So, by way of experiment, we're going to put two naïve naked people, wired for curiosity, into a lush garden, tell them to eat anything except for one thing, and when they (predictably) eat the verboten thing, jump out from behind a bush and yell "gotcha!". Then let them be cursed with painful childbirth and early death. And not just them, the perpetrators . . . but also the countless generations of progeny they've been ordered to put forth (miraculously, since they have only themselves as a breeding population . . . oh, except for those unexplained people in Nodland to the East) until the experimenter gets tired of it all and wipes the program . ..
This sounds less like an experiment, and more like a soap opera written by the Marquis de Sade and directed by Alan Funt.
As for what an SDLC instructor would tell 'god'? Probably, "Do module testing instead of trying to debug the whole system."
This presupposes "intelligence" on the part of malware designers which, given the amount of script-kiddie nonsense out there, is not a universal fact. =)
Of course, I'm being entirely tongue-in-cheek and pointing out that as a design function, the nipples on men don't serve the same function as on women, even though all the same structures (e.g. from an OOP perspective, the object's methods) are still in place. Hormone therapy can cause men to lactate because of this, but there's no known condition in nature that would cause men to naturally lactate.
I could continue the flippancy with a reference to overload methods, but I think I'm already getting a bit obscure.
Digital postage will only hurt people who aren't planning to make money from their e-mail.
Just as with DRM, the honest pay, and the dishonest either find a way around it, or are making so much off of it that it's a mere "cost of doing business".
Someday, they'll drill for old malware deposits that have metamorphosed over time, to refine it into an energy source to power the cars AI will drive in cyberspace.
The apt response can be found in the Wikipedia article for Natural Selection:
As opposed to artificial selection, in which humans favor specific traits, in natural selection the environment acts as a sieve through which only certain variations can pass.
The environment, in this case, is the realm in which Malware attempts to propagate, and the increasing effectiveness of the predators (Anti-virus, Firewalls, IDS/IPS, &c) which can curtail that propagation. The need for a random mutation capability is overstated in your response. In Darwinian selection, that is merely the proposed mechanism of phenotypic change. The same is accomplished here by a diverse body of malware authors adding their own flavor to the individual bits of code. This is still an environment of natural selection. The environment itself provides the selection pressure, rather than conscious arbitration on the part of humans, as to what variants are successful.
For your assertion that this is artificial selection to be true, humans would have to be making a conscious choice as to which kinds of malware is allowed to propagate in order to strengthen certain traits. That is to say, Symantec makes a conscious decision like "We're going to make our AV not eradicate foobar.A because we like the traits it has, and we want to see more malware like that." Clearly, that is not what is happening.
Being a decent human doesn't require this software.
As for people ridiculing and trolling, well, consider Apple fanboys as your model here. Frequently, they bring it upon themselves.
So, 'god' is either a cargo cult programmer, or doesn't pay attention to his compiler warnings. Either way, I'm thinking he needs some time in a SDLC class, and maybe next time submit the code for peer review and maybe run a vulnerability scan or two.
Hmm... the problem here is that a lot is promised for the next release, but apart from some very shaky Gant charts at the end of the requirements doc, no actual detailed build plan has been revealed. I'm calling this Vaporware.
So 'god' is the original engineer, and 'the serpent' is the original malware hacker, and the apple is the original trojan. Suggesting that 'god' did not follow secure coding practices, and as far as anyone can tell, did not do a requirements review. (Nipples on men? A clear case of including an object without ever calling its methods.)
Absolute accuracy would require this, you're right. To accurately map the whole universe, you'd need a 1:1 scale model, accurate to the Planck length, which somehow knows both the velocity AND position of everything despite Heisenberg. Good luck getting the "snapshot" to set the baseline. Better luck preventing your "measurement" of the universe in the initial snapshot from altering it by observation a la Schrödinger. And of course, best of luck finding somewhere to put it. =)
There's a difference between mapping rules in a general fashion, and applying them to actual situations. Invariably, reality always has elements that differ from the model, and thereby make it inaccurate. This is why reductionism doesn't generally map back accurately to the big picture. Understanding a component is different from understanding how the component integrates into the whole, and how other components within the whole interact with, and alter, the component.
