This kind of technology and power in the hands of a certain historical figure from 1930's Europe is indeed something that would worry many. In this day and age, conspiracy theorists aside, a majority of law abiding citizens should have no problem with this technology, provided they are educated and informed on its use.
Normally I would agree with you, except for another very modern -- looking for "indicators" of future illegality rather than convictions for past illegality. This isn't just an issue of "terrorism", but anywhere that "safety" is a concern -- positive vetting for working with children, with the elderly, money, etc. UK legislation will very soon require a very large proportion of the population to be vetted as to whether they are safe to work with children -- possibly right down to the plumber who fixes the school toilets. It is not only convictions that would show up in that vetting, but also unproven accusations. That's right, in the UK you are no longer considered fully "innocent until proven guilty", but must be above reproach to be allowed to work in many roles. And some teachers' careers have been ended by false accusations. The same may soon be true for working in any job involving money. Now consider if those vetting organisations have access to your internet history, together with some statistics about the "surfing habits of registered offenders", and can see who has visited adult pornography sites (is that an indicator of risk to children?) or gambling websites (it that an indicator of potential fraud in the future?). For me personally, you're right and I probably don't have anything to fear -- I happen to lead as socially conservative a life as you're likely to find (just not interested in gambling, etc). But that doesn't mean I have no problem with surveillance inside the home -- the growing trend for the innocent being ruled out of society as "potentially guilty in the future" is something I do have a political problem with.
Then you, for one, don't understand that there is a difference between the "powers" in the offline world and the ones in the "online" world. Even if you wanted you need to put lots of effort into pinpointing someone's location in real life.
That's nonsense. For starters, 90% of the time you are either at your home address (which the government has a record of) or your place of employment (which they also have a record of). And for the remaining time, an ordinary police constable knocking on your door and asking your partner "Hello, we're looking for Mr Bloggs. Do you know where he is right now?" usually reveals the answer. "Pinpointing someone's location in real life" is only hard if that person is already on the run from the law and their friends wish to help them hide and won't answer questions -- and even then it rarely takes the cops that long to catch up with you. "Ooh, what a surprise, he was hiding over at his best mate's house". It's only for the really hard cases they need to look at things like your cell phone signal, number-plate recognition from your car passing tollways and congestion charging zones, or tracing your movements from CCTV camera to CCTV camera (as was done to retrace the movement of the 7/7 bombers).
Religion does exist in video games. They aren't usually the same religions as we have meatside, however. I think that's what people are complaining about. The problem is if you let, say, World of Warcraft priests worship the Christian god, then people will automatically boycott when it doesn't follow a particular sect's beliefs
There's a blocker that comes up before that -- the game designers don't like to do it. The issue is that the game designer is the game's Creator -- he designs the rules, even intervenes with server-upgrades. It, therefore, starts feeling a bit blasphemous to ascribe your own "game-supernatural" actions of creation to God. So, game designers and programmers who believe in God don't want to put their words into His mouth; and the atheist ones don't want God in their game anyway.
... Unbelievable. You come within a hair's breadth of the astonishingly-obvious-yet-no-one-sees-it fact that the problem is not religion, it is extremism
I'm going to go out on a limb here (with this interjection) and suggest that the problem is actually "utilitarianism". The Communist purges were explicitly "for the greater good of the greater many". The Spanish inquisition, meanwhile was justified by the utilitarian argument that "saving someone from hell outweighed torturing them to do so".
One reason, then, why the communist and atheist massacres tend to be more sweeping and vicious than religious atrocities, is that religion tends to discourage utilitarianism. (In Christianity's case, explicitly derides it as "the wisdom of man" -- meaning not very wise at all.) Religion, generally, expounds on how you should and should not treat your neighbour (and, in the Christian case, fellow sinner), and leaves the "greater good" questions of how it'll all turn out in the end up to God. Utilitarianism, meanwhile, demands action -- and if taking a million heads will make life better for the billions yet to be born, then that is the action it demands.
There's not a shred of evidence to support the superstitious belief that there's a god or almighty power or to support the various religions. We have no way to say whether Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, or various others have it right.
There is an all-too-popular dodge of trying to turn "no evidence that I accept" into "not a shred of evidence". You may well disregard the evidence and consider it insufficient, inreliable, or downright dodgy (the book "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" is a compendium of some of the evidence that you presumably reject) but others' judgement is not dependent on your judgement. We already know you personally do not consider the evidence reliable -- otherwise you wouldn't be an atheist -- but making grandiose declarations that "there's not a shred of evidence" (because you disagree with it) is, frankly, just self-centredness.
"Spread atheism," my ass. They encouraged fucking pilgrimages to observe the corpsicle of Lenin! Know what they didn't encourage? Skepticism, rationality, or reason! The three cornerstones of atheism.
They created a goddamn religion around themselves and the state, complete with holy relics and faith-based "science." That's not atheism, so stop repeating that drivel.
How does DRM help the BBC provide their services to the taxpayer, better ?
Because one of its services is its support for British programme-makers and independent production companies. Those companies rely partly on revenue from DVD sales and international sales for their survival. So, the BBC's DRM isn't just "because the nasty big-wigs in Hollywood want us to", but also part of their remit to foster artistic industry in the UK. If Kudos, Tiger Aspect, Hat Trick, etc, say they need DRM if content is to be broadcast in better-than-DVD quality, that matters.
A good CEO will make the company many times his own salary by providing business opportunities, contracts, mergers, and direction.
More to the point, a bad CEO can bankrupt the company, so they're usually willing to pay a premium to try to make sure they don't get a dud. A bad programmer, meanwhile, ought to be found out by the test team and his colleagues doing code reviews and do very little damage.
