First, we create an account and fill it with harmless content containing "inappropriate" words. For example, a text about farm animals that uses the word "cock" a lot. If the documents are flagged, we can assume that Google uses pattern matching to find "bad" words.
Another thing to try is to submit an article condemning hate speech that includes examples of the speech it condemns. Should set off a pattern matching filter.
Second, we create an account and fill it with content inappropriate for human consumption. Weird erotica involving Steve Ballmer, Bob Ross, an elephant and a box of fireworks. Something like that. The important thing is that the whole text does not use any word or phrase that might conceivably set off an automated filter. We use lots of metaphors that are transparent to a human being and opaque to a computer. If the documents are flagged, we can assume that some poor soul at Google actually read them.
The problem is that Nintendo is selling both an emulator for their older consoles (the Wii, via the Virtual Console) and those older games as well. They most likely plan to release a number of games not on the market yet. Essentially, if a game has even been released on a Nintendo platform, they actually expect to sell it until the heat death of the universe or their bankuptcy, whichever comes later.
Good point. There should be legal defenses a company can take (like proving - not just stating! - that the company's leadership was not involved with the decision*) and individual workers should be protected (e.g. by company "jail time" being treated as paid vacation** with rules against just firing people or subtracting the "jail time" from their vacation time). Also, the courts should of course apply the laws as appropriate, perhaps leaning towards relatively mild sentences and only using capital punishment in the most severe of cases - putting the company out of business is not the goal.
One could also implement corporate jail time as the corporation not being able to make any money, with all of their revenues being seized. But that deviates from how it usually goes and is essentially the same as a fine - especially as I'd propose fines based on daily income (a rough equivalent is already used for regular fines in Germany and Switzerland). Twenty million Dollars don't hurt Microsoft much; twenty times their daily income does.
And, of course, it should only apply to companies that are a legal entity - corporations. Regular companies don't have the rights of a legal entity so they wouldn't get the same kind of punishment. But hey, corporations are there so that individual people inside are shielded from the law. I don't see why the company as a whole should also be - fines usually aren't much of a deterrent as the company can easily pay them. Forcing them (through enforced inactivity) to delay their product launch until after Christmas, for example, would hurt a lot. And suddenly we not only have a deterrent against bad behavior, the shareholders would also make sure that "their" corporation behaves - because they'd lose a lot of money if it doesn't.
Yeah, a long "jail term" followed by a shareholder lawsuit could still end up as a one-two punch that kills a company but then again - if a corporation gets shut down for, say, one year that's the equivalent of a twelve-year prison term. If a corporation gets split up that's the equivalent of capital punishment (and couldn't possibly happen in Europe). They'd have to do some serious evil to get there. I'd expect a few two- or three month terms before the corporations wisen up and cut down on crime (and commit their remaining crimes in secret).
* Before anyone calls this "guilty before proven innocent": Of course the punishment would still hinge on the company being found guilty. If the court finds that no one needs to be punished it doesn't matter who doesn't get punished. In fact, it's explicitly an implementation of "innocent until proven guilts" applied to the scapegoat.
** Exceptions could be made for workers who are required to periodically do things in order to keep the company infrastructure from failing - or for the janitor. But even there the workload should be reduced as appropriate and they wouldn't be allowed to use those workers to generate additional revenue.
Intelligence is task specific. You can have brilliant scientists be reduced to bumbling idiots the instant they sit down in front of a computer. Of course it's not a matter of brainpower but a matter of knowledge but they don't have that crucial knowledge and thus make mistakes that, to the average computer geek, look like pure idiocy.
Asking random smart people about the ethical implications of a highly technical issues is not going to give as many insightful answers as asking random technical people does.
There have been remote installs on windows in the past and virus's that could hide inside other executables but those where rather rare
What? There's a cornucopia of viruses that hide themselves inside PE files. In fact, If it doesn't spread to other files on the system I think it doesn't qualify as a virus (although it can still fulfill the definition of a worm if it spreads autonomously to other computers).
In that case, why does the browser display "connecting to google-analytics.com" for twenty seconds? Does Fx always display what it's going to do next until it gets around to doing it? And yes, I have spent half a minute and more just waiting for their server to even respond to my request.
