"(Actually, when you think about it, any social network is really nothing more than a really big BBS with some domain-specific optimizations.)"
Yes!
I run a Ning site and for me, it's the first time I've felt the simplicity and friendliness on an Internet forum that good old BBSes had back in the 80s. Sorry phpBB, but you just aren't quite the same (though you're a good #2).
It's only taken 25 years for the Internet to catch up with Fidonet, but never mind.
Also, tubes sound warmer, darnit. Now take your newfangled 'emo' and give me some good grunge/punk/disco/rock/jazz/Gregorian chant, whatever is older than you.
""Software maintenance" has absolutely nothing to do with computer science. "
And that attitude is EXACTLY why computing still sucks.
If it involves computers, and it's an interesting unsolved problem - and guess what, a LOT of real-world problems turn out to be extremely interesting and extremely unsolved, full of all sorts of corner cases and exceptions to previously supposed 'laws' - then it's computer science.
System administration is like artificial intelligence. It's a human-centric job involving a lot of common sense, and it can't always be readily automated because the rules keep changing. That ought to raise warning flags..Like vision or language recognition, a lot of scientists seem to think administration is so easy that only dumb people bother to investigate it. So they don't. But that's the opposite of the truth. Humans are still stuck doing rote maintenance precisely BECAUSE it's so tricky to do that computers can't yet do it. Which means it's very, very interesting.
A sensible approach to computer science would treat all phases of the development and deployment of information, computing and communication systems as computing systems in themselves. Yes, that involves crossing disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps that's more cybernetics or systems thinking or linguistics or sociology or psychology than computer science as it's currently narrowly defined itself to be. But in that case, computer science has defined itself out of the interesting part of the game - the impact and use of computing in the real world and what parts of this can and can't be predicted and automated - which would be a very sad thing.
"Now, which seems more miraculous: That a man rose from the dead, or that the testimony was mistaken? Which seems more likely?"
'Miraculous' is not the same thing as 'impossible'. It simply means 'rare'.
Given the reality of mediumistic phenomena, psychic healings and 20th/21st century near death experiencers who have reported unexplainable recoveries after being clinically dead? I'd say a man rising from the dead was the simplest explanation, actually.
"The mathematics of it actually aren't all that hard."
Sure, SR is simple given the postulates. But it's the postulates which most people who have problems with relativity object to, because C as a hard limit for *all* information communication is a very big and counterintuitive statement.
It's also, unfortunately, a factually incorrect statement. Not even counting the ether drift observations of Miller and the sidereal correlations of Townsend Brown, if you've investigated psychic phenomena or UFOs at all (both of which do have documentary evidence, albeit anecdotal since living phenomena don't always lend themselves to exact replication), you'll find that there does exist communication which disregards light cones; therefore the postulates of special relativity don't quite describe the actual world we live in. There are exceptions. And not just in a high-gravity environment as GR allows for.
Like most artifacts of science, SR/GR is a simplified model of a much more complex reality, an approximation which works well under limited circumstances. Unfortunately some proponents of a 'scientific worldview' limit their universe absolutely to what the current mathematical models derive, and then remove from consideration all evidence which runs counter to the models on the grounds that it is a priori 'irrational'. That is not exactly logical.
I'm not saying that either psychic or religious experience are 100% reproducible. That's part of what makes them interesting. But there do exist a class of genuine phenomena which religion (generally the mystical, experiential, hands-on variety) is the best way of understanding; practicing religions have had thousands of years of dealing with this stuff while science is very new to the game.
If you're interested in broadening your worldview, Elizabeth Lloyd Meyer's Extraordinary Knowing is the best introductory book I've read about psi from a scientific perspective.
Exactly! Thanks to the Information Purification Directives, Big Steve has created a garden of pure ideology, where the consumer may flourish safe from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Apple's enemies shall talk themselves to death, and the iPhone will bury them with their own confusion.
"A right is what the people in that place and time state it is."
That's debatable, and is in fact exactly what is being debated.
