Speaking of "proving it more with each article," I don't see anyone mentioning this recent gem by Mr. Enderle. Once again, he connects Linux to terrorism.
I'm sure it'll hit Slashdot's front page in a few hours, but nonsubscribers can beat the rush and see it early.
Rob Enderle is the founder--and as best I can tell, sole employee--of "The Enderle Group." Basically, he started calling himself an expert on stuff, a few online 'zines believed him, and he got famous on Slashdot for badmouthing Linux.
Now, how in the hell could a law that keeps 75000 jobs in the US be costing $15 billion? It's certainly not because corporations are forced to pay local workers $200,000 each when they could move the jobs offshore and pay... nothing? Show me a US clothing manufacturer who pays their factory workers 1/10 that much, and I'll be surprised. Even factoring in those pesky worker safety laws and environmental regulations that drive up the cost of US manufacturing, and you still can't come close to $200K.
Nor can I imagine that the feds are spending $15B to administer this law. Cite a source, because I'm convinced this statistic of yours is bogus. It can't cost $15B to hire 75,000 low-skilled workers, therefore you cannot save $15B by moving 75,000 jobs offshore.
You talk about morality, but how is it moral to save a buck by moving labor to countries where worker protections don't exist, or where greedy governments force people to work fourteen hour days? If free trade means I might lose a job opportunity to someone in India, I have no problem with that. If free trade means my neighbor loses a factory job to a Chinese sweatshop which pays just enough to keep the hut thatched, that's an outrage.
I'm not in favor of protectionism because some "nasty furriner" is going to get my job. I'm in favor of protectionism because current open trade practices mean we don't have to live with the consequences of our actions.
Have a dangerous, highly polluting industry? We have four choices: Spend the money to clean it up. Rely on the industry less. Live in our own filth. Outsource the industry to the brown people, and let them live in our pollution. Guess which one we consistently choose?
Have a labor-intensive, low-yield industry like clothing manufacturing? Again, we have several options: We can dive in and do the grunt work ourselves (and deal with labor unrest if we don't compensate workers for their effort). We can work to automate the manufacturing, effectively driving down the costs of production while freeing up the time and energy of hundreds of thousands of people. We can live with less clothing, or clothing that is simpler to manufacture. Finally, we can shove the grunt work off to someone who is just happy having a crowded little apartment and enough kerosene to boil the dysentery out of the water.
In the end, we would have higher prices and crappier consumer goods, but we would also have more effective pollution control technology, less pollution, and more automation in manufacturing (read: More economic bang for each hour of labor, and more free time). But there is no need to make these investments, so long as we have the third world as cheap, commodity labor.
I caught a small glimpse of this phenomenon while volunteering for a short time at a non-profit food canning shop. Most of their labor came from unpaid volunteers, many of whom were receiving handouts from the organization that ran it. I wasn't there long, but I could see dozens of ways to improve the efficiency of their canning process. But most of them involved some level of investment in mechanization, so why install a conveyor belt between point A and point B when you can just have your free labor roll stuff around? Had they been paying their labor even minimum wage, the place would be losing money hand over fist. That's what we get with the current economic empirialism: labor so cheap that it makes no sense not to squander it on low-value activities.
Again, I don't mind losing opportunities to overseas workers. They've got to eat too. I'm not even that distraught about their ability to use their lower cost of living as a bargaining chip.
But I do get concerned when I see a bunch of executives sitting around a table, voting to move a thousand highly skilled technical jobs, and splitting the millions amongst themselves. I get concerned because their actions are so blatantly self-serving. I
Just like a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on, an "unspoken agreement" isn't worth the breath it took not to speak it.
I would say that, most of the time, you're correct about what the company really wants. Most of the time it would be safe to do exactly what you describe. But it's those unusual situations that make for big, scary Slashdot headlines.
Dude, don't become a Slashdot headline (again). Get a lawyer, strike a deal that's fair to you and your potential employer, and then move on.
One point this thread seems to be missing is that not a single line of the "infringing" lines they've cited were actually from SysV's codebase. They're citing code that IBM authored for AIX, and that Sequent authored for Dynix. Some of it was actually put into the kernel, other bits of code were just provided as reference material for those who wanted to copy it.
SCO's claim at this point appears to be that, because IBM developed technologies like JFS and RCU, [Man, the Wik knows everything] then those technologies automatically became SCO's once they were implemented within a UNIX derivative.
In my admittedly non-legal opinion, just because a certain OS technique was discovered and perfected on a UNIX-derived platform, that shouldn't mean that IBM loses the right to bring the same technology to any other platform they're interested in.
It's not about IBM swiping SCO's secret wonder code. It's about IBM developing its own secret wonder code and then being told by SCO that they have no right to use it.
All the surveys I've seen (admittedly publicized by highly biased sources) indicate that, as education increases, religious devotion drops. It's especially true of the hard sciences like physics and chemistry. Of course, you didn't cite the "some academics" in question, and I'm too lazy to look up the studies.