I still think we should apply regular law to companies. Jail term? We just downgrade the time units one step (years -> months -> weeks -> days) and disallow them from doing any business during that time. Suddenly we have a deterrent against them. Life sentence/life jail term? Break them up as per antitrust laws or (if that isn't possible) have their assets auctioned off. Community service? Something like forcing them to offer free service for the specified tome or something.
And, of course, three copyright violations mean no internet anymore (one could allow them an internet presence if it's run by a third party and doesn't allow the visitor to do business with them). They can still use snail mail, fax and telephone. Or, more likely, lobby for a law change. (Unfortunately, the law they'd lobby against wouldn't be the three strikes law.)
You're arguing that nobody who doesn't already know how to program should be allowed to learn it. Inexperienced programmers always create shitty code, in any language. And they will resort to cut-and-paste code from random websites whenever convenient.
Forcing them to use C for web development won't change that; you'll see websites that leak memory like a sieve, open supposedly read-only files in read-write mode and then reuse that pointer (which the coder doesn't notice because he only ever tested with the same value being written to that file) or have all methods declared as void* for "flexibility", with results being casted as inappropriate.
C does not magically make shitty programmers good. Experience does. And C is not the only language on the market in which one can possibly gain that.
You have already heard of JSP, right? And CGI has been around for ages.
I can tell you from experience that writing in a compiled language does not force one to write cleaner code. It just forces one to click "Build" and deploy the new version before the changes go live. In fact, most sloppy coders would generate significantly less secure websites if they were forced to write in C. With PHP, being sloppy means that an attacker could download files they're not supposed to or inject SQL statements. With C, being sloppy means that an attacker could execute arbitrary code on the server.
Well, the Communists aren't around to scare people and unfortunately both the politicians and the tabloid editors are really interested in scared people. Scared people buy every tabloid writing bold headlines like "THIS IS THE (suspected) SICK BASTARD WHO RAPED LITTLE SUSAN (9)" and after enough "news stories" asking questions like "WHY CAN'T ANYONE MAKE THIS ONSLAUGHT OF BESTIAL PEDO-RAPISTS STOP?" and featuring "world reknowned paedophilia experts" being one step short of reciting the eponymous song from the musical Reefer Madness with "child porn" substituted for "reefer", most people who rely on tabloids for their opinions agree that one, two liberties are not a bad thing to lose if it puts a stop to those pedo devils trying to rape all children on the planet.
Of course it won't change a thing. And the anti-paedophilia censorship they were sold on turns out to be anti-everything. But that won't matter as the BILD, the Sun or whatever's the name of their little opinion delivery rag will proudly proclaim the war on paedophilia over. Until the next high-profile paedophilia case when they get to spread the fear again.
I feel compelled to close my post with a few lines from the song "Lasse red'n" form German punk band "Die Ärzte": Die meisten Leute haben ihre Bildung aus der BILD.
Und die besteht nun mal, wer wüßte das nicht,
Aus Angst, Hass, Titten und dem Wetterbericht.
Most people have their education from the BILD.
And that consists, who wouldn't know that,
Of fear, hate, tits and the weather report.
Truer words have never been spoken about a tabloid.
The really big problem is not the child porn; the problem is that with a censorship platform in place, it wouldn't take long to abuse it. In fact, IIRC, there already were proposals for blocks of other content immediately after the law was passed.
So we'd have a secret list of websites nobody can visit, which can contain just about any kind of website deemed "bad", with no public oversight, no means of controlling it and - in the first draft of the law - the always-present looming threat of your visit being logged and you being under investigation when you visit the website. Of course with no prior warning whatsoever.
Oh, and this came from the same administration that had the awesome idea of putting trojans on people's computers/PDAs/smartphones to investigate them, so with the law as written in the first draft we'd possibly be in "visit the wrong website and the BKA can rifle through your hard drive remotely" territory.
That's not just censorship, that's a whole censorfleet.
Plus, where most parties are willing to ignore their standards in exchange for power, the PP is less about gaining power than about forcing other people to adopt their standards out of populism. As such, any colition with the PP would involve the bigger party having to essentially do what the PP wants for the PP's core interest topics (mostly everything involving privacy and IP rights).
