Also, if I were criticizing the US administration for funding something silly, I doubt you'd come to their defence in this way:)
Of course not -- I said so explicitly, in that "it's not my money" was part of the argument. That said, $600k isn't all that much money to spend on fusion research; I wouldn't be entirely offput even if it were my money.
This project isn't nearly as outlandish as the Electric Universe model itself -- it's quite certain that fusion can be made to occur under the circumstances in question, and the big question is whether the reaction can be made net-positive in output. In short, your example cases (funding known charlatans / psychics / etc) don't actually match up with what we're discussing here. I may not want my money spent on a long shot -- but if someone else is putting their money into an unlikely but possible payoff, more power to them; certainly, that's money that's not being spent on a sure thing, but someone needs to fund the long shots.
It would be nice if the lead weren't a known crackpot wrt. his preferred model -- but folks with more conventional views have signed off on funding this project, so it's not quite the utter insanity you make it out to be.
Well, yeah. But if it's someone else shoving that money... let them. It may be idiocy, but something good may come of it.
After all -- it's someone else's money on the input side, but it may be everyone's "good stuff" on the output side. Granted, I might see this a bit differently were I Chilean.
Yeah, and witch-doctors managed to save one or two people when they weren't poisoning dozens. You won't catch me going to one of them instead of an MD, though.
Modern pharma research has done to try to bring useful conclusions off of witch doctors' remedies -- so even if you're going to an MD, you might be getting a (modern, refined, tested, proven) version of something which once was an old wives' tale. Is that an argument for going to an "alternative" physician rather than the MD? Absolutely not! But it is an argument that such alternative approaches may have value, if only as a way of finding interesting things to use an input for the more modern R&D apparatus.
So -- it's useful for experiments based on bad theory to take place, as their results may lead to refinements in good theory.
That someone probably wouldn't have written code up to the standards of the project's maintainer, thus it wouldn't have gotten accepted upstream, thus we would have had to keep paying that someone to update their code every time we wanted to port to a newer version of the upstream product. Sure, it might save some money in the short term (but then it might not -- communications problems can throw off a release schedule pretty easily, and a slipped release date costs more money than any fax subsystem enhancements are worth)... but getting code upstream is well worth it.
We'll see how that goes; outsourcing everything is the approach that company is taking right now. As a shareholder, I wish them the best... but I'm not exactly holding my breath.
I've been the employer allowing a contractor to keep copyright to his code. Why? The contractor was the maintainer of HylaFAX+, and was offering to do custom work for us at a very reasonable price provided we made that policy exception; otherwise, his rates were much, much higher. In addition to fixing bugs on a timeframe that matched with our release schedule (rather than the as-time-permits bugfix schedule for regular OSS users), he added integration points and hooks where we could connect to our custom, proprietary code. Everyone -- including our competition -- has access to those hooks, but we were the folks with the code (both in our product and in the glue) to take immediate and best advantage of them.
We even released some of our less proprietary related bits upstream to the community -- such as scriptage for using Inkscape as a just-in-time SVG renderer for much fancier cover pages than HylaFAX was able to handle on its own. Why? Because I wrote them in-house, and I wasn't going to be there (or working on faxing) forever; having those bits (which weren't exactly "secret sauce", just a little bit of extra flare) in the public consciousness meant that whoever ends up taking over the fax subsystem (of our much, much larger product) now that I'm gone will be able to pick up any third-party enhancements to that code which have been made upstream -- and maybe, just maybe, having that example available of what the enhancements we paid to add to HylaFAX+ can do will result in the HylaFAX.org branch deciding to pick them up, meaning that customers owning fax hardware only the iFax commercial variant of HylaFAX.org can interoperate with would be able to use that hardware with our product.
Have you read the documentation on this softmod discussing why it can't be used to pirate commercial games? There are substantial technical measures protecting commercial software for the Wii (excluding Virtual Console titles) which haven't been cracked, and which this particular team (like most of the Wii homebrew scene) will not assist any third party in cracking.
