For years it was assumed that a lot of the stuff in DNA that looked like random noise to us, was just junk data. The thought lately has been that it's more like a CRC, a Cyclic redundancy check, a mechanism to help find damage, as well as some other error detection and correction code.
So while the macro human animal is quite adaptable, it is also true that our DNA is far more robust and capable of withstanding crap like radiation than we ever gave it credit for when we were still coming to terms with the possible effects of radiation.
Impeachment is removal from office. That's it. If you're going to charge them with a crime, you impeach them, then charge them.
All you can get for impeachment is a loss of your office, and you can be impeached for no reason at all but that your congress hates you (a la Andrew Jackson), and decides that you are guilty of the undefined offense of a "high crime or misdemeanor", which apparently can include lying about a blowjob, as well as, you know, Watergate.
I think the military is at least twice as worried as the average civilian about the concept of putting guns on machines that can think "for themselves" (I know this is an inaccurate way of phrasing artificial cognition in its current stage, so all picky whining will be ignored).
I'm guessing you don't know much about Macs. OS X (10.0) "Cheetah" was released in 2001, but when you hear anyone comparing OS X to Vista, they're talking about OS X (10.4) "Tiger" which was released years later.
The difference between Cheetah and Tiger is huge. Spotlight and Dashboard, two of the apps that Vista is most accused of copying were released in Tiger.
I don't know about "trap"...I mean, sure, it's going to be a hostile crowd...No question of that. But he couldn't intelligently expect anything else, and I'd be extremely surprised if it was represented as anything but an opportunity for him to make his case to the people he is supposedly trying to save from the evils of gaming.
I don't know why they bothered to ask him...He's notoriously unable to deal with people disagreeing with him, and it wouldn't make much of a debate to have him screaming at whoever he was supposed to be debating.
I never even imagined it was about money. It's about security and accountability. I can't imagine being the fricking Navy and being willing to run Windows or similar on some of my combat capable equipment...I'd want a lean, stripped down version of Linux with very specific functionality, and well audited, clean code.
I just can't imagine a military where they routinely depend on software that is geared toward Grandma where they should be using special purpose code.
Too much money getting kicked around with vendor contracts.
I think the likely hood of this is about the same as the spam companies shutting down spam for good, or the virus companies ending viruses, or doctors ending illness.
Basically, no chance in hell. The ingenuity of one little company pitted against every single person who wants them to fail? Look at AACS? Weren't they going to end movie piracy? How's that workin' for them?
Seriously. So he's used XP for a big four months and is in a position to critique all of Windows?
Don't get me wrong. I have a lot more use for linux than windows...My windows PC is basically a beefy Xbox that I occasionally use to run photoshop and dreamweaver.
But a passing familiarity with XP doesn't qualify you to judge all of Microsoft. What about Win2k3? What about Vista? A Vista-to-Feisty comparison would at least be apples to apples. Comparing an OS released in April to two released in 2000 and 2001 respectively, is absurd.
That's just chemistry. Anything you take into your body that is reactive, will react with stuff in your body same as it would with chemicals elsewhere.
Generally random food products aren't all that reactive, though artificial sweeteners, and preservatives, etc are certainly moreso.
The sales teams would whore their mothers in a second for ad revenue, which is the "real" payola for publications. If they are not separate from the people who write the reviews, they'll write a dishonest review in a fricking instant, and not think twice about it. Remember, most sales people get commissions, so they're getting a cut as well as a pat on the back from their boss.
But when the Editorial staff is not the same as the sales staff, that sales person has to go upstairs to someone who doesn't get a cut, and who will take a TON of crap from their peers and from angry readers if they write obviously false garbage, and whose portfolio will forever after contain a pristine example of whoring, which will be perused by prospective future employers at places that probably value truth more than the average tech magazine.
In short, while sales doesn't see anything wrong with blatantly slanting the truth to make their advertisers happy, if you're a serious journalist that will come back to bite you in the ass in countless ways, and there is no benefit to it. On top of that, News and Ad people don't get along very well at all, even under the best of circumstances, so you could get a review with a negative bias, just because the author is itching to piss someone off.
