Your point is well taken, but be careful that you don't make the theory of evolution nonfalsifiable by taking it as an article of faith that everything must have evolved.
It is incumbent on proponents of evolutionary theory (including me) that every putative example of irreducible complexity must be shown that it could have evolved. If they claim that some individual piece could not have evolved, you must find a series of steps by which it could have evolved.
Evolution makes predictions about what can and what cannot evolve. These predictions are what's important about evolutionary theory, or any theory: a theory which makes no predictions is useless.
That's a key difference between ID and evolution theories. ID makes no predictions; an "intelligent designer" created everything, and so everything physically possible could be created. Evolution says, "Certain structures are immensely unlikely to have evolved, and future species are more likely to look like X, Y, and Z and not like P, Q, and R." In that sense ID isn't a scientific theory at all, and why essentially every scientist rejects it.
You're not likely to have evolved parts made of pure aluminum, for example, since pure aluminum never occurs on planet Earth. Moreover, the energies involved in refining it seem to occur in no natural organism. If were were to find such a mechanism in, say, ocelots, fully formed, with no fossil record or examples in related species, you'd be hard pressed to defend evolution.
To my knowledge no such examples exist. The ones put forth by ID theory seem to be grasping at straws, and confused "unexplained" with "unexplainable".
But that doesn't make evolutionary theory necessarily right. All scientific theories must be tested against their predictions, and that's a process that never stops. All challengers must be accepted. The examples that ID proponents push these days are excellent tests of evolutionary theory, and as they are refuted, evolution gets stronger, not weaker.
Admittedly, it is difficult to argue with somebody who isn't putting forth a theory of their own. In theory science accepts all challenges; in practice, scientists have limited time and limited funding and simply don't care to refute every example. Bring me a skeleton of a dinosaur fossil with an aluminum bone, and I'm not going to spend the immense amount of time involved in proving that you faked that bone. Neither can I explain the evolution of bacterial flagellum while standing on one foot to somebody without a strong understanding of bacterial biology, intimate knowledge of metabolic biochemistry, etc.
But please don't make evolution nonfalsifiable to recourse to analogies. I'm willing to accept credible challenges to evolution, and while my explanation may look like your arch example, until I've found the specifics, evolution still hasn't conquered that challenge. If I'm unwilling to accept evidence that refutes my theory, then my theory has no predictive value and I might as well scrap it here and now.
The exploration of the New World was driven by a fairly immediate payoff. They were expecting gold and silver, and they got it (largely by stealing it, but that's besides the point.)
They were also expecting a new trade route for the valuable spice trade, which they didn't get, but they found a bunch of other valuable products essentially immediately: Columbus found tobacco on his first voyage.
Space has all sorts of potential payoffs, but they don't turn an immediate profit on the billions of dollars required to get there. By contrast, funding a misison to the New World was basically printing money. It's a lot easier to fund low-risk ventures than high-risk ones.
The space race of the 1960s wasn't driven by profit motive but by a political situation. It was more like the Olympics than exploration; they didn't even send a scientist on Apollo until late in the mission. It was glorious, but once we reached the moon the public stopped caring so they stopped funding it.
No profit + no glory = no space exploration. It sucks. In contrast, the hippies play a very small role.
Very true. However, the goal of the ID promoters is not to prove the existence of God, but to cast doubt on a theory that they find repugnant. The best-case scenario for them would be to find a true case of irreducible complexity and have the evolutionary theory conclusively disproven.
That doesn't mean that they'd be able to start teaching creationism, but it would mean that the chapters on evolution would have to be struck. It would mean that their children wouldn't be subjected to a theory which explicitly contradicts what they are taught at home.
Personally, I don't bother refuting the ID folks, no matter what they spout at me. Evolution is a theory of such extraordinary explanatory power and such vast evidence that the ID people are clearly not interested in listening to reason or evidence. My goal right now is to understand and work around their political machinations, which are extremely clever. They're not stupid, at least the strategists aren't. They're merely supersitious.
I just want a word with the guy who came up with the term "intelligent designer". If I'd designed this thing I'd have been fired. The design sucks. I've already had to repair one serious failure on my knee (which doesn't come with a warranty, natch, so it's out-of-pocket). And my own eyes have never worked properly; I've had to work with a miserable hack using third-party lenses.
"Intelligent design" my ass. Write up a textbook on "crappy design theory" and I'll buy it.
Uh, thanks. A quite cogent reply. I'll make time to read a few of these. I have to admit I doubt it'll change my mind (I've read other things by C.S. Lewis and I don't find his arguments convincing, and I'm not talking about Narnia), but I'll give it a try. At the very least it'll give me a better ground on which to frame my argument.
