1. Make use of encryption common 2. Once people are familiar with it, hopefully all softwares dealing with data support encryption by default. 3. ??? 4. Profit (for people like me who can't use encryption in for example pidgin because the other person can't be bothered to install the plugin).
If everything needed to be sold to people before they contributed for *that* cause, only "sexy" things would sell. OK, maybe not necessarily "sexy" but I think basic science costing $6 billion might be a hard sell.
That said, maybe your idea would work. Heck, wikipedia works far better than anyone would have guessed few years ago about everyone freely editing an encyclopedia, and your idea doesn't even sound as insane as wikipedia would have sounded to most people back before it started. But your idea hasn't been tested anywhere. And it is just that I am (and probably many are) wary of it being tested in $mycountry.
Slashdot editors see through your try of getting +5 funny/insightful by linking to xkcd. They have upgrades the xkcd meme to be part of story now. Soon all slashdot summaries will contain "I for one../In soviet Russia../Freaking sharks" etc too.
I, for one, welcome our meme neutralizing slashdot editor-overlords.
I don't know about the african picture but the one with the indian women says zilch. You don't see the background so all you have is her traditional cloths, and that is somehow supposed to imply that she doesn't have access to drinking water (or atleast that she is very poor?)
Now, I surely agree that a big chunk of world population is without clean water but are you implying that it is the same population that has trouble finding clear water that is getting cellphones? If yes, I would like proof that is better than a picture that could have better served as propaganda picture (since it gives you the feeling of saying a lot but actually says nothing).
And if you didn't want to imply that the two populations (lacking water vs. cellphone) are the same then what was your point again? Just because a chunk in a country can't access basic necessities, should others who can even access technology stop doing so?
Your (mysterious) reply prompted me to go to the far corners of the internet to learn that the proper word is "defuse". Words spoken like a true zen master - you don't get a clue unless you are already enlightened.
The link s/he posted has extremely nice analogy. Unfortunately, I have no idea if it is a correct analogy but it is definitely easy to understand and makes sense too. Maybe someone who understands the math behind Higg's mechanism can comment on the aptness of the analogy.
Jeez man, didn't you learn anything from all those hollywood documentaries? Out of the bazillion possibilities, the password is always set to be the one that happens to be your second guess (third if there is a bomb ticking and you need the password to diffuse the bomb).
Morality should have various criteria and not one black and white filter.
The case you mentioned would apply here better if the guy involved got into the whole thing thinking of it as a joke (although it sounds like he plans to defraud the company). I will set up another example to make the point you were trying. See if you agree the example.
Let's say I put a hidden cam in my friend's apartment planning to pull a prank of him doing something silly. He brings a girl later and rapes her which I then find on the cam. The friend is pissed off when he comes to know that his act was caught on a cam but I go ahead and give it to the police. Did I do good or bad?
The prank factor at this point is not a relevant factor in my deciding what is ethical. I should not even care whether my prank classifies as good or bad. The OP was talking about how to decide what would be ethical prank.
My understanding of what OP wrote is following. If you plan to pull a prank, try to think if the other person would be amused. Go ahead if you think s/he would. If you find the opposite later, apologize and learn.
My personal formula would be to not pull a prank altogether though. There is always a possibility of a prank going bad and even though a significant fraction of comedy is based on someone's misfortune, don't go looking (and even creating) it.
Fortuny is not a jerk for pulling the prank. He is jerk because he refuses to accept that he made a mistake.
People, knowingly or unknowingly, do bad things. What one expects is that good people accept their mistakes and learn from it. If Fortuny believed that the other people involved would laugh at the end (I doubt he believed that), then he still had a chance after said persons indicated that they were not amused.
So right or wrong should be determined by who is laughing? That line of thought scares me.
And why?
What's wrong with assuming that if the "victim" laughs when s/he knows it was a prank, then it's ok otherwise not? Not that I pull any pranks on people, but I would like to hear your reason.
I haven't even heard anyone's experience of going through even a "boot up, log in" kind of check. For US I know people who had to go through the latter kind of checks.
Any links supporting your claim? Maybe I will start doing it every time I travel. It's not a lot of work anyway.
Whoever thought of putting such policy in place must be a moron. If I have anything worth hiding while getting into US, you can bet I am not going to carry it on disk but encrypt it, put it on a server and copy it securely via ssh once I am in.
