Create a voting machine that reads any press to the touchscreen 60 times per second.
For the first choice, put a low ranking candidate of one party on the right side.
For every other choice, put the second party's candidate on the right side.
Win most of the elections.
One can do it this blatently. Or, one can make the process confusing enough that the voting process is not apparent (switching the side a party's candidate resides on, using different sized portraits/fonts, physical wear causing one side to become more pressure insensitive over time causing non-votes), allowing for intentional or unintentionally manipulation of an election. All the ACLU wants is for people to be able to vote in a way that (1) they're confident that they voted for who they chose and (2) they actually voted for who they chose.
It will be a huge turn for the federal government in US history.
No, it'd be business as usual.
Meaning, this is a blantant example of politicians wanting to use the federal government resources to help primarily large businesses maximize and enforce their revenues.
Well, as I see it, that already holds true. If you're a small business, odds are good that you aren't doing extensive business. That means, if you go to the FBI to complain about already criminal copyright infringement, they'll likely not believe (or bother to do extensive research to verify) that the amount of infringement is monetary significant enough to justify an investigation--you do know there's a monetary losses barrier, right?
Now, will a new czar change this? Not likely. Even if there were no monetary limit, those in power will go after the "high profile" cases to set an example--and that's because the DoJ/FBI realize there's no way they could go after everyone who is clearly infringing (ie, it's not through some asinine, fair use, or edge case). Of course, to prevent most "high profile" cases, you'd have to remove the ability of larger bodies (who through the investment of many people) to own a copyrighted work.
Piracy, like it or not, provides a market balance where in many industries it did not exist before, and most of the politicians know this.
Given that without those politicians piracy couldn't exist (because without copyright, there isn't piracy), I don't think they really care. Oh, and murder, like it or not, provides a market balance to the population size where it did not exist before, but I don't think that's a sound (or relevant) argument to making murder legal or more narrowly defining it to allow "market balance" to exist legally.
"Indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology. It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned." -- Indoctrination, on Wikipedia
What is NCLB all about? Why, standardized testing at the federal level (because even though lots of states have standardized testing, the federal government has taken it upon itself to further standardize standardization). And what happens if you don't give enough "right" answers on tests? You're held back, possibly even deprived of a diploma. What happens if you're inquisitive and ask a lot of questions? You're considered a disturbance, but if you're lucky, you get moved away from the "normal" kids into a "Gifted and Talented" class where you're given more flexibility to do your own research and find your own answers.
For better or worse, most children aren't nurtured to *want* to learn. Instead, children are forced into classrooms and assigned a collection of facts/methods to be further recalled in the near future. Now, through it all, there is *some* leeway to ask questions, and the closer children come to adulthood the more flexability is given to them on what to learn; but, it is not until college that there is significant liberation to learning (a college services as a limited market place of ideas; colleges together severe as a better market place of ideas; the world at large can be a great market place of ideas, but colleges serve as a place to increase the probability of running into people who want to exchange ideas).
Of course, all of this isn't necessarily a horrible thing. Some indoctrination has to occur, reasonably, for a people to maintain a common language. And perhaps even the most reasonable curious child doesn't have the foresight to learn math before they try to learn economics. But, perhaps a system to help guide children instead of, well, indoctrinating them would be better.
So, like it or not, but the DoE does engage in indoctrination. And the DoE has moved further and further into pushing for it (not only at the behest of Bush). Now, how pejoratively you want to take that indoctrination is up to you. I mean, as ironically as the DoD's name is, I do believe there are times for war. So, the list wasn't 100% pejorative. It was mostly meant to be a bit snarky.
PS - The DoE's funding was "diverted" for war just about as much as we're actually paying (not borrowing) for the war in Iraq. Ie, it's all some pretty math on paper and a <sarcasm>great</sarcasm> excuse, but it has no real logic basis in reality.
The only objection to teaching intelligent design in schools is when it is taught in science class, as it is clearly not science.
You just said all opinions are equally valid. Lots of people are of the opinion that it is both true, and science. Who are you to claim different?
You're right, the GP's objection is wrong. The issue is, classes in schools aren't like books. Students can't choose to go to the current science class or the ID science class or the FSM science class. This is because schools are constructed to indoctrinate students rather than provide an open forum for them to learn. This is done because it's believed by most in education that directed learning (like controlled markets) is more efficient than leaving students to learn on their own (like the free market, assuming students are rational actors and learning is a rational act). Or, put simply, you're comparing apples and oranges.
Your bullet points are not absolute requirements for the market to function.
You're right. The GP's bullet points include more elements than necessary. And it leaves out the need of buyers/sellers to be rational.
Furthermore, things like monopolies and uninformed market participants only distort a naive, simplistic analysis of the free market (of which many libertarians are no doubt guilty).
Natural monopolies are, well, natural monopolies; so, they can't be said to distort the market--that doesn't mean they're "fair" by many standards. But, uninformed markets includes things like fraud. And fraud can very drastically distort the market.
They do not hamper the operation of the market itself; in fact they are completely normal and healthy components of it.
"Healthy"? They might be a byproduct of the market. That doesn't make them "healthy".
Take monopolies, for example: laissez-faire economists do not claim that monopolies cannot exist in a free market. Instead, they claim that the free market tends to eliminate monopolies, and does so more efficiently than government regulations can do, since regulations always introduce their own inefficiencies.
Close, but not entirely correct. You forget natural monopolies, for which barriers to entry hamper the ability of other companies to compete. In a real free market, people would be informed enough that they could counter attempts by a natural monopolist to hurt them by boycotting. But, in laissez-faire, there is too much disinformation available and too much disorganization of the people to be able to adequately counter the "unfairness" of pricing.
