Of course, it is our civic duty to keep those people creatively employed at Microsoft. After all, if they couldnt earn their wages getting upset about the companys critics, they might actually be transferred into tech support where people would have to listen to them:).
Of course you're right, Roblimo has it entirely wrong. What he should have said is that the criminals at Microsoft are again proving themselves little better than mobsters and their blatant violations of the law and criminal conduct should result in serious jailtime for everyone from the programmers who lent themselves to these activities to the ones who decide it.
And please keep your sophmoric naive Ayn Rand to yourself.
Most research shows that there is virtually no impact from punishment on crimerates. Crimes are not done with the perpetrator expecting to have _any_ punishment. It isnt part of the equation (except if you count crimes done by rational people. If you got shot for speeding for example, that would probably affect the number of people speeding, because in that case there is a cost benefit analysis done by the perpetrator). The only thing that affects it is the actual chance of getting caught, so if you have a high solved crimes rate that will tend to lower the actual crimerate too (which is probably why you see lower crimerates from things like zero tolerance policies). Most countries have dismal solved crimes rates and many try to make up for it by being brutal instead, which just doesnt matter the least, except as a PR issue for politicians. Once the solved crimes rate goes down you dont get punished for comitting a crime anymore, you get punished for getting caught.
Rehabilitation is, of course, a very difficult problem. Most criminals suffer from mild to rather severe mental disorders, bad social conditions and/or drug abuse, and by the time they end up in prison its usually too late to do anything about it. And even if something can be done about it, having a criminal record isnt likely to improve their chances of being able to support themselves. Basically society has already failed, and they and their victims are the ones who will pay for that failure. (Yah yah, free will, choice, Ill bet ya a good pharmaceutical company could brew up something nice to fix the most 'normal' persons brain chemistry to resemble the average intern and we can see how much free will there really is).
But while neither way will make a great improvement, poor treatment of prisoners leads to more breakout attempts, and it leads to more brutal criminals when they get out. If they werent already total sociopaths when they got in, a number of years in prison isnt going to improve them.
And in the end, punishment just doesnt matter. It doesnt help the victims and it doesnt deter from crime. How to reduce crime is what matters, because frankly, Id much rather not be subjected to a crime at all than know the one who did has a 10 percent chance of getting 20 years in a bad prison.
Yes, the same Amnesty critique is shared by Sweden, if I remember correctly. The military in countries that have a compulsory military service appears to be a sad exception to human rights.
Actually, on that topic, it should probably, in equalitys name, be compulsory for females too. Its a rather interesting remenant of gender discrimination. Even more interesting is that a lot more females than males have been found in support of compulsory military service, as long as they dont have to go through it.
Actually, they are supposed to be places to protect society from those who violate the laws. Since _punishment_ does not significantly deter crime, whats the use of it? With the state of a lot of american prisons they are rather likely to increase crimerate in the country than decrease it, since those subjected to them are usually even less likely to become rehabilitated.
Actually, international governing bodies arent that bad. As long as they stick to regulating what they do well; basic human rights, trade rules, etc. They do this well because the things that a number of geographically and culturally different countries can agree on is likely less extreme than what a single unit may come up with on its own. This gives people everywhere a recourse to some form of basic rights and when involved in a conflict with their government.
Centralization of _some_ things isnt naturally bad. For example, the US has stayed largely democratic under the central government. With just the states, how many wars would there have been between them? How many states would have gone through periods of dictatorship? Id expect at least a few, judging from pre-EU europe, which isnt that far separated culturally.
They should stay out of micromanagement tho, which seems to be very hard for them to do; witness the US and EU on some points. Beurocracies and governments like to gather power, and extending the range of management is a good way to do that.
But the british meat thing is just silly. IIRC, France has its fair share of 'mad cows' too, as do several other EU countries, from what I remember from the height of the scare. So basically its just protectionistic BS from the french government, likely caused by french farmers who seem to have a tendency to be rather... extreme. Maybe theyve eaten a bit much French bovine meat?
