It's not free speech. We do not allow for free speech in all cases when it comes to elections (we limit how many ads you can put on TV, for example).
I would say that, in with the dozens of other election reforms that are needed, we should restrict the purchasing of domain names, search results, etc. which imply one candidate and promote another (or attack the promoted candidate).
Free speech you may have, but this is the electoral equivalent of trademark infringement, and should be treated as such. The site is not a public service, it's an ad for a competing "product". What would we do if Tide (a brand of laundry soap) put out a box in the market labeled "Cheer.gov" (Cheer is another brand of the same product) with Tide in it? Same deal.
On the other hand, if we start deploying blocking today, we reduce the incentive to produce the correct solution (one which prevents audible, and perhaps visual alerts from wireless electronic devices within an area).
The real problem isn't even a social pressure on cell phone and pager companies, but a financial one. If the public views the problem as "solved", then no one is going to buy the new style jammers when they come out, thus it's a losing proposition to even develop them.
No, like it or not, we've developed a new "on-call class" and to say that they can't go to the movies with us is not just wrong, it's not going to work. I think France is about to find this out. I wonder what the percentage of groups of people of size 4+ going out for a night of fun is that contains one person who is on-call for some sort of work... from now on, such groups are going to have to choose a new venue, or patronize those venues which do not block reception. If that percentage is large enough, this becomes a massive financial burden for cinemas.
As an example, my work has me on-call 1 out of 5 weeks. I can go and do what I want, but I have a wireless Internet card in my laptop in the car. If I get a call or page, I have to go respond. I won't make a "choice" not to patronize such places with my friends, I simply cannot, even though I'm a well-behaved cell-user (set to vibrate in large social situations, etc.)
I wonder which cell companies are already working on the set-to-silent-proximity devices and how close they are to deploying. It would be quite nice to have a proper solution, and I would enjoy not having to sit through "inconsiderate cell phone man" ads any longer at the movies.
Your idea is a good one, but a bit too limiting. If you step back from some of the terms (e.g. "data block") and look at existing implementations, I think you'll see that an authentication system (of which, for example SPF is a good first step) combined with SMTP-time weighting of the headers (something like SpamAssassin, but working only with header information) and then a reputation system with a few for degrees of granularity than you suggest above, still meets the basic requirements you set forward.
The key in fighting spam will have to be reputation. The only question is: will it be a decentrallized reputation system, or will it be run by some entity, in a credit-report-like way?
The answer to that is ultimately our decision, but time is running out....
You understand that that's not actually a logical argument, right? The fact that you disagree with, and/or have questions about the motivations of the people producing contradictory results does not mean that they a) do not exist or b) are absolutely wrong. To claim that that must be the case is alien to the scientific method.
"The scientific evidence that humans are affecting the climate with CO2 is as clear as day"
And at one time, the scientific evidence that preventing forest fires was the key to saving communities was clear as day. It also happens to have been wrong, mostly because it was an over-simplification of a complex problem.
I hear a lot of people speaking about the most complex system that we have ever been able to measure to even a tolerable degree of accuracy (the earth's climate) as if we understand it fully. That's simply not true.
In fact, just recently we discovered that forest fires make up for far, far more CO2 release than we had thought (because very hot fires can and do burn permafrost). In fact, just that one source of CO2 dwarfs the output of man. We litterally can't burn enough fossil fuels to make up the difference. We also can't touch the CO2 released by volcanos (which release so much pollutant material that they have a measurable impact on the climate immediately), but forest fires are a special case because, as I noted before, our fire prevention strategies actually worked against us for most of the 20th century and fires now burn hotter and cover more area on average than they used to. If we're looking for theories on why there's more CO2 in the air, why aren't we looking at the massive fires that we've been fighting over the last couple of decades? That's actually the most likely source of human impact on the environment.
The fact of the matter is that we don't yet know how to measure most of the phenomenon that make up our climate. We have computer models that over-simplify the environment enough to make our theories and predictions work on paper, but that's not good enough. We've only been measuring most of the environment (outside of gross measurements) for a few years, and beyond that we have ice and wood records (which actually tell a story that's pretty simillar to what we see today, repeated over and over through the centuries and millenia).
