In the olden days, people used to make blood sacrifices to gods so that their war campaigns would be successful. Skipping the sacrifice would not be "right".
Nowadays, Mr.Ignatieff argues that we should restore the practice. It isn't "right" otherwise -- how could you run a decent, "moral" war without copious blood being spilled?
We fight wars with guns in the real world. We fight wars with scripts, computers, and bandwidth online.
You know, duckie, there is a difference. In one kind of war you die. Really, actually, physically die. In the other kind of war you curse for a while and then reach for the backup tape. I think that's a noticeable difference, no?
We are, he cautions, setting an awful precedent -- it's all right to unleash fearful weapons on unseen targets if you do so in the name of human rights.
Oh, puhleeeeze.
(1) Why is the precedent awful?
(2) Is it OK if you don't "unleash", but simply shoot?
(3) Is it OK if the weapons are not "fearful"?
(4) Is it OK if you see the target before shooting? Do you have to see it with unaided eye, or can optics and/or electronics help?
And as to awful precedents, I would like to point out two: Pol Pot's Cambodia and Rwanda.
It seems to me that the guy is saying that in order for a war to be moral enough people on your side have to be killed.
Minimum acceptable loss ratio?
"Sorry, gentlemen, you suffered less than 15% of our casualties. It is now quite clear that we are the 'good' side and you are the 'evil' side."
I can understand being morally uncomfortable about risklessly killing people at a distance. I would guess this is a remnant from the times when personal man-to-man battles were the only honorable form of combat. But, really, arguing that you MUST pay in blood to achieve military goals...
So, for once, a company decides (for whatever reasons: technical, political, financial.. who knows) to withhold a product until it meets higher standards.
And yet, somehow, we find a way to bash them for this, claiming that they need to "pick up the pace" and that they're "already behind nVidia in the video card wars".
Well, you must believe everything you see on the TV, right?
When a company says it's delaying a launch "to meet higher standards", it does not mean that some engineers gathered together and decided that some parts needed additional polishing in order to be just right. What it means is that the company discovered a show-stopping bug, something so awful and horrible and bletcherous and unpatchable that even the marketing people agreed to postpone the launch. This, in turn, generally indicates that the product in question was rushed and suffers from the MOMOWFIL (Move On, Move On, We'll Fix It Later) syndrome which is not a good thing.
In any case, there are ample reasons to suspect that 3dFX is already dead and we are now witnessing the last covulsions of a corpse...
the genie is out of the bottle, and I dont think france has the power on its own to put it back...
Doesn't mean it's not going to try, though.
A misguided government of a large and fairly rich country can do an incredible amount of damage during the time it takes it to realize that its goals are unachievable.
how should he apply to UN for recognition? Under which premises will he get it and how can he avoid the jurisdiction of his nationality overrules his claim?
I don't think you are thinking about the right problems. Disregarding apperances, the world does not consist of lawyers and government bureacrats.
The main problem for the new nation would be what to do when some goons with machine guns come (take your pick: Russian mafia, Colombian cartels, Malaysian pirates, just some feisty locals). The world is a much bruter and in many ways simpler place than it seems from Slashdot.
Why is it that in the year 2000 we're still writing our operating systems and most of our programs in C (or C++, which, although messy, is not truly high-level)?
Because these are decent languages for the job?
[grins, ducks, and runs...]
Why is it that garbage-collection has never truly come out of the closet?
Because you lose some control over execution of your code, and in a lot of situations that's not desirable at all (real-time systems is a classic example).
Why is it that Java is compiled in byte-code rather than native code - and why is it so slow?
The native code of which processor? If you recall "write once, debu^H^H^H^Hrun anywhere" was the Java's big selling point and a explicit design goal. In any case, native Java compilers are starting to appear.
As to the slowness -- that's exactly because Java is a "more" high-level language. TANSTAAFL.
Why is it that no programming language that I know of is able to handle program invariants and proofs that are any bit more complicated than ("i is an integer") (nothing like "i is a power of 2" for example).
Well, you can always write a C++ class with properly defined assignment operators, etc. which will enforce "i is a power of two". Quite trivial, really.
