"2. Good raid-quality gear *should* be better than easily obtainable gear you can get while soloing"
why? There is exactly no logical reason for this.
My emphasis added, which answers your question. Really the OP is just dodging the point though. There is some sort of implicit acceptance of the idea that anything that can be done soloing must necessarily be easy in comparison to the difficulty of doing something in a group. Certainly there is no reason that "gear you can get while soloing" need be "easily obtainable". As it happens in WoW that is the case, but Blizzard could quite conceivably create tasks that must be done alone but are exceptionally difficult.
I think the real issue here is that for a difficult soloing task to be fair it needs to be restricted to a soloing task - otherwise a group will simply come and, with their combined might, pick up easy loot. Certainly that can be done, but it means tasks that only one player at a time can engage in. To manage to get the sort of throughput required to keep large numbers of players happy you either need to be creative in designing soloing tasks so they can suitably parallelised, or you simply make tasks group based to up throughput. Apparently Blizzard chose the latter.
I think the article is, in a sense, objecting to where that skill is stored. The author of the article wants the joy of learning and improving himself - the skill is stored in him, in his mind and his relfexes. WoW externalises skill acquisition and a lot of the "skill" is stored in the character in the form of levels and bonuses and items etc. In this sense the individual playing need not learn or acquire skill, instead they can simply let their character do so. As a side effect of this externalisation "skill" is acquired at a uniform rate for everyone because "skill" is administered largely by a server and divorced from the individuals playing. This means that time directly correlates to skill and effort at gaining skill is almost purely a function of time - not of thought, nor effort to learn, nor natural talent, or anything else. The game does the learning for you and absolves you of a certain amount of responsibility for thinking. Moreover "skill" is now something that individuals no lonmger possess - it is something that "game characters" possess and can be bought and sold as a commodity; it is no longer something unique and special to you that you can always retain. This is, I feel, the real reasons for his objections. Whether you agree with them or not you should at least realise that there is something significant at work here.
Funny, I always thought that time *is* what gives you rewards. What percentage of your typical slashdot geeks are paid by the hour?
I think you'll find that "skill at the job" is, ultimately, what determines the size of that pay check. If you're highly skilled you will probably be paid a lot more for your time than someone who is just starting out. The main reason that time is used is that time is a lot easier to measure than skill - unless the job has a lot of very clearly defined tasks and milestones it is far more effort for the payroll staff to try and measure the results of your work and pay you accordingly than it is to set an hourly rate based on a general assessment of your skill and assume that the results of your labours are roughly equal to their initial estimation of the amount of value you can produce in an hour multiplied by the number of hours you worked. It is that estimation of "amount of value you can produce in an hour" that really determines how much you get paid, and that is solely determined on their best estimates of your skill.
My Finnish is appalling but I think you'll find that Tääki, Metiriälistik, and Jaappi are better fits should you need to recycle the joke at a later date - though this gets into the confusion over the fact that "j" is pronounced as we pronounce "y" in Finnish, while "y" is pronounced kind of like the the "u" in Munich or bureau.
Taking all the humour out of jokes via pointless dissection since 2006.
Actually, I wonder why I have a "file" menu in apps that are not file-based, like ej: a gnome game.
All the games in the standard gnome-games package don't have a file menu. Instead they have a "Game" menu in it's place, with the usual options you would expect to find (new game, quit, etc.) located there.
If I start up a GNOME session and want to use network meeting functionality, how is there any possible way that I could guess that "Ekiga" is the application I'm looking for?
Because if things have been installed and set up properly "Ekiga" will be under the "Internet" sub-menu of the "Applications" menu, and the entry itself will read something like "Ekiga video-conferencing" with a tooltip saying something like "Communicate with others using text, voice phone calls, or video conferencing". You hold up "Rendezvous Browser" as a well named application because it's clear what it does, but it really begs the question: what the hell is Rendezvous and what does it do? I think the GNOME approach - to choose a distinctive name and pair that with a concise description - is a very good one. You can't have everything named after what it does or else things quickly get pointlessly confused, so distinctive names are good - as long as you pair that with a description of what the app does so people can find it easily. You'll find GNOME conforms to that pretty well, and the result (always having descriptive menu entries and explanatory tooltips for those entries) actually makes for a system where it is easier to find what you want.
The only way to stop global warming were for the people of the world to collectively reduce their usage of energy and lower their standard of living.
