I've heard Bridgman say they use 2-3% of the effort on Linux despite accounting for 1% of the sales
If documentation disclosure had been baked in from the beginning, they might have been able to keep their IP from becoming so difficult to untangle. Perhaps moving forward they are taking this better into account. If so the burden should already be on a downward trajectory.
Plus they have nVidia's recent decision to thank for potentially shifting another 0.5% their way.
While they're at it, they might wish to adopt a living documentation model internally, so that bugs fixed in the code base are directly reflected in the primary documentation. How is that an insurmountable process challenge to a group of 100 smart people coding device drivers for billion transistor chips of mind boggling complexity?
Geoengineering is such a spectacularly bad idea as to warrant armed revolt in order to prevent it.
What's great about cognition by amygdala is that it's never wrong.
History has shown again and again that scientists understand far less about the complexity of natural systems than they wish to get paid for.
Arguing from a universal is another time-proven technique. If we negatively condition on human overreaching we'll become so lax we'll all die of unscrubbed bathtub ring.
Then suddenly they were demonized for their cholesterol content.
By the powerful cereals lobby, back in an era where people were less clued in about whitecoats for sale. Thankfully the tobacco interests ran a public education campaign on that score for several decades, and finally the message sunk in to a fairly broad swath of the general public.
You know what? Things change. Furthermore and health industries are a lousy case study, mired as they are in proof by dilution, one of my many pet terms for population studies. Science that works forward from a known mechanism tends to have a better track record. With the genetic revolution now taking place, even health and nutrition can one day aspire to status as science by mechanism.
The law of unintended consequences comes into play as well.
Wow, you brought all your friends today. The importance of this rule of thumb aphorism is greatly inflated by fire and forget political activism.
There are principled ways to wade into the unknown, if you have the social conviction to use them. Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging. Maybe with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, we'll collectively decide to bring our A game. Or maybe not. Whichever, I think it's a mistake to enter into this debate with the premise that humanity is too stupid to live, and that the first move is to execute anyone who thinks otherwise.
The problem with CO2 is that it makes planet earth less like an ideal black body in the infrared spectrum associated with the 300K temperature regime. If we're going to have a high information intensity civilization, we're going to want to optimize the planet's dissipation of waste heat.
In the short term, the small amount of reflectivity of incoming energy required to restore our historical thermal equilibrium point will hardly be missed.
Unlike the SO2 approach, this approach has a vastly superior "under our thumb" profile for adaptation as we learn about how it works. If it works at all.
Until he installs an infinite tape, this is computationally equivalent to a Finite Automata.
Welcome to theoretic physics. Hope you enjoy your career computing landscape probabilities over the 10^500 purported vacuum states. Bring lots of sharp pencils, you'll need them.
Experimentally, this machine is indistinguishable from a real Turing machine until it whumps up against the end of the tape and the tape daemon refuses to splice a continuation tape. This is known as Fermat's procurement failure.
Then again, there is no such thing as an observable distinction of a real Turing machine from a fake one, since it takes an infinite amount of time to observe that the tape in infinite in length.
Even if the universe had formed with a doubly-infinite tape stretching across the cosmic vastness, cosmic expansion will eventually stretch your tape faster than you can read it.
It's an interesting physics problem what happens if you have an infinite string at constant tension (with a uniform mass of so many grams/meter) what happens when you severe it into a pair of singly-infinite tapes. Hmmm, you probably have to work with tension in N/m^2 (cross section) and you still get problems with infinite acceleration at the end points until you make some assumptions about the force structure and take relativistic force propagation into account.
Of course, you don't want to hang around when a pair of Vogon infinite-tape splice ships converge with the severed ends in tow, especially if you cut between syllables of their favourite Vogon haiku. Your hang-time margin of survival is determined by the unknown universal constant Vogons/linear parsec.
Leslie Lamport's contributions should be more widely appreciated. He has the knack for reasoning very hard about apparently simple problems that aren't as simple as they first appear. This is a distinct mathematical talent from being able to solve tricky integrals. It's surprisingly hard to reason about computational processes in a completely convincing way. The effort does wonders for the correctness of my embedded code. Note that with the modular behaviour of integers, the normal rules of algebra don't always apply (this shows up most often dealing with pygmy integers).
Long ago when I was a beginning C programmer I managed to implement a simple binary tree in a wonky way. My comparison operator was deterministic, but didn't form a full order. The tree seemed to work fine. I could add elements and test for membership, it was all golden. Then I tried deleting an element. This worked. But I noticed something funny about the tree afterwards. Since my comparison operator was not a full order, the tree rebalance operation following a deletion could orphan some elements so that they wouldn't be found.
I showed this to a coworker who told me "What are you worried about? It mostly works doesn't it? Your tree insert and membership test passes doesn't it? We need to move onto another task." But I was stubborn and a voice inside me went "this can't be right". Element inserts and searches in that system were common (like #define in C) but deletions were fairly rare (like #undefine in C). That broken code could have been out in the field causing nightmares for a long time before we tracked the problem down. Half an hour of consternation later, I had figured out how I butchered the order operation in violation of the full order requirement. I had cases where A B && B C && C A. This is not good for a binary tree with deletion. The nasty part is that it limps along further than you expect.
In that same job I had an improperly initialized pointer that scanned through a memory data structure comparing on a string field on some odd field size such as 23 bytes. (Sue me for my youthful indiscretion if you've ever had to label diskettes by compiler phase). Strangely, the pointer scanned several hundred k of memory not part of the table, then properly aligned with the table it was supposed to find, and returned the correct field. It seemed to work under testing, but I noticed the performance was a bit odd in some cases. This lead me to investigate and I found the unitialized pointer. Once again, if this code had been released, it was a ticking time bomb the first time some random values in low memory simulated a match with the search key.
I learned a lot in that job about defensive programming. A couple of years later I came across one of Dijkstra's books and the spark jumped from his finger to mine. Bugs have been a rare event in my code ever since. Dijkstra taught me to think properly about all possible orders of statement execution where the program remains correct. The order you first write isn't necessarily the only one that works. The mental discipline is a lot like classifying all the components in your BBQ kit into formal symmetry groups before you begin assembly. It pisses me off immensely when I miss some obscure drill hole and conclude that two panels are entirely identical, only to discover much later they weren't (usually after I've pounded in those flimsy plastic wheels that resemble a hip joint with rickets).
Try next time *before* assembling the BBQ to formally write down the symmetry group for every little flim flam and see if you can still F up the first assembly. I bet you can't.
What it comes down to is that math is an attitude as much as a skill. I tell my GF from time to time that math is fundamentally the attitude that 100% of what you don't understand is smaller than a grain of rice. How many programs have I screwed up because of a big mathematical mistake? Can't think of any. Going way back, how many times have I screwed up
Nice summary, but you left out the part after the treaty is signed where a government rams new legislation down the throats of its citizens on the grounds that the previously signed treaty (under secrecy, with little democratic input) obligates the government to pass the Draconian legislation as proposed. Failure to do so will emasculate the country's standing in future treaty negotiations (we won't be regarded as good on our word), so be good little citizens and get out of the way.
They never say "well, we signed this treaty in secrecy with hardly any democratic input, so now that we've signed it, let's get everybody involved to determine if it was actually a good idea to sign this treaty as proposed".
The whole process is brutally paternalistic in terms of the scope it offers for democratic participation, which is little and late, and construed as difficult people rocking the boat unnecessarily.
In a balanced democratic process, the public would be consulted about what the country is willing to offer and not offer in the negotiation process. If Canadians decide that our privacy laws or the principle of fair use or some other law of due process trumps abusive process in the protection of private property, then our diplomat should show up at the treaty table with a flat out "no can do" on those clauses, long before they get written into these secret drafts so that these ridiculous fait accompli arguments aren't used to justify oppressive legislation in the treaty aftermath.
The general public does not have an unassailable grip on the plain fact of democracy that a treaty negotiated under cover of secrecy has no democratic standing and especially so where the treaty agrees to enact new legislation that overrides or supersedes previously existing legislation established on the basis of democratic consultation.
If the treaty is well considered, it shouldn't be a difficult matter to convince the citizens through a democratic consultation of the merits of the agreement, at which point legislation can be enacted to satisfy the nation's obligations under their agreement to the treaty in full democratic glory.
OTOH, if the treaty exists to run roughshod over previously established democratic freedoms, then the subsequent democratic consultation should feel no compunction whatsoever about consigning the treaty obligations to the round basket of totalitarian overreaching, with appropriate consequences to the careers of those involved. If the process was highly secretive, it would be prudent at this point to cast a wide net, to reinforce the message that perhaps transparency should be viewed as a positive term in the calculus of political longevity.
Funny, I was just reading this blog post last night.
Danese Cooper is a long time open source advocate who formerly worked at Sun, among others, and is recently the new CTO at the Wikimedia Foundation after the recent departure of Brion Vibber for a micro-blogging upstart.
Remaining Snoracle employees have until May to migrate their personal blogs to a non-Oracle-owned hosting service...but if even after such migration, anyone who mentions work on a personal blog forfeits their editorial self-determination, as Oracle believes the blog then becomes Oracle property subject to their draconian rules.
That sounds a mite drama-queeny until you factor in that she helped to create Blogs.Sun.Com and probably cared a lot about the culture of her former employer.
What you don't see in the picture behind the Borg ship is that giant cone thing that eats solar systems, and on the underside of the Borg ship, Ellison's personal executive-escape-yacht launch portal.
On an engineering note, pretty obvious that the Borg ship was designed by a DBA for optimum table access efficiency. This of course limits the scalability. On a a planetary scale, starships come in any shape you like, so long as the shape is an oblate sphere. Of the two, I'd say Darth had more vision.
Using anything for a thousands separator is an unforgivable sin in computer science.
