No, I'm saying that the suggested device for combating institutional corruption -- public voting records -- has huge problems of its own. Those problems outweight the benefits, especially where there are other oversight mechanisms that may be equally effective in addressing the problem of vote-rigging on a large scale. There are reasons for having secret ballots that shouldn't be whimsically dismissed just because public ballots might seem useful in one particular context.
I'm not "whimsically dismissing" anything. I'm saying point blank that unless I can verify that my vote was counted correctly/i> and you can verify that your vote was counted correctly, and so on, we are at risk of falling into in the worst case scenario of totalitarianism.
Break it down. If you can verify your vote (and a thug is using this against you) you are no worse off then you are with a vote that you can't verify, since you can always just do what the thug asks. This has the same result as casting an unverifiable ballot that the thug's coworkers can modify. But the advantage that you overlook in the voter intimidation situation is that it can't be done without the voters knowledge. Thus the voters have the oportunity (and the motivation) to do something about it, instead of just going quietly to slaughter like good little sheep.
What, pray tell, are these other mechanisms that give the same protection with no risk to the voter?
If the voting machines were open but anonymizing each vote, everything would be fine and dandy. So the proper way is to fix the voting machines, not to open the voting process.
Not so. Unless I can verify that my vote was counted towards the person it was supposed to have counted towards, and you can do likewise, there is the potential for fraud. Even having the source to the voting machine code won't help us, as there are ways around that.
Geez, the stupidity. Sometimes one thinks you deserve the government you have.
You may want to refrain from saying things like that unless you are absolutely sure the point you're making wasn't disproved twenty years ago.
If you can check who someone voted for, you can intimidate and threaten individuals regarding their vote. Imagine large chaps stood outside the voting station encouraging you to vote a particular way having the luxury of knowing exactly how you voted when you're on your way back out.
Nuts. You're saying rather than forcing people who want to steal elections into doing things that are blatantly obvious, clearly illegal, and easily recognized as improper by the casual voter, we should let them steal the elections quietly without bothering anyone? If they have enough goos to threaten the entire electorate (including the police, judges, etc.) than they've already won and the vote isn't going to matter anyway. All secret ballots are doing here is making it easier to steal elections and harder to catch the people who do it.
Development of the tool is focusing on using it to understand what bloggers (using slang and neologisms) are saying about companies' products."
You do not need a fancy program to do this. I can do it for you, without even reading the blogs in question.
Watch.
They are saying your products suck, and that your customer support is worthless.
See how easy that was? Now, you might be wondering how I know this. Simple. They don't use made up words to say good things about you. I'm not sure why (maybe they aren't worried about being sued for saying good things?), but the pattern is very consistent. If somebody goes to the trouble of writing about you in their blog using made up words, they don't like you or the horse you rode in on.
Likewise, if you are a journalist, they call you funny names (Steno Sue, Laura Dildo, Kneepads Miller, "Dollar a Word" Armstrong, etc.) because they've noticed that you consistently write to favour a certain party, position, politician, company, or lifestyle, even when this requires ignoring a pile of facts the size of Paraguay, any one of which would shred your position.
And if you're a politician, it means that someone noticed that what you say in speeches is so unconnected to what you do with the office you hold that the only link between them is the way in which they combine to mollify your nominal constituents while maximizing the benefit to your corporate sponsors.
If you are an industry association, they are saying they hate you, period, and that you are evil incarnate.
See how easy this is? If you still don't get it, I am willing to come out of retirement as a consultant to explain it to you, provided the price is right.
but the only difference is that CC companies are regulated, otherwise they would be worse than Paypal.
Agreed. Thus my point about them wanting to have it both ways. I used to have friends who worked for PayPal, and have a tenancy towards "let the market deal with it" solutions, but there comes a point where you're engaging in fraudulent practices and should be reined in.
Either they aren't a bank, in which case they shouldn't be allowed to do banking, or they are, and they should have to play be the same rules as regular backs. Which, among other things, can't decide not to honor payments just because they don't like you.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I'm no fan of credit card companies either. Or loan sharks, or venture capitalists.
