"Theories" you call them? More like speculations and attempts to give some degree of credibility to the one tribal myth that 3 billion people happen to cling to. I'd like to see anyone spend this amount of effort on Little Red Riding Hood.
I doubt I, or anyone I know, have ever done anything that could be considered suspicious with regards to terrorism.
You have no idea what counts as suspicious for terrorism these days. You can be a Muslim or have an Arab parent or have been to the Middle East or have attended a peace rally or even just make numerous references to the US constitution to be noticed and given a database entry that will stay forever. And if you share the name or adress of someone who does, that is frequently enough.
Of course this dilutes the "terrorist" label for beyond usability. I guess less than a percent of a percent of the people who fulfill these criteria have even committed violent acts of terrorism. But that's fine because the suspicion system has long ceased to be a means of catching those. It is now a multi-purpose government tool that serves for everything from law enforcement to garnering support for war.
If whoever did this - at least some of them - were stupid enough to leave traceable IPs, they'll go to prison. And they deserve it. And if it is because some trolls simply didn't see that somewhere beyond the limit of decency was another limit, a legal one, they deserve to learn the hard way.
I'm angry. Not angry enough to be happy with the various means of online surveillance that law enforcement has appropriated, but angry enough to hwant to see them used, fast.
So, since everyone is going to watch their pr0n videos on paper now, where are they going to store finished prints? Use them as wallpaper tiles? Or, since the sheets are connected, do semi-tasteful pranks involving rolls of the stuff and hundred-storey buildings?
Teachers can't quit. Almost all teachers are at their top productivity right when they start the job, and steadily lose from there. This is true both because they receive very little on-job qualification, and because teaching is an extremely stressful and unthankful job (a highly disproportionate number of people in psychological care are ex-teachers). Worse, teacher qualifications aren't good for much else - they have such a broad knowledge they will rarely be qualified for the highly-specialized professions of today. So to lose a teaching position will very frequently mean a forced career change, and a dramatic fall down the income ladder.
Any even more endangered position (such as being known to be worth less salary than others), is much too close to the low-end job market to be comfortable. So - the union isn't protesting just to spite us. It doesn't prefer inefficiency without a cause. It just has to fight for the very future of its members.
Us relatively high paid IT guys, who haven't seen the poverty line from below in most cases, and who can always train themselves something new, tend to ignore how soul-crushing the lack of a professional perspective is. You know what? The job market isn't free. There are huge barriers to entry, especially for people who are, neurologically, too old to learn a new profession. So what the union does isn't protection of assets, it is fight for survival. You need not respect that, but you'd gain insight into their actions by understanding that.
The solution? Why, on-job qualification programs for teachers, of course. But that's a long-term solution. We don't do that unless re-election is certain.
Why do I say this? Just to make clear this new ruling is just a small symptom of a much wider problem. It shouldn't surprise us in any way, but merely drive home the point Turkey is currently rather distant from European ideas of how to apply state power. More insidiously, this new conflict also points at the ever-increasing difficulty of isolating minority opinions from outside critique - the only way to do it, ultimately, is the North Korean route. I don't think Turkey will do that - they have a very proud and nationalistic government, but it is not a dictatorship with the power to force the ever-increasing price of its ego issues on all of the population.
MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
But MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
But MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
*head explodes*
Scientific literature is now mainly published in digital form and all the infrastructure that paper copies require is increasingly obsolete. Now we still live in the ruins of the time when printing mattered: we have rivalling databases who charge money from "publishers" (just a guy with Office and Outlook Express, in some cases) who in turn charges money from authors. In many cases, having published at a particular journal before or knowing who's probably going to review you has entirely too much influence on what gets accepted. People still insist on distributing their papers as read-only PDFs. The whole system ceases to make sense as a market, and it never made sense as an infrastructure. If all of this luggage was finally done away with and replaced with a state-funded, largely automated, high capacity system that was available from anywhere, lots of highly competent people would have more time to devote to research. The difference such a system would make for scholars is akin to the difference that Wikipedia makes for laymen.
