Obviously he's not too good at getting his message out, or we wouldn't be having this discussion... (isn't that the -worst- thing you can do when you're a hostage-taker or a terrorist? not state your demands clearly enough?)
The way I understood it, he sees the US and other western powers as too willing to meddle in affairs that ought not be any of their business: imperialist powers, roving the globe in search of countries to abuse, setting up puppet states, using locals to fight wars for them, but caring nothing for the local populations. (Afghanistan, anyone? All of South America? Most of Africa? The cold war was a harsh mistress.) Under that model, all he'd really need to care about is causing us to doubt our power, implode, and stay at home. He wouldn't even have to care what we do once we're turned into a bunch of cowardly homebodies, it'd be enough that we'd leave him alone to do whatever he likes in his part of the world, whether that's setting up muslim governments or herding sheep.
But that's my reading of events. I think it's too easy to claim he's insane -- it's convenient to jump from the idea that no reason could justify killing, to the idea that there was no reason at all that we could have an effect on in the future. Denial, perhaps.
I agree with your logic that a better but imperfect system is still better than the old system; but people (particularly managers) seem to easily fall prey to the idea that whatever is better is automatically best, and that whatever is best, is automatically perfect. You can't let them forget that there are problems that still need to be solved, if iteratively. If you just let it go, they'll forget, and when problems creep up, they'll claim it's the first they've heard of them, and the whole cycle starts up again. So yes, go for a better system, but don't let anyone forget about the gaps that still need patching. If they can be patched now, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to go ahead and do that: you need to weigh the cost of delaying deployment of a single better solution against the cost of deploying several incrementally but marginally better solutions one after another, with conversion costs, etc.
But I still see it going the way every other project goes: managers will claim it's a perfect success, they'll ignore dire warnings, retire, and let later managers clean the mess up -- but they won't blame their predecessors, they'll say the problems are new, and collect their reward for fixing an old but ignored problem. And so forth, forever. Those who complain, meanwhile, get nothing. And if they're very lucky, they'll be blamed when someone makes use of the faults they pointed out -- because they helped the terrorists.
Either that, or I've got a bad case of the Mundays.
Veering off-topic, I have to say that I've been rather displeased with all the one-search systems out there. Picasa? One field to search by -- sure hope you don't mind searching both filenames and tags at the same time, 'cause you don't have a choice. All those nifty find-my-files tools that have come out recently have been similar. I'm sure it's the result of thinking that users can't be arsed to know the difference between a filename and the file's content (which likely isn't far from the truth) but... still. Some 'advanced' modes would be nice. Many of the file types they are able to search are rather structured, and having the ability to search intelligently (find me all TIFF files where this particular TIFF property is -blah-) would be nice. But then I'm a DB guy anyway, and all I ever see are tables. Tables and fields. I'm so very sad when someone goes and mashes what looks like several tables, with lots of interesting fields, into a single search box. At least Google proper has some modifiers (link:, site:, etc.) that are slightly more intelligent. Deviant-Art has similar modifiers in the single-search box that allow you to search by image size... but then you're asking random tech-unsavvy users to effectively use a command-line prompt, in a tiny box labeled "search", and they can't even ask for a --help right there...
Quibble: wikipedia seems to me to operate on the principle that "truth" is whatever the latest person to care enough thought it was. Voting happens, but not at every edit, and it's more for the benefit of avoiding back-and-forth edit fights between people who can't agree. But it's certainly not a constant factor in all edits.
Paying politicians well enough that they won't seek outside... help... also implies they have a big incentive to stay in office. That could make them into better politicians, more in tune with the will of the people, or it could make them into lying, mud-slinging bastards -- what we currently call "politicians." I'm not sure it'd really help (either way.)
If you make your games infinitely replayable, will we really want to buy the new games you produce?
If you make your games play-once, there may be a secondary market, yes, but how long does it take before everyone's played the game, is done with it, and is ready for new stuff?
The current trend is your best bet, given the options that don't involve legislators.
Waste, fraud, corruption -- they don't always happen in lump sums. So admittedly, we can't expect every find (nor very many of them) to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But considering how much it probably cost them to just run the audit, and compared to the general budget, I'd have to guess this wasn't that great of a find (in terms of ROI and/or % originally wasted.) Yes, it's naughty, yes, it's great to find it... but... just considering I've watched local government workers use grants for bio-terrorism to purchase themselves PDA's and laptops because they wanted them (not really bothering to justify the purchases)... or how often they just sit up there and play games and rip music in the sheriff's department (they're bored!)... *sigh*... or the time wasted by employees reading/writing slashdot while at work... $88k? bah.