Well, most Fortune 500 companies couldnt care less if the Chinese government shoots a couple of dissidents now and then tho. They're all with their fingers in deep in China, in good company of most western leaders who seem to suffer a common bout of lost memory on state visits there. Linux should probably 'hail' things like this as 'corporate victories'; do you think Microsoft would object to having people forced to use NT at gunpoint? I think Mr. Gates would find this an excellent strategy.
Tables, unfortunately, appear to be the best of a number of painful ways to do things. The alternatives, like frames, are painful for the user. Tables also make cgi generation of parts of pages very easy. The drawback, of course, is that complicated table pages are slow to render.
I must admit that I dont use Microsoft products a lot. Except when Im forced to. The problem is just that, Im _forced_ to.
I get mail that is in Word format. Sure, I can use 'strings' to get the important parts out (altho its always fun to see the text stored multiple times and the amount of crap in.doc files), but it is rather unsatisfactory. Had there been competition and incentives to keep standards for document interchange this wouldnt be a problem. As is, not only are the files incompatible with everything else, they often arent even readable in Word unless you use the same exact version they were written with.
Some products I actually do want to use only run on windows (games mostly). Not a problem, since Ive been _forced_ to buy it anyway. I have three licenses of various versions of Windows. I _wanted_ none of them, but got them, and had to pay for them anyway (and dont even try to argue about this, due to company agreements and so on I had little choice). This may lead to bundling agreements being much more rare, and far easier to get out of.
Not to mention every time I have had to help friends or relatives fix or reinstall windows because the load of is so broken and substandard that it cant run reliably for more than a month. I dont have much problems with my own installation of it (just a few crashes per month), but then I have a 'only one program installed at a time on a windows computer' policy. If this monopoly is broken I can easily replace their windows installations with something more reliable and they could still have a fair chance at compatibility with whatever they need their computers for.
And apart from all other personal gains, maybe higher productivity in a world where computers are less of a pain, lower prices, less problems, more products, etc.
Actually, I dont care about Bill Gates wealth. I do however think that he and the rest of the parties involved in making the decisions to violate the law should be held personally responsible and be prosecuted. There is too much leniency with illegal buisness practices, and the executives in charge should be made aware that they, _personally_, can suffer the consequences of their decisions. Jail time at some white collar crime golfing estate, community service, whatever, just to get the point home that you cannot act in any way you want and get away with it.
These types of crimes may not hurt someone physically, but the effects of the crimes affect millions, if not billions of people through higher prices, shoddy quality and less innovation (and through extension, higher taxes, lower general productivity, etc). Not to mention the fewer, but very personal losses of those trying to run successful buisnesses in competition with those who do not play by the rules.
In either case it doesnt matter. Even if theyre in an appeals process, the fact that they are under close scrutiny will prevent their worst abuses. IBM was in the same situation and it also relieved the pressure on their competition under the investigations.
It is because of the trials that we can buy computers with Linux from several large computer resellers. Without that, Microsoft would just say that well, anyone who sells computers with linux pays three times their competitors for any copies of Windows. Fortunately, their ordinary tactics would just add to the pile of evidence and witnesses against them so they have to be a bit more careful these days.
Its really sad that competition in the sandbox has to be protected by armed guards pointing guns at the neighbourhood bully, but if thats what it takes...
What he was getting at was that he found it bothersome that someone cared about his criminal activities. He wants to be left alone to kill off or buy up any competition.
I dont care if its Ellison or Gates, Microsoft, Sun, Apple or IBM, if they do not act in compliance with the laws, they'd better be ready to defend themselves.
These rules arent about computer software and hardware, they are about illegal buinsess practices in _any_ field.
Finally maybe some innovation can be done in the industry again. Its a great day for anyone who wants to develop popular applications and make money.
Go read the ruling. Its solid and well built.
Microsoft has been attacked because they are little more than cheap mobsters. Im sure you are paid well enough by them tho, but you know, some things just arent worth the money.
