Always hard to always stay up to date on the current common wisdom of Slashdot.
That's because there is none.
I don't mean that there is no wisdom on Slashdot, I mean there is no wisdom of Slashdot. While Slashdotters tend to be like-minded, if they actually agreed on everything, there'd be nothing to discuss, and no real point to the site.
The fact that you're here to complain about the "groupthink" of Slashdot refutes your complaint.
I mean, I suppose I don't really know much about this, but did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers? Seriously, what doesn't CUPS support these days?
millions of paysites out there and thanks to the pissing contest they will simply use a combo of H.264+flash.
Netflix already uses Silverlight, so no, it's not just Flash winning. YouTube has a fair amount of their content working on HTML5. Would these "millions of paysites" be anything anyone cares about?
Does anyone HONESTLY think all the paysites in the world are just gonna join hands with RMS and sing "free as in freedom" around the campfire?
I didn't expect them to with respect to the rest of their websites, but it did happen once before. Firefox got big enough that they were forced to drop their "Works best in IE" buttons and make actually cross-browser sites. Safari and Chrome have finished the job -- there's now too many important browsers for any one browser to become a defacto standard, or for any website to just pick a browser and ignore the others.
I think this is what Chrome was trying to do here. I don't think that'll work by itself, but by the same token, do you really think an actual Web standard will deliberately adopt DRM?
We are talking billions of dollars worth of content which we all know would end up on P2P 15 seconds after you dropped the DRM.
Oh, it's all there. In fact, 15 seconds is about how much time the new iteration of your DRM buys you until your new content is up there too. That's assuming it's even done through the DRM after all -- quite a lot of piracy these days comes from insiders.
I admit I'm surprised there's anyone on Slashdot who still has the delusion that DRM is actually effective at preventing piracy. That's never been what it's about. As far as audio and video, it always has been about controlling legitimate use, not about preventing illegitimate use. It's about being able to sell you the song once on a CD, then again for your iPod, then again as a ringtone, then again every time one of your existing DRM'd versions screws up -- particularly when, say, a DRM-based service goes out of business and you suddenly have to buy all your music again.
If I am a website owner I can cover a good 99% of the planet by sticking with H.264+flash and simply keep a copy of the pre-wrapped H.264 file if I want to support iDevice users.
The better route, if you're going to stick to the H.264 file, would be to start with the HTML5 version, and gracefully degrade to the Flash version for browsers which don't support it. Why would you assume an iDevice is the only place where people would rather not have Flash?
It's also funny that you suggest this after bitching about the lack of DRM. Hey, guess what? H.264 vs WebM has nothing whatsoever to do with DRM. Using the H.264 version in HTML5 on the iDevice means you've got no DRM, so you're back to where you started.
The teen years are where you see some of the most venal, sociopathic behavior in your life.
And if your kid's acting that way, something like this is appropriate. But if you make the first move by breaking their trust and violating their privacy, you pretty much guarantee that's what you're going to see.
To put it another way, suppose you're working for a company which supposedly doesn't track their employees' Internet behavior. You later discover they've installed a keylogger on your work machine and have used it to deliberately gain access to your personal GMail account and such, as a way to prevent leaks, to try to detect disgruntled employees early.
I don't know how many actual disgruntled employees they'd catch that way, but I do know that if I discovered that kind of thing happening, I'd instantly become exactly the sort of disgruntled employee they're worried about.
Yes, teenagers tend to be emotional, impulsive, and ruled by hormones. They're also not entirely irrational -- the answer to every question is not always "because I said so", they actually are capable of understanding and empathizing with your position. The surest way to push them the other direction, into acting like children, is to treat them like children.
Jebus, someone watched too many Disney family films at some point.
As long as I'm recalling my childhood, I suppose I have to admit to that. It's also beside the point, because my family really was like that. My parents actually did trust me, for the most part, and as I demonstrated that I could be trusted, they rewarded me with more trust -- more privacy, more independence, and more responsibility.
Isn't this better than having silly parents voting for a Gov that forces ISPs to nanny their children?
That seems like a bit of a false dichotomy -- I know of ISPs which already offer that service, but the parents have to turn it on. This is already an issue with game consoles -- all major consoles have parental controls, but the kids generally know more about them than the parents.
In the old days when kids play in the garden, you know what they are playing.
Oh? Did every parent know their child was playing doctor?
Anyone who lets their child do whatever he/she wants is doing their child a great disservice and is not a parent.
That's not what I'm suggesting at all. However, there does need to be some privacy for the child, at least.
And anyone who thinks a good family is some form of Western Democracy is a fool. You do not have freedom of speech, nor is the Boss decided by popular vote.
It's actually much more like an anarchy, once the kids get to be teenagers. At that point, it's irrelevant what the Boss says. They're likely bigger, smarter, and stronger than you, and the hours you can actually supervise them are much, much less than before.
I'm not saying let them do drugs. I'm saying at this point, it is their decision, whether you want it to be or not, and you'd better hope you've done your job and they know better by now.
I'm not saying let them meet pedophiles, but the same applies -- short of grounding them from the ages of eight to eighteen, this is going to be their decision. You can forbid it, you can set consequences -- raise the stakes, so to say -- but ultimately, it's their choice, whether you want to admit it or not.
Having parents snoop on kids should also prepare them for adulthood where their employers, Gov and random organizations will snoop on them - and in these cases hardly for their benefit.
What, by teaching them that this is a normal situation that they should just accept?
Spoken like someone who has a pretty poor relationship with their kids -- the kind of dick who says "No child of mine will grow up to be a good-for-nothing poet when my father, and his father, and his father before him were all respectable bricklayers." Or whatever the respective professions are.
You have control for 18 years, at the very best. Then they're independent, and it's entirely up to them if they even want to see you again. If you want to spend the rest of your life in at least some amount of contact with your children, you're going to have to compromise, often. If you can't wait to be rid of them, asserting control at every step of the way is a great way to do that. Hey, if you do it right, you can make them hate you well into your old age as you threaten to write them out of the will!
Your child will probably hate you at some point. That doesn't mean this is a good thing to be deliberately sought after. That's like saying, "Any parent that hasn't had their child break a bone in some point in life hasn't been doing their job."
I may not have experience parenting, but I did take some clues from my own parents. They gave me exactly as much independence as I earned. They understood their job wasn't to control me, but to give me the support and guidance I needed to become an adult. Yes, sometimes it meant they took control, but only as much as they had to.