I think an important point, that needs to be made more often, is that via energy efficiency it is possible to reduce energy use without lowering the standard of living. Build a house with better insulation, more efficient heating systems etc. and you can dramatically reduce energy use without changing the standard of living. Yes there's a greater initial outlay in cost, but it pays itself back in saved energy costs. There are a great many trivial things that can be done (like bothering to better insulate existing homes, using more energy efficient light systems, dressing for the weather rather than according arbitrary social conditioning (and hence saving in both heating and air-conditioning of offices)) that have little or no impact on standards of living, but can make a huge difference in energy consumption if pursued on a broad scale. Reducing energy consumption can be about how to figure out how to do the same or more with less hrough efficiency rather than some blanket reduction of capability.
I love how everyone has become constitutional scholars these days...Unfortunately it's not a cut and dry issue.
I wasn't suggesting it was, or was not constitutional. I was expressing my belief as to what does, and does not, represent good practices with regard to surveillance regardless of legal standing. It may well, once it has worked its way through the system, be decided that Bush's actions were legal. That does not mean I have to agree that allowing such things is a good idea, merely that I accept it as legal as defined by the courts. To judge the legality may well require a constitutional scholar, to have an opinion as to whether such actions are good or bad does not.
Finally the point that I was trying to make was that the practicalities do not absolve the principles: the ends do not necessarily justify the means.
Even if these records get released and prove to be, as claimed, solely people with direct links to known and documented terrorists, that still does not exonerate the establishment of the program. The real issue was never a matter of whether, at this particular time, the NSA was listening in on you or your grandma, it was about precedent. The real issue is whether it is acceptable for an agency like the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance without oversight, without warrants of any kind. In the past the law has been such that various types of surveillance were permitted, but as these cases have come to light each loophole has been blocked - it was precisely for this reason that the Foreign Intelligence Services Court, and the corresponding act, was originally created. An about face and progressive weakening of such laws sets a dangerous precendent, and in my view shouldn't be tolerated. Don't let the report as to what surveillance was conducted blind you to the deeper issue of whether such a precedent is acceptable.
In 50 years with the Decline of Freedom and Liberty here in the US I wouldnt be suprised in the LEAST if China were a MORE free society
The depressing part is even if that actually happened you can bet that the vast majority of people in the US would still believe, and loudly proclaim, that they live in the most free country in the world...
Let the price of gas go up, people use less. Eventually it will get high enough where alternate forms of energy are more feasable.
As a means of finding a natural equilibrium that is indeed an efficient way to go. The problem is that the intervening time while a new equilibrium is being established may not particularly pleasant, and might not be particularly short when compared with natural human timescales.
Consider this hypothetical: over the next year demand continues to increase, while the supply increases much more slowly and oil prices spike quite high, say $100 or $150 a barrel. That's high enough to make many of the alternatives economically viable. The problem is that the infrastructure fr the alternatives isn't there yet. Certainly you'll have a number of companies starting up, or shifting focus, to take advantage of the now economic alternatives. It will take time for both the new industries, and the new systems for distribution, delivery etc. to become sufficiently widespread for the alternatives to fully take up the slack. That leaves you with a period of expensive oil, and insufficient alternatives, which will likely see oil prices spike further. Yes, in due course the other industries will gear up, take over, and return things to something resembling normality, but that's not immediate.
Trying to artifically shortcut to this state tends to blow up in our faces though. So, don't worry, be happy.
Artificially shortcut there? Probably not that helpful. Have a little foresight and make preparations with regard to alternatives that will significantly ease the transition? Possibly a reasonable idea.
But is it really true that a Linux exe can't have its own icon? I thought they could... Or perhaps they can only once installed by the user?
When an application installs it can put an icon in the appropriate place on the system, and add appropriate entries such that the application menu entry and window decorations appear using that icon. The actual executable file itself can't change its icon. Go to "/usr/bin" on a Linux system in the file manager and scroll through - even your standard programs that all have nice icons in the menu have standard "executable" icons based on their MIME type.
Now the question is : how do you make sure trojans can't happen?
Well you could do something similar to what Linux DEs do and not let applications define a custom icon (unless they've been installed, and installed their icon on the system). The OS assigns all icons based on MIME type, and applications don't get choose their own icon.
