If you were to dig down, I think you'd find that the level of resistance to the initiative is directly proportional to the cost of complying.
The odd thing about politics is that people can be on the same "side" for differing reasons.
It may well be that people oppose this based on price, and it may well be that if price is resolved,
much of the resistance falls away. But that doesn't make it a good theory. And it's sad when people
take positions for the wrong reasons because when the reason goes away and they find their are different
ones, it looks like the reasons are a sham rahter than that there were several legitimate, independent
reasons.
Government is out of control on expense. And expense is something that should be scrutinized
carefully. That said, that's not the best reason to oppose this.
The article makes the point that the National ID card "makes life easier". But what's misleading about that is that it makes it sound like the people opposing it "want life hard". They don't. They just understand that the price of having things easy is quite high.
A great many problems of Modern Life are caused by the search for the too-easy
solution. We optimize one thing while ignoring another. We make it easier to get fast food, while pessimizing our health. We decide people would rather not press a button to download images or start a program on a CD just inserted, so we create auto-execute things that breathe life into worms/viruses without requiring human intervention. We decide people would rather not type passwords, so we offer to store them online where they're easier to find.
The problem isn't that having a national ID wouldn't be easier, it's that it might be easier not only for us but for others who work against us. The problem isn't that it wouldn't make it easier for the good guys, it's that we don't always know who the good guys are... Government is not a magic fairytale place that is inhabited only by decent people and is free of bad people, nor is it a horrible place filled with awful people all out to get us. The sad truth is that it's just a place like any other with good people and bad people, and it's also a place that's known to corrupt people with power, so maybe there are a few extra bad eggs thrown in there just for color. So we have to worry about that.
And we have to worry about other things, too. Like creating a fragile, easily-attackable system. Once you get things centralized, the value of cracking it is just temptingly high. That's bad. We wouldn't want all the root passwords in the world all in one place. What slows down intruders in computers is that security systems differ. Why wouldn't we want the same for government?
This idea isn't even new. It's the basis, ultimately, of States Rights, which was nothing more than a crude 1700's theory of root passwords, that said that the feds wouldn't have the passwords, or keys, or guns, or whatever it took, for controlling everything in the US. They had a few keys. And the local states had a few keys. The whole notion of Separation of Powers is a theory based around the idea that anyone is subject either to becoming a bad guy, or being attacked or threatened by a bad guy, and that safety comes not from finding people immune to human nature, but rather from insulating the system from the possibility of human nature being a problem by making sure that any attack on the system moved slowly. It's why there are three heads of government. It's why supermajorities must be used to change the Constitution. It's why there are multiple hierarchies of courts. And so on. Overtaking a democracy is painfully slow, and that's how democracy protects itself.
The real threat to Democracy is the push for "efficiency" and "ease of use" by anything governmental. It's people like Ross Perot, neither the first nor the last of his ilk, but certainly a crisp iconic example of what I'm talking about, who talk about running
If real attacks come, they'll be like Madrid. You won't know it until it happens
A lot of news, especially that from the US Administration, is probably some combination of smokescreen
paranoia, or outright manipulation. And yet, I have to believe that at least some of the reports of
"foiled plots" have some element of truth. And they seem to suggest that the terrorists are getting
caught planning more carefully than you're giving credit for. I'm not taking notes, so not sure what
to cite, but I have the definite sense I've seen stories about terrorists dropping items in public to how long it took for authorities to notice and take action. Consequently, there's no reason to suppose these couldn't have been such items. That might not mean the city was being attacked, but it might reasonably mean that it was about to be, or that plans were underway. Showing a good strong show of concern might mean the difference between terrorists choosing Boston or another city. And that might not seem like a big distinction, but if you live in Boston it could be the kind of subtle distinction that still ends
up mattering.
As for the original thread question of whether this issue was overblown or not, I'd like to just say
this: A lot of the commentary has focused on this as a binary activity with two possible postures--overblown or not. I wasn't aware of the activity as it happened, and only heard after-the-fact accounts, but my impression is that there were several unrelated questions that call for different answers. At first, the police found these things and there was concern. At that point, it's probably reasonable to guess that the perpetrators didn't know what was going on and were innocent of any intent to upset or deceive. And you could imagine it was possible they went about their day without knowing, in which case they'd be innocent all day. But as soon as they saw that a negative frenzy was created, the situation shifted and it should have been called off. At that point, their failure to come forward when they could see real fear shifted from "innocent bringers of a curiosity" to "reckless holders of important knowledge". There could have been a panic and a mad attempt to leave the city, or some part of it, in which people were injured. There could have been a large expenditure of resources better spent on real terrorism and robbing later ability to actually make such expenditure. And so on. In the case of the original broadcast of War of the Worlds, years ago, there were people who just committed suicide because they feared a bad situation. The world is different now, and space aliens might not scare that way, but there's every reason to believe that terrorism can still scare people, and such outcomes are not impossible. The fact that the individuals were aware of the concern and the network was telling them to hold off says there was a serious breach of good judgment, if not worse. How one measures it might indeed be a personal judgment, but measuring it as a non-issue seems... underblown.
While I think it shows good leadership for the CEO to step down, I think it would have been better
leadership for him to know what his organization was up to and to have either known about it in advance or to have stopped it when it was going awry. If he really didn't know because someone planned it without passing the info up the ladder, that person should have been fired rather than the CEO taking the fall. That it didn't go that way certainly hints at the possibility that it would have later come out that the CEO did know, though certainly he's due his day in court... or in People magazine... or wherever we end up trying the case. But I wouldn't rush to call him a hero or a great leader or anything like that at least until the facts are in. It may simply have been an issue of taking minor embarrassment now or facing serious public embarrassment and possible legal action later. If such were the options,
That's perhaps a nice wish. However, assuming it will go away is another thing.
Government is not simply a world marketplace that offers ideas and if no one buys, it
restocks the shelves with other ideas. We give government the special power of force
that we do not give shopkeepers wherein if people disagree with the ideas it is offering,
it can take action. The more vague that action, the more subject to the individual whim
of an individual attempting to enforce or, just as likely, to exploit such powers.
To pick an obvious and somewhat overused example,
the bad ideas of the Nazi movement were indeed rejected by the people, but it's a stretch
to say "therefore one should not worry about governments getting an occasional wrong idea
because these things tend to work out". It took time to notice the problem in that
case, and very bad things happened in the interim. By the time a problem was noticed, it took
was not easy to fix. One cannot simply fast forward to the outcome without seeing the time in
between and say "it was a bad idea and eventually no one bought it".
McCarthyism in the US played out with somewhat similar shape, although fortunately far less cost in human lives. But by similar shape, I mean that it was a kind of insidious idea from the start, and it crept like a cancer with people not seeing what a bad idea it was until it was widespread and it started to impact so many people that it simply could not be ignored.
The notion that the government should be able to push things "harmful to minors" into
this ghetto is like giving a big gun to anyone who has government authority to act but
not telling them who to aim it at. Harmful to minors is not a statement like "boils at 100
degrees" that can be objectively tested. What protections does it offer to people who have
no intent to harm minors and are simply operating in an area that raises questions.
Some things that have been classified by at least some people
as harmful to minors within our lifetime include
sex education, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and the teaching of evolution. Will we expect to find the teaching of safe
sex practices only in the.xxx domain? What about climatechange.xxx or darwin.xxx?
And that's only in the US,
the supposed model of freedom. How will such a domain be construed in countries around the
world that have more conservative points of view. Will we see tjmaxx.xxx? barnesandnoble.xxx?
mit.edu.xxx?
The problem with "parental" government is that people often naively assume that it
it has a brain at all, and also that the brain will be applied uniformly. In fact, what is more
likely is the kind of thing you see on cop shows all the time where cops come to a restaurant
owner who won't give them the info they want and they say "I'm sure you wouldn't want the health
inspector in here all over you." So the guy caves and gives up the information. The public isn't
served by the health code law because in the end, the law is more useful (to those TV cops,
at least) or some undisclosed
purpose than it is for actually making sure things get cooked right.
And the problem is that the undisclosed purpose is flexible and varying. The whole war on terror
is going the same way. If the government can make "being a person" (or at least, all of its aspects)
sufficiently illegal, then there's always at least some club handy for threatening to arrest
a person if he gets out of hand, whatever the enforcer thinks is out of hand. And at that point,
there's no freedom left.
That's an analogy that Slashdotters should understand: It's like software patents.
Overly broad. Overly vague. Applied inconsistently. Difficult to defend.
And offering no really safe avenue of behavior.
And that means no one can safely develop anything. They can just hope they aren't singled
out for enforcement.
Do you want to live a world where everyone should get a license for everything, "just to make sure"?
In a world where you didn't need licenses, what difference would it make who owned the rights to the trooper's software. Rights wouldn't buy you anything.
Exactly.
I don't want to drag on, but I wanted to note the unlikelihood that we're in any kind of
exact agreement, unless I grossly misunderstood you.
I strongly advocate the notion of copyright. Copyright protects creators. But copyright law is (rightly, I think) blurred when someone pays a creator, and the terms of the payment arrangement matter a great deal in ways that seem in dispute here. Without
knowing the terms of the employment contract and a lot more detail, it's hard to say
unambiguously, but from what I've seen, things don't look good for the employee.
I also think it's good for employers to
understand that employees have private lives.
When people, even paid people, make things on their own time with their own tools,
I think they should own those things.
However, there was crossover here of many kinds, and I don't think this case is clearcut.
So your apparent assumptions upthread that this is about Good vs. Evil seem off the mark.
It looks to me more like Confused vs. Sloppy.
I don't see evidence that the employee took steps to separate his development work
from his paid work. He used a computer for work to do material portions (if not all) of his development. He used printer facilities from work. He experimented with debugging his stuff on live data at work. He was paid for some of the activities that crossed over into
his development. And he did nothing to give up front notice to the company (which happens to be the government, but the issues would be the same in private enterprise) that he had such potential conflicts of interest.
Conflicts of interest are, in general, handled by some basic actions: advance notice of a potential for conflict so that parties potentially affected can object before-the-fact and proper ground rules can be in place from the outset, and proper separation of resources (time, equipment, data) such that someone who is potentially affected is comfortable that they are not accidentally funding an effort without being reimbursed for their contributions. I don't see evidence those were dealt with in that way.
You could offer another theory of how the business universe should operate, but so far as I know, that's the status quo, and it was badly handled by the employee. I don't think rushing to the employee's defense and saying "you should get the same benefits as you would if you'd followed well-established guidelines" is fair to those who follow such guidelines, nor is it entirely fair to the employer. I think if you were an employer with an employee doing this to you, you'd see it differently.
I don't plan to follow this subthread up further, so feel free to have another round of reply to close it out. I don't mind not having the last word. Just try to focus on saying what you think rather than worrying about whether I agree with you. The world will suffice in the face of disagreement, and it's more interesting just to hear well-spoken opinions in clear form so that we can all see where we stand and learn from one another.
Do you want to live a world where everyone should get a license for everything, "just to make sure"?
In a world where you didn't need licenses, what difference would it make who owned
the rights to the trooper's software. Rights wouldn't buy you anything.
If rights matter, then it matters who owns them. If rights don't matter, then it
doesn't. So why does my taking sides--or, rather, failing to take sides--in this issue
bear at all on that controversy?
So, basically, you submit to our leather-clad, arms wielding overlords then, Kent?
Kudos on the cute question. A varaint of a perhaps-overused joke here at Slashdot, but enough of a variation that it made me laugh for a moment.
The truth is that I'm extremely sensitive to the delicate balance between people qua individuals and people qua society (and its inherently imperfect implementational approximation, which is "government"). If anything, I'm on the side of those who think that Government is overstepping these days, and that's a risk.
But the fact that an individual or agency does wrong, even routinely, is not a free pass to judge every action of theirs as wrong nor every action of those who oppose or fear it as right. I come down strongly on the side of government unfairly intruding into one's home, so I would oppose them entering his house except on very extreme grounds of imminent public safety (and even then, it's a tricky area). I certainly think there are complex issues when your employer is a government or quasi-government (something capable of behaving like a government in terms of force and getting away with it). But as I mentioned before, this case has "some of each". I also think that people who want to claim independent development should develop independently. They should know when they're on their own time, they should know what is their own resources.
This case is not about what outcome we want for "the good guy" and "the bad guy" even if we could unambiguously and Rightly assign who was in each role. This case is about what the right answer is given the fact pattern. Evaluating it on the basis of "did the guy who I liked win?" isn't right in my book. I try to set my ethical compass on independent sources of guiding truth, not just on the magnetic personality of someone nearby...