As for the Christian Science Monitor, my impression is that it's actually a fairly unslanted news source. The name was insisted on by its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, but it's not a conduit for any given belief system.
Okay, let's go all the way with this idea. Let's say that everyone has multiple cameras hovering around them all the time, and that the feeds from those cameras are accessible to anyone, anywhere. Let's even take it a step further, and say that everything is being recorded permanently.
What happens?
First, everyone discovers what everyone else looks like naked. The profitability of porn sites fall to zero. Next, everyone has an easy way to record all the passwords you type into your computer, which means we need to find some other means of authentication. And authentication is all they're good for now, because with all those cameras trained on you, there's no way to hide what you're doing on the computer.
Marriages by the millions are broken up, as spouses discover each others' infidelities, fetish pr0n surfing, irresponsible secret spending, and all the other things they keep from each other.
Some people respond to this brave new world by hiding, keeping their clothes on every waking moment and doing everything in their power to make their lives so boring that nobody will look at them. Others respond by strictly refusing to care what other people think.
Millions of people end up in prison because the myriad of legal statutes suddenly becomes trivial to enforce. Meanwhile, the prisons have become much safer and practically prison-rape free. Of course, the system is temporarily overburdened because of the sheer volume of file-swappers in the clink. These and many other ill-conceived, feel-good laws end up getting repealed. Ridiculous unenforced laws against adultery have to be repealed when it is discovered that half the state legislature needs to be locked up.
Road rage becomes a much more subtle thing. Sure, you could now find out everything there is to know about the moron who tried to sideswipe you on the freeway. But you can't go to his house and slash his tires, because the cameras would be ever watching. So the easiest thing to do would be to point the authorities to the incident, and let them sign him up for some remedial driving courses.
Stalkers, it would seem, would suddenly have unlimited access to your life. They could observe your every move in perfect detail. But it becomes much more difficult for anyone to harm another person undetected.
Now let's move our cameras up to Washington. Every meeting between lobbyist and politician is open to scrutiny, every misstatement is open to public ridicule. With all the important decisions being made up on the Hill, observation becomes something of a game, where armchair political analysts score whuffie by observing important conversations and bringing them to the attention of others. Political corruption wouldn't end, but it would make it hard to do backroom deals.
It's a weird world to imagine. Privacy would be dead. But I think democracy could survive, and even thrive in it. If this level of surveillance is a threat to freedom, then it certainly needs to be squelched. Privacy, in comparison to freedom, is just one of those things that would be "nice to have." We would miss it, but I think we could manage.
Yes, there are potential abuses. But there are potential abuses under the current system as well, and more cameras could put an end to them.
For example, let's talk about the cops. In many areas, highway patrol officers are required to have cameras running every time they pull someone over. This isn't just to make it easier to convict the perps, but also to keep the officers themselves from unprofessional behavior.
Now let's extrapolate: Imagine that both you and the cop had a head-mounted camera, whose evidence would be admissible in a court of law (some sort of authentication/anti-forgery technology). The threat of physical intimidation is greatly reduced, because you know the cop can't cross certain lines without facing the wrath of the department.
Yes, the power to track will be abused. But under the current system, the power to avoid being tracked is abused by criminals and authorities alike. When a criminal breaks into a house and grabs a stereo system, there's very little that can be done after the fact if there were no witnesses. The police won't go after a minor property crime unless they have an easy lead.
Surveillance could also keep authorities in check. If Buford T. Justice has a penchant for bullying and threatening teenage girls, recording devices would make the pattern easy to confirm, and modern printing technology would make his pink slip easy to produce.
The solution to the potential abuses may actually be very straightforward: Watch the watchers. Turn the cameras on the people who are charged with using the cameras to protect us. Make their every observation a matter of public record, and then let the usefully paranoid among us go through that record with a fine-toothed comb, asking the uncomfortable questions that the authorities don't want to have to answer.
What privacy do I give up when a camera is mounted in a public place? I figure, if I'm someplace where a cop has every right to walk by and scope out what I'm doing (e.g. a public street or a crowded shopping mall) I should have no expectation of my actions being private.
First point: if you're going to teach assembly, RISC assembly is downright elegant compared to the horrid kludge that is x86. x86 is more popular, but if the goal is to get the student into a computer's head, I think RISC is much more straightforward, and there's no shortage of VMs for it.
Second point: There's no faster way to stimulate a person's curiosity about a subject than to let them accomplish something substantial from the get-go. In the same way, there's no faster way to kill curiosity than to keep people from doing anything meaningful until they have a complete grasp of the theory behind it. It is difficult to write even a marginally sophisticated program entirely in assembly, and a lot of people will lose interest long before they've gotten a glimpse of what computers are capable of.
And what is up with the submitter also being the author? Can you say, "shameless self-promotion?"