Also, I haven't noticed any reduction in commercial properties being produced for the DS, despite the availability of toolage for pirating commercial games; the legitimate userbase is simply too large for the pirates to make the system unprofitable.
It's true that freedoms can be and are regularly limited in a state of war; note, however, that a genuine "state of war" is something well-defined -- explicitly declared by Congress, against a specific and well-defined enemy, and with well-understood victory conditions.
The "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" are not such things -- they can be waged indefinitely with no end -- and so no restriction on freedom of speech, particularly political speech (which has the highest level of Constitutional protection) is reasonable or acceptable.
Hypothetically, what if the arguments made by the terrorists make more sense than the arguments (WMD, Alqaida, National Security) made by the govt?
Then the US position will be refined -- through public debate and perhaps a bit of political upheaval -- until such is no longer true. Folks forget the latter part of the quote, "my country, right or wrong": "If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right". I hardly see how one can call oneself a patriot while shirking their duty to evaluate their government's actions in full light of the facts and do their part to set it right.
Perhaps the United States is wrong in its relationship with Israel; if so, the way to determine and to fix it is not through terror but political discourse and -- legal, nonviolent -- political action by the public, should the status quo turn out to be wrong. Barring anyone from being able to participate in this discourse means that they have no resort but violence, and is the wrong way to find any solution.
Have to destroy the village (personal freedoms) to save it, eh?
To claim that allowing repugnant political views to be published and discussed should be prevented to better preserve political freedoms is hypocritical in the first degree. Moreover, full and frank disclosure and discussion is useful: To let terrorists disclose their arguments in public, and to allow those arguments to be debated and defeated in public, introduces appropriate counterarguments into the public consciousness, ensures that those same arguments can no longer be used as convincingly in private (where the lack of public debate might otherwise make them convincing), and makes claims of coverup and large-scale media conspiracy less convincing. As such claims of conspiracy reduce credibility of non-terrorist-controlled information sources, any action which might lend them credence should be clearly avoided whenever possible.
The military battle should be as asymmetric as possible; the public relations battle, on the other hand, should be fought fairly, convincingly, and in full view of the public if it is to be effective. Just as we should not practice waterboarding even if the other side does beheadings, we should not practice even mild censorship of political speech; we need not do either to win, and taking any such actions reduces our credibility and moral standing in the eyes of the world -- including those who might be recruited to either side.
The idea that anyone given a taste of freedom will want to preserve it is false. Look at Russia -- they're moving back towards a police state at an alarming rate, but the populace largely supports it. Given the choice between wealth (or at least comfort) and tight control vs. hardship and freedom, a great many individuals do in practice choose the former. Who are you or I to say that they are wrong?
"Selling" software which one has no guarantee of being able to play in 20 years (even on a emulator) is indeed being... if not an ass, then certainly a party which doesn't play fair. If I "buy" something, I expect to be able to use it in perpetuity.
Now, I subscribe to GameTap, and I don't object that if I stop subscribing I will no longer be able to play any previously-downloaded games -- because that's part of the up-front conditions. For transactions modeled as a purchase, on the other hand, there had damned well better be some mechanism to make sure that legitimate customers aren't left out in the cold when they're up for some nostalgia fifteen years down the line.
The parent did not indicate that they plan on pirating future games. They did indicate that they don't plan on purchasing more games from vendors who use DRM. Folks can, ya know, not play (pirate or purchase) games sold only with DRM, and nothing the parent said directly contradicts intent on their part to go that course.
It's called "giving people the benefit of a doubt". Perhaps you've heard of it? If someone says they're going to take some action, and that action can be taken in a {legal,illegal,moral,immoral} way, it behooves polite society to assume the better of strangers unless one has reason to expect otherwise (beyond, perhaps, one's own unwillingness to take a stand and do the moral thing).
Depends on what you're doing, of course -- but for a good chunk of what I do, I find that the Python toolchain is fastest. Some tools (like Paramiko) simply have no Freely-available equivalents in the.NET world -- I looked at writing my last project (which included a custom SFTP server) with Boo, but just couldn't find the libraries I needed. For web services, several of the Pythonic frameworks -- TurboGears in particular comes to mind -- also seem hard to beat for terseness, readability or (to address your point directly) dev cycle time.