I realize this article is going to go stale soon now and prevent us from replying to each other, but I thought I'd point out a terminology difference that could be important: - what you call freedom, I call ability (sometimes opportunity) - what you call right, I call freedom - what I call right, you don't seem to have a word for.
To me, freedom is what society tells you it won't punish you for. This is beyond the physical ability to do things, which you can't possibly lose (except, perhaps, by being locked up.) A right is a freedom society tells you it will never take away from you, and doesn't have the freedom to take away from you. ("Or else.")
The problem I see with your argument, then, is that you assume that freedom of speech is merely what you call freedom, that is, a basic ability not covered by law. But it's actually a freedom, even a right, in my sense -- the Constitution, our binding agreement, states that I have this freedom. Not merely that I had it, and nobody's touching it, but that society agrees that it shall stand the hell out of my way, or else I have permission to punish it for standing in my way. I think that's a big difference. It's not just unregulated, it's protected by law.
The classic phrase is "just because you -can- do something doesn't mean you -should- do something". I agree that, even with my own terms, you shouldn't do things you have the freedom to do just for the hell of it -- I have the [protected] freedom to commit suicide, but I don't do it purely because I have the freedom to. But I still don't think we can call freedom that which we're told not to do "or else". I'd in fact posit that's part of the definition of freedom. Obviously, mileage varies.
I appreciate that you agree with me, but I'm going to have to disagree with you.
Do you really have a freedom if you can't make use of it without it being taken away? Asking anyone to restrain themselves is pointless unless there's the force of law behind it, and the threat that the freedom they will have excercised will be taken away from them -- at which point it's no freedom at all.
As to morals, again, I must disagree. Laws have basis in force, not in morals and ethics. We do not rely on public shame nor personal contrition as deterrents; we use the threat of force, of punishment. The moral reasons behind our laws, if there are any, are separated from our actual laws by the democratic process. We enact laws on the basis of majority vote, and we do not include in the law the reasoning(s) that lead to those votes. At that point, the moral beliefs of those who voted on the laws fail to be translated into the laws themselves, which are purely objects of force -- primitive, violent devices with which we organize our society.
Our culture is stagnating between treating the symptom and the cause. We know that treating the cause is better than the symptom; we like the idea of prevention. But the easiest and most common path so far has involved blaming, punishing, and regulating the makers of devices and media which are thought to enable or induce criminal acts. We no longer believe in free will. A child can't help but kill people if he has access to a gun, if he plays a violent video game, if he watches an R-rated movie. It wasn't so long ago that governments believed in banning books thought to contain 'dangerous' ideas -- ideas that would inevitably lead people to take actions those governments disagreed with -- but you don't hear much about that these days. Now it's movies and games. (Seen any ESRB-like ratings on books recently?)
What happened to simply telling parents that they're responsible, until the age of 18, for their childrens' actions, and that it's up to them to do whatever's in their power to keep those kids out of trouble, including educating them on what is or isn't appropriate, regardless of what books, movies, or games may imply? If you don't want your kids to buy violent games, don't give them money. They don't need it. If you want to know whether a game is violent or not, don't ask the government to do your research for you. Pay private entities to do that.
So... if we've already taken away *some* rights, then it's okay to continue taking away similar rights, and it's not okay for anyone to ever try to draw a line in the sand and say "no more"? You can't justify one oppression by another.
Assuming evolution (mutation + selection) and a limited amount of time, nothing guarantees that all plausible body models will be attempted. Not everything attempted gets fossilized. Not everything fossilized has been discovered. (Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)
I do remember coming across someone's research in re-evolving N-ped motion in simulations, partially for the purpose of doing computer graphics. Their simulations wound able to walk, run, turn, etc. in a way that looked perfectly natural (switching from walk to run and back again without missing a beat.) Perhaps the same can be (or has been) applied to 3-,5-,7-, etc. legged models to see what would happen, see how fast it could be, etc. Then again, dogs who've lost a leg can still walk, albeit a little oddly. Same with spiders. A 5-legged creature could probably, at the very least, act like a four-legged creature with an extra, useless appendage.
[I'm making the assumption that I'm not the only one to run across obscure bugs in apps, and also not the only one to scour the intarweb looking for that one random forum post with the solution.]
On the other side, you have overly-common names like "Word" and "Publisher" that make google searches ineffective because they're so easily confused with (un)related nouns. The same can be true of overly-short names (C language). I cringe when I think of mainframe job names (MKRUN12BO), but there are times it would be really handy for the purposes of online searches to have quasi-unique names for programs -- not common words, not cute mythical names, not names pulled from a dead language, not names from a work of fiction, and certainly not names that require you to consistently use the vendor's name or the product's purpose in your searches (and hope that everyone else included those in their forum postings.)
