You raise some interesting points. First you try to draw a distinction between physical deformity (maiming as I used in the earlier post) and advantage. Now I would claim from a relative point a view a person is an extremly advanced form of primate (or whatever the common ancestor was). Yet a person who due to some birth defect was reduced to the level of intellectual capacity of a simple primate was physically deformed and would deserve medical treatment to bring him up to 'normal.'
The point of this is the difference between adding an advantage and fixing a deformity is merely one or population mean. If I am raising someone above the mean I am adding an advantage otherwise I am fixing a problem. In my opinion it seems very strange to draw an arbitrary moral line here and say one of these is wrong and the other is correct.
As for the second part I may not have made my argument clear enough. I claim people have unduly negative reactions to genetic engineering because they FEAR obselescence. They will not BE worthless but your gut reaction to someone who is faster smarter and stronger is to feel inferior.
The point of the genetic engineering is not to "win" against others but merely to make our lives better in some sense. Improved eyesight makes life better whether or not others have it as well. I would argue the same goes for increased intelligenve (we are not playing a zero sum game).
In response to your final argument let me present the following example. Two men are each given large red buttons. The first man is told that if he pushes the button bill gates will die. The second is told that bill gates will die unless he presses the button. Now, regardless of what you think the moral answer here is, I hold that both men are equally culpable (the situation is entierly symetric).
Katz suggests that people will try to have cheerful pliant children. While they may try it is very possible that even specifying the genetic code you may get VERY differnt personalities (think seperated twin studies). In addition people don't necesserily want pliant children, they want children who are like they were (live vicarously through your children) cloning is a far more likely danger here then the pliant children issue.
(although given the sex biases in the US you might see everyone trying to engineer good looking but otherwise lacking daughters. Slashdotters need to band together for the good of the next generation and produce daughters genetically engineered for coding)
There are many moral issues to genetic engineering (Katz mentioned several) such as wether only certain people have the benifit and what insurance companies may do with the data. However the on complete non-issue is whether it is a good idea to genetically engineer the species (we still need to be careful we do it well but we should definatly improve ourselves).
What would you do if someone told you not to attend college as you were changing yourself. You would laugh at them no? Why isn't the same issue true with genetic engineering?
Because people are afraid they will be obsoleted! As long as their aren't designer babies I can convince myself I am valuable for who I am. As soon as a man appears who is better looking smarter faster etc.. what do I have left. In addition it also attacks our egotism by PROVING we are not special but just strings of genetic code. Just like the Copernican model of the solar system genetic engineering will not be rejected because it is moral wrong but because accepting it is too much for our ego's and our power structures to bear.
In fact we have a DUTY to genetically engineer our children as soon as it is safe. Standing by and lettting someone be maimed is nearly as bad as maiming them ourselves. Every instant we have the technology but don't use it we are effectively maiming our children. Whether it be in terms of the greater intelligence perfect eyesight or stronger bodies by not granting them these things we are hurthing them
Finally this is an interesting issue but couldn't it have been presented in two paragraphs?
I am unfamiliar with the blackdown project so I don't know what liscense they use. However, did the sun team release an open source tool (i.e. the source code is still freely modifiable) and just not give proper credit or did they actually make it proprietary? If the first is the case don't jump on them too hard yet. The fact that the names of the developers is in the README is a good sign. This might have just been a marketing screw up (maybe whoever wrote the announcment didn't know anything about this). Besides it is a good thing if Sun puts its name behind an open source project (it gives it more credibility) of course they should have given proper credit (and should be urged to do so).
The later (making the code proprietary) is more worrying and of course (whether you like it or not) is what the GPL is designed to protect against. Of course some developers don't mind this and hence release their code under differnt liscences (their choice).
Yes, so no name artists aren't compensated for sales of their work over the internet. This doesn't seem to be a huge lose for most of them (average of 1/2 a CD per artist as quoted in the article). They are effectively selling the rights to their music in return for exposure. This is no differnt then the relatively common practice of submitting articles to magazines free of charge or with very little recompensation.
I heard some things about implanting electronic eyes before but they were incredibly bad resolution (4 pixels) have they improved this?
Secondly does he see the same colors we do? The human eye distingushes color by only three components (RGB) rather then the full frequency spectrum (hence why you can differnt wavelenghts to get similar colors).
There are plenty of examples of cases this isn't true (for instance cameras expose as greenish in florescent lights. If it is still a very small resolution infared might be more useful to distingush people and so forth.