...only 5% are using Vista and call them poor souls...
Hey man, Vista adoption is blowing Windows 2000 adoption out of the water! It's the best thing ever, and not at all like OSX, and...Hey, where the hell are you going?!!?
Heh. That was the first thing that leapt out at me as well. The second was the whole 60hz thing. Do people WANT to go blind? Ug.
Other high notes: PCI Express has passed the magic 50% adoption point
Most people have ~10 gigs of free space and 100+ gigs of space, which means, obviously, that everyone is pirating MP3s and should be ashamed (or that they're hoarding porn, again SHAAAAME),
And more than 50% of users surveyed have megabit or faster internet connections.
Basically, if you need good CMYK support, you might as well just give it up. There is no alternative to the big commercial products, specifically Adobe's big commercial products. Working in the printing industry, we only have 2 kinds of software...Adobe, and zillion dollar special purpose stuff written by companies that do nothing but write image/printing software for big image/printing companies. To make it even more ridiculous, Adobe writes their stuff to be compatible with these big apps, and vice versa.
It's one of those niche markets that OSS is really bad at filling...Not enough people need a cheap alternative to that level of a printing app...I mean, you don't need that level of a printing app unless you've got a couple million dollars worth of printing equipment, so after you've got that, a couple copies of Photoshop isn't going to seem like much.
It's not a question of spine. I just don't give a damn if there is a camera pointed at the street. And likewise, if someone takes a picture of the front of my house from the street, I don't really care. In either situation, I just don't see what the problem is. People walk by my house every day...If that bothered me, I'd live somewhere that couldn't be seen from the road.
Now if someone set up a camera that was pointed at my house and only at my house, that would be different; I'd view it the same as if they parked a van full of monitoring equipment across the street, and I'd take it to court and argue it as unreasonable search and seizure.
Camera in my house? That's just a slippery slope; no one has suggested anything even remotely like that, and I doubt they will.
I know this will come as a rude shock to you, but nobody cares about the front of your house but you. If someone really wanted pictures of your house, they'd take 'em themselves. If the government wanted to know what you were doing they'd get a rubberstamp terrorist warrant and be watching you stomp around your house in your tighty-whiteys in full HD 30 minutes later. If someone wants to watch you, they will.
But some random van swings by and takes a single still and it puts your knickers in a bunch? That's some serious lack of proportion. The next 50 years are going to be a descent into hell for you, because cameras are going to do nothing but get smaller, better, cheaper, and more commonly available.
That basically calls into question the ability to photograph anything, because in every situation there could be someone somewhere in the photo who might be "seen" by someone who isn't visible to them.
I don't think the ability to see someone who is seeing you has any implications on privacy in situations where you can't really be said to have an expectation of privacy, e.g. when you live on a street in a major city, and don't have curtains. It'd be a full-time job to observe everyone who was observing you in that situation.
Oh no, people could see me walking down the street? Is that even legal? I thought that's why no one made eye-contact in big cities; so I couldn't sue them for invasion of my private walking-down-the-street space.
Seriously. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm walking in a public place, someone is probably taking note anyhow, whether its a camera, a vagrant, or just some random schmuck who spends too much time looking out the window.
Thats a pretty strong misrepresentation...Google didn't drive their van through her house. Everything you can see in the picture would have been just as visible if you were walking down the street and happened to look up.
Generally, if you can take a picture of it while standing on your own land, or on public land, then it's legitimate. People are generally understood to not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" if they can be seen doing what they're doing from a public street.
Sure, but as long as it's not serial, it's not that big a deal. The weird genetic problems that crop up through incest generally only show up after two or three generations of too-closely-related breeding. This is basically because you're reintroducing double recessive traits through the allele's, rather than dropping by out-crossing..."Genetic disorders are normally caused by the acquisition of two recessive alleles for a single-gene trait." Other genetic disorders can be passed down regardless if they happen to be dominant (and some of them are).
