Journalism went to hell in a handbasket after the search engine became a common feature in everyday life. The main reason is that journalists are lazy.
There's quite a bit of truth here. But...
On the other hand, as information warfare and counterwarfare continues, it will eventually be harder to do a search and get uncontested data (not that "uncontested" is synonymous with "true", so in a way we already have the problem). One might argue that some of these lazy people console themselves and their consciences by saying it must be true because it stands uncontested, and in some cases that's true. In that case, there might be reason for some optimism over the possibility that as searches turn up not just arguments but counterarguments, good reporters will realize that they have to inform people enough to decide.
But as things progress, I expect a world that looks more like the chaffing effects described by Ron Rivest in his should-be-more-well-known chaffing paper. (He cites it as an encryption technique, but I think there's a curious accidental (or perhaps sometimes intentional) relationship between encryption and political obfuscation.)
In the case of encrypted or chaffed data, you'd think people would work to decode it, not simply report on the fact of an encrypted stream of data as if the average reader could read past it. The question is whether there's a threshold of obfuscation beyond which even lazy reporters will see that they are offering encoded data and will start again to try to decode it. Or is steganography a better model and will journalists never realize that they ought to be decrypting the messages that clever politicians feed thme because they don't even recognize the messages as encoded.
I think laziness plays in but so does conscience. So understanding whether conscience will ever overcome laziness seems to me on understanding the paradigm that's in play.
Probably it's a mix, and probably the results will be mixed. But that makes for boring discussion... or worse than boring: it degrades to the cable TV approach to journalism, where when one person alleges that the world was created by Leprechauns and another alleges a natural physical process, and so they (a) declare that a controversy exists and (b) try to rectify it by giving equal time to each side. Sometimes I think that's about laziness, too, but sometimes I think it's that people have forgotten how to reason, and have somehow assumed that scientific consensus is the same as "scientific democracy", where one vote one viewer determines truth. Laziness, at least, can be cured by a sudden change of heart and desire to act. Losing the skill of how to think critically in a culture is harder to rectify on short notice.
I can use CSS to give the tag an image, and shift the plain-text version of the content off to the side so it doesn't appear on graphical browsers
I completely agree with the spirit of your remark insofar as you're suggesting that technology can trivially solve this problem.
Not just for this, but for an international audience generally (many of whom read English but have trouble with idioms, sarcasm, and other advanced usages), it wouldn't hurt to have an XML or HTML markup that is, effectively, the ability to associate a plainer meaning to text for alternate use. A browser could be put in a mode to show the fancy use, show the basic use, or show the fancy use but with plain use pop-ups like tool tips (or plain-use explanation-on-demand-by-right-click). Doing it this way would allow search engines to offer a radio button saying "search idiomatic uses" which was, perhaps, defaultly off, but that could be re-enabled if the witty text was what stuck in your mind.
Good headlines are like good subject lines in mail. One of the best subject lines I ever saw in email was the text "crowbar in head". No, it wasn't about crowbars, it was about a "brain-damaged program" someone was alleged to have written. It might be a bad search keyword if I was searching for info on crowbars literally, but it is very easy for me to find in old mail because it was unique and easy to remember. I would hate to see the net move away from the ability to make useful labels.
I also worked at a company where the User Interface people got overzealous and started to rename all the editor commands from things like "View xxx" and "Show xxx" and "Print xxx" and so on to just "Show xxx" because they thought that was more regular. But at some point someone noticed that the emacs-style command keys like Control-V (formerly mnemonic for View) no longer made sense. Those UI people were soon pejoratively nicknamed the "View Police" because their entire focus seemed to be on stamping out flexible use of language. People started to rightly question whether eliminating all the synonyms in the language was good, because it meant every time you searched for "Show" you got a zillion hits and every time you searched for "View" you got zero. There are times when this is right and times when this is absolutely wrong, but the problem is not fixed by renaming commands. A better fix would be to have search commands that understand likely synoyms and then the option to turn that on and off. I think that lesson might apply here, too.
So I think there's a lot you could do with, for example, an extended USAGE="sarcasm|wit|pun|joke|..." MEANING="this is a rewording" attribute in, for example, a SPAN element of HTML, for example.
What I don't agree with is doing something like making an IMG tag that has sarcasm or wit or whatever in it and then having the ALT attribute for the IMG element use the plain text. The reasons are many, but include such issues as: eventually Google will search text found in images so it's a temporary solution, people on non-image-based browsers (including the sight-impaired) deserve access to wit, and, most fundamentally, the whole point of markup is that it allows a flexible ability to tag things with their true nature. The true nature is not "wit is graphical and plain meaning is text"; that's just a way to shoehorn a solution into existing frameworks.
(If this is not what you meant, then I've misread you and would appreciate a more detailed explanation of what you're going after.)
So they really think... that we are -ALL- going to be managers.
I'm so glad someone made this point. It's like what's being proposed is a pyramid scam. Look at any org chart and you can see that the people at the top will win and those at the bottom will lose.
Then again, there's one obvious reason to want to be a manager: they get to be the ones to decide whether to outsource and who to outsource.
The only thing that is going to save our jobs is higher wages overseas.
Another excellent point. I don't understand why our labor unions in the US are still so focused on lobbying for higher pay in the US. Saying "we won't take less" is like saying "please get your labor elsewhere". If they had any sense, US labor unions would put their money into creating labor unions in other countries. That's the only way to stop the "elsewhere" from seeming like a good option.
History suggests that once the rest of the world becomes more wealthy, they'll eventually get to feel (rightly or wrongly--it's immaterial--I'm just observing, not moralizing) that it's more of a right than something they should have to struggle for, as happened in the US. Then they'll want their own labor unions or other forms of labor protection to keep from having to be exploited to enrich someone else. And when they do, things will even out. But until then, I suppose one way to view the situation is that the global corporations are desperately racing for the few remaining wildernesses of disorganized workers who are willing to work for less than in the built up countries because what they're offered is better than what they had before. Once they've done that for a while, the offer will no longer be better than what they had and will start to be viewed on an even playing field for what it's actually worth and things will stabilize.
The open question in my mind is whether that inevitably has to take generations or whether the Internet and FedEx and other modern market technology will find a way to speed that up as well.
The fact is, laws passed for the "common good" invariably end up harming those they were notionally intended
Well indeed...
One obvious consequence of making.xxx well-regulated is that there will need to be a place for people to have non-well-regulated stuff. People who want sex and don't want to pay for it will want adware, so if you regulate against it, then you need a.ADS+XXX tld to say "yes, I want xxx but I'll tolerate ads to get them".
What problem is being solved by regulating this new domain that isn't even created anyway? Is it to make it more attractive so people will go there more? I thought the original reason for this domain was to say it was outside the bounds of social reason. Now they want to make a nice sociable place out of the place that is outside the bounds of socialness? Where will the social bounds of that be?
Will there be a.XXXX in a few years because they didn't feel welcome in.XXX?