You could also have better least privilege sandboxing available. It's not foolproof, plenty people will still click through a warning about the application trying to access your addressbook and network and give it suitable rights to run, but it will give some people pause. Some sort of system of Mandatory Access Controls as in SELinux would be suitable. All it really needs is other applications to respect such a security configuration, and a nice user interface put on the whole thing (so that it mostly warns a user about disallowed access attempts, with a prompt asking if they want to update security to allow it in future, and a simple system for programs to request specific access rights on install).
Sure neither of those options are completely bullet proof - nothing is in the face of true human stupidity. On the other hand either or both of those would offer a very significant improvement in security and roustness against such trojns and viruses than MacOSX currently offers.
I always like to point to the funnel-web spider. People are used to the possibility of dangerous spiders, but... leys' collect the highlights from the Wikipedia article:
"...regarded by some to be the most dangerous spider in the world...wandering males have caused a large majority of fatal bites to humans...the venom is known to cause death within a period ranging from 15 minutes to three days...and they often bite aggressively and repeatedly...their fangs have been known to penetrate fingernails and soft shoes, resulting in dangerous bites."
Indeed, it's not like Australia has a shortage of lethalanimals. In practice its largely because Australia has been fairly successfully isolated for a long time and the flora and fauna smply aren't adapted to deal with the introduced species. You'll find exactly the same sorts of problems in New Zealand, and, in fact, in the US if you introduce the wrong species.
Easy enough to do with the use of slightly odd angles and erratic cutting - jump to different angles within a conversation etc. As to made up words - just throw that crap into the dialogue.
You just have to think in terms of film instead of language. Bad writing isn't that hard to translate to film.
I think Neuromancer is, all things considered, quite filmable. It's not that long, for a start, and is driven mainly by plot and setting/atmosphere. That makes it far more filmable than a lot of books. What is needs is a slightly edgy directory willing to give it suitable doses of real grit and plenty of energy. Nolan and Fincher are both good candidates.
Episode I would have been far better if Lucas had stuck to his original sources. Imagine a slight variation on Seven Samurai with Yoda as Kambei, Obi Wan as Katsushiro, and Anakin as Kikuchiyo (who younger and obviously lives instead of getting killed). Plenty of interesting material there, and a classic storyline, plus it's sets up nicely for an Episode II with Obi Wan older and deciding to take a slightly chastened Anakin as his apprentice (presumably unbenownst or to the displeasure of Yoda). There's even nice background for Obi Wan being wiser with regard to the troubles of young love and trying and failing to stop Anakin making the same mistakes. It could have been great. But no, we get crap instead.
Science fiction novels done properly for cinema are virtually nonexistent.
Andrei Tarkovsky did such a remarkable job adapting "Solaris", by Stanislaw Lem, to the screen that you can quite credibly claim that the film is better than the book (though it of course depends on what you're looking for). He also did a remarkable job with "Roadside Picnic" which became "Stalker" - a classic of minimalist science fiction cinema. As with Kubrick, I think having a remarkable visionary director can make the difference.
Seems that they're REALLY filtering the science news for the masses these days...
The quote you cite is actually pretty much straight from the NSF announcement of the awards, so the dumbing down happened at that level, not from the newspaper. I had a quick skim through his recently published papers (as in titles and MathSciNet reviews) and while he is obviously doing some interesting work, apparently mostly in algebraic and differential topology, I couldn't easily discern what new fields he's created, nor what unexpected connections he's made - so it indeed would have been nice if the summary had included just a little more information clarifying that. I'm honestly curious now - can anyone provide a quick overview of his more important contributions?
I know that humans were just the design we ended up with, not the goal, but.. think in terms of the creation of a creature as much more "fit" [from evolutionary perspsective] as a human to an ape.
I think the real question is "more 'fit' for what?", and until we have some semblance of an answer to that I think your concerns are awfully speculative. We really have no idea of what pressures or constraints led to humans developing. In contrast your example of and F16 from a Sopwith Camel there are some very well defined implicit constraints and specifications as to purpose and what constitutes "fitness" in this case. What led to humans may have been some fairly loose and easily satsified constraints with some of the particulars that we take for "fitness" simply being aberrations where the process spun on in an unconstrained direction.
