I'm sure our Republican Congressmen are thinking how great the Grokster legislation is working, then, and will use it as a model for many other situations where they want to make it impossible for new businesses to compete with old ones. I think at this rate, in 20 years or so the US economy will be on par with places like Serbia or Mongolia.
For paleontologists to be surprised about such a thing seems quite stupid. There have been lots of examples of other animals evolving one way or the other depending on the conditions.
A really easy example is mammal evolution. At the time of the dinosaur extinction, mammals mostly consisted of very generalized, small omnivores. From there, the easiest evolutionary advantage for them to develop was to get bigger and become more carnivores so they could eat the other mammals. Size is also often an advantage in competition for other things such as territory and sexual rights. So they got bigger and you'd many early large mammals are nightmarish-looking carnivores. The ancestor of the pig, and the ancester of the whales and hippos, both make excellent examples.
After a point, larger stops being better because it takes so much hunting and good predator/prey ratios to maintain. From there, the easy evolutionary advantage turns to diversification of foodstuffs.
Maintaining size still helps because it reduces the number of predators you can be subject to. It helps to be a herbivore if you want to maintain your size because most organic matter is plant life. Herbivores can become very specialized because plants develop defenses, particularly poisons. The herbivores have to develop immunities or develop instincts as to what minerals or other plants contain the right counter-agents to consume to offset the poisonous plants they eat.
Once a herbivore species refines itself well enough, its population explodes and then provides a better source for the carnivores, who begin to spring back. And we all have heard about the "arms race" that predators and herbivores develop in a stable ecology.
With species occupying the large niches, evolutionary advantage goes to specialization and now you get more diversity.
Once something horrible happens to the environment, it's the small generalists that survive best, and we're back where we started.
I'm certain this sort of cycle has repeated itself from the very early points of life, such as the beginnings of life, Burgess Shale, amphibian, and dinosaur periods. The cycles just get less extreme as the environment stabilizes. When there's a major change, it has to start over again.
Those are the "real rules" only if enough people have decided that abrogate their personal responsibility to their world and their future.
"Everyone does it" doesn't excuse the sociopathic level of behavior that results from that mind-set.
Just because you work for a corporation doesn't make the corporation's "wants" more important than the needs of humanity.
The most extreme example I know if are the Army officers who ordered their troops to massacre Vietnamese villagers because it would make their stats look better, and possibly help their careers. Or you could look to the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. Thousands dead and the corporate types responsible, were "merely" cutting corners to serve the corporation's interest.
As humans, we need to stop letting unethical behavior be acceptable. Thus higher ethical standards are an important thing to support.
Maybe "you lose" in the business environment by not letting children get enslaved to make your shoes. I think you're more a winner by fighting that kind of decision with everything you've got.
It's driving me crazy that anyone speaks of Carly like she actually was ever trying to do anything other than rip off HP. She had a track record of being a friggin' pirate, and the board wanted to know how to strip HP bare, so they hired her to show 'em.
What surprised me was them firing her like they did, which shows there's people with enough power still left on the board who actually give a shit whether HP goes on for a few months longer. Probably too little, too late, but better than nothing...
I wish I could provide names, so obviously this is nothing for you folks but unsupported rumor. Oh, well. An acquaintance of mine who works at Los Alamos claims that she was told by co-workers that some congressperson wanted the lab to be run by the university in their state, and rigged the whole thing to bolster the case for it. The gain was millions of pork dollars for that university.
I griped to my son about the fact that you couldn't strafe in RE4, and he pointed out that if you could, the game would be far too easy to beat. Which, thinking about it, I guess is true. That certain amount of non-control makes things a little harder, and a little spookier. Similar to the earlier games, the very lack of control over view actually heightened the fear factor. I wish they could make a game where you moved naturally and could still be spooked, though.
In the near future it will be illegal for anyone to interact else in any way. If you're smart, you'll buy a plot of land so you can grow your own food and make your own clothes before land transactions become illegal, too.
Some young girls in Colorado were successfully sued for giving a neighbor cookies, for crying out loud.
The article itself, and a lot of these "users need to be made aware" replies, I find very irritating.