Some people on the religious right probably think any mention of sex for anything other than making babies during marriage is bad and belongs in XXX, while others think XXX defines some distinction between hardcore and softcore, and so on. Will they be forward-thinking enough to break this domain into.MOSTLY.XXX and.SOMEWHAT.XXX and.NOTREALLYVERYMUCHATALL.XXX and.WRONGLYTHOUGHTTOBE.XXX and.WHATJERRYFALWELLTHINKSIS.XXX and.WHATTHEPOPETHINKSIS.XXX and.WHATYOUANDITHINKIS.XXX and.EVENWORSETHANCOMMONLYCALLED.XXX and then make everyone be subdomains under that?
Sex is a big concept, full of complexity. You're never going to boil it down to something simple enough to legislate in a uniform way and if you have to idealize it before you can confront it, it's a bad idea to try because, like it or not, the world is not anyone's ideal. You'd think government would get that.
I guess it's like most things where governments confuse the notion of the power to legislate with the notion of having the need to do it all, the competence to do it effectively, or the wisdom to do it right (if indeed there can be said to be any concept of right at all in cases like this). Sometimes it's the job of good government to say to the people calling for legislation: the world is bigger than you think, so grow up and learn to cope.
I also don't think we need the IRS to define whether a project is "open" or not.
Any time you ask the government to reward you for something, I think it's only fair that the people paying out that reward (the taxpayers) have a say in what counts as rewardable and what doesn't.
I'm all for people saying they have a right to do what they want in their private life, but they have left their private life when they start applying for special treatment from the government.
To the actual point of openness, it seems to me quite material when you're going to start a large-scale tax break program (whether for the use of a particular fuel, the worshiping of a particular religion, or the introduction of a new business model--where you could argue "open source" is a bit of each) to ask the question "who is this benefiting?" (another way of saying "how open is this?").
Since the GPL, for example, benefits some business models and not others, and hence some companies and not others, I think the people from those "other companies" (whose taxes are going to encourage this) have a legitimate need to have a say.
Besides, if there is really no definition at all of open, then suppose I choose to take "open" to mean "closed"? Can I then have the tax break? There must be some definition or language is useless. Whether you spell out that definition or make a choice to use one dictionary's definition rather than another, it's still got to be the government that does it if it's the government offering the money.
If there was a.kids domain and everything nice and wholesome moved there, the rest would be deemed "inappropriate for children"...
The set-complement of "explicitly intended for children" is not "inappropriate to children", but rather "maybe or maybe not appropriate to children". Just because something is not explicitly rated "safe for kids" doesn't make it porn, nor even "unsafe for kids".
A.xxx domain can't work to do what I think people want of it. At least not by itself. No matter how hard you try, there will be some things that don't make it into.xxx that someone will complain about. The non-.xxx domain can never be clean enough. Plus, putting someone in.xxx will condemn them to additional costs for no other reason than that some people who don't use them think that they should bear additional costs. I think it's great to have a.xxx space for those who think it's a virtue, but treating it like the presence of.xxx means you can then proceed to overregulate.com is bad.
By contrast, a.kids domain would be something that people should aspire to be a member of (to attract that fussy audience that wants it), and that you can be exiled from if you don't adhere. Plus, the cost would be on the people who think it's needed.
There will always be a clash between people who think that "public space" is "unregulated" space and that people who want "regulated" space should get a private area and people who think that "private space" should not be regulated and that people who want regulation should keep it to the "public areas". Society simply does not agree. That points to the notion that there must always be two kinds of public space, and it should not be thought of as all of one kind. So let there be.xxx, and let it be unregulated. And let there be.kids and let it be hyper-regulated. And leave the middle ground to those more Libertarian among us who think we don't have to hide out in one or the other space in order to get along just fine.
I thought an encyclopedia was full of facts, and that facts held only extremely weak copyright in the first place. The reason (as I understand it) being that it's better to encourage people to restate a fact than to play "telephone", making slight adjustments to the known-to-be true wording each time it is repeating.
I'm not familiar with this case in detail so I may be missing some degree to which this was just gross infringement, but in general the core issue in plagiarism seems to me to be "citation" and not "copying" per se. That is, there may be places where copying is fine with citation and not otherwise.
Wikipedia introduces a new level of subtlety into this, it seems to me: "edit history". An edit history is not a citation. It allows you to lazily recover where a problem was introduced, but it is not a source citation. People are presumably asked not to include copyrighted material, but probably so are paid reporters. When a paid reporter does so, he gets fired, and even then it reflects on the organization that paid him. When the wiki gets bad info, they may try to lock out the contributor (maybe even ineffectually), and yet the wiki does not lose face. It seems to me like it's likely they get off easy here in a way a newspaper doesn't.
Wikipedia (in its default presentation) doesn't tell me which of its data came from which place. People just make changes and I'm not clear that it's always stated where they get those facts. I'm sure a lot of it must be reviewed and checked, but I don't see where the indication is of which is and which is not. And I don't see how "reviewed for truth" proves their document is free of plagiarism.
Also, if there's only one real source of information on a topic, but several people each individually filter in parts of that source, it looks like a kind of "presentational laundering" of the original source. Wikipedia can say it's due to all these people, but can it really say that it hasn't grabbed large amounts of data from other sources?
I'm not really trying to make accusations here. I imagine Wikipedia is very upstanding in their goals and practices. It just seems a bit odd to me to say that an author must cite a source whose entire nature seems to be, paraphrased by me, general knowledge shared among lots of people. When I say 2+2=4, I don't cite a source (even though I probably learned it from some) for pretty much the same reason.
If instead of this article that got in trouble at a newspaper, it had been a wikimedia of some kind, where the parts were individually stripped in from well-meaning people in smaller parts, would it still be in the same degree of trouble? Is the problem "what was done" or just "how it was done"?
Thinking aloud here about the general philosophy as much as this specific incident. I guess I just wonder if the standards people are being held to are at all fair. (And even if the answer will turn out to be that the standards are fair, it doesn't seem to hurt anything to ask the question once in a while.)
there is gold in software support, training, and publishing
that's all well and good. doesn't help a programmer pay the bills though.
Sure it does--the company gets revenue through support, etc. and pays programmers to make software so they have a product to support.
No, that's not the model. The model is that some company gets revenue through support. Sometimes that company is the one that paid the programmers to make the software, but often it's not. There is nothing in the model that says the money necessarily needs to flow to the people who do the work.
The gold analogy is a good one only because the miners of gold are not the ones that put the value there... they're an unrelated crew that often strip-mines a resource with little care as to how it got there.
A better analogy might be seafood, though, since it suggests an ecology that needs to be measured and moderated to hold it in balance avoid overfishing... rather than the oft-told fairy tale of an open software machine that uses perpetual motion technology and unlimited free programmer cycles into a world of surplus gold for everyone.
My personal sense is that whining is too subjective to be a legitimate contractual criterion.