Problem is, there can't really be a standards-based mechanism for delivering DRM anything, at least not in the sense of open standards on the Web.
Right now, if I stick to HTML5 and stuff like WebM, there is the theoretical possibility of me taking nothing but existing open source stuff, or even starting from scratch, and writing software that can consume that media. Pretty much any DRM which allowed me to do that wouldn't really be doing its job as DRM.
The better route is to suck it up and leave the DRM behind.
One guess as to where they learned that? Especially if you're the sort of parent who is going to be dishonest enough to use a keylogger to break into their Facebook account.
Many won't and don't know how to check for a keylogger.
And the more parents do this, especially once you start actually using that information, the quicker kids will get around it. Just look what they do with their schools attempting to censor the Internet.
You're going to be technologically ahead of them for a few months at best. Then they're going to be miles ahead of you again, and you'll have lost what little trust you had.
And in the end, honestly, I don't think there is enough hours in the day to know "everything your kid is doing."
Who said you need to know everything? Just stay in touch.
I think I might use something like this. But not to spy on their internet activity. Just when I was in MS/HS, I knew a few kids that went missing or ran away with an older person. Then, such a tool would get you way ahead of the game on might have happened.
In other words, you'll use it to spy on them, but only in their best interests?
My parents taught me, well before middle school, that people lie on the Internet and that if I meet anyone, they could kidnap me. They had a few sane rules about meeting people -- meet them in public, for example. Since I trusted them -- partly because they didn't do things like install keyloggers on my systems -- and since they made a good argument, I was safe about this kind of thing.
The child you see and interact with everyday is not the full expanse of your kid--it is the expression of words and actions your kid has learned avoids your ire and keeps the allowance money flowing.
If that's the sort of relationship you have with your kid, you've already lost something important. Rather than teach your child what your values are and why they are your values, you've instead taught them that the only reason to be good is because of the consequences, and if no one finds out, it's ok.
A key example:
If your kid is up against some dark inclinations, he or she will realize that telling you could have negative results, and that not telling you keeps the situation fully under their control.
While they may not be able to tell you everything, you'd hope there would be some adult in their life they'd be able to talk to. In any case, this is precisely what I'm talking about. My parents brought me up with the attitude that I can tell them anything.
Besides that, kids are curious. You can teach them something is bad, and have them fully 100% believe you, and they will still wind up seeking it out.
Especially if you just say "This is bad, mmkay?" No, tell them why it's bad, and be honest. Don't tell them all drugs will kill them instantly, because then the instant they see their friends smoking pot and not dying, why should they believe anything you say about any drugs, and why shouldn't they go ahead and try heroin or cocaine?
What it comes down to is teaching your kids to live life in the proper pattern and hope that when they're older the "don't hit your sister because you'll get a spanking" placeholder transmutes into "don't hit your sister because that is fundamentally wrong."
Neither of these is sufficient, but think about it. Why don't you want them to hit their sister? For one, if you can't explain that to me, you're not going to be able to explain it to them, and "because you'll get a spanking" is again going to train them to be exactly what you said -- they'll have a set of behaviors they show you to avoid your ire and keep the money flowing, because after all, being a good person is only important for those reasons. Because that's what you taught them.
This is akin to suggesting that people can only be moral when they believe there's an omniscient, omnipotent god who sees everything wrong they do and is willing to punish them.
How about, don't hit your sister because you're a better person than that. Because you made her cry, look at her! And because she might hit you back, not because I will. But mostly because you want to be a good, compassionate person, don't you? What do you think a good person would do? Let's take one of your heroes -- what would Batman do? (Not WWJD because they may not care about that yet -- ask them who their heroes are!)
I've never actually been a parent, but my parents didn't hit me more than twice in my entire childhood. They very rarely said "because I said so," and I made life difficult for them when they did. They warned me about the Internet, certainly, but they told me the truth about what the dangers were, and far from installing keyloggers, they let me explore -- I switched to Linux when I was 15, and I was playing with programming not long after that, and I have to imagine a parent would need to restrict both of these if they were keylogging me.
the author self-admits that you should be keeping tabs on your kid (by suggesting you're doing it wrong if you're not), then lashes out at tools which enable this in the same breath.
There's a difference between keeping tabs on your kid by, say, talking to them (and their friends), and effectively forcing them to wear a wire.
Children do in fact not have the same rights as adults. This is correct and appropriate.
I agree. However, the longer you treat them as a child, and the less you're willing to grant them adult rights and responsibilities as they earn them, the more you're going to lose control.
If the child wants to keep something secret, they will only use the monitored computer for updates they're ok sharing, while they use a school, library, or friend's computer for anything else.
Unless, of course, all of these are monitored. Also, if you actually read the article, you'd realize this isn't about monitoring the computer, it's about getting access to the child's Facebook account so that it doesn't matter what computer they use.
I'm not quite sure what they meant, or what you meant, but the way I read this, the problem is that the parents are sacrificing too much. They're sacrificing their own integrity, their relationship with their child and any trust there, and their responsibility to prepare their children for when this stuff will be unsupervised.
And I think this is a nice summary:
Edi Goodman, chief privacy officer for Identity Theft 911, expressed mixed feelings about this high-tech parenting method. He called it an updated version of rifling through kids’ drawers and closets.
Only, of course, it's a good deal worse than that. Would you bug you child's room, or make them wear a wire to school?
When the consequences are physical violence, the speech isn't free. Otherwise, it's like saying I have the freedom to kill people so long as I'm alright with the consequences.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Phelps die horribly. I just can't accept the collateral damage. Restricting his speech by, say, preventing protests at funerals, that might make sense, but deciding that it's sometimes ok to respond to speech with physical violence is to stoop to the level of Islamic extremists who actually do kill people for drawing comics.
I agree the vulnerabilities you mentioned are correct, but I really don't think "security theater" is appropriate here.
First, SSL as a technology works just fine. It's entirely possible to create a restricted set of CAs and certificates and have a system at least as secure as, say, SSH. I know I do something similar with OpenVPN connections, which use OpenSSL certificates. Not every use of SSL is the mess that the typical HTTPS in your browser is.
Second, it reduces the number of individuals who can successfully MITM you massively. For a live demonstration of this, walk into any coffee shop and fire up FireSheep, and look at how many people are vulnerable. Flip on SSL and, far from security theater, they are at least safe from you.