In the U.S., at least, the attitude of everyone, everywhere is, the user is never accountable for learning anything, no matter how much training is given. Since the managers are all at least as inept and lazy as everyone working for them, they think that's a reasonable attitude to take.
I've had users delete critical files and blame me for their poor training. "I don't even know what files ARE. You should give me training if you want this to work." My response is, "It's not my job to give you training. You were supposed to know how to use this software before you started working here. This is like you smashed your car into other cars in an intersection, and when the cops arrive, you yell at them for not teaching you to drive."
Of course, management doesn't support us disabling such users' accounts until they can prove they can "drive".
Remember, too, that MOST people fall into the "have to pee on the electric fence" group, and no amount of training will help them see the light. They'll have to lose their life savings to password-stealing crooks before they'll begin to think any of this is important.
As for the article, you can tell the author doesn't do IT for a living. Otherwise, he wouldn't be blaming bad security admins. He'd know that no matter how good the security admin guy is, he can't get support from management to pay for a secure authentication system. Especially when you work for a large enterprise, such systems can't be put in piecemeal, and piecemeal systems aren't practical.
When you try to explain to management why we need better authentication methods, they just look at you like you're a tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic. Even if you manage to get it into your budget, all the pointy-headed bastards can see is a line item that can be cut, more money to go into the board of directors' pockets.
The article is like some bad "How to do Stuff" TV show. "How to cure cancer...First, create a marvelous cure for cancer. Then have a party."
"How to solve the password problem...first, put in a wonderful authentication system. Then have a party."
What I thought...it's like during the Cold War, the US gummint would announce they were no longer going to use a certain model of spyplane, and try to make it sound like they were no longer spying. But it really meant that spyplane was obsolete and had been replaced with something better.
With normal peoples' allergy to thinking about anything, it doesn't matter much how much effort is put into trying to educate them.
They still will not think critically enough to protect themselves from being fooled, on top of which they'll continue to believe whatever makes them comfortable at the moment.
So it'll continue to be more effective for people with an agenda to distort facts and figures, or even simply lie.
It's a shiney new right-wing conservative world. The law is only to keep the little people under control. The rich don't have to obey it. Out with old-fashioned ideas about equality and freedom, in with even older barbarian ideas about tyranny, torture and slavery. 52 million lemmings can't be wrong!
To you people, made-up information that fits your preconceptions are facts, and facts that make you uncomfortable are liberal propaganda. Either that or you missed your lithium dose this morning. I don't know what the hell you guys get out of supporting the administration. They're making you poor just as fast as they're making everyone else poor. I guess you're all just stupid.
Just to join the chorus to say how intuitively obvious this is.
The Science Channel had a good program recently about the stages humans have to go through in order to learn how to lie. A big part of it is the ability to model what other people know and what is detectable as differences in reality.
For instance, in the show, children age 3 and under couldn't fathom that anyone had information they didn't, and also couldn't understand that others didn't know everything they do. So when they lie, they make up information about things they know nothing about, and assume you know nothing about, either. One example is, you play Guess Which Hand? and they just show you which hand the object is in because they know which it is, and think therefore that you automatically know that which hand it is, also.
Clearly, a lot more of the brain is absolutely going to be involved in lying than in truth-telling. That is, if you're actually trying to deceive someone and aren't just being sarcastic:
--You have to recall events as they were, so you're doing exactly the work there that you would if telling the straight truth. --In addition, you're modeling the physical characteristics of events and whether they could fit with what the other person has and will experience during the time period affected by the lie. --And on top of that, the emotive portions are going to be relied on for modeling the emotive characteristics of those you're lying to so you can figure out A) are they buying it? B)if suspicious, how far might they go to unravel the deception?
I'm sure really bad liars use less of their brain to make their lies, and are thus less succesful.
How many times has someone lied to you, and your reaction was, "They lied to me" AND "They think I'm stupid!" It isn't so much they think you're stupid, it's that it's very hard for people to lie successfully to people who are smarter than they are.
The next ice age (or whatever you call it when the glaciers are coming, because we've been in an 'ice age' for the past 2-1/2 million years) has been modeled to be in full swing by 2900. Unlike the last one, which lasted a mere 20,000 years, you can bet the Yellowstone supervolcano will go off and deepen this one, and maybe it'll last 100,000 years or more.
