What kills me is that we see computers used in a way that doesn't even make sense within the loopy rules established for them in the same danged story. Everything's dumbed down, that's to be expected, and okay, they exaggerate what today's machines can do. (You expected long moments while the characters wait for a good carrier signal?) But I at least want the rules to be consistent.
Good example: The Star Trek computers show radically different amounts of independent agency according to situation. They can make holodeck characters act according to their characters in a freely-branching story, but they can't, apparently, problem solve the task of looking for the meaning of alien symbols without specific verbal commands from a human. We're talking about a simple correlation between sounds and meanings, you know?
The quintessential pop culture computer would be Doogie Howser's. Enormous, colorful screen with GIANT letters being typed slowly enough for the camera to follow, at excruciatingly slow "silent film dialog card" pace, D-O-O-G-I-E-'-S T-R-I-T-E D-I-A-R-Y E-N-T-R-I-E-S. If Doogie was to ask for the meaning of life, and the computer was to whir and grind and maybe show an outsized Windows "progress" bar, you'd have the archetypal TV computer. (In the movies it'd maybe be more like "WOPR" from War Games.)
Gender and race show the limits of this (and us)
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The Face Detector
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The subtle stuff that tells you which faces are male and female doesn't have an objective truth behind it. There is no concrete set of criteria you can rely on in making those judgments, it's just a set of rough truths you work with to get by. You can't always make a good guess, there are borderline cases: to use your own intended-to-be-obvious example, some women have lots more facial hair than others.
There's no way for this process to reliably determine something like race, either -- not that doing so is that desirable anyway. The characteristics that make up "an African American guy" are just not nearly as concrete as we think they are from day to day. I have a neighbor who thinks all the Somali people in my area are "Arabs." Her category is a little too broad. It seems to me like she's forcing certain expressions onto their faces, too, as part of her image of what "Arabs" are like.
People's minds love to categorize. Sometimes, a lot of the time, we force information into categories it doesn't quite fit. (Refer to: State Department intelligence from Iraqi exile organizations.) Even when the information is essentially noise, we try to sort it and sift it. As a result we persist in holding weird ideas: astrology, because the paper tells us something vague and we run the events we see past that filter.
We should expect our tools to share some of those biases and blind spots. As much as we might try to address that, we have the blind spots ourselves, so it's hard to know how to counter the problem.
You would think that someone who is STILL whining about the election would have enough time on their hands
Just how antithetical to the democratic process does one have to be to suggest that a disputed Presidential election in 2000 is ancient history not worthy of discussion? "No sense in our digging up that again -- despite the flagrant evidence of the potential for abuse of the voting process in front of us in the form of the whole Diebold story, in which -- again -- a Republican Secretary of State has played a pivotal role in selecting Diebold in Ohio, another pivotal swing state"... (Google "Diebold" and "Plain Dealer". Pure sleaze.)
The pivotal state happened to feature, as its governor, the brother of one of the candidates. The US Supreme court voted 4-3 on strictly partisan lines -- and one of the majority Justices (Clarence Thomas) didn't recuse himself despite his wife working on the transition team for one of the parties before the court. The standards for vote counting varied radically by county and constituency -- for example, Bush pushed hard (and successfully) to allow questionable absentee votes to be recorded in strongly Republican counties as he tried to have the whole hanging chads process stopped. The Secretary of State behaved in the most partisan manner possible, in violation of any standard of objective behavior in the office.
That all won't disappear just because you think the right guy won. If you had any, any ability to see past your own nose, you'd recognize exactly how the Republican party and its flaks would have behaved had Gore been 300 votes up that first night.
One doesn't have to be some sort of flake to see that things broke down, and that the breakdowns weren't trivial, and that there's the potential for it happening again. It's starkly obvious. Sophistry like "I can quote another article for every one you quote" is the most pathetic sort of denial -- but you're clinging to it because it's all you've fricking got. Sleepwalking past this one ain't going to do the trick. You're going to wake up from this and see it was a delusive nightmare.
Give me Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, Ford -- give me a Republican Party that has some heart and mind and soul and a measure of plain responsible decency. This is a junta of sullen chickenhawks who don't know a damn tar baby when they see one, and who don't give a shit about the people of this nation.
You've gotten some flak about specifics, but the guts of your reaction are the same for almost any consumer of any electronics product -- Sony stands out as the company that acts like standards are inherently meant to be proprietary. Nobody else is still trying to do this.
This happens right now with Camcorders -- their smallest pocket-sized models use compression that nobody else's software can deal with. It happens in digital cameras, with the memory sticks, and in music here, and with the minidiscs, and so on.
Not coincidentally, their massive recent success was with Playstation, where everyone else is still using proprietary formats, selling consoles at a break-even point, and trying to make their money on the cartridges too.
I don't have the same feeling about Apple. Is the iTunes MS perfect? No. Is it mostly a loss-leader for iPods? Yes. But the store itself really is designed around the user experience, and it's a small pleasure to use. Sony's products don't feel that way. They miss crucial details. The ultramini camcorders have nasty little rocker zoom switches.
Sony almost seems to design around its proprietary formats as if they were a strength, not a weakness.
Some sociologist could do a pop book on this and end up scoring big on the business bestseller list. As a corporate culture, Sony has failed to "get" the impression this makes on consumers for so long, it's shocking. If they were asking their consumers what to do, they'd hear this loud and clear.
Did you go to the library for free books or buy comics?
Comics are a pretty good way for kids to learn to read. My kids -- ten now -- have always made a habit of checking out comics when we go to the library. Granted, Calvin and Hobbes isn't a novel, but it's reading for joy, and why would I quash it? Their schoolin' has hardly suffered.
Did you go to free museums and theater, or did you pay for movies?
C'mon -- my kids are ten and they've seen The Third Man a couple of times. We saw Ella Enchanted and it was a travesty against the book, and my son was hurt when I said so. I'll live with that, he had his own good natured opinion. We also went to the Louvre and the Musee D'Orsay this March... Do I get an indulgence for letting them see "The Simpsons" once in a while? Even if I *paid* for the Passe Musee?
My point is, false dichotomies only show how damn tricky the thing is, education. (The parent post gives us one too: Either we "keep our standards high" or we allow Downs Syndrome kids to graduate. We don't have to choose between those two.)
Personally I think the only way to raise awake kids is to be awake yourself and show them how. A huge share of the world's people seem to sleepwalk through life. I mean, --
Did you go to the free park or pay for sports?
Looking at the people around me, I'd say either one would be a dang good thing. These people don't exercise at all, and yet they still want to lose weight -- so, the Atkins Diet makes someone millions by selling too-good-to-be-true self-indulgence. Wake up, people. You don't want to die of heart disease? Exercising might just have something to do with it. These adults are every bit as cloudy in their thinking and lax in their effort as the low-income kids I volunteer with -- who watch TV after school instead of going to orchestra. It's much easier to do.
