The sort of violence you're talking about stems from social, economic, and political factors. Religion is the excuse that people sometimes use to justify their own shitty actions. It just happens that, right now, Islam is prevalent in some really crappy countries. The situation can (and has been) reversed.
When's the last time you heard of a major and highly-publicized protest where people were burning large numbers of Bibles just to piss off Christians? I would bet money that there would be death threats from someone. Some poor Muslim cabbie was almost murdered because of the "ground zero mosque"-- he didn't even have anything to do with the mosque. But no, you're right. No Christians have ever been violent.
Mainstream Islam is effectively represented by the Islamic nations around the world: Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc., not by the moderate Muslims in the US or Europe.
Says who? There's a long road to making the point you want to. You have to show (a) those countries are evil; and (b) the evil of those countries is as a result of the dominant religious beliefs, and not socio-economic factors. Then you can begin to blame Islam for those countries. Even then, you still have to show that to be the "mainstream" version of Islam.
And if you really want to make a point, after that, you'd have to show that other religions (e.g. Christianity) don't have similar negative effects. I see Christian nutjobs doing serious damage to the US, but I don't blame Christianity for it.
Freedom of speech and freedom of religion do not mean that you can say or do whatever you want and no one is allowed to react. The freedoms are only meant to protect you from governmental retaliation.
So, for example, you can criticize the government all you want, and e government can't throw you in jail for that. However, if you criticize me, your freedom of speech does not prevent me from ceasing to be your friend or refusing to do business with you. Your freedom to speak the way you want to does not necessarily trump my right to conduct myself the way I want to. As long as Rackspace has fulfilled it's legal obligations, it can cancel service whenever it wants.
And Islam is not "the only religion above criticism". First, it gets criticized all the time. Second, you're much more likely to get in trouble by criticizing Christianity than Islam. A bunch of terrifyingly ignorant bigots are going to burn books for no reason other than to insult a large and diverse group of people. It's stupid. Yeah, they have a constitutional right to say stupid, inflammatory, bigoted things, and nobody is stopping them. Still, I can't blame Rackspace for wanting to make sure no one thinks they're endorsing such things.
the idea that investing in education and infrastructure yields tangible benefits for society!
But it doesn't. You can't just throw money at a problem and find a solution...
I just want to point out that your response doesn't match what you're responding to. The idea was not "throwing money at the problem of education yields tangible benefits".
Or do you think that money spent on education is a waste? A society should not bother educating their citizenry? Is it all that simple, that investments in education are all simply waste?
Or would it be fair to say that education costs money, but an effective and efficient education system will ultimately be worth the resources directed toward its operation? Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right, and that private schools are better. So let's say I spend $120,000 putting my child through private school. Is that $120k not well spent? Could you not conceive of the possibility that, over the course of my child's lifetime, society will gain more that $120k worth of added societal value and productivity from my child's education?
Again, you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Sometimes the paper does not exactly "establish the fact", but you can assert that you're claiming a fact by virtue of it being claimed in some other academic work. By referencing that work, you allow your reader to do research of their own to evaluate the reliability of the claim.
If you think credentials don't enter into it, you're naive.
Thus, if infinitely adaptable levels *do* exist, they should exist as an extended option or potentially an expansion pack to existing games rather than having an entire game based on that.
Or this tech could be used by developers to aid in level creation. Instead of needing to start from scratch for each level, you could generate a bunch of levels, play through them, pick the best ones, and tweak/perfect them. Maybe some fluke in the procedural program will create a design that inspires the level designers.
Well you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Again, the point isn't necessarily that what you're quoting is 100% correct, but that when someone says, "where did you get that idea?" you can point to a particular person and say, "This is what he said and these are his credentials."
My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source.
My impression of the term "authoritative" in an academic context is that it usually doesn't mean "correct" so much as "citable". Someone is an "authority" in that they've actually done some research or survey or study, and they are citing their own work and their own conclusions, so you are thereby allowed to cite them citing their own work. When you cite them, it doesn't mean that what you've said is correct. It means that what you've said can be backed up by someone else with supposed expertise.
And so the problem with the Wikipedia (and encyclopedias in general) is that they are not primary sources, and generally no particular person is claiming responsibility for the articles. That doesn't necessarily make them less accurate or less reliable, but it does mean they're less authoritative.
If that doesn't make it clear, think about the word "official". You get an official statement from a business. Is it more true than an unofficial statement? Not necessarily. What's the difference? There is some official source of the statement that you can cite. I can go to the Apple website and find a claim that Apple iPads are "magical", and I can cite that as an official statement from Apple. I may be able to find a Wikipedia article that says that iPads are not "magical", which would not be official in any way. "Official" has nothing to do with truth, it's just about having a source. "Authoritative" is sometimes used with a similar meaning.
Since Sony makes their money from games, a PS3 with Linux installed (whether by an individual owner or as part of some sort of cluster) wouldn't make any money for Sony, so they took away the option, even if the owner bought it just for the OtherOS option.
If it were really this nefarious, then Sony wouldn't have allowed you to install Linux in the first place. The most likely possibility is that the "OtherOS" option wasn't very popular, and Sony discontinued support for an unpopular feature.
Adding encryption, adding anything to allow anonymity and all you do is make it easier to poke holes in security.
You can always poke holes in any security scheme, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying. Locks can be picked. Passwords can be guessed. Social engineering is always going to be a problem. Still, we do these things.
