There have been various social systems based on the assumption that people are inherently good and honest, and for all I know, they all failed miserably.
There is apparently a management model that illustrates a given system as being like a tree full of monkeys. The monkeys at the top of the tree can look down, and all they see is monkeys. Whereas the monkeys at the bottom of the tree looking up only see assholes.
Sure, self-aggrandising bastards will take a lot of the kudos, perhaps at the expense of others more deserving. There is probably nothing that can prevent that. But my point regarding the actual conduct of research still applies. The application of the scientific method in an attempt to disprove any given hypothesis is what the real work is about. As soon as you discard that and attempt to work from the other direction, you cease to be a scientist and become a marketroid instead.
Of course, there is a chronic lack of ability in science to find the bad ideas...
In the physical sciences it should be possible. Except under conditions of woolly thinking. The whole point of the scientific method is to make your best attempt to experimentally DISPROVE your hypothesis. You can never prove it, but you can hedge it about with so many conditions that it can be accepted as being true.
Obviously this isn't (I think) necessarily all that helpful in "pure" mathematics, but my maths education is only 1st-year Uni level, so I'm not qualified to expound on this.
It is often cited that crappy, broken or incomplete code is often shoved out the door by business in order to meet deadlines.
The reason why R&D is different from software developers is because the latter usually don't need to present conclusions or premises to the community at large. It can (and often does) hide the source and get away with saying "no warranty yada yada..."
By presenting your research in reputable journals, you are exposing it to the examination and criticism of your peers. Thus in theory anyone else can pick up your work and reproduce it. One aspect of Hwang Woo-Suk's work that brought about his demise was that others failed to be able to reproduce his work. Unfortunately for him, his claims were so grandiose that alarm bells rang and people started looking at his work more closely.
The eventual fallout can be seen as evidence that the system works. We have little way of knowing how much dodgy work slips under the radar in the short term, since people don't get paid much for reproducing other scientists' work, but at least there is a mechanism where it CAN happen.
A number of my friends are scientists and some have told me they bodge the results now and again to match what they were expecting.
In that case, they're not scientists. If they fudge results, they are simply invalidating their experimental data by repeating their initial hypothesis as a result without bothering to challenge it.
I can understand commercial pressures for funding and so forth may be important to the researcher, but in many cases it saves everybody a lot of time if negative results are published to start with. Sure, they will rarely earn anyone a Nobel Prize, but we have to accept that a lot of what science is about is repetitious or tedious donkey-work.
Holding users responsible probably opens a legal can of worms
It sure does. But if we were to enforce a policy that owners of infected or owned systems were to be shot (at one end of the scale) or spend a few days in the pillory (as a more lenient option), I suspect that people would be inclined to take a bit more care.
Maybe we need to introduce something like the principle of a driver's licence, where it is assumed that it is a privilege to use the internet, not a right.
Part of the problem here is the issue of readily stealable laptops, netbooks etc. The more "friendly" the system is (read MacBooks for instance) the greater the temptation to just close it up rather than logging out properly. This wipes out any benefit of encrypted filesystems and so forth, and I have to confess I am pretty much as guilty as anyone else on this count, despite the fact that in other respects I am inordinately paranoid.
In my case, this might be related to overconfidence in my (hitherto effective) competence in beating the crap out of any mugger, but nevertheless, I obviously have to admit it's not an ideal security policy.
For some reason, I'm much more careful about my desktop boxes, which are much more effectively locked down when I'm not around.
and looks like he is from Egypt. When I asked him where he was from he told me Canada...
Well, why do you all get so wound up about skin colour anyway?
I understand there was supposed to have been some guy by the name of Jesus who is meant to be fairly highly regarded in the US, and I believe he would have had a middle-Eastern appearance too.
YOU ARE MORTAL SO YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. Make your life worth something instead of cowering from shadows.
Well said. I'm not an American, but this snivelling about terrorists is universal across the Western world, and I am very tired of it. Sure, there are people who are out to kill or hurt others, but ultimately they are no different from any other murderer or other common criminal. And we already have a criminal code in place to deal with those individuals.
We certainly don't need to replace this with a system where everybody is treated as a criminal.