It's frightening how our popular culture has become a sort of siren's call to that hazy state of mind. We don't just suffer from the blur, we inflict it on ourselves, often to sell things. SUVs. There's a Greek tragedy in there somewhere... only nobody relates to those any more. (We just live them out unconsciously, in the form of our foreign policy. But that's another story.)
Everyone agrees at first. Jeez, seems like a botched job, just get someone who knows what she's doing to install the filter.
But advocates of filters in libraries (and in your school) have been saying stuff like that for years. "C'mon, we can stop people from viewing explicit pRon in the library. All we have to do is install common-sense filtering." The librarians are radicals to oppose such a simple idea, and so on.
The questions in this/. posting aren't going to vanish because of common sense. Maybe the breast cancer site gets blocked accidentally, maybe not. The huge question is, who gets to oversee which sites get blocked? And who looks over that person's shoulder? Especially if the companies selling the filters regard their blacklists or blacklisting techniques as proprietary, competitive-advantage information, it ain't easy to even figure out what's blocked and why.
Isn't that situation inherently open to abuse? Do we want political appointees determining what "common sense" is? When they might, for example, have extremely strong views about abortion one way or another? How do we correct stuff that was censored inappropriately, accidentally or not?
(I dunno... I guess when I heard Minnesota's chief sponsor of capital punishment legislation for the last five years invoking "common sense" as the way to address all the problems with the death penalty, I lurched toward cynicism about people trying to wave away complicated problems that way. The guy didn't seem to know that crime "rates" were adjusted for populations, and frankly didn't seem to even have heard all the usual objections to the D.P., but he thought "a committee" could resolve everything through common sense. The words sort of took on a different quality after that, for me.)
Holy "read the quote you used," Robin
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Videogames as Art
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"As much as I agree with the author's premise that video games is art, his writing style bears no reality on the current status of art as a discipline and offers about as much insight as my grandma would on the state of open source..."
To which you reply: "The medium does not decide if something is or is not art." Huh?
The parent agrees, games can be art -- she just doesn't think this article measures up to anything like "the status of art as a discipline."
I used to work in a modern art museum. If we'd hosted a show about video gaming as art, nobody'd have blinked. If we'd put on a shoddy show about games as art, it'd have been a different thing. The parent's saying this ain't much of a show, not that its premise is wrong. That's not being a snob, it's being competent and having some background in the subject.
No offense intended to the article poster, but I'm with the "snob" on this one. Pachinko machines are art, but if you tell me it's because they make pretty noises and you can put money in I'm not that impressed...
"From many published reports, Einstein was a bit on the touched side on social issues"...
What exactly does that mean?
It fills me with deep apprehension to see how people who might otherwise rail against "PC revisionism" will dismiss something like Einstein's various social causes, putting them in a basket like "he was a little 'touched'" to keep them at a safe distance. Heisenberg had worked for the German war machine trying to develop an atom bomb. Do we not think Einstein could possibly have strong feelings about that? Whether this diary's legit or not, that particular point doesn't seem over the edge to me. Over-candid, maybe -- as might happen in a diary...
It' ain't just Einstein (who was an avowed socialist by the way -- boo!). A worse and weirder thing has happened with Helen Keller. Helen Keller was a hell of a woman; Winston Churchill called her "The greatest woman of our age." We've made her a curiosity, a freak show -- because we're airbrushing out her entire adult life so that she's safer for fifth-graders to read about. Okay, so these two people were socialists, and I'm not. (I'd be more of a Keynesian, along the lines of Richard Nixon, economically.) Opinions far from our own aren't inherently nuts, and we don't have to be scared of them -- do we?
In Star Wars there was a storyline, so in that case it might have made some sense, but Star Trek?
If only Star Wars had made that sense, we'd all be so happy.
Personally I see some room for a crossover film: one where the kid Anikin from Episode I is involved in a transporter malfunction and has a black goatee, Jar Jar speaks the king's English, and there's a tiny shred of dramatic tension. Oh, for a temporal anomaly right about now...
(Actually isn't it easier to do a prequel when there's no plotline? Not much tension to whether Obi Wan's going to make it through, when we know he grows up to be Alex Guinness.)
As long as you mention it, I happen to be rereading "Name of the Rose" at night lately, and my impression from the first time -- that he was self-indulgent, like you're saying -- is basically completely gone by now. The book's really written cleanly, it works incredibly well. Also I'm finding his characters are more complete than I'd remembered them. (The movie, though, stunk.)
I truly hate the idea that all fiction has to be so "tight" that every word drives the plot forward another step. If an author wants to assume I'm bright and curious enough to read two pages about pipe organs, and she can write, I'm there. Not everything has to have the narrative compression of a touring Broadway show. Sometimes it's okay to assume your audience is made up of intelligent, curious people who'll stick with you a little.
Thomas Mann is another author whose stuff you probably wouldn't tolerate. Your loss, seriously. Sometimes Peter Cook's "Bedazzled" is cool, but there's a place in the world for "Doctor Faustus" too.
And okay, sometimes those learned digressions are self-conscious fat to be trimmed -- but that isn't limited to "intellectual" fiction at all. Tom Clancy's got as much worthless detail (about military hardware) as anyone. The rafts of detail are painful to wade through, for me.
"...if you as an employer try and make the workplace into something too rigid and constraining, your employees will be demoralized and will not function as well as in a more relaxed enviroment."
We got a memo with weirdly over-specific instructions for how to live in our offices several weeks back. It included several bullet points like this:
Adjust the slats to your preference, but do not raise the blinds. The work space needs to be uniform in appearance.
Please keep photographs and personal mementos to a minimum. This will present a more professional work environment.
And so on. This memo's content was completely ignored by everyone, but it's had its bad effect anyway. After we got it, people sat around talking incredulously about the thing, spending untold hours of company time just bellyaching about it. The thought of those on high in this massive company spending time writing and approving stuff like that is just utterly despiriting.
I must be really naive. I always figured Solo was a smuggler who'd been part of Jabba's organization. Seemed like Jabba was after him for some shipments that didn't make it or something -- looking to settle an old mob score, basically.
God, if Solo had actually been part of some sort of organization that had responsibility for keeping the peace on Tattooine, he sure as heck didn't do a job of it. First he kills off one of Jabba's henchmen in a preventive attack that maybe prevented Jabba getting a scrap of information for a few minutes, but only raised the stakes and made Jabba more interested in nailing him. (He also calls attention to Luke and Obi Wan in the process when they're only trying to lay low -- by murdering the guy in cold blood right where the Storm Troopers are sniffing around.) Then he high-tails it out of town when things get rough. Eventually he gets caught, and his friends have to risk their lives to rescue him. Pretty inept work for someone with a massive organization behind him and all the military cards in his hand, if the analogy you're suggesting works at all...