Given that the PP is very much at odds with big business in those areas, a coalition with them would be a bitter pill to swallow. Possibly too bitter for the established parties, which would mean that 5+ % of all seats would be beyond their control. Five percent are not the world but they can still prove crucial.
As for excessive violence: It's not like the States (often held as the canonical counterexample here) are without their own censorship. Anything involving sex or the primary or secondary sex characteristics is guaranteed to at least bump up your rating (even if you didn't even include it in the game, see Oblivion); then there's that one game (can't remember the name, even though I think it's The Nations) where in the German version one faction produces booze and cigarettes while in the American one they produce lollypops and candy.
Quite seriously, I'd rather have a game wave tits in my child's face than casually depict violence. Sex is natural, fun (if consensual) and a good workout. Violence is a good workout and certainly in our nature but something we should avoid rather than cherish.
I'm not saying here that censorhip of either is necessary, just that I think it's easier to justify violence censorship than sex censorship.
Seeng that this comes from the woman who thought it'd be a good idea to open a press meeting (sorry, can't remember the proper word now in any language) by showing child porn to the reporters. Looks like a pot insisting that everyone else is a kettle.
It depends on how you intend to use it. For most desktop users the requirements look something like this:
- Needs to have a simple installer
- Needs to run without any setup besides running the installer and registering an account
- Needs to be able to be recommended to others who can use it without any explanation whatsoever
- Needs to take care of NAT automatically
- Needs to provide voice and video over IP without any further setup besides possibly camera calibration
- Needs a large user base
- Needs to run on Windows and OS X (only a requirement for Mac users)
In short, my nontechnical friends need to either already use it or be able to get it running with minimal hassle. Skype does that.
Because the USA happen to be the country that declares it has a right to spy on the whole world (I'm fairly certain tht the EU CoM didn't get the idea to give the States access to local bank transaction data on their own), abduct other nations' citizens (extraordinary rendition), force their laws on everyone (the DMCA analogues that were exported everywhere through the WTO) and various other things that make it seem as if the States simply don't care about other nations' sovereignty.
In short: No other foreign country has the nerve to invade my privacy, threaten my freedom and restrict my rights to please their corporations. The USA get criticism because they earn it.
And before you repeat your "the USA are singled out for criticism" whining: They aren't the only country that gets criticized; offhand I can think of "Italy is corrupt", "China has awful work safety standards" and (a while back) "Russia sure likes to cut pieces out of its neighboring countries". However, this story isn't about Chinese work safety standards, it's about the USA getting access to my bank transactions for no apparent reason so the USA are who gets mentioned.
As for you not wanting foreigners to pollute your pristine, all-WASP neighborhood with our dirty un-American ways: Don't worry; if I emigrate it's to Sweden, where good internet and healthcare are cheap and the politicians aren't.
It mainly proves how PC can muddle language to the point where it doesn't fulfill its intended purpose. FO3 can justify the term - the character is from America - but what if other games that aren't as clear about the character being American use the term "African American" to refer to someone of dark skin? Maybe someone who's never been to the States?
The whole term only makes sense for a subset of a subset of all black people. What about someone of Aboriginal descent who lives in Europe and comes to the States on a holiday trip? Is he an African American even though he and his ancestors haven't been to Africa for millennia and he isn't an American citizen? Or the already mentioned white person from Africa who has migrated to the States - is he an African American but not an African American?
Also, how long until "African American" becomes politically uncorrect? Racial terminology is a good example of the PC treadmill.
Do note that in West Europe "the rural sticks" usually means something to the tune of "a town of 1200 people some 50 kilometers from the next big city". Over here it's usually economical to have wastewater plants all over the place (plus it's hard to uphold our tap water standards otherwise; tap water one of the most stictly regulated comestibles in Germany). So, yeah, I do look at those problems from a different perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
This calls for extensive testing.
First, we create an account and fill it with harmless content containing "inappropriate" words. For example, a text about farm animals that uses the word "cock" a lot. If the documents are flagged, we can assume that Google uses pattern matching to find "bad" words.
Another thing to try is to submit an article condemning hate speech that includes examples of the speech it condemns. Should set off a pattern matching filter.