By contrast, what Schneier was talking about was specifically the act of guarding against the sort of threat you'd see as a movie plot, which is a real threat, but is so unlikely and specific that defending against it simply isn't worth it -- often, it's not just a matter of money and resources, it actually buys you no additional security, whereas SSL does provide some security.
Let me put it this way: Forcing you to remove your shoes and surrender any significant amounts of liquid is security theater, because it's defending against specific threats which we've already seen -- I suppose the next bomb will be in someone's hat instead, or made of solid pastes instead of liquid. By contrast, a bulletproof vest is not security theater just because it doesn't defend against a headshot -- even ignoring that helmets exist for that purpose, if it really seems likely you'll get in a firefight of some sort, it's still going to be a lot harder for someone to take you out of the fight, and certainly harder for them to do anything fatal.
I do share your concern for SSL, though. If I may abuse the above analogy, it's become apparent that we need helmets, and maybe better armor.
First, that your'e running a filesystem they recognize at all. I'm sure they'd have had lots of fun with my Reiser4 FS when I was running that.
Second, that you didn't nuke the entire partition. Delete the file, purge it, tar everything up that I care about and put it somewhere else, scrub the drive, reformat, untar.
Third, that it was ever on that filesystem to begin with. Consider "rubberhose"-style encryption like Truecrypt.
Personally, I wouldn't go this route at all, and I like the route he actually chose -- the trusted third party. This isn't a case where he's going to get away by nuking the files anyway, and he shouldn't have to.
...it didn't provide access to all the superjuicy bits - even if they weren't exactly needed for homebrew..
What, like actual hardware accelerated graphics? IIRC, it just provided a framebuffer. Try uninstalling your video drivers and then playing any game.
you really ought to just get a dev license and start making some serious money.
Not everyone's in it for the money, and then you're subject to Sony's rules about what is and isn't allowed on the console. Do you think they'd ever allow something like XBMC?
before long, SONY realized their hacking was getting awfully close to not just unlocking some additional functionality, but also to unlocking piracy.
Interestingly, if you look at the timeline, piracy was about the first thing to fall. It was never the motive, otherwise you'd think these guys would stop.
So they removed OtherOS.
And thus, the first serious effort to hack the PS3. Before they removed OtherOS, it was this invincible platform, people were much more focused at hacking other systems since the PS3 already let them do something, at least.
Keep in mind, the people who made the first attempt are not the same people who ran projects like this.
You also say this casually, as if it's an OK thing for Sony to do, as if it's theirs to remove anymore. If I'd bought a PS3, I'd expect OtherOS to be a feature I bought it with. No matter that Sony had a pissing contest with some hackers, what they're doing here is trying to take back a feature I fucking bought. It's not terribly different from breaking into my car and stealing the stereo back because they've heard some people do evil things with stereos.
...I can do that on a generic PC, laptop, tablet.. you know.. the -real- hacker-friendly hardware.. why bother hacking the PS3 at all if NOT for the piracy?
For the things you can't do on a PC, laptop, tablet, etc. Never mind that, again, it was sold open. How would you feel if Dell took back your ability to run other OSes on your laptop, and locked you to Windows ME?
See if another console developer ever tries to be hackerfriendly again.
I would hope that other developer would take a look at the timeline. The PS3 certainly wasn't harder to hack than any other console. It's now been ripped open harder and deeper than any other console -- Sony is suing because that's what they know how to do, because they know very well that they can't put the cat back in the bag, that they can't just release a patch and call it done. And of course, as a nasty side effect for Sony, piracy is now possible.
But this didn't happen for years. They bought themselves years and years by being even marginally open. If they'd given more access to the hardware, there'd likely be even less incentive to hack it. It's not likely that they'd have kept it closed forever, but it's pretty clear that the only reason the PS3 remained uncracked for so long while other platforms were routinely pwned was OtherOS.
Everybody whining about the homebrew.. get a fucking PC and have at it
Why should I have to? I mean, I have a PC. You're talking about getting another one, trying to make it small, quiet, and cool, while adding enough power to play games, then getting a controller and trying to find PC games that play well from the couch with a controller, then setting up something like MythTV and buying a remote...
Never mind the people who already bought a PS3 for that purpose, back when it was actually reasonable to do. Or the people building clusters out of them. They should just, what, suck it up and throw all that shit away, and then go buy whatever h
Without actually reading TFA, it could be "for a year" or "for years". Such "minor" mistakes only serve to increase ambiguity and make it harder to get at the actual meaning behind the words.
Plus, you'd think it'd be embarrassing by now to have that kind of sloppiness on the Slashdot front page.
And the WBC isn't taking that choice away from anyone. They'd like to, but they aren't. Attacking them for saying they'd like to is, in fact, an attack on freedom of speech.
That's the problem here, WBC has been exploiting this loophole in the U.S. Constitution
Sorry, no. This was the entire fucking point of the bill of rights. It's the opposite of a loophole -- the ooriginal intention is and always has been to allow unpopular opinions to be expressed -- to allow anyone to say anything they want, unless there's a very good reason. "My feelings are hurt" isn't a good enough reason.
So here, for example:
Is it REALLY still free speech if your oppressing others in the process of making it?
How is the WBC "oppressing" anyone? The right approach for dealing with them is to ignore them. I hate that I'm defending the WBC in any way here, but calling what they do "oppression" is laughable -- it implies that they have the power to do anything other than piss people off, which they don't, not until people like you give it to them.
An absolute worst-case scenario here isn't that the WBC gets to keep spreading its hatred. It isn't even that people try to silence them and watch it backfire, allowing the WBC to play the "oppressed" card as they're illegally silenced (and they do know their law). The worst-case scenario is when freedom of speech is taken away from the rest of us because we couldn't deal with someone saying something we don't like.
There are a large number of misconceptions here...
there is no way for him to prove
Correct. Science doesn't prove anything. Proofs are for mathematics. The only theorems in science are all based on laws and theories which are in turn based on observation, so these laws and theories can also be overturned by observation -- thus, there's no way to prove anything positively.
There is no way to know with absolute certainty that any any event occurred, unless we have data from an observer who was present at the event.
Trivially true, because there is no way to know with absolute certainty that any event occurred.
But leaving that aside for the moment, what has anyone ever actually observed? You aren't "observing" my opinions right here, you're observing what I've typed. Not even that -- you haven't observed me typing it. You aren't observing the patterns on the screen, or even the screen itself.
All you're really seeing are the photons hitting your eyes.
Yet you seem to have no difficulty whatsoever communicating with me. You operate as though you believe I actually typed these words, and they are actually currently displayed on your screen, and so on.
