Confirm what identity? You think the State has a monopoly on assigning anyone a usable identity?
If someone lies to a bank, cell phone carrier, newegg, or a prospective employer about his/her identity, that might be fraud depending on the person's intentions, and whether the fake identity is really someone else's or just entirely made-up. It's fraud if you provide an identity with different credit characteristics in the pursuit of a contract involving financial transactions, for instance. I'm not so sure about job apps, though; if you apply to the NSA under a fake identity that's not someone else's, and they hire you and give you access to UBER SECRET data, whose fault is that? It's the responsibility of an employer to make sure the potential employee is suitable for the position, not to make judgments about that based on name, address, and SSN. If they do that and get burned, is that employee fraud or corporate stupidity? There's nothing in an employee's personal information that directly predicts whether they'll violate an employment contract.
Providing "false" information to myspace about your "identity" has no such connection. They're not interested for contractual reasons in your credit score or trustworthiness. They just want some data, any data, that can be used by advertisers to targets ads. Who's to say that the "fake" data many people provide is any less useful for ad targetting than real personal data?
Evolution doesn't have a plan, it is not a ladder or a tree. More of a bush.
True, evolution does not have a plan, unless you define historical and future evolution as a plan, or unless you believe in a religion that has a higher creature guiding everything (including evolution).
The rest of your sentence is semantically meaningless to me, perhaps because I have less-than-average intelligence, but I don't see how it relates to my comments at all. I do not think that I ever equated evolution with anything that could be compared with a ladder or a tree.
In any case, many species of plants are both bushes and trees. Essentially, you fail. If you're going to claim that I have "a fundamental misunderstanding of natural selection and random mutations," you'd best back that up with evidence, rather than demonstrating your ignorance of plant life.
Are you claiming blindness or heart defects are positive (or neutral) in allowing humans to survive in our environment? Are you claiming that such traits would not be selected against if it weren't for advanced medical technology and social institutions designed specifically to help people with those traits (commonly termed "defects" or "diseases" for a reason, you know...)?
In case you're confused, nowhere was I claiming that (artificial) genetic engineering and selection would always create humans better adapted to the environment. However, it would in significant part counteract the spread of maladaptive traits due to social forces and medical technology that have combined to allow more genetically-maladaptive individuals to survive long enough to have offspring.
Everyone has different ideals of the "perfect" human, so allowing arbitrary selection -- even if it were affordable to everyone, which it wouldn't be -- won't eliminate diversity.
What it will do is reverse the trend of propagating serious genetic defects throughout the gene pool. Thanks to social ethics and medical technology, people with major non-adaptive genetic mutations -- degenerative diseases, blindness, deafness, obesity, heart defects, and yes, even way-below-average intelligence (to the degree that's determined by genetics) -- are no longer selected out of the gene pool as they would be in a less organized or less ethical society.
We have an opportunity to pick up where we forced nature to stop in designing better-adapted humans. We may have to do some serious engineering on human genetics in order for us as a species to survive in different environments with toxic materials, not enough oxygen, too much radiation, or other uncorrectable environmental difficulties. That could mean another planet, or Earth in the far-future. Whining about parents genetically testing their zygotes is ridiculous.
Isn't the generally accepted philosophy of being human that what really matters is thoughts and personality? Thoughts cannot be genetically selected. Personality has some genetic basis due to biochemistry in the brain and genetically-determined brain structure, but even there the core of personality is dictated by the environment and experience.
Congratulations. You bought into the anti-gun left's lie. I suggest that you not support any restrictive legislation until you understand exactly what said legislation will restrict. Otherwise politicians will continue to lie to you, abusing your misunderstanding to get your support for measures that you may not actually agree with.
The noise would be a lot less if CCP would communicate with players in a reasonable manner. If CCP would provide a clear picture of how the server architecture worked, people who do have a clue would do the job of telling the idiots that they're idiots. Bad ideas would die out as idiots gradually became aware of their idiocy, and good ideas would keep getting suggested. Better communication, not less (as CCP seems to think), is the solution to lots of idiots clamoring to have their ideas implemented.
Perhaps the single largest issue with "noise" on the eve-online forums is due to a lack of built-in search. All they have to do is add in a form that submits queries to Chribba's eve-search.com. If users can't quickly search for something, they're likely to create a new thread about it. That no doubt pisses off devs who have already seen 1000 threads about the same feature request.
I think one simple change would vastly improve the entire situation. CCP should switch to an open-access, searchable bug and feature-request tracking system. I don't care which one they use, as long as they use a popular, well-supported one and not some garbage in-house system they develop themselves. Having a public bug list would motivate them to fix major problems, and if they are in fact fixing problems at a reasonable rate, players would be able to see that progress.
If they aren't making a reasonable amount of progress, if the bugs are that tough to fix, then perhaps rewriting a large portion of the game isn't such a bad idea. CCP loves to praise stackless python, but if they don't know how to code using it -- which is my working theory, because there are a bunch of bugs where state doesn't seem to be properly adjusted or kept -- then they shouldn't use it.
You're correct, but the poster you're replying to is also correct, just not about the DB size being a problem.
In everything from PR to coding to bug handling to system administration, CCP is a disaster. The only reason the company is viable is because the core idea of the game is awesome, which is why those of us who play get so frustrated and angry that EVE is still bugged to hell and slow as hell when there are hundreds of people in a system.