I'm willing to be convinced that the author might be onto something, but my first impression is that this is a step backward.
The motivation is simple: For every person who is using Bayesian filtering solely on his/her own behalf, there is another person who is implementing it on behalf of some large group of users (e.g. Yahoo, or a corporate mail system).
They're not out to bypass the filter so that they can get their h3rbul v1ager4 messages to somebody who is actively blocking spam, but to the computer-clueless users the filterer is trying to protect from spam.
I notice that the Guardian didn't actually link to the report. It sounds like both sides are making reasonable arguments. Here's the relevant portion (a bit longish):
As China's burgeoning economy grows and with its admission in December 2001 to the World Trade Organization (WTO), foreign ownership, investment and involvement of foreign companies in China's telecommunications industry have soared. One foreign investor, Nortel Networks, announced in September 2003 that it plans to invest US$200 million over the next three years to strengthen its research and development capabilities in China.
Amnesty International remains concerned that in their pursuit of new and lucrative markets, foreign corporations may be indirectly contributing to human rights violations or at the very least failing to give adequate consideration to the human rights implications of their investments. In its first report on State Control of the Internet in China, Amnesty International cited several foreign companies (Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Websense and Sun Microsystems), which had reportedly provided technology which has been used to censor and control the use of the Internet in China.
Following the publication of this report, several companies dismissed allegations that their company's actions might be contributing to human rights violations in China. Cisco Systems denied that the company tailors its products for the Chinese market, saying that "[I]f the government of China wants to monitor the Internet, that's their business. We are basically politically neutral." Microsoft said it "focused on delivering the best technology to people throughout the world", but that it "cannot control the way it may ultimately be used."
Amnesty International considers such responses to be inadequate, particularly in view of recent measures taken at the international level to hold companies more accountable for the human rights implications of their investments. For example the UN Human Rights Norms for Business, adopted in August 2003, state that:
[T]ransnational corporations and other business enterprises shall refrain from any activity which supports, solicits, or encourages States or any other entities to abuse human rights. They shall further seek to ensure that the goods and services they provide will not be used to abuse human rights.
Amnesty International urges all companies which have provided such technology to China to use their contacts and influence with the Chinese authorities to bring an end to restrictions on freedom of expression and information on the Internet and to urge the release of all those detained for Internet-related offences in violation of their fundamental human rights.
Microsoft does have a point: They cannot be blamed for what their customers decide to do with a product. But they do have influence, which on occasion could be used for good. I doubt any of the listed companies would do so if it risked even a slight diminution of that influence, but hopefully that's just cynicism talking.
I really wish they would have been specific about how Microsoft technology was being used to trap dissidents. If it all comes down to "They sold X copies of Windows XP to a corrupt regime," then it strikes me as patently silly. If half my friends copy Windows XP, an organization with the resources of the Chinese Government would be able to do so, and Microsoft couldn't stop them from getting access to it. It's also an open question as to whether Chinese freedom is better served by economic engagement and an influx of technology, or the "starve 'em out" approach used on Cuba.
Now, if Microsoft custom wrote DissidentTracker 3.0*, then yeah, it would be time to storm Redmond. But if that were so, Amnesty International would have been painfully specific in their report.
That's the problem with all big political groups. Even if their intentions are good, their success is contingent upon getting people fired up and involved. Sometimes the truth suffers as a result.
* Obviously a made up product. Anyhow, by the time they got around to marketing it, the software would be named SafeGov XP, Regime Edition.
It would be cheap and easy for hammer makers to install a human skull/kneecap/thumb detector on each unit sold, which automatically reduced its total kinetic energy by 85% when triggered. The overall cost to hammer manufacturers would be less than 17% per unit. Really, its an absolute crime that they aren't required to do so by law.
Okay, enough of that. On a more serious note, it would be possible for auto manufacturers to install breathalyzers on every car. It would be expensive, of course, and a lot of the worst offenders would simply disable them. But if the only priority was to reduce drunk driving fatalities, it would be possible.
Whenever a safety issue like this comes up, two sides generally emerge. On one side, you have the people who think our accidental fatality rate should be precisely zero, and that government should do whatever it takes to enforce that goal. On the other side, we have the folks who think that either the government has no right to mandate anything, or believe that they have no right to mandate any consumer or worker protections that might interfere with a business' pursuit of the almighty buck.
Ideally, the government gets forced into some intermediate position that outrages both sides, but provides the most cost-effective protections to consumers and workers.
Now, every tool has both safe and unsafe uses. The thing about handguns is that their only proper uses are either threatening people, killing people, or practicing with them so that they can be used to more effectively kill people in the future. Whether these uses are proper or not is determined entirely by social context. Robbing a convenience store? Bad. Defending yourself against a convenience store robber? Good.
Again, there's the dilemma: How to get guns in the hands of people who will use them properly, while keeping them out of the hands of those who will use them improperly.