What will happen if microsoft collapses? Well, first of all, the general tech stock market will face a serious reality check and probably collapse. Serious depression. Lots of people will see their savings wiped out. Lots of jobs will be lost. Etc.
Well, so what? The hyperinflation in the tech stock market is hardly news. If morons decide to build their house on an active volcano and dont listen to warnings Im not going to feel any pity when they get instaincinerated.
After that we may get back a stock market more based on reality than a pyramid scheme. And we may get more computers that actually work again. And we may get an actual true productivity improvement from computers that isnt eaten up by Word crashes.
Yes, it will be painful. But it will be a _lot_ less painful than the alternative in the long run.
Of course, things like planning terrorist attacks could easily be done with no grammatical structure. And it would be even easier if you could use all trigger words as much as possible.
Then again, things like Echelon are basically an exercise in futility. You simply cant scan the content of that amount of data and catch anything you didnt already know, if youre dealing with people who know they're being watched. The amount of CPU power that would be needed to catch even the simplest evasions doesnt even come close to existing. Just look at the processing power needed to do even minor filtering on a corporate basis to attempt to block out some stuff from employees. And that _is_ pure text search. Add to that lexical analysis and associations and you realize it doesnt even begin to make sense.
Unless, of course, the NSA directors nephew owns the company selling the hardware, in which case I can see at least how someone is getting some benefit. And if thats the deal it doesnt really matter if it works or not.
You dont have to be a living encyclopaedia either to know that _most_, if not all, children abuse animals, insects, etc. Most grow up and form ethics and morality during their way towards becoming adult, but this takes time and upbringing and most humans do not reach an ethics capability based on anything more advanced than punishment and reward until the low to mid teens.
MMPI and similar tests are easy to trick. The lie indicators are usually pretty obvious. Don't pretend youre perfect, they catch those naive lies easily, just skew the results in the direction you want and avoid the worst rating questions.
My current employers personell woman was amazed at how well and evenly I scored on the psych eval (MMPI derivate designed to separate personality you wish to present, real personality and personality under stress). I did tell her that I had been studying psychology and created tests like that myself tho.
Actually, question 5 would be the lie indicatior. Question 6 wouldnt even be in. In this case, if you completely agreed that you could just shrug it off (and scored high on the rest of the lie indicators on the tests), you would be trying to skew it, or likely lying. Most people cannot just 'shrug it off', and thus if you answer the same way to a couple of other 'lie' questions your results would be trashed. Those questions should be likely, but not blatantly obvious. Other good 'lie' questions would be things like 'I always obey my parents', 'Ive never considered shoplifting', 'Ive never hit anyone in my life', etc. On single questions its ok to answer in the 'best' way, but taken together, all of it would just be too good to be true and your score is out.
Well, I hate to break it to you too, but those neat little categories are not useful on an individual basis. Common patterns of behaviour in people is only useful when it comes to predict likelyhood of a percentage of a group reacting in some way.
First of all, lets take the profilers. Profiling a known criminal is a lot easier than profiling an ordinary person. You already have several very important data points about their behaviour. Extreme psychological disorders also fall into a neater pattern with fewer variations than ordinary human behaviour.
Second, you cannot even being to compare real psychological profiling and evaluation to simple psychological testing. The two are not even in the same realm of accuracy. Not to mention they are not in the same realm when it comes to the amount of work.
Genetics and biology arent useful either. You can predict that out of a group of people with a genetic predisposition for low serotonin levels you will have a higher rate of depression and suicide. However, if an ordinary person should happen to lose his job and his girlfriend dumps him, guess what happens to his serotonin levels. And the same is true for genetic predispositions towards violence; a lot of those who have it wont ever exhibit it because they dont get into any circumstances that would trigger such reactions, and the same way, a lot of people without any predisposition will get such reactions because they are subjected to events that trigger violent reactions in anyone. But as a group you can say those predisposed towards violence will have more members acting violently than those without the biology for it.
