Meh. Every letter I wrote about this elicited a BS reply that was clearly ignorant on the subject.
Things like, "This will increase the security of our citizens at home and abroad" but with no mention of how it would do that.
Or, "Thank you for your concern, I am deeply involved in studying this issue, and I think it's great for national security." Blah blah. I'm not deeply involved in studying it, but my limited research sez that it's not a secure format, and my personal experience is that mechanical authentication makes people sloppy about checking credentials.
Blah blah. RFID has it's place, but it's a terrible idea in this context. Does anyone want a passport than can be read without your knowledge, by a random stranger?
Meh, you can't expect those monkeys to listen to a mere 2335 people...I bet those wierdos who wrote in forgot to include substantial gratiuties along with their reasoned explanation of why this is the dumbest idea ever...I know I did.
I'm still trying to figure out how this could possibly add security. You know the immigration weenies are going to start relying on their magic passport detetctors, and it's not like you can include anything like strong encryption on a RFID chip without making it the size of a deck of cards.
Well, at least I can build a RFID scanner to help me find my passport next time I lose it.
Still anonymous I see. Frankly, I would be to, if I were you.
If you can't grasp the difference between an idea and a physical thing, or grasp the fact that all ideas are derivative from other ideas then I don't see any point in continuing.
Common sense seems to bear me out. If you saw the altered version first, without knowing it was altered, would you think it was the original?
A good example is Stephen King's The Stand. It was originally released as a nicely edited 400-500 page novel. But when he got popular enough, it was re-released as an unedited 1000 page "directors cut" novel, and the edited version vanished.
So we're left with two drastically different books and it's not even clear which one really is the original...The one that was published first, or the one that was written first?
Now after the miniseries was released a few years ago, I knew a number of people who picked up the book, and commented to me at a later date that it really needed some editing. I mentioned that the work had originally been released in an edited format, and people were surprised. Q.E.D.
If you saw A New Hope for the first time today, without knowing anything about it, would you think Han shot first? If you saw ET today, would you think the gov't agents only had radios and not guns?
There is enough revisionist history in the world without making it easier for the revisers.
I'll be happy to argue the point with you when you get the courage to put it under a real username.
Oh, and by the way, equating intellectual property to physical property is a nice way of showing you don't have the first clue as to what you're talking about. In your world, it would be OUR house, because without the ability to pass along intellectual property, no one else would ever have been able to build one.
All the intellectual property in the world today is built on all the intellectual property of the past. Anyone who tries to exert true ownership over it, for anything more than temporary profit, deserves to have it stripped from them.
I could give a damn. But if I want to read Mein Kampf or Limbaugh's new book, whatever it's called, I want to read it as it was written not as some revisionist thinks it ought to have been.
Do I need some no talent hack with a political agenda getting between me and Maruc Aurelius?
I don't mind something like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" so much because the book is public domain...Though at the same time I feel nothing but contempt for someone who would release a dumbed down version of that book. It's true relevance is in its historical context.
I do, however, think it should be clearly marked as a non-original copy. At some point in the future, it may no longer be possible to put your hands on an original hardcopy, and then the original book could be lost in a sea of politically correct edits and revisions.
As an aside, I once read a copy of "Hamlet" that was published in the 1950's that had some of the Shakespearean bawdy humor snipped out of it ("Faith, her privates we"), so it's hardly something unique to our generation.
This is one of the big fallacies of IP. I saw the original film, hell most everyone here did. When that happened, it ceased to be his movie and became our memory...The proof of that is the whole "Han Shot First" contraversy. We all knew it had been changed, though it took him a while to admit it. In this, he's not only messing with "his" movie, but our minds as well.
You can't release something to the world, and then work to eradicate it 20 years later because you changed your mind about what you meant. Frankly, I am of the opinion that, when he decided the original version wasn't the "real" version anymore, and discontinued it, it ceased to be his property.
The purpose of IP law is to allow artists to make money off their creations for a reasonable time, not to give them unlimited control over all derivations of their work, for years and years to come, and certainly not to say, "Just foolin" and try to remove a released work from its rightful place in the public domain.
The problem is, people think the edited version is the original, if they've never been exposed to any other.
People need to suck it up. If they're fragile psyche's can't handle it the way it is, then they should just avoid it entirely, rather than corrupt the author's original intent.
The interesting thing about human consciousness is how it seems to arise specifically from the interaction of supremely primitive internal stimuli (hunger,etc) and incoming sense data.
I'm not sure the mechanics of intelligence matter so much as a stimulus response pattern fed by external data collected in repsonse to an internal drive. We like to think there is magic stuff going on with our minds, but we're really just pattern users, and those patterns are ingrained in the most primitive of ways.