Could evolutionary algorithms solve the Sopwith Camel to F16 problem in the required time? Maybe not. Evolution/Life doesn't always manage to solve the problems with which it is presented, particularly when the constraints are excessive. History is littered with examples of evolution failing to develop a satisfactory solution in time: it's called extinction. So even if humans are a remarkable solution to an incredibly difficult problem it may well be that we are just one of those few cases where an answer did turn up in the requisite time out of millions more cases where it didn't.
I'm certainly ready to admit that the concept could work for a lot of articles. I think the problem is that for particularly controversial articles you'll tend to get more attention on the articles from those involved in editing it. A random passer by is likely to disagree with both poles, and is not necessarily inclined to agree with the neutral article, which will be largely content free.
Put it this way: a basic facility for this already exists - there are plenty of extra articles added to Wikipedia to present the other point of view. Inevitably they either get moderated to the point where they get merged into the main article, or they spin off into extremism and get deleted. What you're essentially proposing is removing the central article into which things can be merged, accepting extrmist POV articles, and letting people vote on which extremist version they prefer.
It's not that I don't see merit to your idea - I think it has considerable benefits. I am just not convinced that it won't introduce its own complications. I suspect neither of us will be properly convinced either way until such a thing has been tried. Perhaps we'll see.
I agree that some level of moderation would help, but I don't think that that would really help the polarisation issue. Again, taking the Abortion article as a hypothetical example, once things have been running for a while I strongly suspect you find that you have 2 wildly innaccurate polar opposite articles with a lot of "agreement" from all the supporters of the relative camps, and a certain amount of "disagreement" from the opposing camp - but in practice that would be limited: why bother dealing with or even looking at the completely bullshit pro-life/pro-choice article when you have a perfectly good pro-choice/pro-life article to edit? In the meantime you'll have the relatively content free neutral article getting strong "disagreement" from both sides, and very little in the way of "agreement" from anyone.
There have been a numberof studiesand articles on how individuation, and letting groups separate, can lead the groups to polarise, often to extremes well beyond the initial views of any of the individuals in the groups. By forcing editors to butt heads over a single common article you tend to get less of the differentiation of separate groups required to drive such polarisation. Once you let groups separate off they will generally get driven to the extremes and little attention will be payed to the other point of view as it is simply incomprehensible to the group at the other extreme ("Why bother trying to go through and detail false claims in the pro-choice/pro-life page? The whole page is nothing but an endless stream of false claims and it would take forever to refute them all properly.").
What I'm proposing is a system where the user sees an interface like the disambiguation page, which offers different articles for each title, including a purportedly nuetral one. So for example, the abortion article would have 3 or more texts: a nuetral one, a pro-life, and a pro-choice.
It's an interesting idea but I see a couple of immediate problems. First it will tend to promote polarisation and probably lessen the quality of the articles. With 2 or more parties arguing over a page new material tends to get vetted heavily. Separate that to two or more point of view pages and they will each rapidly diverge and start to contain significant dubious material. You'll end up with a pro-life page filled with all manner of ridiculous claims and misinformation, and a pro-choice page filled with all manner of ridiculous claims and misinformation, and a neutral one with not a lot of content.
Secondly it will lead to a ridiculous proliferation of parallel pages in many cases. If you've seen enough disputes on Wikipedia over content you'll know that everyone seems to have their own particular spin and there are plenty of people who will defend their point of view as one that is entirely legitimate and not adequately represented. For example you will probably end up with a Communism page with parallel versions by Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, socialists, capitalists, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, libertarian socialists, anarcho-syndicalists... And a similar representation for Capitalism page.
Sorry, while I think the idea is good in spirit, in practice I think it will just cause more problems.
And the fact that the poles on Mars are also melting would seem to indicate a solar system wide event.
Well it would if it was a fact that the poles on Mars are melting. As it happens it's just the southern pole that's melting. In and of itself that isn't even surprising. Mars has a rather different "seasonal" cycle than earth, taking considerably longer, but, as it happens, it is currently "summer" in the southern hemisphere of Mars. Ice caps often melt a little during the summer. Odd that. Now if it were a global change affecting both poles, rather than just a local one... but it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
"2. Good raid-quality gear *should* be better than easily obtainable gear you can get while soloing"
why?
There is exactly no logical reason for this.