Why would it? How is this in any way different to any other official entity (be it a company, the government, non-profit organisation, or anything else) from claiming copyright over its own logos and symbols. Even "Fair Trade", "Oxfam", and "National Heart Foundation" symbols are copyright. Funnily enough, I can't label this post as "officially endorsed by Bob Geldof" without his permission either, nor can I whack the "National Heart Foundation Approved" logo on it without their permission. (Of course, usual fair use / fair dealing exemptions from copyright in your jurisdiction continue to apply).
So would I be alone in asking "where is the story in this"?
It is obvious that you do not have management/team lead experience. This is because, if I'm a manager and my guys screwed up and must stay late to fix it, I might need to stay with them to make sure they get it done. After all, the sign of a good manager is that he takes responsibility for the performance of the professionals under his watch, in particular if the thing to get done is critical, independently of who screws up.
Which leads to the following: the sign of a professional is that he does what needs to be done to get the job done and to conduct his job for the benefit of the business. BTW, if anyone has a problem with that statement, they should quit their jobs. It is dishonest to accept a check for a job function that is not being completed under that premise.
I might regret saying this but the "which leads to the following" isn't entirely true. As a manager of staff, I do have responsibility and visibility across the whole project. But my staff don't. They don't have the time to each know every last detail about what everybody else is doing and how they are performing; that's my job -- they are trusting me to manage the project to a successful result. If Fred drops the ball, then sure enough I need to find a way to get it picked up. But your last line isn't a very helpful way of approaching that. If you insist to Joe-down-the-corridor that "he should quit" / "is being dishonest" if he isn't happy about missing his son's birthday to pick up Fred's mess at the last minute "because that's what's needed to get the job done" -- that sounds like passing the buck on your responsibility for the project, and unless you are in a very high-paying environment (money covers many sins), it isn't helpful. The way you've phrased it really does sound like you are saying "As manager I have a special responsibility for the whole project; but you work for me so that means YOU have a special responsibility for the whole project, SUCKER!" No, if I need Joe to pick up Fred's mess, and don't want him to hand his notice in the next day, I need to show him the respect of recognising that what I'm asking him to do really is a great effort and will be appreciated -- not "it's just part of your job, what are you complaining about, jump to it". Especially as, let's face it, you usually go to a staff-member you trust to pick up the ball at the last minute -- a person you definitely don't want quitting because they feel they've been ill-treated by their manager.
And while IE 6 may be archaic, if you have an intranet based on people using IE 6 that IE 7+, Firefox or another browser breaks, you either have to upgrade the entire intranet or keep IE 6 around
More to the point, the following scenario tends to happen in large corporate IT...
Users: "IE6 is old, slow, and renders pages incorrectly. We'd like to install a more recent browser. As per IT policy, we are raising a support request to install non-standard software or upgrade the corporate standard image." IT: (thinks) "Bugger, they're asking me to do some work again... hmm..." (types email)
Dear users, In regard of your requests for Firefox or IE8. As this is a user-requested upgrade, we require you to provide a full cost-benefit analysis of the upgrade, taking into account the impact on our corporate agreements with third party hardware and software suppliers (which we will not reveal to you as they are commercial in confidence), a detailed technical analysis of the impact on all internal software infrastructure (including those under development that we won't tell you about), and the cost of manpower to perform the upgrade using specific IT staff's accurate salaries and overheads (which again we will not reveal to you). The analysis must contain a full twenty-page analysis of the benefits including time-in-motion studies. For brevity, however, the entire document must be no longer than half a page. Please deliver in person, in triplicate, printed on unicorn hide rather than paper (the IT analyst is allergic to most paper bleaches). We will then schedule the upgrade in our next user-requested improvement slot, currently scheduled for the year 5000. No there is not a timecode for your work preparing this analysis. best regards, Your helpful IT support team.
Apple is not in a monopoly position, MS is. Different rules apply when you are, specifically about abusing your monopoly power in one area (e.g. operating systems) to muscle your way into another (e.g. web browsers).
Actually, Apple has already attracted EU monopoly attention over iPod/iTunes in the music market in 2007, and is likely to face attention in the smartphone market (iPhone) and handheld computer market (iPod Touch and iPhone) in the future -- both of which of course do bundle Safari and AIUI prevent the installation of third party browsers. You don't necessarily need a 90% share to attract monopoly or competition law attention; for instance Lloyds-TSB and HBOS had to be given special dispensation from some competition considerations in the UK for their merger because it would have given them a 25% share of the mortgage market.
Its about time the Australian government realized that games are not just for kids anymore. Its no more objectionable to have a game that is made for adults than it is to have a movie made for adults, yet some countries think there is a difference
That is an interesting question, and one worthy of research. (Hopefully a kind replier will link some research papers.) However, as movies involve observing, while games involve participating, the scientific default position would be that there probably is a difference unless proved otherwise.
Aside from the usual arguments surrounding the average age of game players and my right to choose my entertainment (within reason), and shoehorning games into less restricted categories (GTA-IV, anyone?), I believe outright banning R18+ games probably increasing the availability of these games to minors.
For games that are available in stores, children are the least likely to be able to afford the games. Relative to adults, your average minor is probably going to pirate a game rather than buy it (regardless of legality and classification).
If you ban R18+ games, then adults are going to pirate the game too - if I want to play a game I can't buy in the store, I know I will. In the day of BitTorrent, more people downloading an item in a geographic area, the more accessible that item becomes in that area.
All they're doing by banning R18+ games, is giving minors more seeders when they go ahead and download it anyway.
Evidence, please.
The empirical evidence from the current regime is that where a game is refused classification, the publisher will almost always make the necessary alterations (toning down certain amounts of gore etc) in order to achieve an MA15+ rating. The current system has thus been reasonably effective -- ensuring that games are made suitable for a 15+ audience, and given that anyone in the 15-18 category is unlikely to be prevented from accessing a title simply by its having a higher rating that is a defensible approach (by which I mean "there is an argument for it" not "it is the correct approach").