In the next 80-150 years, due to global warming, the carrying capacity of the earth is going to be drastically reduced. So we need to put something together while we still have population and resources to do it.
...and they still won't give a fraction of a shit about security. Convenience is God to 98% of all the users out there. Their attitude is, "the (programmers/techs who installed this) shouldn't have made it possible, anyway. I have no responsibility for anything I do. Plus I hate to learn and think at all." And of course their managers are just as irresponsible and hold no one accountable except for tech people, for anything that happens via computer.
The corporations will use their super DMCA powers to virtually halt all progress. Open source will become outlawed. One day in the future, no one will own anything, only rent it, due to DMCA and RFID tags. Prices will rise, and choices and quality will diminish, until an outside observer will no longer be able to distinguish a 21st century man from a 14th century one, except the 14th century man at least owned his own clothes and had some privacy from his master.
IT won't happen in 50 years, for certain, for half the jobs. Maybe 10% of jobs. He forgets a lot of development work has to be done on the artificial intelligence for it to become cheap enough. For instance, what's the power source supposed to be? Has everyone forgotten oil is running out in just a few years? You really think we'll just pull power out of our A** and be back on track that quick? These androids aren't going to be just sitting there making computations. They'll be using a lot of power running making macroscopic motions.
Also, there's a chance we'll re-elect Bush and he'll eventually reduce human labor and our economy in this country to the level of our American neighbors to the south, and it'll take even longer for androids to become cost-effective in America. Yeah, that's probably just what he's thinking, too. It's all to put off the grim day the robots take over.
But the 100 year view is too pessimistic (from the android view). He said, "develop human-level artificial intelligence". Not "develop idiot machines just like today's that don't have any learning ability". So programming is not the issue. It's the behavioral routines that condition the robot to learn, yet tweaking it so that robots are still willing to do shit jobs forever instead of going on strike.
Why even mention supreme beings existing or not? When something has no evidence to suggest its likelihood or existence, it's unnecessary to mention it. And very unnecessary to try to make it sound like theory is pointing that way, when it's not pointing in any darn direction.
Why didn't he say the multiverse theory suggests the possibility that exactly 5 ice cream cones with a diameter greater than 1 decillion decillion decillion Milky Way galaxies, with glowing green sprinkles, and zero intelligence, are responsible for everything being the way it is?
He has the same evidence pointing to that as he has that points to a Supreme Being.
The proof of how deadly dangerous these fully electronic voting systems are in the pudding. Check this story from Scoop, about Diebold electronic chicanery in the Georgia elections.
We need to Fight to prevent any voting system that does not generate physical evidence. And we need to Fight to ensure that any interested voter has the ability to assist with or audit the counting and recounts.
That's if we want to live in a democracy. And the only reason we've lost what we have is so many people are too trusting and too lazy to act.
You plainly don't remember the 1970's, when all the crows came home to roost from all the nuclear plants we had built. The problems were numerous: handling the nuclear waste (still a major problem), shoddy construction, radiactive pollution of the air, water and soil, inept management, major corruption between government officials and the nuclear power industry, uncovering of the endless lies told by government and the industry about the costs and consequences of nuclear power. That's why for so many years no new plants have been built. We have a severely bad taste in our mouths left over from what happened. Why do you think we can trust all those people now, when our administration is even more corrupt than those that came before, and with electronic voting machines being rolled out, programmed to give the results the Republicans want in elections, less caring about what anybody in our "democracy" thinks about what they're going to do. Nuclear power -- sounds great, until you find out what it really involves doing to ourselves.
I didn't have time to read everyone's response to your comment. PATRIOT II HASN'T EVEN BEEN INTRODUCED AS A BILL. The Justice Department even denies having anything except a "rough draft" of it.
You need to wake up, and pay attention, and work to PREVENT bills like Patriot II from coming through. Don't assume that they are going to pass and smirk with an "I told you so" look when they do pass and you haven't personally put any effort into preventing it.
Democracy takes work. Too many people are sitting on their butts complaining and not acting.