Seems like hardware having only one non-distinguishing "sense" would be a problem...Humans learn very early that certain things are "good" (eg pleasurable/non-painful) and to be sought, and some things are "bad" (eg painful) and to be avoided. But all that depends on stimuli in the world, and since the only stimuli available to a computer would seem to be data, and since it seems to be difficult to define pleasureable/painful data...
Excel and Access both only open a tiny amount of data at a time, which explains your memory usage...Excel is pretty good at loading more rows on the fly, unless more than a few columns are dynamic which slows the whole mess down, but Access is such that, if you have a table with 200,000+ rows, and you hit the "Last record" button, you can go get a soda and flirt with the girl down the hall for 20 minutes, because your computer ain't going to be doing anything else for a while.
Yea, but you need a unique CD key to play online, and online play is IMHO the biggest draw of that kind of game. You may play through the tournament...I did on the first UT though I haven't since, but the real game is fragging other people.
It's not the first time they've tried to host services, but they've never been successful at it.
The problem is, they want too much control and lock in. It's not enough for them to just sell a service, they need to sell a service that is addictive like crack, and latches on to your business model like something from Alien which can't be removed without killing the host.
Many businesses are understandably concerned about this.
Never underestimate the power of organizational inertia...If you're solution is already up and running, then odds are no one will want to change it. Why fix what ain't broken?
Meh. I'm a softhearted guy by nature, but in a big service environment where everybody has needs and feelings and all the stuff that comes with that, you have to be somewhat calloused. If you tried to personally deal with every issue that came up or bend the rules for every person, you'd go nuts.
That being said, I think Blizz overreacted with your nickname. The number of wankers I see walking around with worse (eg "DrGanksUlotz") definitely inclines me to be lenient toward names that, while they maybe don't match what the devs were hoping for, are still acceptable. There are a lot of MMOs out there, and a lot of people (myself included) have played more than one, so it's nice to be able to keep the same name for the chance to meet an old friend again. I think they need to acknowledge that.
I've thought about that...Some kind of public key registry, so you can always be sure the person posting as X is the same person posting as X everywhere else.
You want to know one that's even worse? I actually got "Satanicpuppy" on AIM, but the email address I registered it to had lapsed (I sent it to a spam dump), and so the confirmation email vanished into the ether, and now no one has that id. =P
Heh. _I_ remember numeric karma, and no caps...Kinda a bummer, because I've been capped out for years...I didn't bother creating a UID until the karma glory days were winding down.
Also, as an amusing side note, I was employed doing cobol during 1997-2000, and I still do some TODAY on a legacy system I support, which is funny because I just turned the big 30 this year. People used to say I got the job because I didn't (at the time) have a CS degree, and thus had less to unlearn.
That pretty much kills it for me right there. If you're arguing from a standpoint where no number of immoral actions make an immoral person, you're pretty much pushing for a system of relativistic ethics...Otherwise known as a worthless ethical system...Liberal weenies push for relativisitic ethics all the time.
I would say the problem with Bush is not that he's a good or bad person, I would say that he tends to actions that are legally defensible and morally indefensible. Shift the tax burden off the rich, onto the poor, go to war under false pretenses, ignore catastrophes until his polls suffer, then pass out rebuilding contracts to his cronies.
All of this suggests to me that he lacks compassion, empathy, and conscience, and that he has been allowed to give voice to these tendencies by the power of his office. Power has not corrupted, but it has allowed him to give voice to his worst tendencies, and that is more than bad enough.
You're readin along, and the guy starts spouting stupid junk, and you look up and see he's on yer foe list, and think to yourself, "Oh yea, he's a jackass" and move on.
Otherwise you're left wondering if this jackass seems familiar or not...Precious time could be lost while you try and figure out which of you is crazy. If you've FOE'd him, then you're reminding yourself, you've already been through this process, and the conclusion was: It's him.
Kinda like the opposite of the Friends list, which is used to mark people who are less crazy than you, or at least crazy in a more constructive way.
Then there is the fan list, which is scary because these are people who don't think YOU'RE crazy, which could be bad if THEY'RE crazy, because then you have to wonder if you ARE crazy.
Then there is the Freak list...if the people on your freak list aren't jackasses and trolls, then the bad news is: It's you.
I cultivate this innocent look for when someone realizes that I moved a system over to a different platform. "Well, the old system broke, and this was the quickest way to get it up and running again, and well, everyone said it ran so nice, I just kept it." *puppy dog eyes* "Don't you like it?"
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. Every letter I wrote about this elicited a BS reply that was clearly ignorant on the subject.
Things like, "This will increase the security of our citizens at home and abroad" but with no mention of how it would do that.