But even if we accept it for discussion's sake, disagreement and dissatisfaction can be natural and healthy in a company. It seems to me a manager's job is not to say "no one can whine" but rather to say "this whining is helping us" or "this whining is not helping us". Good QA departments, for example, are often filled with constructive whiners. The decision to blame the ousting of a non-constructive whiner on policy sounds to me like a failure of management to make the necessary Hard Decisions and then to stand by them. Instead, the manager is trying to hide behind policy that may seem to serve at one moment, but that may have adverse effects on other occasions. Also, my bet is that when push comes to shove on matters unrelated to whining, the same manager will fail to make other critical Hard Decisions, too, then blame their inaction on some equally silly smokescreen.
If a corporation spent greater than 0% of their resources on something that was not profit-related, then
By "I don't take it as fixed", I meant: "rules/laws can be changed", not "people should ignore rules/laws". They might not get changed in practice, but I don't limit my discussions of how the world should be to only situations that hold all laws constant nor even to those things that I think I can personally change. A great deal of important change in the world comes from changing laws, whether it's tax structure to who can go bankrupt to what's a crime.
Although I've never investigated it in detail, my understanding has been that in Japan, a corporation once had a dual responsibility not only to its stockholders but to its employees. (If that's so and someone has a pointer to how that worked or was supposed to work, I'd be curious.) And even if it did not, it's possible to devise such a system... even without being a communist.
(And even if it were a communist idea, that seems more of an ad hominem attack than a technical criticism. Statistically, I'm not big on socialist/communist solutions, but I do think that pure capitalism (unfettered by any rules of fair/ethical conduct) tends to have insufficient safeguards to be practical. And I'm not one who thinks every idea a political system has is poisoned just because that political system as a whole has not been seen to work. I'd like to discuss ideas and mechanisms on their own merits, thank you. If they don't work, it should be possible to explain that on a technical basis; if it takes personal attacks to argue against the ideas, that's a pretty weak criticism.)
What they should do? Google is a corporation. That is, they are a legal entity which was created for the purpose of creating value and limiting the liability of a group of owners.
I am not limited in my commentary to only asking questions for which there are easy answers. Nor is the only possible result of my commentary (or a discussion in which my commentary is just one of many posts) a change in Google. It might be that indeed a change in law is needed. It might be that through talking, I come to accept what Google sometimes does as more reasonable than I thought.
But, in point of fact, I don't take it as fixed that corporations must have as their sole goal the instantaneous enrichment of their stockholders. That is a possible reading of present law, but both law and readings of law can change.
Also, one way to limit liability is to not do things that others might find unethical, so having ethics is not necessarily incompatible with profit.
But some of us are both stockholders and affected parties, so a company that pollutes may improve the profits of its stockholders but if it poisons the waters those stockholders drink, it isn't clearly helping those people either. Liability law addresses some of this, but I think it doesn't take a huge stretch to explain to stockholders that you didn't go into a certain business area because it seemed bad for society. At the point where stockholders are suing corporations for breach of fiduciary responsibility by not exploiting technology at the expense of the public interest, then we can worry about it not being in the corporation's best interest. Google is not running short of ways to make money, as nearly as I can tell, so I don't personally expect it to experience a nearterm rash of such suits.
And anyway, if your posture is that corporations are not the right place to house ethicists, and if corporations like Google agree, then all the more reason for people on the outside to subject them to scrutiny of this kind. Not just me but people writing these stories. My original comment was not just about Google, but about the starstruck style of reporting Google always gets. "Wow, Google is so cool. If I just tell you what they think, you'll be so awestruck you won't dare ask for more of me, the reporter. Just let me open a pipe from God (them) straight to you and you will ask for nothing more." As far as I'm concerned, it's not necessary to merely quote what Google people have to say--let's see some critical analysis of what Google is saying and doing.
I believe Google when they claim they try not to do evil
I don't know if I'd believe or disbelieve such a statement, but I've not seen it in so plain a form. But even then, to "try" is an interesting thing. In a person, I take it to imply that meaningful amounts of energy are expended toward the acheivement of the stated goal. So what really interests me is how they implement it. Trying not to do evil has to be more than simply an accidental effect of getting probably-well-intentioned people together and letting them do hopefully-well-intentioned things; I would not accept that as a process. If they do have a process, I'd like to hear something about why it leads to a better-than-chance set of ill effects. If they don't have a process, I'd like to know why they think they can make such claims (if they even do).
Heck, for that matter, as a first round of discussion, I'd almost bargain down to a clear definition of the goal they are "trying" to achieve--that is, an understanding of what they think is the "evil" they are trying to avoid. Without knowing what they think is good and evil, how can I know that the evil they are trying to avoid is the evil I or you or anyone cares about? And if I don't know that, I don't know what it means to trust them. They might mean that claim in all good faith, and yet not be doing what I want or need them to do.
I never said they didn't. (Nor that they did.) Engineers are people. Some are ethical, some are not. On the whole, probably most are ethical just like any other cross-section of society. But engineers do not have the power to enforce their ethics.
If I, as an engineer at a search engine company, told my boss that I didn't think I felt ethically good about some product we were deploying, I'd feel my job was on the line. It's not like there's a federal protection like the "whistleblower law" that ensures my safety. Besides, ethics is often something that involves more information and time than the average engineer has. It's just not his/her job to worry about. But I think it should be someone's.
Not that all cases are even so clearcut as binary Good and Bad. Some ethical lines are complicated and require discussion. I just never hear stories about such discussion. And the people involved in the discussion when it does happen rarely sound to me like a group of employees at the company in question who are specifically charged with coming up with an ethical position, protected from being fired for actually taking a position contrary to "go ahead", and reliably capable of influencing rollout based on such a position.
Rasmussen offered plain advice for people wanting to develop a Web application, "Don't break the simplicity of the Web" because that is what made it so popular in the first place.
"Google has an amazing infrastructure to do this [and] we have the power to process it; all we need are engineers," he said.
What about ethicists? How many of the people at Google are in charge of considering the impact of what they do, or do they all just assume the spread of knowledge is unconditionally good? (It hasn't necessarily worked out that way in atomic energy, for example. And even less auspicious technological advances like reverse-indexing the phone book have had mixed results sociologically. Not to mention search engines themselves, which haven't been 100% positive in their privacy impact.)
Knowledge is not Wisdom. The Ability to do something is not the Right to do it. Were it so, terrorism would be utterly defensible because it pretty uniformly involves the use of knowledge and ability to take some action that serves the selfish or thoughtless need of the person doing it. What stands between terrorism and righteous/respected power is not ability but ethics--not the knowledge of how to do something, but the wisdom to know when not to do something.
Note that I have not called the Google folks terrorists nor said they shouldn't do what they do. I'm just tired of seeing stories about what Google can do, and I'm interested in seeing more stories about how Google itself decides what is good and bad for it to actually do. Is it really mere lack of engineers that is holding them back from doing arbitrary things? Or do they factor in issues of privacy, security, morality, etc. into their basic design. I'd love to see some stories about that because in stories like this one here, it always seems to be a lacking element. Is profit motive and national law all that the world needs to adjust in order to assure that our collective sensibilities are not violated? If something is not illegal, is that an invitation for Google to do it (ready supply of engineers permitting, of course)?