Just as it is naive to assume an idealized free market, it is also naive to point out certain inefficiencies in the free market and then blithely assume the existence of a similarly idealized form of government intervention to "fix" these inefficiencies.
Um, the GP never made mention of any "idealized form of government intervention". So, this is a strawman argument. While I can't speak for the GP, I would point out that the inefficiencies of less than ideal government intervention can be less than the inefficiencies of a laissez-faire system. One has to look no farther than markets where rampant fraud (because there is little government intervention) causes few people to invest into companies, thereby crippling the market.
All government actions distort the market, and as a result they often do not achieve their stated ends; but many laissez-faire opponents ignore this.
Certainly, not all government intervention has the intended effect. And government intervention certainly isn't always the best approach to resolve inadequacies of a laissez-faire system. But, that doesn't mean there's never a place for government intervention; ie, one can't reasonably treat government intervention as some sort of tabboo to avoid discussing what the "best" thing to do is.
But, then, I consider it more important to be able to live with oneself than to merely live (be it oneself or one's country).
Well, guilt is a luxury of the living. So with that attitude you won't have to face that.
Well, that's the general aim. If I'm constantly feeling guilty by my actions, then either I have a fucked up morality or I'm doing a lot of very objectionable things. Of course, guilt is something that's difficult to avoid completely, most of all because of mistakes, the inability to predict the future, and the inherent property that all humans are vastly lacking in information about the world. Besides, feelings aren't something one has full control over, so even when one knows logically there's no reason to feel guilt, one can still. Of course, that tends to happen more when one is doing something skirting the moral line.
Life is too complex for humans to reasonably pretend simple tautologies about emotions/humans map to reality. That's why I said living a [guilty-free] life is "more important" than living. It's a guideline to strive for. My problem is, a lot of people would rather respond to their fears and avoid dealing with the known abundant guilt that will come until much later--sounds a lot like the US budget, actually. It's incredibly cowardly and lazy.
Its all symptoms of dealing with the symptoms rather than the causes of terrorism.
The problem is, people are trying to solve the problem of terrorism. On top of this is a more pervasive/fundamental problem, the immorality of the populace. As TheVelvetFlamebait points out (indirectly), there will almost always be someone who feels they have a valid reason to attack another people/nation. So, what happens if/when the US turns towards those corrections you suggest? Then the people who now argue against torture will be the ones most pushing it, while the ones for torture now will push towards making the system go their way.
This boils down to, as I said, the immorality of the populace. Individuals feel that part of being strong is being willing to commit an immoral act (aka "being pragmatic") if it is "necessary" to fulfill a "greater" end. And thanks to a representative democracy, that means that politicians are elected to do "the dirty work" for the populace, leading inherently to immoral politicians. But, politicians have their own code of conduct that doesn't involve violence in the government (in general). So, persuasion, guile, etc are used in Congress/Presidentcy/Supreme Court.
Noone's law ideals are perfect, however. So, when something "bad" happens under one's own set of laws, it is easier for already immoral politicians to violently suppress those people instead of either (a) working to fix one's ideals to resolve the problem or (b) accepting that ideals are imperfect and bad things invariably happen no matter how one tries, so merely fixing one's ideals for the sake of change is useless. And again, those politicians who don't respond with violence aren't doing what they're paid/voted-in to do and are eventually removed from office.
This is why "dealing" with terrorism isn't the answer; it is one of those "bad" happenings that invariably occurs. The only thing to really argue is morality/ideals. Torture is self-evidently bad. Violating human rights is self-evidently bad. Trying to boil it down to a cost/benefit analysis to somehow justify going against morality isn't the answer. But, then, I consider it more important to be able to live with oneself than to merely live (be it oneself or one's country). Too bad most Christians don't follow that Christian philosophy.
One flagship game sells 6x more then the other flagship game.
There's no false comparison.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but Super Mario Galaxy isn't a flagship game. That ship sailed after Super Mario Sunshine turned out to be such a disappointment on the Gamecube. If anything, Super Smash Bros Melee was a Gamecube flagship game, and Super Smash Bros Brawl for the Wii could be called one.
Hell, substitute Gears of War and you still can't get Galaxy close.
Now, that's a fair comparison.
Double hell, total game sales the 360 heavily beats Wii.
And another valid point.
If your explanation is people bought the Wii to play Sport, hey that's your call.
And yours:
My actual reason guess would be people bought the Wii because they played Sport. So casual non-gamers bought one,
and they just aren't going to buy many other games. And others, normal gamer types, well, they really didn't like the controller for most games (it's great at bowling and golf sure, not so much many other things), the system itself wasn't fancy, and so it collects dust.
I'd take a wild guess and say "normal gamer types" end up buying a classic controller and are shopping at least a little on the Virtual Console. But, yea, beyond that, normal gamer types probably don't see the interest in using the Wiimote in most games because few games can really use it in non-gimmicky ways.
There's nothing else like the Wii out there. Nothing that gives such a great 1st impression, and yet isn't able to keep up that quality after a few mini-games.
Sounds about right.
The Wii is being sold on sport, and will never be able to move games like the other systems because it's more a novelty then a revolution.
The revolution isn't the hardware. The revolution is either (a) getting so many casual gamers to spend $250 to buy one game or (b) being able to profit potentially at or better than your competitors *just* by selling the console alone. It just happens that the Wii's novelty has the potential for that revolution.
You do realize this is a discussion (meaning, my post, what I replied to, etc...) as to the Wii as a movers of games right? Please consider that when writing things like "false comparision"...
You do realize that when I said "false comparison" I meant comparing the sales of Halo 3 against Galaxy, right? Nearly every XBox 360 owner is now a Halo 3 owner because people bought the XBox 360 to play Halo 3. And nearly every Wii owner bought the Wii to play Wii Sport (sorry about stating the wrong bundled game). Besides, comparing sales figures of only two games has nothing to do with the "attach rate".
and the rest of your reply since it's quite obvious you missed that part.