I know what's suggested here wouldn't be quite that, but it'd be the second to last step before we arrive at a system where free application and publication, anonymous worldwide peer review and free access to all publications speed up research considerably.
However, the advantage of this would be greatest for backwater scientific communities in second- and third-world countries. I could see a couple of legislators not want the Russian anthropologists, Kenyan mathematicians or Peruvian veterinarians to catch up on the guys in "their" universities...
Actually, finding out there are additional dimensions would be extremely useful. To find that out, some sort of interaction in that dimension would have to take place. For all we know, the law of conservation of energy is universal - so to be able to interact with some not-trivially accessible dimension would mean the possibility to transfer energy from/to there. This would make the law of conservation of energy not apply strictly within the three-dimensional subsection of the universe we live in. The ways this would help us are completely beyond anyone's imagination.
I trust that those people who read your paper aren't the type who will give you trouble. But if America really doesn't want your help, don't worry but come to Europe. Places like the AVERT AIDS Education & Research Trust are good to work at. Let the nutjobs faith-heal each other until the problem solves itself.
> why would a border color make me go "Oh, I should let that action happen, I bet that's some Control Panel action", especially when I wasn't working with the control panel.
Colorcoding is an attempt to make the user differentiate, not a piece of extra information.
Consider the situation of the unknowing user, who is confronted with a warning but has insufficient information on its meaning. There will be many of those. In some cases, denying access can give no feedback, in others it can immediately make important things not happen, i.e. negative feedback. Allowing it will almost always result in no feedback because the nasty code, if present, works in the background. In the absence of other information, users will usually attempt to avoid negative feedback, i.e. will establish a semi-conscious always-allow habit. M$ is not trying to educate the user (because users don't like to be educated, least of all in the middle of other work), they are trying to break the uniformity of some users' response to warnings.
Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins or other virtual status rewards make sense. If we learned anything from WoW, it is that such things motivate people to spend time, and even money. But it would be more beneficial to start to give virtual brownie points to editors of the wikipedia, whose help can aid millions, rather than this commercial venture where answers will probably be read by relatively few. On the wiki, a status-based editor rating system that does not grant effective privilege could solve a lot of problems.
The all-important resource that the crew of a generation ship would need is commitment, and nothing creates commitment nearly as efficiently as fundamentalism. Not all fundamentalist groups are aggressive (although those use to get the press) - the Amish are fundamentalist by all the usual definitions, as well. Even if such a group would be aggressive, there would be no people to be aggressive against, just overwhelmingly oppressive circumstances that are great for directing one's righteous zeal at.
I like to base my speculation on reseach, not novels. Try "Toward an Economic Theory of 'Fundamentalism'" by Iannacone for some fairly current research on the matter.
The method most likely to work would be a religious one. Make reaching that goal (peacefully and functionally) a sacred mission, have God or some other supernatural agent watch everyone and condemn their possible transgressions, and train/select your crewmembers for fundamentalist belief in that. Sacred (supernaturally guarded) rules are the ones least likely to be changed (over just one century, that is), they can replace political mechanisms (points of failure) to a large degree, and since their content would be pretty much arbitrary, the sacred rules could say landfall, being a major religious event, automatically passes authority to the second set of rules. Seems a logical solution. And the ship would be called an Ark anyway. They'll have a lot of time on that spaceship: why shouldn't they spend it praying?
Great. I'd wear shirts with (shortened) printouts of articles on them. Wouldn't Crushing by Elephant give a whole new meaning to an XXL shirt? I'd use the T-Shirt article, though, and buy a poster that has has the Poster one. Hope that'd be okay with the license?
Many pictures from the Wikipedia Commons would be great on T-Shirts and have licenses that allow that.
Or lets make fun ones: "Have you sold your Britannica yet?"
The dwindling number of countries which still suck up to the US (like the Czech Republic) are already interested in having such a system on their soil. Everyone with a brain knows it can't work as designated, but there are other uses. The missiles can target airplanes or cars, or be refitted, quickly and quietly, to carry any sort of warhead.