On the other hand, you've been complaining that Java is slow... I don't think you'll like the speed of any high-level language.
Why is it that anyone who wishes to program anything still has to spend half of his time writing things like if ( retval == -1 ) { perror ("frobnicating"); exit (EXIT_FAILURE); }?
First, even in C there are such things (evil, I acknowledge) as macros. Second, sometimes you may want to frobnicate and sometimes you may want to discombobulate. Sometime you will just exit, and other times you'll try to recover gracefully. It all depends and that's why we spend time writing code like this.
Why is it that buffer overruns still exist?
As usual, it's a trade-off. You can run your programs with run-time memory checking (very, very useful during debugging). Memory checking, though, like almost everything else, imposes an overhead. Sometimes it's OK, sometimes it's not.
In any case, if you are programming in C++ and are using a decent library, you should have very few memory access problems. Writing in C and in the usual C style is another matter entirely.
The corp will own the PC and the access and will have little trouble reading your e-mail and checking out your browsing habits.
Use the Nancy Reagan defense ("Just say no").
In any case, AFAIK currently the computers are given out free of strings. A lot of companies allow employees have company-owned computers at home (laptops especially), but that's different -- it's clear that it is a company computer to be used for company business only.
And of course, even if in some future some corp decided to force a home PC on me, how will it force me to use it?
Kaa
And the point of this "article" is?
on
Universal Access
·
· Score: 1
Seems like Jon Katz felt the need to convince Slashdotters that connecting people to the 'net is a Good Thing. Gasp! Look at the nerve of the man! Such controversial ideas and right in front of all these geeks. Katz must reall have the courage of his convictions.
we seem to confuse a belief in the goodness of freedom of the exchange of information and ideas between individuals with the freedom of commercial services to propagate anything they wish regardless of national laws, cultures or sensibilities.
The confusion seems to be on your side. This is not a cultural imperialism issue.
In this particular case, France wants an American corporation to enforce French laws with regard to servers in the US. Moreover, it's not like Yahoo sells Nazi paraphenalia: it just provides a place for individuals to sell them. There is no "commercial service" which "propagates" something -- there is a marketplace in the US which some people in Europe think breaks their local laws. So? It's your laws, you enforce them. If France wants to ban the French from accessing Yahoo auctions, let it set up a national firewall that greps for words like 'Nazi' and we'll see how far it will get.
I see no difference at all from, say, China ordering Yahoo to make all anti-Communist information on its servers unaccessible to all Chinese.
Dream on. Ralph Nader has extreme anti-corporation bias (similar to one exhibited on Slashdot in the ravings of Jon Katz) and a darling boy of class-action litigation lawyers.
Just because Nader hates corporations and makes a not so bad living out of kicking them in whatever the body part happens to be handy, does not mean that he is pro-individual (aka "champion of the little guy"). If anything, he is pro-government. If he had his way, you'll need eleven permits and three certified safety experts watching just to start your lawnmover. Provided you can own a lawnmover, that is -- after all, these are very dangerous devices.
In brief, PPI proposes the following changes to the DMCA:
Require internet service providers that wish to qualify for safe harbor to collect personally identifiable and verifiable information from their users. Napster currently allows its users to sign on anonymously, making it impossible for rights holders to track down the infringers.
Establish a time frame for the "notice and take down" process for removal of infringing material. The law as currently written has no set time table, consequently service providers with a vested interest in the infringing activity of their subscribers, like Napster, have no incentive to act in a timely fashion.
Give judges the flexibility to grant injunctions against service providers whose services are substantially used for copyright infringement. It may be impossible to write a law that accounts for every conceivable technological innovations, however a judge will know an illegal act when she sees it.
Let this be a warning to all who think that Democrats (and PPI is centrist, "New" Democratic think tank) are better (or noticeably different) than Republicans or other politicians.
Major problems with these proposals, such as privacy implications, are left as the exercise for the reader.
And was it just me who found the argument "we don't know what we want to criminalize, so let the judge put into jail everybody he doesn't like" to be particularly pathetic?
What makes you think it's going to be a libertarian haven? From what I've seen, this looks like a overpriced floating combination of a rich folks retirement home and a time-share condo complex.