The less developed a country is the more likely it is to participate in enviornmentally poor activities (excepting countries to poor to have significant industrial infrastructure). Once people are feed and sheltered only they do they start worrying about protecting the forest and the trees and the ozone layer.
Hence in order to reduce enviornmental degradation help third world countries become richer. How? Open up trade so factories can reloacte there and take advantage of labour!!
Explain to me why if it will deystroy local economies will these countries sign the treaty? If they are perfectly content not trading freely with the outside world then they don't have to.
So lets suppose that WalMart 'siphons' money away from bangladesh. This means that people in Bangladesh are buying walmart products. It seems to me that if they are more total goods and we are getting some little slips of paper (or promises to pay little slips of paper) the people there are happier (you can't eat paper). MONEY IS A RED HERRING!! all that matters is where the goods are and who gets the goods.
Secondly many of the human rights cries are actually disguised pleas from US unions to protect there monopoly on certain products at the expense of third world countries!! IF these people didn't want to work at the exported plant then they just wouldn't....the fact that they work in the factory is proof of the fact that they prefer to do this over what they were doing before (or at least enough of them do to change the economy).
Look if Nike opens up a plant in country X they certainly don't get out guns and force people to work there. People work there because they think it is better than doing whatever it was they were doing before (subsistance farming or being unemployed). By droping trade barriers we merely give them more options...they could still choose to trade only amoungst themselves with no harm (in principle).
All this going on about decent wages for third world countries is just a clever way to say "we don't want to lost american jobs." If this actually hurt third world countries they wouldn't sign the treaty would they?
Secondly, and this is the biggest misconception of them all, is that it doesn't screw america. Suppose some american jobs get exported oversees...this means that the people overseas can produce this product cheaper then we can. Hence we can buy more of the product. Some american workers might lost their jobs but someone else will hire them (the number of people with good job records who are actively looking but cannot find jobs is almost minimal). Thus america produces just as much as we did before AND we get more products shipped in from overseas. We are a richer country and workers can buy things cheaper.
My question is why do people insist in believing simplistic arguments about the economy (which is an extremly complicated system) when they wouldn't do the same thing for the weather or anything else (in fact the economy is probably deceptive to analyze as people intuitivly think of money as having fixed value when the amount of goods a dollar can buy varies). I realize I run the danger of being hypocritical, however, most experts seem to believe that lowering tariffs is a positive step.
(this is not meant to imply anything about the previous post he was merely stating an opion the comment was more directed at society in general)
Unfortunatly the protest was not about the power of corporations. It was fueled to a great degree by labour unions wishing to protect their industries in advanced countries at the cost of third world workers and the wealth of all countries including the working class in all countries!
Yes, this treaty will help third world countries (they aren't signing it just to give money to america). Sure some sweat shops might spring up but people work in these sweat shops b/c it is better than what they have without the sweat shops in all but a few countries they are not forced to join the sweatshops.
Yes it will help even the working class in the US as we get more goods at cheaper prices. If steel jobs go oversees this is because steel will be produced cheaper there. This means we will get steel cheaper and more jobs will open up here doing what americans are more efficent at doing than foreign workers. Heck worse comes to worse open up the WTO and decrease the tax rate on those who earn less and increase it on those who earn more. The WTO makes the pie bigger for EVERY country so with proper governmental policy no one should be left out to dry.
For more in depth discussion read this informative salon article.
To some extent a designer must take into account human factors (it would be a poor idea to design a program requiring the user to memorize a 1024 bit key pair...he would merely write it down). However, most security products rely on authenticating the user in some fashion. Until some sort of biomatic information gathering device becomes widely availible (and still there are problems using this to authenticate over an untrusted network) the software designet is stuck using passwords in SOME manner. With almost any security product this is the week link and there is not much the software designer can do about this.
The primary argument for free trade is that of specilization. Perhaps the Japenese can make cars cheaper then we can and we can make wheat cheaper than they can. If there are significant tariffs we will end up making cars for ourselves and they will end up making wheat for themselves. In the case without tarriffs we make the wheat and they make the cars for everyone. Thus the same amount of goods are produced but less resources are consumed in making them hence everyone is better off. In addition having one large world market vs. many seperate markets allows economies of scale to kick in further benifiting the world at large.
>The fudamnetal flaw of capitalism, IMHO, is that the philosophy it springs from does not realize that it is in the selfish (best) interest of everyone to cooperate with >everyone else.