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I'm sure our Republican Congressmen are thinking how great the Grokster legislation is working, then, and will use it as a model for many other situations where they want to make it impossible for new businesses to compete with old ones. I think at this rate, in 20 years or so the US economy will be on par with places like Serbia or Mongolia.
For paleontologists to be surprised about such a thing seems quite stupid. There have been lots of examples of other animals evolving one way or the other depending on the conditions.
A really easy example is mammal evolution. At the time of the dinosaur extinction, mammals mostly consisted of very generalized, small omnivores. From there, the easiest evolutionary advantage for them to develop was to get bigger and become more carnivores so they could eat the other mammals. Size is also often an advantage in competition for other things such as territory and sexual rights. So they got bigger and you'd many early large mammals are nightmarish-looking carnivores. The ancestor of the pig, and the ancester of the whales and hippos, both make excellent examples.
After a point, larger stops being better because it takes so much hunting and good predator/prey ratios to maintain. From there, the easy evolutionary advantage turns to diversification of foodstuffs.
Maintaining size still helps because it reduces the number of predators you can be subject to. It helps to be a herbivore if you want to maintain your size because most organic matter is plant life. Herbivores can become very specialized because plants develop defenses, particularly poisons. The herbivores have to develop immunities or develop instincts as to what minerals or other plants contain the right counter-agents to consume to offset the poisonous plants they eat.
Once a herbivore species refines itself well enough, its population explodes and then provides a better source for the carnivores, who begin to spring back. And we all have heard about the "arms race" that predators and herbivores develop in a stable ecology.
With species occupying the large niches, evolutionary advantage goes to specialization and now you get more diversity.
Once something horrible happens to the environment, it's the small generalists that survive best, and we're back where we started.
I'm certain this sort of cycle has repeated itself from the very early points of life, such as the beginnings of life, Burgess Shale, amphibian, and dinosaur periods. The cycles just get less extreme as the environment stabilizes. When there's a major change, it has to start over again.
...and anyone with any sense at all would know that $2 bills would be more expensive to make than to just get at the bank.
Those are the "real rules" only if enough people have decided that abrogate their personal responsibility to their world and their future.
"Everyone does it" doesn't excuse the sociopathic level of behavior that results from that mind-set.
Just because you work for a corporation doesn't make the corporation's "wants" more important than the needs of humanity.
The most extreme example I know if are the Army officers who ordered their troops to massacre Vietnamese villagers because it would make their stats look better, and possibly help their careers. Or you could look to the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. Thousands dead and the corporate types responsible, were "merely" cutting corners to serve the corporation's interest.
As humans, we need to stop letting unethical behavior be acceptable. Thus higher ethical standards are an important thing to support.
Maybe "you lose" in the business environment by not letting children get enslaved to make your shoes. I think you're more a winner by fighting that kind of decision with everything you've got.
It's driving me crazy that anyone speaks of Carly like she actually was ever trying to do anything other than rip off HP. She had a track record of being a friggin' pirate, and the board wanted to know how to strip HP bare, so they hired her to show 'em.
What surprised me was them firing her like they did, which shows there's people with enough power still left on the board who actually give a shit whether HP goes on for a few months longer. Probably too little, too late, but better than nothing...
I wish I could provide names, so obviously this is nothing for you folks but unsupported rumor. Oh, well. An acquaintance of mine who works at Los Alamos claims that she was told by co-workers that some congressperson wanted the lab to be run by the university in their state, and rigged the whole thing to bolster the case for it. The gain was millions of pork dollars for that university.
I griped to my son about the fact that you couldn't strafe in RE4, and he pointed out that if you could, the game would be far too easy to beat. Which, thinking about it, I guess is true. That certain amount of non-control makes things a little harder, and a little spookier. Similar to the earlier games, the very lack of control over view actually heightened the fear factor. I wish they could make a game where you moved naturally and could still be spooked, though.
In the near future it will be illegal for anyone to interact else in any way. If you're smart, you'll buy a plot of land so you can grow your own food and make your own clothes before land transactions become illegal, too.
Some young girls in Colorado were successfully sued for giving a neighbor cookies, for crying out loud.
The article itself, and a lot of these "users need to be made aware" replies, I find very irritating.