As for psychological tests, again you have the same problem. You can get statistical significance on groups, but you cannot on an individual basis. You have failure rates far into the double digits. Unless you want to subject all the test cases to several months of therapy with different psychologists, over a long time to judge the effects of different situations on the individual.
So what is the use with testing like this? Youll get a number of people on a 'risks' list, but most likely it will be someone not on the list who gets in a bad situation and goes off shooting, simply because the external circumstances on the larger groups are more likely to be the deciding factor, in all but the most mindbogglingly obvious cases.
Getting past psych tests is easy; just go read a book or two on how the tests are constructed. Most test have the same basic structure. Like you say, the 'lies' are fairly predictable. The lie catching questions, that is, that will tell you if the test person is being honest or not. Any moderately intelligent person with any knowledge of psychology tests will breeze through them without being caught.
And you know what? Tests like this _always_ have an _extremely_ high failure rate for single individuals. Unless the creators of the tests flunked out of psychology 101 they should know that most psych tests are only useful to asses _groups_ of people. As in 'kids in this school have stronger tendencies towards violence than kids in that school'.
To get anything even close to a realistic failure rate (down below double digits) in assesing a single individuals disposition and personality traits you have to include several months of therapy by several psychologists as well as massive testing. And even then you wont catch them all since you have the risk of external circumstances like emotional stress, alcohol, drugs, etc that will bypass the normal personality.
Work is not an end to itself, and it is not needed to support the population. _Human_ work, that is. With the automation going on, compare the amount of actual human work needed to support a number of people 100 years ago and today. By the time that 95% of the population is retired you wont need more than 0.5% working to support it (well, you may get a problem in healthcare tho).
You seem to have missed the problem that not all parents are loving and nurturing, and if theyre forced to stay at home they may very well, consciously or not, become resentful. Frankly, if you want some sort of base standard, youd be better off with daycare. With daycare personell, chances are theyve had some education, theyve done it before and someone has interviewed them for the position. You dont need any sort of qualification to become a parent.
Neither is very idyllic, and most kids will get screwed up either way, but if the parents are working they can at least start up a therapy fund for the kid when its old enough to need to deal with it.
Of course, all _real_ terrorists would stick those keywords in their.sig too, since then the NSA wouldnt read their mail, right?
I wonder if its all just some sort of fraud. Such a system would be incredibly easy to fsck around with, but if its an NSA directors nephew owning the company supplying the hardware, maybe the actual usefulness doesnt matter.
Such defensive patenting is already done. Those companies who recognize the fact that the patent system is completely broken and out of control (Oracle, I think, recently made a statement to that effect) still have to defend themselves against patent lawsuits from other companies. All the larger corporations are either the bad players or forced to pull guns too, and point them at eachothers heads so they have a standoff (patent crosslicensing).
A similar approach from the free software community would be to obtain several broad patents on various things of use to almost all software companies (how about 'slashdot effect' as 'method for bringing massive amounts of viewers to your webpages'), and then have the patents controlled by a trusted party. If anyone threatens a free software project, simply counterfile patent violations over those broad patents to get them to back off.
Its the Mutually Assured Destruction of the software world. Wether that is a good way to keep peace or not is debatable. It would be a lot better if the entire idea of software patents was wiped; software has much more in common with works of art (copyrightable) than it has with invention. And invention in the software industry is not the least affected positively by patents, rather it is reduced.
I dont have anything against either of those. Some rich kids are 'better', but who cares? I dont care about anyones opinion unless I respect them, and I dont have much respect for wealth.
What does annoy me is that the entrepreneur who finds a way to make a fortune will probably have it taken from him. Someone who already has loads of money will either buy him out before he realizes what its worth, or simply take it from him because he can never realize his way to make a fortune without financing. Theres a lot of disgusting people floating around in buisness. Be a cynic.
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Of course, it is our civic duty to keep those people creatively employed at Microsoft. After all, if they couldnt earn their wages getting upset about the companys critics, they might actually be transferred into tech support where people would have to listen to them :).