I'm particularly interested in the McDowell book, because I particularly doubt one is likely to derive Christianity from first principles. That is, going from being an atheist to a Christian (as implied by the title of the book), as opposed to arriving at some other religion. But if he can, it would be a neat trick. I'll have to see if my local library has it.
The idea of irreducible complexity is scientifically valid: if you could find a structure which could not have evolved, that's proof that evolution is wrong. That's why evolution is a scientific theory: it proposes tests which it could fail.
Creationists (like the grandparent post) cite certain examples: the eye (there are an awful lot of pieces, and it's hard to see how a less-complex eye could exist to evolve into an eye without first being selected against); the bacterial flagellum (another rather complex piece from which it's hard to imagine the immediate evolutionary precursor).
The examples strike me as extremely strained. There are very few of them repeated over and over. They always apply to soft tissues, so the fossil record is poor. Every time we look at hard tissues, the evolutionary trace is clear.
Despite the complexity of these systems, it still seems that with enough effort we will eventually uncover how they did evolve, perhaps once we have sequenced the genomes of creatures along the evolutionary path. It certainly seems premature to throw out a very successful theory on the basis of this evidence.
But the evidence is there, waiting for you to explain it. Don't dismiss the challenger; know his argument and refute it.
I regularly zoom my browser window. It lets me sit further back from the screen and I can read the text more comfortably. It's not 3D per se, but it could use the 3D features of the video card to do it more smoothly than my computer today can. That's not eye-candy; that's a usability feature.
I've seen a lot of people set their resolutions down because higher resolutions make the text too small to read. The monitor should run at the highest resolution it can refresh comfortably at, and the text should zoom to the appropriate number of pixels.
I suspect that when this feature comes out, I'll be able to zoom any window I like, because it'll be a feature of the graphics system, not of the particular software.
I don't know why I'm feeding the trolls, but it's late and I'm tired, so I'll bite.
Can I ask what your evidence for God is? I assume you're talking about a single entity that is responsible for the Bible and creating the universe.
Just citing the existence of the universe doesn't count as evidence, wondrous as it might be, because that doesn't necessarily tie in to the Biblical representations of God. It may be, and it may not be. If you have any evidence supporting the contention I'd love to see it; I'm not aware of any myself.
On a run the other day I found a waterfowl that I'd never seen before in the lake. It took some doing to figure out what it was. If I could have snapped its picture on my cell camera and gotten an identification (a hooded merganser, it turned out, after some digging), that would have been cool.
I can't imagine how well this would work, since orientation fools things pretty easily. But I imagine that if it were available, I'd find a lot of unidentified objects to look up. (A cooking magazine I read has a "what is this gadget?" column every month.)
One of the hardest things in working for government is that in order to write software properly, you need to get a good look at the data you're working with. You can't see this data; it's heavily, heavily classified.
It's classified two ways: first, a lot of this data is privacy protected (the FBI spies on American citizens and that data is heavily controlled). Second, one of the things it needs to store is sources&methods, which are protected even more closely than the data itself. (The most classified stuff is always about sources&methods, not the data itself.)
The open-source community could write pieces of it, but the hard work on a project like this is adapting it to the particular requirements of the customer.
The problems involved aren't abstract ones that can be solved byu an incredibly clever person like Bram Cohen. They're involved in getting a gazillion people to all buy off on a data format, and convincing them that they really can share information without violating their security requirements (which is really just code-speak for "if I let you have this information I won't be the only one with it, and therefore I become less important.")
The security clearance requirement means that they're working with a drastically reduced pool of programmers. Corners get cut, ideas go unused for lack of implementers, internal oversight is practically nil. (They have code reviews but they're an immense waste of time.)
I'm not sure I've ever worked on a government project of even a tenth this size that I considered to be successful, even if it did get deployed. But throwing it out to the open-source community isn't an option.
In theory there's a guy involved in the process who reads the bids and rejects those that seem infeasible.
In practice this guy is a manager, not a software expert, and he's usually an idiot. I've written dozens of proposals and it's monumentally clear that your job is to impress this idiot. Coming up with an intelligent design is something you spend time on after the bid, not before. And there's usually not time then, because you're busy fulfilling this idiot's pipe dreams.
Well, that's the idea. There are free-speech issues associated with saying, "No, you may not send this email" but forcing somebody to add an easily-filterable tag accomplishes much of the same goals with less burden, at least from the constitutional standpoint.
There are still plenty of difficulties, but the internet isn't quite frictionless. A lot of spam originates in America in one form or another, and I doubt many spammers are actually willing to physically move to another country to continue their ways. The goal is not to algorithmically and logically eliminate all avenues of spam, but to gradually codify more and more rules to cut it down.