To respond to your specific comments -
Children in Australia are very easily able to afford to purchase computer games -- at current prices, a game is likely to be around one to two months' pocket money (not counting additional money from a part-time job, which many 15-18 year olds have).
Regarding BitTorrent, the speed with which a title can be downloaded (ie, the number of active downloaders) isn't actually relevant to availability. There's no part of classification law that says "it's better if you have to leave the download going overnight". The speed of the download isn't difficulty-to-obtain, it's just latency-to-obtain, and I doubt anyone would consider a few extra hours of waiting significant.
In reality, the vast majority of items made illegally available to minors are purchased from shops in defiance of 18+ ratings: cigarettes and alcohol. The number of 16 year-olds who can get a PS3 to play an illegally downloaded game, while large, is much fewer than the number who can get cigarettes illegally from the local store. From an evidence-based perspective, if you want to prevent illegal access by minors, it really is physical availability from shops that should be targeted.
If you don't understand what I mean by trying and failing to prove yourself wrong, your probably need a better understanding of strong inference. I suggest reading The Logic of Scientific Discovery, as it is an excellent book, but there are more cliff note versions available. What it comes down to is that we can't prove things true. We cannot devise a test (or at least nobody has figured out how yet) to prove, 100%, for sure, no questions, that something is true. What we instead to is try to prove things false, we try to falsify theories. We test their predictive ability, trying to find a situation where it fails. If we can't, it's probably a good theory.
That is not actually how most scientific experiments happen -- most experiments really are motivated to seek "evidence for" not "lack of evidence against", because it is "evidence for" that drives citations and impact factor. For instance, consider the standard double-blind clinical trial. The experimental design is looking for a positive effect; it is only the statistical check applied to the result that attempts to disprove a negative (specifically, trying to disprove that it was a chance result). But the experimental design seeking a positive effect actually comes first. If you actually think the scientist writing the paper wanted to prove himself wrong, you are delusional. He wants to provide evidence of an effect that will be cited, and his motivation for disproving sampling bias, gender bias, etc is merely to rebut the predictable complaints of the reviewers. Nobody gets a Nobel prize for saying "bugger, my own unpublished theory doesn't work."
For a more extreme case, consider the question of extraterrestrial life. If the theory is that life can only exist where there is water, then to "try but fail to disprove that theory", NASA should be examining waterless planets hoping to find life that will disprove their theory. But in practice science works by finding evidence for (that's what gets you cited), not lack of evidence against, so NASA would naturally prefer to look at the watery worlds to find evidence to add weight to their theory. Odd as it seems, science in practice is more driven by abduction than induction.
Is it? Physical discipline can be a problem if you take it too far of course, but I was raised with a bit of corporal punishment and looking back I believe that it did me good. It definitely let me know when I was in the wrong and it did no real sort of damage. My parents never took pleasure in doing it and I can honestly say that each time it happened I really had it coming. In my day kids would never act like they do now. Parents have to do their damn job and set boundaries until their kids are old enough to think for themselves.
This is a furphy. "Set boundaries" != "corporal punishment".
Ok -- a disclaimer. I don't want to specifically criticise your parents (I do not know them and do know what extent of physical punishment they used, and in any case they are your parents not mine). However, reading your post as "general advice", I think it is potentially bad advice.
"Did no real sort of damage" is a very vague claim, often used by parents to excuse violence. In reality, it is not the physical harm that is of primary concern -- from personal experience of undergoing physical punishment as a child, yes the bruises really do heal. What is harder to heal is the relationship between the parent and the child. Like it or not, children are fed a rich diet of "violence is not the way to solve your problems" messages from every role model outside the family -- school, government, police, etc. If your child, meanwhile, sees you trying to solve every behavioral problem with violence, you've got a problem. If your child really doesn't "think for himself" you might get away with it, but most smart children will connect the dots and think less of you as a parent for using violence to solve your problems. Suddenly you have a genuine reason for the child not to respect you; they are not merely disobeying you, they believe your actions are morally wrong. You are still their parent, so the child will go to great lengths to forgive you, but nonetheless you've got a recipe for a problematic relationship. In the extreme, they may even feel compelled to disobey you on the moral principle of not giving in to violence.
You can't reason with children like you would with an adult simply because children are NOT adults and do not have mature thought processes yet. Left to their own devices, they will do whatever they want in the immediate moment with no thought of consequences.
Children's thought processes are actually very sophisticated from a very young age. They do not push the boundaries mindlessly -- they do it with deliberate intent. Firstly of establishing what they can and cannot get away with (can I change Daddy's mind by persisting?) and secondly because it captures your attention (if you are disciplining your child, you are paying attention to them). Under-attended children will muck up just to get your attention; and if discipline is the only kind of attention they get, they'll ensure they need plenty of discipline. Far from "no thought of the consequences", those behaviours are very mindful of the consequences -- it's just not the same consequence that you were thinking of. This is where positive parenting programmes have had a great deal of success -- by rewarding positive behaviours with attention rather than rewarding negative behaviours with attention.
Having something published in a journal is not the be-all, end-all, it does not mean that a theory is now correct one and for all time. It means it is time to start wider discussion and testing. The way science works is by trying to prove things wrong. You see phenomena in nature, and you come up with what you think is an explanation for them. You refine said explanation to the point that it makes testable predictions, the sort of thing like "If X occurs, Y will also occur," or whatever. You then set out to try and prove your theory wrong. You test those predictions. You say "Ok, well then let's try making X and see what happens, if we don't get Y, we know that we are wrong." Each time you fail to falsify your theory, you are more sure it is true.
Ahem...