I've about had it with PayPal. They want to have it both ways--they want to be the blameless intermediary who can not be held responsible for what their customers do (in essence, a bank), yet they want to meddle in every transaction, and pass judgment on issues that are none of their business just because they hold the money.
With a credit card company, at least they have the argument that--until you pay them back--it's their money on the line.
Note that no laws are being broken, and so far as I can see no one even complained. This is as bad as a bank deciding that they didn't want to cash valid checks for some people because "we don't like your kind around here."
If I buy say 25 acres of land, and I sell 1 acre parcels of this land,...to 50 people...how long do I have before I go to jail...?
Exactly. And of course the ISP apologists chime in with the "bad analogy--you can get in trouble for overselling goods, but not services" nonsense. Of course, what they are overlooking is that it isn't somehow "less of a crime" to oversell a service, it's just harder to get caught.
The hollowed principle that the ISPs were relying on was the ancient "but I didn't think I'd get caught" defense.
If somebody takes money from people for X, be it a good or a service, and then blocks them from getting what they paid for in order to resell it to others, they are committing fraud. Period.
porkbusters.org refers to rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats. They don't count.
This has been a very common assumption throughout history. It is a safe assumption, up until that point where it is not. I don't care who you are, getting 297,000,000 people pissed at you is not a good idea.
So the question our congress critters need to be asking themselves is "Do I feel lucky?"
And so We The People say to them "Well, punk, do you?"
Look, this is great, go bloggers, hurray for our side. But I've gotta say, "Smoke-Filled Room 0" is a tad optimistic. I mean, if only, right?
Yeah, you're right.
But I was jazzed about it when I submitted it, and doubly so because a few days when the whole thing started it looked like such a hopeless undertaking. I mean, starting from scratch, what do you thing the odds of getting congress critters to admit something like this is? And how long would you expect it to take?
The thing I like best about this story is that its part of a larger reframing of the
conflict, from a red-team vs. blue-team battle where you're stuck choosing the lesser
of two evils to a more clear-cut battle between We The People and those who would like
to take advantage of us.
As a life long Republican that can't stand Bush, I probably have deep ideological difference with half (or more) of the people who worked
on this, but I respect not only their right to hold opinions that differ from mine, but to know where their tax dollars are going, and who doesn't want them to know.
The really sneaky thing about this sort of law is that it's so subjective. Drugs, you can send to a lab, and radar guns are pretty darned accurate most of the time, but this sort of thing? Who decides?
For example, suppose you have a video tape with graphic killing, violence, blowing up buildings and stuff as well as sex scenes. Is it violent porn? What if you accidentally taped a few minutes of the playboy channel over a bunch of network news? Or a Hollywood blockbuster? If you say the people have to actually doing the violence while having sex there would be almost nothing that fits the definition. On the other hand, if you say that anything that contains both elements counts, than almost anything could be called "violent porn" with enough twisting.
And even if you could get the definition down, do you suppose they'll actually release the images in question when someone is publicly accused under this law, or just say "Trust us, it was violent porn."
Of course, laws like that never get abused, so this is really all just theoretical.
However, with Wikis dominating the internet as dense and highly-searchable information repositories, forums are becoming purely social with no utility beyond personal expression or companionship. Can forums exist on a purely social level? What shortcomings endanger the forum's future, and what characteristics have allowed it to survive so far? Why do we need forums in the first place?
The irony here is just too thick. If you really have these sort of doubts, why "Ask Slashdot"?
Why not put up a wiki to let people thrash out the answer there? Or ask your dentist? Or toss some yarrow? But no, of all the possible ways you could have approached the question, the one you decided on was submitting it to a web forum.
On the plus side, I doubt if you're going to get any "google is your friend" responses with this one.
Besides the awkward and nearly unreadable sentence structures in the article, 'dodged the bullet', 'doctored' and 'inevitable conclusion' do not mean what the submitter seems to think they mean.
If the editors won't actually edit articles (to keep Slashdot "more real", apparently), how about just not posting articles that are incomprehensible gibberish?