I don't think they only need engineers. I think they also need ethicists. What I don't know is whether they think that.
It's not the Technology, it's Budget & Safegua
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Google Terror Threat
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You can't blame technology for terrorism. Terrorist will use whatever tools are at their disposal.
Strictly speaking, what you're saying is right. But no one is blaming Technology. You've made a subtle shift here and then defended a position no one is taking. What people are blaming is the availability of technology.
This situation is more akin to someone being alarmed that kids are shooting themselves because gun owners are leaving unboxed guns around and then someone saying "well, you can't blame guns." That's not what's at issue.
Technology is a gun. To boldly mix metaphors--that makes it a double-edged sword that can be used responsibly and irresponsibly.
For Google to defend itself by saying that the sources of the info are public is like gun owners saying that anyone can buy raw materials needed to make a gun factory, and then make their own gun. The problem is that indeed, these things might be available publicly. But not every terrorist is a computer whiz, and there's a big difference between Google maps offering the maps in well-indexed form, and Google just providing 10,000 places you can search for each and every map you want. The former is more like a gun owner leaving his gun unlocked on a shelf in his childrens' room, while the latter is more like worrying the kid is going to get a fake ID and buy a gun themselves. Yes, both are possible, but the odds are still better for all concerned when more safeguards are in place.
Terrorists work on a budget. And the real war with them is not "in principle, can a terrorist with unlimited budget do this" but rather "in practice, are we handing them the tools such that with a shoestring budget, they can turn huge powers against us".
Moreover, as I understand it, the most kind reading of the terrorist agenda I've ever heard is when someone explained that they don't living in a world that is so light on social safeguards--and they're busy demonstrating to us the consequences of the world we have elected. I don't think it's as simple as that. But similar arguments have been made about the Morris worm, ages ago, which did relatively little damage in the grander scheme of things and mostly warned people about much greater problems to come if we didn't attend to the issue of security. We deal with terrorism as if it's done by a specific group of people who if we can get to stand down, will go away. But really it's about the ability of any unhappy person at any time to use a small budget to annoy the masses. And in that regard, it's not about the people but about the opportunities given people.
One answer is to "limit liberty [ironically in the service of 'preserving liberty']". The Bush administration seems to take that approach. I'd like to think we of the technology world can come up with more creative answers than "all technology must be used utterly freely" as our couter-response. I think there's a middle ground. But I see remarkably little public dialog aimed at discussing the abstract issues at this level--technology vs freedom. Perhaps it's just too abstract for most people.
The rings aren't very solid; most of the material is believed to be ice crystals that are, at most, a few meters in diameter. And despite their apparent solidity from here, they're an awful lot of empty space.
Is it in fact known that there's neither gaseous atmosphere nor fine dusty mist among the rings? If gas were emitted or dust kicked up from some member of the rings, would it necessarily float off? Or might it be held by the combined gravity or electrical charge of the local ring structure? (I'm not alleging that it is--I just don't know, so I figured I'd ask.)
Is this really necessary? Can't we just threaten to place our enemies under the protection of FEMA? That seems to achieve the mass casualty effect just fine, and yet the environmental mess it creates will only take a few decades to clear...
If you're increasing life expectancy 50%, it seems like decreased fertility would be a benefit, not a drawback. You don't want to cause a population boom.
This might depend on who "you" is. I thought the traditional Catholic position against birth control was because people were supposed to be fruitful and multiply. I wonder if the Catholic church will then take a position against this because it inhibits such multiplication...
People need to sleep for various reasons (rest, various chemicals get regenerated, etc). It's not a whim of nature.
It's likely chemicals can replace missing chemicals. It's not likely chemicals can replace computation. SO the question comes down to one of whether what the brain is doing is merely "regenerating" or if it's instead "actively computing".
If all the brain is doing in sleep is rebooting (zeroing memory) then a chemical might really help. If instead it is doing a neural net training cycle, and hence aquiring not just history records ("what happened yesterday?"), which might be easily testable, but also skill improvement ("how could I do better tomorrow?"), which might be harder to test, then it's hard to see how you could add a chemical that makes it better. I guess if the chemical cranks the clock cycle, it might make something run faster, but I doubt it would make you feel more rested if it ran you at a higher speed.
I think they should not only test whether it restores prior memories but whether it inhibits "sleep learning" and "overnight insight", if indeed these can be quantified at all.
Rather than just testing people on whether they can do a skill that is probably well-understood to them, they should see how fast they learn new skills (e.g., how to become expert at a video game) when they are or are not under the effect of this drug. On the assumption that some people get better while they sleep and their dreams are constructing and testing hypotheses or running other neural training examples, one might construct a test based on the idea that these effects could be neutralized by the drug "skipping a step".
I think there are already studies that have been done of similar nature to do with what happens when you interrupt someone's sleep cycle to prevent or slice up their REM sleep phases. This other stuff would fit in.
In sum, I think it's one thing to "restore your ability to do a new day" and it's quite another to "make sure you made full use of the previous day". It sounds like the drug does the former, but that they didn't test the latter.
I think people would be pretty alarmed if as soon as they started talking about pizza on the telephone, an advertisement for a local pizza place appeared on the LCD screen of their phone base without their asking.
One wonders what will appear with terrorists planning their next bombing... Echelon?
Or maybe just hardware, home and garden, or electronics stores... and overnight delivery services ("for when it absolutely has to be gone the next day").
That is, unless the government starts to hit the problem head on with a program of counter-terrorism by offering fake suppliers of raw materials... a kind of "reverse phishing" campaign. e.g., "Virginity Airlines - ask our agents to book you undercover today!".
I wonder if Google will monitor what is being chatted about and throw up relevant banner ads.
I think people would be pretty alarmed if as soon as they started talking about pizza on the telephone, an advertisement for a local pizza place appeared on the LCD screen of their phone base without their asking. In that context, it sounds downright creepy. There may be a legal distinction between phones and IM services, but I think most people would say there's no material moral difference.
This seems like a slippery slope. It seems a short step from offering ads based on what people are saying to taking on what people are saying (and reporting those stats to third parties). Certainly the use of "usage stats" are critical to Google's interface to purchasing an AdWords campaign.
And what if the "things people are talking about" are collected with the intent of not being individually identifiable, but in some cases do turn out to be identifiable. This problem has come up with zip codes. People sometimes track them thinking they are anonymous. But some 9-digit zips identify a particular street address, and if only one person lives there, saying that "all people in this zip code have the following buying habits" is the same as naming the person who lives there and saying he has those buying habits if the name can be accessed by reverse lookup. In the case of income surveys by zipcode, this can expose income for certain individuals and, for example, injure their bargaining position when searching for a job or selling a house.
