Let's see if I have this right.. you broadcast your packets on a public network where you already assume anyone can potentially get access to them, then you worry about what happens when the government steps in and asks to receive a copy of those packets?
Like what, the government isn't already part of "anybody"?
I'm far more worried about entities that are not part of the government getting a copy of my packets. Flawed though their procedures, checks and balances may be, at least the government folks have some. What procedures, checks and balances are on the criminals?
They make their money from advertising, and they use Nielsen ratings to decide how many people are seeing their advertising. They know people can avoid watching the commercials if they use a vcr or tivo..
Yup, you hit it right on the head. The Neilsen rating system discounts viewers who record the show for later viewing because they tend to watch fewer commercials. And the more intelligent, more technically savvy people tend to find ways to watch even fewer commercials. Now, if only more of use would be willing to watch commericals, good shows like Firefly could stay on the air. Guess they are just missing their demographic completely.. put sommericals on for the latest piece of technology and you'd have at least some of that demographic interested in seeing the commercials too:-)
This is perhaps the most far-reaching ethical question I can see facing our society right now. Just because technology allows one to do something that was impossible or merely impractical before, is it ethical to do it now?
I can think of lots of ways to get into this one. Here's a few:
Is copying parts of web pages ethical? They are all copyrighted, but since technology make it so easy, and they probably expected it anyway...
HTML allows one to create a page that has pictures on another machine. A link to someone's picture isn't a copy of it, so doesn't violate copyright. However, it does use up their bandwidth. It also separates their content from their image (potentially robbing them of the self-promotion that justified their making the image available on the web). Is it ethical to do this just because the technology was designed with this in mind?
You have found that some has created a deep link to one of your pictures. You don't like that. Is it ethical to change it to something that might embarass them or get them into trouble (e.g. change it to hate propaganda, or porn)?
Technology allows credit bureaus to create large databases of lots of data on individuals. Just because technology allows them to correlate all the data and attach it to individuals, should they do so? Should they then sell the information in those databases to anyone who wants to pay?
Aside from all the music and movie copying hoopla, how about this one that I actually ran into:
On MS's Age of Empires EULA, it states explicitly that the owner is allowed to make a backup copy. However, since the game is copy protected, one must break the copy protection to do as they are permitted in the license. Unfortunately, that breaks the license.
As I see it, there are two ethical quesitons about this. The first is the obvious of whether the owner has the right to make a backup copy or not. The other is whether the company should be excending rights that they forbid in other ways.
using some sort of system to raise or lower the pendulum by just a couple of millimeters will affect the timing rate by several seconds a day
Um.. isn't a mechanical way of pushing or pulling the pendulum around be a doomed design? Wouldn't it have to make the correction with every swing of the pendulum?
There is not concrete place you can draw a line and say "this much alteration is okay, but this much changes the story"
I disagree. Some alterations can and must be done, some are acceptable, some are questionable, and yet others are downright unethical.
Debayering the image that comes off the CCD is a must. Sharpening it a little to make up for the lack of resolution the CCD's color mask introduces is clearly in the acceptable category.
Further sharpening to make the image come out in print better is (IMHO) in the questionable category.
These are all mechanical alterations, done to the entire image, some of them even without the user's knowledge.
Then there's the manipulations that are intended to mislead. The ones that replace details, selectively obscure them or selectively emphasize them with an intent to deceive by not mentioning that they were manipulated. That's how I came to have a page of our local newspaper on my wall at work that features a 3 ft (1m) lotus bloom. Its also where the picture (I wish I had saved) that features two discrete planes of focus that could not possibly have been captured photographically (too many clues that indicate otherwise). Had these not been presented by an organization that attempted to tell me that they were accurate representations of reality, I would have let it pass.
As for pictures being held to a higher standard for their "direct integrity", they have never been truely accurate representations of what the photographer's eye saw. In fact, a lot of early photography was explicitly an intent to deceive the eye through manipulation. Holding photographs in such high regard as bastions of truth and integrity is probably a mistake.
Actually, the version number was not in the file name but was burried inside the DLL itself. When you opened a DLL, you told it what version you wanted it to act like. Newer versions of a library could tell you you can't have that version, tell you yes and ignore the version info, or tell you yes and use it to alter the behavior to retain the old buggy behavior (which was clearly the way they desired things to be done).