Also, and importantly, this isn't just about what happened. It's about what might happen
in the future. Any time you say "the little guy should have won because he's the little guy", you influence the behavior of the little guy by saying "he shouldn't prepare himself" because he's already in the right. Or else you influence him to take action unrelated to the cause--like to buy a gun or get a lawyer, rather than to change his behavior. My analysis is, in part, about saying that people who do this kind of thing should protect themselves better--the police officer who's losing did not adequately protect himself and should have expected at least a risk of this, given current law.
Now if you want to have a discussion about whether the current law should change, I'd
be up for that sometime. But it's a different debate. I have a lot of theories about how I'd change IP law, but I be they're not how you'd change IP law. To have such a debate, it would have to be under a specific other theory we were either jointly advocating or at least jointly agreeing to hold constant for the duration of the discussion... or else such discussion would probably just spin out of control.
The most important thing to understand when debating hypothetical worlds is that no matter how hypothesize the changed law, you still have to go back to the original case and say "does the guy involved know about the law and is he synchronizing to it, or are we having a debate about someone who doesn't follow law and just does things and whether he should always win anyway?" If you assume he doesn't know about the law, then you're really saying "Can you construct a law such that it is so good people don't even have to know it's there?" And in that case, that's a lot like "Do we really need laws anyway, or should we just have judges and common sense?" I'm not sure I'm optimistic about where that trend goes... So if the other possibility is, if we change the law and the person will have to know the law (especially given he's a cop--that's not a stretch), then why isn't the outcome the same in that Universe as in th
I expect the GPL-supporters to take the cop's side. GPL supporters are big on copyright, since copyright is the only thing
that gives them any leverage to ask a business to align with them politically in order to use the software they indulge themselves in the
illusion of offering "freely". If not for copyright, such "freely" given software
would be possible to use freely. The same is true in the case of the cop.
So, actually, I see quite a bit of suspense: I don't expect the entire community to own up to that.
Some contracts permit private development of stuff
and some states enforce the right to do that notwithstanding contractual agreements,
but in both cases (contract and state law) where I've seen it, it usually only applies to things done
(a) on your own time, (b) using your own facilities, and (c) not directly related to your employment.
Otherwise, it risks being a conflict of interest.
I'm not a lawyer, but the common sense of this seems obvious: It's wise to get an admission/agreement in some form from your employer before engaging in any
activity that like this. I've had employers who have said "go ahead" and one employer who said "no way, anything you do whatsoever we'll own".
In the latter case, the employer who said no didn't end up owning the thing because I didn't end up doing it, of course.
Some people like having a work-supplied PC, but anyone doing this kind of thing should avoid such things.
Any hint that the employer contributed to the development sounds like a red flag to me, and that's what it sounds like happened
in this article. If you do have a work-supplied computer, using it only for work, and using your own computer for other things seems the wise way to go.
Personally, I think the issue of the "expertise" he acquired by being a cop is not or should not be an issue.
We all have knowledge, and knowledge/facts are explicitly exempted from copyright ownership, so the state cannot claim to own it,
nor that he improperly used it elsewhere. Absent patenting (which let's all hope doesn't get involved),
the only issue that seems material to me here is the code itself and how it was developed.
This particular case sounds messy from the point of view of establishing any kind of precedent.
It sounds like an issue of people's personal privacy/property, but if he used facilities supplied by work, that makes it mixed as
to principle. I feel bad for the guy, but it sounds like he's made some mistakes.
If I were sorting this out, I'd suggest that the State has no case for taking his software (sounds like a fourth amendment violation) unless he's compounded his set of mistakes by deploying it on machines accessible to them (which would complicate things even more), nor does he probably have a right to market it without their permission if they contributed financially (through use of material facilities). By adopting this posture, both parties have a reason to compromise. Probably the state should pay him some fee or royalty to get past this, if there's a benefit to them to doing so. If an appropriate price point is struck, both will agree, and things will move ahead.
I believe that consistency is one of the biggest things Microsoft was working on when they designed the ribbon. It's an attempt to keep things the same everywhere - even to the point of limiting customization.
Add to "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" the phrase "and large megacorporations".
The change to ribbon interface I'm sure will survive. Vendors change formats all the time in search of a most ergonomic way of doing things.
It's a way of saying "we (the vendor) can do better than we (the vendor) did before".
However, I suspect the public will not ultimately put up with "lack of customization" as a long-term strategy.
That's a way of saying "we (the vendor) can do better than you (the user) did before".
That's a great deal more dicey as a claim. It's one thing to not give a user customization, as Apple did in its early days, because it didn't understand what it was about and how much user demand there was; it's another to move from a customizable environment to a non-customizable one. I don't expect that part of the shift to play as well.
I've installed just IE7, not the Office beta, and am already quite nervous. IE6 got me used to rearranging my menu items and left me feeling that
more rearranging on my part would help even more. When I installed IE7, I was shocked: For all its new features, the one
thing I really hate beyond words is the inability to customize my own experience in terms of button arrangement.
The very next thing I did after installing IE7 was to download Firefox.
People who customize things know they're going at odds with documentation. They can cope, or they don't do it.
I don't care if I have to click a 20-page EULA saying I agree not to complain that the doc is at odds with where I've customized
something. Just don't tell me I can't customize things. I didn't like the auto-abbreviating smart menus, but at least there was a checkbox to turn them off, and I didn't begrudge their having them because it didn't bother me. (I might quibble with the default, but that's a business choice.) As long as someone isn't forced to to rearrange their menus, I don't see the issue. Let me rearrange
mine and them not rearrange theirs. Where is the problem?
But for Microsoft to limit customization seems suspect.
Everything about.NET is about flexible rearrangement of components and functionalities, so if they're saying they have to hold back for a material reason like that they can't do adequate documentation/training in the face of customization, there are deeper problems in their business plan than simply this ribbon change.
But please don't tell me consumers don't need HD with pristine source material and low compression rates.
I can understand the public's desire to buy better quality, but not the industry's desire not to sell it.
They used to be willing to sell VHS because it lost quality over their master copies, and I had the impression they were willing to sell DVD because they
knew HD was coming and they were still selling lesser quality than they owned. If they're willing to sell HD, what do they have in store? Stereovision? Holography? Virtual Reality?
At some point they're going to notice that our native sensory devices are saturated and that they can't churn us further without
selling us sensory implants, since that will be the gating factor, not players.
Someone upthread suggested the motivation was new DRM. Might be. But the present DRM is hard for most normal people to circumvent.
But I doubt even new stuff will be adequate to keep away the pirates... after all, absent ssl implants into our auditory and vision systems, somewhere it has to get decoded or we can't watch it. And if that happens, there's always someplace in the pipe
you can tap into to get the quality picture.
Personally, I think they just want to churn hardware, not software. A new generation of player devices, a new generation of medium-x to medium-y transfer devices, even just raw disk to store all that stuff. And if that's the case, then it shouldn't matter if the
stuff they're selling is the best quality, just better. After all, if they can sell us 2x quality, 4x quality, then 8x quality, they can sell it all 3 times over. If they jump straight to 8x quality in one step, they lose 2/3 of their potential revenue. (I'm just making up those multipliers. But my point is only to say that there's no motivation to compare their target to what users want unless they're fearful other vendors will go faster. And since other vendors want that same churning of the market...)
Of course it's possible they'll lower the prices of all the DVDs to clear inventory and find that most people who've wanted it just buy it all up, and then be surprised that we've saturated most people's field of vision and hearing adequately such that few people race for the new stuff. I love HD, but I was happy with SLP VHS, too. When I converted to DVD, it wasn't for a better picture (though I was happy to get that as a side-effect). It was (a) to avoid rewinding, (b) to avoid picture degradation and permit backups, (c) to compact the physical storage size in my house, and (d) to have something that might survive the thrust into the time of Big Brother DRM (since, if nothing else, I can play these things detached from the internet on standalone devices that don't phone home... one never knows if that will stay true in the modern world of DRM). None of these issues I bought DVD for appear to be improved by the move to HD, so except for a select few shows, I doubt I'll rush to upgrade... and maybe not even then. I wonder if I'm unique in feeling churn burnout.
The reason why Paypal does this is because creating a charity account without being able to provide documents proving your charity status is suspect. It's a red flag.
You make some very good points, and yet...
Never underestimate the contribution of a bad user interface.
I have several times poked at the interface for collecting donations through PayPal, concerned about exactly
the question that this whole thing hinges upon: Charitable Status. I'm not a charity, but could imagine accepting
donations from people who want to support some of the sites I've created, as long as people clearly understand I'm not a charity.
Yet it's hard to find anything in the PayPal user interface or documentation that reassures me that I will not be
mistakenly offered by their software as someone fraudulently pretending to be a charity. So I've never done it.
I suppose what it takes to actually set up one of those things is a belief that "the right thing will magically happen",
and I'm hardly surprised that this kind of misunderstanding happens when that kind of dicey analysis is what one is reduced to.
So while there may be some sensationalizing in the story, and the story may even be focused on the wrong issues,
I think the underlying problem of PayPal failing to deal with this issue explicitly is a real one. And it's hardly surprising
to me, at least, that someone managed to get confused about what the effects of their setup actions might be.
It would be useful if PayPal went to a lot more trouble in its help documentation, its UI, and on the icons/buttons
themselves to say whether the target was purporting to be a charity or not. (For example, the words "Make Charitable Donation" or "Donate (Charitable)" or "Donate (US Charity)" or "Donate (deductible)" might be good ways to highlight charitable donations.
The end-user-donation interface could show would-be donors
about the nature of the charity.) Further, I certainly looked hard for a paragraph or even a section
saying what my obligations might be as a non-charity to disclose the fact in a way that was visibly apparent to people,
but I found none such.
Of course, if someone thinks I just overlooked something obvious, maybe they
can point me to a definitive statement in the online button-making factory or the long, tedious documentation,
where I definitively say
"No, I'm not a charity, don't pass me off as one." and it definitively acknowledges
"Ok, I understand you're not a charity and I'll make sure people know not to treat you as one". I'll be quite happy to find clarifications/corrections attached to this message.
wouldn't the.xxx TLD, designed to be blocked by uptight people, be the last place a porn site would want to live?
The problem isn't with the true.xxx folks, who probably don't really care and figure their market will find them.
The problem is with people who have content that is ambiguous and only "arguably" covered by this.
The problem is there is no.PG,.PG-13,.R,.X before.XXX... which means there will suddenly be a binary division between
"good" and "bad". The world is not so black and white.
The real problem is that there is "middle ground", and there must be at minimum three systems, not too:
Things unambiguously acceptable, things unambiguously outrageous, and things in between (i.e., hybrid).
By making only two groups, you necessarily merge the hybrid with either the protectedthe outrageous. To say that anything
not for highly protected people is outrageous is ridiculous and a sudden huge shift to the conservative that seems unlikely to
succeed, though it would be a stretch to say that nothing like that would ever be tried--consider Prohibition.
Also, since it's defined in a way that makes it sound like you're in with scum, anyone who voluntarily enters is practically
signing a confession that they think their ambiguous content to be depraved. I think that's the saddest of all:
That someone who is just worried they might offend someone is basically forced to stand in the street and wave a sign saying
"kick me" as their reward for being nice.
It would actually be an infinitely saner thing to create a.G or.KIDS domain where people could move to who want to live in a bubble.
There would then be no confusion about who belonged there: anyone who wanted to live by a lot of rules and wanted to be around others of like kind. And there would be very little motivation to cheat, since people who like that kind of thing would rush to it. There's no stigma, after all.
Nor are the standards for what must be in this domain clear in a way that makes sense globally. It seems to me something
that will not be meaningfully able to be administered globally, since some countries that think nothing of certain
controversial issues will not require.XXX, and it will just end up a casual tax on those who do choose to use it.
Or else it will be
be the Internet version of McCarthyism, and the.XXX will gradually expand to be the list of everyone... until it breaks down and you can't watch a PG movie without it being.XXX and people say "why is this closet so crowded?" and demand to be let out.
None of the present plan makes any sense, really. So why are they doing it?
The unspoken truth, of course, is that this is not about Net safety. It is about dictating morality.
And why is that? Perhaps because they're being unable to sell the same morality voluntarily.
The strange thing to me is that this is all about sex.
What about violence? Will there be a.MURDER TLD for people who think killing others is bad?
Will the evening news go there? What about unpopular wars? Or just people who are trying to save young women from unscrupulous coathanger-wielding men in alleys or trying to save the world from overpopulation?
This is the biggest threat to Wikipedia I've heard in a long time.
If Wikipedia content is used to determine whether a message is spam, suddenly there is a direct incentive to spammers to add spam-related content to Wikipedia.
Personally, I think spammers are already much smarter than this.
It may be my imagination, but if so it's surely coming, that spammers are grabbing text from places they harvest my name
and just including that text in messages rather than trying to make up things from scratch.
Since they want to sell me something related to things I do, doing this gives them natural camouflage since the text tends
to be on topic anyway.
Also, filling Wikipedia with spam is the least of our problems.