I'm not saying that human induced global warming is not real. I'm just saying that it's irresponsible to be saying that it's absolutely real, and there is no data to the contrary.
There are many scientists who believe that human induced global warming is over-emphasized or downright wrong, but I don't know of anyone who has been able to get a research grant from anywhere BUT a fossil fuel company on the basis of such a theory in the last 10 years, and since they know that that would taint their work's credibility, most choose another area to pursue.
Even scientists who release data without such a theory are ostracized these days if their data contradicts the popular view. I know one solar astrophysicist whose lab was turned down for several grants because they were considered an "enemy of the planet" for having produced data that suggested that the Sun was causing at least some of the global warming effects we see today. Now I see reports that solar activity has been determined to be insufficient to account for global warming and I wonder... would that be the accepted view if funding were available to people who got politically unacceptable results?
In the end, if we're looking for one cause of any climactic effect, I think we're going to be dissapointed. Man certainly has some impact (you light a match, you've caused global warming), but so have fires, so has the sun and so too may other forces that we do not yet fully understand.
I would not dream of dismissing any language as "bad". There are languages which are used for the wrong purpose (e.g. TCL), but I'm not sure what a "bad language" would be.
Java is a good language, though I'm not too pleased with most of the implementations in terms of their integration with the local system, but that's a matter of taste and implementation, not the language itself.
However, the desire to grow Java into a true high-level language will, it seems to me, take the focus off of its being a bridge between high and low level languages. Others have disagreed, and quite eloquently... we shall see.
C++ is the only "open-source" language that has seen widespread enterprise-level use
Ah... no it's not, not by a long shot.
In certain areas (end-user, non-Web-based UI design for example), I would agree that non-OSS and C++ are the only languages that match your description. But you're not thinking in terms of lines of code in use in such organizations, you're thinking of "high profile" projects.
Perl is probably the single most widely used programming language for what it was originally desgined for: report generation (followed closely by a very fragmented field of: VB, Java, Access, Cobol and such high-priced report-ware as Crystal). Perl is edged out by shell as a systems admin language under Unix and Linux, but since most tasks which grow larger than a certain size in shell end up being re-written in Perl....
C has an immense following, and probably will continue to even as C++ and the other C-derived languages contiue to add features. As corporate addoption of Linux continues, expect to see a resurgence of C usage as well.
And of course, the single most widely used programming language in the history of so-called "enterprise computing" is JavaScript (originally LiveScript), a truly open source language invented by Netscape, whose reference implementation is distributed under the MPL in Mozilla.
You really have to define what you mean by enterprise-level use, though. For example, the fortune 20 include IBM, Verizon and HP, all of which use (and even contribute to) many of the languages described above as well as many others. IBM also accounts for much of the hosting of services (including a lot of things you would never think of unless you're involved in it) for the Fortune 500, and in that capacity they write a lot of code in a number of open source langauges. Further down the list of the Fortune 500 you'll find Apple (who continue to champion Objective-C, making it a defacto member of the list, as it is shipped with, and used for most UI-development in their OS).
Interesting question though... what really ARE the most widely used languages among the largest businesses in the world. I think we might be surprised.
a 7000-word document on configuring ALSA drivers a 400,000-word document on using MySQL a 700,000-word documentation set for Perl (just the core, not counting add-on modules) 6.5MB of Kernel docs 27MB of Gnome help... the list goes on, of course...
Nope, that's not a particularly outstanding trait. If he had talked about this documentation being well integrated with other, related documentation-sets, then I'd find that interesting (rarely is this the case in open source software), but it doesn't sound like it is.
I'm not pleased with the "catch-up" game that Java is playing here. Java was a fairly nice middle-ground betweeen high and low level programming, and what appears to be an effort to become a high level language is rather ominous for those who are interested in testability and performance in Java.
This, BTW, is why you don't want your language to be controled by a company which in turn has a marketing-driven bottom-line. The idea that two languages could co-exist with different target audiences is nonsense to marketing droids, but perfectly reasonable to someone like Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall or any of the other maintainers of truly open-source languages. Open source isn't the only way to maintain this focus, but in today's marketing-driven world, you aren't likely to see too many Bell Labs-like organizations putting out languages like C (which was semi-open source, as was Unix). Java and C# are probably much more typical.