At first glance, "Just get rid of them all" sounds like a pretty good alternative to the morass that comes from walking the tightrope. That's where many of the anti-gun nuts are coming from. But it wouldn't work, and attempting to do make it work will just leave the law-abiders defenseless.
My solution? An unresponsive government and an ill-informed populace. It won't cut down on gun crime or accidental shootings, but it's trivial to implement.
You've made a couple of unwarranted leaps in logic. First, if you're complaining that all Amnesty International does is "whine and moan about censorship by software" while ignoring more important human rights abuses, then the unspoken premise is that this report is the only thing Amnesty International is doing regarding China.
While I haven't personally looked into Amnesty International, that assumption seems pretty likely to be wrong.
Second, I disagree with your apparent belief that economic freedom precedes political freedom. I don't even think the latter absolutely requires the former. Hell, the government of the good ol' star-spangled USA has the ability to take my money and squander it on mammoth, failed projects. But thanks to our relative political freedom, I get to find out about these failures, and I get to complain about them.
Finally, what are these "big issues" but large collections of small, related issues (such as the one in the report). Sure, it's fun to imagine these sweeping changes, but they cannot happen in a political vacuum. The only way China can the sort of economic freedom you describe is for its government to be accountable to Wu and Ling Six-pack, and that can only happen when Chinese citizens can apply political pressure to their government without fear of retaliation.
I was raised Mormon, and the party line was always that they needed to do the whole polygamy thing in order to churn out as many babies as humanly possible. But from a purely biological standpoint, it just doesn't make sense. Supposing there is an eligible young woman, it would be more procreatively efficient to marry her off to an energetic twenty-something guy than a fifty or sixty year old geezer with an already overlarge harem (along with being more enjoyable for said eligible young woman and said energetic twenty-something guy).
The other claim, wholly untrue, is that there weren't enough young men to go around. The ratio of men to women was approximately equal throughout Utah's polygamy era. But due to the artificial shortage created by the "monopolistic practices" of certain favored individuals, many young men had to go on missions just to find and convert eligible young women. Thus, the "Mormons kidnapped my daughter" plot became very popular in the dime novels of the era.
That was a bit of a digression. The point is, claiming that you can get more babies out of x women by giving them all to a single man makes about as much sense as claiming that you can make a baby in one month by putting nine women on the job.
Just imagine the merry hours you'll spend together. She lovingly selects a dog. You forget to feed it, but kick it on occasion when you've had a bad day at work. It goes crazy and bites little Tommy. She tries to nurse it back to sanity with lots of food and petting. You try to teach it to dive into the swimming pool with no exit, then build four walls around it to starve it to death.
There are also a lot of books out there which are freely downloadable, but not modifiable. Has anyone here used a free (in either sense) textbook as their primary learning tool in a college class? If so, what was your experience?
Transparency works both ways. How many of the major watershed events of the Revolution were caused by miscalculations by one side or the other? Could the troops sent over to occupy the Continent have been so heavy-handed in their occupation if their behavior could have been viewed by outsiders on both continents? Could the Stamp Act have been passed if Parliament had a better reading of public sentiment? Could the Boston Tea Party ever have happened if the insider dealing that went on between Parliament and the East India company been a matter of public record in London?
I can't say that a freer flow of information would have led to an agreeable separation. But I don't believe that the Founding Fathers enshrined a clear concept of "right to privacy" into the Constitution (security in person and papers notwithstanding).
Loss of privacy is inevitable. Loss of freedom is not. If we rely on secrecy to protect us from the government, we're already screwed. The government has the resources to create impenetrable cloaks of secrecy, while penetrating any defenses even an extraordinarily skilled person could implement. The only solution I see is to make sure that the government is far more transparent in its operations and far more accountable for its actions than anyone else.
I would agree that we're conditioned to strive for a certain ideal physical appearance. But here's the counterpoint: it seems like mass media is actually pushing individualism as a highly desirable trait.
You don't often see movies which lionize the importance of being just like everyone else, or mindlessly conforming to traditions. The hero is never the stodgy scientist who bravely defends the status quo from the maverick outsiders, or the cop who "works within the system." We want our heroes to have the courage to stand alone against the entire world if necessary.
Hell, just look at any mainstream news comparing Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds, or any random story about an individual fighting some mindless bureaucracy.
So there's at least one source of culture that doesn't give any indication of pushing the "just be average" line. I'm curious as to why this message doesn't always translate into the classroom or workplace.
I'm not offended by your second answer, but I feel like I was unclear in my question. I'm not saying that social skills are unimportant, or that the ability to work well under pressure isn't a highly desirable trait. I understand that I need to work to overcome my deficiencies.
But if I ever end up being in a position where I have to evaluate candidates, I want to be able to recognize the fact that two candidates have equal technical skills, even though one is a horrible interview. If the two really are equal, then I would still choose the one with the social skills. But if--hypothetically--the bad interview was an outstanding coder and the other just knew enough to string buzzwords together convincingly, none of the interview processes I've seen would be able to recognize the fact.
