If only there was an already existing model for dealing with large amounts of different kinds of data, some of it sensitive, spread across a geographically diverse area. Alas, there are no existing examples of how to do this, so we might as well give up. -sigh-
It is only a "bit" more complex than western chess; exactly one bit more complex. The exponent 123 can be stored in 7 bits. The exponent 224 requires 8, a full byte.
Uh, no...still not quite there. The poster was making assumptions about the kind and quality of experiences of the victim based upon his race, i.e., Oh, you are obviously being treated in this way because you are Arabic.
This is a perfectly valid hypothesis. I have a very loose set of requirements for a hypothesis. People ought to feel free to explore all sorts of crazy ideas, especially ones where people might be getting treated differently based upon their race, because that kind of thing has to be rooted out wherever it occurs.
In this case, though, it fails...there's just no evidence to support it, so it's not worth bringing into the discussion.
This is wholly separate from the discussion about whether law enforcement ought to be allowed (1) on my property without a warrant, (2) to track my or my property's location electronically without a warrant.
On this topic, let us recall for a moment that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights does not exist in order to describe the rights of individuals; these documents exist in order to describe the rights of government to infringe the rights of states and individuals. Thus, they begin by recognizing—not granting—the inherent rights of individuals, i.e., rights that cannot be granted by any document. It goes on to say that certain freedoms of individuals may be infringed by government for the express purpose of establishing a stable and free society. (Actually, it says a "more perfect union," which means that our great republic is primarily founded on a grammatical error. More perfect? If it's perfect it's perfect. How can it be moreso?)
So, should government be allowed to track this individual? I don't know. Neither do they, because approval from enough parts of the government necessary to make such a statement was never sought, in my estimation. Nonetheless, this is a wholly separate problem from one of racial/religious profiling.
Implying the racial profiling thing sure sells a lot of ad impressions, though. Coincidence?
Yea......I was thinking "race profiler," and by extension, "hypocrite." (How'd you miss that?) See the excellent response by Obfuscant above for a compelling presentation of the details of my point.
Yea, to 1st post, why should anyone be able to control the groups they're associated with? You're right, it should work just like real life where your most casual friends sign you up for all sorts of things that you have no control over, and you're just an idiot unless you simply accept your fate and go along with it, or terminate all your friendships just in case.
It's obvious to me there's no other solutions, you just have to pick one of those two extreme, unpalatable options. THERE IS NO OTHER POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE.
2. Why do you assume the USG was using racial profiling to track this guy? Just because he's Arabic? So...you just go around assuming that just because someone is Arabic certain things tend to happen to them more than other people even though there's no support for that in the article?
I think there's a word for people that make such snap judgments based on someone's race. Let me see if I can find it...
Yep, I definitely should have included the "coughcoughopensourcecoughcough" at the end of the second paragraph. Apparently at least one person missed it.:-)
My point was that it's completely stupid for someone to expect pre-alpha code released as part of an open source project to be bulletproof. I'd be surprised if even all the fundamentals were in place. The entire point of open source coding is to get your product out there early so you can get collaboration from those who know better.
So is there any question left that we need someone that will stand up for the right to exchange information even if it means such freedom could potentially be abused? (tpb, anyone?)
Yea, that's a great idea. It's like the GPS I have in my car that forces me to click the "Agree" button every time I start the car. I love executing mindless repetitive tasks, but the real parallel to your suggestion is how it shuts down the entry interface every time the car is going more than a few mph. Which is great because that also keeps my wife from entering in the address when she's in the passenger seat, and why should I get a GPS function that works in a sensible way? What, just because I paid for it?
I'm also a big fan of smoking and drinking taxes that punish bad behavior, luxury taxes that punish you for wanting to have something nice, and laws that mandate car seats for children over 2 (which kills and injures more kids than it saves). Basically, I can't get enough of the government all up in my business, especially when they don't know what they're doing and get it completely wrong.
I want to live a boring, bland, uneventful life. Either that, or one that comes to a sudden and needless end because some bureaucrat thought they knew my situation better than me.
One of my other favorite things is when someone comes along and reads mindless drivel and thinks, "Hm, that's interesting. I wonder if I have mod points..."
So it's not that he doesn't want any fart apps...it's just that the only fart apps they'll flag in have to be compelling (as opposed to propelling) fart apps.
I also have to say, I really appreciate the brazen honesty: "These are apps you'll open 3 or 4 times and never look at again. You're not looking at ads..." He could have at least listed that one second...
I was just reinforcing your point with my own particular brand of humor, which others have described as smelling of stale breadcrumbs and overripe bananas.
Wow, 20 megatons, that sounds bad. If medicine advances to the point where I can live well past 120 years old (and I mean live, like really live, not an existence consumed by mostly writhing around in agony), and I happen to live where this thing might hit, by then I'm afraid I'll be too set in my ways to want to move out of the armageddon zone.