The pro-free-speech poster is arguing from the position that the framers of the US Constitution took - that there exist certain *natural* rights which are not granted by a government or society but are inherent to the condition of being human.
I think both Germany and the USA would agree on this, but disagree as to the priority of the right to 'dignity' (or privacy) vs the right to speech.
But the idea that rights themselves exist, are prior to forms of social organisation, and are *recognised* - rather than granted - by democratic governments is fairly fundamental. If we don't agree on this, then there's a fairly big philosophical and political gulf between us.
Actually, not according to Christopher Alexander. He's written a whole series (The Nature of Order) on the mathematical and geometrical reasons why beauty is objective, not subjective - and that people's intuition about the beautiful vs the ugly are actually suprisingly coherent. Which does interesting things to postmodernism.
"Your name, address, social security number, bank account balance, credit card transactions, passwords, medical history, and so on are simple facts. Should those who have access to that information be allowed to state those simple facts? In public, on the internet, where anyone and everyone can see it? "
Name? Yes. Address? At the person's discretion, but phone number and email should be - assuming we had a phone system which allowed caller screening and an email system which was reliable and not drowning in fraudulent spam. One's public contact details should be a matter of public record.
Total bank account balance? Actually, I think yes, as it's a measure of social reputation, but that would require some changes to our economy (in Green Dollar systems, for instance, this information IS public). Certainly if you're in a public position, financial information needs to be transparent.
Medical and credit card history, probably not in our current system. Again, however, in Green Dollar systems, your trading history is open - there's an argument to be made that on systems like eBay, your trading history needs to be open to protect against fraud.
Passwords, no, but that's only because they're a poor solution to the problem of identification and we should really be using something like unforgeable physical dongles instead. So we treat them separately for now, and change them since we assume all encrypted data will eventually become public.
Social security numbers should never have been used for ID purposes without some kind of anti-fraud authentication mechanism. Otherwise, having a unique identifier for a person is a very sensible thing and the online world is moving towards this anyway. But merely *knowing* someone's identity shouldn't ever let you spoof them.
So far so good. But your criminal history - and any news events you've been a party to - that's a matter of public record, or should be. It's about your public life, not your private life, and other people have a right to know for historical research and reputation purposes.
The argument being made by Germany is that committing a crime has a bad effect on reputation, and therefore the public record should be suppressed. The first is unfortunate, and is a result of the crime itself. The second I don't see how it follows. Just because I commit a crime and hurt myself by doing so doesn't mean you shouldn't talk about what I did.
We *should* be less punitive and more open to change in people who have served prison time - but we shouldn't silence the truth to do so.
"You'll never get rid of "link rot", only mitigate it. "
It would be nice if we had some kind of weblike distributed permanent publishing system which was write-once and monotonic. Like Freenet, but without the obsessive secrecy (and child porn), and based on smaller chunks than 'pages'.
Ie, every chunk of data is given a hash and put out onto the... permaweb. Now it's out there, it won't change. Ever. But it can be cached aggressively (think huge caching servers on every continent, big ones on every network, one per host). These chunks could represent anything: files, emails, web forum comments, Twitter updates, blog posts/edits, Wiki edits, user identities, single value assignments for a single field - anything.
Then to close the gap and make it a full-fledged Web-2.0y system, we'd need other chunks which can be interpreted as functions which aggregate chunks and create 'views' of them, and some way of defining relative rather than absolute names for chunks (such as 'now' and 'here' and 'this process/user/host/network'). And a way of a function-chunk subscribing to those 'relative' chunks so that it gets notified (and recalculates and notifies its subscribers) when they change. That part is a little tricky since it means defining a language.
But even just with massive caching of permanent data, I think we could remove a lot of the suckiness from the current interwebs. We sort of broke the Web way back when we allowed cgi scripts and Javascript; now a web page isn't the primary unit, nor is it necessarily cacheable, nor does a URL represent an actual resource, just 'whatever that server wants to give you at that address now'. We have time-relative links, which are useful - but we should also have time-absolute links, which can be stored forever as long as anyone cares.