Hey, maybe George Lucas also cut a scene from SW in which Solo completely changes his story about why he killed Greedo, claiming he did it all because he was already fighting on the Rebel side and that Jabba was somehow connected to Vader and the Emperor. After that he could disclaim any previous connections to Jabba (no arms smuggling) and talk about liberating the people of Tattooine. Hopefully his supporters would forget about the original shooting being murder of an unarmed go-between, and all...
God, I always kind of liked Solo for all his flaws -- but you make him sound like a spineless, self-righteous weasel.
I think that it gives the announcers something to talk about between pitches, which can be interminable in some games.
Among the things Bill James tracked in one of his old Abstracts was the length of games pitched by different starters. Rick Sutcliff was the slowest pitcher in the bigs, I believe. So yeah -- they even have stats for that. And they use them; when MLB wanted to speed up the games a few years back, a maximum delay between pitches was one of their options.
Mostly baseball lets you keep such granular stats because things happen in isolation. One pitcher vs. one hitter, one outfielder's numbers on balls hit to left field, and so on. When the stats become more shared in their scope, it can be as muddy as any other sport. (Knuckleball pitchers get a lot of "passed balls" assessed on their catchers: same as a wild pitch but for some reason those get "blamed" on the catcher. Double-plays-turned is harder to judge because it takes a combination of [mostly] infielders, so that you're judging combinations of shortstops and second basemen -- harder to put in someone's line. And so on. Heck, even earned runs is pretty flaky, leaving alone "Wins.")
Clear Channel sponsored rallies, before the most recent of our wars, promoting the invasion of Iraq.
Howard Stern, meanwhile, had recently become an outspoken critic of the current administration. That the FCC should choose him as their first object lesson after Janet Jackson's half-revealed Halftime show stinks to high heaven. That Clear Channel conspicuously bowed to that pressure in a heartbeat just reeks. They have a right -- but they're talking about decency and not about their real reasons.
I didn't listen to Howard Stern when he was around in my local market. He was boring as heck -- nothing but a puffed-up schtick where he talked about how the local stations had been ripping off his act for years, which wasn't fun to listen to, interspersed with eighth-grade humor. But yeah, there's more than a note of censorship there. The FCC put the "financial risks" in place, conspicuously, for a critic of the President's. Clear Channel complied with nauseating servility. Eck.
Clear Channel didn't pull Howard Stern because he's an ass. (And we'd agree, he's an ass. Revulsion is the only reaction I've ever really had to that show.)
C.C. sponsored pro-invasion demonstrations before we went into Iraq. The decision to knuckle under to FCC pressure at the very moment when Stern started ranting about George W. just reeks of those politics.
So yeah, they've got a right, just like CBS can pull a lame miniseries -- but to pull him on the pretext of indecency when you're actually more than willing to remove an outspoken opponent of W.'s, that's just truly cowardly behavior. To pose as morally indignant while you do that, after years of promoting the selfsame indecent show, that's nauseating. It'd be in there with CBS claiming "artistic reasons" for pulling the Reagans. Say what you did and why. Admit it.
And, gee, funny how the FCC chose Howard as the first object lesson. Pretty brave truth telling on their part, too. Obviously they care pretty deeply about the shocking degradation he'd been spouting for so many years.
I can definitely see either the FCC or Clear Channel winning these awards for this one. Doesn't have to be a breach of the law. Government entities using pretexts to intimidate media outlets into removing critics of the President, that's wrong.
Macro-evolution (between species) can be neither measured nor observed.
This borders on the silliest statement commonly made by creationists, though I think the "What's so unnatural about God?" in the first post is probably the most dishonest bit of faux-musing you've tried. (Note to you: many, many bioliogists manage to easily believe both in God and in the basis for all modern biology, evolutionary theory. They're not driven insane in so doing. Maybe you should look into what they say about that rather than being so afraid of the truth you'll erect complicated rationalizations to protect yourself from it.)
It's always interesting to see which way the creationists will go. Will they say subcellular structures plainly couldn't evolve due to the complexity of that evolution being just beyond our grasp? Michael Bene does so, but concedes macroevolution in the process, in Black Box. On the other hand we have "little mutations happen, but they can't cross the species barrier" arguers, like you. You're arguing that we can't prove anything that takes place in "deep" time, basically.
Guess what -- continental drift is occurring, and we can show scads of geological evidence for it, though no human can witness two continents crashing into each other except indirectly. If you want the evidence for it, go take a vacation in the Rockies. Lots of evidence. Indirect evidence that's still literally and figuratively very powerful in support of that theory. And I can observe it. Duh.
Seemingly you're unaware of exactly how evolution and natural selection came up to start with. It wasn't some mischievous pretext on which Charles Darwin, who'd trained as an Anglican priest for goodness' sake, decided to drive people away from the church of England. The thing is, there were such freaking piles of evidence around that basically geologists and naturalists were unable to account for it all. Fossil cameloids were piling up in South America, for just one example. Nobody had an explanation -- what are these? Where did they come from? Why aren't they like the animals we have now? Evolutionary thought, and in particular Darwin's Origin, that was an attempt to answer the questions everyone had about the scads of evidence. And, as it turns out, it's been by far the best explanation for that evidence-- one that's withstood "peer review" in the most profound sense, flying in the face of social pressures that would do anything, everything, to suppress it. Evolutionary thought isn't the winner of some sort of popularity contest. It wasn't popular at all. It prevailed because it turned out to be the best explanation we have.
Want a practical example of what you're saying you don't believe in? Take a look at how the use of gene cladistics is proving incredibly useful for people trying to treat tapeworms. The comparison between gene structures of tapeworms is being used to determine the evolutionary relationships between different species. A bonus along the way: it turns out parasitism didn't evolve just once in tapeworms, it did so multiple times. There are living non-parasitic relatives that have proven much easier to do lab work with -- saving human lives as better treatments are developed through faster, more comprehensive work. Without evolutionary theory we'd have no idea why that works. None.
Personally I thank God every day there are people who see past zealotry and close-mindedness and try to use human knowledge to do good. Biologists aren't claiming divine knowledge in so doing -- You are, based on your book and on the social pressures of your religion. In my book that's blasphemy and arrogance on your part, friend. Granted, you do it out of fear, but it's still evil, in origin and effect, and I think you're a fool to soldier on trying to pull the shade down.
