An ATM is not all that secure, the security of your transactions comes from their being traceable to a given account and user ID. For voting, which need to be both secure and anonymous, the safeguards which keep ATM transactions safe can't be applied.
I rather enjoyed Consciousness Explained, actually.
What you call "explaining away" is what the scientific community calls "explanation" — "explaining" consciousness by saying "we're conscious because we... have consciousness" isn't an explanation at all.
Dennett takes whole chapters to cover things which "normally" take only a few minutes to explain because the few-minute explanations rely on unspoken assumptions which he is calling into question.
Perhaps the most important thing implicit thing they've done is left the network running when it's obvious to anybody with a brain what it's used for. If they were truly against piracy, they'd shut it down and stop making the software available until they can come out with a new version with filters or other controls.
They can't shut down the network, because they're not operating it. The network is operated by the users of the software. That's the whole point of P2P. There is no central server -- this makes the network more rubust in the event of failure (be that business, legal, or technical failure).
Instead, they are concentrated into holding companies that use them to cash in on patent infringments. Often these patents are neither novel nor non-obvious, so many have no idea they are infringing on a patent before they are slapped with a lawsuit.
Or, and perhaps more to the point, many might have no idea that a technology the picked free out of the infosphere is patent-encumbered, because the patent holder -- whether the original inventor or a holding company -- sees no reason to let the fact that the technology is patented stand in the way of its widespread adoption (yet).
Such "submarine" patents are widespread, especially in products with positive network effects (i.e. the more people use it, the more useful it is, for example the GIF and MP3 formats), and they strike me as somewhat fishy. Using a monopoly to end up with a product that is as popular as it is because it was distributed for free, but that you later assert ownership of, seems, well, like cheating.
I'm not sure how I would adjust the patent system to avoid submarine patents. One problem for IT in particular is that a product may already be widely deployed between when a patent is applied for and when it is granted, and no set of restrictions on how a patented technology may be deployed/marketed can entirely mitigate that.
At a minimum, one would hope that there is some causal relationship between the fact that the original patentee invented a technology and the fact of its later widespread deployment. If, for example, the technology is now widely deployed because 10 other companies also invented it at the same time, while the original patentee sat on it and neither marketed, licensed, or published it, that says two things: It was obvious, and thus unpatentable, after all, and we gave you a patent in return for making this idea available to the wider economy, not just for coming up with it, so if you didn't go to any trouble to make it available then, why should we pay you now?
Hrm, "free"... Gee, Blizzard marketing department, thanks for offering us a free month of game play in exchange for buying a $50 game that is useless without that subscription.
Well, one thing to hope for would be a game that wasn't "useless" without a subscription. There are a number of ways this could be done, each of which has a reason why it will never happen in the commercial MMORPG world:
Give the game a single-player mode -- this will never happen because it wouldn't be the same game, or rather, it wouldn't be marketable as the same game.
Use an existing engine -- actually, I don't know why this couldn't be done, although it might not be as marketable as a game with a new engine. This would be similar to the above scenario except that the single-player mode is a separate game that has already been released. The Warcraft 3 engine could be tweaked into a very interesting MMORPG, for example.
Don't tie the client to the official server -- this will never happen because they make money from subscriptions, which they don't want to lose. "If you want to see our content on our servers, you need a subscription, but if not feel free to play on other random people's servers" is a nice sentiment, but it won't fly as a business model. Players looking for this sort of freedom should look to free or open source engines, as others on this topic have mentioned.
I would love to see a MMORPG that would eat up just a little of my life, priced accordingly.
So is there a way to force edits to a higher standard? That would guarantee that articles improve instead of "regressing to the mean".
How about using a system like Slahdot moderation or meta-moderation to assign scores to edits? The official or default version of a page could be the highest-rated, instead of just the most recent. Building an appropriate set of tools and guidelines for this meta-editing could be tricky, but even a rudimentary version of it could help a lot.