When you increasingly rely on bully strategies that involve large numbers of individual actions that blatantly disregard local laws or human rights, such a system is exceedingly useful. IMNSHO, the primary use of MEADS (which this is a part of) will be the power to blow up any target in the Middle East reliably, at any time, within minutes, with no air force involved and possibly in a difficult-to-trace way. If there was no CNN effect, they might as well deploy Katyushas, like the Hezbollah does.
Due to their track records of very bad decisions, politicians in general are less and less trusted to make correct decisions. In all areas that count, like economy, foreign politics, energy, there is a strong milieu of think tanks, lobbyists and experts that make the politician's individual ideas a minor factor. So when politicians find a relatively unchartered territory, where expert knowledge has not created a clearly limited field of options, they like to hold extreme views that they wouldn't get away with under the scrutiny they are used to. This doesn't just apply to video games, but also to the treatment of illegal immigrants, internet monitoring and other fields.
In other words, this will continue to happen until video game producers and gamers organize and build up a power structure that exerts political influence and whacks over the head those who offer stupid ideas. A workers union of video game coders and artists, plus a representation of interests of video game companies, plus a couple of anti-legislation groups of consumers that manage to ally themselves under an umbrella organization would probably do the trick.
What's becoming of that, anyway? I hear Tajmar has been able to reproduce his hard-to-believe gravity field creation in a rotating accelerated (time dependent angular velocity) superconducting Niobium ring. (source) If true, one of the wilder predictions of Heim theory would be confirmed. Anyone working on that?
What worked for my math teacher was problems we could relate to and understand the value of solving. Invent probabilistic models of who the Human Resources guy is going to hire and have everybody calculate what factors to maximize for job chances, or how good the chances of getting hired are for people who made an effort at school vs those who didn't. Make a complex model of dating and give them a lot of tasks that explore that model - you'll be surprised how excited and happy they are to do that, and how rapidly they'll learn systems of equations. Or explain in mathematical terms the rationale behind the barrage of sequels in cinema or whatever current political issues your kids may have heard about.
Don't worry about gross simplifications, the main thing you need to get across is that the world can be modelled mathematically, and that to know math means ability to predict things. Most pupils (at my schools, anyway) never got more motivation than a wag of the finger and the vague notion that proper math grades are what you need for studying or jobs.
I assume that a couple of basic economic problems wouldn't be out of place in a math lesson, either.
The wiki is currently not an attractive target for legal action precisely because it could, in the worst case, just disintegrate at any time and be replaced using backup data, perhaps in a different country. Damage would be done, but the attacker wouldn't get a lot for his efforts. If the wiki had
lots of money and
financial obligations to advertisers that nailed it in place,
it would
have assets worth making an attempt at and
lack its most powerful means of defense, the hypothetical ability to just go away.
And I think we all agree there are a LOT of opportunities for lawsuits against the wiki, frivolous or otherwise. The sole reason it hasn't been litigated out of existence is that it doesn't have money to pay damages with, and can elect to shut down rather than accept any particular party's view of things.
On a more ideological note, I believe that to become financially dependent is exactly what makes - despite the best of intentions - dictatorships out of revolutions, churches out of spiritual movements and IP defenders out of open source authors, so who knows what it would make out of a free encyclopedia.
Numbers of active serial killers, wild guesses that they are, are usually estimated so high a single one found does not make a significant difference. According to the wiki, the FBI offered the number of circa 35 at large at any given time during the eighties. Finding a single one of them is hardly impressive.
Now don't get me wrong, a serial killer found is a good thing, and I congratulate the police. But that doesn't absolve the mass use of surveillance.
Plus, they probably wouldn't have got him for the previous killings if he hadn't confessed. To get confessions for crimes in the more distant past, surveillance is not useful.
Slashdot Mirror
"Theories" you call them? More like speculations and attempts to give some degree of credibility to the one tribal myth that 3 billion people happen to cling to. I'd like to see anyone spend this amount of effort on Little Red Riding Hood.
It's like having Satanists run a local Baptist Church. No good will come of it.