You could also wildcard which version you were asking for so you'd always get the behavior of the latest-greatest version available. This was probably the achillies heel of the system -- it was possible to skip the version system and create versionitis problems. Worse, the code examples in the books did that, so most programmers probably ended up writing their code that way anyway.
..I think whether NVidia... support OpenGL is far more important than what MS thinks
That would be true except for the fact that MS owns the OpenGL API layer on Windows. They can (and will) revoke that layer as a way of pushing the remaining few holdouts over to their Direct3D technology. Without the API layer, you can have all the OpenGL support you want in the driver and HW and be completely unable to get to it. Furthermore, MS can prevent anyone else from creating an OpenGL API layer that installs on MS. I figure the next major release of their OS will be where they'll start this process.
Worse is that since MS owns Direct3D, they can prevent it from being used for any OS they don't want it used on. This will result in OpenGL only (maybe, unless MS does indeed owns patents that control it) on Linux and Direct3D only on Windows. Yet another tool MS will use to try to kill the Linux threat.
Seems to me that the Open Source community needs to have already invented their own 3D library and API if they want there to be a common 3D graphics library for Linux and Windows.
The Windows GUI does particularly badly at the fuzz test...
I'll grant you that the Windows GUI is worse. Its derived from their old 16-bit verison which wasn't architected with today's knowledge. I'll also grant that it is less secure and that programmers are sloppier.
Unfortunately, I wasn't talking about just the underlying windowing system (although that is less stable on Linux too), but rather the desktop apps that I have to use to get my work done. For example, take the two bugs: the KDE calculator doesn't give even vaguely correct answers in fixed-point mode, and the X windowing system can silently rewrite it's configuration file when a button on one's monitor is pressed. I've experienced both first hand. Neither is a problem on Microsoft's GUI/desktop and can only be explained by lack of testing.
This is why I say that if the code statistics included the windowing system and desktop apps, it probably would have shown a different answer.
How about using a larger sample of code before making such bold statements.
Yes. Include the desktop, windowing system and user level apps. Given the amount of bugs I encounter, they would get the exact opposite story. This sort of yanks the legs out of the adage that people working without a deadline for fun are producing better code -- if it were really true, then Open Source code would be better from the initial release instead of worse.
Of course, what do I know.. perhaps the TCP/IP stack is the only part of Linux that most users typically use out of it:-)
there are real possibilities of breakthroughs that would allow for the construction of such a space elevator
Allow yes. However, whether we should permit the attempt anytime soon is another question. Not from an ethical standpoint, but from an engineering one.
Bridge building is probably a resonable metaphore for this. Major bridges like the Golden Gate bridge were not the result of the first attempt at building a bridge. Lots fell down in the learning process, some castrophically. I can't imagine many of them were built with the knowledge that they would fail in exactly the way they did, which means the people who built them thought they knew enough about the forces and materials being used to get it right.
Unlike bridge building, where one can start small and practice. There really isn't any learning curve with a space elevator.. either you get it right first time, or a major piece of civil engineering fails. When major pieces of civil engineering fail, generally, a bunch of innocent people die.
So yes, perhaps in a few years we might have materials that are beginning to be capable. However, when we should allow the attempt (for earth) is another question entirely.
A paper is nice but its worthless without experience.
I argee, these studens can't really go out and get that decent paying job without actual experience. However, think of the advantage they will have other other college graduates when they themselves graduate from college. With the kind of start such a program would give them, they will have the opportunity of starting the unix sysadmin learning curve at a run rather than from a standing start like most of their peers. What they make of the opportunity is up to them, but they could do very well.
Heck, they could be the beginnings of the breed of Linux Hacker that RedHat needs to be packaging in every box:-)
If people are only willing to buy on features, where's the incentive to spend development time on bugfixes and usability?
The incentive is when you alienate your repeat customers, who then migrate to another product causing you revenue loss.
Case in point, the wife and I recently were forced to upgrade one of our mainstay apps (didn't work under the new version of the OS). The new version is harder to use, and this from people that already know a previous version of the program.