Lower prices, yes, or make the new games so much better than the previous ones that gamers will have no choice (so to speak) but buy the latest. Or create a culture in which playing old games is seen as lame. (Sadly for them, the culture's common-sense wisdom is that old, retro games are still more fun to play than new games -- that's gonna make it difficult.) Whether there's a secondary market or not, their sales are driven by our desire to have their new products. Suggestion: make new products more appealing. I can't find good multiplayer console games, for example. We want to play them, but we're bored of racing games, I don't like fighting games, and we don't like sports games. What's left? Lego Star Wars?
They could also try making games so replayable that no gamer would ever want to get rid of a game once purchased -- but that would be unlikely to improve sales of new games. They could also make games so short that people go through them like, uh, candy -- buy game, play game, sell game, all in the space of a week or month. Even with a secondary market, those games would quickly fade out of existance once everyone's played them. But you'd have to lower the prices for this to be of any interest, and... that's not likely either.
Solution? Increase the cost of primary-market games, get all your profit for the next ten years out of the way, and then stop making games. We'll probably all be better off.
Think about it, if adults don't have access to porn so they can wank off in the peace of their own private space, they will probably go out and seek ways of getting off that are more harmful to others.
Thankfully, prostitution (a sort of middle-ground that isn't per se harmful) is still widely available legally.
The 'science' teacher I had (hi there, Dr. Keas!) left open the possibility of panspermia in that he defended ID in terms of a lack of evidence -- the fossil chain *here* may be lacking, but maybe elsewhere, things would be different. Maybe our true homeworld would have a clear history showing how things came to be. No, I don't agree with that, yes, ID arguments often state that the cell-level structures could never have evolved (not just that we don't see how, but that it's impossible.) But I have heard it taught in such a way that it *sounds* more open-minded (but isn't.) And then there was the "habitable zone" math (at the solar-system, galaxy, and possible-universal-constants levels)... bad memories.
And yes, the whole issue is over history -- religion relies on authority, and authority most often relies on a chain of authority, ergo history. We know X is true because Y told us, and Y knew it was true because Z said so, all the way back to first-hand experience. If history were to be false, religion would be false. Inasmuch as they believe scientists to be making statements of truth about history, they have a problem with it. This is the same religion, mind you, that has also proudly displayed scientific discoveries as proving how ingenious and beautiful God is -- science itself is not always their enemy.
You cannot test for the existence of God, a pre-requisite for ID (otherwise, to what does "intelligence" refer in the title?).
Aliens. I kid you not. When I've heard this taught (in my intro-to-science class at a religious university) it was made clear that "intelligent design" doesn't refer to a particular source of the design, only that it is intelligent, as opposed to mindless (that is, evolution.) It could be aliens, it could be a previous civilization of humans, it could be a trans-dimensional spaghetti monster -- they don't care. ID itself doesn't set out to prove what it is, only that evolution is wrong (on the grounds that it is impossible) in order to set the stage for a later debate (once ID is accepted) as to which intelligent designer makes most sense. At that point, yes, their goal is to prove that their god (as opposed to aliens or anyone else's god) is the intelligent designer. Slightly before that, their goal is to give people who already believe in creationism a way of saying "well, this ID stuff is -compatible- with what I believe, and sounds convincing to me, so I'm okay." Not "true", just "compatible".
You can't just label content as anonymous or not and expect that to be sufficient.
- Users will need to know that you actively intend for them to trust anonymous content less than non-anonymous content, but
- Users will need to know that even though you have now created two classes of content, and anonymous content is explicitly not to be trusted, non-anonymous content is still not guaranteed. One is to be trusted less than the other, but neither are to be trusted. Named content can very much still be wrong, can it not? It's a murky distinction, you'll just confuse people with it.
- The offensive material will still be present, and just as hard to regulate. You can vaguely help things by making anonymous content invisible by default, hoping that users are lazy and that anyone who cares enough to look at the anonymous content will also know better than to trust it blindly. But the libel is still happening, and those smeared by it have just as much right to be unhappy about it, and they'll complain that it's available even if invisible by default.
So really, it comes down to a social problem, not a technological one. People are still too willing to trust anonymous content. A technological solution on Wikipedia doesn't come close to solving the general problem on the internet -- people are just far too trusting.
It's really annoying that companies seem to advertise jobs only for the latest-and-greatest programming languages / toolsets. We've been working on a long-term project for, what, four or five years now -- mostly C++, with a wee bit of php for some online help stuff. So we have experience with C++, php, database work, large projects, custom file formats, etc. Great. But no.NET experience, no java experience, and we've never had a use for XML -- and we're not going to shoehorn those technologies into our project for the hell of it (getting experience we can show on our resume). We're not going to start over with new technologies, just when the project is maturing. It's frustrating. Companies seem to fail to understand that a lot of us aren't code monkeys -- we can move from one language to another in a matter of days or weeks, given a little time to read up on the topic. We can learn new libraries and new tools quite quickly, given the chance. Yet they are determined to find people who already know it all (even their own in-house apps) so they can just drop them in and have productivity. Did we spoil them with the plug'n'play concept?
