I've taught introductory programming several times. I never thought that my goal was to teach a skill, or an abstract concept, or logical thinking. My goal was to convince the students that programming is fun and easier than they thought. If I succeeded, my students would run out of the class saying I CAN DO IT!
To capture their imaginations, I used Visual Basic. I taught them how to draw a ball on the screen, how to make it move, how to bounce it off the wall, and finally how to turn it in to a kind of Pong game. I can take a group of random people off the street, and teach them to make their own Pong in about 3 hours.
Graphics and motion are much more emotionally appealing than any kind of abstract logic. It also presents them with the opportunity to analyze symptoms to debug their own programs. They are better able to grasp the relationship between incorrect behavior and incorrect programming when the subject is graphics and motion.
Something fun like Pong, also teaches the students that programming is a means to an end, not the end itself. The interesting part is clearly what happens with the ball, not what the source code looks like. Later in more advanced courses, a subset of the students might become entranced with programming as an intellectual end, and go on to become software professionals. Good for them.
For those who never do become professionals, they at least grasp that,given a lot of work and common sense, one can create source code that shapes and steers behaviors in the run time. Never again will they think of software as some kind of incomprehensible black magic.
Large scale power applications, such as smoothing out the production of solar or wind energy would be worth billions if it meets the engineering designs.
Energy density is not a big factor for non-mobile static devices. Also, safety can be enhanced by putting the caps inside concrete bunkers.
However, high internal resistance is an obstacle as it limits discharge rate and it also causes energy losses. I suspect that the more serious obstacle to both mobile and non-mobile applications could be leakage (i.e. How long before the charge leaks away because of internal resistive paths?)
There are even more differences. To use a gravity tug, or to orbit the object, or to land on the object, or to harpoon it, all require use of fuel to match the object's position and velocity vector. The probe needs to accelerate to get to the object and then to decelerate or perhaps even reverse direction to match velocity with the object.
A collision does not need to waste fuel for that purpose, and the savings could be used to transfer more kinetic energy change to the object. However, for maximum effect a collision must hit from a direction normal to the path of the asteroid. Depending on the particulars, it may or may not take a lot of fuel to maneuver in from the normal direction.
If the gravity tug is attractive, I suspect it is because it could use a low thrust engine over a period of years to more efficiently convert fuel mass to K.E. than a high thrust engine could. Otherwise, a collision approach would sound optimal.
Even though the conductors may contribute zero heat energy, it still costs a lot to keep them cooled.
A cable is a long thin tube buried under ground. It has a tremendous surface area. Heat leaks in from the ambient surroundings.
The article mentions the cost of cooling, but it did not give a figure. It is possible, that the energy consumed for cooling exceeds the energy losses in a non-superconducting cable of the same capacity.
Also, with a superconducting cable, one must include the cooling system's failure rate and the failure rate of the cooling system's power supply in reliability calculations. The power supply, of course, does not run at 138 KV.
My first personally owned computer wasn't a C64, it was a Commodore Pet. That doesn't make me *that* much older than the C64 crowd, does it?
The Pet was also the first computer I ever used that booted itself when I turned on the power. My reward for turning on the the switch was a HELLO? prompt. All other computers I used at work before the Pet required me to enter a bootstrap program in binary before they would start the OS.
In Pet Basic one could do wonderfully fun things, especially with the character graphics. My kids loved the games I wrote. I don't recall ever buying any software for the Pet. Wrote it all myself. It was great fun.
For some strange reason, the Commodore Pet is always forgotten when people write about the pioneering PC days.
There are huge individual variations in people's responses to addictive substances. Myself, I remember smoking my first cigarette at 15, and only 24 hours later being hooked on a pack per day habit.
Many years (and 250,000 butts) later, I went to a smoking cessation class. I learned that I can't judge what I can get away with by what others get away with. Life's hard that way.
IMHO, neither WAAS nor DGPS are solutions to the jamming problem.
WAAS signals are uploaded to the GPS satellites and broadcast as part of the GPS signals. Thus, when GPS is jammed, WAAS is jammed too.
DGPS ground based transmitters send signals that are potentially strong enough to overcome jamming. However, DGPS transmits the difference between local and GPS estimates. If neither the DGPS, nor your local GPS can receive the GPS signals due to jamming, then DGPS is no help.