I can see it now. "Pro Sacrifice: life and choice just don't eliminate the problem"
;-)
You have no idea what counts as suspicious for terrorism these days. You can be a Muslim or have an Arab parent or have been to the Middle East or have attended a peace rally or even just make numerous references to the US constitution to be noticed and given a database entry that will stay forever. And if you share the name or adress of someone who does, that is frequently enough.
Of course this dilutes the "terrorist" label for beyond usability. I guess less than a percent of a percent of the people who fulfill these criteria have even committed violent acts of terrorism. But that's fine because the suspicion system has long ceased to be a means of catching those. It is now a multi-purpose government tool that serves for everything from law enforcement to garnering support for war.
If whoever did this - at least some of them - were stupid enough to leave traceable IPs, they'll go to prison. And they deserve it. And if it is because some trolls simply didn't see that somewhere beyond the limit of decency was another limit, a legal one, they deserve to learn the hard way.
I'm angry. Not angry enough to be happy with the various means of online surveillance that law enforcement has appropriated, but angry enough to hwant to see them used, fast.
So, since everyone is going to watch their pr0n videos on paper now, where are they going to store finished prints? Use them as wallpaper tiles? Or, since the sheets are connected, do semi-tasteful pranks involving rolls of the stuff and hundred-storey buildings?
Real environmentalists live close to work, bike, or take the bus.
Yeah. And they're scot's, too.
In my country, parents do that. What do parents do in your country? Aren't your teachers most valuable when they teach things parents don't know?
Teachers can't quit. Almost all teachers are at their top productivity right when they start the job, and steadily lose from there. This is true both because they receive very little on-job qualification, and because teaching is an extremely stressful and unthankful job (a highly disproportionate number of people in psychological care are ex-teachers). Worse, teacher qualifications aren't good for much else - they have such a broad knowledge they will rarely be qualified for the highly-specialized professions of today. So to lose a teaching position will very frequently mean a forced career change, and a dramatic fall down the income ladder.
Any even more endangered position (such as being known to be worth less salary than others), is much too close to the low-end job market to be comfortable. So - the union isn't protesting just to spite us. It doesn't prefer inefficiency without a cause. It just has to fight for the very future of its members.
Us relatively high paid IT guys, who haven't seen the poverty line from below in most cases, and who can always train themselves something new, tend to ignore how soul-crushing the lack of a professional perspective is. You know what? The job market isn't free. There are huge barriers to entry, especially for people who are, neurologically, too old to learn a new profession. So what the union does isn't protection of assets, it is fight for survival. You need not respect that, but you'd gain insight into their actions by understanding that.
The solution? Why, on-job qualification programs for teachers, of course. But that's a long-term solution. We don't do that unless re-election is certain.
Turkey, as a country, has what in a human would be diagnosed as pathological narcism. They just jailed a Kurd for six months for respectfully referring to convicted rebel Abdullah Ocalan as "Mr Ocalan". They brought criminal charges against their Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk for mentioning a government-sponsored genocide almost 100 years ago. Turkey denies this holocaust.
Why do I say this? Just to make clear this new ruling is just a small symptom of a much wider problem. It shouldn't surprise us in any way, but merely drive home the point Turkey is currently rather distant from European ideas of how to apply state power. More insidiously, this new conflict also points at the ever-increasing difficulty of isolating minority opinions from outside critique - the only way to do it, ultimately, is the North Korean route. I don't think Turkey will do that - they have a very proud and nationalistic government, but it is not a dictatorship with the power to force the ever-increasing price of its ego issues on all of the population.
MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
But MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
But MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
*head explodes*
Scientific literature is now mainly published in digital form and all the infrastructure that paper copies require is increasingly obsolete. Now we still live in the ruins of the time when printing mattered: we have rivalling databases who charge money from "publishers" (just a guy with Office and Outlook Express, in some cases) who in turn charges money from authors. In many cases, having published at a particular journal before or knowing who's probably going to review you has entirely too much influence on what gets accepted. People still insist on distributing their papers as read-only PDFs. The whole system ceases to make sense as a market, and it never made sense as an infrastructure. If all of this luggage was finally done away with and replaced with a state-funded, largely automated, high capacity system that was available from anywhere, lots of highly competent people would have more time to devote to research. The difference such a system would make for scholars is akin to the difference that Wikipedia makes for laymen.