How certain are you of that?
My point here is that if your complaint is valid, then there is no observation, ever. You're flirting with universal skepticism here, and I don't think you really want to go that route. And if you don't, then it's really a question of how good the evidence is.
Now, "direct" observation is nice, sure, but if you only ever observe an event once, that's not data, that's an anecdote. The other important aspect is repeatability -- not of the event or "experiment", necessarily, but of the observation. And here, you can be more sure of the state of the universe just after the Big Bang than you can about what you had to eat last Tuesday, because our understanding of the Big Bang comes from multiple lines of evidence -- not just multiple observations by multiple scientists, but multiple different kinds of observation. Red-shifted galaxies showing an expanding universe (just extrapolate backwards), cosmic background radiation, etc.
In any case, I'm really not sure how this is relevant to your earlier point:
Although creationists do believe that a supernatural being created the universe, some have postulated theories...
If the point you were really trying to make is that "no one knows", and you were trying to make that point by suggesting alternate "theories", then the challenge to you is still the same as it was before: First, come up with an alternate theory for the creation of the universe which makes testable claims. Then it'll even be in the same ballpark as the Big Bang Theory, though at that point, there's still a pretty big pile of evidence that your new theory would have to explain at least as well as the Big Bang Theory does. At that point, they'd be considered equivalent, in which case, the simpler one would be accepted via Occam's Razor, unless you can present additional evidence which counters the Big Bang Theory, or which your theory explains better.
Until you can do that, it's pretty arrogant of you to say that no one knows. Of course we don't know with absolute certainty, any more than you know with absolute certainty that you're reading this text, but to say that we don't know at all places an unreasonably high bar to what we call "knowledge" to where I doubt you could say that we know anything.
But that's not really what you wanted to say, is it? I suppose I can't say about you specifically, but what creationists usually want to say is that they do know that the existing theory is wrong, which again circles back to: Provide some testable predictions, and let people test them.
Apparently, the humans can actually beat Watson on the buzzer. There's also the confidence level -- after all, you're penalized for wrong answers. It also seems like your complaint here implies no AI can ever play Jeopardy because of that timing advantage. To me, that sounds like "Computers are better at this aspect of the game, and therefore win."
OCR and voice recognition are other problems. Interesting ones, but not quite as relevant. Let me put it this way: If IBM had just come out with a strong AI, but it was effectively a chatterbot (keyboard only, no voice recognition, no OCR), would you find it "underwhelming"?
That aside, this was both an advantage and a disadvantage -- for instance, there was the case where Watson gave exactly the same wrong answer a human had given a moment before. Humans, on the other hand, would have no problem going "Oh, Watson just got that wrong, maybe I need to answer differently."
I'd like to think it's their "Smart Planet" crap. I shudder to use the marketing word, but they do a lot of stuff where they tackle a large-ish problem like city traffic, basically acting as consultants for cities, governments, etc. I suspect a lot of the raw algorithmic work will be useful.
And hey, this would also be a hell of an entry to search. If they could scale this, I wonder if it might be a better interface than Google? Or maybe they'd sell it to Google?
I'm just speculating, though.
And yes, people do pure research. Google's 20% time comes to mind.
Even assuming Moore's Law holds, it's roughly $1-2 billion. Now, it looks like Moore said 2 years, but let's be generous and assume 18 months -- 10 years is 120 months, 120/18 is roughly 6.67 iterations of Moore's Law -- let's be generous and round up to 7.
2**7 is 128. So assuming it stays exactly the same size, the very best you can expect is $1 billion / 128 = $7,812,500. Could software save it? Maybe, if you expect software to get 390,625 times faster.
I can't find much on the dimensions, but it's a room-sized cluster right now. What's a 128th of a room? A quick Google suggests the typical college dorm room is 12'x19', so 228 square feet. So, a 128th of the area is still more than a square foot... times however tall it is. Again, you'd have to expect the software to get many times faster.
And predictions are that Moore's Law is going to slow down or outright stop, not speed up. Experience shows that software tends to at best stay about the same speed, if not get slower as people take advantage of higher-level (but often slower) constructs both to manage complexity and out of laziness (the power's available, may as well use it). Sometimes it does improve, but it's certainly not the norm.
Still think it'll take 10 years? Maybe in 5 there'll be a terminal to one that fits in your pocket, but the actual machine? I very much doubt it.
"They're not waiting for the light to come on," Welty said; rather, the human players try to time their buzzer presses so that they're coming in as close as possible to the light. Though Watson's reaction times are faster than a human, Welty noted that Watson has to wait for the light.
There's more to it than that, also -- it's often the case that Watson isn't sure it has the right answer, and you're penalized for wrong answers. Also, I'm not positive, but I think I saw in some of the trial runs that there were a few cases it actually was slower than a human -- where it came up with the right answer, eventually, but humans beat it easily to the buzzer. I'm not sure if that's the case, but I can definitely believe it -- there's a lot of stuff to sort through, and they're running a lot of algorithms on it.
The reason that there cannot be a polytheistic brand of Christianity, in the eyes of most Christians, is that such a faith would not be Christianity due to violation of Christ's teachings.
According to their interpretation of Christ's teachings. It seems most Christians, whether Catholic, Protestant, or something else, are completely out of touch with what Christ was actually about. How often do you see them actually giving away all their possessions?
The same, by the way, could be said about Fred Phelps, and it's a lot harder to find him being inconsistent with the Bible, to the extent that the Bible itself is internally consistent.
The reason it matters to Christians is the same reason why it matters to many Americans that people they view as irrational, selfish, or hateful do not gain political power.
I'm not sure I see what definitions have to do with political power, unless you were to try to prevent a Catholic from being elected by talking about how the Catholic candidate isn't a real Christian. Not that it's stopped Catholics from being elected before.
The history of America has been defined in part through injustice, genocide, and racism. That doesn't mean that the constitution and hundreds of years of jurisprudence are worthless or bad on the whole.
Nor was I saying, here, that Christianity is bad on the whole -- only that it is a fallacy to claim people you disagree with are not "true Christians" unless you somehow have any authority on the definition of Christianity. By your analogy, while I disagree with many Americans, historical and contemporary, about what the country is supposed to be and how we ought to interpret the Constitution, I'd find it ludicrous to describe them as somehow not being "true Americans."
Slashdot Mirror
Always hard to always stay up to date on the current common wisdom of Slashdot.
That's because there is none.