This is a common problem with text that has been hand translated from another language (in this case, I would suspect either Java or Telugu). I have found that running it through BabbleFish (say, into German and back again) cleans up most the problems. What the article summary was trying to say was:
"James Jones (turbine), on an interview explains on MMORPG.COM that D&D on-line and turbine invent generally the world of Eberron many elements presenting and established, those, in which reality, already into the campaign attitudes were present since early Design, like the Warforged running. Since MMORPG, which was avoided to the rifle bullet, as a well informed Eberron fan underlined the shining disturbances, asked I Keith baker (Eberron play designer) the affair to explain. It passed immediately its own judgement and confirmed that Warforged were its own original creation and that the words of James Jones were a bad choice. It treated also the turbine staff over, which campaign really adjusts is. The inevitable summary of the article is: how much are trusted to box of on-line play places of assembly, if they protect picture of their own promoter?"
Hope that clarifies things. Feel free to use this trick on your own whenever you run accross text like this in the future.
First off, you didn't really answer the question (I'm assuming here that this AC post was written by fermion, since it contains the same types of odd grammatical errors as the grand parent post). Have you ever actually worked with kids?
I have, and my experience is much more in accord with the standard view of childhood as a period of intense learning and rapid acquisition of new abstractions than it is with your picture of children locked in a world of simple and concrete structures. If you want to teach languages, math, music, computer science, or any other "structure rich" subject, childhood is the time to do it. The only things I would suggest holding off on are things like history, music appreciation, and literary criticism which require the acquisition of a large body of concrete but unstructured information before the underlying abstract structures can be perceived.
Addressing a few of your specific points:
Most children play is a simulation of life. Playing house, whatever. The play tends to be based in the concrete, mimicking what the child has seen, while very little elaboration.
This is the sort of thing that makes me think you don't have much experience with real children. You have described the stereotype of childhood play, which is but a faint shadow of the reality. For example:
This morning, a four year old taught me to play a game he had just invented, called "Iggilators and alligators," in which a bear named Iggilators was trying to catch fish from a pond filled with alligators. The bear preferred the taste of the fish's heads to the tails (which have too many "poinks"), but the alligators just ate the fish whole. New fish appeared in the pond at random, and the bear always saw them first because, from his jet pack hovering over the pond, he could see all over while the alligators could only see a short distance in front of them. There were many more rules which I don't recall, but you get the general idea.
When I recently introduced "Paper, scissors, and stone" to a few pre-schoolers, they quickly transformed it into a multiplayer game of much creater complexity by adding "gun" (which beats all three of the others), and then because gun was too powerful, "school bus", which caries all the other players to safety if anyone uses a gun (and causes the gun-user to miss a turn). They later added "the shootout rule," under which, if more than one player used a gun, the first of them to yell "bang" stayed in, school bus or no, and the other was permanently out.
Each kid has a motherboard, and each kid was able to point to a component, recite it's name, and recite it's functionality. This was a good lesson because it was concrete and introduced some vocabulary. The lesson did not try to push the relations between components, or have the kids internalize the meaning and state functionality in their own words.
This was a horrible lesson, for exactly the reasons you list. It taught the kids nothing of lasting value (most of what they memorized will no longer apply by the time they have a chance to apply it) and it focused on rote memorization, which is hard work, instead of developing an understanding which is much easier.
Just try talking the same smart kid(20 IQ point would not make so much of a difference) to recital in which the music is complex. They might tolerate it, but would probably find the music on the Disney station more accessible.
It depends on the source of the complexity. J.S. Bach and Scott Joplin are both complex and accessible without a great deal of prior knowledge, and kids tend to love them (go listen to the tunes of baby toys). On the other hand, if by "complex" you mean music that draws on a body of conventions and idioms that the kids won't know, you are right that they won't enjoy it as much as they would music which uses conventions they are familiar with. This is because it depends on concrete information which they lack, and not due to any deficit in appreciating abstractions.
Have you ever even worked with children? Tried to teach them anything? Have you ever watched (and listened to them) playing?
Kids hop between the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imaginary, with a dexterity that leaves most grown ups in the dust. They learn new languages, new rule sets, new abstract systems, at a rate that we can only envy. And when they learn them they retain the flexibility to think outside them when it suits them.
Your post is condescending and factually inaccurate in so many places I could waste an hour pointing them all out. Instead, I'll pick just one representative example:
Also syntax should be short and forgiving to allow for the limitation of the children.