How long would you last at any real company if: 1. The space-MMORPG project you were working on needed on average 45-60 minutes of downtime a day 2. It could take several minutes or more to transfer items from one container to another, and they're apparently transfered one at a time in the database, because they appear to move one at a time in the client. 3. Players could get stuck jumping between systems or docking/undocking 4. Overview colors and backgrounds were sometimes incorrect, and this has been the case for years. 5. Something as simple as jumping between star systems with a non-real-space map open (the solar system map) completely screwed up the client. 6. Pressing the "dock" button for stations didn't always dock your ship. 7. Bugs routinely took months to get fixed, bugs introduced by a patch weren't fixed until the next major patch 8. Your excuse for performance problems is that you're waiting for a new faster server cluster (which you call a "supercomputer" to sound cool). 8. Meanwhile, you're working on an in-station environment (I suppose for meetings and gambling and such) instead of fixing those bugs or working on performance.
That's pretty much what CCP does.
It's not a matter of "CCP must get performance fixed with 500 people in a system." It's that they're actively working on other crap ("ambulation," the in-station environment) and new features (Trinity graphics are great, but does anyone honestly play the game only because of the graphics?) instead of dedicating those resources towards fixing existing bugs and working on improving performance with the hardware they already have.
If I got the impression that CCP was doing everything they could to fix bugs and improve performance, I'd drop it. Massive amounts of evidence, including a general lack of willingness to communicate anything useful to concerned players, indicates otherwise.
Many players I've talked to have some great ideas that might work to improve performance, but CCP is very closed about how they operate. Unless someone spends months to years as a bug tester, CCP won't take their design ideas seriously. And of course the design of the server is never talked about except in the most vague and broad terms, which makes it easy for CCP to say "you don't know what you're talking about, it's not that simple" whenever anyone offers suggestions on how to improve server-side performance.
I dunno... if someone is manually picking out email addresses and adding them to a list, I don't think the legal system needs to get involved. I would ignore the advertising and I might flame the company in return, but that sort of spam is benign compared to the spam problem we have today.
It's the automated collection and use of email addresses that needs to be reduced. To that end, I fully support legalization of spammer-on-spammer violence. Why not let economics fix the problems that economics created?
Regardless of if the CEO actually did the physical work,the CEO should be held responsible. Here's how I see it, if an employee does something good and the company makes $$$, what share of that does the employee get and what share does the CEO and other upper management get? Why should the distribution of criminal guilt be any different? All of the rewards and none of the responsibility just doesn't ring true to me.
They do not get all the rewards. Their percentage stake in the company is independent of their role as CEO, and their salary is determined by the board, not directly by corporate profits.
If the company makes money, the company's shareholders make money, not (just) the CEO. The CEO gets paid as determined by the board, and the board is elected by the shareholders. CEOs often have a good chunk of stock, sometimes even a majority stake, but that's not always so. If you want to punish the CEO for bad actors inside the company simply because the CEO profits when the company profits, you should also want to punish each and every shareholder.
No CEO wants bad actors inside a company. A bad actor, in severe cases, can generate enough loses, or enough bad press, to sink the company. No CEO wants that, because it would reflect badly on his/her reputation. Holding a CEO personally liable for actions of an employee is not reasonable. Companies have too many employees for someone to bear personal liability for anything bad done by any employee. Simple probability dictates that the liability would be too great, and all the good CEOs would flee their jobs.
CEOs have enormous responsibility, especially after the recent SEC changes designed to avoid future Enron/Worldcom debacles. Executives have more government-mandated liability and duties than ever before. They have duties to their boards, and to all their shareholders by proxy. They have duties to maintain a healthy work environment, or employees will flee and the company will tank. What they do not, and should not have, is responsibility for every crazy thing done by every crazy employee.
Maybe corporations need to be reformed to be more accountable. Maybe there needs to be more oversight at all levels. But ask yourself whether we'd have the internet at all if corporations were much more constrained than they are now. Without places to invest large amounts of money with isolation from (often frivolous) liability, few people would be building infrastructure or producing products with high r&d costs. Be careful what you wish for.
I think the general societal norm is quite different from the political norm in developed countries. Otherwise, I agree.
Nerds are deviants under (say) 1950's norms because they realize those norms are untenable in the face of advancing science and technology. I think nerds tend toward radical (libertarian/anarcho-socialist/green) ideologies because they see an irreconcilable conflict between current mainstream political ideologies and technological/social progress.
There are a lot of reasons for the political decay in most countries, ranging from cultural melting-pot instability, to the game-theoretic 2-party mess to the institutionalization of congress (essay of the same name, Polsby, 1968), to the lack of a frontier for radicals to inhabit, constructing their own societies free from external influence.
Until those problems are mitigated, political norms will remain skewed from general societal norms.
Second - candidate selection within major parties is done by cabal. Sure, there are state-by-state primaries, but the number of voters in those primaries is quite small, and the results of primaries are not binding.
Voter apathy and stupidity contributes to the second problem, but if the first problem were fixed, the major party nominations wouldn't matter quite so much. Money would still mean a lot in determining which candidates gain traction in the media, and thus gain popular support. However, without the game-theoretic nightmare of our current plurality voting system, people could vote their conscience. If nothing else, with people voting their conscience we'd all have a clear idea of the political spectrum in the U.S. Right now we can't tell how many people prefer Green to Democrat, or Libertarian to Republican, because people vote dishonestly in order (they hope) to suffer the least.
Uh, since evolution puts pressure on anything that contributes to the physical properties of the organism, and since the theory suggested in this blog/article is that most or all DNA contributes to the development of the organism in some way, how is that a "win" for intelligent design?