So if you're got a super hot cousin, and you're holding back because of worries about hemophilia or phenylketonuria or something, you needn't.
It wasn't WWII that broke the French, it was World War I. Their casualties were literally in the millions; they fielded the majority of the allied land forces, and most of the war took place on their territory. They held back, literally, the best army in the world. Fought them to a standstill for years in the face of obscene casualties.
After the war was over they hunkered down into a defensive posture, and then when the next war broke out, the French government dithered for months while the German's prepared (the so-called "Phony War" period), basically annihilating the morale of the troops.
So no, the French as a whole didn't make a great showing in WWII. It would have been more surprising if they had. It was very easy for us to talk; our WWI casualties were a joke compared to what had happened in Europe.
Some people call it one thing, some people call it another. Really, even throwing things like emotivism in with the relativists is silly, same as throwing the conseqentialists in with the rest of the objective moral standard crowd, the absolutists if you prefer, but I'm not trying to talk to the philosophy majors here.
If you have any substantive issues with what I said, I'd be glad to hear 'em.
Relativism covers a lot of ground. "Pure" relativism states that all ethics are relative, which does in fact include people saying, "Murder isn't wrong because _I_ believe it isn't wrong."
You're referring to what is more commonly known as "cultural relativism."
Humanity is a social animal. We form packs. We are hardwired to be pack-supporting; you see a huge natural disaster and people rush to the area to help...They don't turn and run the other way. A child gets lost in the mountains, and you get hordes of volunteers tromping around and getting themselves lost in the search.
This is not behaviour that is smart for the individual. Risking your own life for others? Not something you see often in the animal kingdom. But it is something that occurs among humans, and it is a big part of what we consider "good".
Philosophically, ethics falls into two distinct branches: relativism, and objectivism.
Relativism basically states that good and evil are relative...Relative to you personally, relative to your culture, relative to your psychological state. It fits with people's differing views on what is right and wrong; I think it's right, you think it's wrong, we're both correct. Basically it's worthless. If you're a relativist, morals are meaningless, because you can only apply moral judgements to yourself, and what the hell point is there in that?
Objectivism states that good and evil are objective...That there are things that everyone should agree are right and everyone should agree are wrong. Logically, objectivism must be correct, because the alternative is relativism, and relativism is worthless. But no one agrees about right and wrong, so how can it be right?
But when you look at it in terms of humanity as a social animal, it becomes a little clearer. The "Robin Hood" story is a classic example: Stealing is bad, except when you're stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, right? Obviously the group that is being stolen from (the rich) still think it's bad, but since the vast majority of people are not rich, historically it's been considered good.
Mill came up with the theory of Utilitarianism to attempt to explain this sort of thing: in a nutshell, whatever makes the majority happy is right, and whatever makes the majority unhappy is wrong. Politicians live by this one, because they never have to actually consider the greater good, they just have to make 51% happy until the next election. So adding a tax on gasoline to reduce consumption and using the money to pay for better public transit and research into cleaner energy, while probably the "right" thing to do, would never fly because it would piss off 80% of people and the guy'd get canned in the next election by someone running on a "repeal the gas tax" platform.
So utilitarianism clearly needs some work...Reduce "good" into "happy" and you end up with nothing but bread and circuses, because that would make people happy, and happy == good. This, in a nutshell, is the problem with democracy.
So we have a hardwired inclination toward altruism. It definitely explains a few things. The problem is, humanity has a lot of hardwiring. We have tons of instincts, reflexes, automatic responses. Most people learn to override those things as part of their day to day life. Can't live purely on instinct. So what value is it to have a piece of altrustic hardwiring in a society that preaches just the opposite? Altruism is an irrational response, from the point of view of the thing that's about to put its squishy coropreal self in harm's way.
Still, it's nice to know that, if you're trying to be altrusitic, if you're trying to be selfless, you're instinctive responses are going to be in line with your conscious actions. Maybe everyone...most everyone...really does have some good in them, whether they like it or not.