I don't mean that there is no wisdom on Slashdot, I mean there is no wisdom of Slashdot. While Slashdotters tend to be like-minded, if they actually agreed on everything, there'd be nothing to discuss, and no real point to the site.
The fact that you're here to complain about the "groupthink" of Slashdot refutes your complaint.
Really?
I mean, I suppose I don't really know much about this, but did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers? Seriously, what doesn't CUPS support these days?
millions of paysites out there and thanks to the pissing contest they will simply use a combo of H.264+flash.
Netflix already uses Silverlight, so no, it's not just Flash winning. YouTube has a fair amount of their content working on HTML5. Would these "millions of paysites" be anything anyone cares about?
Does anyone HONESTLY think all the paysites in the world are just gonna join hands with RMS and sing "free as in freedom" around the campfire?
I didn't expect them to with respect to the rest of their websites, but it did happen once before. Firefox got big enough that they were forced to drop their "Works best in IE" buttons and make actually cross-browser sites. Safari and Chrome have finished the job -- there's now too many important browsers for any one browser to become a defacto standard, or for any website to just pick a browser and ignore the others.
I think this is what Chrome was trying to do here. I don't think that'll work by itself, but by the same token, do you really think an actual Web standard will deliberately adopt DRM?
We are talking billions of dollars worth of content which we all know would end up on P2P 15 seconds after you dropped the DRM.
Oh, it's all there. In fact, 15 seconds is about how much time the new iteration of your DRM buys you until your new content is up there too. That's assuming it's even done through the DRM after all -- quite a lot of piracy these days comes from insiders.
I admit I'm surprised there's anyone on Slashdot who still has the delusion that DRM is actually effective at preventing piracy. That's never been what it's about. As far as audio and video, it always has been about controlling legitimate use, not about preventing illegitimate use. It's about being able to sell you the song once on a CD, then again for your iPod, then again as a ringtone, then again every time one of your existing DRM'd versions screws up -- particularly when, say, a DRM-based service goes out of business and you suddenly have to buy all your music again.
If I am a website owner I can cover a good 99% of the planet by sticking with H.264+flash and simply keep a copy of the pre-wrapped H.264 file if I want to support iDevice users.
The better route, if you're going to stick to the H.264 file, would be to start with the HTML5 version, and gracefully degrade to the Flash version for browsers which don't support it. Why would you assume an iDevice is the only place where people would rather not have Flash?
It's also funny that you suggest this after bitching about the lack of DRM. Hey, guess what? H.264 vs WebM has nothing whatsoever to do with DRM. Using the H.264 version in HTML5 on the iDevice means you've got no DRM, so you're back to where you started.
Does *anyone* here even recall their childhood?
I do. Vividly.
The teen years are where you see some of the most venal, sociopathic behavior in your life.
And if your kid's acting that way, something like this is appropriate. But if you make the first move by breaking their trust and violating their privacy, you pretty much guarantee that's what you're going to see.
To put it another way, suppose you're working for a company which supposedly doesn't track their employees' Internet behavior. You later discover they've installed a keylogger on your work machine and have used it to deliberately gain access to your personal GMail account and such, as a way to prevent leaks, to try to detect disgruntled employees early.
I don't know how many actual disgruntled employees they'd catch that way, but I do know that if I discovered that kind of thing happening, I'd instantly become exactly the sort of disgruntled employee they're worried about.
Yes, teenagers tend to be emotional, impulsive, and ruled by hormones. They're also not entirely irrational -- the answer to every question is not always "because I said so", they actually are capable of understanding and empathizing with your position. The surest way to push them the other direction, into acting like children, is to treat them like children.
Jebus, someone watched too many Disney family films at some point.
As long as I'm recalling my childhood, I suppose I have to admit to that. It's also beside the point, because my family really was like that. My parents actually did trust me, for the most part, and as I demonstrated that I could be trusted, they rewarded me with more trust -- more privacy, more independence, and more responsibility.
Isn't this better than having silly parents voting for a Gov that forces ISPs to nanny their children?
That seems like a bit of a false dichotomy -- I know of ISPs which already offer that service, but the parents have to turn it on. This is already an issue with game consoles -- all major consoles have parental controls, but the kids generally know more about them than the parents.
In the old days when kids play in the garden, you know what they are playing.
Oh? Did every parent know their child was playing doctor?
Anyone who lets their child do whatever he/she wants is doing their child a great disservice and is not a parent.
That's not what I'm suggesting at all. However, there does need to be some privacy for the child, at least.
And anyone who thinks a good family is some form of Western Democracy is a fool. You do not have freedom of speech, nor is the Boss decided by popular vote.
It's actually much more like an anarchy, once the kids get to be teenagers. At that point, it's irrelevant what the Boss says. They're likely bigger, smarter, and stronger than you, and the hours you can actually supervise them are much, much less than before.
I'm not saying let them do drugs. I'm saying at this point, it is their decision, whether you want it to be or not, and you'd better hope you've done your job and they know better by now.
I'm not saying let them meet pedophiles, but the same applies -- short of grounding them from the ages of eight to eighteen, this is going to be their decision. You can forbid it, you can set consequences -- raise the stakes, so to say -- but ultimately, it's their choice, whether you want to admit it or not.
Having parents snoop on kids should also prepare them for adulthood where their employers, Gov and random organizations will snoop on them - and in these cases hardly for their benefit.
What, by teaching them that this is a normal situation that they should just accept?
Spoken like someone who has a pretty poor relationship with their kids -- the kind of dick who says "No child of mine will grow up to be a good-for-nothing poet when my father, and his father, and his father before him were all respectable bricklayers." Or whatever the respective professions are.
You have control for 18 years, at the very best. Then they're independent, and it's entirely up to them if they even want to see you again. If you want to spend the rest of your life in at least some amount of contact with your children, you're going to have to compromise, often. If you can't wait to be rid of them, asserting control at every step of the way is a great way to do that. Hey, if you do it right, you can make them hate you well into your old age as you threaten to write them out of the will!
Your child will probably hate you at some point. That doesn't mean this is a good thing to be deliberately sought after. That's like saying, "Any parent that hasn't had their child break a bone in some point in life hasn't been doing their job."
I may not have experience parenting, but I did take some clues from my own parents. They gave me exactly as much independence as I earned. They understood their job wasn't to control me, but to give me the support and guidance I needed to become an adult. Yes, sometimes it meant they took control, but only as much as they had to.