We already depend on GPS for ship navigation, especially for close-in navigation around harbors. We would like to use GPS as a substitute for radar in airplane airport approaches. Eventually, we need to make cars with autonomous navigation, which would likely use GPS at least partially.
The prospect of GPS jamming is a major impediment to all these dependencies. Many civilian applications really can't go forward without sufficient security.
Do slashdotters know of non-GPS jamming-immune, ways to do marine, aviation and automobile navigation? Can we re-invent and improve inertial nav? Could we add an inertial nav backup mode to GPS receivers in case of jamming?
Not that it changes the conclusion, but this post claims that CO2 is solid below -109F (-78C)
-78C is the figure for CO2 to become solid at a pressure of one standard atmosphere. At Martian pressures, the temperature would have to be even lower to keep CO2 solid.
Interestingly, it was an identical error (failure to correct for pressure other than 1 atmosphere) that caused the NRC to falsely claim that the melted reactor at Three Mile Island was producing a large hydrogen bubble which could blow the roof off if it exploded. That error greatly amplified the fear of the public. NRC didn't acknowledge their error until long after the event.
That since there's no way for a layman to tell good professionals from bad "professionals", you may as well skip them altogether and do the work yourself. It's either that or go and pay another guy from a totally different company to check over the first guy's work.
Really? I suppose you did your own appendectomy with a spoon. Or perhaps you hired a second surgeon to cut open the incision from your operation to check the first surgeon's work.
Well, the bill passed the house today. In my opinion it's still a sham. We are still trying to fit today's problems and methods to 19th century approaches to creating laws and doing oversight.
It is unrealistic to expect that any law enforcement agency in any country should be prevented from using 21st century technology just like the rest of us do. In this context, that implies passing all traffic through filters and letting algorithms decide who is suspicious.
The problem is not how to monitor suspected terrorists, it is how to figure out who should be suspected.
IMHO a modern approach would permit government to use data mining and other software tools, but it would require that oversight agencies must be allowed access to the source code and be permitted to insert auditing code into the spyware.
We need a department of the judicial branch staffed by people trained in IT, not law. This department would have to power to use software and electronics to oversee all activities of the executive and legislative branches of government. (judicial too?)
Bottom line, every employee of every branch of government expect that every communication, every action, every line of code, should be subject to surveillance. Citizens have a right to privacy. government employees and don't; not even in secret places like the Senate cloak room, the Oval Office, or a judge's chambers.
To put it another way, we can no longer try to prevent abuse by limiting data gathering and filtering. Abuse must be prevented by detecting it at the back end.
The technical challenge would then shift to keeping the surveillance operation secure. It would become the target of all targets to penetrate.
25 years ago I experienced the same problem as an American living in Sweden. Back then, excellence (or the root word excel) was considered a pejorative, not a compliment. Smart kids were not exactly punished for being smart, but they were told that performing better than others was antisocial. The big exception (as others mentioned here) was sports.
The problem is that Europe is dominated by liberal politics. To quote from a column by George Will:
Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity.
end quote
It even prompted a debate in Sweden under the title lagom samhaelet (the mediocrity society). Critics of this policy complained, "Where will our future leaders come from?"
Sweden sent a team to climb Mount Everest. On the final day, instead of being told to give it their all, they were told orka lagom killar (make a decent try guys). They gave up just a few meters from the summit.
Paradoxically, after decades of this wrong-headed policy, Sweden seems very enterprising, very prosperous and well supplied by good leaders. I can't explain it.
It seems to me that I've heard snippets of similar legislation in Austrailia and Germany, now Sweden too.
It is possible that nearly all western countries are going down the same path that the Bush Administration did?
Here's a good opportunity for responsible journalism. Reporters could research and report on domestic spying trends in other countries.
Politically, I see the possibility that a future Obama administration may be exalted for doing the same things that the Bush administration was crucified for.
It will take no time at all for someone to hack these remote kill switches and to boost their range. Then we'll be reading about the threat of terrorists with kill switches hanging around airports.
Can anyone cite an example of a weapon of any kind that can not be turned around by the enemy to use against the originator?