Steady, there -- you're sounding too reasonable
on
The Heavyweight Sea Snail
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Goosing the market a bit in order to gain more time for innovation to occur is not a bad thing
C'mon, stop saying such reasonable things. Get out of the way and let the big energy interests scuttle their competition. They're powerful, and they'd like a market that's "free" to allow them to throw their weight around.
We're in very great danger of a socialist takeover because of this Sea Snail project. Honest. 'Cause there's never been an innovation encouraged by government that helped the economy at all. The British Government didn't encourage the development of chronographs by offering a "Longitude" prize, and don't you let those whiny liberals convince you otherwise.
(It's not like the government subsidized the nascent railway and airline industries, ever, by sending the mail through them, or anything like that. We'd never do something like that. Wouldn't be the good old American way. Nope.)
Where once upon a time new technologies were just introduced, we now run the risk of getting them bludgeoned to death by special-interest groups and environmental impact statements.
You're so right. For example, I have a new technique for extracting gold -- GOLD, I tells ya! -- from common sewage. It involves simply blasting a stream of "quicksilver" through the municipal sewer once a night. The quicksilver bonds with the fluxion and good humors in gold that's suspended in the water as a result of toothbrushes rubbing it free from people's fillings. That scraping, rushing noise may be excruciating for you at first, but you'll adjust.
What, you mean I should have to prove that it works and that you're not going to die of mercury poisoning as a result of my new process? C'mon... once upon a time, I could just have introduced it without all these environmental "special interests" getting in the way. What kind of a world do we live in?? You're stifling my innovation. And here I was going to generously offer to sponsor a public park for your kids with my earnings.
Seriously, don't you think there's a balance to be struck here? Doesn't seem to me like asking the question "Maglev trains are perceived as having a more disturbing sound -- Why?" is a sign that ingenuity is dead. Personally I like living in a world where airports need to think about the noise produced by their traffic patterns. If we figure out what quality these trains might have that makes their sounds more irritating, we can decide whether to do something about it and how much it'd cost. No harm done.
Reconstructive plastic surgeons aren't just covering their butts. To say they're only taking pictures as "cover" against potential lawsuits by their patients isn't doing them justice.
First off, there are lots of legal requirements that have nothing to do with civil malpractice lawsuits -- laws that require reporting of and documentation for cases of domestic violence, for example. There'll be similar laws that apply to your bar fights and drunk driving cases, I bet. If someone gets hit by a drunk driver, the evidence is much more likely to be used by the injured person in court against the driver, not the Doc, right?
Doctors have different motives to be taking pictures, and from their POV it's mostly going to be to help them do good work. X-ray and other diagnostic images stay in a patient's record for a while, and they're partly there to let doctors take a second look down the line, to be able to find something they might have missed -- more of a risk as far as lawsuits go than any sort of protection. With skin cancer you want to have before and after images to judge stuff like the color. Helps you decide whether it's coming back. And so on. It isn't just a "pretty simple" example of malpractice causing doctors to develop a new skill to protect themselves.
Terry Gross's old Fresh Air interviews are also sold on Audible (and iTunes M.S.) by the show, and I'm pretty sure "This American Life" (Ira Glass) is the same way.
Generally the NPR site had gone with Real for a long time, with free access but only streaming. The news shows, including our excellent Minnesota "Mid Day" with Gary Eichden, are still that way. If you want to hear a call-in show about the Death Penalty, you can go back months for that -- but you'll have to hear it in a stream.
Personally, though, I'd pay for the Audible version if some of those shows were available by the file. I'm not a huge Prairie Home Companion fan, but some of the folk songs from old programs I'd pay good money for -- and you can't do that now. Kind of frustrating that they're giving it away, but I can't listen at the gym or whatever.
So there are pros and cons, is I guess all I'm saying. (Probably Lynn Rosetta Casper isn't a voice you want to carry away in your iPod anyway.)
Er, let me try to reverse engineer your world view, here: Apparently you do want to "let our life destroy theirs without even knowing it"? 'Cause, hey, you just said as much...
One has trouble imagining what sort of science is born of this attitude. Most people trying to study something have a sense of responsibility, and at the very least don't want to come up with completely bogus results because they failed to consider the whole experimenter effect thing... You, on the other hand, are shrugging in advance and saying it'd be meant to be.
Most likely, it will be quickly overrun and out-competed for nutrients. If it DOES contaminate and take hold of the planet, then it was meant to be;
You seriously could benefit from reading the stoic philosophers. That and Candide, though I'm sure you'd dismiss either as the sort of "Liberal Arts" nonsense they teach at the college.
Even if you're going to instantly absolve yourself of all your sins -- in advance, no less -- you do kind of want to try to think ahead just the tiniest little bit. Only way you can lead a moral life is to struggle with moral questions. There ain't no easy way out of it, for all the religious solutions that get peddled. You have to work to do the right thing. And call me a tree-hugger, but you have to actually care about what the right thing to do would be, you know?
I have relations down in Oklahoma. When we visit them, there's a decent chance we'll take a day trip over to the site of "Big Brutus," a mammoth mining shovel that's something like 15 stories tall. Brutus weighs around 11 million pounds. Most overengineered thing I've ever seen. Similar situation, too -- here's that site describing the birth of the park:
"It was no longer cost effective to operate Big Brutus, and P&M pulled the plug (so to speak). The huge mechanical beast crawled from the pit of its own making, took one final complete rotation, and lowered its bucket to the ground forever."
Not being in competition with any Roman ruins in the area, Brutus does a modest tourist trade.
Just got back from a week in Paris with my ten-year-old kids. (Man, what a city. Unbelievable, culturally, architecturally, and so much more liveable and just plain beautiful than a New York or Washington, DC. In general I'm proud of the American idea not to place our political capitals in the largest commercial cities, but Paris is amazing. You couldn't see everything that city has to offer in a lifetime.)
Met with nothing but unflagging friendliness from everyone there -- the only exceptions being averted eyes when a group of American teenagers staying in the hotel with us behaved exceptionally boorishly, and then it was just a sort of wince. Teenagers. Loud American teenagers. I related. The people of Paris to be polite -- and helpful when you showed any signs at all of needing help.
I came back, though, and the guy a cube across went on for some time -- days now -- about various awful things I surely hated there. Could I drink the water in that third world country? Aren't they all a bunch of communists? And so on. The picture he has of France right now is a sort of funhouse mirror of his own political leanings. And it's not pretty. No surprises there.
Sad to say, our culture war heroes are on the wrong side of a completely stupid argument here, and they're just plain petulant about that. They were wrong at the time -- the UN Security Council arguments about whether Bush had valid grounds for his war will show you just how right Villepain was at the time -- and now they're PO'ed about it. Typical behavior toward any dissenting opinion that questions their questionable thinking.