I think the real thing to consider is this:
Ie, "I don't think 'attach rate' is itself important. Instead, here's what I consider to be important:". I certainly got the part that the discussion was about "attach rate". But, you know, some of us rebuke the whole idea as irrelevant (or, at least, very suspect). It's like how "number of AAA titles" sounds more like marketing spin than anything I really give a shit about. Now, perhaps when gurps_npc's prediction can be tested.... But as it stands, I don't think I've heard any evidence other than "common sense" that attach rate means anything, be it higher profits, more developers, more games, or better games.
I have several opinions on why, but in the end the why (for us) isn't as important as the numbers.
I think the why is actually important because otherwise you get into a false comparison, which I think you have. The reason why Galaxy isn't selling as well as Halo 3 is simple. People didn't buy their Wii to play Galaxy. They bought it to play Wii Play. Just like people bought the XBox 360 to play Halo (3, 4, et al).
I think the real thing to consider is this: is it better to sell 20 million systems (at a loss) and 5 games or 100 million systems bundled with a game (at a profit) and 1 extra game? There are a lot more casual gamers than there are hardcore gamers. It's a shame Nintendo doesn't ramp up production significantly and drop the price. If the relatively poor sales of other Wii games with the continued strong sales of Wii systems says anything, it's that there's a lot of people perfectly willing to spend a one time fee to buy a console to play a few games. (And all the bundle "offers" by stores are there to say that stores really want to sell their backlog inventory of games with that popular game console, customers be-damned.)
The correct statement is, "...people shoot at you when you violently invade/overthrow their corrupt government, which they themselves hate, and peacefully occupy their nation."
Um, last I checked, the US Army wasn't involved merely in self-defense. The fact is, the US has put it upon itself to force Iraq to have some sort of centralized government instead of allowing all its actors to choose some other path. And they have done this by acting as the Iraq central government's army/police, until the time as the US-sanctioned government has its own army/police. Of course, if the US had merely deposed Saddam and left, there would have been a direct civil war instead of the current more minor civil war against the US-backed government/other factions. To make a (possibly bad) analogy, the US went into Iraq, took a stick and rattled a beehive, and now that it's getting stung, it can pretend that it's purely acting defensively; and so now, it's gone on beehive containment raids.
The difference being, had we "violently occupied their nation", as you state, it's very unlikely things where be anywhere near as bad as they are today.
Sure, if we emulated Saddam, I'm sure we could have had the same sort of control he had. But, then, wasn't part of the reason for deposing Saddam because of his method of control? At least, that's the basis for why he was hung.
This is a point which everyone notes was a huge mistake (among many) and you seem to have forgotten. In fact, it's regarded as the largest mistake of the war.
The largest mistake of the war was starting the war. But, to resolve that problem you'd have to go at least as far back as the Iran coup of 1953. Or perhaps it'd suffice to go as far back as the Iraq-Iran war to *not* support Saddam. The real problem is, then, that the huge mistake of today is just one of a string of huge mistakes of the past. And, yes, I realize that hindsight is 20/20. But, then I wasn't the one who started talking about hypotheticals.
How can you blow 629 deaths reported in a poll into 655,000?
The same way you poll 1,000 people to find out who is leading in the American election season, and hence who should be focused on, given more air time, etc. But, I'm sure you're just as angry every time you see other polls treated as more than the opinions/facts of a couple thousand people.
why the hell is a new report guesstimating 1.2 million deaths consistent with a report that guesstimated 655 thousand?
Because more people have died since the last report, the margin of error probably overlaps (though it's not explicitly stated, it's implied), and both apparently use the same methodology to report that a lot of people were killed.
Let's imagine, for a second, that with the knowledge we have today we could go back 5 years and change the punishment put against Microsoft. If that were the case, my biggest suggestion would be to forbid further development of Internet Explorer, unless it was to add new features. As bad as a reputation as Internet Explorer has had over the past 5 years for security vulnerabilities, Microsoft's inability to fix those security vulnerabilities would have left Internet Explorer a pariah years ago.
For those who think such a requirement is unfair, I can only respond, then let Microsoft be held responsible for selling an *admittedly* defective piece of software. If Microsoft tries to claim that IE is part of Windows, that just means they must refund the price of Windows to all who purchased Windows with IE. And if Microsoft tries to claim a price on IE, then Microsoft can refund the price of IE; meanwhile, they can be sued by Spyglass for back-payments (with interest, late fees, etc) for their technological contributions to IE--the only bad part of this being that it'd possibly contradict an existing settlement.
And now that we know what happened with Microsoft, what would I suggest? To forbid further development of Internet Explorer, unless it was to add new features. If there's anything XP SP2 and Vista's IE limited mode have shown us is, Microsoft doesn't believe any more than anyone else that Internet Explorer is remotely bug free. And I'd predict that within five years, no security updates would leave Internet Explorer a pariah.
Are you sure about that? Most non-slashdotters have a wife and one or more kids. Some of them don't have a seperate computer for every family member. I guarantee that if my GF or her young nieces used my computer on a regular basis, I'd want them to have seperate accounts.
Granted, its stretching a bit (which is why I called it a near definition). My main point, though, is that a desktop OS is there to be maximally used by the user(s). Once you have physical access to the machine, all real security bets are off. The only thing multiple user accounts tend to serve, then, is a simple deterrent against snooping or accidental destruction of another user's data.
In any case, on many (most?) desktops, there's one primary users. And in cases where there's not, it's usually a matter of economy instead of actual desire to share a machine. Admittedly, all of this is really beside the point, since a desktop can have multiple user accounts. I just wanted to, for example, point out the simple case of one user since it shows the absurdity of multiple user accounts.