The more subtle problem is the apparent assumption in all the replies here that the spammers won't use the same technique.
That is, if they know Wikipedia is being consulted to tell what words mean, then all they have to do is consult Wikipedia
to find misunderstandings they can associate. e.g., it might find that B12 was a possible Bingo number, or perhaps it would
find that Boeing once made an airplane named the B12, or they might find it's an isotope of Boron, or...
Knowledge is not a cure for anything. Learning, and improving technique, are ways of staying ahead, but also ways of upping the stakes. When everyone is on an
even playing field knowledgewise, that knowledge is no longer a tactical advantage.
The front on which spammers could easily be brought down is not knowledge but money. The spammers don't have the money to pay for all that spam: they just penalize the rest of us for having made it free by abusing our good will. If email were made to be pay-only, it could destroy the economy of scale that spammers enjoy. And perhaps if Wikipedia becomes an important resource,
making Wikipedia's use be pay-only could fix the problem. Not that it's likely to happen--I'm just observing the opportunity.
The same has been noted about the "recreational" drug trade, though: legalizing such drugs (whatever you think of the issue of use), would likely drive the price down. Speculation has it that they remain illegal in part because the illegal drug trade likes the price advantage of having things be illegal, and that they are some of the loudest to remind us that it would be immoral to legalize them. So it's hardly surprising that spammers are some of the first among us to scream about the immorality of pay-per-message email. In both cases, we continue to pay anyway: we just pay for spam removal and fighting the drug war. As long as we don't count those activities as a cost, we continue to think the price would be high to change the way things work.
Direct physmail, by contrast to email, is a minor irritation because it's paid for by the sender (even if at a discount that I might not agree with). And the availability of World Book or Compton's Encyclopedia in hardcopy has never been a way of overcoming that issue. The fact that money is charged for physmail postage is the thing that wins out. It means the sender must give thought to whether the recipient really cares, and must target mail in a way that's a win-win. No such thought is required in email because the cost is entirely negligible.
Third, imagine for a second that you are correct. What if Bill Gates IS just doing it to burnish his reputation. By criticizing him, you deny him of the value of that investment. Therefore when Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs considers what to do with their fortunes they'll say: "Why would I bother giving away my money if people will just use it as an excuse to attack me.
The preceding post I largely agree with, including the summary text quoted here. My comments are not intended to detract from any of of this post, but to add to it.
It's not just about other people but about Gates himself. People grow and change. They are not themselves the same person
one day as the next. As they grow, they regret things or see things they would like to improve.
Sometimes, too, criticism is good because people learn from it. I'm not apologist for Gates, but it seems fair to admit
that he has seemed to grow quite a bit as a person over the years.
Perhaps he legitimately regrets some things, but can't change them. Maybe some of the things he does now are because he likes doing
them and some are an apology for what damage he may himself consider he's done. Who can say?
I think these things he's doing are his best attempt at doing something
good. He's one of those guys like Ted Kennedy that you can criticize for not being perfect, but geez: neither of these guys has to
work a day for the rest of their life. They can live in luxury if they want. But they wake up, go to work, and do things that
certainly seem helpful to others. Why? For the joy of duping a third-worlder into thinking he's cured when he's not? I doubt it.
If there are things he's doing wrong, let's allow for the possibility he'll get better at it.
What he's doing now seems better than 10 years ago. Why assume he's stopped learning?
Perhaps he'll even read this very thread and improve.
Forced to bet money on who was more likely to change, Gates if he read the Slashdot criticisms or the criticisms if Gates changed, I'd bet on Gates to be the one more capable of change.
I've been programming since the mid 1970's. I sometimes pull out old code and it shocks me how ugly it is. But I have to remind myself, the notion of "programming style" was not invented then. Programming style evolved because I and others recognized the need to have more orderly code in order for projects to scale better and have longer lifetimes. We were so excited by how cool programming was that the notion of how hygienic it was didn't seem relevant yet. Everything from the 70's looks dated. Look at movies of the time and how minorities and women were treated. It seems like there were more bad people then, but if you were alive then you'd know that was not so. People just thought differently. People have always thought differently, and have always evolved from generation to generation. Political and social conscience are not things people are born with, they're things people come to have, and things that build as one has time to make mistakes and see the consequences, time to read, time to talk to people, etc.
Successful people may lag in learning these things for all I know, perhaps because they're busy being successful. (No benefit ever comes without a cost.) Now that he's shifted what he's doing in life to focus on his foundation, Bill has more time, so he's getting caught up. But if he'd taken the time to learn earlier in life, maybe he wouldn't have money to give away. So maybe it wouldn't matter. He'd just be a person with views that were more mainstream and a quantity of money that was more mainstream, too. And some rich guy, Bill Prime, would be the one with money to give away, but he also would have been "busy" for a while, and socially behind the times, so he'd be the one catching up. It's not a perfect world.
We learn as we go. We're a work in progress. It's why old people so often repeat the phrase, "If I had it to do over..." But none of us get to do
Did anyone really think he was turning over a new leaf?
Yeah, can't they be like the rest of us who are consistently only good and
never do anything with direct or indirect effects that are mixed or outright bad?
Refusing to start the car is one thing, and perfectly acceptable, but taking control away from the driver is a big no no under any circumstance.
This reminds me of something I think I saw on Risks Digest years ago, about the risks of modular design. Where someone had built something into a plane that was supposed to save you from killing yourself by excessive G forces if you pulled up the plane too steeply, and they found that it was a bad idea the first time someone had to avoid hitting a mountain at the last minute. There are risks, and then there are other risks, and knowing the right thing to do is often complicated and not possible to know in isolation.
In most cases, this is probably a good idea. But I can imagine someone who has had a bit of alcohol but is being chased by someone. Perhaps even in a setting where there are no cars about, and one needs to merely put some distance between them. Perhaps that someone has broken into their house, or is perhaps a stalker. They run to their car. They get in and try to drive away. No, says the car, probably in some sort of haughty natural language. It's not safe for you to drive. Sounds like a great idea for a movie scene.
This is one of several reasons I don't like automatic cameras taking pictures of cars exceeding the speed limit and mailing them tickets.
There's no indication of context, and the system isn't really artificially intelligent--just doing one particular plodding action.
There are reasons why one needs to exceed the speed limit (to get out of dangerous situations) and to not stop at stop lights under some circumstances (to avoid being rear-ended by someone going faster comes to mind). What alcohol impairs is "judgment". But these automated techniques we're putting in place also have limited judgment by definition... So as long as you're within a certain expected range of situations, they'll work fine. The problems will manifest in the unusual situations, which will have very different properties.
Also, some of it won't be just about reducing risk, but shifting risk or cost from one form to another,
or shifting the responsible party from
one to another. It may well be that these things will allow people to have reduced premiums on insurance, for example.
But if someone gets in
an accident with this in place, it may be construed that the device didn't do its job, and rather than the person who drove
getting all the blame, the maker of the device will probably get sued. I wonder if they'll continue to think these were a good product
once those lawsuits start to roll in. It'll be interesting to see how the case law works out.
On the one hand, there will be pressure to accept sweat sensor data as evidence of high blood alcohol--people seem to just love having "data",
independent of whether they know what it means.
And on the other hand, if the data shows something alarming, that will point away from the
driver toward the car being malfunctioning, so I'd imagine such "data" would tend to exonerate rather than convict drunk drivers.
Unless, of course, you try to start your car and then go to someone else's that isn't protected
and drive that instead... then you'll leave your
fingerprints and a probably-timestamped trace record
of your condition. Ah, the theatre of it all.
Google's test will obviously avoid asking any direct questions about age, gender, and race, because that's illegal (even when objectively justifiable). However, if the test is powered by a statistics engine drawing a database of past performance reviews, then the test could unintentionally evolve to ask about such things indirectly.
I can't believe they would deliberately make decisions on the basis of anything that was not obviously going to help them. First, they are a global corporation, so institutionalizing a lack of diversity would seem suicidal. And second, leaving someone who could do something cool deliberately on the sidewalk is an invitation to them to start a competing company that does better. So I have to believe they have a genuine desire to grow.
On the other hand, while they might not do something like that deliberately, anyone could do it by accident.
People have built random number generators that turned out not to be random.
People have built perceptron recognizers for tanks on a battlefield that turned out to be recognizing the time of day the pictures were shot rather than the tanks.
People can confuse themselves with their own "intelligence".
The weird thing is that they say they chose to use their own data to seed their algorithm with their own people.
If they already have such people, why wouldn't their present hiring practices be fine for finding them?
I heard a talk by Amar Bose of
the Bose corporation where, among his several messages, was a catch phrase "better implies different". So if Google wants to grow and become better, patterning its growth on "more of same" seems bizarre.
I've also not seen ethical guidelines published by Google that says they're afraid to use their own data. Perhaps they do or perhaps they don't. But absent clear promises not to use data in certain ways, I'm not confident of what they're doing. Surely they receive search strings from people typing to computers at successful companies they admire and would like to emulate. A lot can be learned from examining those strings in the aggregate, I'd bet. (Even if they didn't work back from the IP addresses, they could cross-correlate the searches against "anonymous" information about "all searches from sites that seem business-related" and get similar results that were at least superficially "ethically cleaner"... though it's still second-hand use of data that others who don't own search engines don't have access to). And surely they must have their own internal search data (things their employees have typed) and the results of these profiles they asked for from their employees, too. So they can create a psychological map of the areas their employees inquire about and compare it to what the world is interested in. Surely a cross-match of that will reveal "interests" and "skills" and "areas of inquiry" and other useful stuff that they could beef up on in hiring in order to see and shore up their "weaknesses". Surely something like that would be more likely to reveal what they need to hire for. Not that I think it ethically a good idea, but given that they haven't promised not to, somehow I'd be surprised if they weren't utilizing that vast quantity of knowledge about what people search for in order to know what to hire next, if not what research areas to go into or what products to develop. Search engines already count the number of searches for various things and correlate them to events and products to find out the popularity of all manner of things in today's fashion culture. Sometimes that data is just for coffee station chatter (e.g., "more people searched for thus-and-so sport at this year's olympics than last"), but eventually (or behind the scenes already) it may be more (e.g., "people are asking awfully specific legal questions about thus-and-so kind of genetic research at thus-and-so company")...
I've discounted the hypothesis that, like the "all volunteer" US Army, they're having so much trouble getting v
Democracy is a grand experiment. It seems an open question as to whether it works.
Before you can even ask that question, much less answer it, you need to decide: what is the point of democracy? what is it supposed to achieve?
Well, I meant the most minimal thing: It remains to be seen whether it's even self-sustaining.
I take the message from Bush to be that if he allows us even to just audit what he's doing,
we put our nation at risk. I think that's an extreme view. I think the nature of democracy, whether
in the form of a republic or notm, is that the people get some say. And an uninformed public cannot
have a material say. If what we know on important issues is just what they tell us,
then choice is gone.
I am not trying to speak as an advocate of a position. I happen not to like Bush and his policies,
but I also like to think myself capable of objective thought. In this discussion, I am just trying to neutrally analyze what the Bush administration is doing and whether it's consistent with what it says it is doing. And I sense
that it is afraid to say its real position because it would offend the public to know just how little
they trust ordinary people to interpret information correctly. It's hard to tell if that's a choice they
make because they are oblivious or cynical. I wish I understood better.
The reason I use the term "democracy" here is not just that I find it a convenient term (notwithstanding confusion about the various forms of democracy, such as democratic republics, etc.), but because Bush seems to use it. He talks about spreading democracy, and I assume he's saying "give them what we have", not something else. So I'm just adopting his terminology. But at the same time, I'm saying his practice here in the US appears to be "to reduce democratic participation". So I'm a bit baffled by why he thinks it's a danger to us and a solution to others.
And I'm quite baffled as to why he thinks politics needs to get involved in science. I'd honestly like not to believe it's because it brings him more political control. I'd hate to think that people who disagree with me politically are anything other that honest-minded people who have reached different conclusions. But on issues like this, I'm lost trying to find any other really compelling reason. I'd almost believe it was that he just has "tremendous faith in government to do right by people", but it's weird because that's a traditionally leftist point of view, not something you expect from the Republicans. I just can't make sense of it.
What part of Democracy does this administration not understand?
It's not that this administration doesn't have a coherent position,
it's that that position is nearly impossible to audit because most
individuals who might wish to don't command the resources that the
government has, and it becomes a war of wills with the money (and
hence the odds) stacked against the common citizen.
There are things in the world that require actual secrecy. It's
useful to have the codes to launch the missiles be secret. But that
doesn't mean it has to be secret that you have nuclear missiles. In
fact, it's the kind of thing one might want to know in order to decide
if one likes the government that they elect in a supposedly informed
way. How can one be informed on a matter without
information?