I know what's suggested here wouldn't be quite that, but it'd be the second to last step before we arrive at a system where free application and publication, anonymous worldwide peer review and free access to all publications speed up research considerably.
However, the advantage of this would be greatest for backwater scientific communities in second- and third-world countries. I could see a couple of legislators not want the Russian anthropologists, Kenyan mathematicians or Peruvian veterinarians to catch up on the guys in "their" universities...
Actually, finding out there are additional dimensions would be extremely useful. To find that out, some sort of interaction in that dimension would have to take place. For all we know, the law of conservation of energy is universal - so to be able to interact with some not-trivially accessible dimension would mean the possibility to transfer energy from/to there. This would make the law of conservation of energy not apply strictly within the three-dimensional subsection of the universe we live in. The ways this would help us are completely beyond anyone's imagination.
I trust that those people who read your paper aren't the type who will give you trouble. But if America really doesn't want your help, don't worry but come to Europe. Places like the AVERT AIDS Education & Research Trust are good to work at. Let the nutjobs faith-heal each other until the problem solves itself.
> why would a border color make me go "Oh, I should let that action happen, I bet that's some Control Panel action", especially when I wasn't working with the control panel.
Colorcoding is an attempt to make the user differentiate, not a piece of extra information.
Consider the situation of the unknowing user, who is confronted with a warning but has insufficient information on its meaning. There will be many of those. In some cases, denying access can give no feedback, in others it can immediately make important things not happen, i.e. negative feedback. Allowing it will almost always result in no feedback because the nasty code, if present, works in the background. In the absence of other information, users will usually attempt to avoid negative feedback, i.e. will establish a semi-conscious always-allow habit. M$ is not trying to educate the user (because users don't like to be educated, least of all in the middle of other work), they are trying to break the uniformity of some users' response to warnings.
Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins or other virtual status rewards make sense. If we learned anything from WoW, it is that such things motivate people to spend time, and even money. But it would be more beneficial to start to give virtual brownie points to editors of the wikipedia, whose help can aid millions, rather than this commercial venture where answers will probably be read by relatively few. On the wiki, a status-based editor rating system that does not grant effective privilege could solve a lot of problems.
I have elaborated on that elsewhere.
The all-important resource that the crew of a generation ship would need is commitment, and nothing creates commitment nearly as efficiently as fundamentalism. Not all fundamentalist groups are aggressive (although those use to get the press) - the Amish are fundamentalist by all the usual definitions, as well. Even if such a group would be aggressive, there would be no people to be aggressive against, just overwhelmingly oppressive circumstances that are great for directing one's righteous zeal at.
I like to base my speculation on reseach, not novels. Try "Toward an Economic Theory of 'Fundamentalism'" by Iannacone for some fairly current research on the matter.
The method most likely to work would be a religious one. Make reaching that goal (peacefully and functionally) a sacred mission, have God or some other supernatural agent watch everyone and condemn their possible transgressions, and train/select your crewmembers for fundamentalist belief in that. Sacred (supernaturally guarded) rules are the ones least likely to be changed (over just one century, that is), they can replace political mechanisms (points of failure) to a large degree, and since their content would be pretty much arbitrary, the sacred rules could say landfall, being a major religious event, automatically passes authority to the second set of rules. Seems a logical solution. And the ship would be called an Ark anyway. They'll have a lot of time on that spaceship: why shouldn't they spend it praying?
Great. I'd wear shirts with (shortened) printouts of articles on them. Wouldn't Crushing by Elephant give a whole new meaning to an XXL shirt? I'd use the T-Shirt article, though, and buy a poster that has has the Poster one. Hope that'd be okay with the license?
Many pictures from the Wikipedia Commons would be great on T-Shirts and have licenses that allow that.
Or lets make fun ones: "Have you sold your Britannica yet?"