They resent questions. It's as simple as that. And that feeling's still there for some of the people on this side of the Atlantic. Pathetically.
because people executed a program that was mislabeled, it is now electronic trespassing?
Current electronic trespassing rules do forbid "exploratory" hacking into someone's system. This basically was a set of honeypots on P2P systems to disseminate a trojan horse piece of software. The "phone home" part of the trojan gave our vigilantes access to system information they didn't ask for access to -- the seconds count of how long the dialog was open for, for example -- and displayed the victims' IP addresses and countries of origin on a public Web site. They're deliberately misleading people into giving them access to system info. "Exploratory" seems to fit the "phone home" function. Where's your beef with that characterization?
The excuse that "We only made minor changes, to see if we could" doesn't wash against the exploratory hacking standard, either -- and these people went past that and created a deliberate nuisance, so they can't even try it.
Whatever their motives are, they did commit that crime. If they'd used a different delivery method -- posted their trojan on a code library -- you'd see that.
These are some really screwed-up, screwed-over kids. Imagine they'd tucked a mild vomit-inducing medicine inside packages labeled "Jello Pudding" and then gave the stuff away -- on the grounds that supposed black marketeers were giving away the real thing, undercutting Jello's legit profits. "Hey, all it did was waste the user's time and annoy them a little" isn't going to cut it. How do you think Jello's going to feel about that? The letter from Microsoft's legal department should be nasty.
Not to mention the moral aspect. They think they're fighting evil with evil. Welcome to ends justifying means.
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What kills me is that we see computers used in a way that doesn't even make sense within the loopy rules established for them in the same danged story. Everything's dumbed down, that's to be expected, and okay, they exaggerate what today's machines can do. (You expected long moments while the characters wait for a good carrier signal?) But I at least want the rules to be consistent.
Good example: The Star Trek computers show radically different amounts of independent agency according to situation. They can make holodeck characters act according to their characters in a freely-branching story, but they can't, apparently, problem solve the task of looking for the meaning of alien symbols without specific verbal commands from a human. We're talking about a simple correlation between sounds and meanings, you know?
The quintessential pop culture computer would be Doogie Howser's. Enormous, colorful screen with GIANT letters being typed slowly enough for the camera to follow, at excruciatingly slow "silent film dialog card" pace, D-O-O-G-I-E-'-S T-R-I-T-E D-I-A-R-Y E-N-T-R-I-E-S. If Doogie was to ask for the meaning of life, and the computer was to whir and grind and maybe show an outsized Windows "progress" bar, you'd have the archetypal TV computer. (In the movies it'd maybe be more like "WOPR" from War Games.)
There's no way for this process to reliably determine something like race, either -- not that doing so is that desirable anyway. The characteristics that make up "an African American guy" are just not nearly as concrete as we think they are from day to day. I have a neighbor who thinks all the Somali people in my area are "Arabs." Her category is a little too broad. It seems to me like she's forcing certain expressions onto their faces, too, as part of her image of what "Arabs" are like.
People's minds love to categorize. Sometimes, a lot of the time, we force information into categories it doesn't quite fit. (Refer to: State Department intelligence from Iraqi exile organizations.) Even when the information is essentially noise, we try to sort it and sift it. As a result we persist in holding weird ideas: astrology, because the paper tells us something vague and we run the events we see past that filter.
We should expect our tools to share some of those biases and blind spots. As much as we might try to address that, we have the blind spots ourselves, so it's hard to know how to counter the problem.
Just how antithetical to the democratic process does one have to be to suggest that a disputed Presidential election in 2000 is ancient history not worthy of discussion? "No sense in our digging up that again -- despite the flagrant evidence of the potential for abuse of the voting process in front of us in the form of the whole Diebold story, in which -- again -- a Republican Secretary of State has played a pivotal role in selecting Diebold in Ohio, another pivotal swing state"... (Google "Diebold" and "Plain Dealer". Pure sleaze.)
The pivotal state happened to feature, as its governor, the brother of one of the candidates. The US Supreme court voted 4-3 on strictly partisan lines -- and one of the majority Justices (Clarence Thomas) didn't recuse himself despite his wife working on the transition team for one of the parties before the court. The standards for vote counting varied radically by county and constituency -- for example, Bush pushed hard (and successfully) to allow questionable absentee votes to be recorded in strongly Republican counties as he tried to have the whole hanging chads process stopped. The Secretary of State behaved in the most partisan manner possible, in violation of any standard of objective behavior in the office.
That all won't disappear just because you think the right guy won. If you had any, any ability to see past your own nose, you'd recognize exactly how the Republican party and its flaks would have behaved had Gore been 300 votes up that first night.
One doesn't have to be some sort of flake to see that things broke down, and that the breakdowns weren't trivial, and that there's the potential for it happening again. It's starkly obvious. Sophistry like "I can quote another article for every one you quote" is the most pathetic sort of denial -- but you're clinging to it because it's all you've fricking got. Sleepwalking past this one ain't going to do the trick. You're going to wake up from this and see it was a delusive nightmare.
Give me Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, Ford -- give me a Republican Party that has some heart and mind and soul and a measure of plain responsible decency. This is a junta of sullen chickenhawks who don't know a damn tar baby when they see one, and who don't give a shit about the people of this nation.
This happens right now with Camcorders -- their smallest pocket-sized models use compression that nobody else's software can deal with. It happens in digital cameras, with the memory sticks, and in music here, and with the minidiscs, and so on.
Not coincidentally, their massive recent success was with Playstation, where everyone else is still using proprietary formats, selling consoles at a break-even point, and trying to make their money on the cartridges too.
I don't have the same feeling about Apple. Is the iTunes MS perfect? No. Is it mostly a loss-leader for iPods? Yes. But the store itself really is designed around the user experience, and it's a small pleasure to use. Sony's products don't feel that way. They miss crucial details. The ultramini camcorders have nasty little rocker zoom switches.
Sony almost seems to design around its proprietary formats as if they were a strength, not a weakness.
Some sociologist could do a pop book on this and end up scoring big on the business bestseller list. As a corporate culture, Sony has failed to "get" the impression this makes on consumers for so long, it's shocking. If they were asking their consumers what to do, they'd hear this loud and clear.
Did you go to the library for free books or buy comics?
Comics are a pretty good way for kids to learn to read. My kids -- ten now -- have always made a habit of checking out comics when we go to the library. Granted, Calvin and Hobbes isn't a novel, but it's reading for joy, and why would I quash it? Their schoolin' has hardly suffered.
Did you go to free museums and theater, or did you pay for movies?