Here's a bet for you. Pick some eight year old with an IQ twenty points below yours. Both of you move to Hungary and attempt to learn Hungarian. At the end of a year, who do you think will be better?
What people fear are unforeseen long-term consequences of messing with genetics and releasing the results of that into the wild. Once it's out, it's extremely difficult to undo any damage.
Not quite. At least outside the US, the main fears I've seen have been the sort of vendor lock in and interoperability issues that most F/OSS advocates raise against Microsoft. The damage that they worry about isn't vague, general, and environmental (which is mostly US and, from what I can tell, misplaced) it's much more direct, specific, and personal.
For example, the common practice is to set aside some seed from your crop (and often, from the best of your crop) to plant next year. This isn't possible with most GMO; once you switch, you'll have to keep buying seeds from the multinational vendor forever more, or starve. On the other hand, if you don't switch, and your neighbors do, they'll out produce you and you'll starve. Thus GMOs are seen as an aggressive move on the part of the US (mostly) and resented.
There are other concerns, but they all follow this same basic pattern.
Interestingly, the US-centric "oh, but what if it gets loose?" arguments are being used as cover (along with the US's draconian IP assumptions) for the real issue, which is that GMOs may represent an attempt to hold the world hostage by making food proprietary.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I'd bet if there were a GNU or even BSD equivalent GMO, it would be wildly popular. You'd start seeing the lone-farmer equivalent of IRCs like this:
"What'yew plant'n this year?"
"I got me a custom build rice without the pesticides and that there hand tuned drout resistant we gen'd up yar 'afore last."
"You may be right. But I still sware by that new corn patch."
"You can't just keep patching forever. Clean build! Clean build!"
The only people who would benefit from this are the guys making the buyout. They cut MS to the bone, sell off assets, borrow money, issue dividends, then sell the stock before it can tank. After that, what do they care? They already got their dividend & sold off the stock at some inflated price.
I'm sold. Put me down for $200 worth, and let me get back to you on Monday after I check to see how much more I can kick in.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And, unlike the hypothetical pure-greed investors others were talking about, I'm also doing this for the good of humanity. So I expect a proportionately larger cut when we liquidate Microsoft (God, I love the sound of that)
So does that mean that the "if you don't put your name to it, I'll not believe you" argument will disappear?
There are really two different things here. The validity of a logical argument or externally verifiable claim (such as in TFA) doesn't depend on who offers it. On the other hand, things like guarantee's, first hand accounts, etc. often do. If someone could reasonably end their statement with "I give you my word on it" you'll probably want to know who they are. Conversely, if it would make more sense for them to say "You don't have to take my word for it, just go see for yourself" you probably shouldn't care who they are.
For example, consider the arguments surrounding this AP story from today, about yet another politician apparently putting doctored photos on their web site.
I don't care who the person claiming that "she has no shadow in the picture" is; if I doubt their claim I can go check for myself.
However, if someone where to come forward and attest that she was one of the top finishers in the race, I would want to know who they were, and how they knew
If someone came forward and admitted to doctoring the photo, I'd be interested in knowing who and how they claim to did it (e.g., where they got the source photos).
On the other hand, if somebody pointed out that that picture couldn't be what it was claimed to be for some external reason (i.e., it was pouring rain that day) it wouldn't matter who pointed it out.
On one hand we have an established Harvard Phd, who has testified before the U.S. congress, against a game journalist with a bachelors degree in Psychology.
So? If a PhD came out and said that all fish were descendant from cows and some fry cook said it was the other way around, who would you believe? You should base your conclusions on the soundness of the arguments, not who made them.
For that matter, who the arguments where made to shouldn't give them added credibility. Do you really believe that someone having testified to something before Congress makes it automatically true--or even more credible? 'cause there have been a lot of woppers told on the floors of Congress.
I see two problems with this right off the bat. First, as I noted on the thread next door, there are already known ways to hack the vote on "good" machines, on election day, either as an official with access to the machines or as an unofficial "super-voter" who has practiced the necessary steps.