Or, "Thank you for your concern, I am deeply involved in studying this issue, and I think it's great for national security." Blah blah. I'm not deeply involved in studying it, but my limited research sez that it's not a secure format, and my personal experience is that mechanical authentication makes people sloppy about checking credentials.
Blah blah. RFID has it's place, but it's a terrible idea in this context. Does anyone want a passport than can be read without your knowledge, by a random stranger?
Meh, you can't expect those monkeys to listen to a mere 2335 people...I bet those wierdos who wrote in forgot to include substantial gratiuties along with their reasoned explanation of why this is the dumbest idea ever...I know I did.
I'm still trying to figure out how this could possibly add security. You know the immigration weenies are going to start relying on their magic passport detetctors, and it's not like you can include anything like strong encryption on a RFID chip without making it the size of a deck of cards.
Well, at least I can build a RFID scanner to help me find my passport next time I lose it.
Still anonymous I see. Frankly, I would be to, if I were you.
If you can't grasp the difference between an idea and a physical thing, or grasp the fact that all ideas are derivative from other ideas then I don't see any point in continuing.
Common sense seems to bear me out. If you saw the altered version first, without knowing it was altered, would you think it was the original?
A good example is Stephen King's The Stand. It was originally released as a nicely edited 400-500 page novel. But when he got popular enough, it was re-released as an unedited 1000 page "directors cut" novel, and the edited version vanished.
So we're left with two drastically different books and it's not even clear which one really is the original...The one that was published first, or the one that was written first?
Now after the miniseries was released a few years ago, I knew a number of people who picked up the book, and commented to me at a later date that it really needed some editing. I mentioned that the work had originally been released in an edited format, and people were surprised. Q.E.D.
If you saw A New Hope for the first time today, without knowing anything about it, would you think Han shot first? If you saw ET today, would you think the gov't agents only had radios and not guns?
There is enough revisionist history in the world without making it easier for the revisers.
I'll be happy to argue the point with you when you get the courage to put it under a real username.
Oh, and by the way, equating intellectual property to physical property is a nice way of showing you don't have the first clue as to what you're talking about. In your world, it would be OUR house, because without the ability to pass along intellectual property, no one else would ever have been able to build one.
All the intellectual property in the world today is built on all the intellectual property of the past. Anyone who tries to exert true ownership over it, for anything more than temporary profit, deserves to have it stripped from them.
Jackass.
That would be Marcus Aurelius...Spellcheck the goddamn last name, and misspell "Marcus".
I could give a damn. But if I want to read Mein Kampf or Limbaugh's new book, whatever it's called, I want to read it as it was written not as some revisionist thinks it ought to have been.
Do I need some no talent hack with a political agenda getting between me and Maruc Aurelius?
I don't think so.
I don't mind something like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" so much because the book is public domain...Though at the same time I feel nothing but contempt for someone who would release a dumbed down version of that book. It's true relevance is in its historical context.
I do, however, think it should be clearly marked as a non-original copy. At some point in the future, it may no longer be possible to put your hands on an original hardcopy, and then the original book could be lost in a sea of politically correct edits and revisions.
As an aside, I once read a copy of "Hamlet" that was published in the 1950's that had some of the Shakespearean bawdy humor snipped out of it ("Faith, her privates we"), so it's hardly something unique to our generation.
I don't buy it.
This is one of the big fallacies of IP. I saw the original film, hell most everyone here did. When that happened, it ceased to be his movie and became our memory...The proof of that is the whole "Han Shot First" contraversy. We all knew it had been changed, though it took him a while to admit it. In this, he's not only messing with "his" movie, but our minds as well.
You can't release something to the world, and then work to eradicate it 20 years later because you changed your mind about what you meant. Frankly, I am of the opinion that, when he decided the original version wasn't the "real" version anymore, and discontinued it, it ceased to be his property.
The purpose of IP law is to allow artists to make money off their creations for a reasonable time, not to give them unlimited control over all derivations of their work, for years and years to come, and certainly not to say, "Just foolin" and try to remove a released work from its rightful place in the public domain.
The problem is, people think the edited version is the original, if they've never been exposed to any other.
People need to suck it up. If they're fragile psyche's can't handle it the way it is, then they should just avoid it entirely, rather than corrupt the author's original intent.
The interesting thing about human consciousness is how it seems to arise specifically from the interaction of supremely primitive internal stimuli (hunger,etc) and incoming sense data.
I'm not sure the mechanics of intelligence matter so much as a stimulus response pattern fed by external data collected in repsonse to an internal drive. We like to think there is magic stuff going on with our minds, but we're really just pattern users, and those patterns are ingrained in the most primitive of ways.