What if some dastardly person occasionally put a video stream or audio stream into the workspace, for instance...
I think I must be getting old, but I'm having difficulty seeing a whole lot of functional difference between this and Facebook. I can understand why Google might want to claw back some advertising revenue, but that's about all I can see here.
Well, in my case the principle of "if you're not with us then you're against us" is exactly right. And I would happily extend it to all organised religions.
I can't say I care for this method of filtering, since it's inherently unreliable. But my opinion is coloured by a series of experiences years ago when Slashdot routinely and capriciously applied this method of filtering to deal with spammers and script-kiddies. My own posts were blocked as collateral damage. I don't know what/. is doing about this nowadays, but whatever it is seems (mostly) to be working.
It's a great name, too bad the momentum has been lost.
And there lies the rub. Sure, there are plenty of us who still harbour deep suspicicions about Google and its motives, but those reservations pale by comparison to those surrounding Microsoft.
Once all the hype about MSN search and Windows 7 has died down, I wonder if Microsoft might be forced into a position where its most secure bastion is MSOffice. Whatever we might think of MS, the latter is still probably the only one of their products that really qualifies as a "killer".
Disclaimer: my personal preference is for OpenOffice or NeoOffice, dependent on platform.
Hmmm. I still remember my first modem. It was about the size of a large stack of telephone directories, with a rotary-dial phone sitting on top of it. It was supposed to have been 300 baud, but I think in reality it might have been 16.:-{
which marks the first time Microsoft has announced the US exclusivity on the Zune is being dropped.
...which is exactly why I predict Microsoft is unlikely to sell a single unit. Microsoft has totally missed the boat. They might as well just pick up their bags and go home, maybe to try and sell some lame operating system riddled with bugs and bigger holes than Britney...
Ahem. Sorry.
In other words, Move along please, nothing to see here...
Don't compare Bach and Shakespeare to Joe Blow playing at the local pub or reading at the local poetry night. Compare them to the Beatles and Stephen King.
Ummm, if you do that, then you might just as well compare them to Joe Blow at the pub.;-)
It's not only laziness. I've tried installing Linux on various PCs over the years, and out of 8-9 tries, got to the desktop only ONCE. Last try, ubuntu 8.10, gives me "snow " when it's time to launch the gnome desktop.
Now that is scary. Back in the mid-'90s when I was playing around with various Linux distros on a machine with a no-name motherboard and SiS-based graphics card, I didn't get great results (the colour was 16-bit at best) but I never ONCE got snow.
And over the years since (and manymany Linux installs down the track) I have had 100% success in getting X11 to work. Go figure.
The greatest artists of the past, Mozart, Bach, Shakespeare, worked for a pittance comapred to what artists make nowadays.
Yes and no. Yes, they worked for a pittance, because the only way an artist could survive then was to use his craft for the benefit or enjoyment of his patron. But the majority of artists in our age (unless they manage to hit an uncommon seam of luck) have to find other means to feed themselves and their families.
Many current artists make ends meet by using their talents either under corporate sponsorship or (more directly and lucratively) in the advertising industry. I don't think we can truly draw much of a distinction between the environments of most modern artists from that of Johann Sebastian. (Though for my own part, if I were forced to make a choice, I would have to say there has never been a musician whose stature equals that of JSB.)
...or if you show it to them they won't bother with reading it
This is more to the point. Most network admins have the attention span of a flea and won't read past the first sentence of anything you write; actually, I could probably expand that statement to include most people generally. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
...I moved from redhat to debian when potato came out, partly based on slashdot (and linux newbie) raves about apt, so Ubuntu is natural when I want it to just work.
OK. And did you spit chips when you went to edit/etc/inittab and found it wasn't there? I'm not saying that RedHat/Debian/Ubuntu are good or bad, but expecting Ubuntu to "Just Work" can be a tall order if you're used to other Unices.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been various social systems based on the assumption that people are inherently good and honest, and for all I know, they all failed miserably.
There is apparently a management model that illustrates a given system as being like a tree full of monkeys. The monkeys at the top of the tree can look down, and all they see is monkeys. Whereas the monkeys at the bottom of the tree looking up only see assholes.