Sometimes (arguably not in my case) the person who is best for the job isn't even close to the slickest interview. Perhaps in the long run it's inefficient for an interviewing process to go too far afield looking for the rare unpolished gem.
It may also be possible that I stumble over technical questions because I'm honestly not nearly as proficient as I should be. But I've been taking the same classes and doing just as well in them as two of the other people who did fill the position. I do believe that they were a better fit for the position. They both totally deserved the job. But I didn't deserve to leave the interview feeling like I should investigate "Wal-Mart greeter" as a new career path.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of "proving it more with each article," I don't see anyone mentioning this recent gem by Mr. Enderle. Once again, he connects Linux to terrorism.
I'm sure it'll hit Slashdot's front page in a few hours, but nonsubscribers can beat the rush and see it early.
Rob Enderle is the founder--and as best I can tell, sole employee--of "The Enderle Group." Basically, he started calling himself an expert on stuff, a few online 'zines believed him, and he got famous on Slashdot for badmouthing Linux.
Read your post, and start screaming.
Now, how in the hell could a law that keeps 75000 jobs in the US be costing $15 billion? It's certainly not because corporations are forced to pay local workers $200,000 each when they could move the jobs offshore and pay... nothing? Show me a US clothing manufacturer who pays their factory workers 1/10 that much, and I'll be surprised. Even factoring in those pesky worker safety laws and environmental regulations that drive up the cost of US manufacturing, and you still can't come close to $200K.
Nor can I imagine that the feds are spending $15B to administer this law. Cite a source, because I'm convinced this statistic of yours is bogus. It can't cost $15B to hire 75,000 low-skilled workers, therefore you cannot save $15B by moving 75,000 jobs offshore.
You talk about morality, but how is it moral to save a buck by moving labor to countries where worker protections don't exist, or where greedy governments force people to work fourteen hour days? If free trade means I might lose a job opportunity to someone in India, I have no problem with that. If free trade means my neighbor loses a factory job to a Chinese sweatshop which pays just enough to keep the hut thatched, that's an outrage.
I'm not in favor of protectionism because some "nasty furriner" is going to get my job. I'm in favor of protectionism because current open trade practices mean we don't have to live with the consequences of our actions.
Have a dangerous, highly polluting industry? We have four choices: Spend the money to clean it up. Rely on the industry less. Live in our own filth. Outsource the industry to the brown people, and let them live in our pollution. Guess which one we consistently choose?
Have a labor-intensive, low-yield industry like clothing manufacturing? Again, we have several options: We can dive in and do the grunt work ourselves (and deal with labor unrest if we don't compensate workers for their effort). We can work to automate the manufacturing, effectively driving down the costs of production while freeing up the time and energy of hundreds of thousands of people. We can live with less clothing, or clothing that is simpler to manufacture. Finally, we can shove the grunt work off to someone who is just happy having a crowded little apartment and enough kerosene to boil the dysentery out of the water.
In the end, we would have higher prices and crappier consumer goods, but we would also have more effective pollution control technology, less pollution, and more automation in manufacturing (read: More economic bang for each hour of labor, and more free time). But there is no need to make these investments, so long as we have the third world as cheap, commodity labor.
I caught a small glimpse of this phenomenon while volunteering for a short time at a non-profit food canning shop. Most of their labor came from unpaid volunteers, many of whom were receiving handouts from the organization that ran it. I wasn't there long, but I could see dozens of ways to improve the efficiency of their canning process. But most of them involved some level of investment in mechanization, so why install a conveyor belt between point A and point B when you can just have your free labor roll stuff around? Had they been paying their labor even minimum wage, the place would be losing money hand over fist. That's what we get with the current economic empirialism: labor so cheap that it makes no sense not to squander it on low-value activities.
Again, I don't mind losing opportunities to overseas workers. They've got to eat too. I'm not even that distraught about their ability to use their lower cost of living as a bargaining chip.
But I do get concerned when I see a bunch of executives sitting around a table, voting to move a thousand highly skilled technical jobs, and splitting the millions amongst themselves. I get concerned because their actions are so blatantly self-serving. I
Just like a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on, an "unspoken agreement" isn't worth the breath it took not to speak it.
I would say that, most of the time, you're correct about what the company really wants. Most of the time it would be safe to do exactly what you describe. But it's those unusual situations that make for big, scary Slashdot headlines.
Dude, don't become a Slashdot headline (again). Get a lawyer, strike a deal that's fair to you and your potential employer, and then move on.
One point this thread seems to be missing is that not a single line of the "infringing" lines they've cited were actually from SysV's codebase. They're citing code that IBM authored for AIX, and that Sequent authored for Dynix. Some of it was actually put into the kernel, other bits of code were just provided as reference material for those who wanted to copy it.