My emphasis added, which answers your question. Really the OP is just dodging the point though. There is some sort of implicit acceptance of the idea that anything that can be done soloing must necessarily be easy in comparison to the difficulty of doing something in a group. Certainly there is no reason that "gear you can get while soloing" need be "easily obtainable". As it happens in WoW that is the case, but Blizzard could quite conceivably create tasks that must be done alone but are exceptionally difficult.
I think the real issue here is that for a difficult soloing task to be fair it needs to be restricted to a soloing task - otherwise a group will simply come and, with their combined might, pick up easy loot. Certainly that can be done, but it means tasks that only one player at a time can engage in. To manage to get the sort of throughput required to keep large numbers of players happy you either need to be creative in designing soloing tasks so they can suitably parallelised, or you simply make tasks group based to up throughput. Apparently Blizzard chose the latter.
Jedidiah.
I think the article is, in a sense, objecting to where that skill is stored. The author of the article wants the joy of learning and improving himself - the skill is stored in him, in his mind and his relfexes. WoW externalises skill acquisition and a lot of the "skill" is stored in the character in the form of levels and bonuses and items etc. In this sense the individual playing need not learn or acquire skill, instead they can simply let their character do so. As a side effect of this externalisation "skill" is acquired at a uniform rate for everyone because "skill" is administered largely by a server and divorced from the individuals playing. This means that time directly correlates to skill and effort at gaining skill is almost purely a function of time - not of thought, nor effort to learn, nor natural talent, or anything else. The game does the learning for you and absolves you of a certain amount of responsibility for thinking. Moreover "skill" is now something that individuals no lonmger possess - it is something that "game characters" possess and can be bought and sold as a commodity; it is no longer something unique and special to you that you can always retain. This is, I feel, the real reasons for his objections. Whether you agree with them or not you should at least realise that there is something significant at work here.
Jedidiah.
Funny, I always thought that time *is* what gives you rewards. What percentage of your typical slashdot geeks are paid by the hour?
I think you'll find that "skill at the job" is, ultimately, what determines the size of that pay check. If you're highly skilled you will probably be paid a lot more for your time than someone who is just starting out. The main reason that time is used is that time is a lot easier to measure than skill - unless the job has a lot of very clearly defined tasks and milestones it is far more effort for the payroll staff to try and measure the results of your work and pay you accordingly than it is to set an hourly rate based on a general assessment of your skill and assume that the results of your labours are roughly equal to their initial estimation of the amount of value you can produce in an hour multiplied by the number of hours you worked. It is that estimation of "amount of value you can produce in an hour" that really determines how much you get paid, and that is solely determined on their best estimates of your skill.
Jedidiah.
My Finnish is appalling but I think you'll find that Tääki, Metiriälistik, and Jaappi are better fits should you need to recycle the joke at a later date - though this gets into the confusion over the fact that "j" is pronounced as we pronounce "y" in Finnish, while "y" is pronounced kind of like the the "u" in Munich or bureau.
Taking all the humour out of jokes via pointless dissection since 2006.
Jedidiah.
Actually, I wonder why I have a "file" menu in apps that are not file-based, like ej: a gnome game.
All the games in the standard gnome-games package don't have a file menu. Instead they have a "Game" menu in it's place, with the usual options you would expect to find (new game, quit, etc.) located there.
Jedidiah.
If I start up a GNOME session and want to use network meeting functionality, how is there any possible way that I could guess that "Ekiga" is the application I'm looking for?
Because if things have been installed and set up properly "Ekiga" will be under the "Internet" sub-menu of the "Applications" menu, and the entry itself will read something like "Ekiga video-conferencing" with a tooltip saying something like "Communicate with others using text, voice phone calls, or video conferencing". You hold up "Rendezvous Browser" as a well named application because it's clear what it does, but it really begs the question: what the hell is Rendezvous and what does it do? I think the GNOME approach - to choose a distinctive name and pair that with a concise description - is a very good one. You can't have everything named after what it does or else things quickly get pointlessly confused, so distinctive names are good - as long as you pair that with a description of what the app does so people can find it easily. You'll find GNOME conforms to that pretty well, and the result (always having descriptive menu entries and explanatory tooltips for those entries) actually makes for a system where it is easier to find what you want.
Jedidiah.
The only way to stop global warming were for the people of the world to collectively reduce their usage of energy and lower their standard of living.