We have now gone from recommending the program to friends (and have convinced a few to buy it) to not only never wanting to buy another upgrade of it, but not recommending it (we'd actually recommend against it) and actually trying to figure out if it is possible to get the old version to work again.
This company, through their thoughtlessly hosing the user interface, have lost all repeat business, have lost word of mouth advertising, and have actually alienated a customer to the point of trying to not use their investment.
Smart investment for the company or not?
we should see several cameras with X3 technology on the store shelves in time for Christmas. What happened?
The consumers were happy with the current technology?
Sigma introduced a digital SLR-type camera based on this sensor a while back, but
it isn't exactly taking that segment of the digital photographery market by storm either.
If I buy something, I damned well better be able to use it/reinstall it if my computer blows up.
Mark me paranoid, but the info is my tax info. The program is as much a part of the archival data as the.tax file and the paper copies. If there's any question about how I came up with the answers on the paper form, I darn well better be able to install it on another computer so I can access the data and algorithms that went into the conclusion.
Guess my complaint to them last September went unheeded.:-)
Um, I was always taught that the Turing test involved a human holding a "conversation" with some other entity. If they couldn't tell whether they were talking to a computer or a human, then the computer passed.
What do you get if you eliminate the human from the above? Why, a protocol link. Might as well require me to type in TCP/IP packets and consider me human if I make too many erorrs:-)
Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
on
Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 1
Because the professor cannot properly do their job they punish the students?
What a load of crap. I've been on both ends of this issue -- I've been a student looking for distraction and wanting to get something prodcutive done, and I've been a teacher with a student that was unable to be attentive in class due to lack of self control with instant messaging.
As a student, I skipped class or did something else during it. There was one class where I even walked out in the middle every day (I had to go to get the daily change to the programming assignment, and the instructor did say he didn't care if we walked out in the middle).
As a teacher of an elective course, I had a student who was unable to do the assignments due to lack of attention during the (only) 20-minute lectures. Their problem was a stream (every 20-30 seconds) of self-inflicted instant messaging interruptions. Because of it, they couldn't concentrate long enough on what was being said to understand any of it.
As is suggested, I managed to finally make the material interesting enough to that student to get them to be able to do the assignments. What did I do? I unplugged the network connection from their computer ("gee, I don't know why networking isn't working on your computer, but you don't need it anyway"). They then managed to find enough interest in the material being presented to do fairly well in the course (of course, they were behind and never quite caught up).
If I could have just cut assistance off to the student because of their addiction and just let them figure the material out on their own, I would have. However, it would have been difficult to prove they needed help understanding the material because I didn't present it perfectly clearly given their current knowledge, method of learning, grasp of the concepts and mental aptitude vs. they needed help unsderstanding the material because they were too addicted to instant messages to be able to focus on anything for more than 20 seconds at a time.
I set up our new machine for dual boot with Linux (a la RH 7.3) and Win2k. I've shown my wife and daughter a few games that install with the standard Linux distro. Much to my suprise, I started getting calls from home during the workday asking how to boot Linux so they could play some game or another.
So, how about making Linux a choice and letting them decide how much to use it? Show them some of the games available on Linux itself.
Not to mention that when you do load the Nvidia driver, your kernel is henceforth considered "tainted" by proprietary code. Therefore, there is an expectation of proprietary kernel mode drivers.
Seems to me it might be worthwhile looking into the matter if your lawyer has an open mind and might be willing to change his recommendation based on new information. If not, don't waste your time and just do as the lawyer says to do, regardless of how little sense it makes.
Since the signal is optically processed until the very last instant when it is converted to electrical for transmission, is there perhaps an optical encryption method that could be applied?
It sounds like they are optically processing the signal and then converting it to electrical using a special photodiode. Later through, they talk about needing a lens to focus the signal. I'm aware that some radio frequencies can be refracted by matter, but if, as others has said, this frequency range would be stopped by most matter, then what could they be making the lens out of? Or are they pulling a switcheroo and using somethig other than the 120GHz band to demo the technology?
However, general theory is that the airtime is what costs, so he who elects to incurr the airtime pays for it. Since that's the cellphone owner, they get to pay. One doesn't pay to have the phone ring, and all cell phones have caller ID so you can pick and choose whose calls you answer. SMS is a different beast, and you don't get a choice about receiving it or not.