SCO's claim at this point appears to be that, because IBM developed technologies like JFS and RCU, [Man, the Wik knows everything] then those technologies automatically became SCO's once they were implemented within a UNIX derivative.
In my admittedly non-legal opinion, just because a certain OS technique was discovered and perfected on a UNIX-derived platform, that shouldn't mean that IBM loses the right to bring the same technology to any other platform they're interested in.
It's not about IBM swiping SCO's secret wonder code. It's about IBM developing its own secret wonder code and then being told by SCO that they have no right to use it.
All the surveys I've seen (admittedly publicized by highly biased sources) indicate that, as education increases, religious devotion drops. It's especially true of the hard sciences like physics and chemistry. Of course, you didn't cite the "some academics" in question, and I'm too lazy to look up the studies.
As for the Christian Science Monitor, my impression is that it's actually a fairly unslanted news source. The name was insisted on by its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, but it's not a conduit for any given belief system.
Okay, let's go all the way with this idea. Let's say that everyone has multiple cameras hovering around them all the time, and that the feeds from those cameras are accessible to anyone, anywhere. Let's even take it a step further, and say that everything is being recorded permanently.
What happens?
First, everyone discovers what everyone else looks like naked. The profitability of porn sites fall to zero. Next, everyone has an easy way to record all the passwords you type into your computer, which means we need to find some other means of authentication. And authentication is all they're good for now, because with all those cameras trained on you, there's no way to hide what you're doing on the computer.
Marriages by the millions are broken up, as spouses discover each others' infidelities, fetish pr0n surfing, irresponsible secret spending, and all the other things they keep from each other.
Some people respond to this brave new world by hiding, keeping their clothes on every waking moment and doing everything in their power to make their lives so boring that nobody will look at them. Others respond by strictly refusing to care what other people think.
Millions of people end up in prison because the myriad of legal statutes suddenly becomes trivial to enforce. Meanwhile, the prisons have become much safer and practically prison-rape free. Of course, the system is temporarily overburdened because of the sheer volume of file-swappers in the clink. These and many other ill-conceived, feel-good laws end up getting repealed. Ridiculous unenforced laws against adultery have to be repealed when it is discovered that half the state legislature needs to be locked up.
Road rage becomes a much more subtle thing. Sure, you could now find out everything there is to know about the moron who tried to sideswipe you on the freeway. But you can't go to his house and slash his tires, because the cameras would be ever watching. So the easiest thing to do would be to point the authorities to the incident, and let them sign him up for some remedial driving courses.
Stalkers, it would seem, would suddenly have unlimited access to your life. They could observe your every move in perfect detail. But it becomes much more difficult for anyone to harm another person undetected.
Now let's move our cameras up to Washington. Every meeting between lobbyist and politician is open to scrutiny, every misstatement is open to public ridicule. With all the important decisions being made up on the Hill, observation becomes something of a game, where armchair political analysts score whuffie by observing important conversations and bringing them to the attention of others. Political corruption wouldn't end, but it would make it hard to do backroom deals.
It's a weird world to imagine. Privacy would be dead. But I think democracy could survive, and even thrive in it. If this level of surveillance is a threat to freedom, then it certainly needs to be squelched. Privacy, in comparison to freedom, is just one of those things that would be "nice to have." We would miss it, but I think we could manage.
Yes, there are potential abuses. But there are potential abuses under the current system as well, and more cameras could put an end to them.
For example, let's talk about the cops. In many areas, highway patrol officers are required to have cameras running every time they pull someone over. This isn't just to make it easier to convict the perps, but also to keep the officers themselves from unprofessional behavior.
Now let's extrapolate: Imagine that both you and the cop had a head-mounted camera, whose evidence would be admissible in a court of law (some sort of authentication/anti-forgery technology). The threat of physical intimidation is greatly reduced, because you know the cop can't cross certain lines without facing the wrath of the department.
Yes, the power to track will be abused. But under the current system, the power to avoid being tracked is abused by criminals and authorities alike. When a criminal breaks into a house and grabs a stereo system, there's very little that can be done after the fact if there were no witnesses. The police won't go after a minor property crime unless they have an easy lead.
Surveillance could also keep authorities in check. If Buford T. Justice has a penchant for bullying and threatening teenage girls, recording devices would make the pattern easy to confirm, and modern printing technology would make his pink slip easy to produce.
The solution to the potential abuses may actually be very straightforward: Watch the watchers. Turn the cameras on the people who are charged with using the cameras to protect us. Make their every observation a matter of public record, and then let the usefully paranoid among us go through that record with a fine-toothed comb, asking the uncomfortable questions that the authorities don't want to have to answer.
What privacy do I give up when a camera is mounted in a public place? I figure, if I'm someplace where a cop has every right to walk by and scope out what I'm doing (e.g. a public street or a crowded shopping mall) I should have no expectation of my actions being private.