It is sorta fun tho.
Of course you're right, Roblimo has it entirely wrong. What he should have said is that the criminals at Microsoft are again proving themselves little better than mobsters and their blatant violations of the law and criminal conduct should result in serious jailtime for everyone from the programmers who lent themselves to these activities to the ones who decide it.
And please keep your sophmoric naive Ayn Rand to yourself.
Most research shows that there is virtually no impact from punishment on crimerates. Crimes are not done with the perpetrator expecting to have _any_ punishment. It isnt part of the equation (except if you count crimes done by rational people. If you got shot for speeding for example, that would probably affect the number of people speeding, because in that case there is a cost benefit analysis done by the perpetrator). The only thing that affects it is the actual chance of getting caught, so if you have a high solved crimes rate that will tend to lower the actual crimerate too (which is probably why you see lower crimerates from things like zero tolerance policies). Most countries have dismal solved crimes rates and many try to make up for it by being brutal instead, which just doesnt matter the least, except as a PR issue for politicians. Once the solved crimes rate goes down you dont get punished for comitting a crime anymore, you get punished for getting caught.
Rehabilitation is, of course, a very difficult problem. Most criminals suffer from mild to rather severe mental disorders, bad social conditions and/or drug abuse, and by the time they end up in prison its usually too late to do anything about it. And even if something can be done about it, having a criminal record isnt likely to improve their chances of being able to support themselves. Basically society has already failed, and they and their victims are the ones who will pay for that failure. (Yah yah, free will, choice, Ill bet ya a good pharmaceutical company could brew up something nice to fix the most 'normal' persons brain chemistry to resemble the average intern and we can see how much free will there really is).
But while neither way will make a great improvement, poor treatment of prisoners leads to more breakout attempts, and it leads to more brutal criminals when they get out. If they werent already total sociopaths when they got in, a number of years in prison isnt going to improve them.
And in the end, punishment just doesnt matter. It doesnt help the victims and it doesnt deter from crime. How to reduce crime is what matters, because frankly, Id much rather not be subjected to a crime at all than know the one who did has a 10 percent chance of getting 20 years in a bad prison.
Yes, the same Amnesty critique is shared by Sweden, if I remember correctly. The military in countries that have a compulsory military service appears to be a sad exception to human rights.
Actually, on that topic, it should probably, in equalitys name, be compulsory for females too. Its a rather interesting remenant of gender discrimination. Even more interesting is that a lot more females than males have been found in support of compulsory military service, as long as they dont have to go through it.
Actually, they are supposed to be places to protect society from those who violate the laws. Since _punishment_ does not significantly deter crime, whats the use of it? With the state of a lot of american prisons they are rather likely to increase crimerate in the country than decrease it, since those subjected to them are usually even less likely to become rehabilitated.
Actually, international governing bodies arent that bad. As long as they stick to regulating what they do well; basic human rights, trade rules, etc. They do this well because the things that a number of geographically and culturally different countries can agree on is likely less extreme than what a single unit may come up with on its own. This gives people everywhere a recourse to some form of basic rights and when involved in a conflict with their government.
Centralization of _some_ things isnt naturally bad. For example, the US has stayed largely democratic under the central government. With just the states, how many wars would there have been between them? How many states would have gone through periods of dictatorship? Id expect at least a few, judging from pre-EU europe, which isnt that far separated culturally.
They should stay out of micromanagement tho, which seems to be very hard for them to do; witness the US and EU on some points. Beurocracies and governments like to gather power, and extending the range of management is a good way to do that.
But the british meat thing is just silly. IIRC, France has its fair share of 'mad cows' too, as do several other EU countries, from what I remember from the height of the scare. So basically its just protectionistic BS from the french government, likely caused by french farmers who seem to have a tendency to be rather... extreme. Maybe theyve eaten a bit much French bovine meat?