The dwindling number of countries which still suck up to the US (like the Czech Republic) are already interested in having such a system on their soil. Everyone with a brain knows it can't work as designated, but there are other uses. The missiles can target airplanes or cars, or be refitted, quickly and quietly, to carry any sort of warhead.
When you increasingly rely on bully strategies that involve large numbers of individual actions that blatantly disregard local laws or human rights, such a system is exceedingly useful. IMNSHO, the primary use of MEADS (which this is a part of) will be the power to blow up any target in the Middle East reliably, at any time, within minutes, with no air force involved and possibly in a difficult-to-trace way. If there was no CNN effect, they might as well deploy Katyushas, like the Hezbollah does.
Due to their track records of very bad decisions, politicians in general are less and less trusted to make correct decisions. In all areas that count, like economy, foreign politics, energy, there is a strong milieu of think tanks, lobbyists and experts that make the politician's individual ideas a minor factor. So when politicians find a relatively unchartered territory, where expert knowledge has not created a clearly limited field of options, they like to hold extreme views that they wouldn't get away with under the scrutiny they are used to. This doesn't just apply to video games, but also to the treatment of illegal immigrants, internet monitoring and other fields.
In other words, this will continue to happen until video game producers and gamers organize and build up a power structure that exerts political influence and whacks over the head those who offer stupid ideas. A workers union of video game coders and artists, plus a representation of interests of video game companies, plus a couple of anti-legislation groups of consumers that manage to ally themselves under an umbrella organization would probably do the trick.
What's becoming of that, anyway? I hear Tajmar has been able to reproduce his hard-to-believe gravity field creation in a rotating accelerated (time dependent angular velocity) superconducting Niobium ring. (source) If true, one of the wilder predictions of Heim theory would be confirmed. Anyone working on that?
What worked for my math teacher was problems we could relate to and understand the value of solving. Invent probabilistic models of who the Human Resources guy is going to hire and have everybody calculate what factors to maximize for job chances, or how good the chances of getting hired are for people who made an effort at school vs those who didn't. Make a complex model of dating and give them a lot of tasks that explore that model - you'll be surprised how excited and happy they are to do that, and how rapidly they'll learn systems of equations. Or explain in mathematical terms the rationale behind the barrage of sequels in cinema or whatever current political issues your kids may have heard about.
Don't worry about gross simplifications, the main thing you need to get across is that the world can be modelled mathematically, and that to know math means ability to predict things. Most pupils (at my schools, anyway) never got more motivation than a wag of the finger and the vague notion that proper math grades are what you need for studying or jobs.
I assume that a couple of basic economic problems wouldn't be out of place in a math lesson, either.
> The downfall of our own democracy may one day happen due to our own ignorance.
I have a first amendment right not to believe in ignorance!
The wiki is currently not an attractive target for legal action precisely because it could, in the worst case, just disintegrate at any time and be replaced using backup data, perhaps in a different country. Damage would be done, but the attacker wouldn't get a lot for his efforts. If the wiki had
- lots of money and
- financial obligations to advertisers that nailed it in place,
it would- have assets worth making an attempt at and
- lack its most powerful means of defense, the hypothetical ability to just go away.
And I think we all agree there are a LOT of opportunities for lawsuits against the wiki, frivolous or otherwise. The sole reason it hasn't been litigated out of existence is that it doesn't have money to pay damages with, and can elect to shut down rather than accept any particular party's view of things.On a more ideological note, I believe that to become financially dependent is exactly what makes - despite the best of intentions - dictatorships out of revolutions, churches out of spiritual movements and IP defenders out of open source authors, so who knows what it would make out of a free encyclopedia.
Numbers of active serial killers, wild guesses that they are, are usually estimated so high a single one found does not make a significant difference. According to the wiki, the FBI offered the number of circa 35 at large at any given time during the eighties. Finding a single one of them is hardly impressive.
Now don't get me wrong, a serial killer found is a good thing, and I congratulate the police. But that doesn't absolve the mass use of surveillance.
Plus, they probably wouldn't have got him for the previous killings if he hadn't confessed. To get confessions for crimes in the more distant past, surveillance is not useful.