In the U.S., at least, the attitude of everyone, everywhere is, the user is never accountable for learning anything, no matter how much training is given. Since the managers are all at least as inept and lazy as everyone working for them, they think that's a reasonable attitude to take.
I've had users delete critical files and blame me for their poor training. "I don't even know what files ARE. You should give me training if you want this to work." My response is, "It's not my job to give you training. You were supposed to know how to use this software before you started working here. This is like you smashed your car into other cars in an intersection, and when the cops arrive, you yell at them for not teaching you to drive."
Of course, management doesn't support us disabling such users' accounts until they can prove they can "drive".
Remember, too, that MOST people fall into the "have to pee on the electric fence" group, and no amount of training will help them see the light. They'll have to lose their life savings to password-stealing crooks before they'll begin to think any of this is important.
As for the article, you can tell the author doesn't do IT for a living. Otherwise, he wouldn't be blaming bad security admins. He'd know that no matter how good the security admin guy is, he can't get support from management to pay for a secure authentication system. Especially when you work for a large enterprise, such systems can't be put in piecemeal, and piecemeal systems aren't practical.
When you try to explain to management why we need better authentication methods, they just look at you like you're a tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic. Even if you manage to get it into your budget, all the pointy-headed bastards can see is a line item that can be cut, more money to go into the board of directors' pockets.
The article is like some bad "How to do Stuff" TV show. "How to cure cancer...First, create a marvelous cure for cancer. Then have a party."
"How to solve the password problem...first, put in a wonderful authentication system. Then have a party."
What I thought...it's like during the Cold War, the US gummint would announce they were no longer going to use a certain model of spyplane, and try to make it sound like they were no longer spying. But it really meant that spyplane was obsolete and had been replaced with something better.
With normal peoples' allergy to thinking about anything, it doesn't matter much how much effort is put into trying to educate them.
They still will not think critically enough to protect themselves from being fooled, on top of which they'll continue to believe whatever makes them comfortable at the moment.
So it'll continue to be more effective for people with an agenda to distort facts and figures, or even simply lie.
It's a shiney new right-wing conservative world. The law is only to keep the little people under control. The rich don't have to obey it. Out with old-fashioned ideas about equality and freedom, in with even older barbarian ideas about tyranny, torture and slavery. 52 million lemmings can't be wrong!
To you people, made-up information that fits your preconceptions are facts, and facts that make you uncomfortable are liberal propaganda. Either that or you missed your lithium dose this morning. I don't know what the hell you guys get out of supporting the administration. They're making you poor just as fast as they're making everyone else poor. I guess you're all just stupid.
Just to join the chorus to say how intuitively obvious this is.
The Science Channel had a good program recently about the stages humans have to go through in order to learn how to lie. A big part of it is the ability to model what other people know and what is detectable as differences in reality.
For instance, in the show, children age 3 and under couldn't fathom that anyone had information they didn't, and also couldn't understand that others didn't know everything they do. So when they lie, they make up information about things they know nothing about, and assume you know nothing about, either. One example is, you play Guess Which Hand? and they just show you which hand the object is in because they know which it is, and think therefore that you automatically know that which hand it is, also.
Clearly, a lot more of the brain is absolutely going to be involved in lying than in truth-telling. That is, if you're actually trying to deceive someone and aren't just being sarcastic:
--You have to recall events as they were, so you're doing exactly the work there that you would if telling the straight truth.
--In addition, you're modeling the physical characteristics of events and whether they could fit with what the other person has and will experience during the time period affected by the lie.
--And on top of that, the emotive portions are going to be relied on for modeling the emotive characteristics of those you're lying to so you can figure out A) are they buying it? B)if suspicious, how far might they go to unravel the deception?
I'm sure really bad liars use less of their brain to make their lies, and are thus less succesful.
How many times has someone lied to you, and your reaction was, "They lied to me" AND "They think I'm stupid!" It isn't so much they think you're stupid, it's that it's very hard for people to lie successfully to people who are smarter than they are.
We need something like this soon, anyway.
The next ice age (or whatever you call it when the glaciers are coming, because we've been in an 'ice age' for the past 2-1/2 million years) has been modeled to be in full swing by 2900. Unlike the last one, which lasted a mere 20,000 years, you can bet the Yellowstone supervolcano will go off and deepen this one, and maybe it'll last 100,000 years or more.