Of course, landline long distance calls are the opposite way -- costs nothing to receive, only to place the call. I chalk cellphone to being different because, being a new media, it just made sense to invent special rules and laws rather than piggyback on existing rules and laws. NOT! More likely, our representitives aren't getting enough money from the old lobbiests and special interests and needed to foster new ones into existence.
As far as people not knowing about it, that is a problem we're trying to solve.
I thought this thing had been up closer to a year, but perhaps not. Either way, 6 months is more than enough time to get the word out and to get significant amounts of people using it -- heck, it covers summer (for the non-natives: summer = when it isn't raining 24/7 and people occupy the square practically 24/7).
So, what we're arguing about here comes down to whether the tried-and-failed system needs to switch channels, or whether Starbucks wants to have all stores the same except one (or want to switch all their stores to a different channel).
Since having people start to use wireless internet there will be good for both organizations (some will like it, but not want to pay for it), it seems obvious to me how this should play out -- capitulate and let Starbucks have whatever channel they want so both services can coexist and grow.
Slashdot Mirror
Like what, the government isn't already part of "anybody"?
I'm far more worried about entities that are not part of the government getting a copy of my packets. Flawed though their procedures, checks and balances may be, at least the government folks have some. What procedures, checks and balances are on the criminals?
Yup, you hit it right on the head. The Neilsen rating system discounts viewers who record the show for later viewing because they tend to watch fewer commercials. And the more intelligent, more technically savvy people tend to find ways to watch even fewer commercials. Now, if only more of use would be willing to watch commericals, good shows like Firefly could stay on the air. Guess they are just missing their demographic completely.. put sommericals on for the latest piece of technology and you'd have at least some of that demographic interested in seeing the commercials too :-)
I can think of lots of ways to get into this one. Here's a few:
Is copying parts of web pages ethical? They are all copyrighted, but since technology make it so easy, and they probably expected it anyway...
HTML allows one to create a page that has pictures on another machine. A link to someone's picture isn't a copy of it, so doesn't violate copyright. However, it does use up their bandwidth. It also separates their content from their image (potentially robbing them of the self-promotion that justified their making the image available on the web). Is it ethical to do this just because the technology was designed with this in mind?
You have found that some has created a deep link to one of your pictures. You don't like that. Is it ethical to change it to something that might embarass them or get them into trouble (e.g. change it to hate propaganda, or porn)?
Technology allows credit bureaus to create large databases of lots of data on individuals. Just because technology allows them to correlate all the data and attach it to individuals, should they do so? Should they then sell the information in those databases to anyone who wants to pay?
On MS's Age of Empires EULA, it states explicitly that the owner is allowed to make a backup copy. However, since the game is copy protected, one must break the copy protection to do as they are permitted in the license. Unfortunately, that breaks the license.
As I see it, there are two ethical quesitons about this. The first is the obvious of whether the owner has the right to make a backup copy or not. The other is whether the company should be excending rights that they forbid in other ways.
Um.. isn't a mechanical way of pushing or pulling the pendulum around be a doomed design? Wouldn't it have to make the correction with every swing of the pendulum?
I disagree. Some alterations can and must be done, some are acceptable, some are questionable, and yet others are downright unethical.
Debayering the image that comes off the CCD is a must. Sharpening it a little to make up for the lack of resolution the CCD's color mask introduces is clearly in the acceptable category. Further sharpening to make the image come out in print better is (IMHO) in the questionable category. These are all mechanical alterations, done to the entire image, some of them even without the user's knowledge.
Then there's the manipulations that are intended to mislead. The ones that replace details, selectively obscure them or selectively emphasize them with an intent to deceive by not mentioning that they were manipulated. That's how I came to have a page of our local newspaper on my wall at work that features a 3 ft (1m) lotus bloom. Its also where the picture (I wish I had saved) that features two discrete planes of focus that could not possibly have been captured photographically (too many clues that indicate otherwise). Had these not been presented by an organization that attempted to tell me that they were accurate representations of reality, I would have let it pass.
As for pictures being held to a higher standard for their "direct integrity", they have never been truely accurate representations of what the photographer's eye saw. In fact, a lot of early photography was explicitly an intent to deceive the eye through manipulation. Holding photographs in such high regard as bastions of truth and integrity is probably a mistake.