I disagree. The five people left in the field of programming will be under a lot of really tight deadlines.
First point: if you're going to teach assembly, RISC assembly is downright elegant compared to the horrid kludge that is x86. x86 is more popular, but if the goal is to get the student into a computer's head, I think RISC is much more straightforward, and there's no shortage of VMs for it.
Second point: There's no faster way to stimulate a person's curiosity about a subject than to let them accomplish something substantial from the get-go. In the same way, there's no faster way to kill curiosity than to keep people from doing anything meaningful until they have a complete grasp of the theory behind it. It is difficult to write even a marginally sophisticated program entirely in assembly, and a lot of people will lose interest long before they've gotten a glimpse of what computers are capable of.
And what is up with the submitter also being the author? Can you say, "shameless self-promotion?"
I'm willing to be convinced that the author might be onto something, but my first impression is that this is a step backward.
The motivation is simple: For every person who is using Bayesian filtering solely on his/her own behalf, there is another person who is implementing it on behalf of some large group of users (e.g. Yahoo, or a corporate mail system).
They're not out to bypass the filter so that they can get their h3rbul v1ager4 messages to somebody who is actively blocking spam, but to the computer-clueless users the filterer is trying to protect from spam.
Repeatedly.
MSN: litigious bastards
Google: litigious bastards
I definitely prefer MSN's results.
Microsoft does have a point: They cannot be blamed for what their customers decide to do with a product. But they do have influence, which on occasion could be used for good. I doubt any of the listed companies would do so if it risked even a slight diminution of that influence, but hopefully that's just cynicism talking.
I really wish they would have been specific about how Microsoft technology was being used to trap dissidents. If it all comes down to "They sold X copies of Windows XP to a corrupt regime," then it strikes me as patently silly. If half my friends copy Windows XP, an organization with the resources of the Chinese Government would be able to do so, and Microsoft couldn't stop them from getting access to it. It's also an open question as to whether Chinese freedom is better served by economic engagement and an influx of technology, or the "starve 'em out" approach used on Cuba.
Now, if Microsoft custom wrote DissidentTracker 3.0*, then yeah, it would be time to storm Redmond. But if that were so, Amnesty International would have been painfully specific in their report.
That's the problem with all big political groups. Even if their intentions are good, their success is contingent upon getting people fired up and involved. Sometimes the truth suffers as a result.
* Obviously a made up product. Anyhow, by the time they got around to marketing it, the software would be named SafeGov XP, Regime Edition.
It would be cheap and easy for hammer makers to install a human skull/kneecap/thumb detector on each unit sold, which automatically reduced its total kinetic energy by 85% when triggered. The overall cost to hammer manufacturers would be less than 17% per unit. Really, its an absolute crime that they aren't required to do so by law.
Okay, enough of that. On a more serious note, it would be possible for auto manufacturers to install breathalyzers on every car. It would be expensive, of course, and a lot of the worst offenders would simply disable them. But if the only priority was to reduce drunk driving fatalities, it would be possible.
Whenever a safety issue like this comes up, two sides generally emerge. On one side, you have the people who think our accidental fatality rate should be precisely zero, and that government should do whatever it takes to enforce that goal. On the other side, we have the folks who think that either the government has no right to mandate anything, or believe that they have no right to mandate any consumer or worker protections that might interfere with a business' pursuit of the almighty buck.
Ideally, the government gets forced into some intermediate position that outrages both sides, but provides the most cost-effective protections to consumers and workers.
Now, every tool has both safe and unsafe uses. The thing about handguns is that their only proper uses are either threatening people, killing people, or practicing with them so that they can be used to more effectively kill people in the future. Whether these uses are proper or not is determined entirely by social context. Robbing a convenience store? Bad. Defending yourself against a convenience store robber? Good.
Again, there's the dilemma: How to get guns in the hands of people who will use them properly, while keeping them out of the hands of those who will use them improperly.
At first glance, "Just get rid of them all" sounds like a pretty good alternative to the morass that comes from walking the tightrope. That's where many of the anti-gun nuts are coming from. But it wouldn't work, and attempting to do make it work will just leave the law-abiders defenseless.
My solution? An unresponsive government and an ill-informed populace. It won't cut down on gun crime or accidental shootings, but it's trivial to implement.
You've made a couple of unwarranted leaps in logic. First, if you're complaining that all Amnesty International does is "whine and moan about censorship by software" while ignoring more important human rights abuses, then the unspoken premise is that this report is the only thing Amnesty International is doing regarding China.
While I haven't personally looked into Amnesty International, that assumption seems pretty likely to be wrong.
Second, I disagree with your apparent belief that economic freedom precedes political freedom. I don't even think the latter absolutely requires the former. Hell, the government of the good ol' star-spangled USA has the ability to take my money and squander it on mammoth, failed projects. But thanks to our relative political freedom, I get to find out about these failures, and I get to complain about them.