Democracy is a grand experiment. It seems an open question as to whether
it works. But weirdly, though Bush and his cohorts speak about bringing
Democracy to the world, they don't seem to believe in it. I'd think their
position a lot more coherent and believable if they said "We're the party
of 'Democracy has failed.'" They could be about political self-determination
rather than democracy and they wouldn't sound like hypocrites. They could
then say "You, the American people, decided democratically that
"you can't handle the
truth."".
But I think they worry people might not be able to handle that truth.
And hiding one truth soon begets hiding another, until soon it seems like
it should be S.O.P.,
where we just don't let the people have access to any facts,
not even political facts, because they might misinterpret them.
And that's like a cancer. Because every fact you withhold becomes
political by virtue of withholding it. So it feeds itself.
The whole reason science uses something called "peer review" and not just
"review" is to distinguish it from other kind of "review". Like, say,
"government review". Blurring the two is to give take meaning from the
word "peer". Which sounds quite a peery-loss endeavor to me.
Spoiler Warning: If you haven't read Crichton's State of Fear and prefer not to have things spoiled for you, don't read further. I don't know whether what follows constitutes spoiling information, but I hate it when people spoil books for me, so I wanted to note in advance that I'm talking below about the book as if you've read it.
If you subtract those people who are receiving money from fossil fuel companies, then as far as I know there is a total consensus on this issue.
I've heard this claim, too, and it prompts me to ask a question that's been nagging at me for some time in hopes someone here at Slashdot can shed some light:
Can anyone explain why Michael Crichton's State of Fear so strongly seems to take the opposite position? He's a scientist by training, and not a stupid guy. Most of his works reflect a very good understanding of technology and a decent appreciation for how technology interplays with society. That doesn't make him infallible or anything, but it does cause me to want to understand how to put his story into perspective.
Is he one of those who were paid off? Was he approached by someone selling hype in the form of a good story and then so intrigued by the issues that he forgot to check whether the citations he was given were legit? How did he reach a conclusion no one else did? Is he just an idiot? Has he sold out ethics for a provocative book?
He certainly sounded like he genuinely cared about the idea of saving the world from what it seems clear he perceives as environmental whackos just making stuff up. He seems to take a lot of time to research things, and I assume he's neither hurting for money nor incapable of writing a best-selling book with the opposite position if that's where the data led. I listened on audiobook, which made it hard to go back and do reference checking, but it sounds heavily footnoted when he makes his claims, and I presume someone has tracked some of those. Maybe they'll share their results here.
It leads me to wonder if he is missing something... or if I am. How does one sort this out?
And a side note (just to keep this on topic of the Carbon Tax): Even in the case Crichton is right and everyone else is wrong and there's no issue at present, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to "practice" responding to a crisis. Until population growth and resource use is under control, we're either already in crisis or on the path to having a real crisis. And when that happens, we'll need to understand what sociological mechanisms are productive for pulling things into control because we'll need to resolve things quickly. (Experience with the World Trade Center says people will throw rights and justice out the window and just ask to be safe if push comes to shove--look at what happened with the Patriot Act. I'd like to avoid kneejerk moves toward protective dictatorships down the line by doing something a little less harsh now, and a Carbon Tax, whatever you think of it, is certainly more moderate than other extreme measures that could come later if carbon issues got more severe.) Just as the original Internet worm alerted people to the issue of virus control in a way that probably avoided a later surprise attack by something more harmful on the "first try", one could argue that even the expense of a "practice" run on this was worth the time. If Crichton is right. And if he's wrong, it's all the more urgent.
To help us navigate the goofily drawn line between planet and dog, perhaps it would be "civil" of us to just create the abstract notion of a "union of particles orbiting the sun". We could then define Pluto as one of those, and leave the religious issue of which such unions should be marryable to the word "planet" to the respective scientific faiths to sort out. I'm sure that with an appropriate number of masses it will all work out divinely.
Video-sharing has made it possible for lay people to produce satire and political speech with budgets of almost nothing.
When the net (Web 0.9, if you will) came online, there was the risk that it would "democratize" the world and destabilize existing power structures. There was the hint of a world filled with micropayments that would result in a meritocracy for those whose content was popular and that everyone wanted to see.
But then AOL and its ilk (CompuServe, NetZero, and so on) came up with a clever plan: Don't charge for the content, since that would mean giving away money to the people producing it. Just charge for access and let the general public become confused about the "subtle" difference between The Internet (provided by myriad, largely unpaid people world-wide) and the network portal (little more than Mosaic/Netscape/IE with a nicer logo--sometimes an IRC bundled in). Since most people had never seen the Internet any other way, they assumed the network was provided by AOL, but it didn't matter if it was or wasn't since they couldn't imagine it any other way. In many cases, they were afraid to shift vendors because they didn't know if anything they were familiar with would still be there.
You'd think eventually they'd catch on. And to some degree they have. Now they think of network providers as a commodity and they switch more freely. But the odd thing is: the portal people have learned an important lesson. It doesn't matter that the users know the access company isn't producing the content. They just want access, and they're still willing to shell out bucks to the people for access. They don't care that this access money doesn't flow to content creators.
So what's new about Web 2.0? Now people will be making cool videos instead of cool text, but someone else will be making money, not the content producers. So what's changed? Nothing.
Anyone who's ever made a web site (for money or for fun) knows the hard part
is keeping content ever-different. The fact that content is cheap to produce
does not destabilize anything. As long as content comes in, people will pay
for access. And money will flow to our keepers--those in control of the
network portals.
Again from the article:
There is little doubt (in my mind at least) that Web 2.0 will continue to annihilate the current strangleholds on power and influence of the Mainstream Media, traditional movie production studios and distribution agencies, political parties and interest groups, teachers, scholars, religious and educational institutions, corporations, and governments.
It's a useful illusion for them to create. It keeps people thinking there's nothing to rebel against. But most politics is about money and control, and the money and control still comes with the portal providers. Trivial changes to the portals will keep videos from being seen. Trivial changes to costs will make people beg to see "ads" or to do other favors for those in control, in exchange for being able to get another fix of video.
I return to my subject line, as so plainly illustrated in the portrayal of the Watergate scandal by the movie
All the President's Men, when the informant "Deep Throat" advises: Follow the money.
If the people whose voices are so important are not regularly, not by accident but by direct consequence of what they
do, enriching themselves monetarily, they are only under the illusion of having power. Yes, this is how capitalism works--every person for himself, and too bad for those who offer content and forget to ask for money. I don't need a lesson in that. I'm just pointing out that it's not a revolution in how things work unless something changes. And all of that part has remained the same. All that's changed is the nature of the content. Structurally, this enhances the stability of the existing system by enhancing the quality of t
I think the issue might be simpler than it's being made in the article. Here's my take:
Math is taught badly. People don't "learn math" due to teaching. They mostly succeed due to self-learning and otherwise fail and get out as gracefully as they can.
So who learns it on their own? People who don't require a lot of interaction. Loners. People who don't need social interaction to succeed.
And when then when you measure whether mathematicians are loners and perhaps lonely/unhappy? Well, it's not exactly statistically random sample of the population you've started with. You've practically selected for such people in the premise.
Then we make the process feed back on itself. Who becomes math teachers? Mathematicians. What do they know?
They know math. But they don't always know why they know it. It seemed easy to them, compared to their classmates. So they believe in the teaching tactics they were shown, even though they didn't work for most people. So they use those same tactics a lot of the time. Why not? They're a proven success. And someone whose primary credential is teaching, not math, may have a huge barrier to getting to teach anything advanced since they probably didn't get to a lot of Math in that particular degree path.
So we get a lot more of the same.
(A related problem, that I've expounded about on my web site in my critique of No Child Left Behind, is that we try to replicate, city by city, the development of a fresh curriculum for teaching math. We rely on teachers in town after town to come up with a teaching plan, a good presentation, and testing materials rather than just finding one or two or ten people who can present it well and centralizing that. What a waste. If we built computers like we teach math students, we'd be putting chip fabrication plants in each city, and wondering why people were so unhappy with the quality of computer hardware. And we'd be creating No Town's Chip Manufacturing Plant Left Behind programs to try to figure out why small towns couldn't keep pace with large ones. Centralization of effort and distributing value is something that pays huge dividends in both economy of scale and product quality. If kids could re-watch a presentation on video when they didn't get something, back it up, freeze frame it, etc., it would offer great capabilities we don't have with classes now. And it would free human teachers in each town to focus on question answering and helping people in need rather than doing mundane preparation work that is redundant with prep work done by the analogous people in every other town.)
We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE [Unsolicited Commercial Email), although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.
Hormel has chosen not to fight this as agressively as perhaps they should have . .
Well, the reason it's called a "trade mark" and not a "trade name" is that it's allowed to just be a shape. For example, it may well be that there are lots of references to things being 3 meters long (3m) in the net, but 3M's logo doesn't come into jeopoardy as a result of that...
I have to wonder if this suit would have been decided differently if Google's search were strictly case-sensitive. For example, a search for marks that are multiword or that contain characters that google thinks are word breaks or even that are not characters at all will be thwarted by this.
Another possibility is that Hormel's IP lawyers made an ineffective case, failing to cite some of the ways that a Google search might not tell the whole story, or might bias the result.
At least one argument I'd have raised is that any word that managed to catch on (requiring little more than it be short and pronounceable) would have certainly been the dominant Google search result when the issue in question is "the informal name for something that occurs in our mailboxes more than anything else on earth". That is, did they take into account the fact that people mention what they see, and that there's more email spam than virtually anything else just because there's so much spam, not because spam didn't get the word out?
A thought exercise: If we'd decided to call spam something else, like "coke", would Coke have lost its trademark? How zealously has Coke defended itself against the illegal drug trade calling its product "coke"? If Coke gets more hits, I suspect it's not because Coke has more zealously defended its name, I suspect it's because it tastes better than SPAM.
So if we make a graph of the tastiness of the item in question and plot whether it's trademark protected even in the case that it had become the common name for spam, would we find that everything on the "not very tasty end and hence not much talked about or sold" got a "no" and everything on the "very tasty and hence highly deployed" got a "yes". Is this "tastiness step function" the definition of what it takes to be protected as intellectual property?
I think Hormel correctly protected its mark by identifying that in a particular form of use, they asserted control, and that the common use was to be distinguished. Barring the use purchase of a large number of armed soldiers world-wide, something thankfully out of the purchase power of even most corporations, I don't see how they could control what the world does. And I thought trade mark law was about telling people what they could and couldn't do, not about telling corporations when they have and haven't spent their precious marketing dollars correctly.
As long as we don't allow "Google says his statement is inconsistent with 78% of the published material on that subject" to be confused with "he's obviously lying" it could be very useful.
I don't know that I agree that it's that simple. I certainly agree that it will help to keep these two statements separated, but my problem is that in making even this comparison, you've blurred several others that must also be kept straight. That is, in order to get even as far as "78% of the published material" you msut define what "the published material" is.
Does it mean "lines of published material"? "bytes of published material"? Can I write a longer document and have it be counted more?
Does it mean "published documents"? Can I write twice as many documents and have it count more?
Does it mean "sites publishing the info"? That is, are you counting only separate sources? If you are, are you verifying they're really differently owned and controlled?
It sounds to me like there's a risk that Google is creating out of whole cloth a brand new industry, as they did with the industry of "getting you placement in search engines". This one will be "getting you placed in truth engines". Not that people didn't try to manipulate truth before. But if you centralize the evaluation of truth in such a way that you can finitely enumerate the choices, you allow greater manipulation of those with weak minds.
I have for a long time predicted that truth would be obfuscated by a flood of propaganda, a la Rivest's chaffing. I think this kind of centralization will accelerate the arrival and/or dominance of a world full of that. It's coming anyway, but no need to hurry it. We need time as a culture to prepare emotionally, socially, etc. It is simply not the same to say that technology we will eventually have is technology we can judiciously use today.
Why is your assertion that computers can't (or worse, can, but should not be allowed to) determine what is an accurate statement any less "creepily religious" than the google fetishists who think it's inevitable?
This is a fair question, and rather than overly defend a statement that I threw in on a bit of whimsy at the end, I'll go the short route and just say: Maybe it's just as creepy. But I want to underscore that this statement, which I said partly just to be provocative, is dancing around a true philosophical/religious issue (where in the context of this paragraph I'll define religion to be "the pursuit of the answer to unanswerable questions like whether there's a reason we're here at all, what happens after death, where did the Universe come from, and is there any point to existence if we're doomed to die soon (as individuals) or later (as a society, due to supernova, heat death of the universe, or whatever)" rather than as the dogmatic attempt to answer such questions by fiat, which is more how I was using religion in my provocative remark). I didn't mean to say that computers can't assess truth, I meant to ask the question: if computers are to do this for us, what are we retaining to ourselves? Because it follows not logically but pragmatically that a huge number of people are lazy, and once told that the computer can assess truth, they'll simply believe it rather than work hard to find their own truth. And also, if not today then in some tomorrow, there is a likely scenario where people are forced to ask: are we the dispensible ones or are machines, and where machines might be asking the same question, and where it might be an us/them choice. Some people believe machines will eventually replace us, and in a distant future where machines were actually smarter, that doesn't disturb me. What disturbs me is if computers displace us when they are not in fact yet smart nor wise nor even intelligent but have only misassessed that they are because an arbitrary probability calculation has been mistaken for Truth with a capital T.