Even working with JSON (with the JSON.Net library which seems by some folks to be treated as a godsend) is much, much more difficult in.net-based languages than in Python unless one is able to use LINQ; as part of C# 3.x, this isn't available to folks who want to retain compatibility with Mono. I'll grant, on the other hand, that Python's support for SOAP is downright ghastly -- that's a place where both C# and Java have far better solutions.
As for the "integrated development platform" thing, I tend to buy the argument (which I've seen eloquently argued, but no link comes immediately to hand) that Python and its kin (of which Boo is arguably one) tend to make push functionality into the language which moots many of the whiz-bang features of modern IDEs. I've used Eclipse (very recently) and Visual Studio (somewhat less recently) -- and they're both very snazzy to be sure, but I simply don't see a significant difference in productivity between a full-blown IDE and a well-configured programmer's editor when using a powerful enough language. An IDE makes a big different writing in Java or C#, certainly; writing Python or Boo, vim does what I need.
Certainly, I don't doubt that there are problem sets for which the.NET toolchain contains the best tools. I am skeptical, however, that such is true for some overwhelming majority of cases.
But the NSA doesn't need you to connect to their node! They have hooks in your ISP (or, at minimum, the backbone that ISP plugs into) and can sniff your traffic anyhow, so I don't see how the darknet approach buys as much as is being claimed in the context of traffic analysis.
IF we accepted that violent games push insane people over the edge more often than they give them a harmless outlet to funnel tendencies which might otherwise have turned to outright violence -- IF we accept that -- then I nonetheless maintain that it's better that three hundred million people have this aspect of their freedom of speech preserved and twenty of them get killed by a nutjob with a gun than if the three hundred million are told that they can't enjoy their choice of entertainment or can't create artistic works (and some video games do indeed make serious artistic or political statements -- BioShock in particular comes to mind among recent releases) and perhaps the nutjob happens not to be quite pushed over the edge; and yes, I'll voluntarily take my chances of being one of the twenty from that three hundred million. Given that the elements of society which would ban video games haven't been successful in convincing the rest of us to do so, I'm inclined to argue that popular belief is consistent with either (1) the risk being nonexistent, or (2) the risk being acceptable.
There certainly is such a thing as acceptable risk in return for entertainment -- remember that people are killed in car accidents going to the movies or out to buy toys or games or such, and nonetheless rational individuals choose to take such actions. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if more people are killed driving to and from movies in a year than by game-inspired gun violence. Would you ban movies or require that toys and games be purchased mail-order to reduce the instances of car accidents?
Also, the whole bloody-mayhem thing isn't exactly new. The most notorious example in the city I currently live in is that of Charles Whitman, dating back to the late 60s. I'd argue that mass media loudly publicizing such events has more to do with any recent surge (the existence of which I'm not presently ceding) than any other factor -- who doesn't want to be a household name?
If the alternate encyclopedia was created by someone not even knowing that she was simultaneously working on her own, how could it conceivably be "theft"?
Not that it would be theft even if the competing encyclopedia were created with knowledge that it would be in competition with an official version: You can't steal "ideas". You can steal the embodiment of ideas, once they've been affixed to a physical media -- that's what copyright protects. You can steal published mechanisms used in a novel invention, or well-kept secrets used to create a product -- that's what patents and trade secrets, respectively, are for. Mere "ideas" have no, and deserve no, protection -- any other system would stifle creativity. There have been countless independently conceived and created riffs on Hamlet or Beowulf over the years, and the world is richer for it; can you honestly claim we'd be better off with but one?