And then there's the part where they ignore your domain-specific knowledge: no, you've not coded that type of app in that language before, but you -have- coded that type of app in another language, for a similar company, with similar purposes, and you know what to expect. Too bad, nobody cares. (And it seems much, much harder to go down to the bookstore and buy a book about an industry, that explains how everything ties together, than to buy a language-specific book. And users? They don't know the whole picture. You'll have to talk to every damn person there, and then sort through the lies and misconceptions to get down to what you need to know. And then you won't document it, and... yeah.)
... it is in general a stupid thing, the fact of the matter is that in today's world the majority of business decision makers like professionalism, and people make stereotypes about certain types of clothing...
The social world has inertia, though watching fashion shows, you'd be hard-pressed to prove it. People take forever to change their opinions on such things, but conforming to the existing de-facto standard only reinforces it, making change take even longer. Every IT worker I know understands that people feel this way about dress -- and that it's stupid. Yet they'll continue to please customers, customers won't be exposed to different dress, and will never come to associate good service with awkward dress, just as they won't associate good service with tattoos (because they're hidden), abnormal hair (again, hidden or prohibited), etc. People will only associate good service with the 'business look', and will jump to conclusions about otherwise-groomed/dressed/modified service providers.
No business is going to take a chance on this for the sake of re-educating the public. And the social norm doesn't change as quickly as generations die off -- your parents may die, but the habits and stereotypes they gave you will be with you, and your children, and even your grandchildren, long after. Every generation overlaps with several others, and we all try to cater to each other. (Which is why I fail to understand political leaders who think there's actually a risk of society suddenly changing itself to be radically more or less permissive. What's actually happening is merely a question of threshholds as people get fed up with pretending.)
Among the ideas Kehoe has already mocked up are a finger paint that fades from every surface except a special paper
Haven't I been seeing a commercial recently for something similar from Crayon? Kids can color on the paper, but not on carpet, tables, etc.? Is it at all related, or coincidental?
The thought springs to mind that PHP, as it happens, would be uniquely suited to working with the hypotethical XML databases, due to its rather particular concept of arrays. As many of us undoubtely know, a PHP array can be used to contain a tree of arbitrary shape and size, and with nodes of arbitrary types. A native, 1-on-1 match to an XML tree.
Welcome to post-relational, multi-dimensional databases! The wave of the future! Purchase Caché today!
[Caché is the latest in a long line of M/Mumps 'global' database products, where arrays are nested in arrays recursively, with data strewn about the structure. Like PHP. Only with SQL, too. Yesterday's hierarchical database, today. I'm no fan. Others are.]
So... would you complain if cop cars seems to mysteriously always be nearby when you were speeding?
Do you object to cops monitoring your speed? Would you object to an increase in police personnel to do this same job? Do you object to automatic ticketing? Do you object to the notion of guilty until appealed? (tickets are like this) Do you object to the entire notion of speed limits? Do you object to spending this much money on speed limit enforcement? Any money? Do you object to the excessive proportional allocation of funds for this? Do you object to the road work this will require, and the associated traffic?
While there's obviously some discomfort with the notion of having cameras tracking our vehicles all over the place, I'm not seeing the 'why' pinned down precisely. When out in public, you expose yourself to scrutiny -- whether by passers-by, cameras, car-tracking systems, etc. The UK measure is extreme, yes, but we're talking about the automation and scaling-up of existing abilities, not new ones. They could have posted cops every quarter-mile, and hoped they could read and remember plate numbers as well as an electronic system. There would be the same implications in terms of their ability to ticket you, track you, find a stolen (or not) vehicle, etc. but without the technology.
Don't misunderstand me: I get a creepy feeling from this too. And I'm all about revolutions. But it's best to have clearly defined principles first. A new government would need to be limited appropriately, or the same thing would eventually happen again.
It occurs to me that asking a bunch of pro-open-source geeks how to best maintain control over closed-source code in an sub-ideal environment is perhaps not the best idea ever. In fact, I would suggest that you double-check any answers you get here, as, for all you know, they're purposefully sub-par solutions designed to lull you into a false sense of security so the code can be more easily nabbed.
Don't you mean it makes it illegal for anyone else to build a tamper-resistant software product (using this method) and/or tool for making other software tamper-resistant? At no point does this patent prevent the tampering, nor circumvention of the not-quite-uncircumventable method. The legality of tampering is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously he's not too good at getting his message out, or we wouldn't be having this discussion ... (isn't that the -worst- thing you can do when you're a hostage-taker or a terrorist? not state your demands clearly enough?)