As long as we are still asking questions about truth, I think we're on track. Google as an entity for asking questions of the world does not disturb me (well, not as much). Google as an entity for dispensing answers that require computation disturbs me more. Because I want "competition" and the ability to challenge. If Google can tell me who's lying, how much bigger a leap is it to tell me who I should vote for? Hey, why not just let it assess public policy and say what's good and what's not? I don't own the resources to challenge that. Nor do I know anyone who does. So I guess we'll just have to take it's word. So it starts to resemble a religion, a government, a prison in ways that are at least disturbing and where any rational person would say we should err on the side of asking questions and challenging assumptions, not simply assuming "this is fine" until it's too late.
yes, an algorithm *is* immune to lying. It's output may be inaccurate, but lying requires intent to decieve
So it's impossible to write an algorithm that requires, employs, benefits from, or otherwise involves lying? I remember seeing papers out of Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL) on this issue decades ago and being fascinated by the issues of whether lying would optimize variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, for example. A quick web search for terms relating to this (heh--thanks Google!) turned up The Case of the Lying Postman: Decoys and Deception in Negotiation and Economic Implications of Agent Technology and E-Commerce as well as others. I haven't read these references myself, but I'm betting they'll support my
Slashdot Mirror
The odd thing about politics is that people can be on the same "side" for differing reasons.
It may well be that people oppose this based on price, and it may well be that if price is resolved, much of the resistance falls away. But that doesn't make it a good theory. And it's sad when people take positions for the wrong reasons because when the reason goes away and they find their are different ones, it looks like the reasons are a sham rahter than that there were several legitimate, independent reasons.
Government is out of control on expense. And expense is something that should be scrutinized carefully. That said, that's not the best reason to oppose this.
The article makes the point that the National ID card "makes life easier". But what's misleading about that is that it makes it sound like the people opposing it "want life hard". They don't. They just understand that the price of having things easy is quite high.
A great many problems of Modern Life are caused by the search for the too-easy solution. We optimize one thing while ignoring another. We make it easier to get fast food, while pessimizing our health. We decide people would rather not press a button to download images or start a program on a CD just inserted, so we create auto-execute things that breathe life into worms/viruses without requiring human intervention. We decide people would rather not type passwords, so we offer to store them online where they're easier to find.
The problem isn't that having a national ID wouldn't be easier, it's that it might be easier not only for us but for others who work against us. The problem isn't that it wouldn't make it easier for the good guys, it's that we don't always know who the good guys are... Government is not a magic fairytale place that is inhabited only by decent people and is free of bad people, nor is it a horrible place filled with awful people all out to get us. The sad truth is that it's just a place like any other with good people and bad people, and it's also a place that's known to corrupt people with power, so maybe there are a few extra bad eggs thrown in there just for color. So we have to worry about that.
And we have to worry about other things, too. Like creating a fragile, easily-attackable system. Once you get things centralized, the value of cracking it is just temptingly high. That's bad. We wouldn't want all the root passwords in the world all in one place. What slows down intruders in computers is that security systems differ. Why wouldn't we want the same for government?
This idea isn't even new. It's the basis, ultimately, of States Rights, which was nothing more than a crude 1700's theory of root passwords, that said that the feds wouldn't have the passwords, or keys, or guns, or whatever it took, for controlling everything in the US. They had a few keys. And the local states had a few keys. The whole notion of Separation of Powers is a theory based around the idea that anyone is subject either to becoming a bad guy, or being attacked or threatened by a bad guy, and that safety comes not from finding people immune to human nature, but rather from insulating the system from the possibility of human nature being a problem by making sure that any attack on the system moved slowly. It's why there are three heads of government. It's why supermajorities must be used to change the Constitution. It's why there are multiple hierarchies of courts. And so on. Overtaking a democracy is painfully slow, and that's how democracy protects itself.
The real threat to Democracy is the push for "efficiency" and "ease of use" by anything governmental. It's people like Ross Perot, neither the first nor the last of his ilk, but certainly a crisp iconic example of what I'm talking about, who talk about running
A lot of news, especially that from the US Administration, is probably some combination of smokescreen paranoia, or outright manipulation. And yet, I have to believe that at least some of the reports of "foiled plots" have some element of truth. And they seem to suggest that the terrorists are getting caught planning more carefully than you're giving credit for. I'm not taking notes, so not sure what to cite, but I have the definite sense I've seen stories about terrorists dropping items in public to how long it took for authorities to notice and take action. Consequently, there's no reason to suppose these couldn't have been such items. That might not mean the city was being attacked, but it might reasonably mean that it was about to be, or that plans were underway. Showing a good strong show of concern might mean the difference between terrorists choosing Boston or another city. And that might not seem like a big distinction, but if you live in Boston it could be the kind of subtle distinction that still ends up mattering.
As for the original thread question of whether this issue was overblown or not, I'd like to just say this: A lot of the commentary has focused on this as a binary activity with two possible postures--overblown or not. I wasn't aware of the activity as it happened, and only heard after-the-fact accounts, but my impression is that there were several unrelated questions that call for different answers. At first, the police found these things and there was concern. At that point, it's probably reasonable to guess that the perpetrators didn't know what was going on and were innocent of any intent to upset or deceive. And you could imagine it was possible they went about their day without knowing, in which case they'd be innocent all day. But as soon as they saw that a negative frenzy was created, the situation shifted and it should have been called off. At that point, their failure to come forward when they could see real fear shifted from "innocent bringers of a curiosity" to "reckless holders of important knowledge". There could have been a panic and a mad attempt to leave the city, or some part of it, in which people were injured. There could have been a large expenditure of resources better spent on real terrorism and robbing later ability to actually make such expenditure. And so on. In the case of the original broadcast of War of the Worlds, years ago, there were people who just committed suicide because they feared a bad situation. The world is different now, and space aliens might not scare that way, but there's every reason to believe that terrorism can still scare people, and such outcomes are not impossible. The fact that the individuals were aware of the concern and the network was telling them to hold off says there was a serious breach of good judgment, if not worse. How one measures it might indeed be a personal judgment, but measuring it as a non-issue seems ... underblown.
While I think it shows good leadership for the CEO to step down, I think it would have been better leadership for him to know what his organization was up to and to have either known about it in advance or to have stopped it when it was going awry. If he really didn't know because someone planned it without passing the info up the ladder, that person should have been fired rather than the CEO taking the fall. That it didn't go that way certainly hints at the possibility that it would have later come out that the CEO did know, though certainly he's due his day in court... or in People magazine ... or wherever we end up trying the case. But I wouldn't rush to call him a hero or a great leader or anything like that at least until the facts are in. It may simply have been an issue of taking minor embarrassment now or facing serious public embarrassment and possible legal action later. If such were the options,
That's perhaps a nice wish. However, assuming it will go away is another thing.
Government is not simply a world marketplace that offers ideas and if no one buys, it restocks the shelves with other ideas. We give government the special power of force that we do not give shopkeepers wherein if people disagree with the ideas it is offering, it can take action. The more vague that action, the more subject to the individual whim of an individual attempting to enforce or, just as likely, to exploit such powers.
To pick an obvious and somewhat overused example, the bad ideas of the Nazi movement were indeed rejected by the people, but it's a stretch to say "therefore one should not worry about governments getting an occasional wrong idea because these things tend to work out". It took time to notice the problem in that case, and very bad things happened in the interim. By the time a problem was noticed, it took was not easy to fix. One cannot simply fast forward to the outcome without seeing the time in between and say "it was a bad idea and eventually no one bought it".
McCarthyism in the US played out with somewhat similar shape, although fortunately far less cost in human lives. But by similar shape, I mean that it was a kind of insidious idea from the start, and it crept like a cancer with people not seeing what a bad idea it was until it was widespread and it started to impact so many people that it simply could not be ignored.
The notion that the government should be able to push things "harmful to minors" into this ghetto is like giving a big gun to anyone who has government authority to act but not telling them who to aim it at. Harmful to minors is not a statement like "boils at 100 degrees" that can be objectively tested. What protections does it offer to people who have no intent to harm minors and are simply operating in an area that raises questions.
Some things that have been classified by at least some people as harmful to minors within our lifetime include sex education, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth , and the teaching of evolution. Will we expect to find the teaching of safe sex practices only in the .xxx domain? What about climatechange.xxx or darwin.xxx?
And that's only in the US,
the supposed model of freedom. How will such a domain be construed in countries around the
world that have more conservative points of view. Will we see tjmaxx.xxx? barnesandnoble.xxx?
mit.edu.xxx?
The problem with "parental" government is that people often naively assume that it it has a brain at all, and also that the brain will be applied uniformly. In fact, what is more likely is the kind of thing you see on cop shows all the time where cops come to a restaurant owner who won't give them the info they want and they say "I'm sure you wouldn't want the health inspector in here all over you." So the guy caves and gives up the information. The public isn't served by the health code law because in the end, the law is more useful (to those TV cops, at least) or some undisclosed purpose than it is for actually making sure things get cooked right.
And the problem is that the undisclosed purpose is flexible and varying. The whole war on terror is going the same way. If the government can make "being a person" (or at least, all of its aspects) sufficiently illegal, then there's always at least some club handy for threatening to arrest a person if he gets out of hand, whatever the enforcer thinks is out of hand. And at that point, there's no freedom left. That's an analogy that Slashdotters should understand: It's like software patents. Overly broad. Overly vague. Applied inconsistently. Difficult to defend. And offering no really safe avenue of behavior. And that means no one can safely develop anything. They can just hope they aren't singled out for enforcement.
I don't want to drag on, but I wanted to note the unlikelihood that we're in any kind of exact agreement, unless I grossly misunderstood you.
I strongly advocate the notion of copyright. Copyright protects creators. But copyright law is (rightly, I think) blurred when someone pays a creator, and the terms of the payment arrangement matter a great deal in ways that seem in dispute here. Without knowing the terms of the employment contract and a lot more detail, it's hard to say unambiguously, but from what I've seen, things don't look good for the employee.
I also think it's good for employers to understand that employees have private lives. When people, even paid people, make things on their own time with their own tools, I think they should own those things. However, there was crossover here of many kinds, and I don't think this case is clearcut. So your apparent assumptions upthread that this is about Good vs. Evil seem off the mark. It looks to me more like Confused vs. Sloppy.
I don't see evidence that the employee took steps to separate his development work from his paid work. He used a computer for work to do material portions (if not all) of his development. He used printer facilities from work. He experimented with debugging his stuff on live data at work. He was paid for some of the activities that crossed over into his development. And he did nothing to give up front notice to the company (which happens to be the government, but the issues would be the same in private enterprise) that he had such potential conflicts of interest.
Conflicts of interest are, in general, handled by some basic actions: advance notice of a potential for conflict so that parties potentially affected can object before-the-fact and proper ground rules can be in place from the outset, and proper separation of resources (time, equipment, data) such that someone who is potentially affected is comfortable that they are not accidentally funding an effort without being reimbursed for their contributions. I don't see evidence those were dealt with in that way.
You could offer another theory of how the business universe should operate, but so far as I know, that's the status quo, and it was badly handled by the employee. I don't think rushing to the employee's defense and saying "you should get the same benefits as you would if you'd followed well-established guidelines" is fair to those who follow such guidelines, nor is it entirely fair to the employer. I think if you were an employer with an employee doing this to you, you'd see it differently.
I don't plan to follow this subthread up further, so feel free to have another round of reply to close it out. I don't mind not having the last word. Just try to focus on saying what you think rather than worrying about whether I agree with you. The world will suffice in the face of disagreement, and it's more interesting just to hear well-spoken opinions in clear form so that we can all see where we stand and learn from one another.
In a world where you didn't need licenses, what difference would it make who owned the rights to the trooper's software. Rights wouldn't buy you anything.
If rights matter, then it matters who owns them. If rights don't matter, then it doesn't. So why does my taking sides--or, rather, failing to take sides--in this issue bear at all on that controversy?
Kudos on the cute question. A varaint of a perhaps-overused joke here at Slashdot, but enough of a variation that it made me laugh for a moment.
The truth is that I'm extremely sensitive to the delicate balance between people qua individuals and people qua society (and its inherently imperfect implementational approximation, which is "government"). If anything, I'm on the side of those who think that Government is overstepping these days, and that's a risk.