A pedantic correction. "Fucked up" implies unintended consequences, e.g. they didn't really want to collect personal info on people, but it just happened anyway. RealNetworks didn't fuck up. They intentionally, consciously, and deliberately set to collect all information about their users that they could get their littly grubby hands on. So, no, it wasn't a fuck-up. What it seems to be is a rather strong incompatibility between Glaser's value system and my own.
I am really, really tired of RealNetworks trying to spy on its users. This is not the first time and clearly they are going to do whatever they can get away with.
I think I'll now classify RealNetworks as a "don't let a packet come withing three hops of them" company. I am fairly sure I don't have anything of theirs installed, but I'll check just in case.
(1) WMP works better than the RealPlayer -- it crashes less often (note: "less often", not "rarely") and AFAIK supports more formats. Besides, I don't really watch anything in RealAudio/Video anyway.
(2) RealNetworks has a very consistent pattern of trying to spy on its users -- much more so than Microsoft.
(3) Given a choice between dealing with a big lumbering dinosaur (e.g. stegosaurus) and a smaller more aggressive one (e.g. velociraptor), I'll take the big one any time.
Why were the LOVEBUG arrests made? Because the Filipinos had the FBI and Big Brother Janet insisting on it.
Oh, you mean the Filipinos should have just said: "Ha-ha! Serves right these rich stupid imperialist Yankees! Let's give these students a scholarship and tell them to write more viruses."? I have no clue what computer-crime laws are there in the Philippines, but I would assume that virus-writing breaks at least some.
What the hell happened to the concept of sovereignty?
Well, see, there is a problem. If you accept that governments are the "real" players and the populations are just shit to trample on, then yes, sovereignity should be absolute. I mean, why should anybody in the world care that the Pol Pot government is killing off a third of the country's population? Cambodia is sovereign, right?
On the other hand, if you accept that people, individuals, humans, have rights that a government should not be able to (at least easily) take away -- such as the rights for not being killed for knowing how to read and write, or for having been born in the wrong tribe -- then the concept of sovereignity starts to look somewhat shaky.
Basically, it's a trade-off. If you essentially discard sovereignity you do end up with the rich and powerful dictating their will, culture, and morals to the rest of the world. If you absolutize sovereignity, you allow people like Khmer Rouge (Cambodia) and Hutu extremists (Rwanda) to operate completely unchecked.
It's a hard trade-off and not nearly as simple as you make it to be.
I have no idea, what kind of monster will a programmer turn into if he will learn C++ without prior knowledge of C
[Maniacal laughter in the distance...]
FWIW my first language was Modula-2, then I dabbled a bit in Lisp and then went directly to C++. I can code in C, though it's painful (I have to remember which C++ features I can't use). I guess that makes me a monster...
So, for example if you give it a photo of a person, it gets you all photos in which that person appears
That's a hard AI problem. If you can solve it, I can assure you you'll be famous.
I know of a program that scans images (from the web or other places) and picks out porn. Don't laugh, it's real. The program, I don't remember its name, selects pictures containing nude bodies. It works by recognizing skin tones and, I think, not the absolute color values, but rather certain color gradations.
Face recognition (which is what you are talking about) is being actively worked on now. One of the applications is being able to automatically identify people observed by the ubiquious security videocameras. Would you like to live in an aquarium?
Slashdot Mirror
A king losing his crown and a 3 year old losing her doll are of the same magnitude to each.
:-)
Nope. Not if you consider more than the nearest five minutes.
You are not trying to say that denying a kid a toy in a store is morally equivalent to overthrowing a government?
Kaa
In the olden days, people used to make blood sacrifices to gods so that their war campaigns would be successful. Skipping the sacrifice would not be "right".
Nowadays, Mr.Ignatieff argues that we should restore the practice. It isn't "right" otherwise -- how could you run a decent, "moral" war without copious blood being spilled?
Kaa
I think we should go back to 1v1 combat. If someone wants to invade another country then the leaders go at it with swords.
An interesting idea, but for some reason, the vision of Bill Clinton with a big sword in his hand makes me start worrying about national security...