The way I understood it, he sees the US and other western powers as too willing to meddle in affairs that ought not be any of their business: imperialist powers, roving the globe in search of countries to abuse, setting up puppet states, using locals to fight wars for them, but caring nothing for the local populations. (Afghanistan, anyone? All of South America? Most of Africa? The cold war was a harsh mistress.) Under that model, all he'd really need to care about is causing us to doubt our power, implode, and stay at home. He wouldn't even have to care what we do once we're turned into a bunch of cowardly homebodies, it'd be enough that we'd leave him alone to do whatever he likes in his part of the world, whether that's setting up muslim governments or herding sheep.
But that's my reading of events. I think it's too easy to claim he's insane -- it's convenient to jump from the idea that no reason could justify killing, to the idea that there was no reason at all that we could have an effect on in the future. Denial, perhaps.
For those who missed it, Gamasutra's "Bad game designer, no twinkie!" article: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050603/adams_0 1.shtml
I agree with your logic that a better but imperfect system is still better than the old system; but people (particularly managers) seem to easily fall prey to the idea that whatever is better is automatically best, and that whatever is best, is automatically perfect. You can't let them forget that there are problems that still need to be solved, if iteratively. If you just let it go, they'll forget, and when problems creep up, they'll claim it's the first they've heard of them, and the whole cycle starts up again. So yes, go for a better system, but don't let anyone forget about the gaps that still need patching. If they can be patched now, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to go ahead and do that: you need to weigh the cost of delaying deployment of a single better solution against the cost of deploying several incrementally but marginally better solutions one after another, with conversion costs, etc.
But I still see it going the way every other project goes: managers will claim it's a perfect success, they'll ignore dire warnings, retire, and let later managers clean the mess up -- but they won't blame their predecessors, they'll say the problems are new, and collect their reward for fixing an old but ignored problem. And so forth, forever. Those who complain, meanwhile, get nothing. And if they're very lucky, they'll be blamed when someone makes use of the faults they pointed out -- because they helped the terrorists.
Either that, or I've got a bad case of the Mundays.
Veering off-topic, I have to say that I've been rather displeased with all the one-search systems out there. Picasa? One field to search by -- sure hope you don't mind searching both filenames and tags at the same time, 'cause you don't have a choice. All those nifty find-my-files tools that have come out recently have been similar. I'm sure it's the result of thinking that users can't be arsed to know the difference between a filename and the file's content (which likely isn't far from the truth) but ... still. Some 'advanced' modes would be nice. Many of the file types they are able to search are rather structured, and having the ability to search intelligently (find me all TIFF files where this particular TIFF property is -blah-) would be nice. But then I'm a DB guy anyway, and all I ever see are tables. Tables and fields. I'm so very sad when someone goes and mashes what looks like several tables, with lots of interesting fields, into a single search box. At least Google proper has some modifiers (link:, site:, etc.) that are slightly more intelligent. Deviant-Art has similar modifiers in the single-search box that allow you to search by image size ... but then you're asking random tech-unsavvy users to effectively use a command-line prompt, in a tiny box labeled "search", and they can't even ask for a --help right there ...
Quibble: wikipedia seems to me to operate on the principle that "truth" is whatever the latest person to care enough thought it was. Voting happens, but not at every edit, and it's more for the benefit of avoiding back-and-forth edit fights between people who can't agree. But it's certainly not a constant factor in all edits.
... help ... also implies they have a big incentive to stay in office. That could make them into better politicians, more in tune with the will of the people, or it could make them into lying, mud-slinging bastards -- what we currently call "politicians." I'm not sure it'd really help (either way.)
Paying politicians well enough that they won't seek outside
If you make your games infinitely replayable, will we really want to buy the new games you produce?
If you make your games play-once, there may be a secondary market, yes, but how long does it take before everyone's played the game, is done with it, and is ready for new stuff?
The current trend is your best bet, given the options that don't involve legislators.
Waste, fraud, corruption -- they don't always happen in lump sums. So admittedly, we can't expect every find (nor very many of them) to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But considering how much it probably cost them to just run the audit, and compared to the general budget, I'd have to guess this wasn't that great of a find (in terms of ROI and/or % originally wasted.) Yes, it's naughty, yes, it's great to find it ... but ... just considering I've watched local government workers use grants for bio-terrorism to purchase themselves PDA's and laptops because they wanted them (not really bothering to justify the purchases) ... or how often they just sit up there and play games and rip music in the sheriff's department (they're bored!) ... *sigh* ... or the time wasted by employees reading/writing slashdot while at work ... $88k? bah.