The government is notoriously inept at stuff like this, and I can't help thinking any attempt that is made will end in failure...They just don't understand the system. They think making the parents sign in is going to change something, but the reality is that only a tiny percentage of parents will want to do this; after the 20th time they get dragged away from the TV to enter their password so their kid can blog about their new hairclip, they're going to click "Remember Password", and that'll be the end of it.
Or kids will sign up for accounts as 18 year olds and make the whole issue worse.
When it comes right down to it there is no substitute for knowing what your kids are doing. Sure, keep an eye on 'em, but don't pull some sneaky, underhanded crap, because then you turn it into a contest; your ability to spy vs their ability to evade, and they'll probably have more time and motivation than you do, which puts you at a serious disadvantage.
As long as you show an interest, and can keep your cool and not lose your fricking mind when they deviate from what you would wish that they would do, they'll keep you informed. But if you make them feel like they can't trust you to know about their lives without trying to completely control their lives, they'll lie to you, and they'll lie to you specifically about the stuff you'll most need to know about.
On the other hand, there are people who go the opposite way...I had some family issues growing up (tons of alcoholism), and I had to start making meaningful decisions for myself before I even hit my teens.
I made some bad choices, and some good choices, and by the time I got to college I'd pretty much evened out. My freshman semester I had some of the best grades of my life, because I'd already come to terms with my own freedom to act without restrictions, and so college wasn't a shock to me. Likewise, working, living alone, having to budget for food and utilities...It was all stuff I understood.
Really it comes down to being able to make meaningful choices, and having to live with the consequences. I'm not saying kids should be thrown to the wolves, but they need to be able to stretch their minds, and learn to be responsible for their own mistakes. As parents we should try and make sure that their mistakes aren't HUGE mistakes, but going all big brother and trying to make sure they have no mistakes at all does them a disservice.
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No, that's not what he means.
For years it was assumed that a lot of the stuff in DNA that looked like random noise to us, was just junk data. The thought lately has been that it's more like a CRC, a Cyclic redundancy check, a mechanism to help find damage, as well as some other error detection and correction code.
So while the macro human animal is quite adaptable, it is also true that our DNA is far more robust and capable of withstanding crap like radiation than we ever gave it credit for when we were still coming to terms with the possible effects of radiation.
Impeachment is removal from office. That's it. If you're going to charge them with a crime, you impeach them, then charge them.
All you can get for impeachment is a loss of your office, and you can be impeached for no reason at all but that your congress hates you (a la Andrew Jackson), and decides that you are guilty of the undefined offense of a "high crime or misdemeanor", which apparently can include lying about a blowjob, as well as, you know, Watergate.
It's not autonomous. It's radio controlled.
I think the military is at least twice as worried as the average civilian about the concept of putting guns on machines that can think "for themselves" (I know this is an inaccurate way of phrasing artificial cognition in its current stage, so all picky whining will be ignored).
I'm guessing you don't know much about Macs. OS X (10.0) "Cheetah" was released in 2001, but when you hear anyone comparing OS X to Vista, they're talking about OS X (10.4) "Tiger" which was released years later.
The difference between Cheetah and Tiger is huge. Spotlight and Dashboard, two of the apps that Vista is most accused of copying were released in Tiger.
I don't know about "trap"...I mean, sure, it's going to be a hostile crowd...No question of that. But he couldn't intelligently expect anything else, and I'd be extremely surprised if it was represented as anything but an opportunity for him to make his case to the people he is supposedly trying to save from the evils of gaming.
I don't know why they bothered to ask him...He's notoriously unable to deal with people disagreeing with him, and it wouldn't make much of a debate to have him screaming at whoever he was supposed to be debating.
I never even imagined it was about money. It's about security and accountability. I can't imagine being the fricking Navy and being willing to run Windows or similar on some of my combat capable equipment...I'd want a lean, stripped down version of Linux with very specific functionality, and well audited, clean code.
I just can't imagine a military where they routinely depend on software that is geared toward Grandma where they should be using special purpose code.
Too much money getting kicked around with vendor contracts.