But the fact that an individual or agency does wrong, even routinely, is not a free pass to judge every action of theirs as wrong nor every action of those who oppose or fear it as right. I come down strongly on the side of government unfairly intruding into one's home, so I would oppose them entering his house except on very extreme grounds of imminent public safety (and even then, it's a tricky area). I certainly think there are complex issues when your employer is a government or quasi-government (something capable of behaving like a government in terms of force and getting away with it). But as I mentioned before, this case has "some of each". I also think that people who want to claim independent development should develop independently. They should know when they're on their own time, they should know what is their own resources.
This case is not about what outcome we want for "the good guy" and "the bad guy" even if we could unambiguously and Rightly assign who was in each role. This case is about what the right answer is given the fact pattern. Evaluating it on the basis of "did the guy who I liked win?" isn't right in my book. I try to set my ethical compass on independent sources of guiding truth, not just on the magnetic personality of someone nearby...
Also, and importantly, this isn't just about what happened. It's about what might happen in the future. Any time you say "the little guy should have won because he's the little guy", you influence the behavior of the little guy by saying "he shouldn't prepare himself" because he's already in the right. Or else you influence him to take action unrelated to the cause--like to buy a gun or get a lawyer, rather than to change his behavior. My analysis is, in part, about saying that people who do this kind of thing should protect themselves better--the police officer who's losing did not adequately protect himself and should have expected at least a risk of this, given current law.
Now if you want to have a discussion about whether the current law should change, I'd be up for that sometime. But it's a different debate. I have a lot of theories about how I'd change IP law, but I be they're not how you'd change IP law. To have such a debate, it would have to be under a specific other theory we were either jointly advocating or at least jointly agreeing to hold constant for the duration of the discussion ... or else such discussion would probably just spin out of control.
The most important thing to understand when debating hypothetical worlds is that no matter how hypothesize the changed law, you still have to go back to the original case and say "does the guy involved know about the law and is he synchronizing to it, or are we having a debate about someone who doesn't follow law and just does things and whether he should always win anyway?" If you assume he doesn't know about the law, then you're really saying "Can you construct a law such that it is so good people don't even have to know it's there?" And in that case, that's a lot like "Do we really need laws anyway, or should we just have judges and common sense?" I'm not sure I'm optimistic about where that trend goes... So if the other possibility is, if we change the law and the person will have to know the law (especially given he's a cop--that's not a stretch), then why isn't the outcome the same in that Universe as in th
I expect the GPL-supporters to take the cop's side. GPL supporters are big on copyright, since copyright is the only thing that gives them any leverage to ask a business to align with them politically in order to use the software they indulge themselves in the illusion of offering "freely". If not for copyright, such "freely" given software would be possible to use freely. The same is true in the case of the cop. So, actually, I see quite a bit of suspense: I don't expect the entire community to own up to that.
Some contracts permit private development of stuff and some states enforce the right to do that notwithstanding contractual agreements, but in both cases (contract and state law) where I've seen it, it usually only applies to things done (a) on your own time, (b) using your own facilities, and (c) not directly related to your employment. Otherwise, it risks being a conflict of interest.
I'm not a lawyer, but the common sense of this seems obvious: It's wise to get an admission/agreement in some form from your employer before engaging in any activity that like this. I've had employers who have said "go ahead" and one employer who said "no way, anything you do whatsoever we'll own". In the latter case, the employer who said no didn't end up owning the thing because I didn't end up doing it, of course.
Some people like having a work-supplied PC, but anyone doing this kind of thing should avoid such things. Any hint that the employer contributed to the development sounds like a red flag to me, and that's what it sounds like happened in this article. If you do have a work-supplied computer, using it only for work, and using your own computer for other things seems the wise way to go.
Personally, I think the issue of the "expertise" he acquired by being a cop is not or should not be an issue. We all have knowledge, and knowledge/facts are explicitly exempted from copyright ownership, so the state cannot claim to own it, nor that he improperly used it elsewhere. Absent patenting (which let's all hope doesn't get involved), the only issue that seems material to me here is the code itself and how it was developed.
This particular case sounds messy from the point of view of establishing any kind of precedent. It sounds like an issue of people's personal privacy/property, but if he used facilities supplied by work, that makes it mixed as to principle. I feel bad for the guy, but it sounds like he's made some mistakes.
If I were sorting this out, I'd suggest that the State has no case for taking his software (sounds like a fourth amendment violation) unless he's compounded his set of mistakes by deploying it on machines accessible to them (which would complicate things even more), nor does he probably have a right to market it without their permission if they contributed financially (through use of material facilities). By adopting this posture, both parties have a reason to compromise. Probably the state should pay him some fee or royalty to get past this, if there's a benefit to them to doing so. If an appropriate price point is struck, both will agree, and things will move ahead.
Add to "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" the phrase "and large megacorporations".
The change to ribbon interface I'm sure will survive. Vendors change formats all the time in search of a most ergonomic way of doing things. It's a way of saying "we (the vendor) can do better than we (the vendor) did before".
However, I suspect the public will not ultimately put up with "lack of customization" as a long-term strategy. That's a way of saying "we (the vendor) can do better than you (the user) did before". That's a great deal more dicey as a claim. It's one thing to not give a user customization, as Apple did in its early days, because it didn't understand what it was about and how much user demand there was; it's another to move from a customizable environment to a non-customizable one. I don't expect that part of the shift to play as well.
I've installed just IE7, not the Office beta, and am already quite nervous. IE6 got me used to rearranging my menu items and left me feeling that more rearranging on my part would help even more. When I installed IE7, I was shocked: For all its new features, the one thing I really hate beyond words is the inability to customize my own experience in terms of button arrangement. The very next thing I did after installing IE7 was to download Firefox.
People who customize things know they're going at odds with documentation. They can cope, or they don't do it. I don't care if I have to click a 20-page EULA saying I agree not to complain that the doc is at odds with where I've customized something. Just don't tell me I can't customize things. I didn't like the auto-abbreviating smart menus, but at least there was a checkbox to turn them off, and I didn't begrudge their having them because it didn't bother me. (I might quibble with the default, but that's a business choice.) As long as someone isn't forced to to rearrange their menus, I don't see the issue. Let me rearrange mine and them not rearrange theirs. Where is the problem?
But for Microsoft to limit customization seems suspect. Everything about .NET is about flexible rearrangement of components and functionalities, so if they're saying they have to hold back for a material reason like that they can't do adequate documentation/training in the face of customization, there are deeper problems in their business plan than simply this ribbon change.
I can understand the public's desire to buy better quality, but not the industry's desire not to sell it. They used to be willing to sell VHS because it lost quality over their master copies, and I had the impression they were willing to sell DVD because they knew HD was coming and they were still selling lesser quality than they owned. If they're willing to sell HD, what do they have in store? Stereovision? Holography? Virtual Reality? At some point they're going to notice that our native sensory devices are saturated and that they can't churn us further without selling us sensory implants, since that will be the gating factor, not players.
Someone upthread suggested the motivation was new DRM. Might be. But the present DRM is hard for most normal people to circumvent. But I doubt even new stuff will be adequate to keep away the pirates... after all, absent ssl implants into our auditory and vision systems, somewhere it has to get decoded or we can't watch it. And if that happens, there's always someplace in the pipe you can tap into to get the quality picture.
Personally, I think they just want to churn hardware, not software. A new generation of player devices, a new generation of medium-x to medium-y transfer devices, even just raw disk to store all that stuff. And if that's the case, then it shouldn't matter if the stuff they're selling is the best quality, just better. After all, if they can sell us 2x quality, 4x quality, then 8x quality, they can sell it all 3 times over. If they jump straight to 8x quality in one step, they lose 2/3 of their potential revenue. (I'm just making up those multipliers. But my point is only to say that there's no motivation to compare their target to what users want unless they're fearful other vendors will go faster. And since other vendors want that same churning of the market...)
Of course it's possible they'll lower the prices of all the DVDs to clear inventory and find that most people who've wanted it just buy it all up, and then be surprised that we've saturated most people's field of vision and hearing adequately such that few people race for the new stuff. I love HD, but I was happy with SLP VHS, too. When I converted to DVD, it wasn't for a better picture (though I was happy to get that as a side-effect). It was (a) to avoid rewinding, (b) to avoid picture degradation and permit backups, (c) to compact the physical storage size in my house, and (d) to have something that might survive the thrust into the time of Big Brother DRM (since, if nothing else, I can play these things detached from the internet on standalone devices that don't phone home... one never knows if that will stay true in the modern world of DRM). None of these issues I bought DVD for appear to be improved by the move to HD, so except for a select few shows, I doubt I'll rush to upgrade... and maybe not even then. I wonder if I'm unique in feeling churn burnout.
You make some very good points, and yet...
Never underestimate the contribution of a bad user interface.
I have several times poked at the interface for collecting donations through PayPal, concerned about exactly the question that this whole thing hinges upon: Charitable Status. I'm not a charity, but could imagine accepting donations from people who want to support some of the sites I've created, as long as people clearly understand I'm not a charity. Yet it's hard to find anything in the PayPal user interface or documentation that reassures me that I will not be mistakenly offered by their software as someone fraudulently pretending to be a charity. So I've never done it.
I suppose what it takes to actually set up one of those things is a belief that "the right thing will magically happen", and I'm hardly surprised that this kind of misunderstanding happens when that kind of dicey analysis is what one is reduced to. So while there may be some sensationalizing in the story, and the story may even be focused on the wrong issues, I think the underlying problem of PayPal failing to deal with this issue explicitly is a real one. And it's hardly surprising to me, at least, that someone managed to get confused about what the effects of their setup actions might be.
It would be useful if PayPal went to a lot more trouble in its help documentation, its UI, and on the icons/buttons themselves to say whether the target was purporting to be a charity or not. (For example, the words "Make Charitable Donation" or "Donate (Charitable)" or "Donate (US Charity)" or "Donate (deductible)" might be good ways to highlight charitable donations. The end-user-donation interface could show would-be donors about the nature of the charity.) Further, I certainly looked hard for a paragraph or even a section saying what my obligations might be as a non-charity to disclose the fact in a way that was visibly apparent to people, but I found none such. Of course, if someone thinks I just overlooked something obvious, maybe they can point me to a definitive statement in the online button-making factory or the long, tedious documentation, where I definitively say "No, I'm not a charity, don't pass me off as one." and it definitively acknowledges "Ok, I understand you're not a charity and I'll make sure people know not to treat you as one". I'll be quite happy to find clarifications/corrections attached to this message.
The problem isn't with the true .xxx folks, who probably don't really care and figure their market will find them.
The problem is with people who have content that is ambiguous and only "arguably" covered by this.
The problem is there is no .PG, .PG-13, .R, .X before .XXX ... which means there will suddenly be a binary division between
"good" and "bad". The world is not so black and white.
The real problem is that there is "middle ground", and there must be at minimum three systems, not too: Things unambiguously acceptable, things unambiguously outrageous, and things in between (i.e., hybrid). By making only two groups, you necessarily merge the hybrid with either the protectedthe outrageous. To say that anything not for highly protected people is outrageous is ridiculous and a sudden huge shift to the conservative that seems unlikely to succeed, though it would be a stretch to say that nothing like that would ever be tried--consider Prohibition.
Also, since it's defined in a way that makes it sound like you're in with scum, anyone who voluntarily enters is practically signing a confession that they think their ambiguous content to be depraved. I think that's the saddest of all: That someone who is just worried they might offend someone is basically forced to stand in the street and wave a sign saying "kick me" as their reward for being nice.
It would actually be an infinitely saner thing to create a .G or .KIDS domain where people could move to who want to live in a bubble.
There would then be no confusion about who belonged there: anyone who wanted to live by a lot of rules and wanted to be around others of like kind. And there would be very little motivation to cheat, since people who like that kind of thing would rush to it. There's no stigma, after all.
Nor are the standards for what must be in this domain clear in a way that makes sense globally. It seems to me something that will not be meaningfully able to be administered globally, since some countries that think nothing of certain controversial issues will not require .XXX, and it will just end up a casual tax on those who do choose to use it.
Or else it will be be the Internet version of McCarthyism, and the .XXX will gradually expand to be the list of everyone... until it breaks down and you can't watch a PG movie without it being .XXX and people say "why is this closet so crowded?" and demand to be let out.
None of the present plan makes any sense, really. So why are they doing it? The unspoken truth, of course, is that this is not about Net safety. It is about dictating morality. And why is that? Perhaps because they're being unable to sell the same morality voluntarily.
The strange thing to me is that this is all about sex. What about violence? Will there be a .MURDER TLD for people who think killing others is bad?
Will the evening news go there? What about unpopular wars? Or just people who are trying to save young women from unscrupulous coathanger-wielding men in alleys or trying to save the world from overpopulation?