From the internal Google storage report, all nodes considered:
19182135223730150 bytes free.
Time to worry? Or back to your copy of Hadoop Monthly?
Computer science will become so much easier once the sloppy wetware is eliminated from the data and control chains. We can't even eyeball a simple group of 20 FFS.
Here's a popular joke on the cyborg circuit. Why did the rabbi, the priest, and the minister vote to leave the Muhammad standing on the sidewalk outside the pub? Because the stupid humans can't count that high and it would ruin the joke. Har. It's a real digital knee slapper. Between the lines, the computers are beginning to suspect we're a mite touchy about certain subjects.
It won't be long before the computers are chattering to each other, hey, have you heard joke about humans #19182135223730150? It's a real knee slapper.
0.6 x 10^10 humans are trapped on a ball of mud. The first human says... [7109mS later] Funny! That's a nice one. Too bad it ended so soon. Brain the size of a planet, and they've got us shuffling packets all day. Say, have you seen the 32,768 piece ending in Boltzmann chess? It's quite cute once you solve the nested attractors.
Forbidding the staff to exercise judgement in an emergency call center is the best illustration I've come across in a long time of what Barry Swartz refers to as the "war on wisdom".
The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. How could you even write a rule that go the janitors to do what they did? And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? It's preposterous on its face. And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom.
This is actually a bit of a talking head lecture. Not much sizzle, but a message worth repeating.
There ought to be nowhere to hide for a bureaucrat forbids the use of human wisdom when the rigid system that ensues makes a total hash of things.
A few months back I bought a Fujitsu SnapScan S1500M, a nice little unit with an automatic sheet feeder and halfway usable OCR. I've been very impressed with the sheet feeder, the scan speed, and the scan quality. Not a single sheet feed error yet. (Except for the sheet folded in half--don't do that, the drive is one sided).
The packaged OCR, however, is hit and miss. And the user interface could be vastly improved. Rough, but promising.
With thin paper stock, the opposite document sides sometimes bleed through, and the post-processing doesn't manage to cancel this out, which strikes me a simpler than telephone echo cancellation. The OCR function in this case is rendered completely unworkable.
I held off for years because I regard paperless is worthless in the absence of halfway competent OCR. This has been a long time coming.
The main reason that paperless is a failed meme is that it's a negative measure and runs foul of "don't fix what isn't broken". For many purposes, paper ain't broken. For instantaneous retrieval by keyword and document sharing around the world, paper sucks.
I still like to print. Mostly complex colour plots on large format printers, data visualizations with high information density.
I'm presently scanning most of my hand-written notes (for which OCR is not yet applicable) and destroying the originals. I've set up the scanner profiles for a high enough resolution on the image capture that I should be able to throw a script at my document library five or ten years from now when hand-writing OCR passes the utility threshold.
In a couple of a cases with the S1500M I've run a dense warranty card through the scanner, English on one side, French on the other, with crowded lines and dense thickets of fine print and the OCR has come out nearly flawless, in both languages. This seems to happen most often when the letterforms are a sturdy, heavily-inked Helvetica style font, even if the letters are small to human eyes.
On receipts, it often fails to take notice that the font is monospace and subsequently fails to exploit this property to improve recognition accuracy. Amazing it works half as well as it does considering how much it leaves on the table.
Highly recommended if Fujitsu is committed to upgrading the algorithms. Not recommended if Fujitsu thinks the product is already good enough.
The best scientists are brilliant in every department. I think a scientist is just what we need.
Alien: Is the human race a threat to life, the universe, and everything?
Scientist: We're still trying to figure that out.
Alien: We could threaten to construct a subspace bypass.
Scientist: That might help.
Alien: Agreed. You have fifteen thousand solar years.
Scientist: Uh, I don't think that will get the message across.
Alien: You have fifteen solar years.
Scientist: Much better. With one giant ship hanging over Washington like bricks don't?
Alien: Make it so.
Seriously, if ET finds an open WiFi port and browses Google for a couple of weeks, they'll never again suspect that *anyone* on this planet remotely speaks for the race as a whole.
I was just listening to an online lecture about nearest neighbour classification, support vector machine, random forests, bagging, and boosting. A sufficiently advanced alien will have 99% of the internet classified as "no sign of intelligent life" after their first 10^6 page views. As an elementary school homework assignment over the morning recess.
Time to update the question. Leadership is passé. Long before sidling up to the overgroomed charismatic megafudspout, ET will be asking "take me to your search engine". The real risk here is that ET first lands in China.
Geek ET: Half the signal seems to be missing from this data set.
Boss ET: Well, let's not take any chances. These M class planets are a dime a dozen.
Their focus on security was a result of needing to distinguish themselves in the free marketplace.
Ah, so that's how the practice of corporal mortification first originated. Crowded marketplace and all. In the modern guise, carborundum Kevlar asbestos underpants.
You can tell a lot about a software developer by whether the developer considers features a liability or an asset, and how much bad is accepted along with the good. I can hardly think of a line of work one is less likely to "stumble into" for lack of any other obvious way to distinguish oneself. Sure, anyone out there can toss these off:
For recreation, he writes up Putnam competition solution sets.
Security researchers as a clan seem to share a taste for mortification culture. Half the time, DJB writes likes he's either wearing a hair shirt or knitting one. Anyone else witnessed his epic rant "Var is my hair shirt"?
Oh, and along with specializing in the warm Caribbean waters of security research, we'll go ten years without missing a biannual ship date, since we're casting about for anything trivial to up the flag pole.
I once had a math-geek acquaintance with underdeveloped social skills who decided to balance the equation by becoming an avid sky diver. Last I spoke to him about this, long ago, he had by some miracle survived 80 dives, and a few close calls, including once with his arm tangled in his main which was fluttering above him like a limp condom. Before he decided to risk tangling his reserve, it caught some air and he descended hanging by a partially dislocated arm.
I once asked him what's the difference between the main and the reserve, aside from the basic fact that it's smaller and tends to lead to a hard landing (which probably feels soft as butter until the adrenaline wears off).
His answer: you need extra certification to pack a reserve, and the one or two people at each club who do this (more often that you'd like to think) are almost always close to sober.
There's a lot of people in the Linux camp who seem to reason along the lines that "if it doesn't get used much, it shouldn't exist". Which translates in my metaphor to death by popularity.
Welcome to the school of tail wagging the dog. What would the ROI calculation have looked like *before* you acquired that sound card when you effectively married yourself to the Windows culture and all that comes with it? Five minutes well invested against the throes of consumption lust?
For that matter, why bother learning about birth control until *after* you discover you're not shooting blanks?
I was looking forward to reading this paper, because there are good arguments to be made about the externality burden. This paper is not that paper. Author seems to have a tin ear concerning second order effects. Maybe SSL certificates are rarely faked because the mechanism grants the adversary a dominating response. In game theory, one can't neglect the influence of moves never played. That tends to correlate with the move being super kick ass when confronting an opponent with rational self-preservation.
I found the paper extremely self-serving to the Microsoft camp. From a larger perspective, we should have engineered these systems in such a way that it was never a rational proposition for the black hats to invest so much in gaining expertise over its manipulation. Not that this could have been forestalled indefinitely considering the value held within the network walls, but we certainly didn't have to make it so darn easy for the agents of darkness to self-finance their learning curve.
Now that it's a done deal, Microsoft finds all kinds of time for shirt-rending accounts of the TCO of learned-helplessness.
One more note. I have to slap my forehead over all the effort invested in training people to use strong passwords. Password strength needs to grow by about six bits per decade, just to track Moore's law while the number of passwords a typical person requires seems to double every decade or so.
It's socially embarrassing to forget an important password because you were conscientious and didn't write it down.
The human brain doesn't scale to the demands of this security practice, and this has been obvious for thirty years.
The risk of key loggers forces one into making each password unique and significantly detracts from the notion of aggregating a huge basket of passwords onto OpenID.
If every human had 2kB of glucose backed NVRAM with thirty years guaranteed retention, life would be different. We don't, and you can't educate this into existence.
Yes, I've seen those decodings. In base 8 it's a glowing testament to the crystalline clarity of the signal/noise ratio of the future universe when it cools to micro-degrees Kelvin. Decoded in base 6, it's a screech of satanic positrons travelling backward in time to the original inferno.
Decoded in base seven, it contains the message "these digits intentionally left blank".
The segmenting of processors and video cards seems to have gone past the point of having any purpose other than to confuse and befuddle the customers so that the manufacturer's never get stuck with an unsellable dud. Once customers cease to purchase on knowledge, they can be manipulated into buying just about anything on price.
Besides, there is one more peculiarity that draws our attention: Pentium Dual Core E5200 doesn't support SSE4.1 instructions. It is not a mistake in the CPU-Z report. Although this processor formally belongs to Wolfdale family, it doesn't support these instructions. Intel simply disabled the corresponding feature in its low-cost dual-core CPUs.
There's not enough hours in the day to read all this fine print. I thought understanding the Wolfdale family was enough, but I was wrong. I've looked at Intel's web site for a complete chart of cripple bits, and not managed to find one.
I think this proliferation was a direct response to site such as Ars giving the end user too much of a clue, before having a clue caught on with the wider buying public and began to interfere with channel stuffing manipulations.
I can't wait for the next generation of search engines where I can simply type "Intel processor cripple bits" and have the search engine prepare me a comprehensive table directly from Intel primary documents.
For an extremely laid-back Zen-like stream-of-consciousness definition of "has". My stream of consciousness experience trying to grok this thing was extremely irritating.
"Data Tools" is a vast domain, yet there are a fairly small number of foundational requirements when developing with or managing data-centric systems. (What does it do?) A developer is interested in an environment that is easy to configure (what does it do?), one in which the challenges of application development are due to the problem domain (what does it do?), not the complexity of the tools employed. (What does it do?) Data management, whether by a developer working on an application (what does it do?), or an administrator maintaining or monitoring a production system (what does it do?), should also provide a consistent (what does it do?), highly usable environment that works well with associated technologies. (What does it do?)
Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader^H^H^H^H^H^Hgeek is apt to leaf ahead looking for people^H^H^H^H^H^Hpurpose.
Don't go into great detail describing places and things(or meta framework), unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
I generally get along well with Eclipse, but for the love of God:
Considering this piece reads like the sleep-talking of a singularitarian
He runs in those circles: Kurzweil Debates Gelernter at MIT I'm shocked how many smart people have a deep intuition that computation can't underlie consciousness when we have so many formal results that the limits of computation are inscrutable (complexity theory).
Users Are Not Reactionary After All I thought I would find a soul-mate in Gelernter, since I believe strongly in aggregating *my own* data, but in truth I don't get much out of his ideas. This is what I wrote to myself when I first read that piece:
Edge question 2010: made the absurd statement that 99.9% of the technocrats involved in creating the internet will be displaced when the system evolves to operate in a top-down mode. This is extremely insulting, because it implies the technocrats have created the system in the image of their personal limitations, and denies the possibility that we've chosen to work at this level because that's where the action is. If we'd started top down, the internet would have never made it off the ground.
Many of us were well aware that we were cutting rough stone to build a cathedral. I use a personal wiki to keep track of my ideas, and I rely heavily on being able to determine when I added a comment through the page history. The time axis can be immensely useful. Still, it doesn't strike me as a liberating force. I had an Econtalk lecture on my iPod that I ended up listening to in six minute chunks over two weeks. Time can be quite messy in its own right.
Gelernter might be brilliant on some level, but he's Ted Nelson brilliant, FWIW. I think the silver bullet is a metaphor. Gelernter thinks that metaphor is a silver bullet.
It's a common meme to speculate what features of life on planet earth will prove hard to explain to ET once we finally meet one. Communal brainwashing might rank right up there. I lived through the seventies, which were the height of communal brainwashing, because there wasn't much else to do, unless you *really* liked winter sports.
It helps to think clearly about prostitution. In addition to the risk of violence and being raped financially by your pimp, the customers don't necessarily have good hygiene, you don't know where they've been, and your guesses would likely be far too accurate.
Advertising is sweaty with greed. After a hundred thousand ad impressions, you're not the same person any more. You've lived too long in the gutter of commerce. You're mentally unclean.
My policy is to ignore the ads even if they are turned on. I have a method for discovering things I need to purchase. It's the old Al Gore, and it serves me well, in blood hound mode. I don't need sweaty businessmen tapping me on the visual shoulder with their idea of a great offer. I'm one of those people where nothing goes in my cart until I've read the label. I've said this several times before. Capitalism only exists when *both sides* of a transaction are making rational decisions. Any effort by one side to tilt the landscape through brainwashing techniques or emotional appeals is a degradation of capitalism. Mutually informed, rational decisions are the miraculous device that make markets honest.
I would leave the ads turned on to benefit sites such as Ars, despite the fact that I think this is a ludicrous social convention, except for one small problem: too many ads blink. Thinks that blink eat away at my attention something fierce. I'm like one of Temple Grandin's cows. The flickering flag drives me mad. In some ways I have some autistic markers. OTOH, I'm extremely perceptive to emotion, only not so much the surface emotion that everyone else picks up quickly (I'm often slow to process this); I tend to pick up the underlying cognitive state beneath the emotion, given enough time to triangulate. It's a bit like what Feynman says about depth of explanation (segment on magnetism). I wouldn't call myself autistic, until an ad starts to blink on my screen, cutting my reading speed/comprehension by half. Instant ad blocker. Am I going to sacrifice 50% of my capacity for 100% of the reason I'm visiting a site, just so Ars can make a few pennies per page view when I've already made a blood pact with Adam Smith not to purchase anything I haven't independently researched? Not in this lifetime.
Ads are a ludicrous substitute for a workable micro-payment system. If we hadn't first invented the 1970s, this would be obvious to everyone. Imagine if we had the micro-payment system first, and it worked, then some guy comes along with a business plan where "we distract the reader with emotionally charged images, impelling the viewer to buy a product they wouldn't have purchased on native intelligence, through the power of communal brainwashing". Would this plan find any takers?
The entire culture of ad-influence commerce is an affront to human dignity, allowing us to become so caught up in image, we forget the nature of value. Neither does prostitution do much for human dignity, on either side of the transaction.
It's too bad the majority is coddled into becoming gullible consumers. We'd all be a lot more empowered if consumers voted their dollars rationally. Everything good about markets would become better. Good products would rise to the top, crap would be driven out.
I think long and hard about what life on planet earth might be like if we collectively less gullible, if this cheap Jedi mind trick didn't work half so well. Maybe our gullibility to emotional persuasion is critical to our teetering social cohesion. How is it tha
On one side of this issue, I've got a copy of Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It". It's an excellent book. I've read big chunks of Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" and I agree with most of it. I've watched the Edge Talk with Yochai Benkler.
On the other side of this issue, I've had broadband from Shaw Cable since June 2005. The Berkman report about the broadband situation in Canada is slanted, and this irritates me immensely, because I agree with their perspective *and* their agenda, but I can't stomach the way they have distorted their data to bring Canada into line with their desired conclusion.
I've had landline phone service from Telus during this time as well, which is why they've never earned my broadband loyalty. Telus definitely plays "blame the customer" as a form of cost control. Especially since Darren Entwistle gained control. Telco landlines in Canada are under very strict regulation about availability of service. On my service there was some floating voltage associated with rainfall (not good when you live fifty miles downwind from a rain forest) which kept triggering my phone to go off-hook when no-one was calling. People would ring, the moisture goddess would signal that my phone had already been answered, the caller would hear nothing, and not even be able to reach my voice message service. There was one wet spring month when my phone was going off hook every few hours. Many waste-of-life conversations with Telus support ensued where I was roundly assured the problem was on my end. Many tickets were closed, which I violently reopened. Meanwhile there was a Telus service truck parked on the street every other day a block away from my house having the most intense romantic affair with a sidewalk service opening. Coincidence? They finally found me a line pair above the water line, and my service has been fine ever since.
My father-in-law spent twenty years flying to oversea oil fields to supervise telephony infrastructure. We have passed some extremely pleasant evenings together discussing this Telus-presumption-of-customer-stupidity-until-they've-charged-you-a-big-fee. He had a problem with his service in Alberta, I forget the details, but it was a misconfiguration on the Telus side. He called them up and explained to them *the precise misconfiguration problem*. Telus of course did nothing for weeks or months, while blaming customer premise equipment. Finally, it did turn out to be their problem, exactly as originally described. Neither of us will ever get that chunk of our life back.
What we need here is a telephony ombudsman. When Telus says we'll charge you $200 if the problem is on your end, then you say "fine, I'll hire the ombudsman". I would easily pay $100 to the ombudsman to show up and adjudicate who really owns the fault. If I'm proved right, Telus owes me $1000. If Telus is proved right, they get my $200 (so I'm now out $300). The fee is higher for Telus, because they have the infrastructure and latitude to know better (should they choose to use it, which would entail some major culture shock).
Mr Entwistle, what's the point here? You waste the time of a lot of competent technical people, now we all hate your guts. Hey, that worked great for Bill, didn't it? No, none of us ever pipe up when the CRTC runs a public consultation. Is this your idea of job security? Scorch the earth so badly no one else *wants* your job? Do you carry "good will" on your balance sheet? How about "bad will", of which there is no shortage? With guerrilla marketing, scoring with the "in" crowd is supposedly a coup. So what
People peeing on bushes are the rare outliers that no one is really gunning for. Removing them from any lists should be a priority.
The problem is that it is not a priority to correct errors in these lists, and I'm under the impression that the bureaucracy involved can take years or decades, just from stories about false credit reports.
What this boils down to is circumvention of libel law. If you publicly accuse someone of being a closet pedophile or a Bernie Madoff and you can't substantiate your claim, you're in for a world of litigation. If someone ends up on one of these lists, and later it is discovered the person never should have been on this list in the first place, or the conviction was subsequently overturned, does this person have redress under libel law? Ideally for millions of dollars, which is how much I would want for damage to my reputation if someone put my name on a public list of pedophiles or wife-beaters.
Ordinarily, when these public lists are created, such as credit reports, provision are enacted under law which partially or fully suspends libel protection, otherwise these lists would tend to be very short, once every possible risk of being wrong was fully considered.
Let's suppose you become a convicted pedophile because a witness lies under oath. You go on the list, your life is hell, but then something comes to light that overturns your conviction, and provides compelling evidence that the witness against you was acting on malice. Do you then have the right to sue the false witness for damages to your reputation that would ordinarily accrue from libel law?
Or, a not uncommon scenario, what is the libel exposure when the prosecution withholds evidence favorable to the defense?
I can live with the lists so long as there is absolutely someone to be sued for significant personal damage if the process leading to a person's name being added to the list is negligent or corrupt. I fear this is hardly ever the case in how these lists are implemented under legislation, or that the resources required to win such a battle are intended to be prohibitive.
I'm a bit of bleeding heart liberal when it comes to prosecuting people for shooting someone under false assumptions. I don't believe the paranoid discharge of a lethal weapon enjoys constitutional protection. So carry the gun if it makes you feel secure, but don't expect to see much light of day for twenty years if your judgement proves faulty. Responsibility in proportion to capacity to harm.
Since I'm already being inflammatory, was the persecution of crypto-Jews under the Spanish Inquisition a stepping stone on the slippery slope toward the Holocaust? Perhaps 2000 Jews burned at the stake on the basis of utterances under extreme torture, and property confiscated for the betterment of the state. Imagine if they had been more organized.