We'd still be at the mercy of whoever chooses to cache (or not) - but permanent data chunks would be a lot more cache-friendly for those who cared to do themselves. Debacles like the End of Geocities wouldn't be nearly as big a deal - it would still be cached wherever anyone had accessed it.
(This sort of idea of a precisely identified, perma-web rather than a 'whatever the heck the server wants to give you right now' web is pretty much what Ted Nelson's Xanadu was getting at, and has never really been implemented, at least not well.)
"Just to fill you in, they have also made other series (Deep Space Nine, LA LA LA, CAN'T HEAR YOU) and many movies."
NO! There was NOTHING after Deep Space Nine! Nothing! And no Trek movie after Star Trek IV, except for First Contact.
Man, imagine the Decade from Hell we could've had if Paramount had decided they could just keep cranking out Star Trek material without regard to story quality. Sheesh. Close call there.
Slashdot Mirror
"The moon is covered in helium 3. There, we have to have a manned lunar colony in order to be safe from terrorists!"
Well, technically it only needs to be 'manned' by ONE crewmember... and a Gerty.
Just make sure the long-range communications relay satellite has a 'malfunction', know what I mean?
"(Actually, when you think about it, any social network is really nothing more than a really big BBS with some domain-specific optimizations.)"
Yes!
I run a Ning site and for me, it's the first time I've felt the simplicity and friendliness on an Internet forum that good old BBSes had back in the 80s. Sorry phpBB, but you just aren't quite the same (though you're a good #2).
It's only taken 25 years for the Internet to catch up with Fidonet, but never mind.
Also, tubes sound warmer, darnit. Now take your newfangled 'emo' and give me some good grunge/punk/disco/rock/jazz/Gregorian chant, whatever is older than you.
"Rarely is the answer to further investigate working code."
And that's why we have botnets, because code with exploits 'works'.
Can I forward all my spam to you?
"Could you imagine what we'd do to a bridge builder who just tacked stuff on until it kinda sorta stood?"
Buy a million copies of his product, because it was cheap, it would be replaced in three years anyway, and maintenance came on someone else's budget?
"I can simulate the rational thought processes of 90% of humans with one vacuum tube."
And you get a much warmer sound that way, too.
"Now try your number *1024*1024, this clearly isn't as friendly."
1*2^10 * 1*2^10 = 1*2^20 . Easy peasy.
Oh, you meant in base 10? What's that?
""Software maintenance" has absolutely nothing to do with computer science. "
And that attitude is EXACTLY why computing still sucks.
If it involves computers, and it's an interesting unsolved problem - and guess what, a LOT of real-world problems turn out to be extremely interesting and extremely unsolved, full of all sorts of corner cases and exceptions to previously supposed 'laws' - then it's computer science.
System administration is like artificial intelligence. It's a human-centric job involving a lot of common sense, and it can't always be readily automated because the rules keep changing. That ought to raise warning flags. .Like vision or language recognition, a lot of scientists seem to think administration is so easy that only dumb people bother to investigate it. So they don't. But that's the opposite of the truth. Humans are still stuck doing rote maintenance precisely BECAUSE it's so tricky to do that computers can't yet do it. Which means it's very, very interesting.
A sensible approach to computer science would treat all phases of the development and deployment of information, computing and communication systems as computing systems in themselves. Yes, that involves crossing disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps that's more cybernetics or systems thinking or linguistics or sociology or psychology than computer science as it's currently narrowly defined itself to be. But in that case, computer science has defined itself out of the interesting part of the game - the impact and use of computing in the real world and what parts of this can and can't be predicted and automated - which would be a very sad thing.
"Communists are typically godless, but not secular."
Can you explain the difference?
"For starters, which dogmas should you follow? "
That's where mysticism - the practice and observation of personal mental/spiritual experience - comes in, I think.
"scientific inquiry cannot be made into non-existent things."
Hmm. Wouldn't observability be a more important criteria than 'existence'?
We can observe several nonexistent things - fiction, for example.
Likewise, things can potentially exist without being observed (unless you hold to a strict Copenhagen Interpretation).