.. and if that's not enough to make you nervous, there's always the full text search issue...;)
He didn't say it was false. He said it was unsubstantiated.
Indeed, but it seemed to me that there was an implication that things are not worth discussing if they are unsubstantiated, as if this makes them non-issues. Sort of like saying we shouldn't discuss terrorist activities if there's only an unsubstantiated rumor that we might confront a particular situation. Always better to be blindsided, one might say. Well, one might, but I wouldn't.
All other things being equal, I'd rather discuss political and commercial impact in advance of it occurring, rather than being simply reactive.
The Internet does not have a White Pages, so people use something that is more or less exclusively the Yellow Pages.
I was once asked a very stark question by someone trying figure things out: How do I get it so that when someone types my company name into the search engine, it comes up near the top? He wasn't trying to win at advertising, he was just trying to get a listing for people to find at all--like the White Pages. It seemed incredible to him, and suddenly then to me too, that there was no way to do this. He didn't even mind if the person had to type the state and maybe even the town. It didn't help. He was still able to be made invisible by competitors. That's anti-competitive and ultimately hurts all consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
There's quite a bit of truth here. But ...
On the other hand, as information warfare and counterwarfare continues, it will eventually be harder to do a search and get uncontested data (not that "uncontested" is synonymous with "true", so in a way we already have the problem). One might argue that some of these lazy people console themselves and their consciences by saying it must be true because it stands uncontested, and in some cases that's true. In that case, there might be reason for some optimism over the possibility that as searches turn up not just arguments but counterarguments, good reporters will realize that they have to inform people enough to decide.
But as things progress, I expect a world that looks more like the chaffing effects described by Ron Rivest in his should-be-more-well-known chaffing paper. (He cites it as an encryption technique, but I think there's a curious accidental (or perhaps sometimes intentional) relationship between encryption and political obfuscation.)
In the case of encrypted or chaffed data, you'd think people would work to decode it, not simply report on the fact of an encrypted stream of data as if the average reader could read past it. The question is whether there's a threshold of obfuscation beyond which even lazy reporters will see that they are offering encoded data and will start again to try to decode it. Or is steganography a better model and will journalists never realize that they ought to be decrypting the messages that clever politicians feed thme because they don't even recognize the messages as encoded.
I think laziness plays in but so does conscience. So understanding whether conscience will ever overcome laziness seems to me on understanding the paradigm that's in play.
Probably it's a mix, and probably the results will be mixed. But that makes for boring discussion... or worse than boring: it degrades to the cable TV approach to journalism, where when one person alleges that the world was created by Leprechauns and another alleges a natural physical process, and so they (a) declare that a controversy exists and (b) try to rectify it by giving equal time to each side. Sometimes I think that's about laziness, too, but sometimes I think it's that people have forgotten how to reason, and have somehow assumed that scientific consensus is the same as "scientific democracy", where one vote one viewer determines truth. Laziness, at least, can be cured by a sudden change of heart and desire to act. Losing the skill of how to think critically in a culture is harder to rectify on short notice.
I completely agree with the spirit of your remark insofar as you're suggesting that technology can trivially solve this problem.
Not just for this, but for an international audience generally (many of whom read English but have trouble with idioms, sarcasm, and other advanced usages), it wouldn't hurt to have an XML or HTML markup that is, effectively, the ability to associate a plainer meaning to text for alternate use. A browser could be put in a mode to show the fancy use, show the basic use, or show the fancy use but with plain use pop-ups like tool tips (or plain-use explanation-on-demand-by-right-click). Doing it this way would allow search engines to offer a radio button saying "search idiomatic uses" which was, perhaps, defaultly off, but that could be re-enabled if the witty text was what stuck in your mind.
Good headlines are like good subject lines in mail. One of the best subject lines I ever saw in email was the text "crowbar in head". No, it wasn't about crowbars, it was about a "brain-damaged program" someone was alleged to have written. It might be a bad search keyword if I was searching for info on crowbars literally, but it is very easy for me to find in old mail because it was unique and easy to remember. I would hate to see the net move away from the ability to make useful labels.
I also worked at a company where the User Interface people got overzealous and started to rename all the editor commands from things like "View xxx" and "Show xxx" and "Print xxx" and so on to just "Show xxx" because they thought that was more regular. But at some point someone noticed that the emacs-style command keys like Control-V (formerly mnemonic for View) no longer made sense. Those UI people were soon pejoratively nicknamed the "View Police" because their entire focus seemed to be on stamping out flexible use of language. People started to rightly question whether eliminating all the synonyms in the language was good, because it meant every time you searched for "Show" you got a zillion hits and every time you searched for "View" you got zero. There are times when this is right and times when this is absolutely wrong, but the problem is not fixed by renaming commands. A better fix would be to have search commands that understand likely synoyms and then the option to turn that on and off. I think that lesson might apply here, too.
So I think there's a lot you could do with, for example, an extended USAGE="sarcasm|wit|pun|joke|..." MEANING="this is a rewording" attribute in, for example, a SPAN element of HTML, for example.
What I don't agree with is doing something like making an IMG tag that has sarcasm or wit or whatever in it and then having the ALT attribute for the IMG element use the plain text. The reasons are many, but include such issues as: eventually Google will search text found in images so it's a temporary solution, people on non-image-based browsers (including the sight-impaired) deserve access to wit, and, most fundamentally, the whole point of markup is that it allows a flexible ability to tag things with their true nature. The true nature is not "wit is graphical and plain meaning is text"; that's just a way to shoehorn a solution into existing frameworks.
(If this is not what you meant, then I've misread you and would appreciate a more detailed explanation of what you're going after.)
I'm so glad someone made this point. It's like what's being proposed is a pyramid scam. Look at any org chart and you can see that the people at the top will win and those at the bottom will lose.
Then again, there's one obvious reason to want to be a manager: they get to be the ones to decide whether to outsource and who to outsource.
Another excellent point. I don't understand why our labor unions in the US are still so focused on lobbying for higher pay in the US. Saying "we won't take less" is like saying "please get your labor elsewhere". If they had any sense, US labor unions would put their money into creating labor unions in other countries. That's the only way to stop the "elsewhere" from seeming like a good option.
History suggests that once the rest of the world becomes more wealthy, they'll eventually get to feel (rightly or wrongly--it's immaterial--I'm just observing, not moralizing) that it's more of a right than something they should have to struggle for, as happened in the US. Then they'll want their own labor unions or other forms of labor protection to keep from having to be exploited to enrich someone else. And when they do, things will even out. But until then, I suppose one way to view the situation is that the global corporations are desperately racing for the few remaining wildernesses of disorganized workers who are willing to work for less than in the built up countries because what they're offered is better than what they had before. Once they've done that for a while, the offer will no longer be better than what they had and will start to be viewed on an even playing field for what it's actually worth and things will stabilize.
The open question in my mind is whether that inevitably has to take generations or whether the Internet and FedEx and other modern market technology will find a way to speed that up as well.