And if the point is just to give a false sense of security, just cornering random people and having random checks (turn on the laptop sir and enter the password) works as well without needing to keep the laptop indefinitely. Retards.
I recently traveled to US and reformatted my HD making a backup back home just to avoid this stupidity. No one stopped me for any extra checks on the way in though.
A big part of the problem with building quantum computers right now is keeping the qubits stable. The real world is constantly trying to "observe" (or interfere with) the qubits. When that happens, your quantum states break down and you lose your computation. This is a bit reason why we've only been able to build small (5-qubit) machines: it's very hard to keep things isolated and stable.
[Emphasis added]
I think the qubits' behavior is very suspicious. Surely if the qubits have nothing to hide, they shouldn't have any problems!
First off, looking back at my post I realize that I sounded too harsh. Apologies for the tone. Coming back to the discussion,
Do you care to lay odds on placing the NP-complete problems in the set of P in the near future?
No, I don't. Because I have no reasonable basis to be inclined one way or the other about it. By the way, my belief is that P!=NP, but that does not make this belief as valid as my belief that fire-breathing dragons do not exist. Both beliefs are qualitatively different. Also, if opinion polls are all that matter, you would be surprised how many great researchers like Bollobas think that P=NP.
In any case, if you want to ameliorate someone's fear about the doomsday scenario (which by the way I don't share), give reasons and not an invalid analogy. Your analogy was invalid and that was my point. My reply had nothing to do with how reasonable or unreasonable GP's fears were.
You could have written whatever you wrote in the previous post when replying to GP, and your arguments about the state or the art being the best possible solution, or how society handles protocols when flaws are discovered would have made for a much sensible post. A valid (or at least reasonable) conclusion does not automatically validate whatever reasoning you might have made to arrive at the conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Make use of encryption common
2. Once people are familiar with it, hopefully all softwares dealing with data support encryption by default.
3. ???
4. Profit (for people like me who can't use encryption in for example pidgin because the other person can't be bothered to install the plugin).
If everything needed to be sold to people before they contributed for *that* cause, only "sexy" things would sell. OK, maybe not necessarily "sexy" but I think basic science costing $6 billion might be a hard sell.
That said, maybe your idea would work. Heck, wikipedia works far better than anyone would have guessed few years ago about everyone freely editing an encyclopedia, and your idea doesn't even sound as insane as wikipedia would have sounded to most people back before it started. But your idea hasn't been tested anywhere. And it is just that I am (and probably many are) wary of it being tested in $mycountry.
But is YouTube in competition with Yahoo? This is apples and oranges.
I say that comparing the comparison of yahoo with youtube to that of apples and oranges is comparing apples with oranges!
-------
I wish I had something useful to say.
What the hell is your acronym supposed to mean?
Or as you probably would have put it - WTHIYASTM?
Slashdot editors see through your try of getting +5 funny/insightful by linking to xkcd. They have upgrades the xkcd meme to be part of story now. Soon all slashdot summaries will contain "I for one../In soviet Russia../Freaking sharks" etc too.
I, for one, welcome our meme neutralizing slashdot editor-overlords.
Why is the story tagged scientology?
Insightful?
I don't know about the african picture but the one with the indian women says zilch. You don't see the background so all you have is her traditional cloths, and that is somehow supposed to imply that she doesn't have access to drinking water (or atleast that she is very poor?)
Now, I surely agree that a big chunk of world population is without clean water but are you implying that it is the same population that has trouble finding clear water that is getting cellphones? If yes, I would like proof that is better than a picture that could have better served as propaganda picture (since it gives you the feeling of saying a lot but actually says nothing).
And if you didn't want to imply that the two populations (lacking water vs. cellphone) are the same then what was your point again? Just because a chunk in a country can't access basic necessities, should others who can even access technology stop doing so?
Huh? What are these people smoking?
Also, why is it on Idle and not on, say, science?
Speaking as someone who actually RTFA...
Pfft.. party pooper! Way to end the discussion of slashdot lawyers with your "facts"!!
;-)
I support her, she is hot
Yeah, when you put her on fire!
The M-d works in mysterious ways!
Your (mysterious) reply prompted me to go to the far corners of the internet to learn that the proper word is "defuse". Words spoken like a true zen master - you don't get a clue unless you are already enlightened.
Thank you.