Scientific enquiry can be made into anything which can be observed. More easily if the observations can be repeated.
"Now, which seems more miraculous: That a man rose from the dead, or that the testimony was mistaken? Which seems more likely?"
'Miraculous' is not the same thing as 'impossible'. It simply means 'rare'.
Given the reality of mediumistic phenomena, psychic healings and 20th/21st century near death experiencers who have reported unexplainable recoveries after being clinically dead? I'd say a man rising from the dead was the simplest explanation, actually.
"The mathematics of it actually aren't all that hard."
Sure, SR is simple given the postulates. But it's the postulates which most people who have problems with relativity object to, because C as a hard limit for *all* information communication is a very big and counterintuitive statement.
It's also, unfortunately, a factually incorrect statement. Not even counting the ether drift observations of Miller and the sidereal correlations of Townsend Brown, if you've investigated psychic phenomena or UFOs at all (both of which do have documentary evidence, albeit anecdotal since living phenomena don't always lend themselves to exact replication), you'll find that there does exist communication which disregards light cones; therefore the postulates of special relativity don't quite describe the actual world we live in. There are exceptions. And not just in a high-gravity environment as GR allows for.
Like most artifacts of science, SR/GR is a simplified model of a much more complex reality, an approximation which works well under limited circumstances. Unfortunately some proponents of a 'scientific worldview' limit their universe absolutely to what the current mathematical models derive, and then remove from consideration all evidence which runs counter to the models on the grounds that it is a priori 'irrational'. That is not exactly logical.
I'm not saying that either psychic or religious experience are 100% reproducible. That's part of what makes them interesting. But there do exist a class of genuine phenomena which religion (generally the mystical, experiential, hands-on variety) is the best way of understanding; practicing religions have had thousands of years of dealing with this stuff while science is very new to the game.
If you're interested in broadening your worldview, Elizabeth Lloyd Meyer's Extraordinary Knowing is the best introductory book I've read about psi from a scientific perspective.
"You are no closer to reproducing (falsifiably, or otherwise) Jesus Christ's results than a waffle. "
That's not actually quite correct. There is some interesting falsifiable data.
"Next thing you know, they'll be writing "hello world""
There is no World. There is nothing outside the Dome.
Your crystal is blinking, Logan. Happy Lastday!
"You can't compare the app store and totalitarianism. "
No, of course nobody would ever compare a computer system to a totalitarian regime.
Exactly! Thanks to the Information Purification Directives, Big Steve has created a garden of pure ideology, where the consumer may flourish safe from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Apple's enemies shall talk themselves to death, and the iPhone will bury them with their own confusion.
And one last thing... we shall prevail!
"whinging? Are you British? No that's not allowed on my slashdot."
Bloody colonials! I say, it's time we brought the Redcoats back to give you a piece of what for. After tea.
"A right is what the people in that place and time state it is."
That's debatable, and is in fact exactly what is being debated.
The pro-free-speech poster is arguing from the position that the framers of the US Constitution took - that there exist certain *natural* rights which are not granted by a government or society but are inherent to the condition of being human.
I think both Germany and the USA would agree on this, but disagree as to the priority of the right to 'dignity' (or privacy) vs the right to speech.
But the idea that rights themselves exist, are prior to forms of social organisation, and are *recognised* - rather than granted - by democratic governments is fairly fundamental. If we don't agree on this, then there's a fairly big philosophical and political gulf between us.
"For example, beauty is subjective"
Actually, not according to Christopher Alexander. He's written a whole series (The Nature of Order) on the mathematical and geometrical reasons why beauty is objective, not subjective - and that people's intuition about the beautiful vs the ugly are actually suprisingly coherent. Which does interesting things to postmodernism.
But carry on.
"As far as the internet -- do we really want it to be a tool that enables a person's past mistakes to haunt them forever?"
That's called Facebook.
"WERE killers"
I'm not sure they were in wolf form at the time, though.