Sure, self-aggrandising bastards will take a lot of the kudos, perhaps at the expense of others more deserving. There is probably nothing that can prevent that. But my point regarding the actual conduct of research still applies. The application of the scientific method in an attempt to disprove any given hypothesis is what the real work is about. As soon as you discard that and attempt to work from the other direction, you cease to be a scientist and become a marketroid instead.
Of course, there is a chronic lack of ability in science to find the bad ideas...
In the physical sciences it should be possible. Except under conditions of woolly thinking. The whole point of the scientific method is to make your best attempt to experimentally DISPROVE your hypothesis. You can never prove it, but you can hedge it about with so many conditions that it can be accepted as being true.
Obviously this isn't (I think) necessarily all that helpful in "pure" mathematics, but my maths education is only 1st-year Uni level, so I'm not qualified to expound on this.
It is often cited that crappy, broken or incomplete code is often shoved out the door by business in order to meet deadlines.
The reason why R&D is different from software developers is because the latter usually don't need to present conclusions or premises to the community at large. It can (and often does) hide the source and get away with saying "no warranty yada yada..."
By presenting your research in reputable journals, you are exposing it to the examination and criticism of your peers. Thus in theory anyone else can pick up your work and reproduce it. One aspect of Hwang Woo-Suk's work that brought about his demise was that others failed to be able to reproduce his work. Unfortunately for him, his claims were so grandiose that alarm bells rang and people started looking at his work more closely.
The eventual fallout can be seen as evidence that the system works. We have little way of knowing how much dodgy work slips under the radar in the short term, since people don't get paid much for reproducing other scientists' work, but at least there is a mechanism where it CAN happen.
A number of my friends are scientists and some have told me they bodge the results now and again to match what they were expecting.
In that case, they're not scientists. If they fudge results, they are simply invalidating their experimental data by repeating their initial hypothesis as a result without bothering to challenge it.
I can understand commercial pressures for funding and so forth may be important to the researcher, but in many cases it saves everybody a lot of time if negative results are published to start with. Sure, they will rarely earn anyone a Nobel Prize, but we have to accept that a lot of what science is about is repetitious or tedious donkey-work.
My point was that most people don't bother with password on wake-up either.
...but I'm not comfortable with this idea.
;-)
I'm not too comfortable with either of your suggestions. Which I guess leaves us back with the pillory or being shot.
Holding users responsible probably opens a legal can of worms
It sure does. But if we were to enforce a policy that owners of infected or owned systems were to be shot (at one end of the scale) or spend a few days in the pillory (as a more lenient option), I suspect that people would be inclined to take a bit more care.
Maybe we need to introduce something like the principle of a driver's licence, where it is assumed that it is a privilege to use the internet, not a right.
Part of the problem here is the issue of readily stealable laptops, netbooks etc. The more "friendly" the system is (read MacBooks for instance) the greater the temptation to just close it up rather than logging out properly. This wipes out any benefit of encrypted filesystems and so forth, and I have to confess I am pretty much as guilty as anyone else on this count, despite the fact that in other respects I am inordinately paranoid.
In my case, this might be related to overconfidence in my (hitherto effective) competence in beating the crap out of any mugger, but nevertheless, I obviously have to admit it's not an ideal security policy.
For some reason, I'm much more careful about my desktop boxes, which are much more effectively locked down when I'm not around.
and looks like he is from Egypt. When I asked him where he was from he told me Canada...
Well, why do you all get so wound up about skin colour anyway?
I understand there was supposed to have been some guy by the name of Jesus who is meant to be fairly highly regarded in the US, and I believe he would have had a middle-Eastern appearance too.
YOU ARE MORTAL SO YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. Make your life worth something instead of cowering from shadows.
Well said. I'm not an American, but this snivelling about terrorists is universal across the Western world, and I am very tired of it. Sure, there are people who are out to kill or hurt others, but ultimately they are no different from any other murderer or other common criminal. And we already have a criminal code in place to deal with those individuals.
We certainly don't need to replace this with a system where everybody is treated as a criminal.
What if some dastardly person occasionally put a video stream or audio stream into the workspace, for instance...
I think I must be getting old, but I'm having difficulty seeing a whole lot of functional difference between this and Facebook. I can understand why Google might want to claw back some advertising revenue, but that's about all I can see here.