The link s/he posted has extremely nice analogy. Unfortunately, I have no idea if it is a correct analogy but it is definitely easy to understand and makes sense too. Maybe someone who understands the math behind Higg's mechanism can comment on the aptness of the analogy.
Jeez man, didn't you learn anything from all those hollywood documentaries? Out of the bazillion possibilities, the password is always set to be the one that happens to be your second guess (third if there is a bomb ticking and you need the password to diffuse the bomb).
Morality should have various criteria and not one black and white filter.
The case you mentioned would apply here better if the guy involved got into the whole thing thinking of it as a joke (although it sounds like he plans to defraud the company). I will set up another example to make the point you were trying. See if you agree the example.
Let's say I put a hidden cam in my friend's apartment planning to pull a prank of him doing something silly. He brings a girl later and rapes her which I then find on the cam. The friend is pissed off when he comes to know that his act was caught on a cam but I go ahead and give it to the police. Did I do good or bad?
The prank factor at this point is not a relevant factor in my deciding what is ethical. I should not even care whether my prank classifies as good or bad. The OP was talking about how to decide what would be ethical prank.
My understanding of what OP wrote is following. If you plan to pull a prank, try to think if the other person would be amused. Go ahead if you think s/he would. If you find the opposite later, apologize and learn.
My personal formula would be to not pull a prank altogether though. There is always a possibility of a prank going bad and even though a significant fraction of comedy is based on someone's misfortune, don't go looking (and even creating) it.
Fortuny is not a jerk for pulling the prank. He is jerk because he refuses to accept that he made a mistake.
People, knowingly or unknowingly, do bad things. What one expects is that good people accept their mistakes and learn from it. If Fortuny believed that the other people involved would laugh at the end (I doubt he believed that), then he still had a chance after said persons indicated that they were not amused.
So right or wrong should be determined by who is laughing? That line of thought scares me.
And why?
What's wrong with assuming that if the "victim" laughs when s/he knows it was a prank, then it's ok otherwise not? Not that I pull any pranks on people, but I would like to hear your reason.
No, I don't. Because I didn't know about it :-)
I haven't even heard anyone's experience of going through even a "boot up, log in" kind of check. For US I know people who had to go through the latter kind of checks.
Any links supporting your claim? Maybe I will start doing it every time I travel. It's not a lot of work anyway.
Whoever thought of putting such policy in place must be a moron. If I have anything worth hiding while getting into US, you can bet I am not going to carry it on disk but encrypt it, put it on a server and copy it securely via ssh once I am in.
And if the point is just to give a false sense of security, just cornering random people and having random checks (turn on the laptop sir and enter the password) works as well without needing to keep the laptop indefinitely. Retards.
I recently traveled to US and reformatted my HD making a backup back home just to avoid this stupidity. No one stopped me for any extra checks on the way in though.
A big part of the problem with building quantum computers right now is keeping the qubits stable. The real world is constantly trying to "observe" (or interfere with) the qubits. When that happens, your quantum states break down and you lose your computation. This is a bit reason why we've only been able to build small (5-qubit) machines: it's very hard to keep things isolated and stable.
[Emphasis added]
I think the qubits' behavior is very suspicious. Surely if the qubits have nothing to hide, they shouldn't have any problems!
Say you had.... a buttload of code
And the imagination of slashdotters keeps on bewildering me! I salute you sir!
I think the traffic to the register is being redirected to the onion!
You are such a cheerful person. You must be a thousand years old.
First off, looking back at my post I realize that I sounded too harsh. Apologies for the tone. Coming back to the discussion,
Do you care to lay odds on placing the NP-complete problems in the set of P in the near future?
No, I don't. Because I have no reasonable basis to be inclined one way or the other about it. By the way, my belief is that P!=NP, but that does not make this belief as valid as my belief that fire-breathing dragons do not exist. Both beliefs are qualitatively different. Also, if opinion polls are all that matter, you would be surprised how many great researchers like Bollobas think that P=NP.
In any case, if you want to ameliorate someone's fear about the doomsday scenario (which by the way I don't share), give reasons and not an invalid analogy. Your analogy was invalid and that was my point. My reply had nothing to do with how reasonable or unreasonable GP's fears were.
You could have written whatever you wrote in the previous post when replying to GP, and your arguments about the state or the art being the best possible solution, or how society handles protocols when flaws are discovered would have made for a much sensible post. A valid (or at least reasonable) conclusion does not automatically validate whatever reasoning you might have made to arrive at the conclusion.