Indeed, there's nothing to stop a spammer publishing SPF records for their domains, as several of them do in the hope that someone will think that adds some legitimacy to the email.
Actually, this is a good thing. As we move forward with SPF (hopefully sans the Sender-ID, MS-patented features), more and more of the world will be able to build relationships and trust maps with the domains that send them mail. If spamloser.com has sent me spam on several occasions, then I can start to ignore mail from them. If that causes them to want to switch domains, then I deal with them as an unkown, but in no case can they claim to be an SPF-using domain which has a good reputation.
So SPF does not prevent spam, but its use makes spam prevention much easier in the future. SPF is slowly being adopted by more and more companies as they ask, "how can I protect users from scams claiming to be me?" As that adoption becomes more wide-spread, we can start to trust the domain names used in envelope (not header) information and this is a very good thing!
Are you returning to your "roots"?
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Earlier in your career, I heard you compared to Arthur C. Clarke for your ability to present the thoughts, fantasies and concerns of the tech-bubble-white-collar in ways that not only entertained but enlightened (where Clarke was doing the same for the aerospace and technology engineers of the 50s). This was abstract and entertaining in Snow Crash, speculative in Diamond Age and bitingly believable in Cryptonomicon.
So my question is this: were the Baroque Cycle books just an excursion away from that synergy that you had with the high-tech common man, or the start of a long-term trend? Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying they were bad books (far from), just wondering how it fits in.
But the record companies AREN'T paying the price, only retailers. The record companies are making record (no pun intended) profits from online sales (as someone mentioned from mail-order physical media like Amazon or pure-digital purchases like iTunes); more sophisticated than ever music-concert-advertising-movie-product marketing tie-ins; the most agressive royalty-seeking efforts ever; etc. The RECORD COMPANIES are not hurting... yet.
The reason they scream over the loss of physical retails or new technologies is that they fear loss of control that comes with change. They are afraid that someday soon the bubble they have created will burst and poeple will listen to the music they want to instead of the music they've been told to. They're concerned that ready access to any music from anywhere around the world will lead to such a variety of tastes and interests that the market will become too watered down to support their top-heavy marketting operations. They know it's coming, but they thing they can put it off for just a few more years....
I hope they're wrong. Go to a local club and listen to some music. Buy their CD on the spot. It's good for the industry, even if it hurts the giants.
I have not read the book, but what's above seems to be a synopsis of the entire plot. Shouldn't there have been some kind of spoiler warning? I'm not one of those people who consider the divulging of everything but the resolution of the final cliffhanger to be a non-spoiler.
I wasn't defending the MMORPG, just saying that the numbers game is what gets you in, but the social dynamic is what keeps you. Sony and others who run MMORPGS have to carefully maintain the appeal for BOTH in order to succede.
Good points. I think the only part I would take issue with is the "another Saddam" part. My personal feeling is that Saddam was worthy of ousting because of his willingness to abuse his own citizens in a myriad of ways (torture, rape, mass gassings of the Kurds, military action, etc.)
It would be possible to select someone who is going to be more fair-handed with their own people.
What will *not* happen, IMHO, is finding someone who can gain the respect of the Iraqi people AND not be deeply anti-American. Those two traits are, as far as I can tell, mutually exclusive.
Either way, come January (unless we cancel the elections), they're going to elect SOMEONE. My bet is on one of the leaders of the insurrectionists right now. The only question we have to ask is: do we want to have the chance to pick WHICH bad-guy (from our point of view) gets selected.
FAQs have been around since the beginning of the web & most of them still suck
While I agree with the second part of this statement, FAQs significantly pre-date the web. They were certainly common back in the pre-Web Internet days of Usenet newsgroups
Usenet (though, perhaps not FAQs, I'd have to check on when the first FAQ was published) significantly pre-dates the Internet.
The ordering is:
Networking Usenet Arpanet IP (The Internet Protocol) Internet roughly as we know it today The World Wide Web (i.e. the URI scheme used to locate Internet resources)
FAQs would enter into that list either just before or just after the "Internet roughly as we know it today".