Failing to prove yourself wrong does nothing to prove yourself right. "I have a new theory about quantum mechanics. I went to the pub for five hours and didn't prove myself wrong, now I'm really confident!" It is very easy to fail to prove yourself wrong.
Publication is not the preferred route for untested theories -- the proportion of experiments that are ever independently reproduced is pretty much zero. Publish crap, people will cite crap, and we have a nice crap-producing machine.
There are lots of things which are perfectly legal yet something one would prefer to keep private.
If you're after an example that is perhaps more rhetorically useful (and safe for work), try the fact that Google requires all its staff to sign confidentiality clauses in their contracts and has NDAs with its partners, not just about inventions but also about business plans -- does that mean that Google's business is something that it shouldn't be doing, or is Eric planning on striking all those confidentiality contracts?
Having a wife who went through Catholic schools, and 2 kids who went to Catholic high school, I can say that it's at least partly because they don't confuse religion with education. There are religion classes, but they're NOT in the science classes. Plus before you get too upset about religion classes, in some other school they might be counted under ethics or some form of social studies. Neither of my kids nor my wife complained about the religion classes being some form of indoctrination. (My wife is a self-professed liberal, and proud of it.)
I've always been a little concerned that the campaigners to keep religion and existential philosophy out of schools just haven't understood education -- you can't actually control what the children are thinking about or the questions they will internally ask. If you tell children about the evolutionary origins of humanity, and you think the only questions they will want to ask are little details about the scientific method, then you are ridiculously unrealistic. And if you think a policy of "no philosophical or religious discussion allowed" will stop children from thinking and internally asking those religious/existential questions, then frankly you are deluded. And if you wish to stop those questions from being discussed in class, then frankly you might as well put up a sign saying "only government pre-approved questions may be asked, and only government pre-approved answers will be given" -- the children will simply decide that you are unresponsive to their questions and needs, will disengage, and will cease looking to you for any answers. In short, you'll turn them off science in short order. The empirical evidence in Europe is that science applications to universities appear to have fallen as society and schools have become more secular. And the empirical evidence in Europe is that it seems to be the religious schools that produce the best science results -- and part of that is that they most certainly do make space in their schools (in RE classes) for discussion of what (let's face it) society has always called "the big questions" about the meaning of life. They do not expect their students to be little boxed automatons parroting the pre-approved questions; they expect them to think about everything, not just science.
Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites.
I think you're missing the point of Murdoch and Ballmer's pitch. At the moment, the public believe that Google is the best search site. But if they start to hear that Google doesn't include a lot of household name sites -- like The Times, The New York Times, The Sun, Sky News, Fox News, etc -- that perception suffers actually even if you are not a Times reader. If Google is missing a famous (whether or not frequently visited) chunk of the web, but Bing has it, then that hurts Google's reputation. And Google lives or dies by reputation -- despite all they do with email etc, there is very little "vendor lock-in" to a search box. I think it's a smart play by Ballmer -- he's decided that whether or not they could beat Google on quality, that alone probably wouldn't be enough to win back the market -- so they'll try to beat them on perceived coverage as well.
Simply using the name in a commercial capacity is enough to get an unregistered trademark. However, the problem is that he is not selling the Go! programming language. If it's not a commercial entity, then trademark doesn't apply.
He has a book for sale on the programming language. That sounds like using the name in a commercial capacity to me.
For very narrow queries, where you already know ahead of time Wulfram Alpha supports it, you can get useful structured information out of it. For example, if you look up a first name or surname, you can get information on popularity and geographic distribution and such. But the only time I've ever gotten useful information like that is when I already knew that it supported a particular kind of query. That's less like a search engine, and more like just querying a database. There have always been special-purpose databases on the internet where you can look up specific information, once you know that such a database exists for a particular kind of fact. What Alpha utterly fails to do is answer any useful proportion of queries without already knowing in advance exactly what you need to query and what syntax to use when doing so.
Surely that's precisely the point of including Alpha's results in Bing (a plain old search engine). If users don't think Alpha will support a query, they'll usually just search the web hoping someone has answered a similar question before on a forum somewhere. Net result, not many people use Alpha because they don't know what it supports so they usually go straight to the plain old search engine instead. But if a plain old search engine can push suitable queries to Alpha, then you've actually got something useful -- if Alpha doesn't support the query then the user gets web search results and is no worse off (they don't have to repeat their query in a different engine, prejudices against Bing aside), and if it does support it they've probably got a better result.
Won't necessarily "beat Google", of course, but it does seem to be a sensible combination.
And hey, at least some marketing types are happy because they got to use the word "synergy" in a lot of meetings!
One of my professors once said (in lecture) that students are probably the only consumer group that mostly wants less for their money. Its sad but true that most students these days care more about the piece of paper they receive at the "end" of their "education" than they do about actually learning anything. The universities exploit that by making sure that they get less while charging top dollar in tuition and paying the professors squat. Surely this cannot continue forever before the corporations figure out that degrees from "prestigious" universities do not live up to their mythical reputations.
Actually this isn't true. Student's aren't irrationally "there for the piece of paper"; they are perfectly rationally "there for the salary that piece of paper can bring". The corporations meanwhile often regard the material the student has been taught as only a secondary factor for elite universities; the main factor is that the student has been through a very competitive process to get into that university, and has performed well compared to his (similarly highly selected) peers over a multi-year degree. "He's an MIT grad; he must be bright." Prestigious universities are "elite" primarily not because they are better at teaching but because they have elite students. Effectively they are not primarily educational institutions for students, but a shortcut through the modern social class system.
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This kind of technology and power in the hands of a certain historical figure from 1930's Europe is indeed something that would worry many. In this day and age, conspiracy theorists aside, a majority of law abiding citizens should have no problem with this technology, provided they are educated and informed on its use.
