There is a battle for the future of the Web, and it is not about search engines, but about the social Web
There is a battle for the future of people's *privacy*. On one side, ordinary people. On the other side, spooks and profiteers who tell us that "privacy doesn't matter".
That is not where I would have drawn the line...
I would have said we had ordinary people on one side, and paranoid privacy geeks on the other side.
I'm not going to say that "privacy doesn't matter"... But our idea of privacy is a fairly modern invention. Move out to a small town and you'll quickly see what a lack of privacy really is. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or not. It's just the relatively recent migration to large cities where you can get lost in the crowd that has created this idea of privacy.
Which isn't a bad thing. I like my privacy, personally.
But it isn't like Facebook/Google/Bing/Big Brother/whatever are eroding this ancient and mighty establishment called "privacy".
In other words, how is god different from a dude outside time watching a Tivo.
Said hypothetical dude watching a hypothetical Tivo outside of time isn't just some dude watching a Tivo. He's also the hypothetical dude who created time, space, and everything else. He set up all the dominoes and gave them a nudge. They're falling right where he hypothetically planned them to fall.
God is theoretically omniscient and omnipotent. She isn't a mere mortal like we are. He wouldn't be limited to simply observing, unless that is what she chose to do. The choice, then, rests with god.
God builds us all up from scratch. Knows our most intimate thoughts and desires. Already knows whether we'll win the soccer game or not. And if god doesn't want us to win, she can re-build us so that we will not win. Or... If we're destined to lose, can rebuild us so that we will win.
It is not the knowledge of the game's outcome that renders free will absurd. It is the notion that absolutely everything in the universe has been built to perfectly accomplish god's divine plan.
The analogy does not fail. If an entity is able to exist outside of time and see events unfold at will or at the very least know the results beforehand, this is perfectly analogous to the Tivo situation.
Unless your Tivo is located on the TARDIS, the analogy fails. Your Tivo does not exist outside of time.
OK, when you're done ripping on the pope, stop and consider his point of view and what he has to say. Whether you agree or disagree, his point deserves some honest thought and debate.
Let's be realistic here...
The guy is the head of the Catholic church. An organization that is currently hiding/harboring pedophiles. An organization that previously endorsed the Nazi party. An organization that continues to insist that condoms cause AIDS.
Never mind the fact that their whole philosophy is based on the idea that a 2,000 year old book is a more accurate description of the universe around us than the evidence of our own eyes....not exactly somebody I'd consider a real authority on the whole fantasy vs. reality thing.
if God knows the outcome that we don't have free will.
It isn't so much that god knows the outcome... But rather that god created that outcome.
The Bible would have us believe that god is all knowing, all powerful, and all good.
That means god built this world exactly the way she wanted to. No flaws. Even Lucifer's fall was according to plan.
If I write a computer program to output the text "hello world", it hardly has a choice in the matter, does it? That program will spit out "hello world" all day long, exactly as intended. It has no free will.
And if god built this world exactly the way he wanted to, and it's all running according to plan, then none of us have free will either.
So if I Tivo a soccer match and replay it, then the players have no free will? Essentially that is the Christian concept of God. He exists in the past, present and future and knows how everything will turn out.
Your analogy fails.
You are watching a recorded image. The image you're seeing has no will of its own. It isn't like the real players are going to win the game, and your Tivo'ed players are going to lose.
You also have no ability to affect anything. You aren't going to hop back in time and sprain somebody's ankle to make sure your team wins.
Well considering that one would have to be fluent in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew to read the "just one version" I think that you have to accept newer translations over time as the English language evolves, and as historians discover new idiosyncrasies in the ancient languages. You can argue that this is not all that's changed, but it doesn't preclude new versions from coming out for good reason.
It isn't just a matter of translation though...
Depending on what version you're reading, entire books will be present or missing. Whole swathes of text cut out just because somebody didn't like them... And it's supposed to be the unadulterated word of god.
Except that the taxpayers rarely get any say in who they "hire" when the corporate jungle owns all the media outlets and can pretty much dictate who the voters even know are on the ballot.
Well, we're talking about a local school here... Not Washington politics... So it's unlikely that the corporate jungle or media outlets had much to do with who got voted in.
But even if we're talking about Washington politics - it's still the voters fault that things are the way they are. Or, rather, the citizenship in general.
It is your responsibility as a citizen to participate in the democratic process. You're supposed to educate yourself and then show up to vote. If you don't vote, or if you don't bother to educate yourself, you're part of the problem.
So the real geniuses are people like Babbage, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before that train was even built, and Leonardo da Vinci, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before the idea of trains was even invented.
Yes. In my opinion that is true genius. That shows some kind of remarkable insight that just simply wasn't available to anyone else at the time. Or for years to come. There was something truly special about those people.
Of course people thought Babbage was a bit of a nutter at the time, and we probably wouldn't even know who Leonardo da Vinci was today if he hadn't also been a great artist.
Yup. Simply coming up with an idea doesn't do you too much good if you can't implement it. And if you're too far ahead of the curve then the infrastructure to implement it doesn't even exist.