Not to mention mass/energy. Time and distance can only be defined in terms of events, and events can not happen nor could they be observed if they did happen without some mass or energy to interact with other mass or energy.
I always thought that this was why they said that time and space began at the moment of the big bang. Not so much that they commenced then, but before that, without mass or energy there could be no way to express what time or space would mean.
Because in the end, this kind of purely partisan sniping diminishes the concept of impeachment rather than the reputation of the president. Does anyone seriously believe that Kucinich is doing anything more than grandstanding?
I submit the existence of www.impeachobama.org as evidence of how silly it is.
All nuclear power plants have simulators to train the operators. They should all be required to test all changes and software updates in the simulator environment before installing them on line.
That implies that the scope of the simulators may need to be expanded. In addition to training operators, they should become a sandbox for testing any and all things connected directly or indirectly to operational systems.
If business systems become interconnected with operational systems, then the business systems too must be replicated in the simulator environment. That might become a very onerous requirement, but that very difficulty could have a benefit. Architectures that prove to be very onerous to duplicate in a simulated environment, should be rejected and redesigned.
It seems like everyone has surplus CPU cycles coming out of their ears. Why can't the servers just all start using SSL as standard on all URLs? Wouldn't that pretty much foil the spys?
Your little essay sounds great, but it is based on a faulty assumption. What makes you think that Congress is interested in passing unambiguous, effective laws?
Members of Congress are not interested in the public good. They are motivated to get reelected and to acquire and maintain power. They love vague laws because then they can do the easy part while leaving the hard parts to the courts. Consider antipornography laws and campaign finance laws for example. They want Congress to hold the authority to write laws but pass to the executive and judiciary branches the responsibility to enforce and interpret them. The more vague the laws are, the more Congress can point to the failures of the other branches and thus argue that more power should accrue to Congress.
The best possible case for a Congressman is when he/she can vote on vague laws that span the issue. "I voted for the war before I voted against it." I remember reading that in New York state, for example, 33 laws pass one house of the legislature but not the other, and thus never become law. That's great for the members. They can vote on every side of every issue without fear that these bills will actually become law and that someone might hold them responsible.
I learned a long time ago that it is foolish and futile to try to apply logic to income tax rules. Similarly, it is foolish and futile to try to assume good intentions with regard to the law making process.
In the same manner that the Internet helps create pedophiles, then so do photography, the written word, and the five senses also help create pedophiles.
This is an important point politically. Especially when one considers the long term implications of Moore's Law applied to surveillance devices. Video and audio devices that may cost $100 today and are able to store 1 hour of data, will someday cost only $10, then $1, then $0.1 and so on. Ditto, the storage capacity and communications capability will just increase exponentially.
Considering that trend, it seems inevitable that we will set up a classic clash between the power of central authorities versus individual rights. Especially when politicians figure out that they are just as vulnerable to being subjects of surveillance as everyone else, they will scramble to make laws to forbid us to do that. Against that is the difficulty, or near impossibility, of enforcing such laws given the ubiquity and low cost of the devices. It would resemble in many respects the ongoing war over music downloads.
I am reminded of a science fiction story I read once in which video recorders were as small and light as bits of pollen and they permeated every space where air was circulated just as pollen does. That seems like the kind of science fiction prediction that will inevitably become true some day.
Once we launch a trillion or so open source and non-passworded devices in to the atmosphere, there will no longer be any such thing as privacy for any politician or any peasant. The only solace for me and my personal privacy is that I won't live long enough to see that particular science fiction become real.
Adding more to the point. Here is what I have seen happen over and over again.
Young people come in and they contribute to a wave of innovation. Then, they build their career on the enhancement, support and promotion of their innovation. When the time comes for a new wave of innovation, they tend not to contribute to it but rather oppose it. New innovations that would obsolete their prior innovations are seen as a personal threat.
It actually takes quite a bit of courage to be a leader of wave after wave of innovation in the same field. One must be prepared to abandon one's own creation to clear the mind to conceive new ones. Anyhow, one has to be be emotionally prepared to let go with one hand before establishing a firm grip with the other hand. If the new innovation fails, then one is left with nothing, not the old nor the new. At least that's how it feels. Those fears are mostly emotional, not rational. In real life, the old innovation tends to fade away a lot slower than one fears.