In the next 80-150 years, due to global warming, the carrying capacity of the earth is going to be drastically reduced. So we need to put something together while we still have population and resources to do it.
...and they still won't give a fraction of a shit about security. Convenience is God to 98% of all the users out there. Their attitude is, "the (programmers/techs who installed this) shouldn't have made it possible, anyway. I have no responsibility for anything I do. Plus I hate to learn and think at all."
And of course their managers are just as irresponsible and hold no one accountable except for tech people, for anything that happens via computer.
The corporations will use their super DMCA powers to virtually halt all progress. Open source will become outlawed. One day in the future, no one will own anything, only rent it, due to DMCA and RFID tags. Prices will rise, and choices and quality will diminish, until an outside observer will no longer be able to distinguish a 21st century man from a 14th century one, except the 14th century man at least owned his own clothes and had some privacy from his master.
IT won't happen in 50 years, for certain, for half the jobs. Maybe 10% of jobs. He forgets a lot of development work has to be done on the artificial intelligence for it to become cheap enough. For instance, what's the power source supposed to be? Has everyone forgotten oil is running out in just a few years? You really think we'll just pull power out of our A** and be back on track that quick? These androids aren't going to be just sitting there making computations. They'll be using a lot of power running making macroscopic motions.
Also, there's a chance we'll re-elect Bush and he'll eventually reduce human labor and our economy in this country to the level of our American neighbors to the south, and it'll take even longer for androids to become cost-effective in America. Yeah, that's probably just what he's thinking, too. It's all to put off the grim day the robots take over.
But the 100 year view is too pessimistic (from the android view). He said, "develop human-level artificial intelligence". Not "develop idiot machines just like today's that don't have any learning ability". So programming is not the issue. It's the behavioral routines that condition the robot to learn, yet tweaking it so that robots are still willing to do shit jobs forever instead of going on strike.
Why even mention supreme beings existing or not? When something has no evidence to suggest its likelihood or existence, it's unnecessary to mention it. And very unnecessary to try to make it sound like theory is pointing that way, when it's not pointing in any darn direction.
Why didn't he say the multiverse theory suggests the possibility that exactly 5 ice cream cones with a diameter greater than 1 decillion decillion decillion Milky Way galaxies, with glowing green sprinkles, and zero intelligence, are responsible for everything being the way it is?
He has the same evidence pointing to that as he has that points to a Supreme Being.
The proof of how deadly dangerous these fully electronic voting systems are in the pudding. Check this story from Scoop, about Diebold electronic chicanery in the Georgia elections.
We need to Fight to prevent any voting system that does not generate physical evidence. And we need to Fight to ensure that any interested voter has the ability to assist with or audit the counting and recounts.
That's if we want to live in a democracy. And the only reason we've lost what we have is so many people are too trusting and too lazy to act.
You plainly don't remember the 1970's, when all the crows came home to roost from all the nuclear plants we had built. The problems were numerous: handling the nuclear waste (still a major problem), shoddy construction, radiactive pollution of the air, water and soil, inept management, major corruption between government officials and the nuclear power industry, uncovering of the endless lies told by government and the industry about the costs and consequences of nuclear power. That's why for so many years no new plants have been built. We have a severely bad taste in our mouths left over from what happened. Why do you think we can trust all those people now, when our administration is even more corrupt than those that came before, and with electronic voting machines being rolled out, programmed to give the results the Republicans want in elections, less caring about what anybody in our "democracy" thinks about what they're going to do. Nuclear power -- sounds great, until you find out what it really involves doing to ourselves.
I didn't have time to read everyone's response to your comment. PATRIOT II HASN'T EVEN BEEN INTRODUCED AS A BILL. The Justice Department even denies having anything except a "rough draft" of it.
You need to wake up, and pay attention, and work to PREVENT bills like Patriot II from coming through. Don't assume that they are going to pass and smirk with an "I told you so" look when they do pass and you haven't personally put any effort into preventing it.
Democracy takes work. Too many people are sitting on their butts complaining and not acting.