I enter my password quite often in Ubuntu when doing admin-level adjustments.
Forgoing the usual car analogy, I'm going to make an Israel-Palestine analogy*. In response to complaints that Israel tortures people, Alan M. Dershowitz's response amounts to the same argument, other nations in the same position have done it more than Israel has. It doesn't actually address the issue. It merely deflects from the main point.
No country should torture. Torturing less doesn't make you morally superior or abdicate you from your crime. Similarly, no desktop OS should rely on passwords and user accounts to provide security**. A desktop OS, by near definition, is used almost exclusively by one person. As such, pushing multiple user accounts is merely a stopgap/scapegoat meant to lay the responsibility on the user to overcome a serious design flaw***.
*Thank you, PBS.
**This isn't to say a desktop OS can't allow multiple user accounts or can't provide some nature of security through them. But trying to use them as a security mechanism doesn't work. One has to think no further than how when a virus/trojan does "rm -rf ~" or its equivalent in Windows, the user account does very litte for the user.
***By their very nature, UNIX and clones, like Linux, are designed more with the concept of giving one user extreme power and religate most users as subservient, without access to the full potential of the system. This is why Linux and Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista**** fail as desktop OSs. I can't comment about Mac OS X, not having used it. Meanwhile, DOS and Windows 9x fail for providing no security.
****While Windows NT uses a slightly different permission system, based more on VMS than UNIX, it still relies heavily on permissions to solve problems.
I *always* trust SSL, especially certificate authority VeriSign. And it'd be stupid of me to download and install on a Windows machine Microsoft's security update.
The IEEE 754 standard is very well designed and ensures floating-point arithmetic to be accurate, efficient, and compatible across platforms.
And the complaint is that Python isn't precise. Given that a major demand of software is precision and Python was intended to make software development easier, I'd say relying upon the underlying hardware* (be it IEEE 754 or whatever) blindly is crippling.
But it does mean that when there is a precise answer and it is calculatable (I think the former demands the latter), that I do minimally want Python to store it fully in memory and to not print out questionable and/or incorrect answers.
So you'd be happy if Python generates an exact answer when you ask it to compute 1 + 1e-100000 and it allocates several kilobytes of memory to represent the result?
One, yes I want Python to give me an exact answer unless I tell it otherwise. Two, you're making an assumption about an implementation detail (the allocation of "several kilobytes") when there's no basis for that assumption. Further, it's clearly not a requirement of the task, so it's silly to state that as something that's necessary to accept.
Would you still be happy with this behavior if you are doing a numerical computation involving a million numbers?
If that's what I asked of it, yes. But, then, I'm in the class of people who expect computers to do what they're programmed to do.
Exact rational arithmetic is, in general, much slower than floating-point arithmetic, and the cost grows the more operations you perform.
No kidding. The same could be said for bignum math vs integer math. Are you willing to accept that asking for 10**100000+1 might take up "several kilobytes" of memory? Or will you demand that Python overflow and use integers for everything? There's a reason Python is a high level language. And it certainly isn't about being obsessed about implementation details that can change from machine to machine.
*Note: Python may or may not use IEEE 754 (though odds are good it will). Python uses whatever is available in the underlying hardware/C library. A minor point, but it does show that Python isn't going out of its way to comply with the IEEE 754 standard. It just very de facto follows it because so much hardware does/many C libraries do.
The question is, would you also be ok with python being even slower than it is now?
Yes. Using Python is already a trade-off about it being easier to write code over it being optimally efficient.
I am pretty sure (without having searched for it) that an 'exact' class exists for Python, where all math is handled internally, perhaps base 10 to avoid strange rounding errors.
Something like that. The Demical class was created to overcome this problem. In fact, reading from PEP 327, it's clear there's another major problem with Python's "out of the box" floating point support. As it states (from Alex Martelli), "Python (out of the box) doesn't let you have binary floating point numbers with whatever precision you specify: you're limited to what your hardware supplies."
Considering that Python was designed to run on all varities of hardware, having such a core variability with floating point numbers really makes the native floating point support rather risky to ever use. Python's tutorials even include an Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations whose final answer basically reduces to: Pathological cases exist, but use clever % formatting to hide it. Personally, I'd be happier if they used Decimal for floating point arithmetic with "sane" defaults (and yes, I'm punting on what exactly "sane" defaults would be).
Um, perhaps the issue is that people have an expectation that a language like Python doesn't cripple itself with IEEE-754 standards needlessly? It's not very different than how Python is able to handle 2**32+1 or 2**64+1. A major point of Python being "loose" is to prevent having to explicitly take care of underlying data structures to make sure answers "make sense".
Now, does that mean I expect Python to spit out a precise answer for pi? Or not have rounding error when working with pi? No. But it does mean that when there is a precise answer and it is calculatable (I think the former demands the latter), that I do minimally want Python to store it fully in memory and to not print out questionable and/or incorrect answers. And if it fails to do that, then I too wouldn't want to use Python in that capacity.
In the legislature, what party has the majority is what matters, so only looking at the candidate isn't the right thing to do.
Again, being a member of a party doesn't mean believing in a fixed set of beliefs. If it did, then a legislature could be reduced down to one representative of the majority party who would write all the laws. Instead, while there is a lot of party members who will blindly follow whatever their party says most the time, they do have enough individual behavior that slight majorities by one party doesn't insure very much.
But imagine if there was no party to turn to? Instead, you'd see hundreds more overlapping groups that each are defined by votes instead of mostly by party affiliation. Certainly, without a party to turn to to tell politicians how to vote, they would be left to actually try to listen to their constituents to se how they want votes to be cast; or, they would be left to go on their own conscience.