You could also wildcard which version you were asking for so you'd always get the behavior of the latest-greatest version available. This was probably the achillies heel of the system -- it was possible to skip the version system and create versionitis problems. Worse, the code examples in the books did that, so most programmers probably ended up writing their code that way anyway.
That would be true except for the fact that MS owns the OpenGL API layer on Windows. They can (and will) revoke that layer as a way of pushing the remaining few holdouts over to their Direct3D technology. Without the API layer, you can have all the OpenGL support you want in the driver and HW and be completely unable to get to it. Furthermore, MS can prevent anyone else from creating an OpenGL API layer that installs on MS. I figure the next major release of their OS will be where they'll start this process.
Worse is that since MS owns Direct3D, they can prevent it from being used for any OS they don't want it used on. This will result in OpenGL only (maybe, unless MS does indeed owns patents that control it) on Linux and Direct3D only on Windows. Yet another tool MS will use to try to kill the Linux threat.
Seems to me that the Open Source community needs to have already invented their own 3D library and API if they want there to be a common 3D graphics library for Linux and Windows.
Yeah, and you'll have to put up with that stupid coin-op up there trying to fix everything and clubbing folks over the head.
I'll grant you that the Windows GUI is worse. Its derived from their old 16-bit verison which wasn't architected with today's knowledge. I'll also grant that it is less secure and that programmers are sloppier.
Unfortunately, I wasn't talking about just the underlying windowing system (although that is less stable on Linux too), but rather the desktop apps that I have to use to get my work done. For example, take the two bugs: the KDE calculator doesn't give even vaguely correct answers in fixed-point mode, and the X windowing system can silently rewrite it's configuration file when a button on one's monitor is pressed. I've experienced both first hand. Neither is a problem on Microsoft's GUI/desktop and can only be explained by lack of testing.
This is why I say that if the code statistics included the windowing system and desktop apps, it probably would have shown a different answer.
Well, the low budget science fiction movie industry for one. They'll be totally bolloxed without Estes rockets to use for missles.
Yes. Include the desktop, windowing system and user level apps. Given the amount of bugs I encounter, they would get the exact opposite story. This sort of yanks the legs out of the adage that people working without a deadline for fun are producing better code -- if it were really true, then Open Source code would be better from the initial release instead of worse.
Of course, what do I know.. perhaps the TCP/IP stack is the only part of Linux that most users typically use out of it :-)
Allow yes. However, whether we should permit the attempt anytime soon is another question. Not from an ethical standpoint, but from an engineering one.
Bridge building is probably a resonable metaphore for this. Major bridges like the Golden Gate bridge were not the result of the first attempt at building a bridge. Lots fell down in the learning process, some castrophically. I can't imagine many of them were built with the knowledge that they would fail in exactly the way they did, which means the people who built them thought they knew enough about the forces and materials being used to get it right.
Unlike bridge building, where one can start small and practice. There really isn't any learning curve with a space elevator.. either you get it right first time, or a major piece of civil engineering fails. When major pieces of civil engineering fail, generally, a bunch of innocent people die.
So yes, perhaps in a few years we might have materials that are beginning to be capable. However, when we should allow the attempt (for earth) is another question entirely.
I argee, these studens can't really go out and get that decent paying job without actual experience. However, think of the advantage they will have other other college graduates when they themselves graduate from college. With the kind of start such a program would give them, they will have the opportunity of starting the unix sysadmin learning curve at a run rather than from a standing start like most of their peers. What they make of the opportunity is up to them, but they could do very well.
Heck, they could be the beginnings of the breed of Linux Hacker that RedHat needs to be packaging in every box :-)
The incentive is when you alienate your repeat customers, who then migrate to another product causing you revenue loss.
Case in point, the wife and I recently were forced to upgrade one of our mainstay apps (didn't work under the new version of the OS). The new version is harder to use, and this from people that already know a previous version of the program. We have now gone from recommending the program to friends (and have convinced a few to buy it) to not only never wanting to buy another upgrade of it, but not recommending it (we'd actually recommend against it) and actually trying to figure out if it is possible to get the old version to work again.
