking about making GNOME a ''specification,'' rather than a particular ''implementation.''
If we can do this, then it's a great thing, because it means we'll have the basis of a not-just-coders development model. We'll have something where the body of developers are separate from the body of designers. This leads the way for even more decentralization, which is exactly what we need: Right now, the developers are the bottleneck in pretty much all operation. There is very little separation of work, except for website maintenance.
The more we can make clusters of people working on specific tasks, with well defined roles, the greater we can scale this Free Software thing.
Bloody Rayne: Not especially terrified; There are plenty of goths in the world, and I wouldn't be frightened if my daughter were one.
Rachael: Typed in "Rachael Ninja Gaiden" into google image search, didn't find anything.
I've met many people in life, who dressed in goth style, but were friendly, interesting, and capable. And I've met many people who dressed "well," but were contemptuous, boring, and incapable.
On the whole, very few people live the way I believe in living. But of those who do, I find more variety in dress. This isn't to say everyone I know dresses strange, but: I think that, on the whole, the people I like are more willing to dress out of mainstream bounds, than I see day-to-day on the street. Unless, of course, you're in a college district.
Unless my daughter were hanging out with cruel kids or drug addicts, I would interpret her dress as a sign of independence, freedom, and conformity to an free spirit.
I wish there were more variety in the way people dress.
I'm not exactly one to speak though; I'm more of a t-shirt and blue jeans kind of coder.
- You do not require the target to listen to you,
- and you do not require the target to log in to voicemail.
Your listener need only glance at his or her phone to read your message.Thank you, I think you just saved me 30 years of my life.
{;)}=
If you take this argument further, you get something that looks a little like this. You're going to have to scroll down a ways to part 2: Hive Mind Independence, which takes place somewhere between 2013-2023 by the scenario timeline.
The basic idea is this: What if the smart mobs take over? Not just software, but everything?
We see these open developments happening first in software, then elsewhere.
First Open Source software, then Open Source encyclopedia, then Open Source manufacturing, etc., etc.,. It does not seem unreasonable to me to believe that more and more work will develop on top of the network of relationships and trusts that arise from open development.
I always suspect that, if we "met" aliens, they'd be so far beyond us, we'd have essentially nothing to say to them.
I wouldn't fear that they'd take our homes. I'd fear that they would find us a nuisance.
I mean, how often do you dream about taking the ant's home from them, so you can use up all their resources and suck them dry?
You don't. We don't care about ant homes. We don't care about stealing their babies from their mothers. We don't think any of those things, that we fear so much from "the aliens."
They probably don't need our precious Earth. If they can make it all the way out here, they've probably got something else going on such that anything Earth would give them is totally irrelevant. They're probably cyborgs, or computers, or cross-dimensional beings, or something like that.
No. What I fear is annoying the hell out of them. I fear being termites, or ants that are going after scraps too aggressively, or something like that.
Because when people get mad at the termites, they really go after the termites.
A couple more things:
There's a thread over here that talks more about this. The guy is basically saying, "Yes, I've talked with women about this, and they don't really feel that way."
And, further, I have met many women who play games, and they're not thinking the way the article writer thinks. I hope I didn't give the impression that it was just my girlfriend and daughter. Almost all women I have known who play games- they are not feeling objectified. They actually like playing as the attractive characters.
Now, it could still be that the ones who don't play games, that they don't play because of the dress. And I would bet that is true, in part. Again: the conservative Christian woman probably isn't going to get too much into it, I'm guessing.
But there again, we go back to the younger generation being the one that matters here. From where I stand, the population of girls that play games seems large (and growing,) and I don't see any objectification in the charicatures.
Well, that's not entirely true. We are all objects, in a way, after all. And we follow role scripts, and "objectify" ourselves with simplifying ideas about who we are and what not. But, not in the sense that the article writer is concerned about, and certainly not in a way that is frightening away the younger generation.
My guess is that women would be bored if most women were drawn conservatively in games. They'd go, "Damn, why are the male characters so flashy and cool. It's like we have to wear a veil of boringness. These games are terrible."
The evidence is the younger generation.
To see the evidence first-hand, through deviant art, gamer girl circles, anime circles. Look at cosplay, look at what these people are dressing in, look at what characters these women are sympathetic to.
And, I think you'll find that, in this population, women are not turned off by the portrayals of women that the article writer thinks they would be turned off by.
The author wrote that there is something wrong with the way that heroines are designed. He said that he thought it made women feel objectified, and that this was turning them away from games.
I disagree, because my girlfriend (29) and daughter (4) love the outlandish clothes women wear in games.
Three games that we are playing right now are: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy: Chrystal Chronicles, and Xenosaga (ep 1.)
Pretty much all of these feature pretty outlandish clothing. We talk about it. We think it's cool.
I don't know about Ms. Floss, (pictured in the article,) but I suspect my girlfriend would think it was cool, and have no problem playing her. My daughter seems sort of blase, ("Do you like it?" "Yeah..,") but she's more focused on kicking robot ass in Xenosaga right now.
Our daughter regularly tells us, "I want to be Lulu," by which she means: "I want to dress like Lulu." She earnestly likes all these images. We let her cut and paster her old clothing, to make the outfits.
Nobody finds it particularly offensive that Lulu has big breasts.
So, I'm going to have to say: I think that one's right off the mark.
Maybe some women won't find the images appealing. Maybe a conservative christian women won't find it appealing. People who have strong ideas about what people should be, how they should dress- obviously, they're not going to like it.
But, there's a lot of women who like these kinds of things.
When I went to college, interest in anime was mostly a male thing. (Or, perhaps it was that I just went to a school that is mostly male.) But I've heard from the anime that in the younger croud, I'm guessing people aged 15-20 right now, that a lot of girls are into anime- that the ratio is even. I strongly suspect that almost all of those girls will feel comfortable with Ms. Floss.
Look at the movies that are coming out: Sin City, X-Men, - it's like we're going on a comic book fashion rampage. I don't think this is a bad thing.
It may offend more traditional sensibilities. Women from particular backgrounds may feel objectified. But: I think if we're talking about the growth of games, it makes sense to look at what this younger generation is doing and thinking.
You might be interested in something I'm working on.
/a greater-than, to tell you about "blah blah." I'd much rather just type [[blah blah,]] and have slashdot look up my link from my namespace.
I want it to be easy to use bookmarks in speech, not just keep them in a file.
You can see this in wiki- in wiki, if you use a [[special link syntax,]] it'll automatically link the text.
I want that for everything.
If I'm writing in Slashdot, I shouldn't have to write out less-than a href=quote (lookup-and-paste-URL-here) greater-than blah blah less-than
Just like in wiki. But it should be possible from any text medium, and it should be able to link to anything with a URL.
Check out our project if you're interested. We've got a timeline on the scale of a year right now, we've written a bunch of software. We've just formalized our Store spec (so that Firefox and other tools can communicate with a names store in a standard way,) and are in process of formalizing our query spec, so that our name servers all talk the same language. We're about to embark on our Firefox plugin, so you can just name a page as you see it. We have a del.icio.us script as well, that can autogenerate namespace descriptions from del.icio.us XML.
Does del.icio.us (or the lesser known Open Source de.lirio.us) feature spammer protection? Or technorati tags, for that matter? How do people filter out spammers?
I keep thinking: "One of these days, the spammers are going to mess up this system."
Well, thank you.
Thank you, for such a thorough articulation of the argument.
: )