I realize this article is going to go stale soon now and prevent us from replying to each other, but I thought I'd point out a terminology difference that could be important:
- what you call freedom, I call ability (sometimes opportunity)
- what you call right, I call freedom
- what I call right, you don't seem to have a word for.
To me, freedom is what society tells you it won't punish you for. This is beyond the physical ability to do things, which you can't possibly lose (except, perhaps, by being locked up.) A right is a freedom society tells you it will never take away from you, and doesn't have the freedom to take away from you. ("Or else.")
The problem I see with your argument, then, is that you assume that freedom of speech is merely what you call freedom, that is, a basic ability not covered by law. But it's actually a freedom, even a right, in my sense -- the Constitution, our binding agreement, states that I have this freedom. Not merely that I had it, and nobody's touching it, but that society agrees that it shall stand the hell out of my way, or else I have permission to punish it for standing in my way. I think that's a big difference. It's not just unregulated, it's protected by law.
The classic phrase is "just because you -can- do something doesn't mean you -should- do something". I agree that, even with my own terms, you shouldn't do things you have the freedom to do just for the hell of it -- I have the [protected] freedom to commit suicide, but I don't do it purely because I have the freedom to. But I still don't think we can call freedom that which we're told not to do "or else". I'd in fact posit that's part of the definition of freedom. Obviously, mileage varies.
I appreciate that you agree with me, but I'm going to have to disagree with you.
Do you really have a freedom if you can't make use of it without it being taken away? Asking anyone to restrain themselves is pointless unless there's the force of law behind it, and the threat that the freedom they will have excercised will be taken away from them -- at which point it's no freedom at all.
As to morals, again, I must disagree. Laws have basis in force, not in morals and ethics. We do not rely on public shame nor personal contrition as deterrents; we use the threat of force, of punishment. The moral reasons behind our laws, if there are any, are separated from our actual laws by the democratic process. We enact laws on the basis of majority vote, and we do not include in the law the reasoning(s) that lead to those votes. At that point, the moral beliefs of those who voted on the laws fail to be translated into the laws themselves, which are purely objects of force -- primitive, violent devices with which we organize our society.
Our culture is stagnating between treating the symptom and the cause. We know that treating the cause is better than the symptom; we like the idea of prevention. But the easiest and most common path so far has involved blaming, punishing, and regulating the makers of devices and media which are thought to enable or induce criminal acts. We no longer believe in free will. A child can't help but kill people if he has access to a gun, if he plays a violent video game, if he watches an R-rated movie. It wasn't so long ago that governments believed in banning books thought to contain 'dangerous' ideas -- ideas that would inevitably lead people to take actions those governments disagreed with -- but you don't hear much about that these days. Now it's movies and games. (Seen any ESRB-like ratings on books recently?)
What happened to simply telling parents that they're responsible, until the age of 18, for their childrens' actions, and that it's up to them to do whatever's in their power to keep those kids out of trouble, including educating them on what is or isn't appropriate, regardless of what books, movies, or games may imply? If you don't want your kids to buy violent games, don't give them money. They don't need it. If you want to know whether a game is violent or not, don't ask the government to do your research for you. Pay private entities to do that.
So ... if we've already taken away *some* rights, then it's okay to continue taking away similar rights, and it's not okay for anyone to ever try to draw a line in the sand and say "no more"? You can't justify one oppression by another.
Assuming evolution (mutation + selection) and a limited amount of time, nothing guarantees that all plausible body models will be attempted. Not everything attempted gets fossilized. Not everything fossilized has been discovered. (Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)
I do remember coming across someone's research in re-evolving N-ped motion in simulations, partially for the purpose of doing computer graphics. Their simulations wound able to walk, run, turn, etc. in a way that looked perfectly natural (switching from walk to run and back again without missing a beat.) Perhaps the same can be (or has been) applied to 3-,5-,7-, etc. legged models to see what would happen, see how fast it could be, etc. Then again, dogs who've lost a leg can still walk, albeit a little oddly. Same with spiders. A 5-legged creature could probably, at the very least, act like a four-legged creature with an extra, useless appendage.
[I'm making the assumption that I'm not the only one to run across obscure bugs in apps, and also not the only one to scour the intarweb looking for that one random forum post with the solution.]
On the other side, you have overly-common names like "Word" and "Publisher" that make google searches ineffective because they're so easily confused with (un)related nouns. The same can be true of overly-short names (C language). I cringe when I think of mainframe job names (MKRUN12BO), but there are times it would be really handy for the purposes of online searches to have quasi-unique names for programs -- not common words, not cute mythical names, not names pulled from a dead language, not names from a work of fiction, and certainly not names that require you to consistently use the vendor's name or the product's purpose in your searches (and hope that everyone else included those in their forum postings.)