Normally I would agree with you, except for another very modern -- looking for "indicators" of future illegality rather than convictions for past illegality. This isn't just an issue of "terrorism", but anywhere that "safety" is a concern -- positive vetting for working with children, with the elderly, money, etc. UK legislation will very soon require a very large proportion of the population to be vetted as to whether they are safe to work with children -- possibly right down to the plumber who fixes the school toilets. It is not only convictions that would show up in that vetting, but also unproven accusations. That's right, in the UK you are no longer considered fully "innocent until proven guilty", but must be above reproach to be allowed to work in many roles. And some teachers' careers have been ended by false accusations. The same may soon be true for working in any job involving money. Now consider if those vetting organisations have access to your internet history, together with some statistics about the "surfing habits of registered offenders", and can see who has visited adult pornography sites (is that an indicator of risk to children?) or gambling websites (it that an indicator of potential fraud in the future?). For me personally, you're right and I probably don't have anything to fear -- I happen to lead as socially conservative a life as you're likely to find (just not interested in gambling, etc). But that doesn't mean I have no problem with surveillance inside the home -- the growing trend for the innocent being ruled out of society as "potentially guilty in the future" is something I do have a political problem with.
Then you, for one, don't understand that there is a difference between the "powers" in the offline world and the ones in the "online" world. Even if you wanted you need to put lots of effort into pinpointing someone's location in real life.
That's nonsense. For starters, 90% of the time you are either at your home address (which the government has a record of) or your place of employment (which they also have a record of). And for the remaining time, an ordinary police constable knocking on your door and asking your partner "Hello, we're looking for Mr Bloggs. Do you know where he is right now?" usually reveals the answer. "Pinpointing someone's location in real life" is only hard if that person is already on the run from the law and their friends wish to help them hide and won't answer questions -- and even then it rarely takes the cops that long to catch up with you. "Ooh, what a surprise, he was hiding over at his best mate's house". It's only for the really hard cases they need to look at things like your cell phone signal, number-plate recognition from your car passing tollways and congestion charging zones, or tracing your movements from CCTV camera to CCTV camera (as was done to retrace the movement of the 7/7 bombers).
Oh, please. Every single Christian argument I've ever read (and trust me, I've read a few), boils down to some variation on the following:
You confuse the words "argument" and "evidence"; they are not synonymous.
Religion does exist in video games. They aren't usually the same religions as we have meatside, however. I think that's what people are complaining about. The problem is if you let, say, World of Warcraft priests worship the Christian god, then people will automatically boycott when it doesn't follow a particular sect's beliefs
There's a blocker that comes up before that -- the game designers don't like to do it. The issue is that the game designer is the game's Creator -- he designs the rules, even intervenes with server-upgrades. It, therefore, starts feeling a bit blasphemous to ascribe your own "game-supernatural" actions of creation to God. So, game designers and programmers who believe in God don't want to put their words into His mouth; and the atheist ones don't want God in their game anyway.
... Unbelievable. You come within a hair's breadth of the astonishingly-obvious-yet-no-one-sees-it fact that the problem is not religion, it is extremism
I'm going to go out on a limb here (with this interjection) and suggest that the problem is actually "utilitarianism". The Communist purges were explicitly "for the greater good of the greater many". The Spanish inquisition, meanwhile was justified by the utilitarian argument that "saving someone from hell outweighed torturing them to do so".
One reason, then, why the communist and atheist massacres tend to be more sweeping and vicious than religious atrocities, is that religion tends to discourage utilitarianism. (In Christianity's case, explicitly derides it as "the wisdom of man" -- meaning not very wise at all.) Religion, generally, expounds on how you should and should not treat your neighbour (and, in the Christian case, fellow sinner), and leaves the "greater good" questions of how it'll all turn out in the end up to God. Utilitarianism, meanwhile, demands action -- and if taking a million heads will make life better for the billions yet to be born, then that is the action it demands.
There's not a shred of evidence to support the superstitious belief that there's a god or almighty power or to support the various religions. We have no way to say whether Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, or various others have it right.
There is an all-too-popular dodge of trying to turn "no evidence that I accept" into "not a shred of evidence". You may well disregard the evidence and consider it insufficient, inreliable, or downright dodgy (the book "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" is a compendium of some of the evidence that you presumably reject) but others' judgement is not dependent on your judgement. We already know you personally do not consider the evidence reliable -- otherwise you wouldn't be an atheist -- but making grandiose declarations that "there's not a shred of evidence" (because you disagree with it) is, frankly, just self-centredness.
"Spread atheism," my ass. They encouraged fucking pilgrimages to observe the corpsicle of Lenin! Know what they didn't encourage? Skepticism, rationality, or reason! The three cornerstones of atheism.
They created a goddamn religion around themselves and the state, complete with holy relics and faith-based "science." That's not atheism, so stop repeating that drivel.
Ah, this is where you pretend you can disown the "bad atheists" as not really atheist... I mean, it's not as if modern day atheists would have modern day shrines where worhippers can buy idols of their gods.
How does DRM help the BBC provide their services to the taxpayer, better ?
Because one of its services is its support for British programme-makers and independent production companies. Those companies rely partly on revenue from DVD sales and international sales for their survival. So, the BBC's DRM isn't just "because the nasty big-wigs in Hollywood want us to", but also part of their remit to foster artistic industry in the UK. If Kudos, Tiger Aspect, Hat Trick, etc, say they need DRM if content is to be broadcast in better-than-DVD quality, that matters.
A good CEO will make the company many times his own salary by providing business opportunities, contracts, mergers, and direction.
More to the point, a bad CEO can bankrupt the company, so they're usually willing to pay a premium to try to make sure they don't get a dud. A bad programmer, meanwhile, ought to be found out by the test team and his colleagues doing code reviews and do very little damage.
won't have ANY negative ramifications...