If this thing were going to hit where I live today I'd start a new life in a new city like that...by comparison I'm young, I'll roll with the punches. But I'm going to be over 120 years old people! I can't be expected to evacuate a 100 mile zone and set up somewhere new. I'm anticipating I'll be old and crotchety by then!
This all adds up to one thing: terrible news. The chances that medicine will advance, that this thing will hit a populated place, the place where I live, and the chance that I'll be willing to move out of there? Really, really terrible news.
From TFA: "'It could be geology or biology, but it is not coming from another source. There is a seasonal pattern, so it could only be a local origin,' Sergio Fonti, with Italy's Universita del Salento, told Discovery News."
Did the poster to whom I responded not say that Google should cut off his ability to access his own account when he travels to other countries, even though it wouldn't do a thing to address the problem?
I'm sure those crafty hackers will find a way around it and divert through a US waypoint, but there's no need for my account to have broad access from countries I am never going to access it from.
Please allow me to provide an alternative summary of your statement: Though it certainly wouldn't do any good, why not respond by stripping innocent people of freedoms they now have?
What, sir, were you thinking when you wrote this?
Re:High Quality Versus Graphics
on
Learning By Playing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem with injecting math, social politics, etc, into games like MMOs is that the problems to be solved are "constructed"—that is, the lesson to be learned has to be presented as a specific obstacle to be overcome. The criteria to get the reward behind that obstacle has to be defined; essentially, there's right and wrong answers and the reward is not generally connected to the problem in an organic way.
I'll use a simple example for illustrative purposes...remember Math Blaster? If you've ever played it, you get a math problem across the top of the screen and different answers to it fall down. You sit at the bottom in a little Space Invaders-like spaceship blasting away. Shoot the right answer, get points.
Why does this game suck? Because the problem-solving element of solving the math problems is not connected to game play; in fact, game play exists only as an artifice to get you to solve the math problems. One doesn't advance in the game because the result of the equation was useful (other than adding to your score, of course).
Contrast this with an organically presented problem, where your character is standing in a train station, confronted with having to make a decision about how to get somewhere in the game world by a certain time. The player has to run around and get the info from the train schedules, maybe it makes sense to wait for the bullet train that skips stops, maybe it makes sense to wait for a cab to come even if it costs a little extra money. In this way, game play is actually advanced by working out the problem.
Of course, this kind of game play has drawbacks. You can't usually present a binary right/wrong answer—problems that arise organically usually have solutions that present in degrees. One consequence of this is that most of the time you can't force every player to deal with the problem at all, some will find a way to avoid it entirely. The other issue is that it's hard to differentiate between solving a problem based on understanding and solving a problem by finding the answer. You could, for example, find a way for a complex calculus problem to arise naturally in your game, but you have to make sure the player's success is based on deep understanding of the solution, not the player's ability to pull up Wolfram|Alpha and get an answer.
What a great assumption. I'm sure if Adobe was able to charge for every copy of Photoshop that's used, every future graphic designer would pay out of their own pocket to get experience with it. They'd show up for their first day of work like they do now, fully prepared and knowledgeable, and the only difference would be Adobe's bottom line.
Either that, or more and more graphic design houses would find themselves having to switch to the GIMP because it's all anyone seems to know. Hmm...which is it?
It's too bad there's so many problems with this project...I was really looking forward to a good alternative to Facebook.
If only there was some kind of development methodology where these issues could be discovered early on and addressed by those that do have the necessary experience...alas, I forget myself—such a thing is and shall forever remain unattainable fantasy.
I guess we should just be glad they published the source code so the facts are out and we can all agree: the only path forward is to toss the whole idea.
You don't have to encrypt the data you just encrypt the personal identifiers.
First of all, "personal identifiers" is the data we're talking about. All the data is personally identifying.
The best you can do is log accesses of any kind and which employee made the access. But you really can't chase down every single access to ensure it was for the purpose of fixing something...do you have any idea how many bugs are tracked for even a small project?
Right, well for anyone reading this that hasn't thought this issue through carefully, let me say this. If you, like me, want to be able to access and search your email from anyplace on the web, then a fundamental fact of the universe is that your email will have to be hosted somewhere, by someone like Gmail. If the idea of having someone be able to read all your email (in an abuse scenario) is a non-starter for you, then you necessarily have to give up the functionality and stick with downloading your email to one machine. In that case, if you can't access that one machine, then you can't get to your email.
You can never have the functionality only possible with the cloud if you don't trust the sky holding that cloud.