It's a game, and it involves human interaction, but it's no more socializing than a choose-your-own-adventure book.
Ok, then I suggest that you show me the choose-your-own-adventure book from which I can learn how to lead a group of 40-60 people, all of whom bring their own problems to the table. Show me the book where relationships bloom that last for years (so far). Show me the book where the death of the reader is commemorated by hundreds of your peers (attend a funeral for someone who died in real life in EQ and tell me that's not a social outlet for grief and mourning).
No, just because you can't convey subtleties of body-language doesn't mean you're not being social. It certainly constrains the "bandwidth" of social intercourse and enflames certain situations into strong emotion more easily, but I've seen the full range of social expression in-game, and I'm not sure that there's any other place that I've seen such mixing across social, political and geographical boundaries. I dare say young MMORPG players tend to be a bit more well-rounded socially when it comes to aclimating to new cultural situations.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I'm also realistic about Slashdot moderation, so I take it with a grain of salt. Still, nice to see the metamod system working so well.
PS: About your disagreement. I half agree with you that there would be dire consequences. I'm just not certain that there's any way at all to avoid them, and I AM certain that the way we're going now cannot possibly avoid them without killing everyone in Iraq.
Only if our plan is to become so hated that the Arabs forget about Israel does our current plan have the ability to yield fruit. I think the administration probably had the right idea at the start: depose S.H. and move to democracy, but they seem to have thought that they could accomplish those goals through force alone. Now the chance for subtle diplomacy with the local governments throughout the country is gone and we're left with the need to create (or become) a staw man against which the Iraqis can "win". It's the only diplomatic option left, AFAICT.
It's not because I think there's a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow that I suggest what I did... quite the opposite.
the social part is like one junky talking to another junky about how great his last hit was.
That's just absurd. Perhaps it was this way for you. If so, I'm sorry, that sounds pretty rough.
I met people in-game whose ability to organize and prioritize flat-out amazed me. I tried to court more than one of them for employment on the basis of their attention to detail and follow-through alone. Imagine someone who is capable of getting 40 people, all of whom have real-life priorities, to show up in-game at a given time, set aside any petty squabbles and achieve an arbitrary goal that probably doesn't benefit more than 2-5 of them directly. This is an impressive achievement in any area of work or play, and just as I respect the coach who can do it on the football field or the CEO who can do it at the office, I respect the raid-leader who can do it in-game.
I also respect the people who show up, knowing their class cold, having put the time in to get themselves prepared for an encounter, and who can make the class do things that the designers had never intended. I have the same respect for the person who does that in music or in programming.
What I have to wonder is, and I say this with no malice at all... did you not have these experiences because all gamers are addict-like social pariahs, or because the gamers YOU PLAYED WITH were addict-like social pariahs?
What makes mmorpgs so addictive is the simulation of progression achieved by obtaining levels and items through playing the game.
Absolutely not.
I've played EQ for 4 years (stopped just the beginning of this summer), and I can tell you that almost no one KEEPS playing for that reason.
The reason that you keep playing EQ is the same reason that people engage in any competitive real-world activity: the feedback from your peers ranging from kudos to jelousy, etc. It's the sense that you are achieving standing in a community, and that that community is "powerful" (in game terms).
The people who run around on their own and kill stuff to level quit within a year regardless of their success.
There are other categories, of course. For example, there's the social player who has a regular group of real-life friends (this is how I started). They will stay with it until that group finds something else to do.
People don't like to see that it's a social activity because that violates our idea of what "social" is.
Yep, this is one of the things I love about OSS. Somebody has a great idea, starts a company, writes some great code, and then fails to make the business side work.... before this would have meant wasted effort and code that was never seen again, but in this case the code stays and many others can benefit from it for years to come.
This kind of true code re-use (not the hollow buzzword of proprietary development) is why OSS is powerful.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not free speech. We do not allow for free speech in all cases when it comes to elections (we limit how many ads you can put on TV, for example).
I would say that, in with the dozens of other election reforms that are needed, we should restrict the purchasing of domain names, search results, etc. which imply one candidate and promote another (or attack the promoted candidate).