But capitalism does NOT prevent cooperation...it merely says you are free to compete. If people wanted to organize themselves into communes in a captilistic systems they can. For instance kibbitzs (?) in isreal. The fact that people in fact do not act this way is in some sense proof that people aren't ready for a fully cooperative society.
Secondly even in non-capitlistic situations (say research scientists with tenure) there is still plenty of competion for recognition or other such non-monetary values.
In response to the maize farmers it is true that they may be put out of a job but this is precisely because they farm maize extremly inefficently compared to american farmers. So certainly if trade barriers were immediatly droped tomorrow the sudden shit would hurt this third world nation. However if the barriers are droped slowly (especially if the rich countries drop them first although this seems unliekly) (and the WTO doesn't look like it is going to drop all tarriffs immediatly) the maize farmers will transfer into some other sort of jobs (working at a nike plant or some such) thus because maize is cheaper now they will have more maize in the country in addition to faster industrilization by the location of factories in their country.
The WTO doesn't seem to stop workers from organizing or even coutries from passing laws preventing sweatshops and the like. Certainly sweatshops are a bad idea but if the WTO has provisions to somehow penalize countries with sweatshops this will be used by rich countries to justify tariffs against these countries.
As is clear from looking at the history of the US and England sweatshops occur in developing countries whether or not they are competing against developed nations. These sweatshops then tend to disappear as the level of affluence rises to the point that the workers are no longer extremly dependent on the companies (in a poor enough country a workers strike will bring minimal results). Thus by placing tarriffs on a devloping country we could very well be hurting there industrialization and hence prolonging the period of poor workers rights.
In principle an *appropriate* policy could convince the developing nations to have better labour standards in return for no tarriffs, however, such a policy is too likely to be abused by industrial nations which have a large voter block that is scared of competition from these countries. In addition it might make the WTO unpallatable to these developing countries thus obstructing its ennactment and increasing labour abuses.
The enviornmental claims may have some merit but I was saying that any real issue their is getting buried under slogans and unions protesting the decline of their power.
The attack tree idea seems like something which would be best provided to a company by their security vendor. Suppose I sell products to encrypt a companies valuable secrets now it is to my benifit that companies who buy my product don't get hacked etc.. even if it isn't the fault of my product. Thus it becomes my job to improve the security model of the company I sell to. Providing them with attack trees (maybe in software form) is probably a good way to convince them that using 1 billion bit encryption isn't sufficent if the executive keeps the passphrase in his desk drawer.
However, it doesn't seem very useful to the designer of a security product. Any security product needs to be used properly in order to be effective hence most of the social engineering routes on the attack tree are irrelevant to the designer of the software (he cannot control what people do with their passphrases). An attack tree of bugs in the program isn't as helpful because a succesful attack is always one which is unanticipated.
If you realize their is a danger of buffer overflow you add code to prevent the overflow hence at release the developers should always think any route on the attack tree is impossible (in theory the code CAN be safe (unlikely in practice) unlike the implementation of the scheme (people can always be blackmailed etc..) ). Of course a properly designed modular cryptographic program would probably distrust results from its own subroutines (check against faulty returns from your own procedures just as you do against user input) but the attack tree seems to add nothing to this.
The WTO has many many good points and several very troubling points such as patent issues and the ever increasing power of corporations. Unfortunatly this protest distracts attention from the real issues and focuses them on the non-issues of unionized labour and 'workers rights.' The violence involved makes it even worse, no one will take seriously the intellectual property concerns after this.
For the record I call the labour concerns irrelevant because at heart of the matter all that is important is how much stuff the workers recieve. Lowering tarriffs can only increase the total amount of goods in a country (more goods enter the nation) and while some citizens may be demoted to lesser jobs a fluid job market will guarantee everyone is still employed and hence the country has more goods in total.
So the net effect of trade barriers is to favor organized labour at the expense of the rest of the country. While you might feel that working class people deserve more money this could easily be accomplished by increasing federal aid to those who don't make much money. Increasing this aid would accomplish the goal of makeing sure the working class are not impoverished while not reducing the total amount of goods in the country.
On the other hand the WTO's seemingly strong stance on intellectual property might restrict the adoption of new/more efficent technology thereby making the world as a whole a less wealthy place (yes I realize IP is necessery to encourage innovation the trick is striking the right balance). But this issue will now be ignored.
As I understand the fear is that hacked napster clients will be able to report incorrectly what mp3's I have availible. But what prevents me from merely creating files of the appropriate size filled with random bytes?