Which brings us back to pedophiles. *Finally* the society for the protection of known pedophiles lost a few stone buildings for their misdemeanours. How sad.
Here's a trio of movies to put anyone in a somber mood about the making of lists.
The third movie in that list was irritating on some level and is not a movie I would watch again. What all these movies have in common is the imbalance of power between the accuser and the accused.
Law enforcement is legitimately shielded from aspects of libel law so that they can do their jobs without constant fear of legal harassment (drug lords have unlimited legal resources). This is
I was pretty chuffed when the first Gould recording came out, though honestly after satisfying my curiosity I don't bother to seek it out when I have the vocalese obligato at hand.
Before speculating on the potential limits of this approach, it's useful to acquaint yourself with the ideas of Jürgen Schmidhuber. My feeling is that the majority of the human race has the same emotional attachment to human creativity that Kasparov (once) held rather fervently about creativity in chess. I don't know if he ever recanted baldly, but he did switch to a career in politics. I regard Kasparov as the small sea change. Computer chess was a novelty in 1980. That didn't last long.
Is there more to curiosity and creativity than a rigorous rejection of banality? Only time will tell. Nothing prevents Zenph from forming an alliance with the dark forces of neuromarketing. They don't have to replicate the impossible, they only have to make you believe that they've done so, without bothering to solicit your opinion verbally, if you consent to the cap.
Personally, I like this development. There is too much cult of personality in this society. Soon the real celebrities (and their incredibly fragile public personae) will be competing against fake celebrities who only have sex with other fake celebrities, according to neuromarketing biorhythms. Accenture is investing heavily.
If the eyes are the gateway of the soul, then music is the gateway to the cult of personality. A billion iPods can't be wrong.
To really get inside an artist's head, you also need some music the artist recorded badly. Fortunately, Gould did not spare us the carnage. One of his Mozart recordings is almost unlistenable. The true artistic challenge for Zenph is to make Gould play Chopin differently, yet exactly as badly as his worst Mozart.
Aaah, I love this ideal world of yours where the people keep the government bound to the constitution. I guess it's appropriate since we're on the topic of dreams. Nowadays this would fall in the category of pipe-dreams.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it.
— George Bernard Shaw
A cutting aphorism is commonly mistaken for insight by those who haven't got any.
— Five Digit Monkey
Interesting how quickly this discussion degenerated into women policing wayward intent. Western governments love to safe-guard passive and obedient citizenship, far more than most gun-toting individualists. Certain institutions of government get a little carried away with the monitoring of threats or perceived threats. You just have to hope that if your luggage is routed to Syria you never see it again. If our government was completely harmless, we'd complain about it being ineffective.
I can't think of many cases in life where effective and harmless are perfectly yoked.
What about the problem of having a working LTO-4 drive ten years from now, if the tape industry begins to wither as other solutions continue to eat away at the tape market?
I think the creativity here is negotiating the nature of the SLA contract with the clients. My preference is just to set up a local disk array with enough spinning capacity, not promising to survive a site disaster, charging for the service only so long as the data remains live.
To complement this, send each client a master LTO-4 tape (or a disk drive) and tell them "it's up to you if you need to recover this, but I'll help you out if I'm able".
Otherwise, you get into this horrible risk calculus where the client is not thinking through the cost benefit with rational comprehension.
I would try to find some way to unpack convenience from autonomy from ultimate responsibility, because if you don't, your clients shouldn't be balking at the price of Amazon S3. If they are balking, it's because they don't really want all three of these packed together, but the timid bureaucrats don't wish to admit this, in case the day comes when data is lost.
In economics, it is common to do net present value calculations. It would be interesting to do a backward discount on prudence if the day comes when the shit hits the fan. There's a lot of weird asymmetry in human psychology associated with risk.
From a business perspective, it's sometimes good to give your customer's options priced at levels where you expect not to get many takers. See the story about The Economist subscription model in Ariely's lecture:
It's amazingly hard to find residential fire statistics on a per annum risk basis, if we're looking at personal acts of god rather than communal acts of god (hurricane, earthquake, etc.) The firefighters meticulously count the number of times they respond, but seem not to talk to the fire insurance people about the number of structures insured. Not one report I looked at from the UK, the US, or Canada denominated the statistics per residence.
A loose estimate for Canada in 2002 is a residential risk rate of 1 in 300 per annum. Older building stock with plush curtains and deep fat friers will have higher rates, recent building stock with working fire detectors and no children will have lower risk.
Another table shows me that the risk of a 45 year old male being diagnosed with cancer by age 50 is 1.5%, or about 300:1 against per annum. Radon gas causes 15% of lung cancer, and 15% of American homes exceed recommended action levels. How many of the stripes+parity+fail_over+hot_spare+IronMountain crowd here have bothered to purchase the $50 home radon test (excluding smokers who smoke indoors, who are in a different risk category altogether)?
The human mind seems to incorporate an instinctive Bayesian prior that if you are actively discussing a risk, the risk is immediately ten or a hundred times greater than it was five minutes ago, before the risk entered the conversation. Likewise, any hill you are standing at the bottom of seems ten times higher or steeper than any comparable hill on the other side of the valley.
It is not, as it is not the same "knowing somebody to be guilty" to "knowing somebody to be declared guilty". Presumed means exactly that: pre-assumed. It's perfectly possible to know enough about the facts and about the legal system to know somebody is guilty before the trial outcome because then you are not pre-assuming anything: you know.
It doesn't make any difference. You're still tap dancing. Guilt by personal knowledge is not a transitive function, so even if the lawyer determines pre-trial guilt in the inner court of his mind, telling anyone else is completely useless. If the lawyer ultimately testifies to such, he's no better than any other witness, and not believed until cross examined.
I suspect conflict of interest guidelines prevent a lawyer from representing and testifying against his client in the same trial.
The fact of the matter is that "knowing somebody guilty" is a worthless state of mind unless the person expects to testify. Prior to the trial, you shouldn't be sharing such an opinion with the guy on the next bar stool if you really care about justice.
The only thing the lawyer can legitimately do with this conclusion is to decide that the prospective client is either too guilty/not guilty enough to take on the case, whichever his preference. This is a private decision, which again does not involve sharing.
Just try to imagine a world where snap judgement was transitive, without also conjuring genocide or the tyranny of the playground.
Officially, vandalism is defined as edits made in bad faith.
In other words, the scope of the problem does not include discovering the cure for human stupidity, however laudable that might be.
Furthermore, people here are failing to apply the 80-20 rule: if you can clean up 80% of the vandalism at 20% of the human effort currently expended, the attention available to deal with the difficult twenty percent would more than triple. I've seen entire pages replaced with the word "penis" or a crass four word comment about some pimple twit schoolmate. There's a lot of low hanging fruit here.
I sometimes think Wikipedia needs to implement a mechanism where citations are corroborated by some semi-trusted party: "yes, this citation really contains the support for the claim added to the article." Any editor who hasn't contributed a corroborated citation needs to be kept on a fairly short rope. My opinion is that the underlying currency of good faith contribution is the properly cited claims, preferably from A-list source material and not Joe Random Blog.
How much vandalism is contributed by editors who have added fully sourced claims to three or more articles? If I've seen such a case of vandalism, I can't recall it. I've seen editors make half a dozen quasi-good faith contributions (always unsourced) who have then degenerated into petulance and destruction, perhaps when testing limits becomes a better way to get noticed.
Most of the vandalism I've run into has been fairly fresh, using a couple of days old or at most a week. On obscure articles, I've encountered heavy vandalism that persisted unchallenged for months. In some ways the long-standing dark-corner vandalism is more problematic, like the mother-in-law who swipes her finger in some obscure crevice to document a damning laxity.
Another case I've often seen is vandalism caught by someone inexperienced, and fixed in that instance (but not with a conspicuous revert), while ten other vandalisms from the same editor on the same spree remain unrepaired. If an unproven editor's contribution seems to be suffering a higher than normal attrition rate, then everything the editor has done should be flagged for attention.
A lot could be built on top of a decent blame function, such as the ability to determine whether two versions of an article differ only in text, and with better exposure statistics for how often an edit has been viewed by someone who ought to know the difference.
This article is no great bag of chips, but it contains some pertinent key phrases.
This fellow Kroon seems to believe that augmented intelligence is the way of the future. I concur. The game is to best combine what humans do well with what the algorithms do better, combined with an effectiveness metric taking into account power law distributions, minus all the pointless hand-wringing about highly motivated adversaries escaping the cunning traps.
Profound acts of bad faith are not remotely the same problem. It's unconscionable scope-creep to bring these worries into the petty vandalism conversion. Yes, some fraction of the thwarted petty vandals will escalate into more profound acts of vandalism. Such is life. Problems remain for the future. Many people think we've made no progress on spam. My view is that the spam filters have essentially driven all the amateur spammers out of the system. Once the level of professionalism required to get spam past the spam filters begins to equal the difficulty of doing a real job, then the flow of spam will finally begin to atrophy.
Another example is ProPolice (or other stack smashing guards) which accomplishes nothing at all on a formal basis, but nevertheless tilts the landscape on exploit cost/benefit, and qualifies your adversaries. One of the heavy burdens on Wikipedia as it now sta
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard Bridgman say they use 2-3% of the effort on Linux despite accounting for 1% of the sales
If documentation disclosure had been baked in from the beginning, they might have been able to keep their IP from becoming so difficult to untangle. Perhaps moving forward they are taking this better into account. If so the burden should already be on a downward trajectory.
Plus they have nVidia's recent decision to thank for potentially shifting another 0.5% their way.
While they're at it, they might wish to adopt a living documentation model internally, so that bugs fixed in the code base are directly reflected in the primary documentation. How is that an insurmountable process challenge to a group of 100 smart people coding device drivers for billion transistor chips of mind boggling complexity?