Parties were formed was when people stopped looking to vote for representatives and started looking to monopolize the creation and execution of laws. Personally, I think that's a bad thing, even if it is more effective.
I know it's hard sometimes to find the right party to vote for...
There are pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans. Perhaps the problem is too many people voting for the "right party" instead of the "right person"?
I never said I supported a prison sentence at all, actually. I simply said the damages incurred in cleaning up their mess should be figured into the sentencing.... In this case I do not believe in any prison time, as these are not violent offenders and pose no risk to society as a whole. But I do believe being forced to pay for cleaning up the problem and restoring it to a pre-break in state, either through backup restoration or a full audit, along with a hefty amount of community service is appropriate, and will do more to deter this type of crime than jail would.
I'm sorry if I made it sound that you did support a prison sentence. I was speaking to your point about restitution. The difference between a pre-broken state and a full audit is very extreme, be it in the real world or on a computer. My complaint was how administrators have a control fixation and legislators have a fear fixation, both of which work to place unrealistic punishment on people, be it prison term or financial restitution.
After all, guys who do this kind of hacking always think they are too good at it to ever get caught.
And guys who break into schools "always think they are too good at it to ever get caught". Of course, that's not actually true. Some don't realize they're commiting a crime. Others think the law is unfair (think of parts of the DMCA and those who break it). And others do it because they don't think enough about the consequences. Having said all that, I still don't know the proper punishment. I was merely pointing out that many people here had a warped perspective on the situation. Considering that your response seemed to give consideration that a backup cost and similar would suffice as punishment, I don't count you as one of them.
I'd like to raise two points. One, you're absolutely right. I didn't RTFA, and a full audit likely would take thousands of hours. For that, I appologize.
Two, that's mostly irrelevant. If anything, the passage of time without incident strengthens the evidence that all they did was change grades; with more time, the likelihood of stumbling across further evidence of wrongdoing increases.
To put it in perspective, imagine if they had managed to break into the registrar in the olden days when everything was on paper. They'd still be just as capable of breaking into payroll or any other institute (assuming lax security, that is; but then, that seems to be the crux of the argument). Would you really expect a full audit of *everything* to occur once the information of their edits come to light 3 years later? Or would you reason that, well, if there's no further evidence on them...
In short, there is a demand for unreasonable security steps after the fact when there's an assumption of unreasonably lax security at the start. But "if they were smart", they'd be proactive enough to not need to do a full audit after the fact just like "in real life"; I mean, if payroll is that important to be in a separate building and have a separate key, don't you think you'd do the same for a payroll computer/database and its administrators?
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One can do it this blatently. Or, one can make the process confusing enough that the voting process is not apparent (switching the side a party's candidate resides on, using different sized portraits/fonts, physical wear causing one side to become more pressure insensitive over time causing non-votes), allowing for intentional or unintentionally manipulation of an election. All the ACLU wants is for people to be able to vote in a way that (1) they're confident that they voted for who they chose and (2) they actually voted for who they chose.
MS Office [11] is the standard. OOXML is just the cliffnotes.
No, it'd be business as usual.
Well, as I see it, that already holds true. If you're a small business, odds are good that you aren't doing extensive business. That means, if you go to the FBI to complain about already criminal copyright infringement, they'll likely not believe (or bother to do extensive research to verify) that the amount of infringement is monetary significant enough to justify an investigation--you do know there's a monetary losses barrier, right?
Now, will a new czar change this? Not likely. Even if there were no monetary limit, those in power will go after the "high profile" cases to set an example--and that's because the DoJ/FBI realize there's no way they could go after everyone who is clearly infringing (ie, it's not through some asinine, fair use, or edge case). Of course, to prevent most "high profile" cases, you'd have to remove the ability of larger bodies (who through the investment of many people) to own a copyrighted work.
Given that without those politicians piracy couldn't exist (because without copyright, there isn't piracy), I don't think they really care. Oh, and murder, like it or not, provides a market balance to the population size where it did not exist before, but I don't think that's a sound (or relevant) argument to making murder legal or more narrowly defining it to allow "market balance" to exist legally.
What is NCLB all about? Why, standardized testing at the federal level (because even though lots of states have standardized testing, the federal government has taken it upon itself to further standardize standardization). And what happens if you don't give enough "right" answers on tests? You're held back, possibly even deprived of a diploma. What happens if you're inquisitive and ask a lot of questions? You're considered a disturbance, but if you're lucky, you get moved away from the "normal" kids into a "Gifted and Talented" class where you're given more flexibility to do your own research and find your own answers.
For better or worse, most children aren't nurtured to *want* to learn. Instead, children are forced into classrooms and assigned a collection of facts/methods to be further recalled in the near future. Now, through it all, there is *some* leeway to ask questions, and the closer children come to adulthood the more flexability is given to them on what to learn; but, it is not until college that there is significant liberation to learning (a college services as a limited market place of ideas; colleges together severe as a better market place of ideas; the world at large can be a great market place of ideas, but colleges serve as a place to increase the probability of running into people who want to exchange ideas).
Of course, all of this isn't necessarily a horrible thing. Some indoctrination has to occur, reasonably, for a people to maintain a common language. And perhaps even the most reasonable curious child doesn't have the foresight to learn math before they try to learn economics. But, perhaps a system to help guide children instead of, well, indoctrinating them would be better.
So, like it or not, but the DoE does engage in indoctrination. And the DoE has moved further and further into pushing for it (not only at the behest of Bush). Now, how pejoratively you want to take that indoctrination is up to you. I mean, as ironically as the DoD's name is, I do believe there are times for war. So, the list wasn't 100% pejorative. It was mostly meant to be a bit snarky.
PS - The DoE's funding was "diverted" for war just about as much as we're actually paying (not borrowing) for the war in Iraq. Ie, it's all some pretty math on paper and a <sarcasm>great</sarcasm> excuse, but it has no real logic basis in reality.