It would appear that it is easier to fool the napster program in such a manner rather than messing with the source. Everyone can make a file not everyone can code a client.
Secondly who are they scared of? Even script kiddies probably have something better to do than falsely posting mp3's. If it is groups such as the RIAA flooding the server to make it unusable....well they could certainly reverse engineer the client just as well as I can.
Thridly while in this case the client seemed to be easily reverse engineerable security through obscurity is not impossible. If you capture a piece of my own private code the fact that you are unsure of the algorithm renders it difficult to decode (Re: those papers supposedly detailing buried gold in virginia where only one has been decrypted). Sure it isn't as secure as a well tested publicly availible algorithm but if your intent is to hide the actions of an algorithm your choices are limited.
Hell if security through obscurity never worked the wine project would be done.
I really can't blame you as I have done the same thing myself but this posting of empty but ontopic first posts is kinda stupid. If you actually have something to say and get a first post good. Otherwise it just has more style to go for the real first post. Your an AC anyway so why do you care?
I figured someone on slashdot might know the answer to this.
How predetermined is out number of senses and limbs? If I was to implant some device like this into my brain would it always a) feel unnatural b) necesserily interfere with the movement of my arm or c) eventually behave entierly unconciously just like the movement of my arm does now.
Is the same true of senses? If I attached a little I/O port into my brain would it eventually be integrated as a 6th sense or are out brains to preprogramed for this to happen?
Would the answers be differnt is we implanted the devices in utero?
I believe that the trophic factor (encourages nueral development around the implant) is what is proprietary. It was not at all clear from the article that the scientist involved held the patent to the trophic substance. The implant is an extremly simple broadcaster of nueral activity.
This kind of opposition to human improvments is as pervasive as it is strange. In the US at least their is some sort of weird moral structure that says it is okay to "fix defects" but not to improve healthy people. These sorts of attitudes seem to be holding back research a great deal. What if their were no quadrapalegics to benifit from this sort of technology then it might never have been developed. Perhaps without this strange restriction we would have drugs improving the memory and intelligence of the population as a whole.
Unfortunatly modern american government is turning out to be government byt the lobbying group. The administration would never create a checklist that appeared to target women or hispanics even if they accounted for a majority of school crimes.
As it is colombine was statisticalyy insignificat. I believe about 12 people die (or maybe are injured) in school shootings every day across the US.
The reason that "geek" children are targeted is that their is no lobbying group with enough power to protect them. The clear answer is to create a group which represents engineers/scientists politically. Given the general wealth of these profesions and the power they weild considerable change could be enacted.
I understand this company is giving kickbacks or the promise of free use of the results to Icelanders in return for this right.
If they start selling your info to insurance companies they breech a contract they had with your government and you can probably throw them in jail just like you could if your doctor started selling your medical records.
The insurance rep issue just really isn't unique. Eventually some insurance company will begin offering extremly low insurance if you DON'T have a history of heart disease in your family and these people will be more than happy to hand over records to prove this. Eventually competition will drive the price of insurance for people who don't open their records to insane values. Eventually the solutioni will have to be either a) let some people die (bad idea) or b) government guaranteed health care
Technically yes and the same thing could be said about copyright. Except the industry which holds copyrights has gotten extremly powerful. An interesting trend is that whenever the original disney copyright for mickey mouse etc... is about to expire the copyright term is extended (yes for both new copyrights and old copyrights).
This extension of copyright clearly serves no public benifit (these works have already been created so reatroactively extending the copyright doesn't encourage the production of new works) and yet it is enacted! If the biotech industry became large enough such a scenario is possible (tho less likely because of competition within the industry).
For further information about the copyright term extension act and efforts to fight it visit copyright commmons
Teachers knowing about current events is nice but it is no substitute for them knowing their material. FIRST learn the subject you are going to teach well and then, if possible, learn about current events.
Too often teachers will "study up" on current events gaining a vague understanding (in a difficult area like physics) which helps their students no more than being told to read magazines. If instead the teachers could actually master NEWTONIAN mechanics (developed several hundred years ago) it would be a much better world. Merely pluging numbers into formulas is not sufficent.
Only in very rare cases (some CS classes) is this nescessery. Besides C++ has been around for a long damn time. Just make sure the teachers know their shit before you let them teach!