I think the likely hood of this is about the same as the spam companies shutting down spam for good, or the virus companies ending viruses, or doctors ending illness.
Basically, no chance in hell. The ingenuity of one little company pitted against every single person who wants them to fail? Look at AACS? Weren't they going to end movie piracy? How's that workin' for them?
Seriously. So he's used XP for a big four months and is in a position to critique all of Windows?
Don't get me wrong. I have a lot more use for linux than windows...My windows PC is basically a beefy Xbox that I occasionally use to run photoshop and dreamweaver.
But a passing familiarity with XP doesn't qualify you to judge all of Microsoft. What about Win2k3? What about Vista? A Vista-to-Feisty comparison would at least be apples to apples. Comparing an OS released in April to two released in 2000 and 2001 respectively, is absurd.
That's just chemistry. Anything you take into your body that is reactive, will react with stuff in your body same as it would with chemicals elsewhere.
Generally random food products aren't all that reactive, though artificial sweeteners, and preservatives, etc are certainly moreso.
Ha! No, no, that's not how it works.
The sales teams would whore their mothers in a second for ad revenue, which is the "real" payola for publications. If they are not separate from the people who write the reviews, they'll write a dishonest review in a fricking instant, and not think twice about it. Remember, most sales people get commissions, so they're getting a cut as well as a pat on the back from their boss.
But when the Editorial staff is not the same as the sales staff, that sales person has to go upstairs to someone who doesn't get a cut, and who will take a TON of crap from their peers and from angry readers if they write obviously false garbage, and whose portfolio will forever after contain a pristine example of whoring, which will be perused by prospective future employers at places that probably value truth more than the average tech magazine.
In short, while sales doesn't see anything wrong with blatantly slanting the truth to make their advertisers happy, if you're a serious journalist that will come back to bite you in the ass in countless ways, and there is no benefit to it. On top of that, News and Ad people don't get along very well at all, even under the best of circumstances, so you could get a review with a negative bias, just because the author is itching to piss someone off.
...only 5% are using Vista and call them poor souls...
Hey man, Vista adoption is blowing Windows 2000 adoption out of the water! It's the best thing ever, and not at all like OSX, and...Hey, where the hell are you going?!!?
Heh. That was the first thing that leapt out at me as well. The second was the whole 60hz thing. Do people WANT to go blind? Ug.
Other high notes:
PCI Express has passed the magic 50% adoption point
Most people have ~10 gigs of free space and 100+ gigs of space, which means, obviously, that everyone is pirating MP3s and should be ashamed (or that they're hoarding porn, again SHAAAAME),
And more than 50% of users surveyed have megabit or faster internet connections.
Oh sure. I'm not saying that people who send stuff in have to have CMYK, or hell, anything. They can send hardcopy if it's only an ad or a picture.
Still, if you want to learn how the professionals do it, you're really going to need to work on the higher end software.
RGB should be good enough for anyone, right?
Basically, if you need good CMYK support, you might as well just give it up. There is no alternative to the big commercial products, specifically Adobe's big commercial products. Working in the printing industry, we only have 2 kinds of software...Adobe, and zillion dollar special purpose stuff written by companies that do nothing but write image/printing software for big image/printing companies. To make it even more ridiculous, Adobe writes their stuff to be compatible with these big apps, and vice versa.
It's one of those niche markets that OSS is really bad at filling...Not enough people need a cheap alternative to that level of a printing app...I mean, you don't need that level of a printing app unless you've got a couple million dollars worth of printing equipment, so after you've got that, a couple copies of Photoshop isn't going to seem like much.
It's a van. Wired found a picture of it reflected in the window of a shop. Looks like just a regular minivan with a boil on top.
It's not a question of spine. I just don't give a damn if there is a camera pointed at the street. And likewise, if someone takes a picture of the front of my house from the street, I don't really care. In either situation, I just don't see what the problem is. People walk by my house every day...If that bothered me, I'd live somewhere that couldn't be seen from the road.