Well indeed...
One obvious consequence of making .xxx well-regulated is that there will need to be a place for people to have non-well-regulated stuff. People who want sex and don't want to pay for it will want adware, so if you regulate against it, then you need a .ADS+XXX tld to say "yes, I want xxx but I'll tolerate ads to get them".
What problem is being solved by regulating this new domain that isn't even created anyway? Is it to make it more attractive so people will go there more? I thought the original reason for this domain was to say it was outside the bounds of social reason. Now they want to make a nice sociable place out of the place that is outside the bounds of socialness? Where will the social bounds of that be?
Will there be a .XXXX in a few years because they didn't feel welcome in .XXX?
Some people on the religious right probably think any mention of sex for anything other than making babies during marriage is bad and belongs in XXX, while others think XXX defines some distinction between hardcore and softcore, and so on. Will they be forward-thinking enough to break this domain into .MOSTLY.XXX and .SOMEWHAT.XXX and .NOTREALLYVERYMUCHATALL.XXX and .WRONGLYTHOUGHTTOBE.XXX and .WHATJERRYFALWELLTHINKSIS.XXX and .WHATTHEPOPETHINKSIS.XXX and .WHATYOUANDITHINKIS.XXX and .EVENWORSETHANCOMMONLYCALLED.XXX and then make everyone be subdomains under that?
Like legislating the value of pi to 22/7, there are some truths about the world that government should stay well clear of.
Sex is a big concept, full of complexity. You're never going to boil it down to something simple enough to legislate in a uniform way and if you have to idealize it before you can confront it, it's a bad idea to try because, like it or not, the world is not anyone's ideal. You'd think government would get that.
I guess it's like most things where governments confuse the notion of the power to legislate with the notion of having the need to do it all, the competence to do it effectively, or the wisdom to do it right (if indeed there can be said to be any concept of right at all in cases like this). Sometimes it's the job of good government to say to the people calling for legislation: the world is bigger than you think, so grow up and learn to cope.Any time you ask the government to reward you for something, I think it's only fair that the people paying out that reward (the taxpayers) have a say in what counts as rewardable and what doesn't.
I'm all for people saying they have a right to do what they want in their private life, but they have left their private life when they start applying for special treatment from the government.
To the actual point of openness, it seems to me quite material when you're going to start a large-scale tax break program (whether for the use of a particular fuel, the worshiping of a particular religion, or the introduction of a new business model--where you could argue "open source" is a bit of each) to ask the question "who is this benefiting?" (another way of saying "how open is this?").
Since the GPL, for example, benefits some business models and not others, and hence some companies and not others, I think the people from those "other companies" (whose taxes are going to encourage this) have a legitimate need to have a say.
Besides, if there is really no definition at all of open, then suppose I choose to take "open" to mean "closed"? Can I then have the tax break? There must be some definition or language is useless. Whether you spell out that definition or make a choice to use one dictionary's definition rather than another, it's still got to be the government that does it if it's the government offering the money.
A .xxx domain can't work to do what I think people want of it. At least not by itself. No matter how hard you try, there will be some things that don't make it into .xxx that someone will complain about. The non-.xxx domain can never be clean enough. Plus, putting someone in .xxx will condemn them to additional costs for no other reason than that some people who don't use them think that they should bear additional costs. I think it's great to have a .xxx space for those who think it's a virtue, but treating it like the presence of .xxx means you can then proceed to overregulate .com is bad.
.kids domain would be something that people should aspire to be a member of (to attract that fussy audience that wants it), and that you can be exiled from if you don't adhere. Plus, the cost would be on the people who think it's needed.
.xxx, and let it be unregulated. And let there be .kids and let it be hyper-regulated. And leave the middle ground to those more Libertarian among us who think we don't have to hide out in one or the other space in order to get along just fine.
By contrast, a
There will always be a clash between people who think that "public space" is "unregulated" space and that people who want "regulated" space should get a private area and people who think that "private space" should not be regulated and that people who want regulation should keep it to the "public areas". Society simply does not agree. That points to the notion that there must always be two kinds of public space, and it should not be thought of as all of one kind. So let there be
I thought an encyclopedia was full of facts, and that facts held only extremely weak copyright in the first place. The reason (as I understand it) being that it's better to encourage people to restate a fact than to play "telephone", making slight adjustments to the known-to-be true wording each time it is repeating.
I'm not familiar with this case in detail so I may be missing some degree to which this was just gross infringement, but in general the core issue in plagiarism seems to me to be "citation" and not "copying" per se. That is, there may be places where copying is fine with citation and not otherwise.
Wikipedia introduces a new level of subtlety into this, it seems to me: "edit history". An edit history is not a citation. It allows you to lazily recover where a problem was introduced, but it is not a source citation. People are presumably asked not to include copyrighted material, but probably so are paid reporters. When a paid reporter does so, he gets fired, and even then it reflects on the organization that paid him. When the wiki gets bad info, they may try to lock out the contributor (maybe even ineffectually), and yet the wiki does not lose face. It seems to me like it's likely they get off easy here in a way a newspaper doesn't.
Wikipedia (in its default presentation) doesn't tell me which of its data came from which place. People just make changes and I'm not clear that it's always stated where they get those facts. I'm sure a lot of it must be reviewed and checked, but I don't see where the indication is of which is and which is not. And I don't see how "reviewed for truth" proves their document is free of plagiarism.
Also, if there's only one real source of information on a topic, but several people each individually filter in parts of that source, it looks like a kind of "presentational laundering" of the original source. Wikipedia can say it's due to all these people, but can it really say that it hasn't grabbed large amounts of data from other sources?
I'm not really trying to make accusations here. I imagine Wikipedia is very upstanding in their goals and practices. It just seems a bit odd to me to say that an author must cite a source whose entire nature seems to be, paraphrased by me, general knowledge shared among lots of people. When I say 2+2=4, I don't cite a source (even though I probably learned it from some) for pretty much the same reason.
If instead of this article that got in trouble at a newspaper, it had been a wikimedia of some kind, where the parts were individually stripped in from well-meaning people in smaller parts, would it still be in the same degree of trouble? Is the problem "what was done" or just "how it was done"?
Thinking aloud here about the general philosophy as much as this specific incident. I guess I just wonder if the standards people are being held to are at all fair. (And even if the answer will turn out to be that the standards are fair, it doesn't seem to hurt anything to ask the question once in a while.)
No, that's not the model. The model is that some company gets revenue through support. Sometimes that company is the one that paid the programmers to make the software, but often it's not. There is nothing in the model that says the money necessarily needs to flow to the people who do the work.
The gold analogy is a good one only because the miners of gold are not the ones that put the value there... they're an unrelated crew that often strip-mines a resource with little care as to how it got there.
A better analogy might be seafood, though, since it suggests an ecology that needs to be measured and moderated to hold it in balance avoid overfishing ... rather than the oft-told fairy tale of an open software machine that uses perpetual motion technology and unlimited free programmer cycles into a world of surplus gold for everyone.