And secondly, the whole concept of "random samples" is subject to abuse, not only in theory someday but in practice now:
And in Jefferson County, Green Party observer Ed Bortz reported that precinct staff had pre-selected "random" districts for the recount.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not "whimsically dismissing" anything. I'm saying point blank that unless I can verify that my vote was counted correctly/i> and you can verify that your vote was counted correctly, and so on, we are at risk of falling into in the worst case scenario of totalitarianism.
Break it down. If you can verify your vote (and a thug is using this against you) you are no worse off then you are with a vote that you can't verify, since you can always just do what the thug asks. This has the same result as casting an unverifiable ballot that the thug's coworkers can modify. But the advantage that you overlook in the voter intimidation situation is that it can't be done without the voters knowledge. Thus the voters have the oportunity (and the motivation) to do something about it, instead of just going quietly to slaughter like good little sheep.
What, pray tell, are these other mechanisms that give the same protection with no risk to the voter?
--MarkusQ
Not so. Unless I can verify that my vote was counted towards the person it was supposed to have counted towards, and you can do likewise, there is the potential for fraud. Even having the source to the voting machine code won't help us, as there are ways around that.
You may want to refrain from saying things like that unless you are absolutely sure the point you're making wasn't disproved twenty years ago.
--MarkusQ
Nuts. You're saying rather than forcing people who want to steal elections into doing things that are blatantly obvious, clearly illegal, and easily recognized as improper by the casual voter, we should let them steal the elections quietly without bothering anyone? If they have enough goos to threaten the entire electorate (including the police, judges, etc.) than they've already won and the vote isn't going to matter anyway. All secret ballots are doing here is making it easier to steal elections and harder to catch the people who do it.
--MarkusQ
You do not need a fancy program to do this. I can do it for you, without even reading the blogs in question.
Watch.
They are saying your products suck, and that your customer support is worthless.
See how easy that was? Now, you might be wondering how I know this. Simple. They don't use made up words to say good things about you. I'm not sure why (maybe they aren't worried about being sued for saying good things?), but the pattern is very consistent. If somebody goes to the trouble of writing about you in their blog using made up words, they don't like you or the horse you rode in on.
Likewise, if you are a journalist, they call you funny names (Steno Sue, Laura Dildo, Kneepads Miller, "Dollar a Word" Armstrong, etc.) because they've noticed that you consistently write to favour a certain party, position, politician, company, or lifestyle, even when this requires ignoring a pile of facts the size of Paraguay, any one of which would shred your position.
And if you're a politician, it means that someone noticed that what you say in speeches is so unconnected to what you do with the office you hold that the only link between them is the way in which they combine to mollify your nominal constituents while maximizing the benefit to your corporate sponsors.
If you are an industry association, they are saying they hate you, period, and that you are evil incarnate.
See how easy this is? If you still don't get it, I am willing to come out of retirement as a consultant to explain it to you, provided the price is right.
--MarkusQ
Agreed. Thus my point about them wanting to have it both ways. I used to have friends who worked for PayPal, and have a tenancy towards "let the market deal with it" solutions, but there comes a point where you're engaging in fraudulent practices and should be reined in.
Either they aren't a bank, in which case they shouldn't be allowed to do banking, or they are, and they should have to play be the same rules as regular backs. Which, among other things, can't decide not to honor payments just because they don't like you.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I'm no fan of credit card companies either. Or loan sharks, or venture capitalists.
I've about had it with PayPal. They want to have it both ways--they want to be the blameless intermediary who can not be held responsible for what their customers do (in essence, a bank), yet they want to meddle in every transaction, and pass judgment on issues that are none of their business just because they hold the money.
With a credit card company, at least they have the argument that--until you pay them back--it's their money on the line.
Note that no laws are being broken, and so far as I can see no one even complained. This is as bad as a bank deciding that they didn't want to cash valid checks for some people because "we don't like your kind around here."
--MarkusQ
Exactly. And of course the ISP apologists chime in with the "bad analogy--you can get in trouble for overselling goods, but not services" nonsense. Of course, what they are overlooking is that it isn't somehow "less of a crime" to oversell a service, it's just harder to get caught.
The hollowed principle that the ISPs were relying on was the ancient "but I didn't think I'd get caught" defense.
If somebody takes money from people for X, be it a good or a service, and then blocks them from getting what they paid for in order to resell it to others, they are committing fraud. Period.