Slashdot Mirror
You raise some interesting points. First you try to draw a distinction between physical deformity (maiming as I used in the earlier post) and advantage. Now I would claim from a relative point a view a person is an extremly advanced form of primate (or whatever the common ancestor was). Yet a person who due to some birth defect was reduced to the level of intellectual capacity of a simple primate was physically deformed and would deserve medical treatment to bring him up to 'normal.'
The point of this is the difference between adding an advantage and fixing a deformity is merely one or population mean. If I am raising someone above the mean I am adding an advantage otherwise I am fixing a problem. In my opinion it seems very strange to draw an arbitrary moral line here and say one of these is wrong and the other is correct.
As for the second part I may not have made my argument clear enough. I claim people have unduly negative reactions to genetic engineering because they FEAR obselescence. They will not BE worthless but your gut reaction to someone who is faster smarter and stronger is to feel inferior.
The point of the genetic engineering is not to "win" against others but merely to make our lives better in some sense. Improved eyesight makes life better whether or not others have it as well. I would argue the same goes for increased intelligenve (we are not playing a zero sum game).
In response to your final argument let me present the following example. Two men are each given large red buttons. The first man is told that if he pushes the button bill gates will die. The second is told that bill gates will die unless he presses the button. Now, regardless of what you think the moral answer here is, I hold that both men are equally culpable (the situation is entierly symetric).
Katz suggests that people will try to have cheerful pliant children. While they may try it is very possible that even specifying the genetic code you may get VERY differnt personalities (think seperated twin studies). In addition people don't necesserily want pliant children, they want children who are like they were (live vicarously through your children) cloning is a far more likely danger here then the pliant children issue.
(although given the sex biases in the US you might see everyone trying to engineer good looking but otherwise lacking daughters. Slashdotters need to band together for the good of the next generation and produce daughters genetically engineered for coding)
There are many moral issues to genetic engineering (Katz mentioned several) such as wether only certain people have the benifit and what insurance companies may do with the data. However the on complete non-issue is whether it is a good idea to genetically engineer the species (we still need to be careful we do it well but we should definatly improve ourselves).
What would you do if someone told you not to attend college as you were changing yourself. You would laugh at them no? Why isn't the same issue true with genetic engineering?
Because people are afraid they will be obsoleted! As long as their aren't designer babies I can convince myself I am valuable for who I am. As soon as a man appears who is better looking smarter faster etc.. what do I have left. In addition it also attacks our egotism by PROVING we are not special but just strings of genetic code. Just like the Copernican model of the solar system genetic engineering will not be rejected because it is moral wrong but because accepting it is too much for our ego's and our power structures to bear.
In fact we have a DUTY to genetically engineer our children as soon as it is safe. Standing by and lettting someone be maimed is nearly as bad as maiming them ourselves. Every instant we have the technology but don't use it we are effectively maiming our children. Whether it be in terms of the greater intelligence perfect eyesight or stronger bodies by not granting them these things we are hurthing them
Finally this is an interesting issue but couldn't it have been presented in two paragraphs?
I am unfamiliar with the blackdown project so I don't know what liscense they use. However, did the sun team release an open source tool (i.e. the source code is still freely modifiable) and just not give proper credit or did they actually make it proprietary? If the first is the case don't jump on them too hard yet. The fact that the names of the developers is in the README is a good sign. This might have just been a marketing screw up (maybe whoever wrote the announcment didn't know anything about this). Besides it is a good thing if Sun puts its name behind an open source project (it gives it more credibility) of course they should have given proper credit (and should be urged to do so).
The later (making the code proprietary) is more worrying and of course (whether you like it or not) is what the GPL is designed to protect against. Of course some developers don't mind this and hence release their code under differnt liscences (their choice).
Yes, so no name artists aren't compensated for sales of their work over the internet. This doesn't seem to be a huge lose for most of them (average of 1/2 a CD per artist as quoted in the article). They are effectively selling the rights to their music in return for exposure. This is no differnt then the relatively common practice of submitting articles to magazines free of charge or with very little recompensation.
I heard some things about implanting electronic eyes before but they were incredibly bad resolution (4 pixels) have they improved this?
Secondly does he see the same colors we do? The human eye distingushes color by only three components (RGB) rather then the full frequency spectrum (hence why you can differnt wavelenghts to get similar colors).
There are plenty of examples of cases this isn't true (for instance cameras expose as greenish in florescent lights. If it is still a very small resolution infared might be more useful to distingush people and so forth.