Free speech you may have, but this is the electoral equivalent of trademark infringement, and should be treated as such. The site is not a public service, it's an ad for a competing "product". What would we do if Tide (a brand of laundry soap) put out a box in the market labeled "Cheer.gov" (Cheer is another brand of the same product) with Tide in it? Same deal.
On the other hand, if we start deploying blocking today, we reduce the incentive to produce the correct solution (one which prevents audible, and perhaps visual alerts from wireless electronic devices within an area).
The real problem isn't even a social pressure on cell phone and pager companies, but a financial one. If the public views the problem as "solved", then no one is going to buy the new style jammers when they come out, thus it's a losing proposition to even develop them.
No, like it or not, we've developed a new "on-call class" and to say that they can't go to the movies with us is not just wrong, it's not going to work. I think France is about to find this out. I wonder what the percentage of groups of people of size 4+ going out for a night of fun is that contains one person who is on-call for some sort of work... from now on, such groups are going to have to choose a new venue, or patronize those venues which do not block reception. If that percentage is large enough, this becomes a massive financial burden for cinemas.
As an example, my work has me on-call 1 out of 5 weeks. I can go and do what I want, but I have a wireless Internet card in my laptop in the car. If I get a call or page, I have to go respond. I won't make a "choice" not to patronize such places with my friends, I simply cannot, even though I'm a well-behaved cell-user (set to vibrate in large social situations, etc.)
I wonder which cell companies are already working on the set-to-silent-proximity devices and how close they are to deploying. It would be quite nice to have a proper solution, and I would enjoy not having to sit through "inconsiderate cell phone man" ads any longer at the movies.
Your idea is a good one, but a bit too limiting. If you step back from some of the terms (e.g. "data block") and look at existing implementations, I think you'll see that an authentication system (of which, for example SPF is a good first step) combined with SMTP-time weighting of the headers (something like SpamAssassin, but working only with header information) and then a reputation system with a few for degrees of granularity than you suggest above, still meets the basic requirements you set forward.
The key in fighting spam will have to be reputation. The only question is: will it be a decentrallized reputation system, or will it be run by some entity, in a credit-report-like way?
The answer to that is ultimately our decision, but time is running out....
"The fact is, there IS NO OTHER SIDE"
You understand that that's not actually a logical argument, right? The fact that you disagree with, and/or have questions about the motivations of the people producing contradictory results does not mean that they a) do not exist or b) are absolutely wrong. To claim that that must be the case is alien to the scientific method.
"The scientific evidence that humans are affecting the climate with CO2 is as clear as day"
And at one time, the scientific evidence that preventing forest fires was the key to saving communities was clear as day. It also happens to have been wrong, mostly because it was an over-simplification of a complex problem.
I hear a lot of people speaking about the most complex system that we have ever been able to measure to even a tolerable degree of accuracy (the earth's climate) as if we understand it fully. That's simply not true.
In fact, just recently we discovered that forest fires make up for far, far more CO2 release than we had thought (because very hot fires can and do burn permafrost). In fact, just that one source of CO2 dwarfs the output of man. We litterally can't burn enough fossil fuels to make up the difference. We also can't touch the CO2 released by volcanos (which release so much pollutant material that they have a measurable impact on the climate immediately), but forest fires are a special case because, as I noted before, our fire prevention strategies actually worked against us for most of the 20th century and fires now burn hotter and cover more area on average than they used to. If we're looking for theories on why there's more CO2 in the air, why aren't we looking at the massive fires that we've been fighting over the last couple of decades? That's actually the most likely source of human impact on the environment.
The fact of the matter is that we don't yet know how to measure most of the phenomenon that make up our climate. We have computer models that over-simplify the environment enough to make our theories and predictions work on paper, but that's not good enough. We've only been measuring most of the environment (outside of gross measurements) for a few years, and beyond that we have ice and wood records (which actually tell a story that's pretty simillar to what we see today, repeated over and over through the centuries and millenia).
I'm not saying that human induced global warming is not real. I'm just saying that it's irresponsible to be saying that it's absolutely real, and there is no data to the contrary.