At this stage in our understanding of molecular dynamics and genetics, I doubt very much that there's any way for us to distinguish between genetically engineered and naturally evolved creatures... at least not unless there are creatures with nothing even close to them in the fossil record. Despite the tittering of ID proponents, the fossil record is quite extensive, and it's perfectly plausible that critical DNA mutations necessary to differentiate two species would produce discrete (but fairly small) changes in skeletal structure, rather than the perfectly gradual changes that ID proponents claim we should expect.
In its own language, the patent is seeking IP protection for sets or pre-existing genes, not specific constructed organisms or constructed genes. Even if it were patenting actual constructions (which it's not -- I see no claim that Venter & Co. actually created any of the genes in these lists, or that they created more than a few organisms with the sets of genes they're trying to patent, and if they did they could perhaps patent those individually), it is clearly abusive, I think, to patent so many things at once. This charade is patently illegitimate. (pardon the pun)
a) I see no black and white distinction between reshaping law and the interpretation of law, and merely reshaping law. If we can agree that drug dealing is acceptable, do we need to cleanse society of everyone who shared that sentiment and was unwilling to abide by stupid drug laws in the past? I don't think so; evidently you do. Many of the most powerful clans in the U.S. were involved in bootlegging during the prohibition. Where would we be today if those criminals had been executed to make way for the more domesticated businesspeople who were afraid of the law even when it was stupid?
b)
Remove the legal framework, and we have what I exposed above: human life or no human life.
I dispute that dichotomy. As you point out, there is no developmental bright line. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that is difficult to characterize, and impossible to test objectively.
If we protect fertilized eggs because they're genetically human, do we protect eggs modified with somatic cell nuclear transfer? Do we protect other less-capable stem cells because they might be easy to coax into forming embryos?
If we protect a 6-week-old embryo because it has the beginnings of a brain, or a 5-month-old foetus because it has an active nervous system, why not grant equivalent human rights to all mammals? Do they not have brains and nervous systems?
The only bright line in sight is the point at which society grants human rights to a developing human. That is entirely arbitrary. Birth works perfectly well, and I see no reason to go screwing with that bright line. I don't think infants inherently deserve human rights; they are clearly less capable at birth than many other animals which we have no problem prodding with needles and killing in research labs. Nevertheless, I think there's a strong case for giving infants full rights at birth, because there are powerful psychological and sociological mechanisms (parental bonding, community outrage over killing anything that looks human and can move around on its own) for prohibiting the killing of infants. Those reasons disappear when you consider a foetus.
c) What's ethical in wartime with regard to foreigners is highly subjective. Until we have a one-world government, we have to live with the fact that every person in another country can become "the other" if there's a perceived threat to our national interest.
e) I think a large number of people who die of natural causes or diseases would choose euthanasia if they could, and I think the benefits of that would outweigh the minuscule risk of abuse. I've watched three of my grandparents degenerate in nursing homes, and it seem to me that nursing homes are full of people clinging to what they have for no reason other than to avoid upsetting the social order. There plenty of other people, elderly and not-so-elderly, who are nothing more than walking ghosts. They contribute nothing to society, nothing to their families (other than delay of grief from their passing), and don't even better themselves. I think our culture needs to change so that it's acceptable for someone not to want to live any longer. Didn't it used to be that way? Is it just in modern times that anyone who wants to die, even an octogenerian, is considered depressed? Once you admit the possibility that wanting to die is valid, I think you're obligated to provide a way for people to kill themselves.
I think the problems you mention related to legal euthanasia are not much more difficult than many other problems we live with today. People who would go to the trouble of all the trickery you propose would not have any qualms about faking suicides, arranging "accidents," or framing someone for capital murder. Any of those works just as well as euthanasia if you want someone dead. It's not easy to get away with such crimes, and it wouldn't be easy to get away with bribing people to swear that patient X wanted to die. If doctors
First) No, legalized dealing doesn't cause a problem. Profits drop, major corporations take over drug production, and former drug kingpins, while still rich, seen their annual profits fall to small-business levels. Maybe 3rd-world drug lords can leverage cheap/coerced labor to produce coke and heroin and pot, but synthetics would be completely dominated by domestic production. Low profits would eliminate most drug-dealing-related violence. So why do you hate drug dealers again? You think when Britain lost the war of Independence, they should have said, "Hey, sorry about that. Just let us execute all those troublemaking Founding Fathers, and then we'll let you run your own country?"
Second) That might make you feel good, but it's mostly useless because it functions as an extremely attenuated deterrent. Nobody thinks they're going to go commit crimes if they take drugs. They take drugs because they like the feeling. The way to prevent drug-induced crimes is to pay attention to other people and intervene if it looks like they're addicted or are getting in over their head.
b) You're grossly misusing probability, and you evidently have never glanced at embryology. You also don't understand that human rights are a societal construct granted to make society function better, not something inherently belonging to human beings.
c) Physical torture works if the prisoner knows a bunch of things, only a few of which you're interested in, and the prisoner doesn't know how much you (as part of the interrogating agency) know. You can then set a reasonable probability bound on whether he's telling the truth. Various means of torture are used simply to get the prisoner to the point where he's telling you the truth about things you already know or can verify. At that point -- again, only if he doesn't know what you know -- you can be fairly sure he's telling you the truth about things you can't verify.
d) Absolutely agree.
e) Mostly agree, except you're thinking inside the box. If euthanasia is legal, getting witnesses would be easy. Simply get a few witnesses (with nothing to gain from the death), and that prevents most of the abuse you're worried about. Doctors or nurses would make fine witnesses.