Clearly being a real genius isn't of much practical value. The real money is in doing a good job at what someone else already thought up.
Indeed.
Which does take an awful lot of skill, talent, knowledge, foresight, and luck... I'm not claiming it's easy to put together something like Facebook at the right time, with the right interface, and then pull together the right investors.
It's the argument of someone who isn't a genius to claim that genius does not exist, or is really nothing special. Anyone can throw a football, or bang on a drum. Doing it with the practice and timing to actually entertain, or to reliably reach a wide receiver, or to achieve what Zuckerberg with the interface that people _accepted_ takes some noticeable skill.
Skill != Genius
Being able to entertain somebody with a drum or win a game with a football certainly takes skill. Skill that I do not have. But it does not take genius.
Building a nice website also takes skill. It's a skill that I do not have. But it does not take genius.
Genius is not skill, it is vision. It is seeing things that others cannot. You could argue that perhaps Babbage was a genius, since he saw a computing machine long before anyone else did. But Zuckerberg didn't build his website decades before anyone else. Other folks had the same idea at about the same time. Because it had become virtually obvious.
Which is the whole argument. That as technology progresses, and innovations pile atop innovations, it takes less and less vision to see something new. Until eventually it's right there in your face and somebody is going to "invent" it almost by accident.
"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."
If you stack up enough giants, anyone can see anything.
That's an insidious fallacy. There is no 'forward' with technology, it's not like a train that follows the tracks. Technology just evolves in some direction for a while, then switches to another direction, etc. Nobody knows in which direction it goes, and there are plenty of directions that are missed out on and will never be followed. All that anyone can say is that among all the technologies that will be found along the path of our civilization, many of the technologies have relatives found earlier in time.
Direction is irrelevant to the discussion. Any given technology has a pile of prerequisites. As those prerequisites are met, we move closer to having the ability to discover/implement that technology. You can call this "forward" if you want... Or "up", "down", "backwards", "hubwise", or whatever the hell you want. You're still getting closer to having everything you need to make whatever it is we're talking about.
Now, if you always call 'forward' whatever direction technology's headed in, then sure, progress looks like it's inevitable. But then you have problems explaining how some civilizations don't seem to go 'forward' in the same direction as us. For example, many South American civilizations did NOT invent the wheel.
Obviously some prerequisite was not met.
This isn't some MMOG or RPG where you can look at the tech tree and check things off. We're all just feeling around in the dark. But there's some piece of the puzzle that they didn't have.
You also have problems explaining why 'better' technologies sometimes fail, as when the direction switches but you still think the previous direction will continue forever. For example, in VHS vs Betamax the latter was further along the expected direction.
I've never really understood how a tape that couldn't hold an entire feature-length film was supposed to be superior to one that could... I mean, it might have looked prettier and worked better... But if you can't fit a movie on there, who cares?
Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. It's tempting to think of technological evolution as a simple straight line like a train track, but it causes more problems than it solves. It's better to think in terms of an undirected evolutionary model.
The tracks were a metaphor, nothing more. Don't worry, no puppies were harmed in the making of this post.
The problem I see with it is that genius actually does matter. If we all sit down and wait for new inventions because 'surely someone will do it' then no one will do it. A single person can change the course of a nation, and it is impossible to predict individual people
I think you may misunderstand. The argument is that actual genius doesn't really exist. The argument is that the specific individual who comes up with the "invention" is irrelevant. The argument is that there is no stunning ray of sheer brainpower that makes such an "invention" possible - it is, instead, inevitable.
Imagine, if you will, a train barreling down the tracks towards a helpless puppy. When the train is 1,000 miles away from the puppy, nobody really knows what is going to happen. You can't see the big picture. The folks looking at the puppy don't see the train, and the folks looking at the train can't see the puppy. If somebody were to shout out "oh no, the puppy's gonna get squished!" at that moment in time, it would be genius. But as the train gets closer and closer to the puppy, it becomes more and more obvious. And eventually it is almost impossible not to realize that the puppy is going to be run over.
This is the argument. As technology rolls forward, it eventually becomes almost impossible not to invent something new.
You get enough computers chattering away with each-other... Enough people on the web... Enough folks trying to share photos and connect with other people... Cheap enough server infrastructure.. Ample enough bandwidth... Powerful enough databases... And eventually somebody is bound to say "Hey, why don't we throw together some kind of web page where people can keep in touch with each-other and share photos and stuff?"
You have choice. You just don't want to pay for it.
First of all, a T1 barely qualifies as "broadband" these days. It's only 1.5 Mbps. That's not horrible... But it isn't terribly impressive when compared to the 10+ Mbps advertised for most residential connections.
Second, a business class connection like a T1 is not a "choice" for a residential connection.
That's like suggesting that somebody build their own cell tower because the reception is spotty where they live.
Seems to me that 20-30 hours of gameplay used to be the norm... Now you're usually seeing 8-10, and then relying on multiplayer to keep it interesting after that.
I realize they were in their "rights" legally and such to put out the neighbours fire and not his.. (from the TFA, they just sat there and made sure it didn't spread). But I mean, as a human, what the fuck. Is there so little empathy?