True 'nuff, but there's a difference between what I'd like and what I can afford. Or rather, the price point I'd like to hit. I _could_ spend 1/3 of my monthly mortgage on an iPod mini, and I'd probably be really happy. If I cared more about my tunes I could really see it thrilling me, as it thrills many of my friends. But for a hundred bucks, the minor inconveniences make a damn near perfect price point.
Well, I'll miss having a screen. The primo thing about the iPod is its excellent interface. This doesn't really have an interface.
I use a no-name player which is fraught with bugs and unpleasantness, and it cost $50 for a measly 128M. But it does have a screen, so I know what's being played. That means a fair bit to me, since I use it mostly to listen to recorded books and I like knowing what chapter I'm in.
I also need it since I can't store an entire book all at once and need to know what to shuffle in and out. The half-gig iPod would go a long way to solving that problem, but I'll still tend to store partial-books on it (the one I'm listening to and the first part of the next one, for example.)
And I get more than twelve hours out of my single AA battery.
Nonetheless, I am SORELY tempted by this, if for no other reason than Apple's it-just-works reputation.
The conditioning is a very significant point; I alluded to it in the grandparent post. You're asking the user to make a significant security decision every time that popup comes up. Therefore either you must make it extremely rare, or have the answer be the same almost every single time. If users get conditioned to installing software, they will do the wrong thing.
Microsoft's second-most-serious mistake is the design of those popups. But I still believe that its first most mysterious mistake is to have to have them at all. There needs to be a way to accomplish what it does (that is, extend the capability of the system on the fly) without making it open season on your computer.
That's a flaw in the security model, but as I said in the grandparent post it's a flaw that I believe afflicts Linux's security model as well. They can design the popups better (perhaps) or not offer the capability at all, but the real solution is to offer a limited-rights model. Java has it; C# has it, and therefore someday Windows in general will have it. And if that happens Linux is going to be left behind on that front. Users like to be able to download new codecs and fiddly widgets, and as long as those things run at the same level of security as the user, no popup design is going to prevent mischief.
I'm not sure user-level controls are appropriate. The existence of a special more-privileged user to clean up your mistakes is nice, but it would be better to have finer control in the first place. If you were to download malware into your Linux app, it can do a whole bunch of damage even running as you: install itself in your.rc files, add a bunch of stuff to your path, spend out copious spam and copies of itself. IIRC it can even change your shell to itself. The only thing it can't do is prevent a separate, more-privileged user from cleaning it out, but it can make your life pretty hard in the meantime. Compromising "Windows itself" makes your life harder, but not as much harder as you might expect, because it can be pretty damn hard even without global permissions.
I'd much prefer to see a sandbox model that limits the damage malware can do. Linux's model is better than Windows', but it's not as good as it could be, and I like the direction Windows is going on its security model. By Longhorn it could actually surpass Linux. That's at least two years out, and another two years before it sees really wide adoption, but I'd hate to see the Linux community caught flat-footed by it.
One other point: DRM layers, assuming they need to exist (and I'm not asserting it; I'm just assuming it for the the sake of argument) work best at as low a level as possible, to prevent users from bypassing them. Ideally (from a security standpoint) you'd install your codecs in hardware. The analog hole makes for low-resolution copies, and the number of people who can hack it out of hardware is few and requires specialized tools.
So if you're gonna have them, at least a part of them has a right to live at the OS layer. If it's buggy you're screwed, but one security principle is to put all your eggs in one basket, and then ensure that it's a really good basket. The DRM that lives at the OS level should be small, tight, and heavily checked. Codecs written above it should be rights-limited, not just to the user's privilege but even more finely than that.
Thing is, this is one of those cases that hits Windows more because of the monoculture than directly due to the inherent security flaws or the DRM problem.
In general "advanced" formats will require downloading software. The fact that the "advance" here is DRM is almost immaterial, except perhaps for the fact that some people believe they're downloading a license rather than software. But Windows asks explicitly if you want to download and install the software. You get a warning, you have to say, "Yeah, I want that piece of malware." The message may not be clear enough, and since there are cases where you do want it you're asking a naive user to make a fairly sophisticated security judgment, but it is there, and the malware can't bypass it. It doesn't need to.
To my knowledge Linux doesn't have a good solution to that problem, either. If you need software to play that movie/music, it's up to you to verify that the software isn't malware. Linux users escape this problem largely because there aren't enough of them to make it worth the malware writer's effort (as well as the fact that Linux users tend to be better educated and would answer "Hell no!" to the question if asked).
What's needed here is a security sandbox. Download the codec but don't give it permission to do anything except take stuff from one place in memory and dump it to another, or access a limited direct-to-video API. No network access, no disk access. I'm not aware of any particular Linux security sandbox.