Umm, no, you're the one who doesn't understand what incest is.
Your first post doesn't mention pedophilia at all. It's a rant against incest. I suggest you look up the word. It refers to sexual conduct between related individuals (typically first cousin or closer in the U.S.). It does not exclusively refer to sexual relations between parents and their children, and it has nothing to do with the age of the participants. Sex between a 60-year-old parent and 35-year-old child is incest, as is sex between 20-year-old identical twins, as is two 5-year-old first cousins playing doctor.
mdwh2 didn't provide an age distinction because your rant about incest did not include an age distinction. Most people, including myself, object to real pedophilia, regardless of whether it also happens to be incest. Complaints about parent/child sexual relationships are properly criticized because they're pedophilia, not because they're incest.
The taboo against incest is simply selective eugenics. There could be a critical, valuable and rare recessive gene somewhere, and the only way there is a significant chance of an individual expressing that trait is through incest (the alternative being a chance coupling between two carriers from separate gene lines). No educated person would deny that incest resulting in a child puts that child at greater risk of problems due to harmful recessive traits. But there are two sides to almost everything, and criticizing incest-qua-incest while not criticizing reproduction by people with known, serious genetic diseases is garbage -- emotionally-driven public policy.
You're forgetting that any kind of RF service is an oligopoly, because only one company can get a license to a particular band in a particular area, and there are only a few cdma/gsm/wcdma-licensed bands. Prices in the U.S. are what they are because all the cell providers have the same general philosophy -- gouge the customer. If one of them broke with that tradition and started charging reasonable prices that reflected actual costs (plus some profit margin), the rest would have to follow suit. But since none of them is inclined to shift to a realistic pricing model, we all get screwed.
The subject of this thread is a perfect example of gouging. When a provider can offer an unlimited messaging plan for $15/month, the reasonable, rational thing to do is to cap SMS charges at something more -- but not 50 times more -- than that. There is a legitimate need to charge more per message when someone prepays for 100 messages and uses a few thousand. The networks can't do proper capacity planning if users subscribe to minimal plans (voice and/or messaging and/or data) and then use a lot more than that. However, there's no need to charge hundreds or thousands of dollars extra when someone occasionally goes way about their limits, particularly with data and messaging plans where the providers already offer fixed-rate plans of $15 for messaging and $30-$40 for data. Those who don't subscribe to unlimited plans should be charged more per KB, but only up to a cap of maybe $100 or $200 for data or $50 for messaging. That allows the networks to avoid losses if there's a lot of unplanned usage, while not eating up some parent's salary when a wayward kid decides to send/receive a few thousand text messages.
Variable-use services rely on the statistical principle that with large numbers of users, service utilization tends to smooth out. Charging ridiculous amounts for spurious incidents of individual users using more services than expected is plainly abusive. It ignores the reality of relatively minor impact from the service provider's perspective, while depending on the individual customers' tendency to pay linearly for use of services.
How many people, much less judges, know what a website is, really? I mean, how many people understand the distinction between port 80 and HTTP? How many understand that a web forum and a non-web-forum are not different kinds of websites, but merely have different website content?
That kind of understanding requires knowledge that only techies have.
We need range voting. Voting in plurality voting or IRV single-winner elections merely lends credibility to a corrupt method of candidate selection, encouraging dominance by two parties which have a game-theoretic interest in remaining close to moderates on most issues. You can vote for third parties, but it's literally not worth your time to fill in the bubble or press the button, and it's certainly not worth your time to research candidates who have no chance of winning.
Nobody cares whether Libertarians or Greens get.5% or 1% of the vote (unless it's in a swing state), but if national election turnout falls to 20% or 10%, that might catalyze real change.
The rest of the problem is voter stupidity, but that's unsolvable.
FRS for small-campus-wide wireless communications? Are you high? The only criteria for small-campus general wireless communications needs that are met by FRS are 1) wireless and 2) roughly the right range (but probably still underpowered). A few of the criteria FRS fails are: private; node-to-node; station ID; multi-user; legal for general communications purposes... basically, non-digital technologies are a failure for modern communications needs.
If you want something for general wireless communications these days, your options are GSM, CDMA, and VOIP over 802.11a/b/g/n. Even 802.11 is dicey because of its more limited range. Will they work in a Dawn-of-the-Dead scenario? No. Does that mean using a FRS or HAM radio to communicate with your friends and classmates is a good idea _now_? No.
FRS, GMRS, CB, and HAM all have their places, but this is not one of them.
Our lack of an "open multi-party system" in the U.S. is due to the horrid Plurality voting system that we (and most other countries) use for national elections. IRV single-winner -- which is foolishly used in a few (foreign) national elections and a few lower-level elections here and abroad -- is not much better. It encourages speculative, dishonest, strategic voting. Its only dubious distinction (compared to plurality voting) is that it allows voters to provide more (potentially dishonest) information about their preferences.
Range Voting is a very nice alternative. Condorcet is another possibility; while not quite as good as Range Voting, it is vastly superior to Plurality and IRV, and it can use the same ballots as IRV. Its main drawbacks are its complexity, and its few flaws that stand out when compared to the arguably ideal Range Voting system.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent down for not understanding the vulnerability.
Confirm what identity? You think the State has a monopoly on assigning anyone a usable identity?