The Justice Department tortures. The Defense Department wages wars. The Education department indoctrinates. Sounds like a 1984 trifecta.
You're right, the GP's objection is wrong. The issue is, classes in schools aren't like books. Students can't choose to go to the current science class or the ID science class or the FSM science class. This is because schools are constructed to indoctrinate students rather than provide an open forum for them to learn. This is done because it's believed by most in education that directed learning (like controlled markets) is more efficient than leaving students to learn on their own (like the free market, assuming students are rational actors and learning is a rational act). Or, put simply, you're comparing apples and oranges.
You're right. The GP's bullet points include more elements than necessary. And it leaves out the need of buyers/sellers to be rational.
Natural monopolies are, well, natural monopolies; so, they can't be said to distort the market--that doesn't mean they're "fair" by many standards. But, uninformed markets includes things like fraud. And fraud can very drastically distort the market.
"Healthy"? They might be a byproduct of the market. That doesn't make them "healthy".
Close, but not entirely correct. You forget natural monopolies, for which barriers to entry hamper the ability of other companies to compete. In a real free market, people would be informed enough that they could counter attempts by a natural monopolist to hurt them by boycotting. But, in laissez-faire, there is too much disinformation available and too much disorganization of the people to be able to adequately counter the "unfairness" of pricing.
Um, the GP never made mention of any "idealized form of government intervention". So, this is a strawman argument. While I can't speak for the GP, I would point out that the inefficiencies of less than ideal government intervention can be less than the inefficiencies of a laissez-faire system. One has to look no farther than markets where rampant fraud (because there is little government intervention) causes few people to invest into companies, thereby crippling the market.
Certainly, not all government intervention has the intended effect. And government intervention certainly isn't always the best approach to resolve inadequacies of a laissez-faire system. But, that doesn't mean there's never a place for government intervention; ie, one can't reasonably treat government intervention as some sort of tabboo to avoid discussing what the "best" thing to do is.
Well, that's the general aim. If I'm constantly feeling guilty by my actions, then either I have a fucked up morality or I'm doing a lot of very objectionable things. Of course, guilt is something that's difficult to avoid completely, most of all because of mistakes, the inability to predict the future, and the inherent property that all humans are vastly lacking in information about the world. Besides, feelings aren't something one has full control over, so even when one knows logically there's no reason to feel guilt, one can still. Of course, that tends to happen more when one is doing something skirting the moral line.
Life is too complex for humans to reasonably pretend simple tautologies about emotions/humans map to reality. That's why I said living a [guilty-free] life is "more important" than living. It's a guideline to strive for. My problem is, a lot of people would rather respond to their fears and avoid dealing with the known abundant guilt that will come until much later--sounds a lot like the US budget, actually. It's incredibly cowardly and lazy.
The problem is, people are trying to solve the problem of terrorism. On top of this is a more pervasive/fundamental problem, the immorality of the populace. As TheVelvetFlamebait points out (indirectly), there will almost always be someone who feels they have a valid reason to attack another people/nation. So, what happens if/when the US turns towards those corrections you suggest? Then the people who now argue against torture will be the ones most pushing it, while the ones for torture now will push towards making the system go their way.
This boils down to, as I said, the immorality of the populace. Individuals feel that part of being strong is being willing to commit an immoral act (aka "being pragmatic") if it is "necessary" to fulfill a "greater" end. And thanks to a representative democracy, that means that politicians are elected to do "the dirty work" for the populace, leading inherently to immoral politicians. But, politicians have their own code of conduct that doesn't involve violence in the government (in general). So, persuasion, guile, etc are used in Congress/Presidentcy/Supreme Court.
Noone's law ideals are perfect, however. So, when something "bad" happens under one's own set of laws, it is easier for already immoral politicians to violently suppress those people instead of either (a) working to fix one's ideals to resolve the problem or (b) accepting that ideals are imperfect and bad things invariably happen no matter how one tries, so merely fixing one's ideals for the sake of change is useless. And again, those politicians who don't respond with violence aren't doing what they're paid/voted-in to do and are eventually removed from office.
This is why "dealing" with terrorism isn't the answer; it is one of those "bad" happenings that invariably occurs. The only thing to really argue is morality/ideals. Torture is self-evidently bad. Violating human rights is self-evidently bad. Trying to boil it down to a cost/benefit analysis to somehow justify going against morality isn't the answer. But, then, I consider it more important to be able to live with oneself than to merely live (be it oneself or one's country). Too bad most Christians don't follow that Christian philosophy.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but Super Mario Galaxy isn't a flagship game. That ship sailed after Super Mario Sunshine turned out to be such a disappointment on the Gamecube. If anything, Super Smash Bros Melee was a Gamecube flagship game, and Super Smash Bros Brawl for the Wii could be called one.
Now, that's a fair comparison.
And another valid point.
And yours:
I'd take a wild guess and say "normal gamer types" end up buying a classic controller and are shopping at least a little on the Virtual Console. But, yea, beyond that, normal gamer types probably don't see the interest in using the Wiimote in most games because few games can really use it in non-gimmicky ways.
Sounds about right.
The revolution isn't the hardware. The revolution is either (a) getting so many casual gamers to spend $250 to buy one game or (b) being able to profit potentially at or better than your competitors *just* by selling the console alone. It just happens that the Wii's novelty has the potential for that revolution.
You do realize that when I said "false comparison" I meant comparing the sales of Halo 3 against Galaxy, right? Nearly every XBox 360 owner is now a Halo 3 owner because people bought the XBox 360 to play Halo 3. And nearly every Wii owner bought the Wii to play Wii Sport (sorry about stating the wrong bundled game). Besides, comparing sales figures of only two games has nothing to do with the "attach rate".