This very human hang up is what I believe gives rise to the point in the book the NYT article discussed. Cynthia Barton Rabe cleverly catches the point in the very title of her book, namely "Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine..."
The point in the NYT article was much more profound that just user interfaces. I spent my entire career in engineering software battling the tendency of engineers to build ever thicker walls around their thinking boxes as their careers advanced.
Most difficult were engineers who learned clever tricks to conserving memory in their programming. As Moore's progressed, those skills devalued, then became worthless, and finally became negative in value. I had one engineer at late as 1987 who would spend two days effort to save three bytes of memory in his program. Engineers are trained to build on experience, and they expect their experiences to add to their value synergistically as the years pass. The idea that past experience could have negative value was a threat to their personal credos and their career strategy.
It got so bad in my company that I once advocated hiring programmers at age 13, taking them out of school and exploiting them until age 23. At 23 we would force them to retire and finance them to finish high school and college, then move on to some other career. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with that policy.
What should we expect? The whole profession of engineering is based on the concept of incrementally adding to and improving on past experience, from the Romans up to today. Every time a bridge collapses or some other engineering disaster occurs, the public demands that we learn lessons and never ever commit that error again. After 2,000 years of that, how much innovation can you expect?
Contrast that with what is happening at Google. According to reports, Google employees dink around with their own ideas. Sometimes they show up for work on Monday with a bit of prototype code, then they circulate it around the company looking for reactions. The winners survive and the losers disappear without any bridges collapsing or innocent people being killed. That's what so great about software -- it is so easy to prototype. To fully exploit it, you need people who don't know what they can't do.
There was a great book called Computer Wars made the same point about innovation and corporations rather than individuals. The book's point was that if and when the time comes to change the base business model and technology upon which the company was founded, that the founders feel threatened and the company fails. The battle fields re littered with the corpses of countless companies that fell victim to that trap. Now think of Google again. If and when the day comes that the Internet is no longer the big thing, will Google be flexible enough to reinvent itself or will it just die?
How about yourself? if someday the sun came up and the Internet was no longer important, could you reinvent yourself? Can you even imagine that possibility? Probably not -- your thinking box won't allow for such possibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
I've taught introductory programming several times. I never thought that my goal was to teach a skill, or an abstract concept, or logical thinking. My goal was to convince the students that programming is fun and easier than they thought. If I succeeded, my students would run out of the class saying I CAN DO IT!
To capture their imaginations, I used Visual Basic. I taught them how to draw a ball on the screen, how to make it move, how to bounce it off the wall, and finally how to turn it in to a kind of Pong game. I can take a group of random people off the street, and teach them to make their own Pong in about 3 hours.
Graphics and motion are much more emotionally appealing than any kind of abstract logic. It also presents them with the opportunity to analyze symptoms to debug their own programs. They are better able to grasp the relationship between incorrect behavior and incorrect programming when the subject is graphics and motion.
Something fun like Pong, also teaches the students that programming is a means to an end, not the end itself. The interesting part is clearly what happens with the ball, not what the source code looks like. Later in more advanced courses, a subset of the students might become entranced with programming as an intellectual end, and go on to become software professionals. Good for them.
For those who never do become professionals, they at least grasp that,given a lot of work and common sense, one can create source code that shapes and steers behaviors in the run time. Never again will they think of software as some kind of incomprehensible black magic.
My favorite ever I found by doing a hex dump of a Tandy computer. I don't think many users saw this message. It said:
ERROR 0: POWER NOT ON
My second favorite came from a General Electric time sharing computer. It was:
EVIL DO LOOP
Large scale power applications, such as smoothing out the production of solar or wind energy would be worth billions if it meets the engineering designs.
Energy density is not a big factor for non-mobile static devices. Also, safety can be enhanced by putting the caps inside concrete bunkers.
However, high internal resistance is an obstacle as it limits discharge rate and it also causes energy losses. I suspect that the more serious obstacle to both mobile and non-mobile applications could be leakage (i.e. How long before the charge leaks away because of internal resistive paths?)