Human behavior is very nearly impossible to accurately model at the individual level. You hear "I never would have expected him to do that" when people speak about their next door neighbors who go on homicidal rampages. Husbands or wives are shocked when the spouse that they've lived with for years or decades has an affair, buys a sports car, or has a second cup of coffee after dinner. Even crowd dynamics can be altered by incredibly subtle, and unpredictable, circumstances. (Someone in a crowded line says "He's got hairy wrists", someone else hears "He's a terrorist", and soon 8 are trampled to death in the ensuing panic.)
Then, add people deliberately gaming the system into the equation. (i.e. someone else wants to steer the crowd in a different direction than your model would normally predict, perhaps even using your model to predict the best way to disrupt it.)
Raw computing power just can't compensate for all the variables. At some point of hyper-precision, they become recursive anyway, and Gödel gets to have posthumous a laugh at your expense.
Willful nonconformist that I am, I will both comment, and ask for the location of this sign. I have a stone I've been saving for a truly special throwing occasion.
The main idea I'm stating here is that things that work for states like Texas and Wyoming won't necessarily work for California. The idea that if we eliminate or near-eliminate government in California it will somehow magically make things better is absurd. Texas has substantially different parameters and issues to deal with than does California. And a number of "centralized" functions in California are handled in Texas at a local level. For instance, at least up until recently, didn't Texas have regional / locality based PUCs? So that rules governing utilities could vary arbitrarily from zip-code to zip-code?
Maybe part-time legislatures work for tiny (complexity-wise) states like Wyoming. I think Texas' "part-time" status is partially illusionary, as I mentioned, by dint of the fact that frequent and periodic "out of band" special sessions of the lege can be and are called by the Governor.
California is getting the government it's been sold. Pity, that. But hardly an argument for copying the Wyoming or Texas models.
Population roughtly 1/73rd the size of California. GSP of roughly 17.1 billion, or just under one percent of California's GSP.
Of course, over 50% of the land in Wyoming is also owned and managed by the federal government, rather than the state.
I'd say that, by way of analogous comparison, if running the state of California is to be equated with brain surgery, running Wyoming is probably akin to, say, landscape maintenance.
Incidentally, the Republican "Governator", sold to Californians as the "non-pro" who could allegedly solve the problems, hasn't. As with most problems, blamestorming about whose watch they began on generally accomplishes nothing toward actually solving any of them.
I'm sorry, but I'm having a difficult time reconciling your state's level of complexity against the 9th largest economy in the world.
Texas also has only about 58% California's Gross State Product, 56% of its population. Texans opinions of their state aside, it's a DISTANT second in the US economy.
And even though the Texas 'Lege' is only mandated to meet for (no more than) 140 days ever 2 years, special sessions are called at the whim of the governor. Rick Perry is noted for calling as many as three consecutive "special sessions" in the course of a single "off" year.
The idea of "part-time" government probably sounds good to anyone who subscribes to a Grover Norquist / Milton Friedman "Chicago School" viewpoint that government is somehow inherently bad, and should be minimal or non-existent. To me, the idea of part-time government seems an awful lot like hiring a Part-Time brain surgeon. If you don't care that much about the result, you might save a few bucks that way. Personally, I'll go for a full time professional on things that actually matter to me.
Impeaching Bush without getting rid of Dick Cheney first would lead to total abolition of civil and human rights in the US. Even typing that revolted me.
I attempted to quote you above, but something keeps happening to the bold text. Let me try again:
Impeaching Bush without getting rid of Dick Cheney first would lead to imminentizing the eschaton. Even typing that revolted me.
Okay, one more try:
Impeaching Bush without getting rid of Dick Cheney first would lead to victory for Emperor Palpatine. Even typing that revolted me.