Ie, "I don't think 'attach rate' is itself important. Instead, here's what I consider to be important:". I certainly got the part that the discussion was about "attach rate". But, you know, some of us rebuke the whole idea as irrelevant (or, at least, very suspect). It's like how "number of AAA titles" sounds more like marketing spin than anything I really give a shit about. Now, perhaps when gurps_npc's prediction can be tested.... But as it stands, I don't think I've heard any evidence other than "common sense" that attach rate means anything, be it higher profits, more developers, more games, or better games.
I think the why is actually important because otherwise you get into a false comparison, which I think you have. The reason why Galaxy isn't selling as well as Halo 3 is simple. People didn't buy their Wii to play Galaxy. They bought it to play Wii Play. Just like people bought the XBox 360 to play Halo (3, 4, et al).
I think the real thing to consider is this: is it better to sell 20 million systems (at a loss) and 5 games or 100 million systems bundled with a game (at a profit) and 1 extra game? There are a lot more casual gamers than there are hardcore gamers. It's a shame Nintendo doesn't ramp up production significantly and drop the price. If the relatively poor sales of other Wii games with the continued strong sales of Wii systems says anything, it's that there's a lot of people perfectly willing to spend a one time fee to buy a console to play a few games. (And all the bundle "offers" by stores are there to say that stores really want to sell their backlog inventory of games with that popular game console, customers be-damned.)
Um, last I checked, the US Army wasn't involved merely in self-defense. The fact is, the US has put it upon itself to force Iraq to have some sort of centralized government instead of allowing all its actors to choose some other path. And they have done this by acting as the Iraq central government's army/police, until the time as the US-sanctioned government has its own army/police. Of course, if the US had merely deposed Saddam and left, there would have been a direct civil war instead of the current more minor civil war against the US-backed government/other factions. To make a (possibly bad) analogy, the US went into Iraq, took a stick and rattled a beehive, and now that it's getting stung, it can pretend that it's purely acting defensively; and so now, it's gone on beehive containment raids.
Sure, if we emulated Saddam, I'm sure we could have had the same sort of control he had. But, then, wasn't part of the reason for deposing Saddam because of his method of control? At least, that's the basis for why he was hung.
The largest mistake of the war was starting the war. But, to resolve that problem you'd have to go at least as far back as the Iran coup of 1953. Or perhaps it'd suffice to go as far back as the Iraq-Iran war to *not* support Saddam. The real problem is, then, that the huge mistake of today is just one of a string of huge mistakes of the past. And, yes, I realize that hindsight is 20/20. But, then I wasn't the one who started talking about hypotheticals.
The same way you poll 1,000 people to find out who is leading in the American election season, and hence who should be focused on, given more air time, etc. But, I'm sure you're just as angry every time you see other polls treated as more than the opinions/facts of a couple thousand people.
Because more people have died since the last report, the margin of error probably overlaps (though it's not explicitly stated, it's implied), and both apparently use the same methodology to report that a lot of people were killed.
Let's imagine, for a second, that with the knowledge we have today we could go back 5 years and change the punishment put against Microsoft. If that were the case, my biggest suggestion would be to forbid further development of Internet Explorer, unless it was to add new features. As bad as a reputation as Internet Explorer has had over the past 5 years for security vulnerabilities, Microsoft's inability to fix those security vulnerabilities would have left Internet Explorer a pariah years ago.
For those who think such a requirement is unfair, I can only respond, then let Microsoft be held responsible for selling an *admittedly* defective piece of software. If Microsoft tries to claim that IE is part of Windows, that just means they must refund the price of Windows to all who purchased Windows with IE. And if Microsoft tries to claim a price on IE, then Microsoft can refund the price of IE; meanwhile, they can be sued by Spyglass for back-payments (with interest, late fees, etc) for their technological contributions to IE--the only bad part of this being that it'd possibly contradict an existing settlement.
And now that we know what happened with Microsoft, what would I suggest? To forbid further development of Internet Explorer, unless it was to add new features. If there's anything XP SP2 and Vista's IE limited mode have shown us is, Microsoft doesn't believe any more than anyone else that Internet Explorer is remotely bug free. And I'd predict that within five years, no security updates would leave Internet Explorer a pariah.
Granted, its stretching a bit (which is why I called it a near definition). My main point, though, is that a desktop OS is there to be maximally used by the user(s). Once you have physical access to the machine, all real security bets are off. The only thing multiple user accounts tend to serve, then, is a simple deterrent against snooping or accidental destruction of another user's data.
In any case, on many (most?) desktops, there's one primary users. And in cases where there's not, it's usually a matter of economy instead of actual desire to share a machine. Admittedly, all of this is really beside the point, since a desktop can have multiple user accounts. I just wanted to, for example, point out the simple case of one user since it shows the absurdity of multiple user accounts.
Forgoing the usual car analogy, I'm going to make an Israel-Palestine analogy*. In response to complaints that Israel tortures people, Alan M. Dershowitz's response amounts to the same argument, other nations in the same position have done it more than Israel has. It doesn't actually address the issue. It merely deflects from the main point.
No country should torture. Torturing less doesn't make you morally superior or abdicate you from your crime. Similarly, no desktop OS should rely on passwords and user accounts to provide security**. A desktop OS, by near definition, is used almost exclusively by one person. As such, pushing multiple user accounts is merely a stopgap/scapegoat meant to lay the responsibility on the user to overcome a serious design flaw***.
*Thank you, PBS.
**This isn't to say a desktop OS can't allow multiple user accounts or can't provide some nature of security through them. But trying to use them as a security mechanism doesn't work. One has to think no further than how when a virus/trojan does "rm -rf ~" or its equivalent in Windows, the user account does very litte for the user.