Microsoft does have its own, in its C#/CLR, though clearly that hasn't made it to the point of writing codecs yet. And it may not, since these are performance-intensive apps and virtual machines impose overhead. I've seen codecs written in Java, and they're tolerable but not what you'd choose.
I was struck at the time by what Roger Ebert had to say about the second viewing:
"The first time, I thought I'd need a second viewing to understand everything. The second time, I found that greater understanding helped on the plot level, but didn't enrich the viewing experience. Once is right for this movie."
(From his review)
I'm told that the DVDs also have alternate cuts of the movie in chronological order. That's a piece of coolness that makes this one of the truly great DVDs.
Present situation: religious nutcases with nuclear weapons.
Worse situation: nobody knowing where those nuclear weapons are.
At least at the moment there is a small deterrent to Iran's use of nuclear force: the fact that Tehran will be a big chunk of glass if it uses them. At least now we have some idea where those weapons are. Removing that present government and replacing it with anarchy sounds like an excellent way to scatter the nukes to the four winds, to be used by a man without a country to retaliate against.
In this case I simply refer to the number of soldiers required. The US is tapped out for soldiers, unless it wishes to institute a draft or pull soldiers from missions it considers critical. There are those who claim it is already understaffed for the mission it has.
Beyond that, I think that the more soldiers you have on the ground, the more likely it is that you can protect the people from the inevitable insurgency (whether home-grown or supported from outside).
Large coalitions have the problem of competing goals. The best solution to my mind would be a large coalition which agrees on its goals and works together, like the Allies in World War II. Whether a large coaltion with fractured goals beats a small one stretched too thin, well, that would take careful analysis of the particular situation. Personally, I'd love to hold off until I could manage to assemble that large, focused coalition, but I don't know if that's possible in this case.
Taking out the existing leadership without a plan for replacing it would be irresponsible. And in a country with nuclear weapons, "irresponsible" turns into "hazardous to your health" pretty damn quick.
Not that I've got any brilliant alternatives, except diplomatic ones where you get a big coalition together to solve the problem correctly. That, of course, is far easier said than done.
Actually, it has nothing to do with DVD player makers. It has to do with movie companies.
The movie companies are the ones that own the content. They're the ones that want DRM to protect what they own. If they decide that you can't buy Meet the Fockers in any format other than HP's new DRM-laden DVD-esque format, then you can't have a copy unless you buy the new player.
Of course it's not as simple as that, since the movie companies would be reluctant to shift all at once, thereby losing sales to people who aren't willing to spend $100 on a new player just yet. They have a variety of ways to encourage you to buy the new players, including conspiring with the DVD consortium to make sure that the format is supported in all new DVD players (which will continue to support the existing DVD format, probably indefinitely).
So ultimately it has everything to do with DRM, or rather with content and therefore (from the studio's point view) DRM. If the Average Joe decides he doesn't want things that "don't work", he's free to stop buying it. But from what I've seen Joe really, really wants to see Lemony Snicket on his home theater and will gradually upgrade his equipment if that's the only way. He can watch his old movies and his new ones, and as far as he can tell things work precisely the way they used to.
Actually, I'm not. I don't particularly care for the evidence put forth by ID believers, since it seems extremely esoteric. I've never seen a piece of "irreducible complexity" that looks like it won't eventually yield to a hypothesis that would allow it to have evolved. If God designed things with irreducible complexity, He chose some very odd places to put it. Things sure _look_ like they evolved, and those things we don't already understand seem very likely to be explained one day. It's not like there are patent numbers printed on the inside of cells or components made out of aluminum or other irrefutably designed parts.
What I "believe without proof" is what you suggest, that we're trying to come up with the simplest theory of the world. It doesn't have to be true, but I hold it to be true that the simplest explanation that covers all the facts is mostly likely to be correct. Thus far, I haven't seen any evidence that necessitates an intelligent designer, a theory that raises far more questions than it answers.
So the recursive loops don't bother me. Whether Klaatu himself evolved or was created by the-one-and-only-true-Christian-God, it covers the evidence supposedly presented by ID believers. I don't even have to sputter about "well, we will fit it into evolution... someday!" when presented with eyes or flagellae or other such things. I simply point out that even if I didn't reject their hypothesis as untenable, I reject the moral consequences they draw from it anyway.
It's a form of ad hominem arguement I'm engaging in, demonstrating that I believe that my opponent is not arguing in good faith. I believe that they have goals independent of finding out Truth (as I define truth, that is, forming a theory which adequately covers the observable facts without introducing unnecessary restrictions.) Perhaps that's the wrong way to win an argument, but if I can convince the great-grandparent poster to reconsider his assumptions, I'll be happy.
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Your point is well taken, but be careful that you don't make the theory of evolution nonfalsifiable by taking it as an article of faith that everything must have evolved.