Second, we create an account and fill it with content inappropriate for human consumption. Weird erotica involving Steve Ballmer, Bob Ross, an elephant and a box of fireworks. Something like that. The important thing is that the whole text does not use any word or phrase that might conceivably set off an automated filter. We use lots of metaphors that are transparent to a human being and opaque to a computer. If the documents are flagged, we can assume that some poor soul at Google actually read them.
Science is fun!
The problem is that Nintendo is selling both an emulator for their older consoles (the Wii, via the Virtual Console) and those older games as well. They most likely plan to release a number of games not on the market yet. Essentially, if a game has even been released on a Nintendo platform, they actually expect to sell it until the heat death of the universe or their bankuptcy, whichever comes later.
Good luck applying an English patch to your original Mother 3 cartridge.
Good point. There should be legal defenses a company can take (like proving - not just stating! - that the company's leadership was not involved with the decision*) and individual workers should be protected (e.g. by company "jail time" being treated as paid vacation** with rules against just firing people or subtracting the "jail time" from their vacation time). Also, the courts should of course apply the laws as appropriate, perhaps leaning towards relatively mild sentences and only using capital punishment in the most severe of cases - putting the company out of business is not the goal.
One could also implement corporate jail time as the corporation not being able to make any money, with all of their revenues being seized. But that deviates from how it usually goes and is essentially the same as a fine - especially as I'd propose fines based on daily income (a rough equivalent is already used for regular fines in Germany and Switzerland). Twenty million Dollars don't hurt Microsoft much; twenty times their daily income does.
And, of course, it should only apply to companies that are a legal entity - corporations. Regular companies don't have the rights of a legal entity so they wouldn't get the same kind of punishment. But hey, corporations are there so that individual people inside are shielded from the law. I don't see why the company as a whole should also be - fines usually aren't much of a deterrent as the company can easily pay them. Forcing them (through enforced inactivity) to delay their product launch until after Christmas, for example, would hurt a lot. And suddenly we not only have a deterrent against bad behavior, the shareholders would also make sure that "their" corporation behaves - because they'd lose a lot of money if it doesn't.
Yeah, a long "jail term" followed by a shareholder lawsuit could still end up as a one-two punch that kills a company but then again - if a corporation gets shut down for, say, one year that's the equivalent of a twelve-year prison term. If a corporation gets split up that's the equivalent of capital punishment (and couldn't possibly happen in Europe). They'd have to do some serious evil to get there. I'd expect a few two- or three month terms before the corporations wisen up and cut down on crime (and commit their remaining crimes in secret).
* Before anyone calls this "guilty before proven innocent": Of course the punishment would still hinge on the company being found guilty. If the court finds that no one needs to be punished it doesn't matter who doesn't get punished. In fact, it's explicitly an implementation of "innocent until proven guilts" applied to the scapegoat.
** Exceptions could be made for workers who are required to periodically do things in order to keep the company infrastructure from failing - or for the janitor. But even there the workload should be reduced as appropriate and they wouldn't be allowed to use those workers to generate additional revenue.
Intelligence is task specific. You can have brilliant scientists be reduced to bumbling idiots the instant they sit down in front of a computer. Of course it's not a matter of brainpower but a matter of knowledge but they don't have that crucial knowledge and thus make mistakes that, to the average computer geek, look like pure idiocy.
Asking random smart people about the ethical implications of a highly technical issues is not going to give as many insightful answers as asking random technical people does.
What? There's a cornucopia of viruses that hide themselves inside PE files. In fact, If it doesn't spread to other files on the system I think it doesn't qualify as a virus (although it can still fulfill the definition of a worm if it spreads autonomously to other computers).
Because a billion is obviously twice as much as a million. It has the bi- prefix.
Fillet minions? What are those, an evil butcher's henchmen?
Well, Obama could swat lab-grown artificial fly meat all day and PETA wouldn't complain. So they're prefectly consistent. ;)
In that case, why does the browser display "connecting to google-analytics.com" for twenty seconds? Does Fx always display what it's going to do next until it gets around to doing it? And yes, I have spent half a minute and more just waiting for their server to even respond to my request.