My personal sense is that whining is too subjective to be a legitimate contractual criterion.
But even if we accept it for discussion's sake, disagreement and dissatisfaction can be natural and healthy in a company. It seems to me a manager's job is not to say "no one can whine" but rather to say "this whining is helping us" or "this whining is not helping us". Good QA departments, for example, are often filled with constructive whiners. The decision to blame the ousting of a non-constructive whiner on policy sounds to me like a failure of management to make the necessary Hard Decisions and then to stand by them. Instead, the manager is trying to hide behind policy that may seem to serve at one moment, but that may have adverse effects on other occasions. Also, my bet is that when push comes to shove on matters unrelated to whining, the same manager will fail to make other critical Hard Decisions, too, then blame their inaction on some equally silly smokescreen.
By "I don't take it as fixed", I meant: "rules/laws can be changed", not "people should ignore rules/laws". They might not get changed in practice, but I don't limit my discussions of how the world should be to only situations that hold all laws constant nor even to those things that I think I can personally change. A great deal of important change in the world comes from changing laws, whether it's tax structure to who can go bankrupt to what's a crime.
Although I've never investigated it in detail, my understanding has been that in Japan, a corporation once had a dual responsibility not only to its stockholders but to its employees. (If that's so and someone has a pointer to how that worked or was supposed to work, I'd be curious.) And even if it did not, it's possible to devise such a system ... even without being a communist.
(And even if it were a communist idea, that seems more of an ad hominem attack than a technical criticism. Statistically, I'm not big on socialist/communist solutions, but I do think that pure capitalism (unfettered by any rules of fair/ethical conduct) tends to have insufficient safeguards to be practical. And I'm not one who thinks every idea a political system has is poisoned just because that political system as a whole has not been seen to work. I'd like to discuss ideas and mechanisms on their own merits, thank you. If they don't work, it should be possible to explain that on a technical basis; if it takes personal attacks to argue against the ideas, that's a pretty weak criticism.)
I am not limited in my commentary to only asking questions for which there are easy answers. Nor is the only possible result of my commentary (or a discussion in which my commentary is just one of many posts) a change in Google. It might be that indeed a change in law is needed. It might be that through talking, I come to accept what Google sometimes does as more reasonable than I thought.
But, in point of fact, I don't take it as fixed that corporations must have as their sole goal the instantaneous enrichment of their stockholders. That is a possible reading of present law, but both law and readings of law can change.
Also, one way to limit liability is to not do things that others might find unethical, so having ethics is not necessarily incompatible with profit.
But some of us are both stockholders and affected parties, so a company that pollutes may improve the profits of its stockholders but if it poisons the waters those stockholders drink, it isn't clearly helping those people either. Liability law addresses some of this, but I think it doesn't take a huge stretch to explain to stockholders that you didn't go into a certain business area because it seemed bad for society. At the point where stockholders are suing corporations for breach of fiduciary responsibility by not exploiting technology at the expense of the public interest, then we can worry about it not being in the corporation's best interest. Google is not running short of ways to make money, as nearly as I can tell, so I don't personally expect it to experience a nearterm rash of such suits.
And anyway, if your posture is that corporations are not the right place to house ethicists, and if corporations like Google agree, then all the more reason for people on the outside to subject them to scrutiny of this kind. Not just me but people writing these stories. My original comment was not just about Google, but about the starstruck style of reporting Google always gets. "Wow, Google is so cool. If I just tell you what they think, you'll be so awestruck you won't dare ask for more of me, the reporter. Just let me open a pipe from God (them) straight to you and you will ask for nothing more." As far as I'm concerned, it's not necessary to merely quote what Google people have to say--let's see some critical analysis of what Google is saying and doing.
I don't know if I'd believe or disbelieve such a statement, but I've not seen it in so plain a form. But even then, to "try" is an interesting thing. In a person, I take it to imply that meaningful amounts of energy are expended toward the acheivement of the stated goal. So what really interests me is how they implement it. Trying not to do evil has to be more than simply an accidental effect of getting probably-well-intentioned people together and letting them do hopefully-well-intentioned things; I would not accept that as a process. If they do have a process, I'd like to hear something about why it leads to a better-than-chance set of ill effects. If they don't have a process, I'd like to know why they think they can make such claims (if they even do).
Heck, for that matter, as a first round of discussion, I'd almost bargain down to a clear definition of the goal they are "trying" to achieve--that is, an understanding of what they think is the "evil" they are trying to avoid. Without knowing what they think is good and evil, how can I know that the evil they are trying to avoid is the evil I or you or anyone cares about? And if I don't know that, I don't know what it means to trust them. They might mean that claim in all good faith, and yet not be doing what I want or need them to do.
I never said they didn't. (Nor that they did.) Engineers are people. Some are ethical, some are not. On the whole, probably most are ethical just like any other cross-section of society. But engineers do not have the power to enforce their ethics.
If I, as an engineer at a search engine company, told my boss that I didn't think I felt ethically good about some product we were deploying, I'd feel my job was on the line. It's not like there's a federal protection like the "whistleblower law" that ensures my safety. Besides, ethics is often something that involves more information and time than the average engineer has. It's just not his/her job to worry about. But I think it should be someone's.
Not that all cases are even so clearcut as binary Good and Bad. Some ethical lines are complicated and require discussion. I just never hear stories about such discussion. And the people involved in the discussion when it does happen rarely sound to me like a group of employees at the company in question who are specifically charged with coming up with an ethical position, protected from being fired for actually taking a position contrary to "go ahead", and reliably capable of influencing rollout based on such a position.
What about ethicists? How many of the people at Google are in charge of considering the impact of what they do, or do they all just assume the spread of knowledge is unconditionally good? (It hasn't necessarily worked out that way in atomic energy, for example. And even less auspicious technological advances like reverse-indexing the phone book have had mixed results sociologically. Not to mention search engines themselves, which haven't been 100% positive in their privacy impact.)
Knowledge is not Wisdom. The Ability to do something is not the Right to do it. Were it so, terrorism would be utterly defensible because it pretty uniformly involves the use of knowledge and ability to take some action that serves the selfish or thoughtless need of the person doing it. What stands between terrorism and righteous/respected power is not ability but ethics--not the knowledge of how to do something, but the wisdom to know when not to do something.
Note that I have not called the Google folks terrorists nor said they shouldn't do what they do. I'm just tired of seeing stories about what Google can do, and I'm interested in seeing more stories about how Google itself decides what is good and bad for it to actually do. Is it really mere lack of engineers that is holding them back from doing arbitrary things? Or do they factor in issues of privacy, security, morality, etc. into their basic design. I'd love to see some stories about that because in stories like this one here, it always seems to be a lacking element. Is profit motive and national law all that the world needs to adjust in order to assure that our collective sensibilities are not violated? If something is not illegal, is that an invitation for Google to do it (ready supply of engineers permitting, of course)?