It is incumbent on proponents of evolutionary theory (including me) that every putative example of irreducible complexity must be shown that it could have evolved. If they claim that some individual piece could not have evolved, you must find a series of steps by which it could have evolved.
Evolution makes predictions about what can and what cannot evolve. These predictions are what's important about evolutionary theory, or any theory: a theory which makes no predictions is useless.
That's a key difference between ID and evolution theories. ID makes no predictions; an "intelligent designer" created everything, and so everything physically possible could be created. Evolution says, "Certain structures are immensely unlikely to have evolved, and future species are more likely to look like X, Y, and Z and not like P, Q, and R." In that sense ID isn't a scientific theory at all, and why essentially every scientist rejects it.
You're not likely to have evolved parts made of pure aluminum, for example, since pure aluminum never occurs on planet Earth. Moreover, the energies involved in refining it seem to occur in no natural organism. If were were to find such a mechanism in, say, ocelots, fully formed, with no fossil record or examples in related species, you'd be hard pressed to defend evolution.
To my knowledge no such examples exist. The ones put forth by ID theory seem to be grasping at straws, and confused "unexplained" with "unexplainable".
But that doesn't make evolutionary theory necessarily right. All scientific theories must be tested against their predictions, and that's a process that never stops. All challengers must be accepted. The examples that ID proponents push these days are excellent tests of evolutionary theory, and as they are refuted, evolution gets stronger, not weaker.
Admittedly, it is difficult to argue with somebody who isn't putting forth a theory of their own. In theory science accepts all challenges; in practice, scientists have limited time and limited funding and simply don't care to refute every example. Bring me a skeleton of a dinosaur fossil with an aluminum bone, and I'm not going to spend the immense amount of time involved in proving that you faked that bone. Neither can I explain the evolution of bacterial flagellum while standing on one foot to somebody without a strong understanding of bacterial biology, intimate knowledge of metabolic biochemistry, etc.
But please don't make evolution nonfalsifiable to recourse to analogies. I'm willing to accept credible challenges to evolution, and while my explanation may look like your arch example, until I've found the specifics, evolution still hasn't conquered that challenge. If I'm unwilling to accept evidence that refutes my theory, then my theory has no predictive value and I might as well scrap it here and now.
So we're evolving towards an intelligent design? That should make everybody happy!
The exploration of the New World was driven by a fairly immediate payoff. They were expecting gold and silver, and they got it (largely by stealing it, but that's besides the point.)
They were also expecting a new trade route for the valuable spice trade, which they didn't get, but they found a bunch of other valuable products essentially immediately: Columbus found tobacco on his first voyage.
Space has all sorts of potential payoffs, but they don't turn an immediate profit on the billions of dollars required to get there. By contrast, funding a misison to the New World was basically printing money. It's a lot easier to fund low-risk ventures than high-risk ones.
The space race of the 1960s wasn't driven by profit motive but by a political situation. It was more like the Olympics than exploration; they didn't even send a scientist on Apollo until late in the mission. It was glorious, but once we reached the moon the public stopped caring so they stopped funding it.
No profit + no glory = no space exploration. It sucks. In contrast, the hippies play a very small role.
Our ignorance does not prove the existence of God
Very true. However, the goal of the ID promoters is not to prove the existence of God, but to cast doubt on a theory that they find repugnant. The best-case scenario for them would be to find a true case of irreducible complexity and have the evolutionary theory conclusively disproven.
That doesn't mean that they'd be able to start teaching creationism, but it would mean that the chapters on evolution would have to be struck. It would mean that their children wouldn't be subjected to a theory which explicitly contradicts what they are taught at home.
Personally, I don't bother refuting the ID folks, no matter what they spout at me. Evolution is a theory of such extraordinary explanatory power and such vast evidence that the ID people are clearly not interested in listening to reason or evidence. My goal right now is to understand and work around their political machinations, which are extremely clever. They're not stupid, at least the strategists aren't. They're merely supersitious.
I just want a word with the guy who came up with the term "intelligent designer". If I'd designed this thing I'd have been fired. The design sucks. I've already had to repair one serious failure on my knee (which doesn't come with a warranty, natch, so it's out-of-pocket). And my own eyes have never worked properly; I've had to work with a miserable hack using third-party lenses.
"Intelligent design" my ass. Write up a textbook on "crappy design theory" and I'll buy it.
Uh, thanks. A quite cogent reply. I'll make time to read a few of these. I have to admit I doubt it'll change my mind (I've read other things by C.S. Lewis and I don't find his arguments convincing, and I'm not talking about Narnia), but I'll give it a try. At the very least it'll give me a better ground on which to frame my argument.