I still think we should apply regular law to companies. Jail term? We just downgrade the time units one step (years -> months -> weeks -> days) and disallow them from doing any business during that time. Suddenly we have a deterrent against them. Life sentence/life jail term? Break them up as per antitrust laws or (if that isn't possible) have their assets auctioned off. Community service? Something like forcing them to offer free service for the specified tome or something.
And, of course, three copyright violations mean no internet anymore (one could allow them an internet presence if it's run by a third party and doesn't allow the visitor to do business with them). They can still use snail mail, fax and telephone. Or, more likely, lobby for a law change. (Unfortunately, the law they'd lobby against wouldn't be the three strikes law.)
You're arguing that nobody who doesn't already know how to program should be allowed to learn it. Inexperienced programmers always create shitty code, in any language. And they will resort to cut-and-paste code from random websites whenever convenient.
Forcing them to use C for web development won't change that; you'll see websites that leak memory like a sieve, open supposedly read-only files in read-write mode and then reuse that pointer (which the coder doesn't notice because he only ever tested with the same value being written to that file) or have all methods declared as void* for "flexibility", with results being casted as inappropriate.
C does not magically make shitty programmers good. Experience does. And C is not the only language on the market in which one can possibly gain that.
You have already heard of JSP, right? And CGI has been around for ages.
I can tell you from experience that writing in a compiled language does not force one to write cleaner code. It just forces one to click "Build" and deploy the new version before the changes go live. In fact, most sloppy coders would generate significantly less secure websites if they were forced to write in C. With PHP, being sloppy means that an attacker could download files they're not supposed to or inject SQL statements. With C, being sloppy means that an attacker could execute arbitrary code on the server.
No, thanks. I like my server not getting rooted.
A big upside, though, is C's first-class string handling, especially where Unicode is concerned. Scripting languages just aren't in the same league.
Well, the Communists aren't around to scare people and unfortunately both the politicians and the tabloid editors are really interested in scared people. Scared people buy every tabloid writing bold headlines like "THIS IS THE (suspected) SICK BASTARD WHO RAPED LITTLE SUSAN (9)" and after enough "news stories" asking questions like "WHY CAN'T ANYONE MAKE THIS ONSLAUGHT OF BESTIAL PEDO-RAPISTS STOP?" and featuring "world reknowned paedophilia experts" being one step short of reciting the eponymous song from the musical Reefer Madness with "child porn" substituted for "reefer", most people who rely on tabloids for their opinions agree that one, two liberties are not a bad thing to lose if it puts a stop to those pedo devils trying to rape all children on the planet.
Of course it won't change a thing. And the anti-paedophilia censorship they were sold on turns out to be anti-everything. But that won't matter as the BILD, the Sun or whatever's the name of their little opinion delivery rag will proudly proclaim the war on paedophilia over. Until the next high-profile paedophilia case when they get to spread the fear again.
I feel compelled to close my post with a few lines from the song "Lasse red'n" form German punk band "Die Ärzte":
Die meisten Leute haben ihre Bildung aus der BILD.
Und die besteht nun mal, wer wüßte das nicht,
Aus Angst, Hass, Titten und dem Wetterbericht.
Most people have their education from the BILD.
And that consists, who wouldn't know that,
Of fear, hate, tits and the weather report.
Truer words have never been spoken about a tabloid.
The really big problem is not the child porn; the problem is that with a censorship platform in place, it wouldn't take long to abuse it. In fact, IIRC, there already were proposals for blocks of other content immediately after the law was passed.
So we'd have a secret list of websites nobody can visit, which can contain just about any kind of website deemed "bad", with no public oversight, no means of controlling it and - in the first draft of the law - the always-present looming threat of your visit being logged and you being under investigation when you visit the website. Of course with no prior warning whatsoever.
Oh, and this came from the same administration that had the awesome idea of putting trojans on people's computers/PDAs/smartphones to investigate them, so with the law as written in the first draft we'd possibly be in "visit the wrong website and the BKA can rifle through your hard drive remotely" territory.
That's not just censorship, that's a whole censorfleet.