As human beings, I'm sure there was plenty of empathy. And now that this guy's got national attention, I'm sure there will be plenty more. There'll be donations a-plenty. He'll probably be fine.
But water isn't free... Nor is the gas to drive the truck out there... Nor are the paychecks that all the fire fighters collect... You can't really run a fire department for free. If they start running around, putting out fires for free, pretty soon there won't be a fire department at all.
Why couldn't they have put it out and then billed him? He probably would have been so happy he would have paid it. This reeks of callousness. What have "we" become (I'm not american, but I am a human, I think..)
Fire departments cost money all the time, not just when stuff is on fire. You have to pay to maintain the equipment, pay the employees, etc. You need that money year-round, not just when stuff is on fire. And, if you're lucky, more people pay you (via taxes or fees) than people actually have fires. So you don't have to charge every single person the full cost of putting out their fire.
If they were allowed to collect money at the time of the fire, nobody would pay ahead of time. I mean, hell, why would you? Pay $75 now on the off chance that you might have a fire... Or pay $75 when your house is actually in flames, and if it never burns you don't have to pay... Tough choice!
But then the fire department has no money to maintain anything, no money to hire anyone. And then you've got no fire department at all.
I don't mind paying for stuff I like... And I sure as hell want to support the folk making quality entertainment. I want my local theater to make enough money to stay in business, and further to see good ticket sales on specific types of films so that they'll carry more of those in the future. I want movies I like to make good money, so that more are made like it. I want to support the stuff that I like, so that there will be more of it in the future.
But it's getting a little ridiculous.
We'll pay over $10 for a ticket to the movies... And then get hit with an insane markup on on munchies. And then watch a never-ending loop of commercials while waiting for the lights to dim. And then watch 10+ minutes of commercials after the lights dim. And then there's the previews. And finally the movie starts.
That seems like an excessive amount of advertising considering how much we're paying for tickets and munchies.
The same thing goes for my TV at home... We paid for the initial installation, the receivers, the TVs. We're paying a monthly fee. We pay a premium fee to get some extra channels. There's product placement everywhere, and we're still seeing commercials every few minutes.
What would be nice is if the GUI could automatically create a shell script doing the change. That way you could (a) learn about how to do it per CLI by looking at the generated shell script, and (b) apply the generated shell script (after proper inspection, of course) to other computers.
Cisco's GUI stuff doesn't really generate any scripts, but the commands it creates are the same things you'd type into a CLI. And the resulting configuration is just as human-readable (barring any weird naming conventions) as one built using the CLI. I've actually learned an awful lot about the Cisco CLI by using their GUI.
We've just started working with Aruba hardware. Installed a mobility controller last week. They've got a GUI that does something similar. It's all a pretty web-based front-end, but it again generates CLI commands and a human-readable configuration. I'm still very new to the platform, but I'm already learning about their CLI through the GUI. And getting work done that I wouldn't be able to if I had to look up the CLI commands for everything.
Microsoft's more recent tools are also doing this. Exchange 2007 and newer, for example, are really completely driven by the PowerShell CLI. The GUI generates commands and just feeds them into PowerShell for you. So you can again issue your commands through the GUI, and learn how you could have done it in PowerShell instead.
I have Win 7 x64 Pro in a VMWare image and it works relatively well in there, but I had to tweak the settings for the container, and if I run it with less than 2GB of memory allocated, it starts to get pissy.
Why would you want to run a 64-bit operating system with anything less than 4 GB of RAM?
I derive a great amount of personal satisfaction from learning and understanding how things work. I find I'm definitely a minority in that respect. It saddens me.
I actually find that most people are interested in understanding how things work. However, most people don't have time to learn advanced physics or learn how other things work because they are more worried being busy raising kids, feeding their family, maintaining social relationships, or dealing with crime in their neighborhood.
It's just the nerds that grew up in suburbia and never leave their computers who think that they are special.
Your mileage has obviously varied from mine...
I spent the last 7 years of my life working for a small IT shop providing support to local businesses, private individuals, college students, and anyone else with a broken computer.
It's been my experience that folks simply do not care to learn how things work. It isn't a matter of not having time, they just don't care. They've got their job, their set of tasks, and that's all they care about. They don't want to know anything more than that.
Obviously there's individual variation. I find computers interesting, so I've learned a lot about them. Some other person finds plants interesting and has learned a lot about gardening. And not everyone is averse to learning about new things.
But I've found an awful lot of people just aren't curious. They don't know how something works, they don't care how it works, and they'll actively resist learning about it.
I've tried to teach people how to work the computers they're sitting in front of... How to use the software that's necessary for them to do their jobs... And they'll almost instantly declare that something is beyond them as soon as you vary one hair from their daily routine. Try to explain that you can move an icon to a different place on the screen? "I just don't understand those computer things..."
I'm not sure that your average human being has ever been terribly curious. Maybe it's always been somewhat atypical.
But curiosity is definitely being discouraged these days. You aren't supposed to ask too many questions. You aren't supposed to do anything too unusual. Better not do anything suspicious...