[sarcasm] Yup. I couldn't possibly figure out how to rob, murder or carjack someone if I hadn't played GTA1 back in the day -- and the knowledge that driving a car [any car, even a stolen one] through a spraypainting facility will magically get the cops off my trail for anything I've ever done sure is handy. [/sarcasm]
GTA isn't for kids, and I certainly think that cases where children are playing it are troubling (particularly for hours and hours on end, but that's true of any video game regardless of content), but the whole violent-videogames-cause-RL-violence meme is silly. It's much more defensible that individuals who are violent in nature are attracted to violent video games -- but I don't see how that's an argument for any kind of a ban, certainly not a strong enough argument to overcome the first-amendment counterpoint. Any rational individual knows that actions taken in real life have real consequences attached to them, and so evaluates such actions using a completely different metric than one might use in playing a game.
So -- I won't complain about the consequences of violent video games being available for sale to adults, because I honestly believe that there are no substantial negative consequences on the scale described. If my family is (against all probability to the contrary) murdered in a random act of violence, I'll do the rational thing and blame the person who pulled the trigger, rather than searching for scapegoats. That said, violent videogames have permeated our society to the point that any real effects on the level of random violence should already be highly visible -- and while there's a highly publicized shooting spree here or there, (1) there's no clear causal correlation, and (2) the death rate from those isn't even close to background noise in the grand scheme of things; it's far, far more likely that my family will die in a random traffic accident, and that's a risk we willingly accept every time we get in the car to watch a movie or go to the store.
Keep your fearmongering. If you want to live in a world where you're afraid of every kid who owns an Xbox, you're welcome to -- but me and mine prefer to go about living our lives (and facing much more real and present challenges), unworried by your imaginary and unrealized fears. I imagine those who were afraid of D&D or rock-and-roll felt similarly to you earlier in this century -- every generation finds some reason to worry needlessly about their youth -- but history proved those fears out as unfounded, and will do so again.
You do realize that "the citizenry" has more than one opinion, and that you're part of it?
So -- if you don't agree with what you see as the slashdot groupthink, you're obviously (1) misperceiving that groupthink, and/or (2) offending individuals (like yourself) who don't subscribe. What's more, though, the perception that there is a unified groupthink is mistaken. The Linux geeks and the Apple geeks are still two different camps. The OSS folks want to see copyright laws enforced (with enlightened self interest encouraging adoption of open source terms where appropriate), while the RMS groupies want to see copyright for software fundamentally modified. There are plenty of folks around here who think Ron Paul's a nutjob -- go look at any political article for proof; while the RP contingent is vocal, they're very, very far from alone. Almost everyone will agree that fair use is misunderstood, but some folks will claim that it's really meant to be a get-out-of-jail-free card for noncommercial (but otherwise outright) theft, while others will say that it's misunderstood by those who see it as anything other than a last-ditch legal defense with tightly limited scope. To be sure, there are folks who take any of the positions you caricature as part of the local groupthink -- but individuals taking all of those positions are far more rare.
Now please stop the ad hominem attacks against a strawman "groupthink" that doesn't even exist.
(might have just been Access, but the fundamentals are there)
I'm very skeptical of any MIS class having adequately covered the fundamentals -- schema normalization rather than form building, for example. That might just be a symptom of the school where I went to, OTOH, where the MIS courses (in the view of the CS department, at least) had nothing which in any way could be associated with "rigor".
Frankly, I think that inadequate coverage of a topic is worse than none at all -- if folks have the impression that they know something well enough to be effective in it, whereas in fact they only know enough to be dangerous, those are the people who are going to go out and build unmaintainable or insecure systems.
Meh. I went to CSU Chico (certainly not a tear-through-your-wallet school) about a decade ago. Database programming was required (IIRC), and reasonably comprehensive for what I think (rightly? wrongly?) was a 200-level class (the softballs you mentioned, the various normal forms and transformations between them, etc etc).
There might be schools that graduate folks without that knowledge, but I'd sure hope there wouldn't be many of them.
I think that synchronizing multiple databases is a little much overhead -- it's sane to just have a restricted view, accessing only the relevant information, which is the only thing the user the website connects as has authorization to query.
Slightly off-topic, but I'm curious how many organizations would have caught this error before the page was published. Does your organization have security and testing policies in place such that this error would have prevented the page from being released? Or are you solely responsible for testing and securing your own code?