Finally, what are these "big issues" but large collections of small, related issues (such as the one in the report). Sure, it's fun to imagine these sweeping changes, but they cannot happen in a political vacuum. The only way China can the sort of economic freedom you describe is for its government to be accountable to Wu and Ling Six-pack, and that can only happen when Chinese citizens can apply political pressure to their government without fear of retaliation.
I was raised Mormon, and the party line was always that they needed to do the whole polygamy thing in order to churn out as many babies as humanly possible. But from a purely biological standpoint, it just doesn't make sense. Supposing there is an eligible young woman, it would be more procreatively efficient to marry her off to an energetic twenty-something guy than a fifty or sixty year old geezer with an already overlarge harem (along with being more enjoyable for said eligible young woman and said energetic twenty-something guy).
The other claim, wholly untrue, is that there weren't enough young men to go around. The ratio of men to women was approximately equal throughout Utah's polygamy era. But due to the artificial shortage created by the "monopolistic practices" of certain favored individuals, many young men had to go on missions just to find and convert eligible young women. Thus, the "Mormons kidnapped my daughter" plot became very popular in the dime novels of the era.
That was a bit of a digression. The point is, claiming that you can get more babies out of x women by giving them all to a single man makes about as much sense as claiming that you can make a baby in one month by putting nine women on the job.
I haven't played FFXI, but I'd steer towards something with more cooperation and less violence.
Second Life looks like an interesting possibility.
Just imagine the merry hours you'll spend together. She lovingly selects a dog. You forget to feed it, but kick it on occasion when you've had a bad day at work. It goes crazy and bites little Tommy. She tries to nurse it back to sanity with lots of food and petting. You try to teach it to dive into the swimming pool with no exit, then build four walls around it to starve it to death.
Yep, a good time will be had by all.
Here are some links I dredged up last time this subject rolled through.
Wiki Textbooks
Light and Matter: Open physics textbooks.
An open math textbook
Project Gutenberg, for all the English majors out there.
There are also a lot of books out there which are freely downloadable, but not modifiable. Has anyone here used a free (in either sense) textbook as their primary learning tool in a college class? If so, what was your experience?
Transparency works both ways. How many of the major watershed events of the Revolution were caused by miscalculations by one side or the other? Could the troops sent over to occupy the Continent have been so heavy-handed in their occupation if their behavior could have been viewed by outsiders on both continents? Could the Stamp Act have been passed if Parliament had a better reading of public sentiment? Could the Boston Tea Party ever have happened if the insider dealing that went on between Parliament and the East India company been a matter of public record in London?
I can't say that a freer flow of information would have led to an agreeable separation. But I don't believe that the Founding Fathers enshrined a clear concept of "right to privacy" into the Constitution (security in person and papers notwithstanding).
Loss of privacy is inevitable. Loss of freedom is not. If we rely on secrecy to protect us from the government, we're already screwed. The government has the resources to create impenetrable cloaks of secrecy, while penetrating any defenses even an extraordinarily skilled person could implement. The only solution I see is to make sure that the government is far more transparent in its operations and far more accountable for its actions than anyone else.
I would agree that we're conditioned to strive for a certain ideal physical appearance. But here's the counterpoint: it seems like mass media is actually pushing individualism as a highly desirable trait.
You don't often see movies which lionize the importance of being just like everyone else, or mindlessly conforming to traditions. The hero is never the stodgy scientist who bravely defends the status quo from the maverick outsiders, or the cop who "works within the system." We want our heroes to have the courage to stand alone against the entire world if necessary.
Hell, just look at any mainstream news comparing Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds, or any random story about an individual fighting some mindless bureaucracy.
So there's at least one source of culture that doesn't give any indication of pushing the "just be average" line. I'm curious as to why this message doesn't always translate into the classroom or workplace.
I'm not offended by your second answer, but I feel like I was unclear in my question. I'm not saying that social skills are unimportant, or that the ability to work well under pressure isn't a highly desirable trait. I understand that I need to work to overcome my deficiencies.
But if I ever end up being in a position where I have to evaluate candidates, I want to be able to recognize the fact that two candidates have equal technical skills, even though one is a horrible interview. If the two really are equal, then I would still choose the one with the social skills. But if--hypothetically--the bad interview was an outstanding coder and the other just knew enough to string buzzwords together convincingly, none of the interview processes I've seen would be able to recognize the fact.
Sometimes (arguably not in my case) the person who is best for the job isn't even close to the slickest interview. Perhaps in the long run it's inefficient for an interviewing process to go too far afield looking for the rare unpolished gem.
It may also be possible that I stumble over technical questions because I'm honestly not nearly as proficient as I should be. But I've been taking the same classes and doing just as well in them as two of the other people who did fill the position. I do believe that they were a better fit for the position. They both totally deserved the job. But I didn't deserve to leave the interview feeling like I should investigate "Wal-Mart greeter" as a new career path.