I know this is a hopelessly late reply, but what the heck, I'll keep being argumentative.
Ownership of a television set or cable apparatus is not required for reception of publicly owned airwaves. At least, thus far, and in the US. I know that licensing is or was required for receivers in the UK and other parts Europe, but in the US, the broadcast frequencies are considered public property, and are administered by the FCC as a public trust.
If you have fillings in your teeth that are able to pick up the audio portion of a television broadcast, you're entitled to do so. At least, until the broadcast flag makes your mouth an illegal analog hole, or something of that nature. The equipment is irrelevant. The networks don't release their copyrights by broadcasting, any more than the GPL broaches copyright ownership of Linux. But when they broadcast, they do so without an implied contract on the part of the receiver that the program will be diligently watched, commercials and all, and only on equipment they approve of and during the broadcast time. They can't, according to fair use, have an expectation that they can dictate terms of use to the end user. This is like the author / copyright owner of a book stipulating that the book should only be read at night, or only while wearing their patented brand of reading glasses, and threatening to sue anyone who fails to comply with these restrictions. (In fact, not a bad analogy there to DRM. If they patent special glasses that expire one month after first use, maybe by going opaque, and then scramble the letters in a way that their glasses can re-assemble the text, you'd have a book form of DRM. And probably cause just as many headaches as music DRM causes.)
Again, if they can show that they experience a direct loss as a result of people being able to watch a torrent of their show, then the law would protect them. As it is, the person who gets the torrent had the right to watch it when it was broadcast, and nothing, yet, dictates that they lose that right after the show is over. Why do they not have the right to watch a torrent of that show?
As to your last point, that's an utter straw-man argument. Vista is a licensed product that users pay for. Television shows bear no contract or license with the viewer, and they are free. You're comparing Apples to T'ang dynasty chopstick rests.
I find no validity to the argument that a broadcaster has televised a show for free, but then somehow still expects that they're going to be able to retain the right to dictate when and how a person is able to watch.
Now, if someone was making commercial use and selling the intellectual property of the content provider, then I'd say there's a solid case that that person is committing theft of revenue. But downloading a torrent of an episode of Lost from bittorrent because you missed it and want to watch it while on the train ride to work, or whatnot, is not significantly different from recording it on your DVR for playback later in the day.
What this is about is getting people used to having their Fair Use rights to time-shift and place-shift denied, so we all slowly forget that we ever *could* watch programming on our own terms.
I don't see how a broadcaster can argue that their show, that they broadcasted FOR FREE one night previous, somehow gains monetary value because someone downloads it.
How is this lost revenue? Because of the redacted commercials? The sponsor's message didn't get to that viewer anyway if they missed the episode. Sponsors base their advertising on a speculative audience pool anyway, based on ratings from a sample, rather than actual viewing habits. Since the ratings are based on people who actually *did* watch it on television, the downloaders fall outside of the ratings pool. And if it weren't for VCRs and DVRs, most of those shows would be completely missed to begin with.
The ratings pools would still be entirely speculative even if you took time/place-shifting completely out of the equation. Remember what life was like before TiVo? Did you sit like a good little drone and soak in all that commercially goodness? Or did you, more likely, use it as a chance to go to the bathroom or get a snack? Personally, if I'm watching live TV on a non-DVR, I'll mute the damned commercials. Is that theft?
When they do finally get the broadcast flag fully imposed, clearly most shows will be blocked from DVR recording. If they didn't mind recording, they wouldn't put up such a stink about downloading. But I'll bet you there'll be other provisions to prevent you from muting the commercials too. After they've gotten us conditioned for a few years, I'm sure it'll be mandatory to watch the whole broadcast if you watch it at all. They'll probably find a way to apply the DMCA to say that muting the show, or walking away during the commercial, somehow constitutes circumventing their DRM.
I see the rig from Clockwork Orange in the near future, coming to a home near you. Strap in, or no Seinfeld re-runs for you!