A small population of master/slaves could invade an arbitrariliy large block of TitForTat if evolution was by duplicating winner and removing loser after n iterations.
How? Since the slave serves the master by losing to it, after a few generations the slaves will all be extinct.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, tidal friction causes the moon to drift further and further away — and the Earth to rotate more slowly.
The main reason I'm excited about Bluray is the Japan / US region are the same. I don't have to bother with working around the region locks anymore.
You're excited because the industry cartel's questionable, anti-competitive tactics will be slightly less evil than last time?
An ATM is not all that secure, the security of your transactions comes from their being traceable to a given account and user ID. For voting, which need to be both secure and anonymous, the safeguards which keep ATM transactions safe can't be applied.
I rather enjoyed Consciousness Explained, actually.
What you call "explaining away" is what the scientific community calls "explanation" — "explaining" consciousness by saying "we're conscious because we... have consciousness" isn't an explanation at all.
Dennett takes whole chapters to cover things which "normally" take only a few minutes to explain because the few-minute explanations rely on unspoken assumptions which he is calling into question.
Perhaps the most important thing implicit thing they've done is left the network running when it's obvious to anybody with a brain what it's used for. If they were truly against piracy, they'd shut it down and stop making the software available until they can come out with a new version with filters or other controls.
They can't shut down the network, because they're not operating it. The network is operated by the users of the software. That's the whole point of P2P. There is no central server -- this makes the network more rubust in the event of failure (be that business, legal, or technical failure).
Instead, they are concentrated into holding companies that use them to cash in on patent infringments. Often these patents are neither novel nor non-obvious, so many have no idea they are infringing on a patent before they are slapped with a lawsuit.
Or, and perhaps more to the point, many might have no idea that a technology the picked free out of the infosphere is patent-encumbered, because the patent holder -- whether the original inventor or a holding company -- sees no reason to let the fact that the technology is patented stand in the way of its widespread adoption (yet).
Such "submarine" patents are widespread, especially in products with positive network effects (i.e. the more people use it, the more useful it is, for example the GIF and MP3 formats), and they strike me as somewhat fishy. Using a monopoly to end up with a product that is as popular as it is because it was distributed for free, but that you later assert ownership of, seems, well, like cheating.
I'm not sure how I would adjust the patent system to avoid submarine patents. One problem for IT in particular is that a product may already be widely deployed between when a patent is applied for and when it is granted, and no set of restrictions on how a patented technology may be deployed/marketed can entirely mitigate that.
At a minimum, one would hope that there is some causal relationship between the fact that the original patentee invented a technology and the fact of its later widespread deployment. If, for example, the technology is now widely deployed because 10 other companies also invented it at the same time, while the original patentee sat on it and neither marketed, licensed, or published it, that says two things: It was obvious, and thus unpatentable, after all, and we gave you a patent in return for making this idea available to the wider economy, not just for coming up with it, so if you didn't go to any trouble to make it available then, why should we pay you now?
Hrm, "free"... Gee, Blizzard marketing department, thanks for offering us a free month of game play in exchange for buying a $50 game that is useless without that subscription.
Well, one thing to hope for would be a game that wasn't "useless" without a subscription. There are a number of ways this could be done, each of which has a reason why it will never happen in the commercial MMORPG world:
I would love to see a MMORPG that would eat up just a little of my life, priced accordingly.
postgreSnot runs faster
Is running really what we want Snot to be doing?
So is there a way to force edits to a higher standard? That would guarantee that articles improve instead of "regressing to the mean".
How about using a system like Slahdot moderation or meta-moderation to assign scores to edits? The official or default version of a page could be the highest-rated, instead of just the most recent. Building an appropriate set of tools and guidelines for this meta-editing could be tricky, but even a rudimentary version of it could help a lot.
Our moon's atmosphere pretty much == space void. So, erh, yes.
Not an atmosphere thicker than our moon's atmosphere, an atmosphere thicker than our (Earth's) atmosphere.
How? Since the slave serves the master by losing to it, after a few generations the slaves will all be extinct.