There are many scientists who believe that human induced global warming is over-emphasized or downright wrong, but I don't know of anyone who has been able to get a research grant from anywhere BUT a fossil fuel company on the basis of such a theory in the last 10 years, and since they know that that would taint their work's credibility, most choose another area to pursue.
Even scientists who release data without such a theory are ostracized these days if their data contradicts the popular view. I know one solar astrophysicist whose lab was turned down for several grants because they were considered an "enemy of the planet" for having produced data that suggested that the Sun was causing at least some of the global warming effects we see today. Now I see reports that solar activity has been determined to be insufficient to account for global warming and I wonder... would that be the accepted view if funding were available to people who got politically unacceptable results?
In the end, if we're looking for one cause of any climactic effect, I think we're going to be dissapointed. Man certainly has some impact (you light a match, you've caused global warming), but so have fires, so has the sun and so too may other forces that we do not yet fully understand.
Other resources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/in_depth/sci_tech/200
I would not dream of dismissing any language as "bad". There are languages which are used for the wrong purpose (e.g. TCL), but I'm not sure what a "bad language" would be.
Java is a good language, though I'm not too pleased with most of the implementations in terms of their integration with the local system, but that's a matter of taste and implementation, not the language itself.
However, the desire to grow Java into a true high-level language will, it seems to me, take the focus off of its being a bridge between high and low level languages. Others have disagreed, and quite eloquently... we shall see.
C++ is the only "open-source" language that has seen widespread enterprise-level use
Ah... no it's not, not by a long shot.
In certain areas (end-user, non-Web-based UI design for example), I would agree that non-OSS and C++ are the only languages that match your description. But you're not thinking in terms of lines of code in use in such organizations, you're thinking of "high profile" projects.
Perl is probably the single most widely used programming language for what it was originally desgined for: report generation (followed closely by a very fragmented field of: VB, Java, Access, Cobol and such high-priced report-ware as Crystal). Perl is edged out by shell as a systems admin language under Unix and Linux, but since most tasks which grow larger than a certain size in shell end up being re-written in Perl....
C has an immense following, and probably will continue to even as C++ and the other C-derived languages contiue to add features. As corporate addoption of Linux continues, expect to see a resurgence of C usage as well.
And of course, the single most widely used programming language in the history of so-called "enterprise computing" is JavaScript (originally LiveScript), a truly open source language invented by Netscape, whose reference implementation is distributed under the MPL in Mozilla.
You really have to define what you mean by enterprise-level use, though. For example, the fortune 20 include IBM, Verizon and HP, all of which use (and even contribute to) many of the languages described above as well as many others. IBM also accounts for much of the hosting of services (including a lot of things you would never think of unless you're involved in it) for the Fortune 500, and in that capacity they write a lot of code in a number of open source langauges. Further down the list of the Fortune 500 you'll find Apple (who continue to champion Objective-C, making it a defacto member of the list, as it is shipped with, and used for most UI-development in their OS).
Interesting question though... what really ARE the most widely used languages among the largest businesses in the world. I think we might be surprised.
Ah... ok, who mentioned C++?
Were you responding to my comment about C?
Hmmm, *looks on hard drive*...
... the list goes on, of course ...
a 7000-word document on configuring ALSA drivers
a 400,000-word document on using MySQL
a 700,000-word documentation set for Perl (just the core, not counting add-on modules)
6.5MB of Kernel docs
27MB of Gnome help
Nope, that's not a particularly outstanding trait. If he had talked about this documentation being well integrated with other, related documentation-sets, then I'd find that interesting (rarely is this the case in open source software), but it doesn't sound like it is.
I'm not pleased with the "catch-up" game that Java is playing here. Java was a fairly nice middle-ground betweeen high and low level programming, and what appears to be an effort to become a high level language is rather ominous for those who are interested in testability and performance in Java.
This, BTW, is why you don't want your language to be controled by a company which in turn has a marketing-driven bottom-line. The idea that two languages could co-exist with different target audiences is nonsense to marketing droids, but perfectly reasonable to someone like Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall or any of the other maintainers of truly open-source languages. Open source isn't the only way to maintain this focus, but in today's marketing-driven world, you aren't likely to see too many Bell Labs-like organizations putting out languages like C (which was semi-open source, as was Unix). Java and C# are probably much more typical.