In my current employer (or at least in the section thereof I currently reside), everything gets desk-checked by at least one other person before it's checked in. They're also picky enough about hiring that I couldn't see this happening in the dev group. (In code written by the sysadmins, maybe -- but they're not supposed to be writing their own tools for just this reason; such things are supposed to be referred over as requests to dev, which go through design and peer review and QA).
Generally a good point. OTOH, if one can standardize on use of templating languages that do automatic output-side escaping (Genshi comes to mind), the whole thing should be pretty moot -- and one thing I understand Fortune 50 companies to be pretty good at is managing process and internal standardization. (Wouldn't know firsthand, haven't worked for one yet -- will RSN, as my current employer is in the process of being purchased).
Slashdot Mirror
This project isn't nearly as outlandish as the Electric Universe model itself -- it's quite certain that fusion can be made to occur under the circumstances in question, and the big question is whether the reaction can be made net-positive in output. In short, your example cases (funding known charlatans / psychics / etc) don't actually match up with what we're discussing here. I may not want my money spent on a long shot -- but if someone else is putting their money into an unlikely but possible payoff, more power to them; certainly, that's money that's not being spent on a sure thing, but someone needs to fund the long shots.
It would be nice if the lead weren't a known crackpot wrt. his preferred model -- but folks with more conventional views have signed off on funding this project, so it's not quite the utter insanity you make it out to be.
Well, yeah. But if it's someone else shoving that money... let them. It may be idiocy, but something good may come of it.
After all -- it's someone else's money on the input side, but it may be everyone's "good stuff" on the output side. Granted, I might see this a bit differently were I Chilean.
Modern pharma research has done to try to bring useful conclusions off of witch doctors' remedies -- so even if you're going to an MD, you might be getting a (modern, refined, tested, proven) version of something which once was an old wives' tale. Is that an argument for going to an "alternative" physician rather than the MD? Absolutely not! But it is an argument that such alternative approaches may have value, if only as a way of finding interesting things to use an input for the more modern R&D apparatus.
So -- it's useful for experiments based on bad theory to take place, as their results may lead to refinements in good theory.
That someone probably wouldn't have written code up to the standards of the project's maintainer, thus it wouldn't have gotten accepted upstream, thus we would have had to keep paying that someone to update their code every time we wanted to port to a newer version of the upstream product. Sure, it might save some money in the short term (but then it might not -- communications problems can throw off a release schedule pretty easily, and a slipped release date costs more money than any fax subsystem enhancements are worth)... but getting code upstream is well worth it.
We'll see how that goes; outsourcing everything is the approach that company is taking right now. As a shareholder, I wish them the best... but I'm not exactly holding my breath.
I've been the employer allowing a contractor to keep copyright to his code. Why? The contractor was the maintainer of HylaFAX+, and was offering to do custom work for us at a very reasonable price provided we made that policy exception; otherwise, his rates were much, much higher. In addition to fixing bugs on a timeframe that matched with our release schedule (rather than the as-time-permits bugfix schedule for regular OSS users), he added integration points and hooks where we could connect to our custom, proprietary code. Everyone -- including our competition -- has access to those hooks, but we were the folks with the code (both in our product and in the glue) to take immediate and best advantage of them.
We even released some of our less proprietary related bits upstream to the community -- such as scriptage for using Inkscape as a just-in-time SVG renderer for much fancier cover pages than HylaFAX was able to handle on its own. Why? Because I wrote them in-house, and I wasn't going to be there (or working on faxing) forever; having those bits (which weren't exactly "secret sauce", just a little bit of extra flare) in the public consciousness meant that whoever ends up taking over the fax subsystem (of our much, much larger product) now that I'm gone will be able to pick up any third-party enhancements to that code which have been made upstream -- and maybe, just maybe, having that example available of what the enhancements we paid to add to HylaFAX+ can do will result in the HylaFAX.org branch deciding to pick them up, meaning that customers owning fax hardware only the iFax commercial variant of HylaFAX.org can interoperate with would be able to use that hardware with our product.