Kaa
We fight wars with guns in the real world. We fight wars with scripts, computers, and bandwidth online.
You know, duckie, there is a difference. In one kind of war you die. Really, actually, physically die. In the other kind of war you curse for a while and then reach for the backup tape. I think that's a noticeable difference, no?
Kaa
We are, he cautions, setting an awful precedent -- it's all right to unleash fearful weapons on unseen targets if you do so in the name of human rights.
Oh, puhleeeeze.
(1) Why is the precedent awful?
(2) Is it OK if you don't "unleash", but simply shoot?
(3) Is it OK if the weapons are not "fearful"?
(4) Is it OK if you see the target before shooting? Do you have to see it with unaided eye, or can optics and/or electronics help?
And as to awful precedents, I would like to point out two: Pol Pot's Cambodia and Rwanda.
Kaa
It seems to me that the guy is saying that in order for a war to be moral enough people on your side have to be killed.
Minimum acceptable loss ratio?
"Sorry, gentlemen, you suffered less than 15% of our casualties. It is now quite clear that we are the 'good' side and you are the 'evil' side."
I can understand being morally uncomfortable about risklessly killing people at a distance. I would guess this is a remnant from the times when personal man-to-man battles were the only honorable form of combat. But, really, arguing that you MUST pay in blood to achieve military goals...
Kaa
So, for once, a company decides (for whatever reasons: technical, political, financial .. who knows) to withhold a product until it meets higher standards.
And yet, somehow, we find a way to bash them for this, claiming that they need to "pick up the pace" and that they're "already behind nVidia in the video card wars".
Well, you must believe everything you see on the TV, right?
When a company says it's delaying a launch "to meet higher standards", it does not mean that some engineers gathered together and decided that some parts needed additional polishing in order to be just right. What it means is that the company discovered a show-stopping bug, something so awful and horrible and bletcherous and unpatchable that even the marketing people agreed to postpone the launch. This, in turn, generally indicates that the product in question was rushed and suffers from the MOMOWFIL (Move On, Move On, We'll Fix It Later) syndrome which is not a good thing.
In any case, there are ample reasons to suspect that 3dFX is already dead and we are now witnessing the last covulsions of a corpse...
Kaa
the genie is out of the bottle, and I dont think france has the power on its own to put it back...
Doesn't mean it's not going to try, though.
A misguided government of a large and fairly rich country can do an incredible amount of damage during the time it takes it to realize that its goals are unachievable.
Kaa
how should he apply to UN for recognition? Under which premises will he get it and how can he avoid the jurisdiction of his nationality overrules his claim?
I don't think you are thinking about the right problems. Disregarding apperances, the world does not consist of lawyers and government bureacrats.
The main problem for the new nation would be what to do when some goons with machine guns come (take your pick: Russian mafia, Colombian cartels, Malaysian pirates, just some feisty locals). The world is a much bruter and in many ways simpler place than it seems from Slashdot.
Kaa
Why is it that in the year 2000 we're still writing our operating systems and most of our programs in C (or C++, which, although messy, is not truly high-level)?
Because these are decent languages for the job?
[grins, ducks, and runs...]
Why is it that garbage-collection has never truly come out of the closet?
Because you lose some control over execution of your code, and in a lot of situations that's not desirable at all (real-time systems is a classic example).
Why is it that Java is compiled in byte-code rather than native code - and why is it so slow?
The native code of which processor? If you recall "write once, debu^H^H^H^Hrun anywhere" was the Java's big selling point and a explicit design goal. In any case, native Java compilers are starting to appear.
As to the slowness -- that's exactly because Java is a "more" high-level language. TANSTAAFL.
Why is it that no programming language that I know of is able to handle program invariants and proofs that are any bit more complicated than ("i is an integer") (nothing like "i is a power of 2" for example).
Well, you can always write a C++ class with properly defined assignment operators, etc. which will enforce "i is a power of two". Quite trivial, really.
On the other hand, you've been complaining that Java is slow... I don't think you'll like the speed of any high-level language.