Personally, I think spammers are already much smarter than this. It may be my imagination, but if so it's surely coming, that spammers are grabbing text from places they harvest my name and just including that text in messages rather than trying to make up things from scratch. Since they want to sell me something related to things I do, doing this gives them natural camouflage since the text tends to be on topic anyway.
Also, filling Wikipedia with spam is the least of our problems. The more subtle problem is the apparent assumption in all the replies here that the spammers won't use the same technique. That is, if they know Wikipedia is being consulted to tell what words mean, then all they have to do is consult Wikipedia to find misunderstandings they can associate. e.g., it might find that B12 was a possible Bingo number, or perhaps it would find that Boeing once made an airplane named the B12, or they might find it's an isotope of Boron, or...
Knowledge is not a cure for anything. Learning, and improving technique, are ways of staying ahead, but also ways of upping the stakes. When everyone is on an even playing field knowledgewise, that knowledge is no longer a tactical advantage.
The front on which spammers could easily be brought down is not knowledge but money. The spammers don't have the money to pay for all that spam: they just penalize the rest of us for having made it free by abusing our good will. If email were made to be pay-only, it could destroy the economy of scale that spammers enjoy. And perhaps if Wikipedia becomes an important resource, making Wikipedia's use be pay-only could fix the problem. Not that it's likely to happen--I'm just observing the opportunity.
The same has been noted about the "recreational" drug trade, though: legalizing such drugs (whatever you think of the issue of use), would likely drive the price down. Speculation has it that they remain illegal in part because the illegal drug trade likes the price advantage of having things be illegal, and that they are some of the loudest to remind us that it would be immoral to legalize them. So it's hardly surprising that spammers are some of the first among us to scream about the immorality of pay-per-message email. In both cases, we continue to pay anyway: we just pay for spam removal and fighting the drug war. As long as we don't count those activities as a cost, we continue to think the price would be high to change the way things work.
Direct physmail, by contrast to email, is a minor irritation because it's paid for by the sender (even if at a discount that I might not agree with). And the availability of World Book or Compton's Encyclopedia in hardcopy has never been a way of overcoming that issue. The fact that money is charged for physmail postage is the thing that wins out. It means the sender must give thought to whether the recipient really cares, and must target mail in a way that's a win-win. No such thought is required in email because the cost is entirely negligible.
The preceding post I largely agree with, including the summary text quoted here. My comments are not intended to detract from any of of this post, but to add to it.
It's not just about other people but about Gates himself. People grow and change. They are not themselves the same person one day as the next. As they grow, they regret things or see things they would like to improve. Sometimes, too, criticism is good because people learn from it. I'm not apologist for Gates, but it seems fair to admit that he has seemed to grow quite a bit as a person over the years. Perhaps he legitimately regrets some things, but can't change them. Maybe some of the things he does now are because he likes doing them and some are an apology for what damage he may himself consider he's done. Who can say?
I think these things he's doing are his best attempt at doing something good. He's one of those guys like Ted Kennedy that you can criticize for not being perfect, but geez: neither of these guys has to work a day for the rest of their life. They can live in luxury if they want. But they wake up, go to work, and do things that certainly seem helpful to others. Why? For the joy of duping a third-worlder into thinking he's cured when he's not? I doubt it.
If there are things he's doing wrong, let's allow for the possibility he'll get better at it. What he's doing now seems better than 10 years ago. Why assume he's stopped learning? Perhaps he'll even read this very thread and improve. Forced to bet money on who was more likely to change, Gates if he read the Slashdot criticisms or the criticisms if Gates changed, I'd bet on Gates to be the one more capable of change.
I've been programming since the mid 1970's. I sometimes pull out old code and it shocks me how ugly it is. But I have to remind myself, the notion of "programming style" was not invented then. Programming style evolved because I and others recognized the need to have more orderly code in order for projects to scale better and have longer lifetimes. We were so excited by how cool programming was that the notion of how hygienic it was didn't seem relevant yet. Everything from the 70's looks dated. Look at movies of the time and how minorities and women were treated. It seems like there were more bad people then, but if you were alive then you'd know that was not so. People just thought differently. People have always thought differently, and have always evolved from generation to generation. Political and social conscience are not things people are born with, they're things people come to have, and things that build as one has time to make mistakes and see the consequences, time to read, time to talk to people, etc.
Successful people may lag in learning these things for all I know, perhaps because they're busy being successful. (No benefit ever comes without a cost.) Now that he's shifted what he's doing in life to focus on his foundation, Bill has more time, so he's getting caught up. But if he'd taken the time to learn earlier in life, maybe he wouldn't have money to give away. So maybe it wouldn't matter. He'd just be a person with views that were more mainstream and a quantity of money that was more mainstream, too. And some rich guy, Bill Prime, would be the one with money to give away, but he also would have been "busy" for a while, and socially behind the times, so he'd be the one catching up. It's not a perfect world. We learn as we go. We're a work in progress. It's why old people so often repeat the phrase, "If I had it to do over..." But none of us get to do
Yeah, can't they be like the rest of us who are consistently only good and never do anything with direct or indirect effects that are mixed or outright bad?
This reminds me of something I think I saw on Risks Digest years ago, about the risks of modular design. Where someone had built something into a plane that was supposed to save you from killing yourself by excessive G forces if you pulled up the plane too steeply, and they found that it was a bad idea the first time someone had to avoid hitting a mountain at the last minute. There are risks, and then there are other risks, and knowing the right thing to do is often complicated and not possible to know in isolation.
In most cases, this is probably a good idea. But I can imagine someone who has had a bit of alcohol but is being chased by someone. Perhaps even in a setting where there are no cars about, and one needs to merely put some distance between them. Perhaps that someone has broken into their house, or is perhaps a stalker. They run to their car. They get in and try to drive away. No, says the car, probably in some sort of haughty natural language. It's not safe for you to drive. Sounds like a great idea for a movie scene.
This is one of several reasons I don't like automatic cameras taking pictures of cars exceeding the speed limit and mailing them tickets. There's no indication of context, and the system isn't really artificially intelligent--just doing one particular plodding action. There are reasons why one needs to exceed the speed limit (to get out of dangerous situations) and to not stop at stop lights under some circumstances (to avoid being rear-ended by someone going faster comes to mind). What alcohol impairs is "judgment". But these automated techniques we're putting in place also have limited judgment by definition... So as long as you're within a certain expected range of situations, they'll work fine. The problems will manifest in the unusual situations, which will have very different properties.
Also, some of it won't be just about reducing risk, but shifting risk or cost from one form to another, or shifting the responsible party from one to another. It may well be that these things will allow people to have reduced premiums on insurance, for example. But if someone gets in an accident with this in place, it may be construed that the device didn't do its job, and rather than the person who drove getting all the blame, the maker of the device will probably get sued. I wonder if they'll continue to think these were a good product once those lawsuits start to roll in. It'll be interesting to see how the case law works out. On the one hand, there will be pressure to accept sweat sensor data as evidence of high blood alcohol--people seem to just love having "data", independent of whether they know what it means. And on the other hand, if the data shows something alarming, that will point away from the driver toward the car being malfunctioning, so I'd imagine such "data" would tend to exonerate rather than convict drunk drivers. Unless, of course, you try to start your car and then go to someone else's that isn't protected and drive that instead... then you'll leave your fingerprints and a probably-timestamped trace record of your condition. Ah, the theatre of it all.
I can't believe they would deliberately make decisions on the basis of anything that was not obviously going to help them. First, they are a global corporation, so institutionalizing a lack of diversity would seem suicidal. And second, leaving someone who could do something cool deliberately on the sidewalk is an invitation to them to start a competing company that does better. So I have to believe they have a genuine desire to grow.
On the other hand, while they might not do something like that deliberately, anyone could do it by accident. People have built random number generators that turned out not to be random. People have built perceptron recognizers for tanks on a battlefield that turned out to be recognizing the time of day the pictures were shot rather than the tanks. People can confuse themselves with their own "intelligence".
The weird thing is that they say they chose to use their own data to seed their algorithm with their own people. If they already have such people, why wouldn't their present hiring practices be fine for finding them? I heard a talk by Amar Bose of the Bose corporation where, among his several messages, was a catch phrase "better implies different". So if Google wants to grow and become better, patterning its growth on "more of same" seems bizarre.
I've also not seen ethical guidelines published by Google that says they're afraid to use their own data. Perhaps they do or perhaps they don't. But absent clear promises not to use data in certain ways, I'm not confident of what they're doing. Surely they receive search strings from people typing to computers at successful companies they admire and would like to emulate. A lot can be learned from examining those strings in the aggregate, I'd bet. (Even if they didn't work back from the IP addresses, they could cross-correlate the searches against "anonymous" information about "all searches from sites that seem business-related" and get similar results that were at least superficially "ethically cleaner"... though it's still second-hand use of data that others who don't own search engines don't have access to). And surely they must have their own internal search data (things their employees have typed) and the results of these profiles they asked for from their employees, too. So they can create a psychological map of the areas their employees inquire about and compare it to what the world is interested in. Surely a cross-match of that will reveal "interests" and "skills" and "areas of inquiry" and other useful stuff that they could beef up on in hiring in order to see and shore up their "weaknesses". Surely something like that would be more likely to reveal what they need to hire for. Not that I think it ethically a good idea, but given that they haven't promised not to, somehow I'd be surprised if they weren't utilizing that vast quantity of knowledge about what people search for in order to know what to hire next, if not what research areas to go into or what products to develop. Search engines already count the number of searches for various things and correlate them to events and products to find out the popularity of all manner of things in today's fashion culture. Sometimes that data is just for coffee station chatter (e.g., "more people searched for thus-and-so sport at this year's olympics than last"), but eventually (or behind the scenes already) it may be more (e.g., "people are asking awfully specific legal questions about thus-and-so kind of genetic research at thus-and-so company")...
I've discounted the hypothesis that, like the "all volunteer" US Army, they're having so much trouble getting v
Well, I meant the most minimal thing: It remains to be seen whether it's even self-sustaining. I take the message from Bush to be that if he allows us even to just audit what he's doing, we put our nation at risk. I think that's an extreme view. I think the nature of democracy, whether in the form of a republic or notm, is that the people get some say. And an uninformed public cannot have a material say. If what we know on important issues is just what they tell us, then choice is gone.
I am not trying to speak as an advocate of a position. I happen not to like Bush and his policies, but I also like to think myself capable of objective thought. In this discussion, I am just trying to neutrally analyze what the Bush administration is doing and whether it's consistent with what it says it is doing. And I sense that it is afraid to say its real position because it would offend the public to know just how little they trust ordinary people to interpret information correctly. It's hard to tell if that's a choice they make because they are oblivious or cynical. I wish I understood better.
The reason I use the term "democracy" here is not just that I find it a convenient term (notwithstanding confusion about the various forms of democracy, such as democratic republics, etc.), but because Bush seems to use it. He talks about spreading democracy, and I assume he's saying "give them what we have", not something else. So I'm just adopting his terminology. But at the same time, I'm saying his practice here in the US appears to be "to reduce democratic participation". So I'm a bit baffled by why he thinks it's a danger to us and a solution to others.
And I'm quite baffled as to why he thinks politics needs to get involved in science. I'd honestly like not to believe it's because it brings him more political control. I'd hate to think that people who disagree with me politically are anything other that honest-minded people who have reached different conclusions. But on issues like this, I'm lost trying to find any other really compelling reason. I'd almost believe it was that he just has "tremendous faith in government to do right by people", but it's weird because that's a traditionally leftist point of view, not something you expect from the Republicans. I just can't make sense of it.
What part of Democracy does this administration not understand?
It's not that this administration doesn't have a coherent position, it's that that position is nearly impossible to audit because most individuals who might wish to don't command the resources that the government has, and it becomes a war of wills with the money (and hence the odds) stacked against the common citizen.
There are things in the world that require actual secrecy. It's useful to have the codes to launch the missiles be secret. But that doesn't mean it has to be secret that you have nuclear missiles. In fact, it's the kind of thing one might want to know in order to decide if one likes the government that they elect in a supposedly informed way. How can one be informed on a matter without information?
Democracy is a grand experiment. It seems an open question as to whether it works. But weirdly, though Bush and his cohorts speak about bringing Democracy to the world, they don't seem to believe in it. I'd think their position a lot more coherent and believable if they said "We're the party of 'Democracy has failed.'" They could be about political self-determination rather than democracy and they wouldn't sound like hypocrites. They could then say "You, the American people, decided democratically that "you can't handle the truth."". But I think they worry people might not be able to handle that truth.
And hiding one truth soon begets hiding another, until soon it seems like it should be S.O.P., where we just don't let the people have access to any facts, not even political facts, because they might misinterpret them.
And that's like a cancer. Because every fact you withhold becomes political by virtue of withholding it. So it feeds itself.