--MarkusQ
You haven't known many psychos, have you?
--MarkusQ
This has been a very common assumption throughout history. It is a safe assumption, up until that point where it is not. I don't care who you are, getting 297,000,000 people pissed at you is not a good idea.
So the question our congress critters need to be asking themselves is "Do I feel lucky?"
And so We The People say to them "Well, punk, do you?"
--MarkusQ
It's the chili festival. Quite simple, really:
--MarkusQ
Yeah, you're right.
But I was jazzed about it when I submitted it, and doubly so because a few days when the whole thing started it looked like such a hopeless undertaking. I mean, starting from scratch, what do you thing the odds of getting congress critters to admit something like this is? And how long would you expect it to take?
--MarkusQ
The thing I like best about this story is that its part of a larger reframing of the conflict, from a red-team vs. blue-team battle where you're stuck choosing the lesser of two evils to a more clear-cut battle between We The People and those who would like to take advantage of us.
As a life long Republican that can't stand Bush, I probably have deep ideological difference with half (or more) of the people who worked on this, but I respect not only their right to hold opinions that differ from mine, but to know where their tax dollars are going, and who doesn't want them to know.
--MarkusQ
The really sneaky thing about this sort of law is that it's so subjective. Drugs, you can send to a lab, and radar guns are pretty darned accurate most of the time, but this sort of thing? Who decides?
For example, suppose you have a video tape with graphic killing, violence, blowing up buildings and stuff as well as sex scenes. Is it violent porn? What if you accidentally taped a few minutes of the playboy channel over a bunch of network news? Or a Hollywood blockbuster? If you say the people have to actually doing the violence while having sex there would be almost nothing that fits the definition. On the other hand, if you say that anything that contains both elements counts, than almost anything could be called "violent porn" with enough twisting.
And even if you could get the definition down, do you suppose they'll actually release the images in question when someone is publicly accused under this law, or just say "Trust us, it was violent porn."
Of course, laws like that never get abused, so this is really all just theoretical.
--MarkusQ
My favorite misconception:
I actually heard a PHB state as fact that "GPL" stood for "GNU Per Linux" and was just an abbreviation for "GNU/Linux".
You don't know how hard it was not to ask him what BSD stood for.
--MarkusQ
The irony here is just too thick. If you really have these sort of doubts, why "Ask Slashdot"?
Why not put up a wiki to let people thrash out the answer there? Or ask your dentist? Or toss some yarrow? But no, of all the possible ways you could have approached the question, the one you decided on was submitting it to a web forum.
On the plus side, I doubt if you're going to get any "google is your friend" responses with this one.
--MarkusQ
This is a common problem with text that has been hand translated from another language (in this case, I would suspect either Java or Telugu). I have found that running it through BabbleFish (say, into German and back again) cleans up most the problems. What the article summary was trying to say was:
Hope that clarifies things. Feel free to use this trick on your own whenever you run accross text like this in the future.
--MarkusQ
First off, you didn't really answer the question (I'm assuming here that this AC post was written by fermion, since it contains the same types of odd grammatical errors as the grand parent post). Have you ever actually worked with kids?
I have, and my experience is much more in accord with the standard view of childhood as a period of intense learning and rapid acquisition of new abstractions than it is with your picture of children locked in a world of simple and concrete structures. If you want to teach languages, math, music, computer science, or any other "structure rich" subject, childhood is the time to do it. The only things I would suggest holding off on are things like history, music appreciation, and literary criticism which require the acquisition of a large body of concrete but unstructured information before the underlying abstract structures can be perceived.
Addressing a few of your specific points:
This is the sort of thing that makes me think you don't have much experience with real children. You have described the stereotype of childhood play, which is but a faint shadow of the reality. For example:
This was a horrible lesson, for exactly the reasons you list. It taught the kids nothing of lasting value (most of what they memorized will no longer apply by the time they have a chance to apply it) and it focused on rote memorization, which is hard work, instead of developing an understanding which is much easier.