Why is it that anyone who wishes to program anything still has to spend half of his time writing things like if ( retval == -1 ) { perror ("frobnicating"); exit (EXIT_FAILURE); }?
First, even in C there are such things (evil, I acknowledge) as macros. Second, sometimes you may want to frobnicate and sometimes you may want to discombobulate. Sometime you will just exit, and other times you'll try to recover gracefully. It all depends and that's why we spend time writing code like this.
Why is it that buffer overruns still exist?
As usual, it's a trade-off. You can run your programs with run-time memory checking (very, very useful during debugging). Memory checking, though, like almost everything else, imposes an overhead. Sometimes it's OK, sometimes it's not.
In any case, if you are programming in C++ and are using a decent library, you should have very few memory access problems. Writing in C and in the usual C style is another matter entirely.
To summarize: TANSTAAFL.
Kaa
Maybe the same way they could force you to eat peanuts by leaving a bowl of them on your desk?
:-)
Ancient wisdom: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts".
In any case, if they are so much interested in my scores in Civilization and Baldur's Gate, all they have to do is ask
Kaa
The corp will own the PC and the access and will have little trouble reading your e-mail and checking out your browsing habits.
Use the Nancy Reagan defense ("Just say no").
In any case, AFAIK currently the computers are given out free of strings. A lot of companies allow employees have company-owned computers at home (laptops especially), but that's different -- it's clear that it is a company computer to be used for company business only.
And of course, even if in some future some corp decided to force a home PC on me, how will it force me to use it?
Kaa
Seems like Jon Katz felt the need to convince Slashdotters that connecting people to the 'net is a Good Thing. Gasp! Look at the nerve of the man! Such controversial ideas and right in front of all these geeks. Katz must reall have the courage of his convictions.
Kaa
we seem to confuse a belief in the goodness of freedom of the exchange of information and ideas between individuals with the freedom of commercial services to propagate anything they wish regardless of national laws, cultures or sensibilities.
The confusion seems to be on your side. This is not a cultural imperialism issue.
In this particular case, France wants an American corporation to enforce French laws with regard to servers in the US. Moreover, it's not like Yahoo sells Nazi paraphenalia: it just provides a place for individuals to sell them. There is no "commercial service" which "propagates" something -- there is a marketplace in the US which some people in Europe think breaks their local laws. So? It's your laws, you enforce them. If France wants to ban the French from accessing Yahoo auctions, let it set up a national firewall that greps for words like 'Nazi' and we'll see how far it will get.
I see no difference at all from, say, China ordering Yahoo to make all anti-Communist information on its servers unaccessible to all Chinese.
Kaa
Ralph Nader is a champion of the little guy
Dream on. Ralph Nader has extreme anti-corporation bias (similar to one exhibited on Slashdot in the ravings of Jon Katz) and a darling boy of class-action litigation lawyers.
Just because Nader hates corporations and makes a not so bad living out of kicking them in whatever the body part happens to be handy, does not mean that he is pro-individual (aka "champion of the little guy"). If anything, he is pro-government. If he had his way, you'll need eleven permits and three certified safety experts watching just to start your lawnmover. Provided you can own a lawnmover, that is -- after all, these are very dangerous devices.
Kaa
In brief,
PPI proposes the following changes to the DMCA:
Require internet service providers that wish to qualify for safe harbor to collect personally identifiable and verifiable information from their users. Napster currently allows its users to sign on anonymously, making it impossible for rights holders to track down the infringers.
Establish a time frame for the "notice and take down" process for removal of infringing material. The law as currently written has no set time table, consequently service providers with a vested interest in the infringing activity of their subscribers, like Napster, have no incentive to act in a timely fashion.
Give judges the flexibility to grant injunctions against service providers whose services are substantially used for copyright infringement. It may be impossible to write a law that accounts for every conceivable technological innovations, however a judge will know an illegal act when she sees it.
Let this be a warning to all who think that Democrats (and PPI is centrist, "New" Democratic think tank) are better (or noticeably different) than Republicans or other politicians.
Major problems with these proposals, such as privacy implications, are left as the exercise for the reader.