I'm particularly interested in the McDowell book, because I particularly doubt one is likely to derive Christianity from first principles. That is, going from being an atheist to a Christian (as implied by the title of the book), as opposed to arriving at some other religion. But if he can, it would be a neat trick. I'll have to see if my local library has it.
Do a web search on irreducible complexity.
The idea of irreducible complexity is scientifically valid: if you could find a structure which could not have evolved, that's proof that evolution is wrong. That's why evolution is a scientific theory: it proposes tests which it could fail.
Creationists (like the grandparent post) cite certain examples: the eye (there are an awful lot of pieces, and it's hard to see how a less-complex eye could exist to evolve into an eye without first being selected against); the bacterial flagellum (another rather complex piece from which it's hard to imagine the immediate evolutionary precursor).
The examples strike me as extremely strained. There are very few of them repeated over and over. They always apply to soft tissues, so the fossil record is poor. Every time we look at hard tissues, the evolutionary trace is clear.
Despite the complexity of these systems, it still seems that with enough effort we will eventually uncover how they did evolve, perhaps once we have sequenced the genomes of creatures along the evolutionary path. It certainly seems premature to throw out a very successful theory on the basis of this evidence.
But the evidence is there, waiting for you to explain it. Don't dismiss the challenger; know his argument and refute it.
I regularly zoom my browser window. It lets me sit further back from the screen and I can read the text more comfortably. It's not 3D per se, but it could use the 3D features of the video card to do it more smoothly than my computer today can. That's not eye-candy; that's a usability feature.
I've seen a lot of people set their resolutions down because higher resolutions make the text too small to read. The monitor should run at the highest resolution it can refresh comfortably at, and the text should zoom to the appropriate number of pixels.
I suspect that when this feature comes out, I'll be able to zoom any window I like, because it'll be a feature of the graphics system, not of the particular software.
I don't know why I'm feeding the trolls, but it's late and I'm tired, so I'll bite.
Can I ask what your evidence for God is? I assume you're talking about a single entity that is responsible for the Bible and creating the universe.
Just citing the existence of the universe doesn't count as evidence, wondrous as it might be, because that doesn't necessarily tie in to the Biblical representations of God. It may be, and it may not be. If you have any evidence supporting the contention I'd love to see it; I'm not aware of any myself.
On a run the other day I found a waterfowl that I'd never seen before in the lake. It took some doing to figure out what it was. If I could have snapped its picture on my cell camera and gotten an identification (a hooded merganser, it turned out, after some digging), that would have been cool.
I can't imagine how well this would work, since orientation fools things pretty easily. But I imagine that if it were available, I'd find a lot of unidentified objects to look up. (A cooking magazine I read has a "what is this gadget?" column every month.)
One of the hardest things in working for government is that in order to write software properly, you need to get a good look at the data you're working with. You can't see this data; it's heavily, heavily classified.
It's classified two ways: first, a lot of this data is privacy protected (the FBI spies on American citizens and that data is heavily controlled). Second, one of the things it needs to store is sources&methods, which are protected even more closely than the data itself. (The most classified stuff is always about sources&methods, not the data itself.)
The open-source community could write pieces of it, but the hard work on a project like this is adapting it to the particular requirements of the customer.
The problems involved aren't abstract ones that can be solved byu an incredibly clever person like Bram Cohen. They're involved in getting a gazillion people to all buy off on a data format, and convincing them that they really can share information without violating their security requirements (which is really just code-speak for "if I let you have this information I won't be the only one with it, and therefore I become less important.")
The security clearance requirement means that they're working with a drastically reduced pool of programmers. Corners get cut, ideas go unused for lack of implementers, internal oversight is practically nil. (They have code reviews but they're an immense waste of time.)
I'm not sure I've ever worked on a government project of even a tenth this size that I considered to be successful, even if it did get deployed. But throwing it out to the open-source community isn't an option.
In theory there's a guy involved in the process who reads the bids and rejects those that seem infeasible.
In practice this guy is a manager, not a software expert, and he's usually an idiot. I've written dozens of proposals and it's monumentally clear that your job is to impress this idiot. Coming up with an intelligent design is something you spend time on after the bid, not before. And there's usually not time then, because you're busy fulfilling this idiot's pipe dreams.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Well, that's the idea. There are free-speech issues associated with saying, "No, you may not send this email" but forcing somebody to add an easily-filterable tag accomplishes much of the same goals with less burden, at least from the constitutional standpoint.
There are still plenty of difficulties, but the internet isn't quite frictionless. A lot of spam originates in America in one form or another, and I doubt many spammers are actually willing to physically move to another country to continue their ways. The goal is not to algorithmically and logically eliminate all avenues of spam, but to gradually codify more and more rules to cut it down.