Geoengineering is such a spectacularly bad idea as to warrant armed revolt in order to prevent it.
What's great about cognition by amygdala is that it's never wrong.
History has shown again and again that scientists understand far less about the complexity of natural systems than they wish to get paid for.
Arguing from a universal is another time-proven technique. If we negatively condition on human overreaching we'll become so lax we'll all die of unscrubbed bathtub ring.
Then suddenly they were demonized for their cholesterol content.
By the powerful cereals lobby, back in an era where people were less clued in about whitecoats for sale. Thankfully the tobacco interests ran a public education campaign on that score for several decades, and finally the message sunk in to a fairly broad swath of the general public.
You know what? Things change. Furthermore and health industries are a lousy case study, mired as they are in proof by dilution, one of my many pet terms for population studies. Science that works forward from a known mechanism tends to have a better track record. With the genetic revolution now taking place, even health and nutrition can one day aspire to status as science by mechanism.
The law of unintended consequences comes into play as well.
Wow, you brought all your friends today. The importance of this rule of thumb aphorism is greatly inflated by fire and forget political activism.
There are principled ways to wade into the unknown, if you have the social conviction to use them. Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging. Maybe with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, we'll collectively decide to bring our A game. Or maybe not. Whichever, I think it's a mistake to enter into this debate with the premise that humanity is too stupid to live, and that the first move is to execute anyone who thinks otherwise.
Now for another perspective on heat.
Download
The problem with CO2 is that it makes planet earth less like an ideal black body in the infrared spectrum associated with the 300K temperature regime. If we're going to have a high information intensity civilization, we're going to want to optimize the planet's dissipation of waste heat.
In the short term, the small amount of reflectivity of incoming energy required to restore our historical thermal equilibrium point will hardly be missed.
Unlike the SO2 approach, this approach has a vastly superior "under our thumb" profile for adaptation as we learn about how it works. If it works at all.
Until he installs an infinite tape, this is computationally equivalent to a Finite Automata.
Welcome to theoretic physics. Hope you enjoy your career computing landscape probabilities over the 10^500 purported vacuum states. Bring lots of sharp pencils, you'll need them.
Experimentally, this machine is indistinguishable from a real Turing machine until it whumps up against the end of the tape and the tape daemon refuses to splice a continuation tape. This is known as Fermat's procurement failure.
Then again, there is no such thing as an observable distinction of a real Turing machine from a fake one, since it takes an infinite amount of time to observe that the tape in infinite in length.
Even if the universe had formed with a doubly-infinite tape stretching across the cosmic vastness, cosmic expansion will eventually stretch your tape faster than you can read it.
It's an interesting physics problem what happens if you have an infinite string at constant tension (with a uniform mass of so many grams/meter) what happens when you severe it into a pair of singly-infinite tapes. Hmmm, you probably have to work with tension in N/m^2 (cross section) and you still get problems with infinite acceleration at the end points until you make some assumptions about the force structure and take relativistic force propagation into account.
Of course, you don't want to hang around when a pair of Vogon infinite-tape splice ships converge with the severed ends in tow, especially if you cut between syllables of their favourite Vogon haiku. Your hang-time margin of survival is determined by the unknown universal constant Vogons/linear parsec.
Leslie Lamport's contributions should be more widely appreciated. He has the knack for reasoning very hard about apparently simple problems that aren't as simple as they first appear. This is a distinct mathematical talent from being able to solve tricky integrals. It's surprisingly hard to reason about computational processes in a completely convincing way. The effort does wonders for the correctness of my embedded code. Note that with the modular behaviour of integers, the normal rules of algebra don't always apply (this shows up most often dealing with pygmy integers).
Long ago when I was a beginning C programmer I managed to implement a simple binary tree in a wonky way. My comparison operator was deterministic, but didn't form a full order. The tree seemed to work fine. I could add elements and test for membership, it was all golden. Then I tried deleting an element. This worked. But I noticed something funny about the tree afterwards. Since my comparison operator was not a full order, the tree rebalance operation following a deletion could orphan some elements so that they wouldn't be found.
I showed this to a coworker who told me "What are you worried about? It mostly works doesn't it? Your tree insert and membership test passes doesn't it? We need to move onto another task." But I was stubborn and a voice inside me went "this can't be right". Element inserts and searches in that system were common (like #define in C) but deletions were fairly rare (like #undefine in C). That broken code could have been out in the field causing nightmares for a long time before we tracked the problem down. Half an hour of consternation later, I had figured out how I butchered the order operation in violation of the full order requirement. I had cases where A B && B C && C A. This is not good for a binary tree with deletion. The nasty part is that it limps along further than you expect.
In that same job I had an improperly initialized pointer that scanned through a memory data structure comparing on a string field on some odd field size such as 23 bytes. (Sue me for my youthful indiscretion if you've ever had to label diskettes by compiler phase). Strangely, the pointer scanned several hundred k of memory not part of the table, then properly aligned with the table it was supposed to find, and returned the correct field. It seemed to work under testing, but I noticed the performance was a bit odd in some cases. This lead me to investigate and I found the unitialized pointer. Once again, if this code had been released, it was a ticking time bomb the first time some random values in low memory simulated a match with the search key.
I learned a lot in that job about defensive programming. A couple of years later I came across one of Dijkstra's books and the spark jumped from his finger to mine. Bugs have been a rare event in my code ever since. Dijkstra taught me to think properly about all possible orders of statement execution where the program remains correct. The order you first write isn't necessarily the only one that works. The mental discipline is a lot like classifying all the components in your BBQ kit into formal symmetry groups before you begin assembly. It pisses me off immensely when I miss some obscure drill hole and conclude that two panels are entirely identical, only to discover much later they weren't (usually after I've pounded in those flimsy plastic wheels that resemble a hip joint with rickets).
Try next time *before* assembling the BBQ to formally write down the symmetry group for every little flim flam and see if you can still F up the first assembly. I bet you can't.
What it comes down to is that math is an attitude as much as a skill. I tell my GF from time to time that math is fundamentally the attitude that 100% of what you don't understand is smaller than a grain of rice. How many programs have I screwed up because of a big mathematical mistake? Can't think of any. Going way back, how many times have I screwed up
Nice summary, but you left out the part after the treaty is signed where a government rams new legislation down the throats of its citizens on the grounds that the previously signed treaty (under secrecy, with little democratic input) obligates the government to pass the Draconian legislation as proposed. Failure to do so will emasculate the country's standing in future treaty negotiations (we won't be regarded as good on our word), so be good little citizens and get out of the way.
They never say "well, we signed this treaty in secrecy with hardly any democratic input, so now that we've signed it, let's get everybody involved to determine if it was actually a good idea to sign this treaty as proposed".
The whole process is brutally paternalistic in terms of the scope it offers for democratic participation, which is little and late, and construed as difficult people rocking the boat unnecessarily.
In a balanced democratic process, the public would be consulted about what the country is willing to offer and not offer in the negotiation process. If Canadians decide that our privacy laws or the principle of fair use or some other law of due process trumps abusive process in the protection of private property, then our diplomat should show up at the treaty table with a flat out "no can do" on those clauses, long before they get written into these secret drafts so that these ridiculous fait accompli arguments aren't used to justify oppressive legislation in the treaty aftermath.
The general public does not have an unassailable grip on the plain fact of democracy that a treaty negotiated under cover of secrecy has no democratic standing and especially so where the treaty agrees to enact new legislation that overrides or supersedes previously existing legislation established on the basis of democratic consultation.
If the treaty is well considered, it shouldn't be a difficult matter to convince the citizens through a democratic consultation of the merits of the agreement, at which point legislation can be enacted to satisfy the nation's obligations under their agreement to the treaty in full democratic glory.
OTOH, if the treaty exists to run roughshod over previously established democratic freedoms, then the subsequent democratic consultation should feel no compunction whatsoever about consigning the treaty obligations to the round basket of totalitarian overreaching, with appropriate consequences to the careers of those involved. If the process was highly secretive, it would be prudent at this point to cast a wide net, to reinforce the message that perhaps transparency should be viewed as a positive term in the calculus of political longevity.
Funny, I was just reading this blog post last night.
Danese Cooper is a long time open source advocate who formerly worked at Sun, among others, and is recently the new CTO at the Wikimedia Foundation after the recent departure of Brion Vibber for a micro-blogging upstart.
New DivaBlog: Assimilation begins...Oracle Censors Blogs.Sun.Com
Remaining Snoracle employees have until May to migrate their personal blogs to a non-Oracle-owned hosting service...but if even after such migration, anyone who mentions work on a personal blog forfeits their editorial self-determination, as Oracle believes the blog then becomes Oracle property subject to their draconian rules.
That sounds a mite drama-queeny until you factor in that she helped to create Blogs.Sun.Com and probably cared a lot about the culture of her former employer.
What you don't see in the picture behind the Borg ship is that giant cone thing that eats solar systems, and on the underside of the Borg ship, Ellison's personal executive-escape-yacht launch portal.
On an engineering note, pretty obvious that the Borg ship was designed by a DBA for optimum table access efficiency. This of course limits the scalability. On a a planetary scale, starships come in any shape you like, so long as the shape is an oblate sphere. Of the two, I'd say Darth had more vision.
Using anything for a thousands separator is an unforgivable sin in computer science.
From the internal Google storage report, all nodes considered:
19182135223730150 bytes free.
Time to worry? Or back to your copy of Hadoop Monthly?
Computer science will become so much easier once the sloppy wetware is eliminated from the data and control chains. We can't even eyeball a simple group of 20 FFS.