Slashdot Mirror
If only there was an already existing model for dealing with large amounts of different kinds of data, some of it sensitive, spread across a geographically diverse area. Alas, there are no existing examples of how to do this, so we might as well give up. -sigh-
...and also, your pet's name was "i|yGgd$s"
It is only a "bit" more complex than western chess; exactly one bit more complex. The exponent 123 can be stored in 7 bits. The exponent 224 requires 8, a full byte.
See what I did there? -puffs chest out proudly-
Uh, no...still not quite there. The poster was making assumptions about the kind and quality of experiences of the victim based upon his race, i.e., Oh, you are obviously being treated in this way because you are Arabic.
This is a perfectly valid hypothesis. I have a very loose set of requirements for a hypothesis. People ought to feel free to explore all sorts of crazy ideas, especially ones where people might be getting treated differently based upon their race, because that kind of thing has to be rooted out wherever it occurs.
In this case, though, it fails...there's just no evidence to support it, so it's not worth bringing into the discussion.
This is wholly separate from the discussion about whether law enforcement ought to be allowed (1) on my property without a warrant, (2) to track my or my property's location electronically without a warrant.
On this topic, let us recall for a moment that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights does not exist in order to describe the rights of individuals; these documents exist in order to describe the rights of government to infringe the rights of states and individuals. Thus, they begin by recognizing—not granting—the inherent rights of individuals, i.e., rights that cannot be granted by any document. It goes on to say that certain freedoms of individuals may be infringed by government for the express purpose of establishing a stable and free society. (Actually, it says a "more perfect union," which means that our great republic is primarily founded on a grammatical error. More perfect? If it's perfect it's perfect. How can it be moreso?)
So, should government be allowed to track this individual? I don't know. Neither do they, because approval from enough parts of the government necessary to make such a statement was never sought, in my estimation. Nonetheless, this is a wholly separate problem from one of racial/religious profiling.
Implying the racial profiling thing sure sells a lot of ad impressions, though. Coincidence?
Yea......I was thinking "race profiler," and by extension, "hypocrite." (How'd you miss that?) See the excellent response by Obfuscant above for a compelling presentation of the details of my point.
This is the best thread ever. =]
Yea, to 1st post, why should anyone be able to control the groups they're associated with? You're right, it should work just like real life where your most casual friends sign you up for all sorts of things that you have no control over, and you're just an idiot unless you simply accept your fate and go along with it, or terminate all your friendships just in case.
It's obvious to me there's no other solutions, you just have to pick one of those two extreme, unpalatable options. THERE IS NO OTHER POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE.
1. I like civil liberties and the ACLU.
2. Why do you assume the USG was using racial profiling to track this guy? Just because he's Arabic? So...you just go around assuming that just because someone is Arabic certain things tend to happen to them more than other people even though there's no support for that in the article?
I think there's a word for people that make such snap judgments based on someone's race. Let me see if I can find it...
Yep, I definitely should have included the "coughcoughopensourcecoughcough" at the end of the second paragraph. Apparently at least one person missed it. :-)
My point was that it's completely stupid for someone to expect pre-alpha code released as part of an open source project to be bulletproof. I'd be surprised if even all the fundamentals were in place. The entire point of open source coding is to get your product out there early so you can get collaboration from those who know better.
So is there any question left that we need someone that will stand up for the right to exchange information even if it means such freedom could potentially be abused? (tpb, anyone?)
Let's make it magnetic and call it a hard drive!
Yea, that's a great idea. It's like the GPS I have in my car that forces me to click the "Agree" button every time I start the car. I love executing mindless repetitive tasks, but the real parallel to your suggestion is how it shuts down the entry interface every time the car is going more than a few mph. Which is great because that also keeps my wife from entering in the address when she's in the passenger seat, and why should I get a GPS function that works in a sensible way? What, just because I paid for it?
I'm also a big fan of smoking and drinking taxes that punish bad behavior, luxury taxes that punish you for wanting to have something nice, and laws that mandate car seats for children over 2 (which kills and injures more kids than it saves). Basically, I can't get enough of the government all up in my business, especially when they don't know what they're doing and get it completely wrong.
I want to live a boring, bland, uneventful life. Either that, or one that comes to a sudden and needless end because some bureaucrat thought they knew my situation better than me.
One of my other favorite things is when someone comes along and reads mindless drivel and thinks, "Hm, that's interesting. I wonder if I have mod points..."
So it's not that he doesn't want any fart apps...it's just that the only fart apps they'll flag in have to be compelling (as opposed to propelling) fart apps.
I also have to say, I really appreciate the brazen honesty: "These are apps you'll open 3 or 4 times and never look at again. You're not looking at ads..." He could have at least listed that one second...
I was just reinforcing your point with my own particular brand of humor, which others have described as smelling of stale breadcrumbs and overripe bananas.