There are even more differences. To use a gravity tug, or to orbit the object, or to land on the object, or to harpoon it, all require use of fuel to match the object's position and velocity vector. The probe needs to accelerate to get to the object and then to decelerate or perhaps even reverse direction to match velocity with the object.
A collision does not need to waste fuel for that purpose, and the savings could be used to transfer more kinetic energy change to the object. However, for maximum effect a collision must hit from a direction normal to the path of the asteroid. Depending on the particulars, it may or may not take a lot of fuel to maneuver in from the normal direction.
If the gravity tug is attractive, I suspect it is because it could use a low thrust engine over a period of years to more efficiently convert fuel mass to K.E. than a high thrust engine could. Otherwise, a collision approach would sound optimal.
Even though the conductors may contribute zero heat energy, it still costs a lot to keep them cooled.
A cable is a long thin tube buried under ground. It has a tremendous surface area. Heat leaks in from the ambient surroundings.
The article mentions the cost of cooling, but it did not give a figure. It is possible, that the energy consumed for cooling exceeds the energy losses in a non-superconducting cable of the same capacity.
Also, with a superconducting cable, one must include the cooling system's failure rate and the failure rate of the cooling system's power supply in reliability calculations. The power supply, of course, does not run at 138 KV.
My first personally owned computer wasn't a C64, it was a Commodore Pet. That doesn't make me *that* much older than the C64 crowd, does it?
The Pet was also the first computer I ever used that booted itself when I turned on the power. My reward for turning on the the switch was a HELLO? prompt. All other computers I used at work before the Pet required me to enter a bootstrap program in binary before they would start the OS.
In Pet Basic one could do wonderfully fun things, especially with the character graphics. My kids loved the games I wrote. I don't recall ever buying any software for the Pet. Wrote it all myself. It was great fun.
For some strange reason, the Commodore Pet is always forgotten when people write about the pioneering PC days.
There are huge individual variations in people's responses to addictive substances. Myself, I remember smoking my first cigarette at 15, and only 24 hours later being hooked on a pack per day habit.
Many years (and 250,000 butts) later, I went to a smoking cessation class. I learned that I can't judge what I can get away with by what others get away with. Life's hard that way.
IMHO, neither WAAS nor DGPS are solutions to the jamming problem.
WAAS signals are uploaded to the GPS satellites and broadcast as part of the GPS signals. Thus, when GPS is jammed, WAAS is jammed too.
DGPS ground based transmitters send signals that are potentially strong enough to overcome jamming. However, DGPS transmits the difference between local and GPS estimates. If neither the DGPS, nor your local GPS can receive the GPS signals due to jamming, then DGPS is no help.
We already depend on GPS for ship navigation, especially for close-in navigation around harbors. We would like to use GPS as a substitute for radar in airplane airport approaches. Eventually, we need to make cars with autonomous navigation, which would likely use GPS at least partially.
The prospect of GPS jamming is a major impediment to all these dependencies. Many civilian applications really can't go forward without sufficient security.
Do slashdotters know of non-GPS jamming-immune, ways to do marine, aviation and automobile navigation?
Can we re-invent and improve inertial nav?
Could we add an inertial nav backup mode to GPS receivers in case of jamming?
-78C is the figure for CO2 to become solid at a pressure of one standard atmosphere. At Martian pressures, the temperature would have to be even lower to keep CO2 solid.
Interestingly, it was an identical error (failure to correct for pressure other than 1 atmosphere) that caused the NRC to falsely claim that the melted reactor at Three Mile Island was producing a large hydrogen bubble which could blow the roof off if it exploded. That error greatly amplified the fear of the public. NRC didn't acknowledge their error until long after the event.
Really? I suppose you did your own appendectomy with a spoon. Or perhaps you hired a second surgeon to cut open the incision from your operation to check the first surgeon's work.
It is unrealistic to expect that any law enforcement agency in any country should be prevented from using 21st century technology just like the rest of us do. In this context, that implies passing all traffic through filters and letting algorithms decide who is suspicious.
The problem is not how to monitor suspected terrorists, it is how to figure out who should be suspected.
IMHO a modern approach would permit government to use data mining and other software tools, but it would require that oversight agencies must be allowed access to the source code and be permitted to insert auditing code into the spyware.