Well, most Fortune 500 companies couldnt care less if the Chinese government shoots a couple of dissidents now and then tho. They're all with their fingers in deep in China, in good company of most western leaders who seem to suffer a common bout of lost memory on state visits there. Linux should probably 'hail' things like this as 'corporate victories'; do you think Microsoft would object to having people forced to use NT at gunpoint? I think Mr. Gates would find this an excellent strategy.
Tables, unfortunately, appear to be the best of a number of painful ways to do things. The alternatives, like frames, are painful for the user. Tables also make cgi generation of parts of pages very easy. The drawback, of course, is that complicated table pages are slow to render.
What I personally gain? Let me tell you.
.doc files), but it is rather unsatisfactory. Had there been competition and incentives to keep standards for document interchange this wouldnt be a problem. As is, not only are the files incompatible with everything else, they often arent even readable in Word unless you use the same exact version they were written with.
I must admit that I dont use Microsoft products a lot. Except when Im forced to. The problem is just that, Im _forced_ to.
I get mail that is in Word format. Sure, I can use 'strings' to get the important parts out (altho its always fun to see the text stored multiple times and the amount of crap in
Some products I actually do want to use only run on windows (games mostly). Not a problem, since Ive been _forced_ to buy it anyway. I have three licenses of various versions of Windows. I _wanted_ none of them, but got them, and had to pay for them anyway (and dont even try to argue about this, due to company agreements and so on I had little choice). This may lead to bundling agreements being much more rare, and far easier to get out of.
Not to mention every time I have had to help friends or relatives fix or reinstall windows because the load of is so broken and substandard that it cant run reliably for more than a month. I dont have much problems with my own installation of it (just a few crashes per month), but then I have a 'only one program installed at a time on a windows computer' policy. If this monopoly is broken I can easily replace their windows installations with something more reliable and they could still have a fair chance at compatibility with whatever they need their computers for.
And apart from all other personal gains, maybe higher productivity in a world where computers are less of a pain, lower prices, less problems, more products, etc.
Actually, I dont care about Bill Gates wealth. I do however think that he and the rest of the parties involved in making the decisions to violate the law should be held personally responsible and be prosecuted. There is too much leniency with illegal buisness practices, and the executives in charge should be made aware that they, _personally_, can suffer the consequences of their decisions. Jail time at some white collar crime golfing estate, community service, whatever, just to get the point home that you cannot act in any way you want and get away with it.
These types of crimes may not hurt someone physically, but the effects of the crimes affect millions, if not billions of people through higher prices, shoddy quality and less innovation (and through extension, higher taxes, lower general productivity, etc). Not to mention the fewer, but very personal losses of those trying to run successful buisnesses in competition with those who do not play by the rules.
In either case it doesnt matter. Even if theyre in an appeals process, the fact that they are under close scrutiny will prevent their worst abuses. IBM was in the same situation and it also relieved the pressure on their competition under the investigations.
It is because of the trials that we can buy computers with Linux from several large computer resellers. Without that, Microsoft would just say that well, anyone who sells computers with linux pays three times their competitors for any copies of Windows. Fortunately, their ordinary tactics would just add to the pile of evidence and witnesses against them so they have to be a bit more careful these days.
Its really sad that competition in the sandbox has to be protected by armed guards pointing guns at the neighbourhood bully, but if thats what it takes...
What he was getting at was that he found it bothersome that someone cared about his criminal activities. He wants to be left alone to kill off or buy up any competition.
I dont care if its Ellison or Gates, Microsoft, Sun, Apple or IBM, if they do not act in compliance with the laws, they'd better be ready to defend themselves.
These rules arent about computer software and hardware, they are about illegal buinsess practices in _any_ field.
Finally maybe some innovation can be done in the industry again. Its a great day for anyone who wants to develop popular applications and make money.
Go read the ruling. Its solid and well built.
Microsoft has been attacked because they are little more than cheap mobsters. Im sure you are paid well enough by them tho, but you know, some things just arent worth the money.