It depends on the source of the complexity. J.S. Bach and Scott Joplin are both complex and accessible without a great deal of prior knowledge, and kids tend to love them (go listen to the tunes of baby toys). On the other hand, if by "complex" you mean music that draws on a body of conventions and idioms that the kids won't know, you are right that they won't enjoy it as much as they would music which uses conventions they are familiar with. This is because it depends on concrete information which they lack, and not due to any deficit in appreciating abstractions.
--MarkusQ
Have you ever even worked with children? Tried to teach them anything? Have you ever watched (and listened to them) playing?
Kids hop between the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imaginary, with a dexterity that leaves most grown ups in the dust. They learn new languages, new rule sets, new abstract systems, at a rate that we can only envy. And when they learn them they retain the flexibility to think outside them when it suits them.
Your post is condescending and factually inaccurate in so many places I could waste an hour pointing them all out. Instead, I'll pick just one representative example:
Here's a bet for you. Pick some eight year old with an IQ twenty points below yours. Both of you move to Hungary and attempt to learn Hungarian. At the end of a year, who do you think will be better?
--MarkusQ
Beats me. You'll have to ask the guy who swiped it.
--MarkusQ
Not quite. At least outside the US, the main fears I've seen have been the sort of vendor lock in and interoperability issues that most F/OSS advocates raise against Microsoft. The damage that they worry about isn't vague, general, and environmental (which is mostly US and, from what I can tell, misplaced) it's much more direct, specific, and personal.
For example, the common practice is to set aside some seed from your crop (and often, from the best of your crop) to plant next year. This isn't possible with most GMO; once you switch, you'll have to keep buying seeds from the multinational vendor forever more, or starve. On the other hand, if you don't switch, and your neighbors do, they'll out produce you and you'll starve. Thus GMOs are seen as an aggressive move on the part of the US (mostly) and resented.
There are other concerns, but they all follow this same basic pattern.
Interestingly, the US-centric "oh, but what if it gets loose?" arguments are being used as cover (along with the US's draconian IP assumptions) for the real issue, which is that GMOs may represent an attempt to hold the world hostage by making food proprietary.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I'd bet if there were a GNU or even BSD equivalent GMO, it would be wildly popular. You'd start seeing the lone-farmer equivalent of IRCs like this:
"What'yew plant'n this year?"
"I got me a custom build rice without the pesticides and that there hand tuned drout resistant we gen'd up yar 'afore last."
"You may be right. But I still sware by that new corn patch."
"You can't just keep patching forever. Clean build! Clean build!"
I'm sold. Put me down for $200 worth, and let me get back to you on Monday after I check to see how much more I can kick in.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And, unlike the hypothetical pure-greed investors others were talking about, I'm also doing this for the good of humanity. So I expect a proportionately larger cut when we liquidate Microsoft (God, I love the sound of that)
Now there's one business model that certainly could have benefited from picking FOSS.
Hey, here's an idea: maybe we should push this as counter-FUD:
Man sentenced to six years for picking proprietary software
Intrinsic risks of "poison pill" licenses overlooked by many
It's just a thought.
--MarkusQ
There are really two different things here. The validity of a logical argument or externally verifiable claim (such as in TFA) doesn't depend on who offers it. On the other hand, things like guarantee's, first hand accounts, etc. often do. If someone could reasonably end their statement with "I give you my word on it" you'll probably want to know who they are. Conversely, if it would make more sense for them to say "You don't have to take my word for it, just go see for yourself" you probably shouldn't care who they are.
For example, consider the arguments surrounding this AP story from today, about yet another politician apparently putting doctored photos on their web site.
Does that answer your question?
--MarkusQ
So? If a PhD came out and said that all fish were descendant from cows and some fry cook said it was the other way around, who would you believe? You should base your conclusions on the soundness of the arguments, not who made them.
For that matter, who the arguments where made to shouldn't give them added credibility. Do you really believe that someone having testified to something before Congress makes it automatically true--or even more credible? 'cause there have been a lot of woppers told on the floors of Congress.
--MarkusQ
I see two problems with this right off the bat. First, as I noted on the thread next door, there are already known ways to hack the vote on "good" machines, on election day, either as an official with access to the machines or as an unofficial "super-voter" who has practiced the necessary steps.
And secondly, the whole concept of "random samples" is subject to abuse, not only in theory someday but in practice now:
--MarkusQ