This company, through their thoughtlessly hosing the user interface, have lost all repeat business, have lost word of mouth advertising, and have actually alienated a customer to the point of trying to not use their investment. Smart investment for the company or not?
The consumers were happy with the current technology?
Sigma introduced a digital SLR-type camera based on this sensor a while back, but it isn't exactly taking that segment of the digital photographery market by storm either.
Mark me paranoid, but the info is my tax info. The program is as much a part of the archival data as the .tax file and the paper copies. If there's any question about how I came up with the answers on the paper form, I darn well better be able to install it on another computer so I can access the data and algorithms that went into the conclusion.
Guess my complaint to them last September went unheeded. :-)
What do you get if you eliminate the human from the above? Why, a protocol link. Might as well require me to type in TCP/IP packets and consider me human if I make too many erorrs :-)
What a load of crap. I've been on both ends of this issue -- I've been a student looking for distraction and wanting to get something prodcutive done, and I've been a teacher with a student that was unable to be attentive in class due to lack of self control with instant messaging.
As a student, I skipped class or did something else during it. There was one class where I even walked out in the middle every day (I had to go to get the daily change to the programming assignment, and the instructor did say he didn't care if we walked out in the middle).
As a teacher of an elective course, I had a student who was unable to do the assignments due to lack of attention during the (only) 20-minute lectures. Their problem was a stream (every 20-30 seconds) of self-inflicted instant messaging interruptions. Because of it, they couldn't concentrate long enough on what was being said to understand any of it.
As is suggested, I managed to finally make the material interesting enough to that student to get them to be able to do the assignments. What did I do? I unplugged the network connection from their computer ("gee, I don't know why networking isn't working on your computer, but you don't need it anyway"). They then managed to find enough interest in the material being presented to do fairly well in the course (of course, they were behind and never quite caught up).
If I could have just cut assistance off to the student because of their addiction and just let them figure the material out on their own, I would have. However, it would have been difficult to prove they needed help understanding the material because I didn't present it perfectly clearly given their current knowledge, method of learning, grasp of the concepts and mental aptitude vs. they needed help unsderstanding the material because they were too addicted to instant messages to be able to focus on anything for more than 20 seconds at a time.
So, how about making Linux a choice and letting them decide how much to use it? Show them some of the games available on Linux itself.
Seems to me it might be worthwhile looking into the matter if your lawyer has an open mind and might be willing to change his recommendation based on new information. If not, don't waste your time and just do as the lawyer says to do, regardless of how little sense it makes.
Since the signal is optically processed until the very last instant when it is converted to electrical for transmission, is there perhaps an optical encryption method that could be applied?
It sounds like they are optically processing the signal and then converting it to electrical using a special photodiode. Later through, they talk about needing a lens to focus the signal. I'm aware that some radio frequencies can be refracted by matter, but if, as others has said, this frequency range would be stopped by most matter, then what could they be making the lens out of? Or are they pulling a switcheroo and using somethig other than the 120GHz band to demo the technology?
However, general theory is that the airtime is what costs, so he who elects to incurr the airtime pays for it. Since that's the cellphone owner, they get to pay. One doesn't pay to have the phone ring, and all cell phones have caller ID so you can pick and choose whose calls you answer. SMS is a different beast, and you don't get a choice about receiving it or not.
Of course, landline long distance calls are the opposite way -- costs nothing to receive, only to place the call. I chalk cellphone to being different because, being a new media, it just made sense to invent special rules and laws rather than piggyback on existing rules and laws. NOT! More likely, our representitives aren't getting enough money from the old lobbiests and special interests and needed to foster new ones into existence.
hope that helps put it into perspective.
I thought this thing had been up closer to a year, but perhaps not. Either way, 6 months is more than enough time to get the word out and to get significant amounts of people using it -- heck, it covers summer (for the non-natives: summer = when it isn't raining 24/7 and people occupy the square practically 24/7).
So, what we're arguing about here comes down to whether the tried-and-failed system needs to switch channels, or whether Starbucks wants to have all stores the same except one (or want to switch all their stores to a different channel).
Since having people start to use wireless internet there will be good for both organizations (some will like it, but not want to pay for it), it seems obvious to me how this should play out -- capitulate and let Starbucks have whatever channel they want so both services can coexist and grow.