Plus, where most parties are willing to ignore their standards in exchange for power, the PP is less about gaining power than about forcing other people to adopt their standards out of populism. As such, any colition with the PP would involve the bigger party having to essentially do what the PP wants for the PP's core interest topics (mostly everything involving privacy and IP rights).
Given that the PP is very much at odds with big business in those areas, a coalition with them would be a bitter pill to swallow. Possibly too bitter for the established parties, which would mean that 5+ % of all seats would be beyond their control. Five percent are not the world but they can still prove crucial.
As for excessive violence: It's not like the States (often held as the canonical counterexample here) are without their own censorship. Anything involving sex or the primary or secondary sex characteristics is guaranteed to at least bump up your rating (even if you didn't even include it in the game, see Oblivion); then there's that one game (can't remember the name, even though I think it's The Nations) where in the German version one faction produces booze and cigarettes while in the American one they produce lollypops and candy.
Quite seriously, I'd rather have a game wave tits in my child's face than casually depict violence. Sex is natural, fun (if consensual) and a good workout. Violence is a good workout and certainly in our nature but something we should avoid rather than cherish.
I'm not saying here that censorhip of either is necessary, just that I think it's easier to justify violence censorship than sex censorship.
Seeng that this comes from the woman who thought it'd be a good idea to open a press meeting (sorry, can't remember the proper word now in any language) by showing child porn to the reporters. Looks like a pot insisting that everyone else is a kettle.
It depends on how you intend to use it. For most desktop users the requirements look something like this:
- Needs to have a simple installer
- Needs to run without any setup besides running the installer and registering an account
- Needs to be able to be recommended to others who can use it without any explanation whatsoever
- Needs to take care of NAT automatically
- Needs to provide voice and video over IP without any further setup besides possibly camera calibration
- Needs a large user base
- Needs to run on Windows and OS X (only a requirement for Mac users)
In short, my nontechnical friends need to either already use it or be able to get it running with minimal hassle. Skype does that.
It would be somewhat acceptable if the displays stacked vertically, giving us 1024x1200. 2048x600 is absurd.
Because the USA happen to be the country that declares it has a right to spy on the whole world (I'm fairly certain tht the EU CoM didn't get the idea to give the States access to local bank transaction data on their own), abduct other nations' citizens (extraordinary rendition), force their laws on everyone (the DMCA analogues that were exported everywhere through the WTO) and various other things that make it seem as if the States simply don't care about other nations' sovereignty.
In short: No other foreign country has the nerve to invade my privacy, threaten my freedom and restrict my rights to please their corporations. The USA get criticism because they earn it.
And before you repeat your "the USA are singled out for criticism" whining: They aren't the only country that gets criticized; offhand I can think of "Italy is corrupt", "China has awful work safety standards" and (a while back) "Russia sure likes to cut pieces out of its neighboring countries". However, this story isn't about Chinese work safety standards, it's about the USA getting access to my bank transactions for no apparent reason so the USA are who gets mentioned.
As for you not wanting foreigners to pollute your pristine, all-WASP neighborhood with our dirty un-American ways: Don't worry; if I emigrate it's to Sweden, where good internet and healthcare are cheap and the politicians aren't.
It mainly proves how PC can muddle language to the point where it doesn't fulfill its intended purpose. FO3 can justify the term - the character is from America - but what if other games that aren't as clear about the character being American use the term "African American" to refer to someone of dark skin? Maybe someone who's never been to the States?
The whole term only makes sense for a subset of a subset of all black people. What about someone of Aboriginal descent who lives in Europe and comes to the States on a holiday trip? Is he an African American even though he and his ancestors haven't been to Africa for millennia and he isn't an American citizen? Or the already mentioned white person from Africa who has migrated to the States - is he an African American but not an African American?
Also, how long until "African American" becomes politically uncorrect? Racial terminology is a good example of the PC treadmill.
Do note that in West Europe "the rural sticks" usually means something to the tune of "a town of 1200 people some 50 kilometers from the next big city". Over here it's usually economical to have wastewater plants all over the place (plus it's hard to uphold our tap water standards otherwise; tap water one of the most stictly regulated comestibles in Germany). So, yeah, I do look at those problems from a different perspective.
Depends on how fast we can get our hands at some Elerium-115.