If someone lies to a bank, cell phone carrier, newegg, or a prospective employer about his/her identity, that might be fraud depending on the person's intentions, and whether the fake identity is really someone else's or just entirely made-up. It's fraud if you provide an identity with different credit characteristics in the pursuit of a contract involving financial transactions, for instance. I'm not so sure about job apps, though; if you apply to the NSA under a fake identity that's not someone else's, and they hire you and give you access to UBER SECRET data, whose fault is that? It's the responsibility of an employer to make sure the potential employee is suitable for the position, not to make judgments about that based on name, address, and SSN. If they do that and get burned, is that employee fraud or corporate stupidity? There's nothing in an employee's personal information that directly predicts whether they'll violate an employment contract.
Providing "false" information to myspace about your "identity" has no such connection. They're not interested for contractual reasons in your credit score or trustworthiness. They just want some data, any data, that can be used by advertisers to targets ads. Who's to say that the "fake" data many people provide is any less useful for ad targetting than real personal data?
True, evolution does not have a plan, unless you define historical and future evolution as a plan, or unless you believe in a religion that has a higher creature guiding everything (including evolution).
The rest of your sentence is semantically meaningless to me, perhaps because I have less-than-average intelligence, but I don't see how it relates to my comments at all. I do not think that I ever equated evolution with anything that could be compared with a ladder or a tree.
In any case, many species of plants are both bushes and trees. Essentially, you fail. If you're going to claim that I have "a fundamental misunderstanding of natural selection and random mutations," you'd best back that up with evidence, rather than demonstrating your ignorance of plant life.
Are you claiming blindness or heart defects are positive (or neutral) in allowing humans to survive in our environment? Are you claiming that such traits would not be selected against if it weren't for advanced medical technology and social institutions designed specifically to help people with those traits (commonly termed "defects" or "diseases" for a reason, you know...)?
In case you're confused, nowhere was I claiming that (artificial) genetic engineering and selection would always create humans better adapted to the environment. However, it would in significant part counteract the spread of maladaptive traits due to social forces and medical technology that have combined to allow more genetically-maladaptive individuals to survive long enough to have offspring.
Everyone has different ideals of the "perfect" human, so allowing arbitrary selection -- even if it were affordable to everyone, which it wouldn't be -- won't eliminate diversity.
What it will do is reverse the trend of propagating serious genetic defects throughout the gene pool. Thanks to social ethics and medical technology, people with major non-adaptive genetic mutations -- degenerative diseases, blindness, deafness, obesity, heart defects, and yes, even way-below-average intelligence (to the degree that's determined by genetics) -- are no longer selected out of the gene pool as they would be in a less organized or less ethical society.
We have an opportunity to pick up where we forced nature to stop in designing better-adapted humans. We may have to do some serious engineering on human genetics in order for us as a species to survive in different environments with toxic materials, not enough oxygen, too much radiation, or other uncorrectable environmental difficulties. That could mean another planet, or Earth in the far-future. Whining about parents genetically testing their zygotes is ridiculous.
Isn't the generally accepted philosophy of being human that what really matters is thoughts and personality? Thoughts cannot be genetically selected. Personality has some genetic basis due to biochemistry in the brain and genetically-determined brain structure, but even there the core of personality is dictated by the environment and experience.
Congratulations. You bought into the anti-gun left's lie. I suggest that you not support any restrictive legislation until you understand exactly what said legislation will restrict. Otherwise politicians will continue to lie to you, abusing your misunderstanding to get your support for measures that you may not actually agree with.
Those backups had better be encrypted (manually) as well. At least there you can use real crypto, not some ECB-mode AES garbage.
The noise would be a lot less if CCP would communicate with players in a reasonable manner. If CCP would provide a clear picture of how the server architecture worked, people who do have a clue would do the job of telling the idiots that they're idiots. Bad ideas would die out as idiots gradually became aware of their idiocy, and good ideas would keep getting suggested. Better communication, not less (as CCP seems to think), is the solution to lots of idiots clamoring to have their ideas implemented.
Perhaps the single largest issue with "noise" on the eve-online forums is due to a lack of built-in search. All they have to do is add in a form that submits queries to Chribba's eve-search.com. If users can't quickly search for something, they're likely to create a new thread about it. That no doubt pisses off devs who have already seen 1000 threads about the same feature request.
I think one simple change would vastly improve the entire situation. CCP should switch to an open-access, searchable bug and feature-request tracking system. I don't care which one they use, as long as they use a popular, well-supported one and not some garbage in-house system they develop themselves. Having a public bug list would motivate them to fix major problems, and if they are in fact fixing problems at a reasonable rate, players would be able to see that progress.
If they aren't making a reasonable amount of progress, if the bugs are that tough to fix, then perhaps rewriting a large portion of the game isn't such a bad idea. CCP loves to praise stackless python, but if they don't know how to code using it -- which is my working theory, because there are a bunch of bugs where state doesn't seem to be properly adjusted or kept -- then they shouldn't use it.
You're correct, but the poster you're replying to is also correct, just not about the DB size being a problem.
In everything from PR to coding to bug handling to system administration, CCP is a disaster. The only reason the company is viable is because the core idea of the game is awesome, which is why those of us who play get so frustrated and angry that EVE is still bugged to hell and slow as hell when there are hundreds of people in a system.
How long would you last at any real company if:
1. The space-MMORPG project you were working on needed on average 45-60 minutes of downtime a day
2. It could take several minutes or more to transfer items from one container to another, and they're apparently transfered one at a time in the database, because they appear to move one at a time in the client.
3. Players could get stuck jumping between systems or docking/undocking
4. Overview colors and backgrounds were sometimes incorrect, and this has been the case for years.
5. Something as simple as jumping between star systems with a non-real-space map open (the solar system map) completely screwed up the client.