Lower prices, yes, or make the new games so much better than the previous ones that gamers will have no choice (so to speak) but buy the latest. Or create a culture in which playing old games is seen as lame. (Sadly for them, the culture's common-sense wisdom is that old, retro games are still more fun to play than new games -- that's gonna make it difficult.) Whether there's a secondary market or not, their sales are driven by our desire to have their new products. Suggestion: make new products more appealing. I can't find good multiplayer console games, for example. We want to play them, but we're bored of racing games, I don't like fighting games, and we don't like sports games. What's left? Lego Star Wars?
... that's not likely either.
They could also try making games so replayable that no gamer would ever want to get rid of a game once purchased -- but that would be unlikely to improve sales of new games. They could also make games so short that people go through them like, uh, candy -- buy game, play game, sell game, all in the space of a week or month. Even with a secondary market, those games would quickly fade out of existance once everyone's played them. But you'd have to lower the prices for this to be of any interest, and
Solution? Increase the cost of primary-market games, get all your profit for the next ten years out of the way, and then stop making games. We'll probably all be better off.
Think about it, if adults don't have access to porn so they can wank off in the peace of their own private space, they will probably go out and seek ways of getting off that are more harmful to others.
Thankfully, prostitution (a sort of middle-ground that isn't per se harmful) is still widely available legally.
Oh wait.
The 'science' teacher I had (hi there, Dr. Keas!) left open the possibility of panspermia in that he defended ID in terms of a lack of evidence -- the fossil chain *here* may be lacking, but maybe elsewhere, things would be different. Maybe our true homeworld would have a clear history showing how things came to be. No, I don't agree with that, yes, ID arguments often state that the cell-level structures could never have evolved (not just that we don't see how, but that it's impossible.) But I have heard it taught in such a way that it *sounds* more open-minded (but isn't.) And then there was the "habitable zone" math (at the solar-system, galaxy, and possible-universal-constants levels) ... bad memories.
And yes, the whole issue is over history -- religion relies on authority, and authority most often relies on a chain of authority, ergo history. We know X is true because Y told us, and Y knew it was true because Z said so, all the way back to first-hand experience. If history were to be false, religion would be false. Inasmuch as they believe scientists to be making statements of truth about history, they have a problem with it. This is the same religion, mind you, that has also proudly displayed scientific discoveries as proving how ingenious and beautiful God is -- science itself is not always their enemy.
You cannot test for the existence of God, a pre-requisite for ID (otherwise, to what does "intelligence" refer in the title?).
Aliens. I kid you not. When I've heard this taught (in my intro-to-science class at a religious university) it was made clear that "intelligent design" doesn't refer to a particular source of the design, only that it is intelligent, as opposed to mindless (that is, evolution.) It could be aliens, it could be a previous civilization of humans, it could be a trans-dimensional spaghetti monster -- they don't care. ID itself doesn't set out to prove what it is, only that evolution is wrong (on the grounds that it is impossible) in order to set the stage for a later debate (once ID is accepted) as to which intelligent designer makes most sense. At that point, yes, their goal is to prove that their god (as opposed to aliens or anyone else's god) is the intelligent designer. Slightly before that, their goal is to give people who already believe in creationism a way of saying "well, this ID stuff is -compatible- with what I believe, and sounds convincing to me, so I'm okay." Not "true", just "compatible".
The jury is purely a finder of fact
And then there's jury nullification, which nobody wants you to know about.
You can't just label content as anonymous or not and expect that to be sufficient.
- Users will need to know that you actively intend for them to trust anonymous content less than non-anonymous content, but
- Users will need to know that even though you have now created two classes of content, and anonymous content is explicitly not to be trusted, non-anonymous content is still not guaranteed. One is to be trusted less than the other, but neither are to be trusted. Named content can very much still be wrong, can it not? It's a murky distinction, you'll just confuse people with it.
- The offensive material will still be present, and just as hard to regulate. You can vaguely help things by making anonymous content invisible by default, hoping that users are lazy and that anyone who cares enough to look at the anonymous content will also know better than to trust it blindly. But the libel is still happening, and those smeared by it have just as much right to be unhappy about it, and they'll complain that it's available even if invisible by default.
So really, it comes down to a social problem, not a technological one. People are still too willing to trust anonymous content. A technological solution on Wikipedia doesn't come close to solving the general problem on the internet -- people are just far too trusting.