And was it just me who found the argument "we don't know what we want to criminalize, so let the judge put into jail everybody he doesn't like" to be particularly pathetic?
Kaa
a project to build a mobile libertarian haven
What makes you think it's going to be a libertarian haven? From what I've seen, this looks like a overpriced floating combination of a rich folks retirement home and a time-share condo complex.
Kaa
Real Networks fucked up a LONG time ago.
A pedantic correction. "Fucked up" implies unintended consequences, e.g. they didn't really want to collect personal info on people, but it just happened anyway. RealNetworks didn't fuck up. They intentionally, consciously, and deliberately set to collect all information about their users that they could get their littly grubby hands on. So, no, it wasn't a fuck-up. What it seems to be is a rather strong incompatibility between Glaser's value system and my own.
Kaa
I am really, really tired of RealNetworks trying to spy on its users. This is not the first time and clearly they are going to do whatever they can get away with.
I think I'll now classify RealNetworks as a "don't let a packet come withing three hops of them" company. I am fairly sure I don't have anything of theirs installed, but I'll check just in case.
Kaa
What would you rather have, Windows Media Player?
Well, since you've asked, yes.
(1) WMP works better than the RealPlayer -- it crashes less often (note: "less often", not "rarely") and AFAIK supports more formats. Besides, I don't really watch anything in RealAudio/Video anyway.
(2) RealNetworks has a very consistent pattern of trying to spy on its users -- much more so than Microsoft.
(3) Given a choice between dealing with a big lumbering dinosaur (e.g. stegosaurus) and a smaller more aggressive one (e.g. velociraptor), I'll take the big one any time.
Kaa
Makes me sick.
You get sick easily, don't you?
Why were the LOVEBUG arrests made? Because the Filipinos had the FBI and Big Brother Janet insisting on it.
Oh, you mean the Filipinos should have just said: "Ha-ha! Serves right these rich stupid imperialist Yankees! Let's give these students a scholarship and tell them to write more viruses."? I have no clue what computer-crime laws are there in the Philippines, but I would assume that virus-writing breaks at least some.
What the hell happened to the concept of sovereignty?
Well, see, there is a problem. If you accept that governments are the "real" players and the populations are just shit to trample on, then yes, sovereignity should be absolute. I mean, why should anybody in the world care that the Pol Pot government is killing off a third of the country's population? Cambodia is sovereign, right?
On the other hand, if you accept that people, individuals, humans, have rights that a government should not be able to (at least easily) take away -- such as the rights for not being killed for knowing how to read and write, or for having been born in the wrong tribe -- then the concept of sovereignity starts to look somewhat shaky.
Basically, it's a trade-off. If you essentially discard sovereignity you do end up with the rich and powerful dictating their will, culture, and morals to the rest of the world. If you absolutize sovereignity, you allow people like Khmer Rouge (Cambodia) and Hutu extremists (Rwanda) to operate completely unchecked.
It's a hard trade-off and not nearly as simple as you make it to be.
Kaa
If we include self replicating organisms that exploit psychological weaknesses
You mean women, right?
Kaa
It turns out these girls were paid a measly $100-300 each to bare all in a national magazine. Poor sluts,
Don't you know, man? They do it for the ART, not for money!
Kaa
I have no idea, what kind of monster will a programmer turn into if he will learn C++ without prior knowledge of C
[Maniacal laughter in the distance...]
FWIW my first language was Modula-2, then I dabbled a bit in Lisp and then went directly to C++. I can code in C, though it's painful (I have to remember which C++ features I can't use). I guess that makes me a monster...
[Maniacal laughter coming closer...]
Kaa
So, for example if you give it a photo of a person, it gets you all photos in which that person appears
That's a hard AI problem. If you can solve it, I can assure you you'll be famous.
I know of a program that scans images (from the web or other places) and picks out porn. Don't laugh, it's real. The program, I don't remember its name, selects pictures containing nude bodies. It works by recognizing skin tones and, I think, not the absolute color values, but rather certain color gradations.
Face recognition (which is what you are talking about) is being actively worked on now. One of the applications is being able to automatically identify people observed by the ubiquious security videocameras. Would you like to live in an aquarium?
Kaa