True 'nuff, but there's a difference between what I'd like and what I can afford. Or rather, the price point I'd like to hit. I _could_ spend 1/3 of my monthly mortgage on an iPod mini, and I'd probably be really happy. If I cared more about my tunes I could really see it thrilling me, as it thrills many of my friends. But for a hundred bucks, the minor inconveniences make a damn near perfect price point.
Well, I'll miss having a screen. The primo thing about the iPod is its excellent interface. This doesn't really have an interface.
I use a no-name player which is fraught with bugs and unpleasantness, and it cost $50 for a measly 128M. But it does have a screen, so I know what's being played. That means a fair bit to me, since I use it mostly to listen to recorded books and I like knowing what chapter I'm in.
I also need it since I can't store an entire book all at once and need to know what to shuffle in and out. The half-gig iPod would go a long way to solving that problem, but I'll still tend to store partial-books on it (the one I'm listening to and the first part of the next one, for example.)
And I get more than twelve hours out of my single AA battery.
Nonetheless, I am SORELY tempted by this, if for no other reason than Apple's it-just-works reputation.
The conditioning is a very significant point; I alluded to it in the grandparent post. You're asking the user to make a significant security decision every time that popup comes up. Therefore either you must make it extremely rare, or have the answer be the same almost every single time. If users get conditioned to installing software, they will do the wrong thing.
Microsoft's second-most-serious mistake is the design of those popups. But I still believe that its first most mysterious mistake is to have to have them at all. There needs to be a way to accomplish what it does (that is, extend the capability of the system on the fly) without making it open season on your computer.
That's a flaw in the security model, but as I said in the grandparent post it's a flaw that I believe afflicts Linux's security model as well. They can design the popups better (perhaps) or not offer the capability at all, but the real solution is to offer a limited-rights model. Java has it; C# has it, and therefore someday Windows in general will have it. And if that happens Linux is going to be left behind on that front. Users like to be able to download new codecs and fiddly widgets, and as long as those things run at the same level of security as the user, no popup design is going to prevent mischief.
I'm not sure user-level controls are appropriate. The existence of a special more-privileged user to clean up your mistakes is nice, but it would be better to have finer control in the first place. If you were to download malware into your Linux app, it can do a whole bunch of damage even running as you: install itself in your .rc files, add a bunch of stuff to your path, spend out copious spam and copies of itself. IIRC it can even change your shell to itself. The only thing it can't do is prevent a separate, more-privileged user from cleaning it out, but it can make your life pretty hard in the meantime. Compromising "Windows itself" makes your life harder, but not as much harder as you might expect, because it can be pretty damn hard even without global permissions.
I'd much prefer to see a sandbox model that limits the damage malware can do. Linux's model is better than Windows', but it's not as good as it could be, and I like the direction Windows is going on its security model. By Longhorn it could actually surpass Linux. That's at least two years out, and another two years before it sees really wide adoption, but I'd hate to see the Linux community caught flat-footed by it.
One other point: DRM layers, assuming they need to exist (and I'm not asserting it; I'm just assuming it for the the sake of argument) work best at as low a level as possible, to prevent users from bypassing them. Ideally (from a security standpoint) you'd install your codecs in hardware. The analog hole makes for low-resolution copies, and the number of people who can hack it out of hardware is few and requires specialized tools.
So if you're gonna have them, at least a part of them has a right to live at the OS layer. If it's buggy you're screwed, but one security principle is to put all your eggs in one basket, and then ensure that it's a really good basket. The DRM that lives at the OS level should be small, tight, and heavily checked. Codecs written above it should be rights-limited, not just to the user's privilege but even more finely than that.
Thing is, this is one of those cases that hits Windows more because of the monoculture than directly due to the inherent security flaws or the DRM problem.
In general "advanced" formats will require downloading software. The fact that the "advance" here is DRM is almost immaterial, except perhaps for the fact that some people believe they're downloading a license rather than software. But Windows asks explicitly if you want to download and install the software. You get a warning, you have to say, "Yeah, I want that piece of malware." The message may not be clear enough, and since there are cases where you do want it you're asking a naive user to make a fairly sophisticated security judgment, but it is there, and the malware can't bypass it. It doesn't need to.
To my knowledge Linux doesn't have a good solution to that problem, either. If you need software to play that movie/music, it's up to you to verify that the software isn't malware. Linux users escape this problem largely because there aren't enough of them to make it worth the malware writer's effort (as well as the fact that Linux users tend to be better educated and would answer "Hell no!" to the question if asked).
What's needed here is a security sandbox. Download the codec but don't give it permission to do anything except take stuff from one place in memory and dump it to another, or access a limited direct-to-video API. No network access, no disk access. I'm not aware of any particular Linux security sandbox.