Why would it? How is this in any way different to any other official entity (be it a company, the government, non-profit organisation, or anything else) from claiming copyright over its own logos and symbols. Even "Fair Trade", "Oxfam", and "National Heart Foundation" symbols are copyright. Funnily enough, I can't label this post as "officially endorsed by Bob Geldof" without his permission either, nor can I whack the "National Heart Foundation Approved" logo on it without their permission. (Of course, usual fair use / fair dealing exemptions from copyright in your jurisdiction continue to apply).
So would I be alone in asking "where is the story in this"?
It is obvious that you do not have management/team lead experience. This is because, if I'm a manager and my guys screwed up and must stay late to fix it, I might need to stay with them to make sure they get it done. After all, the sign of a good manager is that he takes responsibility for the performance of the professionals under his watch, in particular if the thing to get done is critical, independently of who screws up. Which leads to the following: the sign of a professional is that he does what needs to be done to get the job done and to conduct his job for the benefit of the business. BTW, if anyone has a problem with that statement, they should quit their jobs. It is dishonest to accept a check for a job function that is not being completed under that premise.
I might regret saying this but the "which leads to the following" isn't entirely true. As a manager of staff, I do have responsibility and visibility across the whole project. But my staff don't. They don't have the time to each know every last detail about what everybody else is doing and how they are performing; that's my job -- they are trusting me to manage the project to a successful result. If Fred drops the ball, then sure enough I need to find a way to get it picked up. But your last line isn't a very helpful way of approaching that. If you insist to Joe-down-the-corridor that "he should quit" / "is being dishonest" if he isn't happy about missing his son's birthday to pick up Fred's mess at the last minute "because that's what's needed to get the job done" -- that sounds like passing the buck on your responsibility for the project, and unless you are in a very high-paying environment (money covers many sins), it isn't helpful. The way you've phrased it really does sound like you are saying "As manager I have a special responsibility for the whole project; but you work for me so that means YOU have a special responsibility for the whole project, SUCKER!" No, if I need Joe to pick up Fred's mess, and don't want him to hand his notice in the next day, I need to show him the respect of recognising that what I'm asking him to do really is a great effort and will be appreciated -- not "it's just part of your job, what are you complaining about, jump to it". Especially as, let's face it, you usually go to a staff-member you trust to pick up the ball at the last minute -- a person you definitely don't want quitting because they feel they've been ill-treated by their manager.
And while IE 6 may be archaic, if you have an intranet based on people using IE 6 that IE 7+, Firefox or another browser breaks, you either have to upgrade the entire intranet or keep IE 6 around
More to the point, the following scenario tends to happen in large corporate IT...
Users: "IE6 is old, slow, and renders pages incorrectly. We'd like to install a more recent browser. As per IT policy, we are raising a support request to install non-standard software or upgrade the corporate standard image."
IT: (thinks) "Bugger, they're asking me to do some work again... hmm..." (types email)
Dear users,
In regard of your requests for Firefox or IE8. As this is a user-requested upgrade, we require you to provide a full cost-benefit analysis of the upgrade, taking into account the impact on our corporate agreements with third party hardware and software suppliers (which we will not reveal to you as they are commercial in confidence), a detailed technical analysis of the impact on all internal software infrastructure (including those under development that we won't tell you about), and the cost of manpower to perform the upgrade using specific IT staff's accurate salaries and overheads (which again we will not reveal to you). The analysis must contain a full twenty-page analysis of the benefits including time-in-motion studies. For brevity, however, the entire document must be no longer than half a page. Please deliver in person, in triplicate, printed on unicorn hide rather than paper (the IT analyst is allergic to most paper bleaches). We will then schedule the upgrade in our next user-requested improvement slot, currently scheduled for the year 5000. No there is not a timecode for your work preparing this analysis.
best regards,
Your helpful IT support team.
Apple is not in a monopoly position, MS is. Different rules apply when you are, specifically about abusing your monopoly power in one area (e.g. operating systems) to muscle your way into another (e.g. web browsers).
Actually, Apple has already attracted EU monopoly attention over iPod/iTunes in the music market in 2007, and is likely to face attention in the smartphone market (iPhone) and handheld computer market (iPod Touch and iPhone) in the future -- both of which of course do bundle Safari and AIUI prevent the installation of third party browsers. You don't necessarily need a 90% share to attract monopoly or competition law attention; for instance Lloyds-TSB and HBOS had to be given special dispensation from some competition considerations in the UK for their merger because it would have given them a 25% share of the mortgage market.
Its about time the Australian government realized that games are not just for kids anymore. Its no more objectionable to have a game that is made for adults than it is to have a movie made for adults, yet some countries think there is a difference
That is an interesting question, and one worthy of research. (Hopefully a kind replier will link some research papers.) However, as movies involve observing, while games involve participating, the scientific default position would be that there probably is a difference unless proved otherwise.
Aside from the usual arguments surrounding the average age of game players and my right to choose my entertainment (within reason), and shoehorning games into less restricted categories (GTA-IV, anyone?), I believe outright banning R18+ games probably increasing the availability of these games to minors.
For games that are available in stores, children are the least likely to be able to afford the games. Relative to adults, your average minor is probably going to pirate a game rather than buy it (regardless of legality and classification).
If you ban R18+ games, then adults are going to pirate the game too - if I want to play a game I can't buy in the store, I know I will. In the day of BitTorrent, more people downloading an item in a geographic area, the more accessible that item becomes in that area.
All they're doing by banning R18+ games, is giving minors more seeders when they go ahead and download it anyway.
Evidence, please.