Geeks, almost by definition, are curious creatures. Not just IT geeks. Anyone with the drive and passion to really find out how things work - be it a computer programmer, an automotive mechanic, a structural engineer, a geologist, or whatever - is going to fall outside of the social norm. That's why they're called "geeks".
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Fragmentation is where Android itself splits up. Like having one version of Android on a Verizon phone, and something different on an AT&T phone, and they may not even work with the same apps.
That's bad for Android as an OS, because then consumers aren't sure what will or won't work on their phone. It says "Android" on the phone... But it isn't actually Android, it's Verizon's flavor of Android.
This is another app store. It isn't going to fragment the Android platform, it's just going to give you another place to buy your Android apps.
First of all I'm happy that not all my boxes are directly reachable from the outside world. Only those that I choose (DMZ or specific port forwarding). A simple quite effective security measure against many worms, for example. What's not addressable can't be infected that way.
That's what firewalls are for.
Secondly if you're really trying to run web pages from home, and want your other computer to serve one too, why not putting that one on say port 8080? You won't be running any serious commercial web site from such a set-up anyway (assuming you're somewhat sane). And it's reachable from the outside again.
The problem with putting that one on port 8080 is that your average user has no idea what a port is or how to specify one. If I tell my parents to go to www.example.com they can manage it. If I try telling them to go to www.example.com:8080 they'll wind up with all sorts of strange interpretations of that.
Just because I'm not going to be running any "serious commercial web site" from my house doesn't mean I don't want people to be able to find it. I could run a small photo album, or my own blog, or a forum, or a mail server... Any number of things. If I only open it up to my friends and family there's absolutely no reason why my bandwidth couldn't handle it.
But, if you really think that's unreasonable, replace "home" with "small business that's only been given/sold a single public IP address by their ISP". The relative scarcity of IP addresses has turned them into commodities. You have to actually purchase additional IP addresses. If you're running even a few servers that need to be publicly accessible it quickly becomes very inconvenient to have to pass everything through NAT. And you only need two of the same thing to find yourself needing another IP address.
Same for your VCR and your water meter: assign them their own port numbers. No unique IP needed.
Granted, we're unlikely to have 65,000+ devices requiring their own connectivity to the Internet... But your answer is tantamount to suggesting that every mail server should have its own, unique port number. There's a reason we've standardized port numbers. Imagine trying to set up a mail server if every single machine you tried to talk to had its own, unique port. Imagine trying to manage traffic without being able to match against port numbers.
And yes of course it's convenient if everything is addressable from anywhere. The Stuxnet writers would have had an easier job if they could reach those PLCs directly instead of first having to infect another computer.
Again, you're somehow forgetting the fact that firewalls exist.
If you don't want a machine to be accessible from the outside world, you don't allow it. Only allow outgoing connections. It isn't that hard.
what limitations? my iphone is on NAT. what will IPV6 allow me to do on it that i can't do now
The original idea of the Internet was a network of peers. Every address was globally routable, and any machine could host content.
There are obvious security issues with this... Which is why we've got firewalls... But there wasn't really anything standing in the way of you hosting a game server, or website, or whatever on your home machine.
NAT now stands in the way of you doing this. NAT has destroyed the whole "network of peers" thing.
NAT is fine for simply consuming content. For your iPhone, for example, I doubt if it's an issue. And if you're just loading up random web pages at home, or connecting to WoW, or whatever - you'll be fine.
But if you want to host a web page at home you're going to have to not just open the ports in your firewall, but forward the traffic from your outside IP to the inside IP. And if you want a second box to serve up a web page too? Too bad. You only get one port 80 per IP address, and you've only got one globally routable IP address.
Again, if all you're doing is consuming, this isn't all that much of a problem. But then you aren't a peer, either.
Where this starts to be more of an issue is with various devices that we now want to be able to communicate with remotely. It's becoming more and more common for people to want to remote into home computers. Or maybe program a DVR remotely. Or maybe some utility company wants to be able to check your electric/water meter remotely.
Being able to host your own content is becoming more important, not less. And shoving everything behind NAT is becoming more of a problem, not less.
It's not (always) bribery, but just a PR stunt. They don't do these things for better review scores, but for media attention.
Reviews really aren't about the numbers though... They're about the publicity. Yes, sure, folks talk about what score some game got from some site... But the review itself is more than a number. It's generally several pages of description, a bunch of screenshots, opinion bits, memorable quotes from the dialogue... That's all PR. Even if a game gets a bad score, some folks will buy it because of a cool screenshot in a review.
Serious, what good is "rancid, rotting meat mixed with spent shell casings, teeth, broken glasses and dog tags" or "brass knuckles"? If it's not cash, or some other thing they can cash in then it's not really bribery.
Pretty much all of that could be converted to cash on ebay. People will buy just about anything. Especially if it's branded merchandise.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a battle for the future of the Web, and it is not about search engines, but about the social Web
There is a battle for the future of people's *privacy*. On one side, ordinary people. On the other side, spooks and profiteers who tell us that "privacy doesn't matter".
That is not where I would have drawn the line...
I would have said we had ordinary people on one side, and paranoid privacy geeks on the other side.