Interesting observation:
The less developed a country is the more likely it is to participate in enviornmentally poor activities (excepting countries to poor to have significant industrial infrastructure). Once people are feed and sheltered only they do they start worrying about protecting the forest and the trees and the ozone layer.
Hence in order to reduce enviornmental degradation help third world countries become richer. How? Open up trade so factories can reloacte there and take advantage of labour!!
ohh and BEFORE the seattle issue the WTO had already opened committess to look into enviornmental issues because nations had expressed concern
Explain to me why if it will deystroy local economies will these countries sign the treaty? If they are perfectly content not trading freely with the outside world then they don't have to.
So lets suppose that WalMart 'siphons' money away from bangladesh. This means that people in Bangladesh are buying walmart products. It seems to me that if they are more total goods and we are getting some little slips of paper (or promises to pay little slips of paper) the people there are happier (you can't eat paper). MONEY IS A RED HERRING!! all that matters is where the goods are and who gets the goods.
Secondly many of the human rights cries are actually disguised pleas from US unions to protect there monopoly on certain products at the expense of third world countries!! IF these people didn't want to work at the exported plant then they just wouldn't....the fact that they work in the factory is proof of the fact that they prefer to do this over what they were doing before (or at least enough of them do to change the economy).
Look if Nike opens up a plant in country X they certainly don't get out guns and force people to work there. People work there because they think it is better than doing whatever it was they were doing before (subsistance farming or being unemployed). By droping trade barriers we merely give them more options...they could still choose to trade only amoungst themselves with no harm (in principle).
All this going on about decent wages for third world countries is just a clever way to say "we don't want to lost american jobs." If this actually hurt third world countries they wouldn't sign the treaty would they?
Secondly, and this is the biggest misconception of them all, is that it doesn't screw america. Suppose some american jobs get exported oversees...this means that the people overseas can produce this product cheaper then we can. Hence we can buy more of the product. Some american workers might lost their jobs but someone else will hire them (the number of people with good job records who are actively looking but cannot find jobs is almost minimal). Thus america produces just as much as we did before AND we get more products shipped in from overseas. We are a richer country and workers can buy things cheaper.
My question is why do people insist in believing simplistic arguments about the economy (which is an extremly complicated system) when they wouldn't do the same thing for the weather or anything else (in fact the economy is probably deceptive to analyze as people intuitivly think of money as having fixed value when the amount of goods a dollar can buy varies). I realize I run the danger of being hypocritical, however, most experts seem to believe that lowering tariffs is a positive step.
(this is not meant to imply anything about the previous post he was merely stating an opion the comment was more directed at society in general)
Unfortunatly the protest was not about the power of corporations. It was fueled to a great degree by labour unions wishing to protect their industries in advanced countries at the cost of third world workers and the wealth of all countries including the working class in all countries!
Yes, this treaty will help third world countries (they aren't signing it just to give money to america). Sure some sweat shops might spring up but people work in these sweat shops b/c it is better than what they have without the sweat shops in all but a few countries they are not forced to join the sweatshops.
Yes it will help even the working class in the US as we get more goods at cheaper prices. If steel jobs go oversees this is because steel will be produced cheaper there. This means we will get steel cheaper and more jobs will open up here doing what americans are more efficent at doing than foreign workers. Heck worse comes to worse open up the WTO and decrease the tax rate on those who earn less and increase it on those who earn more. The WTO makes the pie bigger for EVERY country so with proper governmental policy no one should be left out to dry.
For more in depth discussion read this informative salon article.
To some extent a designer must take into account human factors (it would be a poor idea to design a program requiring the user to memorize a 1024 bit key pair...he would merely write it down). However, most security products rely on authenticating the user in some fashion. Until some sort of biomatic information gathering device becomes widely availible (and still there are problems using this to authenticate over an untrusted network) the software designet is stuck using passwords in SOME manner. With almost any security product this is the week link and there is not much the software designer can do about this.
The primary argument for free trade is that of specilization. Perhaps the Japenese can make cars cheaper then we can and we can make wheat cheaper than they can. If there are significant tariffs we will end up making cars for ourselves and they will end up making wheat for themselves. In the case without tarriffs we make the wheat and they make the cars for everyone. Thus the same amount of goods are produced but less resources are consumed in making them hence everyone is better off. In addition having one large world market vs. many seperate markets allows economies of scale to kick in further benifiting the world at large.
>The fudamnetal flaw of capitalism, IMHO, is that the philosophy it springs from does not realize that it is in the selfish (best) interest of everyone to cooperate with
>everyone else.