Now if someone set up a camera that was pointed at my house and only at my house, that would be different; I'd view it the same as if they parked a van full of monitoring equipment across the street, and I'd take it to court and argue it as unreasonable search and seizure.
Camera in my house? That's just a slippery slope; no one has suggested anything even remotely like that, and I doubt they will.
I know this will come as a rude shock to you, but nobody cares about the front of your house but you. If someone really wanted pictures of your house, they'd take 'em themselves. If the government wanted to know what you were doing they'd get a rubberstamp terrorist warrant and be watching you stomp around your house in your tighty-whiteys in full HD 30 minutes later. If someone wants to watch you, they will.
But some random van swings by and takes a single still and it puts your knickers in a bunch? That's some serious lack of proportion. The next 50 years are going to be a descent into hell for you, because cameras are going to do nothing but get smaller, better, cheaper, and more commonly available.
That basically calls into question the ability to photograph anything, because in every situation there could be someone somewhere in the photo who might be "seen" by someone who isn't visible to them.
I don't think the ability to see someone who is seeing you has any implications on privacy in situations where you can't really be said to have an expectation of privacy, e.g. when you live on a street in a major city, and don't have curtains. It'd be a full-time job to observe everyone who was observing you in that situation.
Oh no, people could see me walking down the street? Is that even legal? I thought that's why no one made eye-contact in big cities; so I couldn't sue them for invasion of my private walking-down-the-street space.
Seriously. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm walking in a public place, someone is probably taking note anyhow, whether its a camera, a vagrant, or just some random schmuck who spends too much time looking out the window.
Thats a pretty strong misrepresentation...Google didn't drive their van through her house. Everything you can see in the picture would have been just as visible if you were walking down the street and happened to look up.
Generally, if you can take a picture of it while standing on your own land, or on public land, then it's legitimate. People are generally understood to not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" if they can be seen doing what they're doing from a public street.
Sure, but as long as it's not serial, it's not that big a deal. The weird genetic problems that crop up through incest generally only show up after two or three generations of too-closely-related breeding. This is basically because you're reintroducing double recessive traits through the allele's, rather than dropping by out-crossing..."Genetic disorders are normally caused by the acquisition of two recessive alleles for a single-gene trait." Other genetic disorders can be passed down regardless if they happen to be dominant (and some of them are).
So if you're got a super hot cousin, and you're holding back because of worries about hemophilia or phenylketonuria or something, you needn't.
It wasn't WWII that broke the French, it was World War I. Their casualties were literally in the millions; they fielded the majority of the allied land forces, and most of the war took place on their territory. They held back, literally, the best army in the world. Fought them to a standstill for years in the face of obscene casualties.
After the war was over they hunkered down into a defensive posture, and then when the next war broke out, the French government dithered for months while the German's prepared (the so-called "Phony War" period), basically annihilating the morale of the troops.
So no, the French as a whole didn't make a great showing in WWII. It would have been more surprising if they had. It was very easy for us to talk; our WWI casualties were a joke compared to what had happened in Europe.
Some people call it one thing, some people call it another. Really, even throwing things like emotivism in with the relativists is silly, same as throwing the conseqentialists in with the rest of the objective moral standard crowd, the absolutists if you prefer, but I'm not trying to talk to the philosophy majors here.
If you have any substantive issues with what I said, I'd be glad to hear 'em.
Relativism covers a lot of ground. "Pure" relativism states that all ethics are relative, which does in fact include people saying, "Murder isn't wrong because _I_ believe it isn't wrong."
You're referring to what is more commonly known as "cultural relativism."
Humanity is a social animal. We form packs. We are hardwired to be pack-supporting; you see a huge natural disaster and people rush to the area to help...They don't turn and run the other way. A child gets lost in the mountains, and you get hordes of volunteers tromping around and getting themselves lost in the search.
This is not behaviour that is smart for the individual. Risking your own life for others? Not something you see often in the animal kingdom. But it is something that occurs among humans, and it is a big part of what we consider "good".
Philosophically, ethics falls into two distinct branches: relativism, and objectivism.