The empirical evidence from the current regime is that where a game is refused classification, the publisher will almost always make the necessary alterations (toning down certain amounts of gore etc) in order to achieve an MA15+ rating. The current system has thus been reasonably effective -- ensuring that games are made suitable for a 15+ audience, and given that anyone in the 15-18 category is unlikely to be prevented from accessing a title simply by its having a higher rating that is a defensible approach (by which I mean "there is an argument for it" not "it is the correct approach").
To respond to your specific comments -
Children in Australia are very easily able to afford to purchase computer games -- at current prices, a game is likely to be around one to two months' pocket money (not counting additional money from a part-time job, which many 15-18 year olds have).
Regarding BitTorrent, the speed with which a title can be downloaded (ie, the number of active downloaders) isn't actually relevant to availability. There's no part of classification law that says "it's better if you have to leave the download going overnight". The speed of the download isn't difficulty-to-obtain, it's just latency-to-obtain, and I doubt anyone would consider a few extra hours of waiting significant.
In reality, the vast majority of items made illegally available to minors are purchased from shops in defiance of 18+ ratings: cigarettes and alcohol. The number of 16 year-olds who can get a PS3 to play an illegally downloaded game, while large, is much fewer than the number who can get cigarettes illegally from the local store. From an evidence-based perspective, if you want to prevent illegal access by minors, it really is physical availability from shops that should be targeted.
If you don't understand what I mean by trying and failing to prove yourself wrong, your probably need a better understanding of strong inference. I suggest reading The Logic of Scientific Discovery, as it is an excellent book, but there are more cliff note versions available. What it comes down to is that we can't prove things true. We cannot devise a test (or at least nobody has figured out how yet) to prove, 100%, for sure, no questions, that something is true. What we instead to is try to prove things false, we try to falsify theories. We test their predictive ability, trying to find a situation where it fails. If we can't, it's probably a good theory.
That is not actually how most scientific experiments happen -- most experiments really are motivated to seek "evidence for" not "lack of evidence against", because it is "evidence for" that drives citations and impact factor. For instance, consider the standard double-blind clinical trial. The experimental design is looking for a positive effect; it is only the statistical check applied to the result that attempts to disprove a negative (specifically, trying to disprove that it was a chance result). But the experimental design seeking a positive effect actually comes first. If you actually think the scientist writing the paper wanted to prove himself wrong, you are delusional. He wants to provide evidence of an effect that will be cited, and his motivation for disproving sampling bias, gender bias, etc is merely to rebut the predictable complaints of the reviewers. Nobody gets a Nobel prize for saying "bugger, my own unpublished theory doesn't work."
For a more extreme case, consider the question of extraterrestrial life. If the theory is that life can only exist where there is water, then to "try but fail to disprove that theory", NASA should be examining waterless planets hoping to find life that will disprove their theory. But in practice science works by finding evidence for (that's what gets you cited), not lack of evidence against, so NASA would naturally prefer to look at the watery worlds to find evidence to add weight to their theory. Odd as it seems, science in practice is more driven by abduction than induction.
Is it? Physical discipline can be a problem if you take it too far of course, but I was raised with a bit of corporal punishment and looking back I believe that it did me good. It definitely let me know when I was in the wrong and it did no real sort of damage. My parents never took pleasure in doing it and I can honestly say that each time it happened I really had it coming. In my day kids would never act like they do now. Parents have to do their damn job and set boundaries until their kids are old enough to think for themselves.
This is a furphy. "Set boundaries" != "corporal punishment".
Ok -- a disclaimer. I don't want to specifically criticise your parents (I do not know them and do know what extent of physical punishment they used, and in any case they are your parents not mine). However, reading your post as "general advice", I think it is potentially bad advice.
"Did no real sort of damage" is a very vague claim, often used by parents to excuse violence. In reality, it is not the physical harm that is of primary concern -- from personal experience of undergoing physical punishment as a child, yes the bruises really do heal. What is harder to heal is the relationship between the parent and the child. Like it or not, children are fed a rich diet of "violence is not the way to solve your problems" messages from every role model outside the family -- school, government, police, etc. If your child, meanwhile, sees you trying to solve every behavioral problem with violence, you've got a problem. If your child really doesn't "think for himself" you might get away with it, but most smart children will connect the dots and think less of you as a parent for using violence to solve your problems. Suddenly you have a genuine reason for the child not to respect you; they are not merely disobeying you, they believe your actions are morally wrong. You are still their parent, so the child will go to great lengths to forgive you, but nonetheless you've got a recipe for a problematic relationship. In the extreme, they may even feel compelled to disobey you on the moral principle of not giving in to violence.
You can't reason with children like you would with an adult simply because children are NOT adults and do not have mature thought processes yet. Left to their own devices, they will do whatever they want in the immediate moment with no thought of consequences.
Children's thought processes are actually very sophisticated from a very young age. They do not push the boundaries mindlessly -- they do it with deliberate intent. Firstly of establishing what they can and cannot get away with (can I change Daddy's mind by persisting?) and secondly because it captures your attention (if you are disciplining your child, you are paying attention to them). Under-attended children will muck up just to get your attention; and if discipline is the only kind of attention they get, they'll ensure they need plenty of discipline. Far from "no thought of the consequences", those behaviours are very mindful of the consequences -- it's just not the same consequence that you were thinking of. This is where positive parenting programmes have had a great deal of success -- by rewarding positive behaviours with attention rather than rewarding negative behaviours with attention.
Having something published in a journal is not the be-all, end-all, it does not mean that a theory is now correct one and for all time. It means it is time to start wider discussion and testing. The way science works is by trying to prove things wrong. You see phenomena in nature, and you come up with what you think is an explanation for them. You refine said explanation to the point that it makes testable predictions, the sort of thing like "If X occurs, Y will also occur," or whatever. You then set out to try and prove your theory wrong. You test those predictions. You say "Ok, well then let's try making X and see what happens, if we don't get Y, we know that we are wrong." Each time you fail to falsify your theory, you are more sure it is true.