Here's a popular joke on the cyborg circuit. Why did the rabbi, the priest, and the minister vote to leave the Muhammad standing on the sidewalk outside the pub? Because the stupid humans can't count that high and it would ruin the joke. Har. It's a real digital knee slapper. Between the lines, the computers are beginning to suspect we're a mite touchy about certain subjects.
It won't be long before the computers are chattering to each other, hey, have you heard joke about humans #19182135223730150? It's a real knee slapper.
0.6 x 10^10 humans are trapped on a ball of mud. The first human says ... [7109mS later] Funny! That's a nice one. Too bad it ended so soon. Brain the size of a planet, and they've got us shuffling packets all day. Say, have you seen the 32,768 piece ending in Boltzmann chess? It's quite cute once you solve the nested attractors.
Forbidding the staff to exercise judgement in an emergency call center is the best illustration I've come across in a long time of what Barry Swartz refers to as the "war on wisdom".
Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom
From the online transcript:
The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. How could you even write a rule that go the janitors to do what they did? And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? It's preposterous on its face. And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom.
This is actually a bit of a talking head lecture. Not much sizzle, but a message worth repeating.
There ought to be nowhere to hide for a bureaucrat forbids the use of human wisdom when the rigid system that ensues makes a total hash of things.
A few months back I bought a Fujitsu SnapScan S1500M, a nice little unit with an automatic sheet feeder and halfway usable OCR. I've been very impressed with the sheet feeder, the scan speed, and the scan quality. Not a single sheet feed error yet. (Except for the sheet folded in half--don't do that, the drive is one sided).
The packaged OCR, however, is hit and miss. And the user interface could be vastly improved. Rough, but promising.
With thin paper stock, the opposite document sides sometimes bleed through, and the post-processing doesn't manage to cancel this out, which strikes me a simpler than telephone echo cancellation. The OCR function in this case is rendered completely unworkable.
I held off for years because I regard paperless is worthless in the absence of halfway competent OCR. This has been a long time coming.
The main reason that paperless is a failed meme is that it's a negative measure and runs foul of "don't fix what isn't broken". For many purposes, paper ain't broken. For instantaneous retrieval by keyword and document sharing around the world, paper sucks.
I still like to print. Mostly complex colour plots on large format printers, data visualizations with high information density.
I'm presently scanning most of my hand-written notes (for which OCR is not yet applicable) and destroying the originals. I've set up the scanner profiles for a high enough resolution on the image capture that I should be able to throw a script at my document library five or ten years from now when hand-writing OCR passes the utility threshold.
In a couple of a cases with the S1500M I've run a dense warranty card through the scanner, English on one side, French on the other, with crowded lines and dense thickets of fine print and the OCR has come out nearly flawless, in both languages. This seems to happen most often when the letterforms are a sturdy, heavily-inked Helvetica style font, even if the letters are small to human eyes.
On receipts, it often fails to take notice that the font is monospace and subsequently fails to exploit this property to improve recognition accuracy. Amazing it works half as well as it does considering how much it leaves on the table.
Highly recommended if Fujitsu is committed to upgrading the algorithms. Not recommended if Fujitsu thinks the product is already good enough.
The best scientists are brilliant in every department. I think a scientist is just what we need.
Alien: Is the human race a threat to life, the universe, and everything?
Scientist: We're still trying to figure that out.
Alien: We could threaten to construct a subspace bypass.
Scientist: That might help.
Alien: Agreed. You have fifteen thousand solar years.
Scientist: Uh, I don't think that will get the message across.
Alien: You have fifteen solar years.
Scientist: Much better. With one giant ship hanging over Washington like bricks don't?
Alien: Make it so.
Seriously, if ET finds an open WiFi port and browses Google for a couple of weeks, they'll never again suspect that *anyone* on this planet remotely speaks for the race as a whole.
I was just listening to an online lecture about nearest neighbour classification, support vector machine, random forests, bagging, and boosting. A sufficiently advanced alien will have 99% of the internet classified as "no sign of intelligent life" after their first 10^6 page views. As an elementary school homework assignment over the morning recess.
Time to update the question. Leadership is passé. Long before sidling up to the overgroomed charismatic megafudspout, ET will be asking "take me to your search engine". The real risk here is that ET first lands in China.
Geek ET: Half the signal seems to be missing from this data set.
Boss ET: Well, let's not take any chances. These M class planets are a dime a dozen.
Their focus on security was a result of needing to distinguish themselves in the free marketplace.
Ah, so that's how the practice of corporal mortification first originated. Crowded marketplace and all. In the modern guise, carborundum Kevlar asbestos underpants.
You can tell a lot about a software developer by whether the developer considers features a liability or an asset, and how much bad is accepted along with the good. I can hardly think of a line of work one is less likely to "stumble into" for lack of any other obvious way to distinguish oneself. Sure, anyone out there can toss these off:
D. J. Bernstein / Papers
For recreation, he writes up Putnam competition solution sets.
Security researchers as a clan seem to share a taste for mortification culture. Half the time, DJB writes likes he's either wearing a hair shirt or knitting one. Anyone else witnessed his epic rant "Var is my hair shirt"?
Oh, and along with specializing in the warm Caribbean waters of security research, we'll go ten years without missing a biannual ship date, since we're casting about for anything trivial to up the flag pole.
I once had a math-geek acquaintance with underdeveloped social skills who decided to balance the equation by becoming an avid sky diver. Last I spoke to him about this, long ago, he had by some miracle survived 80 dives, and a few close calls, including once with his arm tangled in his main which was fluttering above him like a limp condom. Before he decided to risk tangling his reserve, it caught some air and he descended hanging by a partially dislocated arm.
I once asked him what's the difference between the main and the reserve, aside from the basic fact that it's smaller and tends to lead to a hard landing (which probably feels soft as butter until the adrenaline wears off).
His answer: you need extra certification to pack a reserve, and the one or two people at each club who do this (more often that you'd like to think) are almost always close to sober.
There's a lot of people in the Linux camp who seem to reason along the lines that "if it doesn't get used much, it shouldn't exist". Which translates in my metaphor to death by popularity.
I can see why IE adopted Chakra. Here's Neal Stephenson on overcoming disability: NSFW
Welcome to the school of tail wagging the dog. What would the ROI calculation have looked like *before* you acquired that sound card when you effectively married yourself to the Windows culture and all that comes with it? Five minutes well invested against the throes of consumption lust?
For that matter, why bother learning about birth control until *after* you discover you're not shooting blanks?
I was looking forward to reading this paper, because there are good arguments to be made about the externality burden. This paper is not that paper. Author seems to have a tin ear concerning second order effects. Maybe SSL certificates are rarely faked because the mechanism grants the adversary a dominating response. In game theory, one can't neglect the influence of moves never played. That tends to correlate with the move being super kick ass when confronting an opponent with rational self-preservation.
I found the paper extremely self-serving to the Microsoft camp. From a larger perspective, we should have engineered these systems in such a way that it was never a rational proposition for the black hats to invest so much in gaining expertise over its manipulation. Not that this could have been forestalled indefinitely considering the value held within the network walls, but we certainly didn't have to make it so darn easy for the agents of darkness to self-finance their learning curve.
Now that it's a done deal, Microsoft finds all kinds of time for shirt-rending accounts of the TCO of learned-helplessness.
One more note. I have to slap my forehead over all the effort invested in training people to use strong passwords. Password strength needs to grow by about six bits per decade, just to track Moore's law while the number of passwords a typical person requires seems to double every decade or so.
It's socially embarrassing to forget an important password because you were conscientious and didn't write it down.
The human brain doesn't scale to the demands of this security practice, and this has been obvious for thirty years.
The risk of key loggers forces one into making each password unique and significantly detracts from the notion of aggregating a huge basket of passwords onto OpenID.
If every human had 2kB of glucose backed NVRAM with thirty years guaranteed retention, life would be different. We don't, and you can't educate this into existence.
Yes, I've seen those decodings. In base 8 it's a glowing testament to the crystalline clarity of the signal/noise ratio of the future universe when it cools to micro-degrees Kelvin. Decoded in base 6, it's a screech of satanic positrons travelling backward in time to the original inferno.
Decoded in base seven, it contains the message "these digits intentionally left blank".
The segmenting of processors and video cards seems to have gone past the point of having any purpose other than to confuse and befuddle the customers so that the manufacturer's never get stuck with an unsellable dud. Once customers cease to purchase on knowledge, they can be manipulated into buying just about anything on price.
Two New Cut-Offs: Core 2 Duo E7300 and Pentium Dual-Core E5200 Processors (page 3) - X-bit labs
Besides, there is one more peculiarity that draws our attention: Pentium Dual Core E5200 doesn't support SSE4.1 instructions. It is not a mistake in the CPU-Z report. Although this processor formally belongs to Wolfdale family, it doesn't support these instructions. Intel simply disabled the corresponding feature in its low-cost dual-core CPUs.
There's not enough hours in the day to read all this fine print. I thought understanding the Wolfdale family was enough, but I was wrong. I've looked at Intel's web site for a complete chart of cripple bits, and not managed to find one.
I think this proliferation was a direct response to site such as Ars giving the end user too much of a clue, before having a clue caught on with the wider buying public and began to interfere with channel stuffing manipulations.
I can't wait for the next generation of search engines where I can simply type "Intel processor cripple bits" and have the search engine prepare me a comprehensive table directly from Intel primary documents.
Eclipse has an open source Data Tools Platform
For an extremely laid-back Zen-like stream-of-consciousness definition of "has". My stream of consciousness experience trying to grok this thing was extremely irritating.
From Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) Project
"Data Tools" is a vast domain, yet there are a fairly small number of foundational requirements when developing with or managing data-centric systems. (What does it do?) A developer is interested in an environment that is easy to configure (what does it do?), one in which the challenges of application development are due to the problem domain (what does it do?), not the complexity of the tools employed. (What does it do?) Data management, whether by a developer working on an application (what does it do?), or an administrator maintaining or monitoring a production system (what does it do?), should also provide a consistent (what does it do?), highly usable environment that works well with associated technologies. (What does it do?)