I'm not going to say that "privacy doesn't matter"... But our idea of privacy is a fairly modern invention. Move out to a small town and you'll quickly see what a lack of privacy really is. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or not. It's just the relatively recent migration to large cities where you can get lost in the crowd that has created this idea of privacy.
Which isn't a bad thing. I like my privacy, personally.
But it isn't like Facebook/Google/Bing/Big Brother/whatever are eroding this ancient and mighty establishment called "privacy".
The hypothetical Tivo exists outside time.
In other words, how is god different from a dude outside time watching a Tivo.
Said hypothetical dude watching a hypothetical Tivo outside of time isn't just some dude watching a Tivo. He's also the hypothetical dude who created time, space, and everything else. He set up all the dominoes and gave them a nudge. They're falling right where he hypothetically planned them to fall.
God is theoretically omniscient and omnipotent. She isn't a mere mortal like we are. He wouldn't be limited to simply observing, unless that is what she chose to do. The choice, then, rests with god.
God builds us all up from scratch. Knows our most intimate thoughts and desires. Already knows whether we'll win the soccer game or not. And if god doesn't want us to win, she can re-build us so that we will not win. Or... If we're destined to lose, can rebuild us so that we will win.
It is not the knowledge of the game's outcome that renders free will absurd. It is the notion that absolutely everything in the universe has been built to perfectly accomplish god's divine plan.
The analogy does not fail. If an entity is able to exist outside of time and see events unfold at will or at the very least know the results beforehand, this is perfectly analogous to the Tivo situation.
Unless your Tivo is located on the TARDIS, the analogy fails. Your Tivo does not exist outside of time.
OK, when you're done ripping on the pope, stop and consider his point of view and what he has to say. Whether you agree or disagree, his point deserves some honest thought and debate.
Let's be realistic here...
The guy is the head of the Catholic church. An organization that is currently hiding/harboring pedophiles. An organization that previously endorsed the Nazi party. An organization that continues to insist that condoms cause AIDS.
Never mind the fact that their whole philosophy is based on the idea that a 2,000 year old book is a more accurate description of the universe around us than the evidence of our own eyes. ...not exactly somebody I'd consider a real authority on the whole fantasy vs. reality thing.
if God knows the outcome that we don't have free will.
It isn't so much that god knows the outcome... But rather that god created that outcome.
The Bible would have us believe that god is all knowing, all powerful, and all good.
That means god built this world exactly the way she wanted to. No flaws. Even Lucifer's fall was according to plan.
If I write a computer program to output the text "hello world", it hardly has a choice in the matter, does it? That program will spit out "hello world" all day long, exactly as intended. It has no free will.
And if god built this world exactly the way he wanted to, and it's all running according to plan, then none of us have free will either.
So if I Tivo a soccer match and replay it, then the players have no free will? Essentially that is the Christian concept of God. He exists in the past, present and future and knows how everything will turn out.
Your analogy fails.
You are watching a recorded image. The image you're seeing has no will of its own. It isn't like the real players are going to win the game, and your Tivo'ed players are going to lose.
You also have no ability to affect anything. You aren't going to hop back in time and sprain somebody's ankle to make sure your team wins.
Well considering that one would have to be fluent in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew to read the "just one version" I think that you have to accept newer translations over time as the English language evolves, and as historians discover new idiosyncrasies in the ancient languages. You can argue that this is not all that's changed, but it doesn't preclude new versions from coming out for good reason.
It isn't just a matter of translation though...
Depending on what version you're reading, entire books will be present or missing. Whole swathes of text cut out just because somebody didn't like them... And it's supposed to be the unadulterated word of god.
Except that the taxpayers rarely get any say in who they "hire" when the corporate jungle owns all the media outlets and can pretty much dictate who the voters even know are on the ballot.
Well, we're talking about a local school here... Not Washington politics... So it's unlikely that the corporate jungle or media outlets had much to do with who got voted in.
But even if we're talking about Washington politics - it's still the voters fault that things are the way they are. Or, rather, the citizenship in general.
It is your responsibility as a citizen to participate in the democratic process. You're supposed to educate yourself and then show up to vote. If you don't vote, or if you don't bother to educate yourself, you're part of the problem.
So the real geniuses are people like Babbage, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before that train was even built, and Leonardo da Vinci, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before the idea of trains was even invented.
Yes. In my opinion that is true genius. That shows some kind of remarkable insight that just simply wasn't available to anyone else at the time. Or for years to come. There was something truly special about those people.
Of course people thought Babbage was a bit of a nutter at the time, and we probably wouldn't even know who Leonardo da Vinci was today if he hadn't also been a great artist.
Yup. Simply coming up with an idea doesn't do you too much good if you can't implement it. And if you're too far ahead of the curve then the infrastructure to implement it doesn't even exist.
Clearly being a real genius isn't of much practical value. The real money is in doing a good job at what someone else already thought up.
Indeed.
Which does take an awful lot of skill, talent, knowledge, foresight, and luck... I'm not claiming it's easy to put together something like Facebook at the right time, with the right interface, and then pull together the right investors.
But it isn't genius.