I think an important point, that needs to be made more often, is that via energy efficiency it is possible to reduce energy use without lowering the standard of living. Build a house with better insulation, more efficient heating systems etc. and you can dramatically reduce energy use without changing the standard of living. Yes there's a greater initial outlay in cost, but it pays itself back in saved energy costs. There are a great many trivial things that can be done (like bothering to better insulate existing homes, using more energy efficient light systems, dressing for the weather rather than according arbitrary social conditioning (and hence saving in both heating and air-conditioning of offices)) that have little or no impact on standards of living, but can make a huge difference in energy consumption if pursued on a broad scale. Reducing energy consumption can be about how to figure out how to do the same or more with less hrough efficiency rather than some blanket reduction of capability.
Jedidiah.
I love how everyone has become constitutional scholars these days...Unfortunately it's not a cut and dry issue.
I wasn't suggesting it was, or was not constitutional. I was expressing my belief as to what does, and does not, represent good practices with regard to surveillance regardless of legal standing. It may well, once it has worked its way through the system, be decided that Bush's actions were legal. That does not mean I have to agree that allowing such things is a good idea, merely that I accept it as legal as defined by the courts. To judge the legality may well require a constitutional scholar, to have an opinion as to whether such actions are good or bad does not.
Finally the point that I was trying to make was that the practicalities do not absolve the principles: the ends do not necessarily justify the means.
Jedidiah.
Even if these records get released and prove to be, as claimed, solely people with direct links to known and documented terrorists, that still does not exonerate the establishment of the program. The real issue was never a matter of whether, at this particular time, the NSA was listening in on you or your grandma, it was about precedent. The real issue is whether it is acceptable for an agency like the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance without oversight, without warrants of any kind. In the past the law has been such that various types of surveillance were permitted, but as these cases have come to light each loophole has been blocked - it was precisely for this reason that the Foreign Intelligence Services Court, and the corresponding act, was originally created. An about face and progressive weakening of such laws sets a dangerous precendent, and in my view shouldn't be tolerated. Don't let the report as to what surveillance was conducted blind you to the deeper issue of whether such a precedent is acceptable.
Jedidiah.
In 50 years with the Decline of Freedom and Liberty here in the US I wouldnt be suprised in the LEAST if China were a MORE free society
The depressing part is even if that actually happened you can bet that the vast majority of people in the US would still believe, and loudly proclaim, that they live in the most free country in the world...
Jedidiah.
Let the price of gas go up, people use less. Eventually it will get high enough where alternate forms of energy are more feasable.
As a means of finding a natural equilibrium that is indeed an efficient way to go. The problem is that the intervening time while a new equilibrium is being established may not particularly pleasant, and might not be particularly short when compared with natural human timescales.
Consider this hypothetical: over the next year demand continues to increase, while the supply increases much more slowly and oil prices spike quite high, say $100 or $150 a barrel. That's high enough to make many of the alternatives economically viable. The problem is that the infrastructure fr the alternatives isn't there yet. Certainly you'll have a number of companies starting up, or shifting focus, to take advantage of the now economic alternatives. It will take time for both the new industries, and the new systems for distribution, delivery etc. to become sufficiently widespread for the alternatives to fully take up the slack. That leaves you with a period of expensive oil, and insufficient alternatives, which will likely see oil prices spike further. Yes, in due course the other industries will gear up, take over, and return things to something resembling normality, but that's not immediate.
Trying to artifically shortcut to this state tends to blow up in our faces though. So, don't worry, be happy.
Artificially shortcut there? Probably not that helpful. Have a little foresight and make preparations with regard to alternatives that will significantly ease the transition? Possibly a reasonable idea.
Jedidiah.
But is it really true that a Linux exe can't have its own icon? I thought they could... Or perhaps they can only once installed by the user?
When an application installs it can put an icon in the appropriate place on the system, and add appropriate entries such that the application menu entry and window decorations appear using that icon. The actual executable file itself can't change its icon. Go to "/usr/bin" on a Linux system in the file manager and scroll through - even your standard programs that all have nice icons in the menu have standard "executable" icons based on their MIME type.
Jedidiah.
Now the question is : how do you make sure trojans can't happen?
Well you could do something similar to what Linux DEs do and not let applications define a custom icon (unless they've been installed, and installed their icon on the system). The OS assigns all icons based on MIME type, and applications don't get choose their own icon.