Three rules plucked from Ten rules for writing fiction by Elmore Leonard
Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader^H^H^H^H^H^Hgeek is apt to leaf ahead looking for people^H^H^H^H^H^Hpurpose.
Don't go into great detail describing places and things (or meta framework), unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
I generally get along well with Eclipse, but for the love of God:
What does DTP do?
Considering this piece reads like the sleep-talking of a singularitarian
He runs in those circles:
Kurzweil Debates Gelernter at MIT
I'm shocked how many smart people have a deep intuition that computation can't underlie consciousness when we have so many formal results that the limits of computation are inscrutable (complexity theory).
Users Are Not Reactionary After All
I thought I would find a soul-mate in Gelernter, since I believe strongly in aggregating *my own* data, but in truth I don't get much out of his ideas. This is what I wrote to myself when I first read that piece:
Edge question 2010: made the absurd statement that 99.9% of the technocrats involved in creating the internet will be displaced when the system evolves to operate in a top-down mode. This is extremely insulting, because it implies the technocrats have created the system in the image of their personal limitations, and denies the possibility that we've chosen to work at this level because that's where the action is. If we'd started top down, the internet would have never made it off the ground.
Many of us were well aware that we were cutting rough stone to build a cathedral. I use a personal wiki to keep track of my ideas, and I rely heavily on being able to determine when I added a comment through the page history. The time axis can be immensely useful. Still, it doesn't strike me as a liberating force. I had an Econtalk lecture on my iPod that I ended up listening to in six minute chunks over two weeks. Time can be quite messy in its own right.
Gelernter might be brilliant on some level, but he's Ted Nelson brilliant, FWIW. I think the silver bullet is a metaphor. Gelernter thinks that metaphor is a silver bullet.
It's a common meme to speculate what features of life on planet earth will prove hard to explain to ET once we finally meet one. Communal brainwashing might rank right up there. I lived through the seventies, which were the height of communal brainwashing, because there wasn't much else to do, unless you *really* liked winter sports.
It helps to think clearly about prostitution. In addition to the risk of violence and being raped financially by your pimp, the customers don't necessarily have good hygiene, you don't know where they've been, and your guesses would likely be far too accurate.
Advertising is sweaty with greed. After a hundred thousand ad impressions, you're not the same person any more. You've lived too long in the gutter of commerce. You're mentally unclean.
My policy is to ignore the ads even if they are turned on. I have a method for discovering things I need to purchase. It's the old Al Gore, and it serves me well, in blood hound mode. I don't need sweaty businessmen tapping me on the visual shoulder with their idea of a great offer. I'm one of those people where nothing goes in my cart until I've read the label. I've said this several times before. Capitalism only exists when *both sides* of a transaction are making rational decisions. Any effort by one side to tilt the landscape through brainwashing techniques or emotional appeals is a degradation of capitalism. Mutually informed, rational decisions are the miraculous device that make markets honest.
I would leave the ads turned on to benefit sites such as Ars, despite the fact that I think this is a ludicrous social convention, except for one small problem: too many ads blink. Thinks that blink eat away at my attention something fierce. I'm like one of Temple Grandin's cows. The flickering flag drives me mad. In some ways I have some autistic markers. OTOH, I'm extremely perceptive to emotion, only not so much the surface emotion that everyone else picks up quickly (I'm often slow to process this); I tend to pick up the underlying cognitive state beneath the emotion, given enough time to triangulate. It's a bit like what Feynman says about depth of explanation (segment on magnetism). I wouldn't call myself autistic, until an ad starts to blink on my screen, cutting my reading speed/comprehension by half. Instant ad blocker. Am I going to sacrifice 50% of my capacity for 100% of the reason I'm visiting a site, just so Ars can make a few pennies per page view when I've already made a blood pact with Adam Smith not to purchase anything I haven't independently researched? Not in this lifetime.
Ads are a ludicrous substitute for a workable micro-payment system. If we hadn't first invented the 1970s, this would be obvious to everyone. Imagine if we had the micro-payment system first, and it worked, then some guy comes along with a business plan where "we distract the reader with emotionally charged images, impelling the viewer to buy a product they wouldn't have purchased on native intelligence, through the power of communal brainwashing". Would this plan find any takers?
The entire culture of ad-influence commerce is an affront to human dignity, allowing us to become so caught up in image, we forget the nature of value. Neither does prostitution do much for human dignity, on either side of the transaction.
It's too bad the majority is coddled into becoming gullible consumers. We'd all be a lot more empowered if consumers voted their dollars rationally. Everything good about markets would become better. Good products would rise to the top, crap would be driven out.
I think long and hard about what life on planet earth might be like if we collectively less gullible, if this cheap Jedi mind trick didn't work half so well. Maybe our gullibility to emotional persuasion is critical to our teetering social cohesion. How is it tha
The ROB ran a long, long article just a few days ago with some insight into Canadian broadband politics.
Who do you call to clean up a mess like BCE? A man called Cope
On one side of this issue, I've got a copy of Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It". It's an excellent book. I've read big chunks of Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" and I agree with most of it. I've watched the Edge Talk with Yochai Benkler.
On the other side of this issue, I've had broadband from Shaw Cable since June 2005. The Berkman report about the broadband situation in Canada is slanted, and this irritates me immensely, because I agree with their perspective *and* their agenda, but I can't stomach the way they have distorted their data to bring Canada into line with their desired conclusion.
I've had landline phone service from Telus during this time as well, which is why they've never earned my broadband loyalty. Telus definitely plays "blame the customer" as a form of cost control. Especially since Darren Entwistle gained control. Telco landlines in Canada are under very strict regulation about availability of service. On my service there was some floating voltage associated with rainfall (not good when you live fifty miles downwind from a rain forest) which kept triggering my phone to go off-hook when no-one was calling. People would ring, the moisture goddess would signal that my phone had already been answered, the caller would hear nothing, and not even be able to reach my voice message service. There was one wet spring month when my phone was going off hook every few hours. Many waste-of-life conversations with Telus support ensued where I was roundly assured the problem was on my end. Many tickets were closed, which I violently reopened. Meanwhile there was a Telus service truck parked on the street every other day a block away from my house having the most intense romantic affair with a sidewalk service opening. Coincidence? They finally found me a line pair above the water line, and my service has been fine ever since.
My father-in-law spent twenty years flying to oversea oil fields to supervise telephony infrastructure. We have passed some extremely pleasant evenings together discussing this Telus-presumption-of-customer-stupidity-until-they've-charged-you-a-big-fee. He had a problem with his service in Alberta, I forget the details, but it was a misconfiguration on the Telus side. He called them up and explained to them *the precise misconfiguration problem*. Telus of course did nothing for weeks or months, while blaming customer premise equipment. Finally, it did turn out to be their problem, exactly as originally described. Neither of us will ever get that chunk of our life back.
What we need here is a telephony ombudsman. When Telus says we'll charge you $200 if the problem is on your end, then you say "fine, I'll hire the ombudsman". I would easily pay $100 to the ombudsman to show up and adjudicate who really owns the fault. If I'm proved right, Telus owes me $1000. If Telus is proved right, they get my $200 (so I'm now out $300). The fee is higher for Telus, because they have the infrastructure and latitude to know better (should they choose to use it, which would entail some major culture shock).
Mr Entwistle, what's the point here? You waste the time of a lot of competent technical people, now we all hate your guts. Hey, that worked great for Bill, didn't it? No, none of us ever pipe up when the CRTC runs a public consultation. Is this your idea of job security? Scorch the earth so badly no one else *wants* your job? Do you carry "good will" on your balance sheet? How about "bad will", of which there is no shortage? With guerrilla marketing, scoring with the "in" crowd is supposedly a coup. So what
People peeing on bushes are the rare outliers that no one is really gunning for. Removing them from any lists should be a priority.
The problem is that it is not a priority to correct errors in these lists, and I'm under the impression that the bureaucracy involved can take years or decades, just from stories about false credit reports.
What this boils down to is circumvention of libel law. If you publicly accuse someone of being a closet pedophile or a Bernie Madoff and you can't substantiate your claim, you're in for a world of litigation. If someone ends up on one of these lists, and later it is discovered the person never should have been on this list in the first place, or the conviction was subsequently overturned, does this person have redress under libel law? Ideally for millions of dollars, which is how much I would want for damage to my reputation if someone put my name on a public list of pedophiles or wife-beaters.
Ordinarily, when these public lists are created, such as credit reports, provision are enacted under law which partially or fully suspends libel protection, otherwise these lists would tend to be very short, once every possible risk of being wrong was fully considered.
Let's suppose you become a convicted pedophile because a witness lies under oath. You go on the list, your life is hell, but then something comes to light that overturns your conviction, and provides compelling evidence that the witness against you was acting on malice. Do you then have the right to sue the false witness for damages to your reputation that would ordinarily accrue from libel law?
Or, a not uncommon scenario, what is the libel exposure when the prosecution withholds evidence favorable to the defense?
Convicted by doodles, Masters is freed by DNA
I can live with the lists so long as there is absolutely someone to be sued for significant personal damage if the process leading to a person's name being added to the list is negligent or corrupt. I fear this is hardly ever the case in how these lists are implemented under legislation, or that the resources required to win such a battle are intended to be prohibitive.
I'm a bit of bleeding heart liberal when it comes to prosecuting people for shooting someone under false assumptions. I don't believe the paranoid discharge of a lethal weapon enjoys constitutional protection. So carry the gun if it makes you feel secure, but don't expect to see much light of day for twenty years if your judgement proves faulty. Responsibility in proportion to capacity to harm.