We need a department of the judicial branch staffed by people trained in IT, not law. This department would have to power to use software and electronics to oversee all activities of the executive and legislative branches of government. (judicial too?)
Bottom line, every employee of every branch of government expect that every communication, every action, every line of code, should be subject to surveillance. Citizens have a right to privacy. government employees and don't; not even in secret places like the Senate cloak room, the Oval Office, or a judge's chambers.
To put it another way, we can no longer try to prevent abuse by limiting data gathering and filtering. Abuse must be prevented by detecting it at the back end.
The technical challenge would then shift to keeping the surveillance operation secure. It would become the target of all targets to penetrate.
The problem is that Europe is dominated by liberal politics. To quote from a column by George Will:
Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity. end quote
It even prompted a debate in Sweden under the title lagom samhaelet (the mediocrity society). Critics of this policy complained, "Where will our future leaders come from?" Sweden sent a team to climb Mount Everest. On the final day, instead of being told to give it their all, they were told orka lagom killar (make a decent try guys). They gave up just a few meters from the summit.
Paradoxically, after decades of this wrong-headed policy, Sweden seems very enterprising, very prosperous and well supplied by good leaders. I can't explain it.
It seems to me that I've heard snippets of similar legislation in Austrailia and Germany, now Sweden too.
It is possible that nearly all western countries are going down the same path that the Bush Administration did?
Here's a good opportunity for responsible journalism. Reporters could research and report on domestic spying trends in other countries.
Politically, I see the possibility that a future Obama administration may be exalted for doing the same things that the Bush administration was crucified for.
It will take no time at all for someone to hack these remote kill switches and to boost their range. Then we'll be reading about the threat of terrorists with kill switches hanging around airports.
Can anyone cite an example of a weapon of any kind that can not be turned around by the enemy to use against the originator?
Not to mention mass/energy. Time and distance can only be defined in terms of events, and events can not happen nor could they be observed if they did happen without some mass or energy to interact with other mass or energy.
I always thought that this was why they said that time and space began at the moment of the big bang. Not so much that they commenced then, but before that, without mass or energy there could be no way to express what time or space would mean.
Because in the end, this kind of purely partisan sniping diminishes the concept of impeachment rather than the reputation of the president. Does anyone seriously believe that Kucinich is doing anything more than grandstanding?
I submit the existence of www.impeachobama.org as evidence of how silly it is.
All nuclear power plants have simulators to train the operators. They should all be required to test all changes and software updates in the simulator environment before installing them on line.
That implies that the scope of the simulators may need to be expanded. In addition to training operators, they should become a sandbox for testing any and all things connected directly or indirectly to operational systems.
If business systems become interconnected with operational systems, then the business systems too must be replicated in the simulator environment. That might become a very onerous requirement, but that very difficulty could have a benefit. Architectures that prove to be very onerous to duplicate in a simulated environment, should be rejected and redesigned.
It seems like everyone has surplus CPU cycles coming out of their ears. Why can't the servers just all start using SSL as standard on all URLs? Wouldn't that pretty much foil the spys?
Your little essay sounds great, but it is based on a faulty assumption. What makes you think that Congress is interested in passing unambiguous, effective laws?
Members of Congress are not interested in the public good. They are motivated to get reelected and to acquire and maintain power. They love vague laws because then they can do the easy part while leaving the hard parts to the courts. Consider antipornography laws and campaign finance laws for example. They want Congress to hold the authority to write laws but pass to the executive and judiciary branches the responsibility to enforce and interpret them. The more vague the laws are, the more Congress can point to the failures of the other branches and thus argue that more power should accrue to Congress.
The best possible case for a Congressman is when he/she can vote on vague laws that span the issue. "I voted for the war before I voted against it." I remember reading that in New York state, for example, 33 laws pass one house of the legislature but not the other, and thus never become law. That's great for the members. They can vote on every side of every issue without fear that these bills will actually become law and that someone might hold them responsible.
I learned a long time ago that it is foolish and futile to try to apply logic to income tax rules. Similarly, it is foolish and futile to try to assume good intentions with regard to the law making process.
daveschroeder makes a very good point
In the same manner that the Internet helps create pedophiles, then so do photography, the written word, and the five senses also help create pedophiles.