But capitalism does NOT prevent cooperation...it merely says you are free to compete. If people wanted to organize themselves into communes in a captilistic systems they can. For instance kibbitzs (?) in isreal. The fact that people in fact do not act this way is in some sense proof that people aren't ready for a fully cooperative society.
Secondly even in non-capitlistic situations (say research scientists with tenure) there is still plenty of competion for recognition or other such non-monetary values.
In response to the maize farmers it is true that they may be put out of a job but this is precisely because they farm maize extremly inefficently compared to american farmers. So certainly if trade barriers were immediatly droped tomorrow the sudden shit would hurt this third world nation. However if the barriers are droped slowly (especially if the rich countries drop them first although this seems unliekly) (and the WTO doesn't look like it is going to drop all tarriffs immediatly) the maize farmers will transfer into some other sort of jobs (working at a nike plant or some such) thus because maize is cheaper now they will have more maize in the country in addition to faster industrilization by the location of factories in their country.
The WTO doesn't seem to stop workers from organizing or even coutries from passing laws preventing sweatshops and the like. Certainly sweatshops are a bad idea but if the WTO has provisions to somehow penalize countries with sweatshops this will be used by rich countries to justify tariffs against these countries.
As is clear from looking at the history of the US and England sweatshops occur in developing countries whether or not they are competing against developed nations. These sweatshops then tend to disappear as the level of affluence rises to the point that the workers are no longer extremly dependent on the companies (in a poor enough country a workers strike will bring minimal results). Thus by placing tarriffs on a devloping country we could very well be hurting there industrialization and hence prolonging the period of poor workers rights.
In principle an *appropriate* policy could convince the developing nations to have better labour standards in return for no tarriffs, however, such a policy is too likely to be abused by industrial nations which have a large voter block that is scared of competition from these countries. In addition it might make the WTO unpallatable to these developing countries thus obstructing its ennactment and increasing labour abuses.
The enviornmental claims may have some merit but I was saying that any real issue their is getting buried under slogans and unions protesting the decline of their power.
The attack tree idea seems like something which would be best provided to a company by their security vendor. Suppose I sell products to encrypt a companies valuable secrets now it is to my benifit that companies who buy my product don't get hacked etc.. even if it isn't the fault of my product. Thus it becomes my job to improve the security model of the company I sell to. Providing them with attack trees (maybe in software form) is probably a good way to convince them that using 1 billion bit encryption isn't sufficent if the executive keeps the passphrase in his desk drawer.
However, it doesn't seem very useful to the designer of a security product. Any security product needs to be used properly in order to be effective hence most of the social engineering routes on the attack tree are irrelevant to the designer of the software (he cannot control what people do with their passphrases). An attack tree of bugs in the program isn't as helpful because a succesful attack is always one which is unanticipated.
If you realize their is a danger of buffer overflow you add code to prevent the overflow hence at release the developers should always think any route on the attack tree is impossible (in theory the code CAN be safe (unlikely in practice) unlike the implementation of the scheme (people can always be blackmailed etc..) ). Of course a properly designed modular cryptographic program would probably distrust results from its own subroutines (check against faulty returns from your own procedures just as you do against user input) but the attack tree seems to add nothing to this.
The WTO has many many good points and several very troubling points such as patent issues and the ever increasing power of corporations. Unfortunatly this protest distracts attention from the real issues and focuses them on the non-issues of unionized labour and 'workers rights.' The violence involved makes it even worse, no one will take seriously the intellectual property concerns after this.
For the record I call the labour concerns irrelevant because at heart of the matter all that is important is how much stuff the workers recieve. Lowering tarriffs can only increase the total amount of goods in a country (more goods enter the nation) and while some citizens may be demoted to lesser jobs a fluid job market will guarantee everyone is still employed and hence the country has more goods in total.
So the net effect of trade barriers is to favor organized labour at the expense of the rest of the country. While you might feel that working class people deserve more money this could easily be accomplished by increasing federal aid to those who don't make much money. Increasing this aid would accomplish the goal of makeing sure the working class are not impoverished while not reducing the total amount of goods in the country.
On the other hand the WTO's seemingly strong stance on intellectual property might restrict the adoption of new/more efficent technology thereby making the world as a whole a less wealthy place (yes I realize IP is necessery to encourage innovation the trick is striking the right balance). But this issue will now be ignored.
As I understand the fear is that hacked napster clients will be able to report incorrectly what mp3's I have availible. But what prevents me from merely creating files of the appropriate size filled with random bytes?