***By their very nature, UNIX and clones, like Linux, are designed more with the concept of giving one user extreme power and religate most users as subservient, without access to the full potential of the system. This is why Linux and Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista**** fail as desktop OSs. I can't comment about Mac OS X, not having used it. Meanwhile, DOS and Windows 9x fail for providing no security.
****While Windows NT uses a slightly different permission system, based more on VMS than UNIX, it still relies heavily on permissions to solve problems.
Microsoft warns of hijacked certificates
I *always* trust SSL, especially certificate authority VeriSign. And it'd be stupid of me to download and install on a Windows machine Microsoft's security update.
And the complaint is that Python isn't precise. Given that a major demand of software is precision and Python was intended to make software development easier, I'd say relying upon the underlying hardware* (be it IEEE 754 or whatever) blindly is crippling.
One, yes I want Python to give me an exact answer unless I tell it otherwise. Two, you're making an assumption about an implementation detail (the allocation of "several kilobytes") when there's no basis for that assumption. Further, it's clearly not a requirement of the task, so it's silly to state that as something that's necessary to accept.
If that's what I asked of it, yes. But, then, I'm in the class of people who expect computers to do what they're programmed to do.
No kidding. The same could be said for bignum math vs integer math. Are you willing to accept that asking for 10**100000+1 might take up "several kilobytes" of memory? Or will you demand that Python overflow and use integers for everything? There's a reason Python is a high level language. And it certainly isn't about being obsessed about implementation details that can change from machine to machine.
*Note: Python may or may not use IEEE 754 (though odds are good it will). Python uses whatever is available in the underlying hardware/C library. A minor point, but it does show that Python isn't going out of its way to comply with the IEEE 754 standard. It just very de facto follows it because so much hardware does/many C libraries do.
Yes. Using Python is already a trade-off about it being easier to write code over it being optimally efficient.
Something like that. The Demical class was created to overcome this problem. In fact, reading from PEP 327, it's clear there's another major problem with Python's "out of the box" floating point support. As it states (from Alex Martelli), "Python (out of the box) doesn't let you have binary floating point numbers with whatever precision you specify: you're limited to what your hardware supplies."
Considering that Python was designed to run on all varities of hardware, having such a core variability with floating point numbers really makes the native floating point support rather risky to ever use. Python's tutorials even include an Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations whose final answer basically reduces to: Pathological cases exist, but use clever % formatting to hide it. Personally, I'd be happier if they used Decimal for floating point arithmetic with "sane" defaults (and yes, I'm punting on what exactly "sane" defaults would be).
Um, perhaps the issue is that people have an expectation that a language like Python doesn't cripple itself with IEEE-754 standards needlessly? It's not very different than how Python is able to handle 2**32+1 or 2**64+1. A major point of Python being "loose" is to prevent having to explicitly take care of underlying data structures to make sure answers "make sense".
Now, does that mean I expect Python to spit out a precise answer for pi? Or not have rounding error when working with pi? No. But it does mean that when there is a precise answer and it is calculatable (I think the former demands the latter), that I do minimally want Python to store it fully in memory and to not print out questionable and/or incorrect answers. And if it fails to do that, then I too wouldn't want to use Python in that capacity.
Again, being a member of a party doesn't mean believing in a fixed set of beliefs. If it did, then a legislature could be reduced down to one representative of the majority party who would write all the laws. Instead, while there is a lot of party members who will blindly follow whatever their party says most the time, they do have enough individual behavior that slight majorities by one party doesn't insure very much.
But imagine if there was no party to turn to? Instead, you'd see hundreds more overlapping groups that each are defined by votes instead of mostly by party affiliation. Certainly, without a party to turn to to tell politicians how to vote, they would be left to actually try to listen to their constituents to se how they want votes to be cast; or, they would be left to go on their own conscience.
Parties were formed was when people stopped looking to vote for representatives and started looking to monopolize the creation and execution of laws. Personally, I think that's a bad thing, even if it is more effective.
There are pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans. Perhaps the problem is too many people voting for the "right party" instead of the "right person"?
I'm sorry if I made it sound that you did support a prison sentence. I was speaking to your point about restitution. The difference between a pre-broken state and a full audit is very extreme, be it in the real world or on a computer. My complaint was how administrators have a control fixation and legislators have a fear fixation, both of which work to place unrealistic punishment on people, be it prison term or financial restitution.
And guys who break into schools "always think they are too good at it to ever get caught". Of course, that's not actually true. Some don't realize they're commiting a crime. Others think the law is unfair (think of parts of the DMCA and those who break it). And others do it because they don't think enough about the consequences. Having said all that, I still don't know the proper punishment. I was merely pointing out that many people here had a warped perspective on the situation. Considering that your response seemed to give consideration that a backup cost and similar would suffice as punishment, I don't count you as one of them.
I'd like to raise two points. One, you're absolutely right. I didn't RTFA, and a full audit likely would take thousands of hours. For that, I appologize.
Two, that's mostly irrelevant. If anything, the passage of time without incident strengthens the evidence that all they did was change grades; with more time, the likelihood of stumbling across further evidence of wrongdoing increases.
To put it in perspective, imagine if they had managed to break into the registrar in the olden days when everything was on paper. They'd still be just as capable of breaking into payroll or any other institute (assuming lax security, that is; but then, that seems to be the crux of the argument). Would you really expect a full audit of *everything* to occur once the information of their edits come to light 3 years later? Or would you reason that, well, if there's no further evidence on them...
In short, there is a demand for unreasonable security steps after the fact when there's an assumption of unreasonably lax security at the start. But "if they were smart", they'd be proactive enough to not need to do a full audit after the fact just like "in real life"; I mean, if payroll is that important to be in a separate building and have a separate key, don't you think you'd do the same for a payroll computer/database and its administrators?