Problem is, there can't really be a standards-based mechanism for delivering DRM anything, at least not in the sense of open standards on the Web.
Right now, if I stick to HTML5 and stuff like WebM, there is the theoretical possibility of me taking nothing but existing open source stuff, or even starting from scratch, and writing software that can consume that media. Pretty much any DRM which allowed me to do that wouldn't really be doing its job as DRM.
The better route is to suck it up and leave the DRM behind.
However, kids lie and lie well.
One guess as to where they learned that? Especially if you're the sort of parent who is going to be dishonest enough to use a keylogger to break into their Facebook account.
Many won't and don't know how to check for a keylogger.
And the more parents do this, especially once you start actually using that information, the quicker kids will get around it. Just look what they do with their schools attempting to censor the Internet.
You're going to be technologically ahead of them for a few months at best. Then they're going to be miles ahead of you again, and you'll have lost what little trust you had.
And in the end, honestly, I don't think there is enough hours in the day to know "everything your kid is doing."
Who said you need to know everything? Just stay in touch.
I think I might use something like this. But not to spy on their internet activity. Just when I was in MS/HS, I knew a few kids that went missing or ran away with an older person. Then, such a tool would get you way ahead of the game on might have happened.
In other words, you'll use it to spy on them, but only in their best interests?
My parents taught me, well before middle school, that people lie on the Internet and that if I meet anyone, they could kidnap me. They had a few sane rules about meeting people -- meet them in public, for example. Since I trusted them -- partly because they didn't do things like install keyloggers on my systems -- and since they made a good argument, I was safe about this kind of thing.
The child you see and interact with everyday is not the full expanse of your kid--it is the expression of words and actions your kid has learned avoids your ire and keeps the allowance money flowing.
If that's the sort of relationship you have with your kid, you've already lost something important. Rather than teach your child what your values are and why they are your values, you've instead taught them that the only reason to be good is because of the consequences, and if no one finds out, it's ok.
A key example:
If your kid is up against some dark inclinations, he or she will realize that telling you could have negative results, and that not telling you keeps the situation fully under their control.
While they may not be able to tell you everything, you'd hope there would be some adult in their life they'd be able to talk to. In any case, this is precisely what I'm talking about. My parents brought me up with the attitude that I can tell them anything.
Besides that, kids are curious. You can teach them something is bad, and have them fully 100% believe you, and they will still wind up seeking it out.
Especially if you just say "This is bad, mmkay?" No, tell them why it's bad, and be honest. Don't tell them all drugs will kill them instantly, because then the instant they see their friends smoking pot and not dying, why should they believe anything you say about any drugs, and why shouldn't they go ahead and try heroin or cocaine?
What it comes down to is teaching your kids to live life in the proper pattern and hope that when they're older the "don't hit your sister because you'll get a spanking" placeholder transmutes into "don't hit your sister because that is fundamentally wrong."
Neither of these is sufficient, but think about it. Why don't you want them to hit their sister? For one, if you can't explain that to me, you're not going to be able to explain it to them, and "because you'll get a spanking" is again going to train them to be exactly what you said -- they'll have a set of behaviors they show you to avoid your ire and keep the money flowing, because after all, being a good person is only important for those reasons. Because that's what you taught them.
This is akin to suggesting that people can only be moral when they believe there's an omniscient, omnipotent god who sees everything wrong they do and is willing to punish them.
How about, don't hit your sister because you're a better person than that. Because you made her cry, look at her! And because she might hit you back, not because I will. But mostly because you want to be a good, compassionate person, don't you? What do you think a good person would do? Let's take one of your heroes -- what would Batman do? (Not WWJD because they may not care about that yet -- ask them who their heroes are!)
I've never actually been a parent, but my parents didn't hit me more than twice in my entire childhood. They very rarely said "because I said so," and I made life difficult for them when they did. They warned me about the Internet, certainly, but they told me the truth about what the dangers were, and far from installing keyloggers, they let me explore -- I switched to Linux when I was 15, and I was playing with programming not long after that, and I have to imagine a parent would need to restrict both of these if they were keylogging me.
the author self-admits that you should be keeping tabs on your kid (by suggesting you're doing it wrong if you're not), then lashes out at tools which enable this in the same breath.
There's a difference between keeping tabs on your kid by, say, talking to them (and their friends), and effectively forcing them to wear a wire.
Children do in fact not have the same rights as adults. This is correct and appropriate.
I agree. However, the longer you treat them as a child, and the less you're willing to grant them adult rights and responsibilities as they earn them, the more you're going to lose control.
If the child wants to keep something secret, they will only use the monitored computer for updates they're ok sharing, while they use a school, library, or friend's computer for anything else.
Unless, of course, all of these are monitored. Also, if you actually read the article, you'd realize this isn't about monitoring the computer, it's about getting access to the child's Facebook account so that it doesn't matter what computer they use.
I'm not quite sure what they meant, or what you meant, but the way I read this, the problem is that the parents are sacrificing too much. They're sacrificing their own integrity, their relationship with their child and any trust there, and their responsibility to prepare their children for when this stuff will be unsupervised.
And I think this is a nice summary:
Edi Goodman, chief privacy officer for Identity Theft 911, expressed mixed feelings about this high-tech parenting method. He called it an updated version of rifling through kids’ drawers and closets.
Only, of course, it's a good deal worse than that. Would you bug you child's room, or make them wear a wire to school?
When the consequences are physical violence, the speech isn't free. Otherwise, it's like saying I have the freedom to kill people so long as I'm alright with the consequences.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Phelps die horribly. I just can't accept the collateral damage. Restricting his speech by, say, preventing protests at funerals, that might make sense, but deciding that it's sometimes ok to respond to speech with physical violence is to stoop to the level of Islamic extremists who actually do kill people for drawing comics.
I agree the vulnerabilities you mentioned are correct, but I really don't think "security theater" is appropriate here.
First, SSL as a technology works just fine. It's entirely possible to create a restricted set of CAs and certificates and have a system at least as secure as, say, SSH. I know I do something similar with OpenVPN connections, which use OpenSSL certificates. Not every use of SSL is the mess that the typical HTTPS in your browser is.
Second, it reduces the number of individuals who can successfully MITM you massively. For a live demonstration of this, walk into any coffee shop and fire up FireSheep, and look at how many people are vulnerable. Flip on SSL and, far from security theater, they are at least safe from you.