Indeed, there's nothing to stop a spammer publishing SPF records for their domains, as several of them do in the hope that someone will think that adds some legitimacy to the email.
Actually, this is a good thing. As we move forward with SPF (hopefully sans the Sender-ID, MS-patented features), more and more of the world will be able to build relationships and trust maps with the domains that send them mail. If spamloser.com has sent me spam on several occasions, then I can start to ignore mail from them. If that causes them to want to switch domains, then I deal with them as an unkown, but in no case can they claim to be an SPF-using domain which has a good reputation.
So SPF does not prevent spam, but its use makes spam prevention much easier in the future. SPF is slowly being adopted by more and more companies as they ask, "how can I protect users from scams claiming to be me?" As that adoption becomes more wide-spread, we can start to trust the domain names used in envelope (not header) information and this is a very good thing!
Earlier in your career, I heard you compared to Arthur C. Clarke for your ability to present the thoughts, fantasies and concerns of the tech-bubble-white-collar in ways that not only entertained but enlightened (where Clarke was doing the same for the aerospace and technology engineers of the 50s). This was abstract and entertaining in Snow Crash, speculative in Diamond Age and bitingly believable in Cryptonomicon.
So my question is this: were the Baroque Cycle books just an excursion away from that synergy that you had with the high-tech common man, or the start of a long-term trend? Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying they were bad books (far from), just wondering how it fits in.
But the record companies AREN'T paying the price, only retailers. The record companies are making record (no pun intended) profits from online sales (as someone mentioned from mail-order physical media like Amazon or pure-digital purchases like iTunes); more sophisticated than ever music-concert-advertising-movie-product marketing tie-ins; the most agressive royalty-seeking efforts ever; etc. The RECORD COMPANIES are not hurting... yet.
The reason they scream over the loss of physical retails or new technologies is that they fear loss of control that comes with change. They are afraid that someday soon the bubble they have created will burst and poeple will listen to the music they want to instead of the music they've been told to. They're concerned that ready access to any music from anywhere around the world will lead to such a variety of tastes and interests that the market will become too watered down to support their top-heavy marketting operations. They know it's coming, but they thing they can put it off for just a few more years....
I hope they're wrong. Go to a local club and listen to some music. Buy their CD on the spot. It's good for the industry, even if it hurts the giants.
I have not read the book, but what's above seems to be a synopsis of the entire plot. Shouldn't there have been some kind of spoiler warning? I'm not one of those people who consider the divulging of everything but the resolution of the final cliffhanger to be a non-spoiler.
You're right on the nose, and I agree fully.
I wasn't defending the MMORPG, just saying that the numbers game is what gets you in, but the social dynamic is what keeps you. Sony and others who run MMORPGS have to carefully maintain the appeal for BOTH in order to succede.
Good points. I think the only part I would take issue with is the "another Saddam" part. My personal feeling is that Saddam was worthy of ousting because of his willingness to abuse his own citizens in a myriad of ways (torture, rape, mass gassings of the Kurds, military action, etc.)
It would be possible to select someone who is going to be more fair-handed with their own people.
What will *not* happen, IMHO, is finding someone who can gain the respect of the Iraqi people AND not be deeply anti-American. Those two traits are, as far as I can tell, mutually exclusive.
Either way, come January (unless we cancel the elections), they're going to elect SOMEONE. My bet is on one of the leaders of the insurrectionists right now. The only question we have to ask is: do we want to have the chance to pick WHICH bad-guy (from our point of view) gets selected.
Three iterations of "obviously" followed by a dismissal doesn't actually work as a defense for your debunked possition.
Please try posting again, but this time use logic.
FAQs have been around since the beginning of the web & most of them still suck
While I agree with the second part of this statement, FAQs significantly pre-date the web. They were certainly common back in the pre-Web Internet days of Usenet newsgroups
Usenet (though, perhaps not FAQs, I'd have to check on when the first FAQ was published) significantly pre-dates the Internet.
The ordering is:
Networking
Usenet
Arpanet
IP (The Internet Protocol)
Internet roughly as we know it today
The World Wide Web (i.e. the URI scheme used to locate Internet resources)
FAQs would enter into that list either just before or just after the "Internet roughly as we know it today".