Here's a good mathematical challenge. If Indiana had passed that law making pi 3.2, what would the eccentricity of tires sold in Indiana be?
This is an important point politically. Especially when one considers the long term implications of Moore's Law applied to surveillance devices. Video and audio devices that may cost $100 today and are able to store 1 hour of data, will someday cost only $10, then $1, then $0.1 and so on. Ditto, the storage capacity and communications capability will just increase exponentially.
Considering that trend, it seems inevitable that we will set up a classic clash between the power of central authorities versus individual rights. Especially when politicians figure out that they are just as vulnerable to being subjects of surveillance as everyone else, they will scramble to make laws to forbid us to do that. Against that is the difficulty, or near impossibility, of enforcing such laws given the ubiquity and low cost of the devices. It would resemble in many respects the ongoing war over music downloads.
I am reminded of a science fiction story I read once in which video recorders were as small and light as bits of pollen and they permeated every space where air was circulated just as pollen does. That seems like the kind of science fiction prediction that will inevitably become true some day.
Once we launch a trillion or so open source and non-passworded devices in to the atmosphere, there will no longer be any such thing as privacy for any politician or any peasant. The only solace for me and my personal privacy is that I won't live long enough to see that particular science fiction become real.
Adding more to the point. Here is what I have seen happen over and over again.
Young people come in and they contribute to a wave of innovation. Then, they build their career on the enhancement, support and promotion of their innovation. When the time comes for a new wave of innovation, they tend not to contribute to it but rather oppose it. New innovations that would obsolete their prior innovations are seen as a personal threat.
It actually takes quite a bit of courage to be a leader of wave after wave of innovation in the same field. One must be prepared to abandon one's own creation to clear the mind to conceive new ones. Anyhow, one has to be be emotionally prepared to let go with one hand before establishing a firm grip with the other hand. If the new innovation fails, then one is left with nothing, not the old nor the new. At least that's how it feels. Those fears are mostly emotional, not rational. In real life, the old innovation tends to fade away a lot slower than one fears.
This very human hang up is what I believe gives rise to the point in the book the NYT article discussed. Cynthia Barton Rabe cleverly catches the point in the very title of her book, namely "Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine..."
t
The point in the NYT article was much more profound that just user interfaces. I spent my entire career in engineering software battling the tendency of engineers to build ever thicker walls around their thinking boxes as their careers advanced.
Most difficult were engineers who learned clever tricks to conserving memory in their programming. As Moore's progressed, those skills devalued, then became worthless, and finally became negative in value. I had one engineer at late as 1987 who would spend two days effort to save three bytes of memory in his program. Engineers are trained to build on experience, and they expect their experiences to add to their value synergistically as the years pass. The idea that past experience could have negative value was a threat to their personal credos and their career strategy.
It got so bad in my company that I once advocated hiring programmers at age 13, taking them out of school and exploiting them until age 23. At 23 we would force them to retire and finance them to finish high school and college, then move on to some other career. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with that policy.
What should we expect? The whole profession of engineering is based on the concept of incrementally adding to and improving on past experience, from the Romans up to today. Every time a bridge collapses or some other engineering disaster occurs, the public demands that we learn lessons and never ever commit that error again. After 2,000 years of that, how much innovation can you expect?
Contrast that with what is happening at Google. According to reports, Google employees dink around with their own ideas. Sometimes they show up for work on Monday with a bit of prototype code, then they circulate it around the company looking for reactions. The winners survive and the losers disappear without any bridges collapsing or innocent people being killed. That's what so great about software -- it is so easy to prototype. To fully exploit it, you need people who don't know what they can't do.
There was a great book called Computer Wars made the same point about innovation and corporations rather than individuals. The book's point was that if and when the time comes to change the base business model and technology upon which the company was founded, that the founders feel threatened and the company fails. The battle fields re littered with the corpses of countless companies that fell victim to that trap. Now think of Google again. If and when the day comes that the Internet is no longer the big thing, will Google be flexible enough to reinvent itself or will it just die?
How about yourself? if someday the sun came up and the Internet was no longer important, could you reinvent yourself? Can you even imagine that possibility? Probably not -- your thinking box won't allow for such possibilities.