By contrast, what Schneier was talking about was specifically the act of guarding against the sort of threat you'd see as a movie plot, which is a real threat, but is so unlikely and specific that defending against it simply isn't worth it -- often, it's not just a matter of money and resources, it actually buys you no additional security, whereas SSL does provide some security.
Let me put it this way: Forcing you to remove your shoes and surrender any significant amounts of liquid is security theater, because it's defending against specific threats which we've already seen -- I suppose the next bomb will be in someone's hat instead, or made of solid pastes instead of liquid. By contrast, a bulletproof vest is not security theater just because it doesn't defend against a headshot -- even ignoring that helmets exist for that purpose, if it really seems likely you'll get in a firefight of some sort, it's still going to be a lot harder for someone to take you out of the fight, and certainly harder for them to do anything fatal.
I do share your concern for SSL, though. If I may abuse the above analogy, it's become apparent that we need helmets, and maybe better armor.
This is assuming several things:
First, that your'e running a filesystem they recognize at all. I'm sure they'd have had lots of fun with my Reiser4 FS when I was running that.
Second, that you didn't nuke the entire partition. Delete the file, purge it, tar everything up that I care about and put it somewhere else, scrub the drive, reformat, untar.
Third, that it was ever on that filesystem to begin with. Consider "rubberhose"-style encryption like Truecrypt.
Personally, I wouldn't go this route at all, and I like the route he actually chose -- the trusted third party. This isn't a case where he's going to get away by nuking the files anyway, and he shouldn't have to.
...it didn't provide access to all the superjuicy bits - even if they weren't exactly needed for homebrew..
What, like actual hardware accelerated graphics? IIRC, it just provided a framebuffer. Try uninstalling your video drivers and then playing any game.
you really ought to just get a dev license and start making some serious money.
Not everyone's in it for the money, and then you're subject to Sony's rules about what is and isn't allowed on the console. Do you think they'd ever allow something like XBMC?
before long, SONY realized their hacking was getting awfully close to not just unlocking some additional functionality, but also to unlocking piracy.
Interestingly, if you look at the timeline, piracy was about the first thing to fall. It was never the motive, otherwise you'd think these guys would stop.
So they removed OtherOS.
And thus, the first serious effort to hack the PS3. Before they removed OtherOS, it was this invincible platform, people were much more focused at hacking other systems since the PS3 already let them do something, at least.
Keep in mind, the people who made the first attempt are not the same people who ran projects like this.
You also say this casually, as if it's an OK thing for Sony to do, as if it's theirs to remove anymore. If I'd bought a PS3, I'd expect OtherOS to be a feature I bought it with. No matter that Sony had a pissing contest with some hackers, what they're doing here is trying to take back a feature I fucking bought. It's not terribly different from breaking into my car and stealing the stereo back because they've heard some people do evil things with stereos.
...I can do that on a generic PC, laptop, tablet.. you know.. the -real- hacker-friendly hardware.. why bother hacking the PS3 at all if NOT for the piracy?
For the things you can't do on a PC, laptop, tablet, etc. Never mind that, again, it was sold open. How would you feel if Dell took back your ability to run other OSes on your laptop, and locked you to Windows ME?
See if another console developer ever tries to be hackerfriendly again.
I would hope that other developer would take a look at the timeline. The PS3 certainly wasn't harder to hack than any other console. It's now been ripped open harder and deeper than any other console -- Sony is suing because that's what they know how to do, because they know very well that they can't put the cat back in the bag, that they can't just release a patch and call it done. And of course, as a nasty side effect for Sony, piracy is now possible.
But this didn't happen for years. They bought themselves years and years by being even marginally open. If they'd given more access to the hardware, there'd likely be even less incentive to hack it. It's not likely that they'd have kept it closed forever, but it's pretty clear that the only reason the PS3 remained uncracked for so long while other platforms were routinely pwned was OtherOS.
Everybody whining about the homebrew.. get a fucking PC and have at it
Why should I have to? I mean, I have a PC. You're talking about getting another one, trying to make it small, quiet, and cool, while adding enough power to play games, then getting a controller and trying to find PC games that play well from the couch with a controller, then setting up something like MythTV and buying a remote...
Never mind the people who already bought a PS3 for that purpose, back when it was actually reasonable to do. Or the people building clusters out of them. They should just, what, suck it up and throw all that shit away, and then go buy whatever h
Without actually reading TFA, it could be "for a year" or "for years". Such "minor" mistakes only serve to increase ambiguity and make it harder to get at the actual meaning behind the words.
Plus, you'd think it'd be embarrassing by now to have that kind of sloppiness on the Slashdot front page.
Apparently, so are the motivations and goals of the single anonymous member which posted that story.
And the WBC isn't taking that choice away from anyone. They'd like to, but they aren't. Attacking them for saying they'd like to is, in fact, an attack on freedom of speech.
That's the problem here, WBC has been exploiting this loophole in the U.S. Constitution
Sorry, no. This was the entire fucking point of the bill of rights. It's the opposite of a loophole -- the ooriginal intention is and always has been to allow unpopular opinions to be expressed -- to allow anyone to say anything they want, unless there's a very good reason. "My feelings are hurt" isn't a good enough reason.
So here, for example:
Is it REALLY still free speech if your oppressing others in the process of making it?
How is the WBC "oppressing" anyone? The right approach for dealing with them is to ignore them. I hate that I'm defending the WBC in any way here, but calling what they do "oppression" is laughable -- it implies that they have the power to do anything other than piss people off, which they don't, not until people like you give it to them.
An absolute worst-case scenario here isn't that the WBC gets to keep spreading its hatred. It isn't even that people try to silence them and watch it backfire, allowing the WBC to play the "oppressed" card as they're illegally silenced (and they do know their law). The worst-case scenario is when freedom of speech is taken away from the rest of us because we couldn't deal with someone saying something we don't like.
There are a large number of misconceptions here...
there is no way for him to prove
Correct. Science doesn't prove anything. Proofs are for mathematics. The only theorems in science are all based on laws and theories which are in turn based on observation, so these laws and theories can also be overturned by observation -- thus, there's no way to prove anything positively.
There is no way to know with absolute certainty that any any event occurred, unless we have data from an observer who was present at the event.
Trivially true, because there is no way to know with absolute certainty that any event occurred.
But leaving that aside for the moment, what has anyone ever actually observed? You aren't "observing" my opinions right here, you're observing what I've typed. Not even that -- you haven't observed me typing it. You aren't observing the patterns on the screen, or even the screen itself.
All you're really seeing are the photons hitting your eyes.