6. Pressing the "dock" button for stations didn't always dock your ship.
7. Bugs routinely took months to get fixed, bugs introduced by a patch weren't fixed until the next major patch
8. Your excuse for performance problems is that you're waiting for a new faster server cluster (which you call a "supercomputer" to sound cool).
8. Meanwhile, you're working on an in-station environment (I suppose for meetings and gambling and such) instead of fixing those bugs or working on performance.
That's pretty much what CCP does.
It's not a matter of "CCP must get performance fixed with 500 people in a system." It's that they're actively working on other crap ("ambulation," the in-station environment) and new features (Trinity graphics are great, but does anyone honestly play the game only because of the graphics?) instead of dedicating those resources towards fixing existing bugs and working on improving performance with the hardware they already have.
If I got the impression that CCP was doing everything they could to fix bugs and improve performance, I'd drop it. Massive amounts of evidence, including a general lack of willingness to communicate anything useful to concerned players, indicates otherwise.
Many players I've talked to have some great ideas that might work to improve performance, but CCP is very closed about how they operate. Unless someone spends months to years as a bug tester, CCP won't take their design ideas seriously. And of course the design of the server is never talked about except in the most vague and broad terms, which makes it easy for CCP to say "you don't know what you're talking about, it's not that simple" whenever anyone offers suggestions on how to improve server-side performance.
I dunno... if someone is manually picking out email addresses and adding them to a list, I don't think the legal system needs to get involved. I would ignore the advertising and I might flame the company in return, but that sort of spam is benign compared to the spam problem we have today.
It's the automated collection and use of email addresses that needs to be reduced. To that end, I fully support legalization of spammer-on-spammer violence. Why not let economics fix the problems that economics created?
Regardless of if the CEO actually did the physical work,the CEO should be held responsible. Here's how I see it, if an employee does something good and the company makes $$$, what share of that does the employee get and what share does the CEO and other upper management get? Why should the distribution of criminal guilt be any different? All of the rewards and none of the responsibility just doesn't ring true to me.
They do not get all the rewards. Their percentage stake in the company is independent of their role as CEO, and their salary is determined by the board, not directly by corporate profits.
If the company makes money, the company's shareholders make money, not (just) the CEO. The CEO gets paid as determined by the board, and the board is elected by the shareholders. CEOs often have a good chunk of stock, sometimes even a majority stake, but that's not always so. If you want to punish the CEO for bad actors inside the company simply because the CEO profits when the company profits, you should also want to punish each and every shareholder.
No CEO wants bad actors inside a company. A bad actor, in severe cases, can generate enough loses, or enough bad press, to sink the company. No CEO wants that, because it would reflect badly on his/her reputation. Holding a CEO personally liable for actions of an employee is not reasonable. Companies have too many employees for someone to bear personal liability for anything bad done by any employee. Simple probability dictates that the liability would be too great, and all the good CEOs would flee their jobs.
CEOs have enormous responsibility, especially after the recent SEC changes designed to avoid future Enron/Worldcom debacles. Executives have more government-mandated liability and duties than ever before. They have duties to their boards, and to all their shareholders by proxy. They have duties to maintain a healthy work environment, or employees will flee and the company will tank. What they do not, and should not have, is responsibility for every crazy thing done by every crazy employee.
Maybe corporations need to be reformed to be more accountable. Maybe there needs to be more oversight at all levels. But ask yourself whether we'd have the internet at all if corporations were much more constrained than they are now. Without places to invest large amounts of money with isolation from (often frivolous) liability, few people would be building infrastructure or producing products with high r&d costs. Be careful what you wish for.
I think the general societal norm is quite different from the political norm in developed countries. Otherwise, I agree.
Nerds are deviants under (say) 1950's norms because they realize those norms are untenable in the face of advancing science and technology. I think nerds tend toward radical (libertarian/anarcho-socialist/green) ideologies because they see an irreconcilable conflict between current mainstream political ideologies and technological/social progress.
There are a lot of reasons for the political decay in most countries, ranging from cultural melting-pot instability, to the game-theoretic 2-party mess to the institutionalization of congress (essay of the same name, Polsby, 1968), to the lack of a frontier for radicals to inhabit, constructing their own societies free from external influence.
Until those problems are mitigated, political norms will remain skewed from general societal norms.
I totally agree. The problem is at least two-fold.
First - the plurality election system (as opposed to range voting) for federal and state elections. It is perfectly rational for someone who hates both major parties to vote for the one they hate the least, because expected utility from a major-party vote in the plurality system is many orders of magnitude greater than expected utility from a third-party vote. (That is an early -- and I doubt original -- result in the paper, but the presentation is good and the rest of the paper is gold.)
Second - candidate selection within major parties is done by cabal. Sure, there are state-by-state primaries, but the number of voters in those primaries is quite small, and the results of primaries are not binding.
Voter apathy and stupidity contributes to the second problem, but if the first problem were fixed, the major party nominations wouldn't matter quite so much. Money would still mean a lot in determining which candidates gain traction in the media, and thus gain popular support. However, without the game-theoretic nightmare of our current plurality voting system, people could vote their conscience. If nothing else, with people voting their conscience we'd all have a clear idea of the political spectrum in the U.S. Right now we can't tell how many people prefer Green to Democrat, or Libertarian to Republican, because people vote dishonestly in order (they hope) to suffer the least.
Uh, since evolution puts pressure on anything that contributes to the physical properties of the organism, and since the theory suggested in this blog/article is that most or all DNA contributes to the development of the organism in some way, how is that a "win" for intelligent design?