Slashdot Mirror
So, by way of experiment, we're going to put two naïve naked people, wired for curiosity, into a lush garden, tell them to eat anything except for one thing, and when they (predictably) eat the verboten thing, jump out from behind a bush and yell "gotcha!". Then let them be cursed with painful childbirth and early death. And not just them, the perpetrators . . . but also the countless generations of progeny they've been ordered to put forth (miraculously, since they have only themselves as a breeding population . . . oh, except for those unexplained people in Nodland to the East) until the experimenter gets tired of it all and wipes the program . . .
This sounds less like an experiment, and more like a soap opera written by the Marquis de Sade and directed by Alan Funt.
As for what an SDLC instructor would tell 'god'? Probably, "Do module testing instead of trying to debug the whole system."
This presupposes "intelligence" on the part of malware designers which, given the amount of script-kiddie nonsense out there, is not a universal fact. =)
Of course, I'm being entirely tongue-in-cheek and pointing out that as a design function, the nipples on men don't serve the same function as on women, even though all the same structures (e.g. from an OOP perspective, the object's methods) are still in place. Hormone therapy can cause men to lactate because of this, but there's no known condition in nature that would cause men to naturally lactate.
I could continue the flippancy with a reference to overload methods, but I think I'm already getting a bit obscure.
Nope.
Digital postage will only hurt people who aren't planning to make money from their e-mail.
Just as with DRM, the honest pay, and the dishonest either find a way around it, or are making so much off of it that it's a mere "cost of doing business".
Someday, they'll drill for old malware deposits that have metamorphosed over time, to refine it into an energy source to power the cars AI will drive in cyberspace.
Ha. Okay, but the PRIMARY method [lactation] is not being called unless you're into some serious hormone treatments.
The apt response can be found in the Wikipedia article for Natural Selection :
The environment, in this case, is the realm in which Malware attempts to propagate, and the increasing effectiveness of the predators (Anti-virus, Firewalls, IDS/IPS, &c) which can curtail that propagation. The need for a random mutation capability is overstated in your response. In Darwinian selection, that is merely the proposed mechanism of phenotypic change. The same is accomplished here by a diverse body of malware authors adding their own flavor to the individual bits of code. This is still an environment of natural selection. The environment itself provides the selection pressure, rather than conscious arbitration on the part of humans, as to what variants are successful.
For your assertion that this is artificial selection to be true, humans would have to be making a conscious choice as to which kinds of malware is allowed to propagate in order to strengthen certain traits. That is to say, Symantec makes a conscious decision like "We're going to make our AV not eradicate foobar.A because we like the traits it has, and we want to see more malware like that." Clearly, that is not what is happening.
Being a decent human doesn't require this software. As for people ridiculing and trolling, well, consider Apple fanboys as your model here. Frequently, they bring it upon themselves.
So, 'god' is either a cargo cult programmer, or doesn't pay attention to his compiler warnings. Either way, I'm thinking he needs some time in a SDLC class, and maybe next time submit the code for peer review and maybe run a vulnerability scan or two.
Hmm... the problem here is that a lot is promised for the next release, but apart from some very shaky Gant charts at the end of the requirements doc, no actual detailed build plan has been revealed. I'm calling this Vaporware.
So 'god' is the original engineer, and 'the serpent' is the original malware hacker, and the apple is the original trojan. Suggesting that 'god' did not follow secure coding practices, and as far as anyone can tell, did not do a requirements review. (Nipples on men? A clear case of including an object without ever calling its methods.)
Otherwise, it will never be able to do streaming.
Just what we need, bears smart enough to capitalize on zero-day exploits.