C'mon -- my kids are ten and they've seen The Third Man a couple of times. We saw Ella Enchanted and it was a travesty against the book, and my son was hurt when I said so. I'll live with that, he had his own good natured opinion. We also went to the Louvre and the Musee D'Orsay this March... Do I get an indulgence for letting them see "The Simpsons" once in a while? Even if I *paid* for the Passe Musee?
My point is, false dichotomies only show how damn tricky the thing is, education. (The parent post gives us one too: Either we "keep our standards high" or we allow Downs Syndrome kids to graduate. We don't have to choose between those two.)
Personally I think the only way to raise awake kids is to be awake yourself and show them how. A huge share of the world's people seem to sleepwalk through life. I mean, --
Did you go to the free park or pay for sports?
Looking at the people around me, I'd say either one would be a dang good thing. These people don't exercise at all, and yet they still want to lose weight -- so, the Atkins Diet makes someone millions by selling too-good-to-be-true self-indulgence. Wake up, people. You don't want to die of heart disease? Exercising might just have something to do with it. These adults are every bit as cloudy in their thinking and lax in their effort as the low-income kids I volunteer with -- who watch TV after school instead of going to orchestra. It's much easier to do.
It's frightening how our popular culture has become a sort of siren's call to that hazy state of mind. We don't just suffer from the blur, we inflict it on ourselves, often to sell things. SUVs. There's a Greek tragedy in there somewhere... only nobody relates to those any more. (We just live them out unconsciously, in the form of our foreign policy. But that's another story.)
But advocates of filters in libraries (and in your school) have been saying stuff like that for years. "C'mon, we can stop people from viewing explicit pRon in the library. All we have to do is install common-sense filtering." The librarians are radicals to oppose such a simple idea, and so on.
The questions in this /. posting aren't going to vanish because of common sense. Maybe the breast cancer site gets blocked accidentally, maybe not. The huge question is, who gets to oversee which sites get blocked? And who looks over that person's shoulder? Especially if the companies selling the filters regard their blacklists or blacklisting techniques as proprietary, competitive-advantage information, it ain't easy to even figure out what's blocked and why.
Isn't that situation inherently open to abuse? Do we want political appointees determining what "common sense" is? When they might, for example, have extremely strong views about abortion one way or another? How do we correct stuff that was censored inappropriately, accidentally or not?
(I dunno... I guess when I heard Minnesota's chief sponsor of capital punishment legislation for the last five years invoking "common sense" as the way to address all the problems with the death penalty, I lurched toward cynicism about people trying to wave away complicated problems that way. The guy didn't seem to know that crime "rates" were adjusted for populations, and frankly didn't seem to even have heard all the usual objections to the D.P., but he thought "a committee" could resolve everything through common sense. The words sort of took on a different quality after that, for me.)
To which you reply: "The medium does not decide if something is or is not art." Huh?
The parent agrees, games can be art -- she just doesn't think this article measures up to anything like "the status of art as a discipline."
I used to work in a modern art museum. If we'd hosted a show about video gaming as art, nobody'd have blinked. If we'd put on a shoddy show about games as art, it'd have been a different thing. The parent's saying this ain't much of a show, not that its premise is wrong. That's not being a snob, it's being competent and having some background in the subject.
No offense intended to the article poster, but I'm with the "snob" on this one. Pachinko machines are art, but if you tell me it's because they make pretty noises and you can put money in I'm not that impressed...
What exactly does that mean?
It fills me with deep apprehension to see how people who might otherwise rail against "PC revisionism" will dismiss something like Einstein's various social causes, putting them in a basket like "he was a little 'touched'" to keep them at a safe distance. Heisenberg had worked for the German war machine trying to develop an atom bomb. Do we not think Einstein could possibly have strong feelings about that? Whether this diary's legit or not, that particular point doesn't seem over the edge to me. Over-candid, maybe -- as might happen in a diary...
It' ain't just Einstein (who was an avowed socialist by the way -- boo!). A worse and weirder thing has happened with Helen Keller. Helen Keller was a hell of a woman; Winston Churchill called her "The greatest woman of our age." We've made her a curiosity, a freak show -- because we're airbrushing out her entire adult life so that she's safer for fifth-graders to read about. Okay, so these two people were socialists, and I'm not. (I'd be more of a Keynesian, along the lines of Richard Nixon, economically.) Opinions far from our own aren't inherently nuts, and we don't have to be scared of them -- do we?
If only Star Wars had made that sense, we'd all be so happy.
Personally I see some room for a crossover film: one where the kid Anikin from Episode I is involved in a transporter malfunction and has a black goatee, Jar Jar speaks the king's English, and there's a tiny shred of dramatic tension. Oh, for a temporal anomaly right about now...
(Actually isn't it easier to do a prequel when there's no plotline? Not much tension to whether Obi Wan's going to make it through, when we know he grows up to be Alex Guinness.)
As long as you mention it, I happen to be rereading "Name of the Rose" at night lately, and my impression from the first time -- that he was self-indulgent, like you're saying -- is basically completely gone by now. The book's really written cleanly, it works incredibly well. Also I'm finding his characters are more complete than I'd remembered them. (The movie, though, stunk.)
I truly hate the idea that all fiction has to be so "tight" that every word drives the plot forward another step. If an author wants to assume I'm bright and curious enough to read two pages about pipe organs, and she can write, I'm there. Not everything has to have the narrative compression of a touring Broadway show. Sometimes it's okay to assume your audience is made up of intelligent, curious people who'll stick with you a little.
Thomas Mann is another author whose stuff you probably wouldn't tolerate. Your loss, seriously. Sometimes Peter Cook's "Bedazzled" is cool, but there's a place in the world for "Doctor Faustus" too.
And okay, sometimes those learned digressions are self-conscious fat to be trimmed -- but that isn't limited to "intellectual" fiction at all. Tom Clancy's got as much worthless detail (about military hardware) as anyone. The rafts of detail are painful to wade through, for me.
So, uh, nope -- it's not as "simple as that."
We got a memo with weirdly over-specific instructions for how to live in our offices several weeks back. It included several bullet points like this:
And so on. This memo's content was completely ignored by everyone, but it's had its bad effect anyway. After we got it, people sat around talking incredulously about the thing, spending untold hours of company time just bellyaching about it. The thought of those on high in this massive company spending time writing and approving stuff like that is just utterly despiriting.