Yet you seem to have no difficulty whatsoever communicating with me. You operate as though you believe I actually typed these words, and they are actually currently displayed on your screen, and so on.
How certain are you of that?
My point here is that if your complaint is valid, then there is no observation, ever. You're flirting with universal skepticism here, and I don't think you really want to go that route. And if you don't, then it's really a question of how good the evidence is.
Now, "direct" observation is nice, sure, but if you only ever observe an event once, that's not data, that's an anecdote. The other important aspect is repeatability -- not of the event or "experiment", necessarily, but of the observation. And here, you can be more sure of the state of the universe just after the Big Bang than you can about what you had to eat last Tuesday, because our understanding of the Big Bang comes from multiple lines of evidence -- not just multiple observations by multiple scientists, but multiple different kinds of observation. Red-shifted galaxies showing an expanding universe (just extrapolate backwards), cosmic background radiation, etc.
In any case, I'm really not sure how this is relevant to your earlier point:
Although creationists do believe that a supernatural being created the universe, some have postulated theories...
If the point you were really trying to make is that "no one knows", and you were trying to make that point by suggesting alternate "theories", then the challenge to you is still the same as it was before: First, come up with an alternate theory for the creation of the universe which makes testable claims. Then it'll even be in the same ballpark as the Big Bang Theory, though at that point, there's still a pretty big pile of evidence that your new theory would have to explain at least as well as the Big Bang Theory does. At that point, they'd be considered equivalent, in which case, the simpler one would be accepted via Occam's Razor, unless you can present additional evidence which counters the Big Bang Theory, or which your theory explains better.
Until you can do that, it's pretty arrogant of you to say that no one knows. Of course we don't know with absolute certainty, any more than you know with absolute certainty that you're reading this text, but to say that we don't know at all places an unreasonably high bar to what we call "knowledge" to where I doubt you could say that we know anything.
But that's not really what you wanted to say, is it? I suppose I can't say about you specifically, but what creationists usually want to say is that they do know that the existing theory is wrong, which again circles back to: Provide some testable predictions, and let people test them.
Well, let's see...
Apparently, the humans can actually beat Watson on the buzzer. There's also the confidence level -- after all, you're penalized for wrong answers. It also seems like your complaint here implies no AI can ever play Jeopardy because of that timing advantage. To me, that sounds like "Computers are better at this aspect of the game, and therefore win."
OCR and voice recognition are other problems. Interesting ones, but not quite as relevant. Let me put it this way: If IBM had just come out with a strong AI, but it was effectively a chatterbot (keyboard only, no voice recognition, no OCR), would you find it "underwhelming"?
That aside, this was both an advantage and a disadvantage -- for instance, there was the case where Watson gave exactly the same wrong answer a human had given a moment before. Humans, on the other hand, would have no problem going "Oh, Watson just got that wrong, maybe I need to answer differently."
I'd like to think it's their "Smart Planet" crap. I shudder to use the marketing word, but they do a lot of stuff where they tackle a large-ish problem like city traffic, basically acting as consultants for cities, governments, etc. I suspect a lot of the raw algorithmic work will be useful.
And hey, this would also be a hell of an entry to search. If they could scale this, I wonder if it might be a better interface than Google? Or maybe they'd sell it to Google?
I'm just speculating, though.
And yes, people do pure research. Google's 20% time comes to mind.
Even assuming Moore's Law holds, it's roughly $1-2 billion. Now, it looks like Moore said 2 years, but let's be generous and assume 18 months -- 10 years is 120 months, 120/18 is roughly 6.67 iterations of Moore's Law -- let's be generous and round up to 7.
2**7 is 128. So assuming it stays exactly the same size, the very best you can expect is $1 billion / 128 = $7,812,500. Could software save it? Maybe, if you expect software to get 390,625 times faster.
I can't find much on the dimensions, but it's a room-sized cluster right now. What's a 128th of a room? A quick Google suggests the typical college dorm room is 12'x19', so 228 square feet. So, a 128th of the area is still more than a square foot... times however tall it is. Again, you'd have to expect the software to get many times faster.
And predictions are that Moore's Law is going to slow down or outright stop, not speed up. Experience shows that software tends to at best stay about the same speed, if not get slower as people take advantage of higher-level (but often slower) constructs both to manage complexity and out of laziness (the power's available, may as well use it). Sometimes it does improve, but it's certainly not the norm.
Still think it'll take 10 years? Maybe in 5 there'll be a terminal to one that fits in your pocket, but the actual machine? I very much doubt it.
From that page:
"They're not waiting for the light to come on," Welty said; rather, the human players try to time their buzzer presses so that they're coming in as close as possible to the light. Though Watson's reaction times are faster than a human, Welty noted that Watson has to wait for the light.
There's more to it than that, also -- it's often the case that Watson isn't sure it has the right answer, and you're penalized for wrong answers. Also, I'm not positive, but I think I saw in some of the trial runs that there were a few cases it actually was slower than a human -- where it came up with the right answer, eventually, but humans beat it easily to the buzzer. I'm not sure if that's the case, but I can definitely believe it -- there's a lot of stuff to sort through, and they're running a lot of algorithms on it.
The reason that there cannot be a polytheistic brand of Christianity, in the eyes of most Christians, is that such a faith would not be Christianity due to violation of Christ's teachings.
According to their interpretation of Christ's teachings. It seems most Christians, whether Catholic, Protestant, or something else, are completely out of touch with what Christ was actually about. How often do you see them actually giving away all their possessions?
The same, by the way, could be said about Fred Phelps, and it's a lot harder to find him being inconsistent with the Bible, to the extent that the Bible itself is internally consistent.
The reason it matters to Christians is the same reason why it matters to many Americans that people they view as irrational, selfish, or hateful do not gain political power.
I'm not sure I see what definitions have to do with political power, unless you were to try to prevent a Catholic from being elected by talking about how the Catholic candidate isn't a real Christian. Not that it's stopped Catholics from being elected before.
The history of America has been defined in part through injustice, genocide, and racism. That doesn't mean that the constitution and hundreds of years of jurisprudence are worthless or bad on the whole.
Nor was I saying, here, that Christianity is bad on the whole -- only that it is a fallacy to claim people you disagree with are not "true Christians" unless you somehow have any authority on the definition of Christianity. By your analogy, while I disagree with many Americans, historical and contemporary, about what the country is supposed to be and how we ought to interpret the Constitution, I'd find it ludicrous to describe them as somehow not being "true Americans."