The whole reason science uses something called "peer review" and not just "review" is to distinguish it from other kind of "review". Like, say, "government review". Blurring the two is to give take meaning from the word "peer". Which sounds quite a peery-loss endeavor to me.
Spoiler Warning: If you haven't read Crichton's State of Fear and prefer not to have things spoiled for you, don't read further. I don't know whether what follows constitutes spoiling information, but I hate it when people spoil books for me, so I wanted to note in advance that I'm talking below about the book as if you've read it.
I've heard this claim, too, and it prompts me to ask a question that's been nagging at me for some time in hopes someone here at Slashdot can shed some light:
Can anyone explain why Michael Crichton's State of Fear so strongly seems to take the opposite position? He's a scientist by training, and not a stupid guy. Most of his works reflect a very good understanding of technology and a decent appreciation for how technology interplays with society. That doesn't make him infallible or anything, but it does cause me to want to understand how to put his story into perspective.
Is he one of those who were paid off? Was he approached by someone selling hype in the form of a good story and then so intrigued by the issues that he forgot to check whether the citations he was given were legit? How did he reach a conclusion no one else did? Is he just an idiot? Has he sold out ethics for a provocative book?
He certainly sounded like he genuinely cared about the idea of saving the world from what it seems clear he perceives as environmental whackos just making stuff up. He seems to take a lot of time to research things, and I assume he's neither hurting for money nor incapable of writing a best-selling book with the opposite position if that's where the data led. I listened on audiobook, which made it hard to go back and do reference checking, but it sounds heavily footnoted when he makes his claims, and I presume someone has tracked some of those. Maybe they'll share their results here.
It leads me to wonder if he is missing something... or if I am. How does one sort this out?
And a side note (just to keep this on topic of the Carbon Tax): Even in the case Crichton is right and everyone else is wrong and there's no issue at present, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to "practice" responding to a crisis. Until population growth and resource use is under control, we're either already in crisis or on the path to having a real crisis. And when that happens, we'll need to understand what sociological mechanisms are productive for pulling things into control because we'll need to resolve things quickly. (Experience with the World Trade Center says people will throw rights and justice out the window and just ask to be safe if push comes to shove--look at what happened with the Patriot Act. I'd like to avoid kneejerk moves toward protective dictatorships down the line by doing something a little less harsh now, and a Carbon Tax, whatever you think of it, is certainly more moderate than other extreme measures that could come later if carbon issues got more severe.) Just as the original Internet worm alerted people to the issue of virus control in a way that probably avoided a later surprise attack by something more harmful on the "first try", one could argue that even the expense of a "practice" run on this was worth the time. If Crichton is right. And if he's wrong, it's all the more urgent.
To help us navigate the goofily drawn line between planet and dog, perhaps it would be "civil" of us to just create the abstract notion of a "union of particles orbiting the sun". We could then define Pluto as one of those, and leave the religious issue of which such unions should be marryable to the word "planet" to the respective scientific faiths to sort out. I'm sure that with an appropriate number of masses it will all work out divinely.
From the article:
When the net (Web 0.9, if you will) came online, there was the risk that it would "democratize" the world and destabilize existing power structures. There was the hint of a world filled with micropayments that would result in a meritocracy for those whose content was popular and that everyone wanted to see.
But then AOL and its ilk (CompuServe, NetZero, and so on) came up with a clever plan: Don't charge for the content, since that would mean giving away money to the people producing it. Just charge for access and let the general public become confused about the "subtle" difference between The Internet (provided by myriad, largely unpaid people world-wide) and the network portal (little more than Mosaic/Netscape/IE with a nicer logo--sometimes an IRC bundled in). Since most people had never seen the Internet any other way, they assumed the network was provided by AOL, but it didn't matter if it was or wasn't since they couldn't imagine it any other way. In many cases, they were afraid to shift vendors because they didn't know if anything they were familiar with would still be there.
You'd think eventually they'd catch on. And to some degree they have. Now they think of network providers as a commodity and they switch more freely. But the odd thing is: the portal people have learned an important lesson. It doesn't matter that the users know the access company isn't producing the content. They just want access, and they're still willing to shell out bucks to the people for access. They don't care that this access money doesn't flow to content creators.
So what's new about Web 2.0? Now people will be making cool videos instead of cool text, but someone else will be making money, not the content producers. So what's changed? Nothing.
Anyone who's ever made a web site (for money or for fun) knows the hard part is keeping content ever-different. The fact that content is cheap to produce does not destabilize anything. As long as content comes in, people will pay for access. And money will flow to our keepers--those in control of the network portals.
Again from the article:
It's a useful illusion for them to create. It keeps people thinking there's nothing to rebel against. But most politics is about money and control, and the money and control still comes with the portal providers. Trivial changes to the portals will keep videos from being seen. Trivial changes to costs will make people beg to see "ads" or to do other favors for those in control, in exchange for being able to get another fix of video.
I return to my subject line, as so plainly illustrated in the portrayal of the Watergate scandal by the movie All the President's Men, when the informant "Deep Throat" advises: Follow the money.
If the people whose voices are so important are not regularly, not by accident but by direct consequence of what they do, enriching themselves monetarily, they are only under the illusion of having power. Yes, this is how capitalism works--every person for himself, and too bad for those who offer content and forget to ask for money. I don't need a lesson in that. I'm just pointing out that it's not a revolution in how things work unless something changes. And all of that part has remained the same. All that's changed is the nature of the content. Structurally, this enhances the stability of the existing system by enhancing the quality of t
I think the issue might be simpler than it's being made in the article. Here's my take:
Math is taught badly. People don't "learn math" due to teaching. They mostly succeed due to self-learning and otherwise fail and get out as gracefully as they can.
So who learns it on their own? People who don't require a lot of interaction. Loners. People who don't need social interaction to succeed.
And when then when you measure whether mathematicians are loners and perhaps lonely/unhappy? Well, it's not exactly statistically random sample of the population you've started with. You've practically selected for such people in the premise.
Then we make the process feed back on itself. Who becomes math teachers? Mathematicians. What do they know? They know math. But they don't always know why they know it. It seemed easy to them, compared to their classmates. So they believe in the teaching tactics they were shown, even though they didn't work for most people. So they use those same tactics a lot of the time. Why not? They're a proven success. And someone whose primary credential is teaching, not math, may have a huge barrier to getting to teach anything advanced since they probably didn't get to a lot of Math in that particular degree path. So we get a lot more of the same.
(A related problem, that I've expounded about on my web site in my critique of No Child Left Behind, is that we try to replicate, city by city, the development of a fresh curriculum for teaching math. We rely on teachers in town after town to come up with a teaching plan, a good presentation, and testing materials rather than just finding one or two or ten people who can present it well and centralizing that. What a waste. If we built computers like we teach math students, we'd be putting chip fabrication plants in each city, and wondering why people were so unhappy with the quality of computer hardware. And we'd be creating No Town's Chip Manufacturing Plant Left Behind programs to try to figure out why small towns couldn't keep pace with large ones. Centralization of effort and distributing value is something that pays huge dividends in both economy of scale and product quality. If kids could re-watch a presentation on video when they didn't get something, back it up, freeze frame it, etc., it would offer great capabilities we don't have with classes now. And it would free human teachers in each town to focus on question answering and helping people in need rather than doing mundane preparation work that is redundant with prep work done by the analogous people in every other town.)
Well, the reason it's called a "trade mark" and not a "trade name" is that it's allowed to just be a shape. For example, it may well be that there are lots of references to things being 3 meters long (3m) in the net, but 3M's logo doesn't come into jeopoardy as a result of that...
I have to wonder if this suit would have been decided differently if Google's search were strictly case-sensitive. For example, a search for marks that are multiword or that contain characters that google thinks are word breaks or even that are not characters at all will be thwarted by this.
Another possibility is that Hormel's IP lawyers made an ineffective case, failing to cite some of the ways that a Google search might not tell the whole story, or might bias the result.
At least one argument I'd have raised is that any word that managed to catch on (requiring little more than it be short and pronounceable) would have certainly been the dominant Google search result when the issue in question is "the informal name for something that occurs in our mailboxes more than anything else on earth". That is, did they take into account the fact that people mention what they see, and that there's more email spam than virtually anything else just because there's so much spam, not because spam didn't get the word out?
A thought exercise: If we'd decided to call spam something else, like "coke", would Coke have lost its trademark? How zealously has Coke defended itself against the illegal drug trade calling its product "coke"? If Coke gets more hits, I suspect it's not because Coke has more zealously defended its name, I suspect it's because it tastes better than SPAM.
So if we make a graph of the tastiness of the item in question and plot whether it's trademark protected even in the case that it had become the common name for spam, would we find that everything on the "not very tasty end and hence not much talked about or sold" got a "no" and everything on the "very tasty and hence highly deployed" got a "yes". Is this "tastiness step function" the definition of what it takes to be protected as intellectual property?
I think Hormel correctly protected its mark by identifying that in a particular form of use, they asserted control, and that the common use was to be distinguished. Barring the use purchase of a large number of armed soldiers world-wide, something thankfully out of the purchase power of even most corporations, I don't see how they could control what the world does. And I thought trade mark law was about telling people what they could and couldn't do, not about telling corporations when they have and haven't spent their precious marketing dollars correctly.
I don't know that I agree that it's that simple. I certainly agree that it will help to keep these two statements separated, but my problem is that in making even this comparison, you've blurred several others that must also be kept straight. That is, in order to get even as far as "78% of the published material" you msut define what "the published material" is.
Does it mean "lines of published material"? "bytes of published material"? Can I write a longer document and have it be counted more?
Does it mean "published documents"? Can I write twice as many documents and have it count more?
Does it mean "sites publishing the info"? That is, are you counting only separate sources? If you are, are you verifying they're really differently owned and controlled?
It sounds to me like there's a risk that Google is creating out of whole cloth a brand new industry, as they did with the industry of "getting you placement in search engines". This one will be "getting you placed in truth engines". Not that people didn't try to manipulate truth before. But if you centralize the evaluation of truth in such a way that you can finitely enumerate the choices, you allow greater manipulation of those with weak minds.
I have for a long time predicted that truth would be obfuscated by a flood of propaganda, a la Rivest's chaffing. I think this kind of centralization will accelerate the arrival and/or dominance of a world full of that. It's coming anyway, but no need to hurry it. We need time as a culture to prepare emotionally, socially, etc. It is simply not the same to say that technology we will eventually have is technology we can judiciously use today.
This is a fair question, and rather than overly defend a statement that I threw in on a bit of whimsy at the end, I'll go the short route and just say: Maybe it's just as creepy. But I want to underscore that this statement, which I said partly just to be provocative, is dancing around a true philosophical/religious issue (where in the context of this paragraph I'll define religion to be "the pursuit of the answer to unanswerable questions like whether there's a reason we're here at all, what happens after death, where did the Universe come from, and is there any point to existence if we're doomed to die soon (as individuals) or later (as a society, due to supernova, heat death of the universe, or whatever)" rather than as the dogmatic attempt to answer such questions by fiat, which is more how I was using religion in my provocative remark). I didn't mean to say that computers can't assess truth, I meant to ask the question: if computers are to do this for us, what are we retaining to ourselves? Because it follows not logically but pragmatically that a huge number of people are lazy, and once told that the computer can assess truth, they'll simply believe it rather than work hard to find their own truth. And also, if not today then in some tomorrow, there is a likely scenario where people are forced to ask: are we the dispensible ones or are machines, and where machines might be asking the same question, and where it might be an us/them choice. Some people believe machines will eventually replace us, and in a distant future where machines were actually smarter, that doesn't disturb me. What disturbs me is if computers displace us when they are not in fact yet smart nor wise nor even intelligent but have only misassessed that they are because an arbitrary probability calculation has been mistaken for Truth with a capital T.
As long as we are still asking questions about truth, I think we're on track. Google as an entity for asking questions of the world does not disturb me (well, not as much). Google as an entity for dispensing answers that require computation disturbs me more. Because I want "competition" and the ability to challenge. If Google can tell me who's lying, how much bigger a leap is it to tell me who I should vote for? Hey, why not just let it assess public policy and say what's good and what's not? I don't own the resources to challenge that. Nor do I know anyone who does. So I guess we'll just have to take it's word. So it starts to resemble a religion, a government, a prison in ways that are at least disturbing and where any rational person would say we should err on the side of asking questions and challenging assumptions, not simply assuming "this is fine" until it's too late.
So it's impossible to write an algorithm that requires, employs, benefits from, or otherwise involves lying? I remember seeing papers out of Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL) on this issue decades ago and being fascinated by the issues of whether lying would optimize variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, for example. A quick web search for terms relating to this (heh--thanks Google!) turned up The Case of the Lying Postman: Decoys and Deception in Negotiation and Economic Implications of Agent Technology and E-Commerce as well as others. I haven't read these references myself, but I'm betting they'll support my