Seems like hardware having only one non-distinguishing "sense" would be a problem...Humans learn very early that certain things are "good" (eg pleasurable/non-painful) and to be sought, and some things are "bad" (eg painful) and to be avoided. But all that depends on stimuli in the world, and since the only stimuli available to a computer would seem to be data, and since it seems to be difficult to define pleasureable/painful data...
Excel and Access both only open a tiny amount of data at a time, which explains your memory usage...Excel is pretty good at loading more rows on the fly, unless more than a few columns are dynamic which slows the whole mess down, but Access is such that, if you have a table with 200,000+ rows, and you hit the "Last record" button, you can go get a soda and flirt with the girl down the hall for 20 minutes, because your computer ain't going to be doing anything else for a while.
Yea, but you need a unique CD key to play online, and online play is IMHO the biggest draw of that kind of game. You may play through the tournament...I did on the first UT though I haven't since, but the real game is fragging other people.
It's not the first time they've tried to host services, but they've never been successful at it.
The problem is, they want too much control and lock in. It's not enough for them to just sell a service, they need to sell a service that is addictive like crack, and latches on to your business model like something from Alien which can't be removed without killing the host.
Many businesses are understandably concerned about this.
Real Genius
Never underestimate the power of organizational inertia...If you're solution is already up and running, then odds are no one will want to change it. Why fix what ain't broken?
AARG! We can't kill anything either! So what if we take forever to die? That's the only thing we have going for us!
Meh. I'm a softhearted guy by nature, but in a big service environment where everybody has needs and feelings and all the stuff that comes with that, you have to be somewhat calloused. If you tried to personally deal with every issue that came up or bend the rules for every person, you'd go nuts.
That being said, I think Blizz overreacted with your nickname. The number of wankers I see walking around with worse (eg "DrGanksUlotz") definitely inclines me to be lenient toward names that, while they maybe don't match what the devs were hoping for, are still acceptable. There are a lot of MMOs out there, and a lot of people (myself included) have played more than one, so it's nice to be able to keep the same name for the chance to meet an old friend again. I think they need to acknowledge that.
I've thought about that...Some kind of public key registry, so you can always be sure the person posting as X is the same person posting as X everywhere else.
You want to know one that's even worse? I actually got "Satanicpuppy" on AIM, but the email address I registered it to had lapsed (I sent it to a spam dump), and so the confirmation email vanished into the ether, and now no one has that id. =P
Heh. _I_ remember numeric karma, and no caps...Kinda a bummer, because I've been capped out for years...I didn't bother creating a UID until the karma glory days were winding down.
Also, as an amusing side note, I was employed doing cobol during 1997-2000, and I still do some TODAY on a legacy system I support, which is funny because I just turned the big 30 this year. People used to say I got the job because I didn't (at the time) have a CS degree, and thus had less to unlearn.
We cannot judge persons.
That pretty much kills it for me right there. If you're arguing from a standpoint where no number of immoral actions make an immoral person, you're pretty much pushing for a system of relativistic ethics...Otherwise known as a worthless ethical system...Liberal weenies push for relativisitic ethics all the time.
I would say the problem with Bush is not that he's a good or bad person, I would say that he tends to actions that are legally defensible and morally indefensible. Shift the tax burden off the rich, onto the poor, go to war under false pretenses, ignore catastrophes until his polls suffer, then pass out rebuilding contracts to his cronies.
All of this suggests to me that he lacks compassion, empathy, and conscience, and that he has been allowed to give voice to these tendencies by the power of his office. Power has not corrupted, but it has allowed him to give voice to his worst tendencies, and that is more than bad enough.
It means both.
I use it as a heads up.
You're readin along, and the guy starts spouting stupid junk, and you look up and see he's on yer foe list, and think to yourself, "Oh yea, he's a jackass" and move on.
Otherwise you're left wondering if this jackass seems familiar or not...Precious time could be lost while you try and figure out which of you is crazy. If you've FOE'd him, then you're reminding yourself, you've already been through this process, and the conclusion was: It's him.
Kinda like the opposite of the Friends list, which is used to mark people who are less crazy than you, or at least crazy in a more constructive way.
Then there is the fan list, which is scary because these are people who don't think YOU'RE crazy, which could be bad if THEY'RE crazy, because then you have to wonder if you ARE crazy.
Then there is the Freak list...if the people on your freak list aren't jackasses and trolls, then the bad news is: It's you.
I cultivate this innocent look for when someone realizes that I moved a system over to a different platform. "Well, the old system broke, and this was the quickest way to get it up and running again, and well, everyone said it ran so nice, I just kept it." *puppy dog eyes* "Don't you like it?"
Muahahahaha.