At this stage in our understanding of molecular dynamics and genetics, I doubt very much that there's any way for us to distinguish between genetically engineered and naturally evolved creatures... at least not unless there are creatures with nothing even close to them in the fossil record. Despite the tittering of ID proponents, the fossil record is quite extensive, and it's perfectly plausible that critical DNA mutations necessary to differentiate two species would produce discrete (but fairly small) changes in skeletal structure, rather than the perfectly gradual changes that ID proponents claim we should expect.
He's a judge, silly. By fiat, judges are competent in any cases over which they preside.
Sort of like how certified idjits are --again, by cultural fiat-- competent in the area of certification.
That's a great idea. Let's give every packet kiddie out there the ability to get our monthly DSL costs doubled or tripled.
Is the cost per email .125 cents or .125 dollars?
In its own language, the patent is seeking IP protection for sets or pre-existing genes, not specific constructed organisms or constructed genes. Even if it were patenting actual constructions (which it's not -- I see no claim that Venter & Co. actually created any of the genes in these lists, or that they created more than a few organisms with the sets of genes they're trying to patent, and if they did they could perhaps patent those individually), it is clearly abusive, I think, to patent so many things at once. This charade is patently illegitimate. (pardon the pun)
a) I see no black and white distinction between reshaping law and the interpretation of law, and merely reshaping law. If we can agree that drug dealing is acceptable, do we need to cleanse society of everyone who shared that sentiment and was unwilling to abide by stupid drug laws in the past? I don't think so; evidently you do. Many of the most powerful clans in the U.S. were involved in bootlegging during the prohibition. Where would we be today if those criminals had been executed to make way for the more domesticated businesspeople who were afraid of the law even when it was stupid?
b)
I dispute that dichotomy. As you point out, there is no developmental bright line. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that is difficult to characterize, and impossible to test objectively.
If we protect fertilized eggs because they're genetically human, do we protect eggs modified with somatic cell nuclear transfer? Do we protect other less-capable stem cells because they might be easy to coax into forming embryos?
If we protect a 6-week-old embryo because it has the beginnings of a brain, or a 5-month-old foetus because it has an active nervous system, why not grant equivalent human rights to all mammals? Do they not have brains and nervous systems?
The only bright line in sight is the point at which society grants human rights to a developing human. That is entirely arbitrary. Birth works perfectly well, and I see no reason to go screwing with that bright line. I don't think infants inherently deserve human rights; they are clearly less capable at birth than many other animals which we have no problem prodding with needles and killing in research labs. Nevertheless, I think there's a strong case for giving infants full rights at birth, because there are powerful psychological and sociological mechanisms (parental bonding, community outrage over killing anything that looks human and can move around on its own) for prohibiting the killing of infants. Those reasons disappear when you consider a foetus.
c) What's ethical in wartime with regard to foreigners is highly subjective. Until we have a one-world government, we have to live with the fact that every person in another country can become "the other" if there's a perceived threat to our national interest.
e) I think a large number of people who die of natural causes or diseases would choose euthanasia if they could, and I think the benefits of that would outweigh the minuscule risk of abuse. I've watched three of my grandparents degenerate in nursing homes, and it seem to me that nursing homes are full of people clinging to what they have for no reason other than to avoid upsetting the social order. There plenty of other people, elderly and not-so-elderly, who are nothing more than walking ghosts. They contribute nothing to society, nothing to their families (other than delay of grief from their passing), and don't even better themselves. I think our culture needs to change so that it's acceptable for someone not to want to live any longer. Didn't it used to be that way? Is it just in modern times that anyone who wants to die, even an octogenerian, is considered depressed? Once you admit the possibility that wanting to die is valid, I think you're obligated to provide a way for people to kill themselves.
I think the problems you mention related to legal euthanasia are not much more difficult than many other problems we live with today. People who would go to the trouble of all the trickery you propose would not have any qualms about faking suicides, arranging "accidents," or framing someone for capital murder. Any of those works just as well as euthanasia if you want someone dead. It's not easy to get away with such crimes, and it wouldn't be easy to get away with bribing people to swear that patient X wanted to die. If doctors
a)
First) No, legalized dealing doesn't cause a problem. Profits drop, major corporations take over drug production, and former drug kingpins, while still rich, seen their annual profits fall to small-business levels. Maybe 3rd-world drug lords can leverage cheap/coerced labor to produce coke and heroin and pot, but synthetics would be completely dominated by domestic production. Low profits would eliminate most drug-dealing-related violence. So why do you hate drug dealers again? You think when Britain lost the war of Independence, they should have said, "Hey, sorry about that. Just let us execute all those troublemaking Founding Fathers, and then we'll let you run your own country?"
Second) That might make you feel good, but it's mostly useless because it functions as an extremely attenuated deterrent. Nobody thinks they're going to go commit crimes if they take drugs. They take drugs because they like the feeling. The way to prevent drug-induced crimes is to pay attention to other people and intervene if it looks like they're addicted or are getting in over their head.
b) You're grossly misusing probability, and you evidently have never glanced at embryology. You also don't understand that human rights are a societal construct granted to make society function better, not something inherently belonging to human beings.
c) Physical torture works if the prisoner knows a bunch of things, only a few of which you're interested in, and the prisoner doesn't know how much you (as part of the interrogating agency) know. You can then set a reasonable probability bound on whether he's telling the truth. Various means of torture are used simply to get the prisoner to the point where he's telling you the truth about things you already know or can verify. At that point -- again, only if he doesn't know what you know -- you can be fairly sure he's telling you the truth about things you can't verify.
d) Absolutely agree.
e) Mostly agree, except you're thinking inside the box. If euthanasia is legal, getting witnesses would be easy. Simply get a few witnesses (with nothing to gain from the death), and that prevents most of the abuse you're worried about. Doctors or nurses would make fine witnesses.