Absolute accuracy would require this, you're right. To accurately map the whole universe, you'd need a 1:1 scale model, accurate to the Planck length, which somehow knows both the velocity AND position of everything despite Heisenberg. Good luck getting the "snapshot" to set the baseline. Better luck preventing your "measurement" of the universe in the initial snapshot from altering it by observation a la Schrödinger. And of course, best of luck finding somewhere to put it. =)
There's a difference between mapping rules in a general fashion, and applying them to actual situations. Invariably, reality always has elements that differ from the model, and thereby make it inaccurate. This is why reductionism doesn't generally map back accurately to the big picture. Understanding a component is different from understanding how the component integrates into the whole, and how other components within the whole interact with, and alter, the component.
Human behavior is very nearly impossible to accurately model at the individual level. You hear "I never would have expected him to do that" when people speak about their next door neighbors who go on homicidal rampages. Husbands or wives are shocked when the spouse that they've lived with for years or decades has an affair, buys a sports car, or has a second cup of coffee after dinner. Even crowd dynamics can be altered by incredibly subtle, and unpredictable, circumstances. (Someone in a crowded line says "He's got hairy wrists", someone else hears "He's a terrorist", and soon 8 are trampled to death in the ensuing panic.)
Then, add people deliberately gaming the system into the equation. (i.e. someone else wants to steer the crowd in a different direction than your model would normally predict, perhaps even using your model to predict the best way to disrupt it.)
Raw computing power just can't compensate for all the variables. At some point of hyper-precision, they become recursive anyway, and Gödel gets to have posthumous a laugh at your expense.
What about Crystal Pepsi?
Willful nonconformist that I am, I will both comment, and ask for the location of this sign. I have a stone I've been saving for a truly special throwing occasion.
Thanks. What shall I do for an encore? =)
The main idea I'm stating here is that things that work for states like Texas and Wyoming won't necessarily work for California. The idea that if we eliminate or near-eliminate government in California it will somehow magically make things better is absurd. Texas has substantially different parameters and issues to deal with than does California. And a number of "centralized" functions in California are handled in Texas at a local level. For instance, at least up until recently, didn't Texas have regional / locality based PUCs? So that rules governing utilities could vary arbitrarily from zip-code to zip-code?
Maybe part-time legislatures work for tiny (complexity-wise) states like Wyoming. I think Texas' "part-time" status is partially illusionary, as I mentioned, by dint of the fact that frequent and periodic "out of band" special sessions of the lege can be and are called by the Governor.
California is getting the government it's been sold. Pity, that. But hardly an argument for copying the Wyoming or Texas models.
Now I *might* be able to get behind Texas if they forwarded *that* as a form of sane goverment. =)
Okay, let's take a look at Wyoming for a second.
Population roughtly 1/73rd the size of California. GSP of roughly 17.1 billion, or just under one percent of California's GSP.
Of course, over 50% of the land in Wyoming is also owned and managed by the federal government, rather than the state.
I'd say that, by way of analogous comparison, if running the state of California is to be equated with brain surgery, running Wyoming is probably akin to, say, landscape maintenance.
Incidentally, the Republican "Governator", sold to Californians as the "non-pro" who could allegedly solve the problems, hasn't. As with most problems, blamestorming about whose watch they began on generally accomplishes nothing toward actually solving any of them.
I'm sorry, but I'm having a difficult time reconciling your state's level of complexity against the 9th largest economy in the world.
Texas also has only about 58% California's Gross State Product, 56% of its population. Texans opinions of their state aside, it's a DISTANT second in the US economy.
And even though the Texas 'Lege' is only mandated to meet for (no more than) 140 days ever 2 years, special sessions are called at the whim of the governor. Rick Perry is noted for calling as many as three consecutive "special sessions" in the course of a single "off" year.
The idea of "part-time" government probably sounds good to anyone who subscribes to a Grover Norquist / Milton Friedman "Chicago School" viewpoint that government is somehow inherently bad, and should be minimal or non-existent. To me, the idea of part-time government seems an awful lot like hiring a Part-Time brain surgeon. If you don't care that much about the result, you might save a few bucks that way. Personally, I'll go for a full time professional on things that actually matter to me.
I attempted to quote you above, but something keeps happening to the bold text. Let me try again:
Okay, one more try:
I give up.