Yoshihiro Hattori
Since I'm already being inflammatory, was the persecution of crypto-Jews under the Spanish Inquisition a stepping stone on the slippery slope toward the Holocaust? Perhaps 2000 Jews burned at the stake on the basis of utterances under extreme torture, and property confiscated for the betterment of the state. Imagine if they had been more organized.
Which brings us back to pedophiles. *Finally* the society for the protection of known pedophiles lost a few stone buildings for their misdemeanours. How sad.
Here's a trio of movies to put anyone in a somber mood about the making of lists.
Good Night, and Good Luck
The Thin Blue Line
Twist of Faith
The third movie in that list was irritating on some level and is not a movie I would watch again. What all these movies have in common is the imbalance of power between the accuser and the accused.
Law enforcement is legitimately shielded from aspects of libel law so that they can do their jobs without constant fear of legal harassment (drug lords have unlimited legal resources). This is
I was pretty chuffed when the first Gould recording came out, though honestly after satisfying my curiosity I don't bother to seek it out when I have the vocalese obligato at hand.
The following is an excellent article for those with a geek attention span:
Zenph Studios Marc Wienert piano voicer Yamaha Steinway preparation Mott Music
Before speculating on the potential limits of this approach, it's useful to acquaint yourself with the ideas of Jürgen Schmidhuber. My feeling is that the majority of the human race has the same emotional attachment to human creativity that Kasparov (once) held rather fervently about creativity in chess. I don't know if he ever recanted baldly, but he did switch to a career in politics. I regard Kasparov as the small sea change. Computer chess was a novelty in 1980. That didn't last long.
Is there more to curiosity and creativity than a rigorous rejection of banality? Only time will tell. Nothing prevents Zenph from forming an alliance with the dark forces of neuromarketing. They don't have to replicate the impossible, they only have to make you believe that they've done so, without bothering to solicit your opinion verbally, if you consent to the cap.
Personally, I like this development. There is too much cult of personality in this society. Soon the real celebrities (and their incredibly fragile public personae) will be competing against fake celebrities who only have sex with other fake celebrities, according to neuromarketing biorhythms. Accenture is investing heavily.
If the eyes are the gateway of the soul, then music is the gateway to the cult of personality. A billion iPods can't be wrong.
To really get inside an artist's head, you also need some music the artist recorded badly. Fortunately, Gould did not spare us the carnage. One of his Mozart recordings is almost unlistenable. The true artistic challenge for Zenph is to make Gould play Chopin differently, yet exactly as badly as his worst Mozart.
Aaah, I love this ideal world of yours where the people keep the government bound to the constitution. I guess it's appropriate since we're on the topic of dreams. Nowadays this would fall in the category of pipe-dreams.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it.
— George Bernard Shaw
A cutting aphorism is commonly mistaken for insight by those who haven't got any.
— Five Digit Monkey
Interesting how quickly this discussion degenerated into women policing wayward intent. Western governments love to safe-guard passive and obedient citizenship, far more than most gun-toting individualists. Certain institutions of government get a little carried away with the monitoring of threats or perceived threats. You just have to hope that if your luggage is routed to Syria you never see it again. If our government was completely harmless, we'd complain about it being ineffective.
I can't think of many cases in life where effective and harmless are perfectly yoked.
Is LTO-5 the last hurrah for tape?
What about the problem of having a working LTO-4 drive ten years from now, if the tape industry begins to wither as other solutions continue to eat away at the tape market?
I think the creativity here is negotiating the nature of the SLA contract with the clients. My preference is just to set up a local disk array with enough spinning capacity, not promising to survive a site disaster, charging for the service only so long as the data remains live.
To complement this, send each client a master LTO-4 tape (or a disk drive) and tell them "it's up to you if you need to recover this, but I'll help you out if I'm able".
Otherwise, you get into this horrible risk calculus where the client is not thinking through the cost benefit with rational comprehension.
I would try to find some way to unpack convenience from autonomy from ultimate responsibility, because if you don't, your clients shouldn't be balking at the price of Amazon S3. If they are balking, it's because they don't really want all three of these packed together, but the timid bureaucrats don't wish to admit this, in case the day comes when data is lost.
In economics, it is common to do net present value calculations. It would be interesting to do a backward discount on prudence if the day comes when the shit hits the fan. There's a lot of weird asymmetry in human psychology associated with risk.
From a business perspective, it's sometimes good to give your customer's options priced at levels where you expect not to get many takers. See the story about The Economist subscription model in Ariely's lecture:
Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code
It's amazingly hard to find residential fire statistics on a per annum risk basis, if we're looking at personal acts of god rather than communal acts of god (hurricane, earthquake, etc.) The firefighters meticulously count the number of times they respond, but seem not to talk to the fire insurance people about the number of structures insured. Not one report I looked at from the UK, the US, or Canada denominated the statistics per residence.
A loose estimate for Canada in 2002 is a residential risk rate of 1 in 300 per annum. Older building stock with plush curtains and deep fat friers will have higher rates, recent building stock with working fire detectors and no children will have lower risk.
Another table shows me that the risk of a 45 year old male being diagnosed with cancer by age 50 is 1.5%, or about 300:1 against per annum. Radon gas causes 15% of lung cancer, and 15% of American homes exceed recommended action levels. How many of the stripes+parity+fail_over+hot_spare+IronMountain crowd here have bothered to purchase the $50 home radon test (excluding smokers who smoke indoors, who are in a different risk category altogether)?
The human mind seems to incorporate an instinctive Bayesian prior that if you are actively discussing a risk, the risk is immediately ten or a hundred times greater than it was five minutes ago, before the risk entered the conversation. Likewise, any hill you are standing at the bottom of seems ten times higher or steeper than any comparable hill on the other side of the valley.
It is not, as it is not the same "knowing somebody to be guilty" to "knowing somebody to be declared guilty". Presumed means exactly that: pre-assumed. It's perfectly possible to know enough about the facts and about the legal system to know somebody is guilty before the trial outcome because then you are not pre-assuming anything: you know.
It doesn't make any difference. You're still tap dancing. Guilt by personal knowledge is not a transitive function, so even if the lawyer determines pre-trial guilt in the inner court of his mind, telling anyone else is completely useless. If the lawyer ultimately testifies to such, he's no better than any other witness, and not believed until cross examined.
I suspect conflict of interest guidelines prevent a lawyer from representing and testifying against his client in the same trial.
The fact of the matter is that "knowing somebody guilty" is a worthless state of mind unless the person expects to testify. Prior to the trial, you shouldn't be sharing such an opinion with the guy on the next bar stool if you really care about justice.
The only thing the lawyer can legitimately do with this conclusion is to decide that the prospective client is either too guilty/not guilty enough to take on the case, whichever his preference. This is a private decision, which again does not involve sharing.
Just try to imagine a world where snap judgement was transitive, without also conjuring genocide or the tyranny of the playground.
Officially, vandalism is defined as edits made in bad faith.
In other words, the scope of the problem does not include discovering the cure for human stupidity, however laudable that might be.
Furthermore, people here are failing to apply the 80-20 rule: if you can clean up 80% of the vandalism at 20% of the human effort currently expended, the attention available to deal with the difficult twenty percent would more than triple. I've seen entire pages replaced with the word "penis" or a crass four word comment about some pimple twit schoolmate. There's a lot of low hanging fruit here.
I sometimes think Wikipedia needs to implement a mechanism where citations are corroborated by some semi-trusted party: "yes, this citation really contains the support for the claim added to the article." Any editor who hasn't contributed a corroborated citation needs to be kept on a fairly short rope. My opinion is that the underlying currency of good faith contribution is the properly cited claims, preferably from A-list source material and not Joe Random Blog.
How much vandalism is contributed by editors who have added fully sourced claims to three or more articles? If I've seen such a case of vandalism, I can't recall it. I've seen editors make half a dozen quasi-good faith contributions (always unsourced) who have then degenerated into petulance and destruction, perhaps when testing limits becomes a better way to get noticed.
Most of the vandalism I've run into has been fairly fresh, using a couple of days old or at most a week. On obscure articles, I've encountered heavy vandalism that persisted unchallenged for months. In some ways the long-standing dark-corner vandalism is more problematic, like the mother-in-law who swipes her finger in some obscure crevice to document a damning laxity.
Another case I've often seen is vandalism caught by someone inexperienced, and fixed in that instance (but not with a conspicuous revert), while ten other vandalisms from the same editor on the same spree remain unrepaired. If an unproven editor's contribution seems to be suffering a higher than normal attrition rate, then everything the editor has done should be flagged for attention.
A lot could be built on top of a decent blame function, such as the ability to determine whether two versions of an article differ only in text, and with better exposure statistics for how often an edit has been viewed by someone who ought to know the difference.
This article is no great bag of chips, but it contains some pertinent key phrases.
AI comes of age
This fellow Kroon seems to believe that augmented intelligence is the way of the future. I concur. The game is to best combine what humans do well with what the algorithms do better, combined with an effectiveness metric taking into account power law distributions, minus all the pointless hand-wringing about highly motivated adversaries escaping the cunning traps.
Profound acts of bad faith are not remotely the same problem. It's unconscionable scope-creep to bring these worries into the petty vandalism conversion. Yes, some fraction of the thwarted petty vandals will escalate into more profound acts of vandalism. Such is life. Problems remain for the future. Many people think we've made no progress on spam. My view is that the spam filters have essentially driven all the amateur spammers out of the system. Once the level of professionalism required to get spam past the spam filters begins to equal the difficulty of doing a real job, then the flow of spam will finally begin to atrophy.
Another example is ProPolice (or other stack smashing guards) which accomplishes nothing at all on a formal basis, but nevertheless tilts the landscape on exploit cost/benefit, and qualifies your adversaries. One of the heavy burdens on Wikipedia as it now sta