It would appear that it is easier to fool the napster program in such a manner rather than messing with the source. Everyone can make a file not everyone can code a client.
Secondly who are they scared of? Even script kiddies probably have something better to do than falsely posting mp3's. If it is groups such as the RIAA flooding the server to make it unusable....well they could certainly reverse engineer the client just as well as I can.
Thridly while in this case the client seemed to be easily reverse engineerable security through obscurity is not impossible. If you capture a piece of my own private code the fact that you are unsure of the algorithm renders it difficult to decode (Re: those papers supposedly detailing buried gold in virginia where only one has been decrypted). Sure it isn't as secure as a well tested publicly availible algorithm but if your intent is to hide the actions of an algorithm your choices are limited.
Hell if security through obscurity never worked the wine project would be done.
I really can't blame you as I have done the same thing myself but this posting of empty but ontopic first posts is kinda stupid. If you actually have something to say and get a first post good. Otherwise it just has more style to go for the real first post. Your an AC anyway so why do you care?
I figured someone on slashdot might know the answer to this.
How predetermined is out number of senses and limbs? If I was to implant some device like this into my brain would it always a) feel unnatural b) necesserily interfere with the movement of my arm or c) eventually behave entierly unconciously just like the movement of my arm does now.
Is the same true of senses? If I attached a little I/O port into my brain would it eventually be integrated as a 6th sense or are out brains to preprogramed for this to happen?
Would the answers be differnt is we implanted the devices in utero?
I believe that the trophic factor (encourages nueral development around the implant) is what is proprietary. It was not at all clear from the article that the scientist involved held the patent to the trophic substance. The implant is an extremly simple broadcaster of nueral activity.
This kind of opposition to human improvments is as pervasive as it is strange. In the US at least their is some sort of weird moral structure that says it is okay to "fix defects" but not to improve healthy people. These sorts of attitudes seem to be holding back research a great deal. What if their were no quadrapalegics to benifit from this sort of technology then it might never have been developed. Perhaps without this strange restriction we would have drugs improving the memory and intelligence of the population as a whole.
Unfortunatly modern american government is turning out to be government byt the lobbying group. The administration would never create a checklist that appeared to target women or hispanics even if they accounted for a majority of school crimes.
As it is colombine was statisticalyy insignificat. I believe about 12 people die (or maybe are injured) in school shootings every day across the US.
The reason that "geek" children are targeted is that their is no lobbying group with enough power to protect them. The clear answer is to create a group which represents engineers/scientists politically. Given the general wealth of these profesions and the power they weild considerable change could be enacted.
I understand this company is giving kickbacks or the promise of free use of the results to Icelanders in return for this right.
If they start selling your info to insurance companies they breech a contract they had with your government and you can probably throw them in jail just like you could if your doctor started selling your medical records.
The insurance rep issue just really isn't unique. Eventually some insurance company will begin offering extremly low insurance if you DON'T have a history of heart disease in your family and these people will be more than happy to hand over records to prove this. Eventually competition will drive the price of insurance for people who don't open their records to insane values. Eventually the solutioni will have to be either a) let some people die (bad idea) or b) government guaranteed health care
>The patent (if granted) WILL expire someday
Technically yes and the same thing could be said about copyright. Except the industry which holds copyrights has gotten extremly powerful. An interesting trend is that whenever the original disney copyright for mickey mouse etc... is about to expire the copyright term is extended (yes for both new copyrights and old copyrights).
This extension of copyright clearly serves no public benifit (these works have already been created so reatroactively extending the copyright doesn't encourage the production of new works) and yet it is enacted! If the biotech industry became large enough such a scenario is possible (tho less likely because of competition within the industry).
For further information about the copyright term extension act and efforts to fight it visit copyright commmons
Teachers knowing about current events is nice but it is no substitute for them knowing their material. FIRST learn the subject you are going to teach well and then, if possible, learn about current events.
Too often teachers will "study up" on current events gaining a vague understanding (in a difficult area like physics) which helps their students no more than being told to read magazines. If instead the teachers could actually master NEWTONIAN mechanics (developed several hundred years ago) it would be a much better world. Merely pluging numbers into formulas is not sufficent.
Only in very rare cases (some CS classes) is this nescessery. Besides C++ has been around for a long damn time. Just make sure the teachers know their shit before you let them teach!
Score:5, Troll??
Seem weird to anyone else?