Well, in my case the principle of "if you're not with us then you're against us" is exactly right. And I would happily extend it to all organised religions.
No, it means they have to use other IP addresses
/. is doing about this nowadays, but whatever it is seems (mostly) to be working.
I can't say I care for this method of filtering, since it's inherently unreliable. But my opinion is coloured by a series of experiences years ago when Slashdot routinely and capriciously applied this method of filtering to deal with spammers and script-kiddies. My own posts were blocked as collateral damage. I don't know what
No, but I predict people will start pronouncing it as "Bung".
;-)
Yes, but only in New Zealand.
It's a great name, too bad the momentum has been lost.
And there lies the rub. Sure, there are plenty of us who still harbour deep suspicicions about Google and its motives, but those reservations pale by comparison to those surrounding Microsoft.
Once all the hype about MSN search and Windows 7 has died down, I wonder if Microsoft might be forced into a position where its most secure bastion is MSOffice. Whatever we might think of MS, the latter is still probably the only one of their products that really qualifies as a "killer".
Disclaimer: my personal preference is for OpenOffice or NeoOffice, dependent on platform.
Hmmm. I still remember my first modem. It was about the size of a large stack of telephone directories, with a rotary-dial phone sitting on top of it. It was supposed to have been 300 baud, but I think in reality it might have been 16. :-{
There are a few of us young people who actually prefer the Zune to the iPod.
Bill? That you? Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're only a year or so older than I am, and you're the only other owner of a Zune that I know.
which marks the first time Microsoft has announced the US exclusivity on the Zune is being dropped.
...which is exactly why I predict Microsoft is unlikely to sell a single unit. Microsoft has totally missed the boat. They might as well just pick up their bags and go home, maybe to try and sell some lame operating system riddled with bugs and bigger holes than Britney...
Ahem. Sorry.
In other words, Move along please, nothing to see here...
Don't compare Bach and Shakespeare to Joe Blow playing at the local pub or reading at the local poetry night. Compare them to the Beatles and Stephen King.
;-)
Ummm, if you do that, then you might just as well compare them to Joe Blow at the pub.
My apologies.
:-}
I was trying for a +n Funny (I don't need the karma), but a few idiots obviously decided to take me seriously. My bad.
It's not only laziness. I've tried installing Linux on various PCs over the years, and out of 8-9 tries, got to the desktop only ONCE. Last try, ubuntu 8.10, gives me "snow " when it's time to launch the gnome desktop.
Now that is scary. Back in the mid-'90s when I was playing around with various Linux distros on a machine with a no-name motherboard and SiS-based graphics card, I didn't get great results (the colour was 16-bit at best) but I never ONCE got snow.
And over the years since (and manymany Linux installs down the track) I have had 100% success in getting X11 to work. Go figure.
The greatest artists of the past, Mozart, Bach, Shakespeare, worked for a pittance comapred to what artists make nowadays.
Yes and no. Yes, they worked for a pittance, because the only way an artist could survive then was to use his craft for the benefit or enjoyment of his patron. But the majority of artists in our age (unless they manage to hit an uncommon seam of luck) have to find other means to feed themselves and their families.
Many current artists make ends meet by using their talents either under corporate sponsorship or (more directly and lucratively) in the advertising industry. I don't think we can truly draw much of a distinction between the environments of most modern artists from that of Johann Sebastian. (Though for my own part, if I were forced to make a choice, I would have to say there has never been a musician whose stature equals that of JSB.)
Maybe they need something like the Czar Cannon to make life interesting, if nothing else...
...or if you show it to them they won't bother with reading it
This is more to the point. Most network admins have the attention span of a flea and won't read past the first sentence of anything you write; actually, I could probably expand that statement to include most people generally. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
...I moved from redhat to debian when potato came out, partly based on slashdot (and linux newbie) raves about apt, so Ubuntu is natural when I want it to just work.
/etc/inittab and found it wasn't there? I'm not saying that RedHat/Debian/Ubuntu are good or bad, but expecting Ubuntu to "Just Work" can be a tall order if you're used to other Unices.
OK. And did you spit chips when you went to edit