I don't think they only need engineers. I think they also need ethicists. What I don't know is whether they think that.
Strictly speaking, what you're saying is right. But no one is blaming Technology. You've made a subtle shift here and then defended a position no one is taking. What people are blaming is the availability of technology.
This situation is more akin to someone being alarmed that kids are shooting themselves because gun owners are leaving unboxed guns around and then someone saying "well, you can't blame guns." That's not what's at issue.
Technology is a gun. To boldly mix metaphors--that makes it a double-edged sword that can be used responsibly and irresponsibly.
For Google to defend itself by saying that the sources of the info are public is like gun owners saying that anyone can buy raw materials needed to make a gun factory, and then make their own gun. The problem is that indeed, these things might be available publicly. But not every terrorist is a computer whiz, and there's a big difference between Google maps offering the maps in well-indexed form, and Google just providing 10,000 places you can search for each and every map you want. The former is more like a gun owner leaving his gun unlocked on a shelf in his childrens' room, while the latter is more like worrying the kid is going to get a fake ID and buy a gun themselves. Yes, both are possible, but the odds are still better for all concerned when more safeguards are in place.
Terrorists work on a budget. And the real war with them is not "in principle, can a terrorist with unlimited budget do this" but rather "in practice, are we handing them the tools such that with a shoestring budget, they can turn huge powers against us".
Moreover, as I understand it, the most kind reading of the terrorist agenda I've ever heard is when someone explained that they don't living in a world that is so light on social safeguards--and they're busy demonstrating to us the consequences of the world we have elected. I don't think it's as simple as that. But similar arguments have been made about the Morris worm, ages ago, which did relatively little damage in the grander scheme of things and mostly warned people about much greater problems to come if we didn't attend to the issue of security. We deal with terrorism as if it's done by a specific group of people who if we can get to stand down, will go away. But really it's about the ability of any unhappy person at any time to use a small budget to annoy the masses. And in that regard, it's not about the people but about the opportunities given people.
One answer is to "limit liberty [ironically in the service of 'preserving liberty']". The Bush administration seems to take that approach. I'd like to think we of the technology world can come up with more creative answers than "all technology must be used utterly freely" as our couter-response. I think there's a middle ground. But I see remarkably little public dialog aimed at discussing the abstract issues at this level--technology vs freedom. Perhaps it's just too abstract for most people.
Wow. That's just eerily similar to David Brin's The Loom of Thessaly.
Is it in fact known that there's neither gaseous atmosphere nor fine dusty mist among the rings? If gas were emitted or dust kicked up from some member of the rings, would it necessarily float off? Or might it be held by the combined gravity or electrical charge of the local ring structure? (I'm not alleging that it is--I just don't know, so I figured I'd ask.)
Is this really necessary? Can't we just threaten to place our enemies under the protection of FEMA? That seems to achieve the mass casualty effect just fine, and yet the environmental mess it creates will only take a few decades to clear...
This might depend on who "you" is. I thought the traditional Catholic position against birth control was because people were supposed to be fruitful and multiply. I wonder if the Catholic church will then take a position against this because it inhibits such multiplication...
It's likely chemicals can replace missing chemicals. It's not likely chemicals can replace computation. SO the question comes down to one of whether what the brain is doing is merely "regenerating" or if it's instead "actively computing".
If all the brain is doing in sleep is rebooting (zeroing memory) then a chemical might really help. If instead it is doing a neural net training cycle, and hence aquiring not just history records ("what happened yesterday?"), which might be easily testable, but also skill improvement ("how could I do better tomorrow?"), which might be harder to test, then it's hard to see how you could add a chemical that makes it better. I guess if the chemical cranks the clock cycle, it might make something run faster, but I doubt it would make you feel more rested if it ran you at a higher speed.
I think they should not only test whether it restores prior memories but whether it inhibits "sleep learning" and "overnight insight", if indeed these can be quantified at all.
Rather than just testing people on whether they can do a skill that is probably well-understood to them, they should see how fast they learn new skills (e.g., how to become expert at a video game) when they are or are not under the effect of this drug. On the assumption that some people get better while they sleep and their dreams are constructing and testing hypotheses or running other neural training examples, one might construct a test based on the idea that these effects could be neutralized by the drug "skipping a step".
I think there are already studies that have been done of similar nature to do with what happens when you interrupt someone's sleep cycle to prevent or slice up their REM sleep phases. This other stuff would fit in.
In sum, I think it's one thing to "restore your ability to do a new day" and it's quite another to "make sure you made full use of the previous day". It sounds like the drug does the former, but that they didn't test the latter.
Or maybe just hardware, home and garden, or electronics stores ... and overnight delivery services ("for when it absolutely has to be gone the next day").
That is, unless the government starts to hit the problem head on with a program of counter-terrorism by offering fake suppliers of raw materials ... a kind of "reverse phishing" campaign. e.g., "Virginity Airlines - ask our agents to book you undercover today!".
I think people would be pretty alarmed if as soon as they started talking about pizza on the telephone, an advertisement for a local pizza place appeared on the LCD screen of their phone base without their asking. In that context, it sounds downright creepy. There may be a legal distinction between phones and IM services, but I think most people would say there's no material moral difference.
This seems like a slippery slope. It seems a short step from offering ads based on what people are saying to taking on what people are saying (and reporting those stats to third parties). Certainly the use of "usage stats" are critical to Google's interface to purchasing an AdWords campaign.
And what if the "things people are talking about" are collected with the intent of not being individually identifiable, but in some cases do turn out to be identifiable. This problem has come up with zip codes. People sometimes track them thinking they are anonymous. But some 9-digit zips identify a particular street address, and if only one person lives there, saying that "all people in this zip code have the following buying habits" is the same as naming the person who lives there and saying he has those buying habits if the name can be accessed by reverse lookup. In the case of income surveys by zipcode, this can expose income for certain individuals and, for example, injure their bargaining position when searching for a job or selling a house.
.. and if that's not enough to make you nervous, there's always the full text search issue ... ;)
Indeed, but it seemed to me that there was an implication that things are not worth discussing if they are unsubstantiated, as if this makes them non-issues. Sort of like saying we shouldn't discuss terrorist activities if there's only an unsubstantiated rumor that we might confront a particular situation. Always better to be blindsided, one might say. Well, one might, but I wouldn't.
All other things being equal, I'd rather discuss political and commercial impact in advance of it occurring, rather than being simply reactive.
The Internet does not have a White Pages, so people use something that is more or less exclusively the Yellow Pages.
I was once asked a very stark question by someone trying figure things out: How do I get it so that when someone types my company name into the search engine, it comes up near the top? He wasn't trying to win at advertising, he was just trying to get a listing for people to find at all--like the White Pages. It seemed incredible to him, and suddenly then to me too, that there was no way to do this. He didn't even mind if the person had to type the state and maybe even the town. It didn't help. He was still able to be made invisible by competitors. That's anti-competitive and ultimately hurts all consumers.