Microsoft does have its own, in its C#/CLR, though clearly that hasn't made it to the point of writing codecs yet. And it may not, since these are performance-intensive apps and virtual machines impose overhead. I've seen codecs written in Java, and they're tolerable but not what you'd choose.
I was struck at the time by what Roger Ebert had to say about the second viewing:
"The first time, I thought I'd need a second viewing to understand everything. The second time, I found that greater understanding helped on the plot level, but didn't enrich the viewing experience. Once is right for this movie."
(From his review)
I'm told that the DVDs also have alternate cuts of the movie in chronological order. That's a piece of coolness that makes this one of the truly great DVDs.
Present situation: religious nutcases with nuclear weapons.
Worse situation: nobody knowing where those nuclear weapons are.
At least at the moment there is a small deterrent to Iran's use of nuclear force: the fact that Tehran will be a big chunk of glass if it uses them. At least now we have some idea where those weapons are. Removing that present government and replacing it with anarchy sounds like an excellent way to scatter the nukes to the four winds, to be used by a man without a country to retaliate against.
In this case I simply refer to the number of soldiers required. The US is tapped out for soldiers, unless it wishes to institute a draft or pull soldiers from missions it considers critical. There are those who claim it is already understaffed for the mission it has.
Beyond that, I think that the more soldiers you have on the ground, the more likely it is that you can protect the people from the inevitable insurgency (whether home-grown or supported from outside).
Large coalitions have the problem of competing goals. The best solution to my mind would be a large coalition which agrees on its goals and works together, like the Allies in World War II. Whether a large coaltion with fractured goals beats a small one stretched too thin, well, that would take careful analysis of the particular situation. Personally, I'd love to hold off until I could manage to assemble that large, focused coalition, but I don't know if that's possible in this case.
Taking out the existing leadership without a plan for replacing it would be irresponsible. And in a country with nuclear weapons, "irresponsible" turns into "hazardous to your health" pretty damn quick.
Not that I've got any brilliant alternatives, except diplomatic ones where you get a big coalition together to solve the problem correctly. That, of course, is far easier said than done.
That plan is working GREAT in North Korea.
Actually, it has nothing to do with DVD player makers. It has to do with movie companies.
The movie companies are the ones that own the content. They're the ones that want DRM to protect what they own. If they decide that you can't buy Meet the Fockers in any format other than HP's new DRM-laden DVD-esque format, then you can't have a copy unless you buy the new player.
Of course it's not as simple as that, since the movie companies would be reluctant to shift all at once, thereby losing sales to people who aren't willing to spend $100 on a new player just yet. They have a variety of ways to encourage you to buy the new players, including conspiring with the DVD consortium to make sure that the format is supported in all new DVD players (which will continue to support the existing DVD format, probably indefinitely).
So ultimately it has everything to do with DRM, or rather with content and therefore (from the studio's point view) DRM. If the Average Joe decides he doesn't want things that "don't work", he's free to stop buying it. But from what I've seen Joe really, really wants to see Lemony Snicket on his home theater and will gradually upgrade his equipment if that's the only way. He can watch his old movies and his new ones, and as far as he can tell things work precisely the way they used to.
Hey, I'm just trying to sort out the "evidence".
Actually, I'm not. I don't particularly care for the evidence put forth by ID believers, since it seems extremely esoteric. I've never seen a piece of "irreducible complexity" that looks like it won't eventually yield to a hypothesis that would allow it to have evolved. If God designed things with irreducible complexity, He chose some very odd places to put it. Things sure _look_ like they evolved, and those things we don't already understand seem very likely to be explained one day. It's not like there are patent numbers printed on the inside of cells or components made out of aluminum or other irrefutably designed parts.
What I "believe without proof" is what you suggest, that we're trying to come up with the simplest theory of the world. It doesn't have to be true, but I hold it to be true that the simplest explanation that covers all the facts is mostly likely to be correct. Thus far, I haven't seen any evidence that necessitates an intelligent designer, a theory that raises far more questions than it answers.
So the recursive loops don't bother me. Whether Klaatu himself evolved or was created by the-one-and-only-true-Christian-God, it covers the evidence supposedly presented by ID believers. I don't even have to sputter about "well, we will fit it into evolution... someday!" when presented with eyes or flagellae or other such things. I simply point out that even if I didn't reject their hypothesis as untenable, I reject the moral consequences they draw from it anyway.
It's a form of ad hominem arguement I'm engaging in, demonstrating that I believe that my opponent is not arguing in good faith. I believe that they have goals independent of finding out Truth (as I define truth, that is, forming a theory which adequately covers the observable facts without introducing unnecessary restrictions.) Perhaps that's the wrong way to win an argument, but if I can convince the great-grandparent poster to reconsider his assumptions, I'll be happy.