Have you read the documentation on this softmod discussing why it can't be used to pirate commercial games? There are substantial technical measures protecting commercial software for the Wii (excluding Virtual Console titles) which haven't been cracked, and which this particular team (like most of the Wii homebrew scene) will not assist any third party in cracking.
Also, I haven't noticed any reduction in commercial properties being produced for the DS, despite the availability of toolage for pirating commercial games; the legitimate userbase is simply too large for the pirates to make the system unprofitable.
It's true that freedoms can be and are regularly limited in a state of war; note, however, that a genuine "state of war" is something well-defined -- explicitly declared by Congress, against a specific and well-defined enemy, and with well-understood victory conditions.
The "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" are not such things -- they can be waged indefinitely with no end -- and so no restriction on freedom of speech, particularly political speech (which has the highest level of Constitutional protection) is reasonable or acceptable.
Perhaps the United States is wrong in its relationship with Israel; if so, the way to determine and to fix it is not through terror but political discourse and -- legal, nonviolent -- political action by the public, should the status quo turn out to be wrong. Barring anyone from being able to participate in this discourse means that they have no resort but violence, and is the wrong way to find any solution.
Have to destroy the village (personal freedoms) to save it, eh?
To claim that allowing repugnant political views to be published and discussed should be prevented to better preserve political freedoms is hypocritical in the first degree. Moreover, full and frank disclosure and discussion is useful: To let terrorists disclose their arguments in public, and to allow those arguments to be debated and defeated in public, introduces appropriate counterarguments into the public consciousness, ensures that those same arguments can no longer be used as convincingly in private (where the lack of public debate might otherwise make them convincing), and makes claims of coverup and large-scale media conspiracy less convincing. As such claims of conspiracy reduce credibility of non-terrorist-controlled information sources, any action which might lend them credence should be clearly avoided whenever possible.
The military battle should be as asymmetric as possible; the public relations battle, on the other hand, should be fought fairly, convincingly, and in full view of the public if it is to be effective. Just as we should not practice waterboarding even if the other side does beheadings, we should not practice even mild censorship of political speech; we need not do either to win, and taking any such actions reduces our credibility and moral standing in the eyes of the world -- including those who might be recruited to either side.
The idea that anyone given a taste of freedom will want to preserve it is false. Look at Russia -- they're moving back towards a police state at an alarming rate, but the populace largely supports it. Given the choice between wealth (or at least comfort) and tight control vs. hardship and freedom, a great many individuals do in practice choose the former. Who are you or I to say that they are wrong?
"Selling" software which one has no guarantee of being able to play in 20 years (even on a emulator) is indeed being... if not an ass, then certainly a party which doesn't play fair. If I "buy" something, I expect to be able to use it in perpetuity.
Now, I subscribe to GameTap, and I don't object that if I stop subscribing I will no longer be able to play any previously-downloaded games -- because that's part of the up-front conditions. For transactions modeled as a purchase, on the other hand, there had damned well better be some mechanism to make sure that legitimate customers aren't left out in the cold when they're up for some nostalgia fifteen years down the line.
The parent did not indicate that they plan on pirating future games. They did indicate that they don't plan on purchasing more games from vendors who use DRM. Folks can, ya know, not play (pirate or purchase) games sold only with DRM, and nothing the parent said directly contradicts intent on their part to go that course.
It's called "giving people the benefit of a doubt". Perhaps you've heard of it? If someone says they're going to take some action, and that action can be taken in a {legal,illegal,moral,immoral} way, it behooves polite society to assume the better of strangers unless one has reason to expect otherwise (beyond, perhaps, one's own unwillingness to take a stand and do the moral thing).
Heard of this thing called "dual licensing"?
Depends on what you're doing, of course -- but for a good chunk of what I do, I find that the Python toolchain is fastest. Some tools (like Paramiko) simply have no Freely-available equivalents in the .NET world -- I looked at writing my last project (which included a custom SFTP server) with Boo, but just couldn't find the libraries I needed. For web services, several of the Pythonic frameworks -- TurboGears in particular comes to mind -- also seem hard to beat for terseness, readability or (to address your point directly) dev cycle time.