Umm, no, you're the one who doesn't understand what incest is.
Your first post doesn't mention pedophilia at all. It's a rant against incest. I suggest you look up the word. It refers to sexual conduct between related individuals (typically first cousin or closer in the U.S.). It does not exclusively refer to sexual relations between parents and their children, and it has nothing to do with the age of the participants. Sex between a 60-year-old parent and 35-year-old child is incest, as is sex between 20-year-old identical twins, as is two 5-year-old first cousins playing doctor.
mdwh2 didn't provide an age distinction because your rant about incest did not include an age distinction. Most people, including myself, object to real pedophilia, regardless of whether it also happens to be incest. Complaints about parent/child sexual relationships are properly criticized because they're pedophilia, not because they're incest.
The taboo against incest is simply selective eugenics. There could be a critical, valuable and rare recessive gene somewhere, and the only way there is a significant chance of an individual expressing that trait is through incest (the alternative being a chance coupling between two carriers from separate gene lines). No educated person would deny that incest resulting in a child puts that child at greater risk of problems due to harmful recessive traits. But there are two sides to almost everything, and criticizing incest-qua-incest while not criticizing reproduction by people with known, serious genetic diseases is garbage -- emotionally-driven public policy.
You're forgetting that any kind of RF service is an oligopoly, because only one company can get a license to a particular band in a particular area, and there are only a few cdma/gsm/wcdma-licensed bands. Prices in the U.S. are what they are because all the cell providers have the same general philosophy -- gouge the customer. If one of them broke with that tradition and started charging reasonable prices that reflected actual costs (plus some profit margin), the rest would have to follow suit. But since none of them is inclined to shift to a realistic pricing model, we all get screwed.
The subject of this thread is a perfect example of gouging. When a provider can offer an unlimited messaging plan for $15/month, the reasonable, rational thing to do is to cap SMS charges at something more -- but not 50 times more -- than that. There is a legitimate need to charge more per message when someone prepays for 100 messages and uses a few thousand. The networks can't do proper capacity planning if users subscribe to minimal plans (voice and/or messaging and/or data) and then use a lot more than that. However, there's no need to charge hundreds or thousands of dollars extra when someone occasionally goes way about their limits, particularly with data and messaging plans where the providers already offer fixed-rate plans of $15 for messaging and $30-$40 for data. Those who don't subscribe to unlimited plans should be charged more per KB, but only up to a cap of maybe $100 or $200 for data or $50 for messaging. That allows the networks to avoid losses if there's a lot of unplanned usage, while not eating up some parent's salary when a wayward kid decides to send/receive a few thousand text messages.
Variable-use services rely on the statistical principle that with large numbers of users, service utilization tends to smooth out. Charging ridiculous amounts for spurious incidents of individual users using more services than expected is plainly abusive. It ignores the reality of relatively minor impact from the service provider's perspective, while depending on the individual customers' tendency to pay linearly for use of services.
How many people, much less judges, know what a website is, really? I mean, how many people understand the distinction between port 80 and HTTP? How many understand that a web forum and a non-web-forum are not different kinds of websites, but merely have different website content?
That kind of understanding requires knowledge that only techies have.
We need range voting. Voting in plurality voting or IRV single-winner elections merely lends credibility to a corrupt method of candidate selection, encouraging dominance by two parties which have a game-theoretic interest in remaining close to moderates on most issues. You can vote for third parties, but it's literally not worth your time to fill in the bubble or press the button, and it's certainly not worth your time to research candidates who have no chance of winning.
Nobody cares whether Libertarians or Greens get .5% or 1% of the vote (unless it's in a swing state), but if national election turnout falls to 20% or 10%, that might catalyze real change.
The rest of the problem is voter stupidity, but that's unsolvable.
FRS for small-campus-wide wireless communications? Are you high? The only criteria for small-campus general wireless communications needs that are met by FRS are 1) wireless and 2) roughly the right range (but probably still underpowered). A few of the criteria FRS fails are: private; node-to-node; station ID; multi-user; legal for general communications purposes... basically, non-digital technologies are a failure for modern communications needs.
If you want something for general wireless communications these days, your options are GSM, CDMA, and VOIP over 802.11a/b/g/n. Even 802.11 is dicey because of its more limited range. Will they work in a Dawn-of-the-Dead scenario? No. Does that mean using a FRS or HAM radio to communicate with your friends and classmates is a good idea _now_? No.
FRS, GMRS, CB, and HAM all have their places, but this is not one of them.
Our lack of an "open multi-party system" in the U.S. is due to the horrid Plurality voting system that we (and most other countries) use for national elections. IRV single-winner -- which is foolishly used in a few (foreign) national elections and a few lower-level elections here and abroad -- is not much better. It encourages speculative, dishonest, strategic voting. Its only dubious distinction (compared to plurality voting) is that it allows voters to provide more (potentially dishonest) information about their preferences.
Range Voting is a very nice alternative. Condorcet is another possibility; while not quite as good as Range Voting, it is vastly superior to Plurality and IRV, and it can use the same ballots as IRV. Its main drawbacks are its complexity, and its few flaws that stand out when compared to the arguably ideal Range Voting system.