I know this is a hopelessly late reply, but what the heck, I'll keep being argumentative.
Ownership of a television set or cable apparatus is not required for reception of publicly owned airwaves. At least, thus far, and in the US. I know that licensing is or was required for receivers in the UK and other parts Europe, but in the US, the broadcast frequencies are considered public property, and are administered by the FCC as a public trust.
If you have fillings in your teeth that are able to pick up the audio portion of a television broadcast, you're entitled to do so. At least, until the broadcast flag makes your mouth an illegal analog hole, or something of that nature. The equipment is irrelevant. The networks don't release their copyrights by broadcasting, any more than the GPL broaches copyright ownership of Linux. But when they broadcast, they do so without an implied contract on the part of the receiver that the program will be diligently watched, commercials and all, and only on equipment they approve of and during the broadcast time. They can't, according to fair use, have an expectation that they can dictate terms of use to the end user. This is like the author / copyright owner of a book stipulating that the book should only be read at night, or only while wearing their patented brand of reading glasses, and threatening to sue anyone who fails to comply with these restrictions. (In fact, not a bad analogy there to DRM. If they patent special glasses that expire one month after first use, maybe by going opaque, and then scramble the letters in a way that their glasses can re-assemble the text, you'd have a book form of DRM. And probably cause just as many headaches as music DRM causes.)
Again, if they can show that they experience a direct loss as a result of people being able to watch a torrent of their show, then the law would protect them. As it is, the person who gets the torrent had the right to watch it when it was broadcast, and nothing, yet, dictates that they lose that right after the show is over. Why do they not have the right to watch a torrent of that show?
As to your last point, that's an utter straw-man argument. Vista is a licensed product that users pay for. Television shows bear no contract or license with the viewer, and they are free. You're comparing Apples to T'ang dynasty chopstick rests.
I disagree.
I find no validity to the argument that a broadcaster has televised a show for free, but then somehow still expects that they're going to be able to retain the right to dictate when and how a person is able to watch.
Now, if someone was making commercial use and selling the intellectual property of the content provider, then I'd say there's a solid case that that person is committing theft of revenue. But downloading a torrent of an episode of Lost from bittorrent because you missed it and want to watch it while on the train ride to work, or whatnot, is not significantly different from recording it on your DVR for playback later in the day.
What this is about is getting people used to having their Fair Use rights to time-shift and place-shift denied, so we all slowly forget that we ever *could* watch programming on our own terms.
I don't see how a broadcaster can argue that their show, that they broadcasted FOR FREE one night previous, somehow gains monetary value because someone downloads it.
How is this lost revenue? Because of the redacted commercials? The sponsor's message didn't get to that viewer anyway if they missed the episode. Sponsors base their advertising on a speculative audience pool anyway, based on ratings from a sample, rather than actual viewing habits. Since the ratings are based on people who actually *did* watch it on television, the downloaders fall outside of the ratings pool. And if it weren't for VCRs and DVRs, most of those shows would be completely missed to begin with.
The ratings pools would still be entirely speculative even if you took time/place-shifting completely out of the equation. Remember what life was like before TiVo? Did you sit like a good little drone and soak in all that commercially goodness? Or did you, more likely, use it as a chance to go to the bathroom or get a snack? Personally, if I'm watching live TV on a non-DVR, I'll mute the damned commercials. Is that theft?
When they do finally get the broadcast flag fully imposed, clearly most shows will be blocked from DVR recording. If they didn't mind recording, they wouldn't put up such a stink about downloading. But I'll bet you there'll be other provisions to prevent you from muting the commercials too. After they've gotten us conditioned for a few years, I'm sure it'll be mandatory to watch the whole broadcast if you watch it at all. They'll probably find a way to apply the DMCA to say that muting the show, or walking away during the commercial, somehow constitutes circumventing their DRM.
I see the rig from Clockwork Orange in the near future, coming to a home near you. Strap in, or no Seinfeld re-runs for you!