God, if Solo had actually been part of some sort of organization that had responsibility for keeping the peace on Tattooine, he sure as heck didn't do a job of it. First he kills off one of Jabba's henchmen in a preventive attack that maybe prevented Jabba getting a scrap of information for a few minutes, but only raised the stakes and made Jabba more interested in nailing him. (He also calls attention to Luke and Obi Wan in the process when they're only trying to lay low -- by murdering the guy in cold blood right where the Storm Troopers are sniffing around.) Then he high-tails it out of town when things get rough. Eventually he gets caught, and his friends have to risk their lives to rescue him. Pretty inept work for someone with a massive organization behind him and all the military cards in his hand, if the analogy you're suggesting works at all...
Hey, maybe George Lucas also cut a scene from SW in which Solo completely changes his story about why he killed Greedo, claiming he did it all because he was already fighting on the Rebel side and that Jabba was somehow connected to Vader and the Emperor. After that he could disclaim any previous connections to Jabba (no arms smuggling) and talk about liberating the people of Tattooine. Hopefully his supporters would forget about the original shooting being murder of an unarmed go-between, and all...
God, I always kind of liked Solo for all his flaws -- but you make him sound like a spineless, self-righteous weasel.
Among the things Bill James tracked in one of his old Abstracts was the length of games pitched by different starters. Rick Sutcliff was the slowest pitcher in the bigs, I believe. So yeah -- they even have stats for that. And they use them; when MLB wanted to speed up the games a few years back, a maximum delay between pitches was one of their options.
Mostly baseball lets you keep such granular stats because things happen in isolation. One pitcher vs. one hitter, one outfielder's numbers on balls hit to left field, and so on. When the stats become more shared in their scope, it can be as muddy as any other sport. (Knuckleball pitchers get a lot of "passed balls" assessed on their catchers: same as a wild pitch but for some reason those get "blamed" on the catcher. Double-plays-turned is harder to judge because it takes a combination of [mostly] infielders, so that you're judging combinations of shortstops and second basemen -- harder to put in someone's line. And so on. Heck, even earned runs is pretty flaky, leaving alone "Wins.")
Howard Stern, meanwhile, had recently become an outspoken critic of the current administration. That the FCC should choose him as their first object lesson after Janet Jackson's half-revealed Halftime show stinks to high heaven. That Clear Channel conspicuously bowed to that pressure in a heartbeat just reeks. They have a right -- but they're talking about decency and not about their real reasons.
I didn't listen to Howard Stern when he was around in my local market. He was boring as heck -- nothing but a puffed-up schtick where he talked about how the local stations had been ripping off his act for years, which wasn't fun to listen to, interspersed with eighth-grade humor. But yeah, there's more than a note of censorship there. The FCC put the "financial risks" in place, conspicuously, for a critic of the President's. Clear Channel complied with nauseating servility. Eck.
C.C. sponsored pro-invasion demonstrations before we went into Iraq. The decision to knuckle under to FCC pressure at the very moment when Stern started ranting about George W. just reeks of those politics.
So yeah, they've got a right, just like CBS can pull a lame miniseries -- but to pull him on the pretext of indecency when you're actually more than willing to remove an outspoken opponent of W.'s, that's just truly cowardly behavior. To pose as morally indignant while you do that, after years of promoting the selfsame indecent show, that's nauseating. It'd be in there with CBS claiming "artistic reasons" for pulling the Reagans. Say what you did and why. Admit it.
And, gee, funny how the FCC chose Howard as the first object lesson. Pretty brave truth telling on their part, too. Obviously they care pretty deeply about the shocking degradation he'd been spouting for so many years.
I can definitely see either the FCC or Clear Channel winning these awards for this one. Doesn't have to be a breach of the law. Government entities using pretexts to intimidate media outlets into removing critics of the President, that's wrong.
Hasn't customizing it to the radio settings of the passing cars already been done? Seems like a slashdot story, IIRC.
This borders on the silliest statement commonly made by creationists, though I think the "What's so unnatural about God?" in the first post is probably the most dishonest bit of faux-musing you've tried. (Note to you: many, many bioliogists manage to easily believe both in God and in the basis for all modern biology, evolutionary theory. They're not driven insane in so doing. Maybe you should look into what they say about that rather than being so afraid of the truth you'll erect complicated rationalizations to protect yourself from it.)
It's always interesting to see which way the creationists will go. Will they say subcellular structures plainly couldn't evolve due to the complexity of that evolution being just beyond our grasp? Michael Bene does so, but concedes macroevolution in the process, in Black Box. On the other hand we have "little mutations happen, but they can't cross the species barrier" arguers, like you. You're arguing that we can't prove anything that takes place in "deep" time, basically.
Guess what -- continental drift is occurring, and we can show scads of geological evidence for it, though no human can witness two continents crashing into each other except indirectly. If you want the evidence for it, go take a vacation in the Rockies. Lots of evidence. Indirect evidence that's still literally and figuratively very powerful in support of that theory. And I can observe it. Duh.
Seemingly you're unaware of exactly how evolution and natural selection came up to start with. It wasn't some mischievous pretext on which Charles Darwin, who'd trained as an Anglican priest for goodness' sake, decided to drive people away from the church of England. The thing is, there were such freaking piles of evidence around that basically geologists and naturalists were unable to account for it all. Fossil cameloids were piling up in South America, for just one example. Nobody had an explanation -- what are these? Where did they come from? Why aren't they like the animals we have now? Evolutionary thought, and in particular Darwin's Origin, that was an attempt to answer the questions everyone had about the scads of evidence. And, as it turns out, it's been by far the best explanation for that evidence-- one that's withstood "peer review" in the most profound sense, flying in the face of social pressures that would do anything, everything, to suppress it. Evolutionary thought isn't the winner of some sort of popularity contest. It wasn't popular at all. It prevailed because it turned out to be the best explanation we have.
Want a practical example of what you're saying you don't believe in? Take a look at how the use of gene cladistics is proving incredibly useful for people trying to treat tapeworms. The comparison between gene structures of tapeworms is being used to determine the evolutionary relationships between different species. A bonus along the way: it turns out parasitism didn't evolve just once in tapeworms, it did so multiple times. There are living non-parasitic relatives that have proven much easier to do lab work with -- saving human lives as better treatments are developed through faster, more comprehensive work. Without evolutionary theory we'd have no idea why that works. None.
Personally I thank God every day there are people who see past zealotry and close-mindedness and try to use human knowledge to do good. Biologists aren't claiming divine knowledge in so doing -- You are, based on your book and on the social pressures of your religion. In my book that's blasphemy and arrogance on your part, friend. Granted, you do it out of fear, but it's still evil, in origin and effect, and I think you're a fool to soldier on trying to pull the shade down.
C'mon, stop saying such reasonable things. Get out of the way and let the big energy interests scuttle their competition. They're powerful, and they'd like a market that's "free" to allow them to throw their weight around.