You could also have better least privilege sandboxing available. It's not foolproof, plenty people will still click through a warning about the application trying to access your addressbook and network and give it suitable rights to run, but it will give some people pause. Some sort of system of Mandatory Access Controls as in SELinux would be suitable. All it really needs is other applications to respect such a security configuration, and a nice user interface put on the whole thing (so that it mostly warns a user about disallowed access attempts, with a prompt asking if they want to update security to allow it in future, and a simple system for programs to request specific access rights on install).
Sure neither of those options are completely bullet proof - nothing is in the face of true human stupidity. On the other hand either or both of those would offer a very significant improvement in security and roustness against such trojns and viruses than MacOSX currently offers.
Jedidiah.
I always like to point to the funnel-web spider. People are used to the possibility of dangerous spiders, but... leys' collect the highlights from the Wikipedia article:
"...regarded by some to be the most dangerous spider in the world...wandering males have caused a large majority of fatal bites to humans...the venom is known to cause death within a period ranging from 15 minutes to three days...and they often bite aggressively and repeatedly...their fangs have been known to penetrate fingernails and soft shoes, resulting in dangerous bites."
Sounds positively wonderful really.
Jedidiah.
Indeed, it's not like Australia has a shortage of lethal animals. In practice its largely because Australia has been fairly successfully isolated for a long time and the flora and fauna smply aren't adapted to deal with the introduced species. You'll find exactly the same sorts of problems in New Zealand, and, in fact, in the US if you introduce the wrong species.
Jedidiah.
Easy enough to do with the use of slightly odd angles and erratic cutting - jump to different angles within a conversation etc. As to made up words - just throw that crap into the dialogue.
You just have to think in terms of film instead of language. Bad writing isn't that hard to translate to film.
Jedidiah.
I think Neuromancer is, all things considered, quite filmable. It's not that long, for a start, and is driven mainly by plot and setting/atmosphere. That makes it far more filmable than a lot of books. What is needs is a slightly edgy directory willing to give it suitable doses of real grit and plenty of energy. Nolan and Fincher are both good candidates.
Jedidiah.
Episode I would have been far better if Lucas had stuck to his original sources. Imagine a slight variation on Seven Samurai with Yoda as Kambei, Obi Wan as Katsushiro, and Anakin as Kikuchiyo (who younger and obviously lives instead of getting killed). Plenty of interesting material there, and a classic storyline, plus it's sets up nicely for an Episode II with Obi Wan older and deciding to take a slightly chastened Anakin as his apprentice (presumably unbenownst or to the displeasure of Yoda). There's even nice background for Obi Wan being wiser with regard to the troubles of young love and trying and failing to stop Anakin making the same mistakes. It could have been great. But no, we get crap instead.
Jedidiah.
Science fiction novels done properly for cinema are virtually nonexistent.
Andrei Tarkovsky did such a remarkable job adapting "Solaris", by Stanislaw Lem, to the screen that you can quite credibly claim that the film is better than the book (though it of course depends on what you're looking for). He also did a remarkable job with "Roadside Picnic" which became "Stalker" - a classic of minimalist science fiction cinema. As with Kubrick, I think having a remarkable visionary director can make the difference.
Jedidiah.
Seems that they're REALLY filtering the science news for the masses these days...
The quote you cite is actually pretty much straight from the NSF announcement of the awards, so the dumbing down happened at that level, not from the newspaper. I had a quick skim through his recently published papers (as in titles and MathSciNet reviews) and while he is obviously doing some interesting work, apparently mostly in algebraic and differential topology, I couldn't easily discern what new fields he's created, nor what unexpected connections he's made - so it indeed would have been nice if the summary had included just a little more information clarifying that. I'm honestly curious now - can anyone provide a quick overview of his more important contributions?
Jedidiah.
I know that humans were just the design we ended up with, not the goal,
but.. think in terms of the creation of a creature as much more "fit" [from evolutionary perspsective] as a human to an ape.
I think the real question is "more 'fit' for what?", and until we have some semblance of an answer to that I think your concerns are awfully speculative. We really have no idea of what pressures or constraints led to humans developing. In contrast your example of and F16 from a Sopwith Camel there are some very well defined implicit constraints and specifications as to purpose and what constitutes "fitness" in this case. What led to humans may have been some fairly loose and easily satsified constraints with some of the particulars that we take for "fitness" simply being aberrations where the process spun on in an unconstrained direction.