"Your name, address, social security number, bank account balance, credit card transactions, passwords, medical history, and so on are simple facts. Should those who have access to that information be allowed to state those simple facts? In public, on the internet, where anyone and everyone can see it? "
Name? Yes. Address? At the person's discretion, but phone number and email should be - assuming we had a phone system which allowed caller screening and an email system which was reliable and not drowning in fraudulent spam. One's public contact details should be a matter of public record.
Total bank account balance? Actually, I think yes, as it's a measure of social reputation, but that would require some changes to our economy (in Green Dollar systems, for instance, this information IS public). Certainly if you're in a public position, financial information needs to be transparent.
Medical and credit card history, probably not in our current system. Again, however, in Green Dollar systems, your trading history is open - there's an argument to be made that on systems like eBay, your trading history needs to be open to protect against fraud.
Passwords, no, but that's only because they're a poor solution to the problem of identification and we should really be using something like unforgeable physical dongles instead. So we treat them separately for now, and change them since we assume all encrypted data will eventually become public.
Social security numbers should never have been used for ID purposes without some kind of anti-fraud authentication mechanism. Otherwise, having a unique identifier for a person is a very sensible thing and the online world is moving towards this anyway. But merely *knowing* someone's identity shouldn't ever let you spoof them.
So far so good. But your criminal history - and any news events you've been a party to - that's a matter of public record, or should be. It's about your public life, not your private life, and other people have a right to know for historical research and reputation purposes.
The argument being made by Germany is that committing a crime has a bad effect on reputation, and therefore the public record should be suppressed. The first is unfortunate, and is a result of the crime itself. The second I don't see how it follows. Just because I commit a crime and hurt myself by doing so doesn't mean you shouldn't talk about what I did.
We *should* be less punitive and more open to change in people who have served prison time - but we shouldn't silence the truth to do so.
He had softly and suddenly vanished away -
For the Sears was a boson, you see.
"You'll never get rid of "link rot", only mitigate it. "
It would be nice if we had some kind of weblike distributed permanent publishing system which was write-once and monotonic. Like Freenet, but without the obsessive secrecy (and child porn), and based on smaller chunks than 'pages'.
Ie, every chunk of data is given a hash and put out onto the ... permaweb. Now it's out there, it won't change. Ever. But it can be cached aggressively (think huge caching servers on every continent, big ones on every network, one per host). These chunks could represent anything: files, emails, web forum comments, Twitter updates, blog posts/edits, Wiki edits, user identities, single value assignments for a single field - anything.
Then to close the gap and make it a full-fledged Web-2.0y system, we'd need other chunks which can be interpreted as functions which aggregate chunks and create 'views' of them, and some way of defining relative rather than absolute names for chunks (such as 'now' and 'here' and 'this process/user/host/network'). And a way of a function-chunk subscribing to those 'relative' chunks so that it gets notified (and recalculates and notifies its subscribers) when they change. That part is a little tricky since it means defining a language.
But even just with massive caching of permanent data, I think we could remove a lot of the suckiness from the current interwebs. We sort of broke the Web way back when we allowed cgi scripts and Javascript; now a web page isn't the primary unit, nor is it necessarily cacheable, nor does a URL represent an actual resource, just 'whatever that server wants to give you at that address now'. We have time-relative links, which are useful - but we should also have time-absolute links, which can be stored forever as long as anyone cares.
We'd still be at the mercy of whoever chooses to cache (or not) - but permanent data chunks would be a lot more cache-friendly for those who cared to do themselves. Debacles like the End of Geocities wouldn't be nearly as big a deal - it would still be cached wherever anyone had accessed it.
(This sort of idea of a precisely identified, perma-web rather than a 'whatever the heck the server wants to give you right now' web is pretty much what Ted Nelson's Xanadu was getting at, and has never really been implemented, at least not well.)
"Just to fill you in, they have also made other series (Deep Space Nine, LA LA LA, CAN'T HEAR YOU) and many movies."
NO! There was NOTHING after Deep Space Nine! Nothing! And no Trek movie after Star Trek IV, except for First Contact.
Man, imagine the Decade from Hell we could've had if Paramount had decided they could just keep cranking out Star Trek material without regard to story quality. Sheesh. Close call there.