It's the argument of someone who isn't a genius to claim that genius does not exist, or is really nothing special. Anyone can throw a football, or bang on a drum. Doing it with the practice and timing to actually entertain, or to reliably reach a wide receiver, or to achieve what Zuckerberg with the interface that people _accepted_ takes some noticeable skill.
Skill != Genius
Being able to entertain somebody with a drum or win a game with a football certainly takes skill. Skill that I do not have. But it does not take genius.
Building a nice website also takes skill. It's a skill that I do not have. But it does not take genius.
Genius is not skill, it is vision. It is seeing things that others cannot. You could argue that perhaps Babbage was a genius, since he saw a computing machine long before anyone else did. But Zuckerberg didn't build his website decades before anyone else. Other folks had the same idea at about the same time. Because it had become virtually obvious.
Which is the whole argument. That as technology progresses, and innovations pile atop innovations, it takes less and less vision to see something new. Until eventually it's right there in your face and somebody is going to "invent" it almost by accident.
"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."
If you stack up enough giants, anyone can see anything.
That's an insidious fallacy. There is no 'forward' with technology, it's not like a train that follows the tracks. Technology just evolves in some direction for a while, then switches to another direction, etc. Nobody knows in which direction it goes, and there are plenty of directions that are missed out on and will never be followed. All that anyone can say is that among all the technologies that will be found along the path of our civilization, many of the technologies have relatives found earlier in time.
Direction is irrelevant to the discussion. Any given technology has a pile of prerequisites. As those prerequisites are met, we move closer to having the ability to discover/implement that technology. You can call this "forward" if you want... Or "up", "down", "backwards", "hubwise", or whatever the hell you want. You're still getting closer to having everything you need to make whatever it is we're talking about.
Now, if you always call 'forward' whatever direction technology's headed in, then sure, progress looks like it's inevitable. But then you have problems explaining how some civilizations don't seem to go 'forward' in the same direction as us. For example, many South American civilizations did NOT invent the wheel.
Obviously some prerequisite was not met.
This isn't some MMOG or RPG where you can look at the tech tree and check things off. We're all just feeling around in the dark. But there's some piece of the puzzle that they didn't have.
You also have problems explaining why 'better' technologies sometimes fail, as when the direction switches but you still think the previous direction will continue forever. For example, in VHS vs Betamax the latter was further along the expected direction.
I've never really understood how a tape that couldn't hold an entire feature-length film was supposed to be superior to one that could... I mean, it might have looked prettier and worked better... But if you can't fit a movie on there, who cares?
Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. It's tempting to think of technological evolution as a simple straight line like a train track, but it causes more problems than it solves. It's better to think in terms of an undirected evolutionary model.
The tracks were a metaphor, nothing more. Don't worry, no puppies were harmed in the making of this post.
The problem I see with it is that genius actually does matter. If we all sit down and wait for new inventions because 'surely someone will do it' then no one will do it. A single person can change the course of a nation, and it is impossible to predict individual people
I think you may misunderstand. The argument is that actual genius doesn't really exist. The argument is that the specific individual who comes up with the "invention" is irrelevant. The argument is that there is no stunning ray of sheer brainpower that makes such an "invention" possible - it is, instead, inevitable.
Imagine, if you will, a train barreling down the tracks towards a helpless puppy. When the train is 1,000 miles away from the puppy, nobody really knows what is going to happen. You can't see the big picture. The folks looking at the puppy don't see the train, and the folks looking at the train can't see the puppy. If somebody were to shout out "oh no, the puppy's gonna get squished!" at that moment in time, it would be genius. But as the train gets closer and closer to the puppy, it becomes more and more obvious. And eventually it is almost impossible not to realize that the puppy is going to be run over.
This is the argument. As technology rolls forward, it eventually becomes almost impossible not to invent something new.
You get enough computers chattering away with each-other... Enough people on the web... Enough folks trying to share photos and connect with other people... Cheap enough server infrastructure.. Ample enough bandwidth... Powerful enough databases... And eventually somebody is bound to say "Hey, why don't we throw together some kind of web page where people can keep in touch with each-other and share photos and stuff?"
Or you can get a business class line, like a T1.
You have choice. You just don't want to pay for it.
First of all, a T1 barely qualifies as "broadband" these days. It's only 1.5 Mbps. That's not horrible... But it isn't terribly impressive when compared to the 10+ Mbps advertised for most residential connections.
Second, a business class connection like a T1 is not a "choice" for a residential connection.
That's like suggesting that somebody build their own cell tower because the reception is spotty where they live.
What about the cost per hour of gameplay?
Seems to me that 20-30 hours of gameplay used to be the norm... Now you're usually seeing 8-10, and then relying on multiplayer to keep it interesting after that.
I realize they were in their "rights" legally and such to put out the neighbours fire and not his.. (from the TFA, they just sat there and made sure it didn't spread). But I mean, as a human, what the fuck. Is there so little empathy?
As human beings, I'm sure there was plenty of empathy. And now that this guy's got national attention, I'm sure there will be plenty more. There'll be donations a-plenty. He'll probably be fine.