Could evolutionary algorithms solve the Sopwith Camel to F16 problem in the required time? Maybe not. Evolution/Life doesn't always manage to solve the problems with which it is presented, particularly when the constraints are excessive. History is littered with examples of evolution failing to develop a satisfactory solution in time: it's called extinction. So even if humans are a remarkable solution to an incredibly difficult problem it may well be that we are just one of those few cases where an answer did turn up in the requisite time out of millions more cases where it didn't.
Jedidiah.
I'm certainly ready to admit that the concept could work for a lot of articles. I think the problem is that for particularly controversial articles you'll tend to get more attention on the articles from those involved in editing it. A random passer by is likely to disagree with both poles, and is not necessarily inclined to agree with the neutral article, which will be largely content free.
Put it this way: a basic facility for this already exists - there are plenty of extra articles added to Wikipedia to present the other point of view. Inevitably they either get moderated to the point where they get merged into the main article, or they spin off into extremism and get deleted. What you're essentially proposing is removing the central article into which things can be merged, accepting extrmist POV articles, and letting people vote on which extremist version they prefer.
It's not that I don't see merit to your idea - I think it has considerable benefits. I am just not convinced that it won't introduce its own complications. I suspect neither of us will be properly convinced either way until such a thing has been tried. Perhaps we'll see.
Jedidiah.
I agree that some level of moderation would help, but I don't think that that would really help the polarisation issue. Again, taking the Abortion article as a hypothetical example, once things have been running for a while I strongly suspect you find that you have 2 wildly innaccurate polar opposite articles with a lot of "agreement" from all the supporters of the relative camps, and a certain amount of "disagreement" from the opposing camp - but in practice that would be limited: why bother dealing with or even looking at the completely bullshit pro-life/pro-choice article when you have a perfectly good pro-choice/pro-life article to edit? In the meantime you'll have the relatively content free neutral article getting strong "disagreement" from both sides, and very little in the way of "agreement" from anyone.
There have been a number of studies and articles on how individuation, and letting groups separate, can lead the groups to polarise, often to extremes well beyond the initial views of any of the individuals in the groups. By forcing editors to butt heads over a single common article you tend to get less of the differentiation of separate groups required to drive such polarisation. Once you let groups separate off they will generally get driven to the extremes and little attention will be payed to the other point of view as it is simply incomprehensible to the group at the other extreme ("Why bother trying to go through and detail false claims in the pro-choice/pro-life page? The whole page is nothing but an endless stream of false claims and it would take forever to refute them all properly.").
Finally here's Wikipedia on the subject.
Jedidiah.
What I'm proposing is a system where the user sees an interface like the disambiguation page, which offers different articles for each title, including a purportedly nuetral one. So for example, the abortion article would have 3 or more texts: a nuetral one, a pro-life, and a pro-choice.
It's an interesting idea but I see a couple of immediate problems. First it will tend to promote polarisation and probably lessen the quality of the articles. With 2 or more parties arguing over a page new material tends to get vetted heavily. Separate that to two or more point of view pages and they will each rapidly diverge and start to contain significant dubious material. You'll end up with a pro-life page filled with all manner of ridiculous claims and misinformation, and a pro-choice page filled with all manner of ridiculous claims and misinformation, and a neutral one with not a lot of content.
Secondly it will lead to a ridiculous proliferation of parallel pages in many cases. If you've seen enough disputes on Wikipedia over content you'll know that everyone seems to have their own particular spin and there are plenty of people who will defend their point of view as one that is entirely legitimate and not adequately represented. For example you will probably end up with a Communism page with parallel versions by Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, socialists, capitalists, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, libertarian socialists, anarcho-syndicalists... And a similar representation for Capitalism page.
Sorry, while I think the idea is good in spirit, in practice I think it will just cause more problems.
Jedidiah.
And the fact that the poles on Mars are also melting would seem to indicate a solar system wide event.
Well it would if it was a fact that the poles on Mars are melting. As it happens it's just the southern pole that's melting. In and of itself that isn't even surprising. Mars has a rather different "seasonal" cycle than earth, taking considerably longer, but, as it happens, it is currently "summer" in the southern hemisphere of Mars. Ice caps often melt a little during the summer. Odd that. Now if it were a global change affecting both poles, rather than just a local one... but it isn't.
Jedidiah.