What will happen if microsoft collapses? Well, first of all, the general tech stock market will face a serious reality check and probably collapse. Serious depression. Lots of people will see their savings wiped out. Lots of jobs will be lost. Etc.
Well, so what? The hyperinflation in the tech stock market is hardly news. If morons decide to build their house on an active volcano and dont listen to warnings Im not going to feel any pity when they get instaincinerated.
After that we may get back a stock market more based on reality than a pyramid scheme. And we may get more computers that actually work again. And we may get an actual true productivity improvement from computers that isnt eaten up by Word crashes.
Yes, it will be painful. But it will be a _lot_ less painful than the alternative in the long run.
Of course, things like planning terrorist attacks could easily be done with no grammatical structure. And it would be even easier if you could use all trigger words as much as possible.
Then again, things like Echelon are basically an exercise in futility. You simply cant scan the content of that amount of data and catch anything you didnt already know, if youre dealing with people who know they're being watched. The amount of CPU power that would be needed to catch even the simplest evasions doesnt even come close to existing. Just look at the processing power needed to do even minor filtering on a corporate basis to attempt to block out some stuff from employees. And that _is_ pure text search. Add to that lexical analysis and associations and you realize it doesnt even begin to make sense.
Unless, of course, the NSA directors nephew owns the company selling the hardware, in which case I can see at least how someone is getting some benefit. And if thats the deal it doesnt really matter if it works or not.
Of course. Thats why the _real_ terrorists use those fields to send the messages, since they're filtered out.
Or maybe filtering the crap would make the whole exercise pointless?
You dont have to be a living encyclopaedia either to know that _most_, if not all, children abuse animals, insects, etc. Most grow up and form ethics and morality during their way towards becoming adult, but this takes time and upbringing and most humans do not reach an ethics capability based on anything more advanced than punishment and reward until the low to mid teens.
MMPI and similar tests are easy to trick. The lie indicators are usually pretty obvious. Don't pretend youre perfect, they catch those naive lies easily, just skew the results in the direction you want and avoid the worst rating questions.
My current employers personell woman was amazed at how well and evenly I scored on the psych eval (MMPI derivate designed to separate personality you wish to present, real personality and personality under stress). I did tell her that I had been studying psychology and created tests like that myself tho.
Actually, question 5 would be the lie indicatior. Question 6 wouldnt even be in. In this case, if you completely agreed that you could just shrug it off (and scored high on the rest of the lie indicators on the tests), you would be trying to skew it, or likely lying. Most people cannot just 'shrug it off', and thus if you answer the same way to a couple of other 'lie' questions your results would be trashed. Those questions should be likely, but not blatantly obvious. Other good 'lie' questions would be things like 'I always obey my parents', 'Ive never considered shoplifting', 'Ive never hit anyone in my life', etc. On single questions its ok to answer in the 'best' way, but taken together, all of it would just be too good to be true and your score is out.
Well, I hate to break it to you too, but those neat little categories are not useful on an individual basis. Common patterns of behaviour in people is only useful when it comes to predict likelyhood of a percentage of a group reacting in some way.
First of all, lets take the profilers. Profiling a known criminal is a lot easier than profiling an ordinary person. You already have several very important data points about their behaviour. Extreme psychological disorders also fall into a neater pattern with fewer variations than ordinary human behaviour.
Second, you cannot even being to compare real psychological profiling and evaluation to simple psychological testing. The two are not even in the same realm of accuracy. Not to mention they are not in the same realm when it comes to the amount of work.
Genetics and biology arent useful either. You can predict that out of a group of people with a genetic predisposition for low serotonin levels you will have a higher rate of depression and suicide. However, if an ordinary person should happen to lose his job and his girlfriend dumps him, guess what happens to his serotonin levels. And the same is true for genetic predispositions towards violence; a lot of those who have it wont ever exhibit it because they dont get into any circumstances that would trigger such reactions, and the same way, a lot of people without any predisposition will get such reactions because they are subjected to events that trigger violent reactions in anyone. But as a group you can say those predisposed towards violence will have more members acting violently than those without the biology for it.