Relativism basically states that good and evil are relative...Relative to you personally, relative to your culture, relative to your psychological state. It fits with people's differing views on what is right and wrong; I think it's right, you think it's wrong, we're both correct. Basically it's worthless. If you're a relativist, morals are meaningless, because you can only apply moral judgements to yourself, and what the hell point is there in that?
Objectivism states that good and evil are objective...That there are things that everyone should agree are right and everyone should agree are wrong. Logically, objectivism must be correct, because the alternative is relativism, and relativism is worthless. But no one agrees about right and wrong, so how can it be right?
But when you look at it in terms of humanity as a social animal, it becomes a little clearer. The "Robin Hood" story is a classic example: Stealing is bad, except when you're stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, right? Obviously the group that is being stolen from (the rich) still think it's bad, but since the vast majority of people are not rich, historically it's been considered good.
Mill came up with the theory of Utilitarianism to attempt to explain this sort of thing: in a nutshell, whatever makes the majority happy is right, and whatever makes the majority unhappy is wrong. Politicians live by this one, because they never have to actually consider the greater good, they just have to make 51% happy until the next election. So adding a tax on gasoline to reduce consumption and using the money to pay for better public transit and research into cleaner energy, while probably the "right" thing to do, would never fly because it would piss off 80% of people and the guy'd get canned in the next election by someone running on a "repeal the gas tax" platform.
So utilitarianism clearly needs some work...Reduce "good" into "happy" and you end up with nothing but bread and circuses, because that would make people happy, and happy == good. This, in a nutshell, is the problem with democracy.
So we have a hardwired inclination toward altruism. It definitely explains a few things. The problem is, humanity has a lot of hardwiring. We have tons of instincts, reflexes, automatic responses. Most people learn to override those things as part of their day to day life. Can't live purely on instinct. So what value is it to have a piece of altrustic hardwiring in a society that preaches just the opposite? Altruism is an irrational response, from the point of view of the thing that's about to put its squishy coropreal self in harm's way.
Still, it's nice to know that, if you're trying to be altrusitic, if you're trying to be selfless, you're instinctive responses are going to be in line with your conscious actions. Maybe everyone...most everyone...really does have some good in them, whether they like it or not.
The government is notoriously inept at stuff like this, and I can't help thinking any attempt that is made will end in failure...They just don't understand the system. They think making the parents sign in is going to change something, but the reality is that only a tiny percentage of parents will want to do this; after the 20th time they get dragged away from the TV to enter their password so their kid can blog about their new hairclip, they're going to click "Remember Password", and that'll be the end of it.
Or kids will sign up for accounts as 18 year olds and make the whole issue worse.
When it comes right down to it there is no substitute for knowing what your kids are doing. Sure, keep an eye on 'em, but don't pull some sneaky, underhanded crap, because then you turn it into a contest; your ability to spy vs their ability to evade, and they'll probably have more time and motivation than you do, which puts you at a serious disadvantage.
As long as you show an interest, and can keep your cool and not lose your fricking mind when they deviate from what you would wish that they would do, they'll keep you informed. But if you make them feel like they can't trust you to know about their lives without trying to completely control their lives, they'll lie to you, and they'll lie to you specifically about the stuff you'll most need to know about.
On the other hand, there are people who go the opposite way...I had some family issues growing up (tons of alcoholism), and I had to start making meaningful decisions for myself before I even hit my teens.
I made some bad choices, and some good choices, and by the time I got to college I'd pretty much evened out. My freshman semester I had some of the best grades of my life, because I'd already come to terms with my own freedom to act without restrictions, and so college wasn't a shock to me. Likewise, working, living alone, having to budget for food and utilities...It was all stuff I understood.
Really it comes down to being able to make meaningful choices, and having to live with the consequences. I'm not saying kids should be thrown to the wolves, but they need to be able to stretch their minds, and learn to be responsible for their own mistakes. As parents we should try and make sure that their mistakes aren't HUGE mistakes, but going all big brother and trying to make sure they have no mistakes at all does them a disservice.