Wow, 20 megatons, that sounds bad. If medicine advances to the point where I can live well past 120 years old (and I mean live, like really live, not an existence consumed by mostly writhing around in agony), and I happen to live where this thing might hit, by then I'm afraid I'll be too set in my ways to want to move out of the armageddon zone.
If this thing were going to hit where I live today I'd start a new life in a new city like that...by comparison I'm young, I'll roll with the punches. But I'm going to be over 120 years old people! I can't be expected to evacuate a 100 mile zone and set up somewhere new. I'm anticipating I'll be old and crotchety by then!
This all adds up to one thing: terrible news. The chances that medicine will advance, that this thing will hit a populated place, the place where I live, and the chance that I'll be willing to move out of there? Really, really terrible news.
In Soviet Russia, we send space into junk.
Actually, it is kind of sad, even when stated in the style of the Yakov meme. :-/
From TFA: "'It could be geology or biology, but it is not coming from another source. There is a seasonal pattern, so it could only be a local origin,' Sergio Fonti, with Italy's Universita del Salento, told Discovery News."
To paraphrase: "It is geology."
Did the poster to whom I responded not say that Google should cut off his ability to access his own account when he travels to other countries, even though it wouldn't do a thing to address the problem?
You think I have a reading comprehension problem?
Please allow me to provide an alternative summary of your statement: Though it certainly wouldn't do any good, why not respond by stripping innocent people of freedoms they now have?
What, sir, were you thinking when you wrote this?
The problem with injecting math, social politics, etc, into games like MMOs is that the problems to be solved are "constructed"—that is, the lesson to be learned has to be presented as a specific obstacle to be overcome. The criteria to get the reward behind that obstacle has to be defined; essentially, there's right and wrong answers and the reward is not generally connected to the problem in an organic way.
I'll use a simple example for illustrative purposes...remember Math Blaster? If you've ever played it, you get a math problem across the top of the screen and different answers to it fall down. You sit at the bottom in a little Space Invaders-like spaceship blasting away. Shoot the right answer, get points.
Why does this game suck? Because the problem-solving element of solving the math problems is not connected to game play; in fact, game play exists only as an artifice to get you to solve the math problems. One doesn't advance in the game because the result of the equation was useful (other than adding to your score, of course).
Contrast this with an organically presented problem, where your character is standing in a train station, confronted with having to make a decision about how to get somewhere in the game world by a certain time. The player has to run around and get the info from the train schedules, maybe it makes sense to wait for the bullet train that skips stops, maybe it makes sense to wait for a cab to come even if it costs a little extra money. In this way, game play is actually advanced by working out the problem.
Of course, this kind of game play has drawbacks. You can't usually present a binary right/wrong answer—problems that arise organically usually have solutions that present in degrees. One consequence of this is that most of the time you can't force every player to deal with the problem at all, some will find a way to avoid it entirely. The other issue is that it's hard to differentiate between solving a problem based on understanding and solving a problem by finding the answer. You could, for example, find a way for a complex calculus problem to arise naturally in your game, but you have to make sure the player's success is based on deep understanding of the solution, not the player's ability to pull up Wolfram|Alpha and get an answer.
(To anyone that may have missed it, perhaps I should have included —coughcoughopensourcecough— at the end of that second paragraph.)
What a great assumption. I'm sure if Adobe was able to charge for every copy of Photoshop that's used, every future graphic designer would pay out of their own pocket to get experience with it. They'd show up for their first day of work like they do now, fully prepared and knowledgeable, and the only difference would be Adobe's bottom line.
Either that, or more and more graphic design houses would find themselves having to switch to the GIMP because it's all anyone seems to know. Hmm...which is it?
It's too bad there's so many problems with this project...I was really looking forward to a good alternative to Facebook.
If only there was some kind of development methodology where these issues could be discovered early on and addressed by those that do have the necessary experience...alas, I forget myself—such a thing is and shall forever remain unattainable fantasy.
I guess we should just be glad they published the source code so the facts are out and we can all agree: the only path forward is to toss the whole idea.
First of all, "personal identifiers" is the data we're talking about. All the data is personally identifying.
The best you can do is log accesses of any kind and which employee made the access. But you really can't chase down every single access to ensure it was for the purpose of fixing something...do you have any idea how many bugs are tracked for even a small project?
Right, well for anyone reading this that hasn't thought this issue through carefully, let me say this. If you, like me, want to be able to access and search your email from anyplace on the web, then a fundamental fact of the universe is that your email will have to be hosted somewhere, by someone like Gmail. If the idea of having someone be able to read all your email (in an abuse scenario) is a non-starter for you, then you necessarily have to give up the functionality and stick with downloading your email to one machine. In that case, if you can't access that one machine, then you can't get to your email.
You can never have the functionality only possible with the cloud if you don't trust the sky holding that cloud.