But water isn't free... Nor is the gas to drive the truck out there... Nor are the paychecks that all the fire fighters collect... You can't really run a fire department for free. If they start running around, putting out fires for free, pretty soon there won't be a fire department at all.
Why couldn't they have put it out and then billed him? He probably would have been so happy he would have paid it. This reeks of callousness. What have "we" become (I'm not american, but I am a human, I think..)
Fire departments cost money all the time, not just when stuff is on fire. You have to pay to maintain the equipment, pay the employees, etc. You need that money year-round, not just when stuff is on fire. And, if you're lucky, more people pay you (via taxes or fees) than people actually have fires. So you don't have to charge every single person the full cost of putting out their fire.
If they were allowed to collect money at the time of the fire, nobody would pay ahead of time. I mean, hell, why would you? Pay $75 now on the off chance that you might have a fire... Or pay $75 when your house is actually in flames, and if it never burns you don't have to pay... Tough choice!
But then the fire department has no money to maintain anything, no money to hire anyone. And then you've got no fire department at all.
Apple doesn't want an application install vector that they don't control.
What does this app have to do with install vectors?
I'm kind of torn on this.
I don't mind paying for stuff I like... And I sure as hell want to support the folk making quality entertainment. I want my local theater to make enough money to stay in business, and further to see good ticket sales on specific types of films so that they'll carry more of those in the future. I want movies I like to make good money, so that more are made like it. I want to support the stuff that I like, so that there will be more of it in the future.
But it's getting a little ridiculous.
We'll pay over $10 for a ticket to the movies... And then get hit with an insane markup on on munchies. And then watch a never-ending loop of commercials while waiting for the lights to dim. And then watch 10+ minutes of commercials after the lights dim. And then there's the previews. And finally the movie starts.
That seems like an excessive amount of advertising considering how much we're paying for tickets and munchies.
The same thing goes for my TV at home... We paid for the initial installation, the receivers, the TVs. We're paying a monthly fee. We pay a premium fee to get some extra channels. There's product placement everywhere, and we're still seeing commercials every few minutes.
Is all that really necessary?
What would be nice is if the GUI could automatically create a shell script doing the change. That way you could (a) learn about how to do it per CLI by looking at the generated shell script, and (b) apply the generated shell script (after proper inspection, of course) to other computers.
Cisco's GUI stuff doesn't really generate any scripts, but the commands it creates are the same things you'd type into a CLI. And the resulting configuration is just as human-readable (barring any weird naming conventions) as one built using the CLI. I've actually learned an awful lot about the Cisco CLI by using their GUI.
We've just started working with Aruba hardware. Installed a mobility controller last week. They've got a GUI that does something similar. It's all a pretty web-based front-end, but it again generates CLI commands and a human-readable configuration. I'm still very new to the platform, but I'm already learning about their CLI through the GUI. And getting work done that I wouldn't be able to if I had to look up the CLI commands for everything.
Microsoft's more recent tools are also doing this. Exchange 2007 and newer, for example, are really completely driven by the PowerShell CLI. The GUI generates commands and just feeds them into PowerShell for you. So you can again issue your commands through the GUI, and learn how you could have done it in PowerShell instead.
I have Win 7 x64 Pro in a VMWare image and it works relatively well in there, but I had to tweak the settings for the container, and if I run it with less than 2GB of memory allocated, it starts to get pissy.
Why would you want to run a 64-bit operating system with anything less than 4 GB of RAM?
I derive a great amount of personal satisfaction from learning and understanding how things work. I find I'm definitely a minority in that respect. It saddens me.
I actually find that most people are interested in understanding how things work. However, most people don't have time to learn advanced physics or learn how other things work because they are more worried being busy raising kids, feeding their family, maintaining social relationships, or dealing with crime in their neighborhood.
It's just the nerds that grew up in suburbia and never leave their computers who think that they are special.
Your mileage has obviously varied from mine...
I spent the last 7 years of my life working for a small IT shop providing support to local businesses, private individuals, college students, and anyone else with a broken computer.
It's been my experience that folks simply do not care to learn how things work. It isn't a matter of not having time, they just don't care. They've got their job, their set of tasks, and that's all they care about. They don't want to know anything more than that.
Obviously there's individual variation. I find computers interesting, so I've learned a lot about them. Some other person finds plants interesting and has learned a lot about gardening. And not everyone is averse to learning about new things.
But I've found an awful lot of people just aren't curious. They don't know how something works, they don't care how it works, and they'll actively resist learning about it.
I've tried to teach people how to work the computers they're sitting in front of... How to use the software that's necessary for them to do their jobs... And they'll almost instantly declare that something is beyond them as soon as you vary one hair from their daily routine. Try to explain that you can move an icon to a different place on the screen? "I just don't understand those computer things..."
I'm not sure that your average human being has ever been terribly curious. Maybe it's always been somewhat atypical.
But curiosity is definitely being discouraged these days. You aren't supposed to ask too many questions. You aren't supposed to do anything too unusual. Better not do anything suspicious...