It's really annoying that companies seem to advertise jobs only for the latest-and-greatest programming languages / toolsets. We've been working on a long-term project for, what, four or five years now -- mostly C++, with a wee bit of php for some online help stuff. So we have experience with C++, php, database work, large projects, custom file formats, etc. Great. But no .NET experience, no java experience, and we've never had a use for XML -- and we're not going to shoehorn those technologies into our project for the hell of it (getting experience we can show on our resume). We're not going to start over with new technologies, just when the project is maturing. It's frustrating. Companies seem to fail to understand that a lot of us aren't code monkeys -- we can move from one language to another in a matter of days or weeks, given a little time to read up on the topic. We can learn new libraries and new tools quite quickly, given the chance. Yet they are determined to find people who already know it all (even their own in-house apps) so they can just drop them in and have productivity. Did we spoil them with the plug'n'play concept?
... yeah.)
And then there's the part where they ignore your domain-specific knowledge: no, you've not coded that type of app in that language before, but you -have- coded that type of app in another language, for a similar company, with similar purposes, and you know what to expect. Too bad, nobody cares. (And it seems much, much harder to go down to the bookstore and buy a book about an industry, that explains how everything ties together, than to buy a language-specific book. And users? They don't know the whole picture. You'll have to talk to every damn person there, and then sort through the lies and misconceptions to get down to what you need to know. And then you won't document it, and
[/rant]
The social world has inertia, though watching fashion shows, you'd be hard-pressed to prove it. People take forever to change their opinions on such things, but conforming to the existing de-facto standard only reinforces it, making change take even longer. Every IT worker I know understands that people feel this way about dress -- and that it's stupid. Yet they'll continue to please customers, customers won't be exposed to different dress, and will never come to associate good service with awkward dress, just as they won't associate good service with tattoos (because they're hidden), abnormal hair (again, hidden or prohibited), etc. People will only associate good service with the 'business look', and will jump to conclusions about otherwise-groomed/dressed/modified service providers.
No business is going to take a chance on this for the sake of re-educating the public. And the social norm doesn't change as quickly as generations die off -- your parents may die, but the habits and stereotypes they gave you will be with you, and your children, and even your grandchildren, long after. Every generation overlaps with several others, and we all try to cater to each other. (Which is why I fail to understand political leaders who think there's actually a risk of society suddenly changing itself to be radically more or less permissive. What's actually happening is merely a question of threshholds as people get fed up with pretending.)
Among the ideas Kehoe has already mocked up are a finger paint that fades from every surface except a special paper
Haven't I been seeing a commercial recently for something similar from Crayon? Kids can color on the paper, but not on carpet, tables, etc.? Is it at all related, or coincidental?
The thought springs to mind that PHP, as it happens, would be uniquely suited to working with the hypotethical XML databases, due to its rather particular concept of arrays. As many of us undoubtely know, a PHP array can be used to contain a tree of arbitrary shape and size, and with nodes of arbitrary types. A native, 1-on-1 match to an XML tree.
Welcome to post-relational, multi-dimensional databases! The wave of the future! Purchase Caché today!
[Caché is the latest in a long line of M/Mumps 'global' database products, where arrays are nested in arrays recursively, with data strewn about the structure. Like PHP. Only with SQL, too. Yesterday's hierarchical database, today. I'm no fan. Others are.]
So ... would you complain if cop cars seems to mysteriously always be nearby when you were speeding?
Do you object to cops monitoring your speed?
Would you object to an increase in police personnel to do this same job?
Do you object to automatic ticketing?
Do you object to the notion of guilty until appealed? (tickets are like this)
Do you object to the entire notion of speed limits?
Do you object to spending this much money on speed limit enforcement? Any money?
Do you object to the excessive proportional allocation of funds for this?
Do you object to the road work this will require, and the associated traffic?
While there's obviously some discomfort with the notion of having cameras tracking our vehicles all over the place, I'm not seeing the 'why' pinned down precisely. When out in public, you expose yourself to scrutiny -- whether by passers-by, cameras, car-tracking systems, etc. The UK measure is extreme, yes, but we're talking about the automation and scaling-up of existing abilities, not new ones. They could have posted cops every quarter-mile, and hoped they could read and remember plate numbers as well as an electronic system. There would be the same implications in terms of their ability to ticket you, track you, find a stolen (or not) vehicle, etc. but without the technology.
Don't misunderstand me: I get a creepy feeling from this too. And I'm all about revolutions. But it's best to have clearly defined principles first. A new government would need to be limited appropriately, or the same thing would eventually happen again.
It occurs to me that asking a bunch of pro-open-source geeks how to best maintain control over closed-source code in an sub-ideal environment is perhaps not the best idea ever. In fact, I would suggest that you double-check any answers you get here, as, for all you know, they're purposefully sub-par solutions designed to lull you into a false sense of security so the code can be more easily nabbed.
Don't you mean it makes it illegal for anyone else to build a tamper-resistant software product (using this method) and/or tool for making other software tamper-resistant? At no point does this patent prevent the tampering, nor circumvention of the not-quite-uncircumventable method. The legality of tampering is irrelevant.