.net-based languages than in Python unless one is able to use LINQ; as part of C# 3.x, this isn't available to folks who want to retain compatibility with Mono. I'll grant, on the other hand, that Python's support for SOAP is downright ghastly -- that's a place where both C# and Java have far better solutions.
.NET toolchain contains the best tools. I am skeptical, however, that such is true for some overwhelming majority of cases.
Even working with JSON (with the JSON.Net library which seems by some folks to be treated as a godsend) is much, much more difficult in
As for the "integrated development platform" thing, I tend to buy the argument (which I've seen eloquently argued, but no link comes immediately to hand) that Python and its kin (of which Boo is arguably one) tend to make push functionality into the language which moots many of the whiz-bang features of modern IDEs. I've used Eclipse (very recently) and Visual Studio (somewhat less recently) -- and they're both very snazzy to be sure, but I simply don't see a significant difference in productivity between a full-blown IDE and a well-configured programmer's editor when using a powerful enough language. An IDE makes a big different writing in Java or C#, certainly; writing Python or Boo, vim does what I need.
Certainly, I don't doubt that there are problem sets for which the
But the NSA doesn't need you to connect to their node! They have hooks in your ISP (or, at minimum, the backbone that ISP plugs into) and can sniff your traffic anyhow, so I don't see how the darknet approach buys as much as is being claimed in the context of traffic analysis.
IF we accepted that violent games push insane people over the edge more often than they give them a harmless outlet to funnel tendencies which might otherwise have turned to outright violence -- IF we accept that -- then I nonetheless maintain that it's better that three hundred million people have this aspect of their freedom of speech preserved and twenty of them get killed by a nutjob with a gun than if the three hundred million are told that they can't enjoy their choice of entertainment or can't create artistic works (and some video games do indeed make serious artistic or political statements -- BioShock in particular comes to mind among recent releases) and perhaps the nutjob happens not to be quite pushed over the edge; and yes, I'll voluntarily take my chances of being one of the twenty from that three hundred million. Given that the elements of society which would ban video games haven't been successful in convincing the rest of us to do so, I'm inclined to argue that popular belief is consistent with either (1) the risk being nonexistent, or (2) the risk being acceptable.
There certainly is such a thing as acceptable risk in return for entertainment -- remember that people are killed in car accidents going to the movies or out to buy toys or games or such, and nonetheless rational individuals choose to take such actions. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if more people are killed driving to and from movies in a year than by game-inspired gun violence. Would you ban movies or require that toys and games be purchased mail-order to reduce the instances of car accidents?
Also, the whole bloody-mayhem thing isn't exactly new. The most notorious example in the city I currently live in is that of Charles Whitman, dating back to the late 60s. I'd argue that mass media loudly publicizing such events has more to do with any recent surge (the existence of which I'm not presently ceding) than any other factor -- who doesn't want to be a household name?
If the alternate encyclopedia was created by someone not even knowing that she was simultaneously working on her own, how could it conceivably be "theft"?
Not that it would be theft even if the competing encyclopedia were created with knowledge that it would be in competition with an official version: You can't steal "ideas". You can steal the embodiment of ideas, once they've been affixed to a physical media -- that's what copyright protects. You can steal published mechanisms used in a novel invention, or well-kept secrets used to create a product -- that's what patents and trade secrets, respectively, are for. Mere "ideas" have no, and deserve no, protection -- any other system would stifle creativity. There have been countless independently conceived and created riffs on Hamlet or Beowulf over the years, and the world is richer for it; can you honestly claim we'd be better off with but one?
Yup -- isn't it great?
I really don't see what your point is. We know this is true, and we still have plenty of fun doing it.