As for psychological tests, again you have the same problem. You can get statistical significance on groups, but you cannot on an individual basis. You have failure rates far into the double digits. Unless you want to subject all the test cases to several months of therapy with different psychologists, over a long time to judge the effects of different situations on the individual.
So what is the use with testing like this? Youll get a number of people on a 'risks' list, but most likely it will be someone not on the list who gets in a bad situation and goes off shooting, simply because the external circumstances on the larger groups are more likely to be the deciding factor, in all but the most mindbogglingly obvious cases.
Getting past psych tests is easy; just go read a book or two on how the tests are constructed. Most test have the same basic structure. Like you say, the 'lies' are fairly predictable. The lie catching questions, that is, that will tell you if the test person is being honest or not. Any moderately intelligent person with any knowledge of psychology tests will breeze through them without being caught.
And you know what? Tests like this _always_ have an _extremely_ high failure rate for single individuals. Unless the creators of the tests flunked out of psychology 101 they should know that most psych tests are only useful to asses _groups_ of people. As in 'kids in this school have stronger tendencies towards violence than kids in that school'.
To get anything even close to a realistic failure rate (down below double digits) in assesing a single individuals disposition and personality traits you have to include several months of therapy by several psychologists as well as massive testing. And even then you wont catch them all since you have the risk of external circumstances like emotional stress, alcohol, drugs, etc that will bypass the normal personality.
Work is not an end to itself, and it is not needed to support the population. _Human_ work, that is. With the automation going on, compare the amount of actual human work needed to support a number of people 100 years ago and today. By the time that 95% of the population is retired you wont need more than 0.5% working to support it (well, you may get a problem in healthcare tho).
You seem to have missed the problem that not all parents are loving and nurturing, and if theyre forced to stay at home they may very well, consciously or not, become resentful. Frankly, if you want some sort of base standard, youd be better off with daycare. With daycare personell, chances are theyve had some education, theyve done it before and someone has interviewed them for the position. You dont need any sort of qualification to become a parent.
Neither is very idyllic, and most kids will get screwed up either way, but if the parents are working they can at least start up a therapy fund for the kid when its old enough to need to deal with it.
Of course, all _real_ terrorists would stick those keywords in their .sig too, since then the NSA wouldnt read their mail, right?
I wonder if its all just some sort of fraud. Such a system would be incredibly easy to fsck around with, but if its an NSA directors nephew owning the company supplying the hardware, maybe the actual usefulness doesnt matter.
Such defensive patenting is already done. Those companies who recognize the fact that the patent system is completely broken and out of control (Oracle, I think, recently made a statement to that effect) still have to defend themselves against patent lawsuits from other companies. All the larger corporations are either the bad players or forced to pull guns too, and point them at eachothers heads so they have a standoff (patent crosslicensing).
A similar approach from the free software community would be to obtain several broad patents on various things of use to almost all software companies (how about 'slashdot effect' as 'method for bringing massive amounts of viewers to your webpages'), and then have the patents controlled by a trusted party. If anyone threatens a free software project, simply counterfile patent violations over those broad patents to get them to back off.
Its the Mutually Assured Destruction of the software world. Wether that is a good way to keep peace or not is debatable. It would be a lot better if the entire idea of software patents was wiped; software has much more in common with works of art (copyrightable) than it has with invention. And invention in the software industry is not the least affected positively by patents, rather it is reduced.
I dont have anything against either of those. Some rich kids are 'better', but who cares? I dont care about anyones opinion unless I respect them, and I dont have much respect for wealth.
What does annoy me is that the entrepreneur who finds a way to make a fortune will probably have it taken from him. Someone who already has loads of money will either buy him out before he realizes what its worth, or simply take it from him because he can never realize his way to make a fortune without financing. Theres a lot of disgusting people floating around in buisness. Be a cynic.