We're in very great danger of a socialist takeover because of this Sea Snail project. Honest. 'Cause there's never been an innovation encouraged by government that helped the economy at all. The British Government didn't encourage the development of chronographs by offering a "Longitude" prize, and don't you let those whiny liberals convince you otherwise.
(It's not like the government subsidized the nascent railway and airline industries, ever, by sending the mail through them, or anything like that. We'd never do something like that. Wouldn't be the good old American way. Nope.)
You're so right. For example, I have a new technique for extracting gold -- GOLD, I tells ya! -- from common sewage. It involves simply blasting a stream of "quicksilver" through the municipal sewer once a night. The quicksilver bonds with the fluxion and good humors in gold that's suspended in the water as a result of toothbrushes rubbing it free from people's fillings. That scraping, rushing noise may be excruciating for you at first, but you'll adjust.
What, you mean I should have to prove that it works and that you're not going to die of mercury poisoning as a result of my new process? C'mon... once upon a time, I could just have introduced it without all these environmental "special interests" getting in the way. What kind of a world do we live in?? You're stifling my innovation. And here I was going to generously offer to sponsor a public park for your kids with my earnings.
Seriously, don't you think there's a balance to be struck here? Doesn't seem to me like asking the question "Maglev trains are perceived as having a more disturbing sound -- Why?" is a sign that ingenuity is dead. Personally I like living in a world where airports need to think about the noise produced by their traffic patterns. If we figure out what quality these trains might have that makes their sounds more irritating, we can decide whether to do something about it and how much it'd cost. No harm done.
First off, there are lots of legal requirements that have nothing to do with civil malpractice lawsuits -- laws that require reporting of and documentation for cases of domestic violence, for example. There'll be similar laws that apply to your bar fights and drunk driving cases, I bet. If someone gets hit by a drunk driver, the evidence is much more likely to be used by the injured person in court against the driver, not the Doc, right?
Doctors have different motives to be taking pictures, and from their POV it's mostly going to be to help them do good work. X-ray and other diagnostic images stay in a patient's record for a while, and they're partly there to let doctors take a second look down the line, to be able to find something they might have missed -- more of a risk as far as lawsuits go than any sort of protection. With skin cancer you want to have before and after images to judge stuff like the color. Helps you decide whether it's coming back. And so on. It isn't just a "pretty simple" example of malpractice causing doctors to develop a new skill to protect themselves.
Generally the NPR site had gone with Real for a long time, with free access but only streaming. The news shows, including our excellent Minnesota "Mid Day" with Gary Eichden, are still that way. If you want to hear a call-in show about the Death Penalty, you can go back months for that -- but you'll have to hear it in a stream.
Personally, though, I'd pay for the Audible version if some of those shows were available by the file. I'm not a huge Prairie Home Companion fan, but some of the folk songs from old programs I'd pay good money for -- and you can't do that now. Kind of frustrating that they're giving it away, but I can't listen at the gym or whatever.
So there are pros and cons, is I guess all I'm saying. (Probably Lynn Rosetta Casper isn't a voice you want to carry away in your iPod anyway.)
Er, let me try to reverse engineer your world view, here: Apparently you do want to "let our life destroy theirs without even knowing it"? 'Cause, hey, you just said as much...
One has trouble imagining what sort of science is born of this attitude. Most people trying to study something have a sense of responsibility, and at the very least don't want to come up with completely bogus results because they failed to consider the whole experimenter effect thing... You, on the other hand, are shrugging in advance and saying it'd be meant to be.
Most likely, it will be quickly overrun and out-competed for nutrients. If it DOES contaminate and take hold of the planet, then it was meant to be;
You seriously could benefit from reading the stoic philosophers. That and Candide, though I'm sure you'd dismiss either as the sort of "Liberal Arts" nonsense they teach at the college.
Even if you're going to instantly absolve yourself of all your sins -- in advance, no less -- you do kind of want to try to think ahead just the tiniest little bit. Only way you can lead a moral life is to struggle with moral questions. There ain't no easy way out of it, for all the religious solutions that get peddled. You have to work to do the right thing. And call me a tree-hugger, but you have to actually care about what the right thing to do would be, you know?
"It was no longer cost effective to operate Big Brutus, and P&M pulled the plug (so to speak). The huge mechanical beast crawled from the pit of its own making, took one final complete rotation, and lowered its bucket to the ground forever."
Not being in competition with any Roman ruins in the area, Brutus does a modest tourist trade.
Met with nothing but unflagging friendliness from everyone there -- the only exceptions being averted eyes when a group of American teenagers staying in the hotel with us behaved exceptionally boorishly, and then it was just a sort of wince. Teenagers. Loud American teenagers. I related. The people of Paris to be polite -- and helpful when you showed any signs at all of needing help.
I came back, though, and the guy a cube across went on for some time -- days now -- about various awful things I surely hated there. Could I drink the water in that third world country? Aren't they all a bunch of communists? And so on. The picture he has of France right now is a sort of funhouse mirror of his own political leanings. And it's not pretty. No surprises there.
Sad to say, our culture war heroes are on the wrong side of a completely stupid argument here, and they're just plain petulant about that. They were wrong at the time -- the UN Security Council arguments about whether Bush had valid grounds for his war will show you just how right Villepain was at the time -- and now they're PO'ed about it. Typical behavior toward any dissenting opinion that questions their questionable thinking.
They resent questions. It's as simple as that. And that feeling's still there for some of the people on this side of the Atlantic. Pathetically.
Current electronic trespassing rules do forbid "exploratory" hacking into someone's system. This basically was a set of honeypots on P2P systems to disseminate a trojan horse piece of software. The "phone home" part of the trojan gave our vigilantes access to system information they didn't ask for access to -- the seconds count of how long the dialog was open for, for example -- and displayed the victims' IP addresses and countries of origin on a public Web site. They're deliberately misleading people into giving them access to system info. "Exploratory" seems to fit the "phone home" function. Where's your beef with that characterization?
The excuse that "We only made minor changes, to see if we could" doesn't wash against the exploratory hacking standard, either -- and these people went past that and created a deliberate nuisance, so they can't even try it.
Whatever their motives are, they did commit that crime. If they'd used a different delivery method -- posted their trojan on a code library -- you'd see that.
These are some really screwed-up, screwed-over kids. Imagine they'd tucked a mild vomit-inducing medicine inside packages labeled "Jello Pudding" and then gave the stuff away -- on the grounds that supposed black marketeers were giving away the real thing, undercutting Jello's legit profits. "Hey, all it did was waste the user's time and annoy them a little" isn't going to cut it. How do you think Jello's going to feel about that? The letter from Microsoft's legal department should be nasty.
Not to mention the moral aspect. They think they're fighting evil with evil. Welcome to ends justifying means.