[sarcasm] Yup. I couldn't possibly figure out how to rob, murder or carjack someone if I hadn't played GTA1 back in the day -- and the knowledge that driving a car [any car, even a stolen one] through a spraypainting facility will magically get the cops off my trail for anything I've ever done sure is handy. [/sarcasm]
GTA isn't for kids, and I certainly think that cases where children are playing it are troubling (particularly for hours and hours on end, but that's true of any video game regardless of content), but the whole violent-videogames-cause-RL-violence meme is silly. It's much more defensible that individuals who are violent in nature are attracted to violent video games -- but I don't see how that's an argument for any kind of a ban, certainly not a strong enough argument to overcome the first-amendment counterpoint. Any rational individual knows that actions taken in real life have real consequences attached to them, and so evaluates such actions using a completely different metric than one might use in playing a game.
So -- I won't complain about the consequences of violent video games being available for sale to adults, because I honestly believe that there are no substantial negative consequences on the scale described. If my family is (against all probability to the contrary) murdered in a random act of violence, I'll do the rational thing and blame the person who pulled the trigger, rather than searching for scapegoats. That said, violent videogames have permeated our society to the point that any real effects on the level of random violence should already be highly visible -- and while there's a highly publicized shooting spree here or there, (1) there's no clear causal correlation, and (2) the death rate from those isn't even close to background noise in the grand scheme of things; it's far, far more likely that my family will die in a random traffic accident, and that's a risk we willingly accept every time we get in the car to watch a movie or go to the store.
Keep your fearmongering. If you want to live in a world where you're afraid of every kid who owns an Xbox, you're welcome to -- but me and mine prefer to go about living our lives (and facing much more real and present challenges), unworried by your imaginary and unrealized fears. I imagine those who were afraid of D&D or rock-and-roll felt similarly to you earlier in this century -- every generation finds some reason to worry needlessly about their youth -- but history proved those fears out as unfounded, and will do so again.
You do realize that "the citizenry" has more than one opinion, and that you're part of it?
So -- if you don't agree with what you see as the slashdot groupthink, you're obviously (1) misperceiving that groupthink, and/or (2) offending individuals (like yourself) who don't subscribe. What's more, though, the perception that there is a unified groupthink is mistaken. The Linux geeks and the Apple geeks are still two different camps. The OSS folks want to see copyright laws enforced (with enlightened self interest encouraging adoption of open source terms where appropriate), while the RMS groupies want to see copyright for software fundamentally modified. There are plenty of folks around here who think Ron Paul's a nutjob -- go look at any political article for proof; while the RP contingent is vocal, they're very, very far from alone. Almost everyone will agree that fair use is misunderstood, but some folks will claim that it's really meant to be a get-out-of-jail-free card for noncommercial (but otherwise outright) theft, while others will say that it's misunderstood by those who see it as anything other than a last-ditch legal defense with tightly limited scope. To be sure, there are folks who take any of the positions you caricature as part of the local groupthink -- but individuals taking all of those positions are far more rare.
Now please stop the ad hominem attacks against a strawman "groupthink" that doesn't even exist.
Frankly, I think that inadequate coverage of a topic is worse than none at all -- if folks have the impression that they know something well enough to be effective in it, whereas in fact they only know enough to be dangerous, those are the people who are going to go out and build unmaintainable or insecure systems.
Meh. I went to CSU Chico (certainly not a tear-through-your-wallet school) about a decade ago. Database programming was required (IIRC), and reasonably comprehensive for what I think (rightly? wrongly?) was a 200-level class (the softballs you mentioned, the various normal forms and transformations between them, etc etc).
There might be schools that graduate folks without that knowledge, but I'd sure hope there wouldn't be many of them.
I think that synchronizing multiple databases is a little much overhead -- it's sane to just have a restricted view, accessing only the relevant information, which is the only thing the user the website connects as has authorization to query.
Generally a good point. OTOH, if one can standardize on use of templating languages that do automatic output-side escaping (Genshi comes to mind), the whole thing should be pretty moot -- and one thing I understand Fortune 50 companies to be pretty good at is managing process and internal standardization. (Wouldn't know firsthand, haven't worked for one yet -- will RSN, as my current employer is in the process of being purchased).