Geeks, almost by definition, are curious creatures. Not just IT geeks. Anyone with the drive and passion to really find out how things work - be it a computer programmer, an automotive mechanic, a structural engineer, a geologist, or whatever - is going to fall outside of the social norm. That's why they're called "geeks".
Just what Android needs, more fragmentation.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Fragmentation is where Android itself splits up. Like having one version of Android on a Verizon phone, and something different on an AT&T phone, and they may not even work with the same apps.
That's bad for Android as an OS, because then consumers aren't sure what will or won't work on their phone. It says "Android" on the phone... But it isn't actually Android, it's Verizon's flavor of Android.
This is another app store. It isn't going to fragment the Android platform, it's just going to give you another place to buy your Android apps.
First of all I'm happy that not all my boxes are directly reachable from the outside world. Only those that I choose (DMZ or specific port forwarding). A simple quite effective security measure against many worms, for example. What's not addressable can't be infected that way.
That's what firewalls are for.
Secondly if you're really trying to run web pages from home, and want your other computer to serve one too, why not putting that one on say port 8080? You won't be running any serious commercial web site from such a set-up anyway (assuming you're somewhat sane). And it's reachable from the outside again.
The problem with putting that one on port 8080 is that your average user has no idea what a port is or how to specify one. If I tell my parents to go to www.example.com they can manage it. If I try telling them to go to www.example.com:8080 they'll wind up with all sorts of strange interpretations of that.
Just because I'm not going to be running any "serious commercial web site" from my house doesn't mean I don't want people to be able to find it. I could run a small photo album, or my own blog, or a forum, or a mail server... Any number of things. If I only open it up to my friends and family there's absolutely no reason why my bandwidth couldn't handle it.
But, if you really think that's unreasonable, replace "home" with "small business that's only been given/sold a single public IP address by their ISP". The relative scarcity of IP addresses has turned them into commodities. You have to actually purchase additional IP addresses. If you're running even a few servers that need to be publicly accessible it quickly becomes very inconvenient to have to pass everything through NAT. And you only need two of the same thing to find yourself needing another IP address.
Same for your VCR and your water meter: assign them their own port numbers. No unique IP needed.
Granted, we're unlikely to have 65,000+ devices requiring their own connectivity to the Internet... But your answer is tantamount to suggesting that every mail server should have its own, unique port number. There's a reason we've standardized port numbers. Imagine trying to set up a mail server if every single machine you tried to talk to had its own, unique port. Imagine trying to manage traffic without being able to match against port numbers.
And yes of course it's convenient if everything is addressable from anywhere. The Stuxnet writers would have had an easier job if they could reach those PLCs directly instead of first having to infect another computer.
Again, you're somehow forgetting the fact that firewalls exist.
If you don't want a machine to be accessible from the outside world, you don't allow it. Only allow outgoing connections. It isn't that hard.
what limitations? my iphone is on NAT. what will IPV6 allow me to do on it that i can't do now
The original idea of the Internet was a network of peers. Every address was globally routable, and any machine could host content.
There are obvious security issues with this... Which is why we've got firewalls... But there wasn't really anything standing in the way of you hosting a game server, or website, or whatever on your home machine.
NAT now stands in the way of you doing this. NAT has destroyed the whole "network of peers" thing.
NAT is fine for simply consuming content. For your iPhone, for example, I doubt if it's an issue. And if you're just loading up random web pages at home, or connecting to WoW, or whatever - you'll be fine.
But if you want to host a web page at home you're going to have to not just open the ports in your firewall, but forward the traffic from your outside IP to the inside IP. And if you want a second box to serve up a web page too? Too bad. You only get one port 80 per IP address, and you've only got one globally routable IP address.
Again, if all you're doing is consuming, this isn't all that much of a problem. But then you aren't a peer, either.
Where this starts to be more of an issue is with various devices that we now want to be able to communicate with remotely. It's becoming more and more common for people to want to remote into home computers. Or maybe program a DVR remotely. Or maybe some utility company wants to be able to check your electric/water meter remotely.
Being able to host your own content is becoming more important, not less. And shoving everything behind NAT is becoming more of a problem, not less.
blablablabla. i99% of the times, NAT is in conjunction with a stateful firewall. That's why people say NAT = FIREWALLED.
So if shoes are normally encountered in the presence of socks, shoes are the same as socks?
Seems a little lazy to me...
Regardless, NAT is not a security mechanism. It is not the equivalent of a firewall. And removing NAT will not prevent you from putting in a firewall.
It's not (always) bribery, but just a PR stunt. They don't do these things for better review scores, but for media attention.
Reviews really aren't about the numbers though... They're about the publicity. Yes, sure, folks talk about what score some game got from some site... But the review itself is more than a number. It's generally several pages of description, a bunch of screenshots, opinion bits, memorable quotes from the dialogue... That's all PR. Even if a game gets a bad score, some folks will buy it because of a cool screenshot in a review.
Serious, what good is "rancid, rotting meat mixed with spent shell casings, teeth, broken glasses and dog tags" or "brass knuckles"?
If it's not cash, or some other thing they can cash in then it's not really bribery.
Pretty much all of that could be converted to cash on ebay. People will buy just about anything. Especially if it's branded merchandise.