It's a game, and it involves human interaction, but it's no more socializing than a choose-your-own-adventure book.
Ok, then I suggest that you show me the choose-your-own-adventure book from which I can learn how to lead a group of 40-60 people, all of whom bring their own problems to the table. Show me the book where relationships bloom that last for years (so far). Show me the book where the death of the reader is commemorated by hundreds of your peers (attend a funeral for someone who died in real life in EQ and tell me that's not a social outlet for grief and mourning).
No, just because you can't convey subtleties of body-language doesn't mean you're not being social. It certainly constrains the "bandwidth" of social intercourse and enflames certain situations into strong emotion more easily, but I've seen the full range of social expression in-game, and I'm not sure that there's any other place that I've seen such mixing across social, political and geographical boundaries. I dare say young MMORPG players tend to be a bit more well-rounded socially when it comes to aclimating to new cultural situations.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I'm also realistic about Slashdot moderation, so I take it with a grain of salt. Still, nice to see the metamod system working so well.
PS: About your disagreement. I half agree with you that there would be dire consequences. I'm just not certain that there's any way at all to avoid them, and I AM certain that the way we're going now cannot possibly avoid them without killing everyone in Iraq.
Only if our plan is to become so hated that the Arabs forget about Israel does our current plan have the ability to yield fruit. I think the administration probably had the right idea at the start: depose S.H. and move to democracy, but they seem to have thought that they could accomplish those goals through force alone. Now the chance for subtle diplomacy with the local governments throughout the country is gone and we're left with the need to create (or become) a staw man against which the Iraqis can "win". It's the only diplomatic option left, AFAICT.
It's not because I think there's a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow that I suggest what I did... quite the opposite.
the social part is like one junky talking to another junky about how great his last hit was.
That's just absurd. Perhaps it was this way for you. If so, I'm sorry, that sounds pretty rough.
I met people in-game whose ability to organize and prioritize flat-out amazed me. I tried to court more than one of them for employment on the basis of their attention to detail and follow-through alone. Imagine someone who is capable of getting 40 people, all of whom have real-life priorities, to show up in-game at a given time, set aside any petty squabbles and achieve an arbitrary goal that probably doesn't benefit more than 2-5 of them directly. This is an impressive achievement in any area of work or play, and just as I respect the coach who can do it on the football field or the CEO who can do it at the office, I respect the raid-leader who can do it in-game.
I also respect the people who show up, knowing their class cold, having put the time in to get themselves prepared for an encounter, and who can make the class do things that the designers had never intended. I have the same respect for the person who does that in music or in programming.
What I have to wonder is, and I say this with no malice at all... did you not have these experiences because all gamers are addict-like social pariahs, or because the gamers YOU PLAYED WITH were addict-like social pariahs?
What makes mmorpgs so addictive is the simulation of progression achieved by obtaining levels and items through playing the game.
Absolutely not.
I've played EQ for 4 years (stopped just the beginning of this summer), and I can tell you that almost no one KEEPS playing for that reason.
The reason that you keep playing EQ is the same reason that people engage in any competitive real-world activity: the feedback from your peers ranging from kudos to jelousy, etc. It's the sense that you are achieving standing in a community, and that that community is "powerful" (in game terms).
The people who run around on their own and kill stuff to level quit within a year regardless of their success.
There are other categories, of course. For example, there's the social player who has a regular group of real-life friends (this is how I started). They will stay with it until that group finds something else to do.
People don't like to see that it's a social activity because that violates our idea of what "social" is.
Looks like you're right... and so was I ;-)
An article about the outage
They were running under Win 95, or so I read in the CNN article at the time. Story may have chanced since then.
Speaking of blaming people, that particular example involved running an OS in production which was end-of-lifed over 3 (4?) years ago!
Yep, this is one of the things I love about OSS. Somebody has a great idea, starts a company, writes some great code, and then fails to make the business side work.... before this would have meant wasted effort and code that was never seen again, but in this case the code stays and many others can benefit from it for years to come.
This kind of true code re-use (not the hollow buzzword of proprietary development) is why OSS is powerful.