Ahem...
Failing to prove yourself wrong does nothing to prove yourself right. "I have a new theory about quantum mechanics. I went to the pub for five hours and didn't prove myself wrong, now I'm really confident!" It is very easy to fail to prove yourself wrong.
Publication is not the preferred route for untested theories -- the proportion of experiments that are ever independently reproduced is pretty much zero. Publish crap, people will cite crap, and we have a nice crap-producing machine.
There are lots of things which are perfectly legal yet something one would prefer to keep private.
If you're after an example that is perhaps more rhetorically useful (and safe for work), try the fact that Google requires all its staff to sign confidentiality clauses in their contracts and has NDAs with its partners, not just about inventions but also about business plans -- does that mean that Google's business is something that it shouldn't be doing, or is Eric planning on striking all those confidentiality contracts?
Surely this is the topic where the moderation ought to be "+1 Troll".
(And if it's a troll, I'm guessing it's +1 to the strength stat.)
Having a wife who went through Catholic schools, and 2 kids who went to Catholic high school, I can say that it's at least partly because they don't confuse religion with education. There are religion classes, but they're NOT in the science classes. Plus before you get too upset about religion classes, in some other school they might be counted under ethics or some form of social studies. Neither of my kids nor my wife complained about the religion classes being some form of indoctrination. (My wife is a self-professed liberal, and proud of it.)
I've always been a little concerned that the campaigners to keep religion and existential philosophy out of schools just haven't understood education -- you can't actually control what the children are thinking about or the questions they will internally ask. If you tell children about the evolutionary origins of humanity, and you think the only questions they will want to ask are little details about the scientific method, then you are ridiculously unrealistic. And if you think a policy of "no philosophical or religious discussion allowed" will stop children from thinking and internally asking those religious/existential questions, then frankly you are deluded. And if you wish to stop those questions from being discussed in class, then frankly you might as well put up a sign saying "only government pre-approved questions may be asked, and only government pre-approved answers will be given" -- the children will simply decide that you are unresponsive to their questions and needs, will disengage, and will cease looking to you for any answers. In short, you'll turn them off science in short order. The empirical evidence in Europe is that science applications to universities appear to have fallen as society and schools have become more secular. And the empirical evidence in Europe is that it seems to be the religious schools that produce the best science results -- and part of that is that they most certainly do make space in their schools (in RE classes) for discussion of what (let's face it) society has always called "the big questions" about the meaning of life. They do not expect their students to be little boxed automatons parroting the pre-approved questions; they expect them to think about everything, not just science.
Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites.
I think you're missing the point of Murdoch and Ballmer's pitch. At the moment, the public believe that Google is the best search site. But if they start to hear that Google doesn't include a lot of household name sites -- like The Times, The New York Times, The Sun, Sky News, Fox News, etc -- that perception suffers actually even if you are not a Times reader. If Google is missing a famous (whether or not frequently visited) chunk of the web, but Bing has it, then that hurts Google's reputation. And Google lives or dies by reputation -- despite all they do with email etc, there is very little "vendor lock-in" to a search box. I think it's a smart play by Ballmer -- he's decided that whether or not they could beat Google on quality, that alone probably wouldn't be enough to win back the market -- so they'll try to beat them on perceived coverage as well.
Simply using the name in a commercial capacity is enough to get an unregistered trademark. However, the problem is that he is not selling the Go! programming language. If it's not a commercial entity, then trademark doesn't apply.
He has a book for sale on the programming language. That sounds like using the name in a commercial capacity to me.
For very narrow queries, where you already know ahead of time Wulfram Alpha supports it, you can get useful structured information out of it. For example, if you look up a first name or surname, you can get information on popularity and geographic distribution and such. But the only time I've ever gotten useful information like that is when I already knew that it supported a particular kind of query. That's less like a search engine, and more like just querying a database. There have always been special-purpose databases on the internet where you can look up specific information, once you know that such a database exists for a particular kind of fact. What Alpha utterly fails to do is answer any useful proportion of queries without already knowing in advance exactly what you need to query and what syntax to use when doing so.
Surely that's precisely the point of including Alpha's results in Bing (a plain old search engine). If users don't think Alpha will support a query, they'll usually just search the web hoping someone has answered a similar question before on a forum somewhere. Net result, not many people use Alpha because they don't know what it supports so they usually go straight to the plain old search engine instead. But if a plain old search engine can push suitable queries to Alpha, then you've actually got something useful -- if Alpha doesn't support the query then the user gets web search results and is no worse off (they don't have to repeat their query in a different engine, prejudices against Bing aside), and if it does support it they've probably got a better result.
Won't necessarily "beat Google", of course, but it does seem to be a sensible combination.
And hey, at least some marketing types are happy because they got to use the word "synergy" in a lot of meetings!
One of my professors once said (in lecture) that students are probably the only consumer group that mostly wants less for their money. Its sad but true that most students these days care more about the piece of paper they receive at the "end" of their "education" than they do about actually learning anything. The universities exploit that by making sure that they get less while charging top dollar in tuition and paying the professors squat. Surely this cannot continue forever before the corporations figure out that degrees from "prestigious" universities do not live up to their mythical reputations.
Actually this isn't true. Student's aren't irrationally "there for the piece of paper"; they are perfectly rationally "there for the salary that piece of paper can bring". The corporations meanwhile often regard the material the student has been taught as only a secondary factor for elite universities; the main factor is that the student has been through a very competitive process to get into that university, and has performed well compared to his (similarly highly selected) peers over a multi-year degree. "He's an MIT grad; he must be bright." Prestigious universities are "elite" primarily not because they are better at teaching but because they have elite students. Effectively they are not primarily educational institutions for students, but a shortcut through the modern social class system.