Security is not about making unauthorized access impossible. It's about making unauthorized access difficult and risky so that fewer people try, and fewer still succeed.
Well there's also relatively small steps like providing some better/simpler schemes for encryption/signing. PGP is pretty good, but poorly supported in most email clients. SSL is good, but CAs are lazy and expensive. SFTP provides encryption, but you generally need to blindly trust the host on the first connect.
One of the suggestions I've read around here is to support public keys in DNS records. If the DNS records are signed, then you can verify the public key did, in fact, come from the domain owner. Not a perfect solution, but it seems like it could be a first step to getting rid of the current CA system, which sucks IMO.
Yes, that will work, but then you still need to install virtual machine software, have a Windows 98 disc (and technically license), and then you'll have to support and possibly troubleshoot a whole other environment.
Imagine 100 years from now. Someone wants to play Wing Commander in order to experience an early example of the art form we know as "video games". They'll still need to dig up a Windows 98 install disk? That's kind of shitty.
Or maybe, an option to harvest ratings already made (1-5 stars) from my iTunes library, instead of asking me to go wandering through the store?
I'd agree with this one. It seems like absolute common sense. On the other hand, you know if they did that, no matter how clearly it was labelled, people would be complaining about it as a privacy violation.
I would agree Apple should go back to the drawing board with iTunes. Not because I think it's horrible-- IMO it works fine on OSX-- but because it was designed primarily to store and play a music library. Since then, it has grown to store movies, TV shows, podcasts, sync calendars and other personal information, store and transfer applications to portable devices, backup the applications' data, transfer documents to portable devices, and now have a built-in social networking site. It's also used to do weird little things like sync photos to portable devices with iPhoto.
It's just a lot of stuff for one application to be doing, and if you want to use it for one thing, you need to install it all. The name doesn't really make sense anymore; iTunes does a lot that doesn't have to do with "tunes". Many things seem incongruous. For example, managing applications and transferring documents to an iPad are not the same sort of activity as listening to your music library. The method for transferring documents is kind of terrible, which I think it tied up with trying to do it in an application that was not intended for it.
I think they need to break things up a bit. Maybe they could make the media store software, music management software, video management software, and the device syncing software into 4 different pieces of software, each optimized for its task? Or maybe some things could be built into the OS better?
I don't know, really. It seems like there are always trade-offs between trying to put everything into one application vs. trying to make a separate application for each task. You can go too far either way.
I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
How about a compromise? A touchy-feely hippie ultra-authoritarian regime that prevents rape, gang fights, and drug dealing while providing education and therapy.
There's a big overlap between bad guys, people with emotional/psychological problems, and people who have horrible lives with no opportunities for betterment. While we're locking up the bad guys, we might want to try to make them less bad.
Also, let's lock up fewer guys. Legalize drugs, do away with mandatory sentencing. Save prison time for violent offenders.
Well the Stanford prison experiment shows something a little more extreme than "people in power will often abuse authority." It's more like "oppressed people tend to rebel, while people in power tend to dehumanize and abuse those they have power over."
The famous Milgram experiment showed that people will tend to obey authority, even when being asked to do something immoral (to the point of killing another person).
Well I'd assume that's just a start-- a possible first step. I don't know what the final limit would be. Maybe eventually we end up with a small army of robots that hop from asteroid to asteroid, pulling out valuable materials, and nudging them back towards earth. If gravity isn't very significant, the energy requirements to get stuff back to earth might not be huge, especially if you're not in a rush. Then you just need to devise a system to collect it and bring it down to the surface without burning too much up on re-entry.
It is ironic that a course on using computer communications would be thought of as being taught from a textbook.
I also think you should have them learn by doing. Let them get their hands dirty trying to accomplish a specific goal.
I know it's problematic and potentially expensive, but if I were teaching about computers, the first thing I'd do is give a student a bunch of computer parts and an install CD. Make a project out of screwing the motherboard into the case, installing RAM and the video card, and hooking up all the drives. Troubleshoot any problems that arise, actually explaining how you figure out what the problem is. Then have them install something a little hairy, like an old version of Gentoo (I'm assuming the new versions are easier, but I haven't used it in a long time). Let them experiment.
An ideal education isn't all theory from textbooks.
I didn't say "shifty-looking". Anyway, "Don't hire the shifty guy because he's a little cheaper," was just an example. You can't be 100% sure, but I've heard employers express a lack of confidence in their IT people only to say something like, "but he was cheaper than the guy we wanted."
So instead of sending good money after bad, it can be immensely sensible to let things be and instead try to ensure that the employees don't leave disgruntled.
Well step #1 is to try to hire some IT people who are generally trustworthy. Don't hire the shifty guy because he's a little cheaper. *Then* you try to make sure that your IT staff is gruntled.
It's also good if you can hire 2 people to work together. Though it might not be a viable option because of a shortage of work to go around, a person's honesty generally goes up if they're working with a partner. If you have 2 network admins, each will be more hesitant to do something shady for fear of the other one catching on. If one does do something shady, the other might also notice and alert you to it.
So that's the prevention aspect. After the fact, there are things you can do (check firewall rules, rotate all passwords, etc), but to some extent you're going to rely on your ex-employee's lack of cleverness, foresight, and malice. Either that, or you're going to be rebuilding your entire network.
Yeah, I don't think it was intended to be dishonest or misleading. Given the state of computer games, there was absolutely zero chance that the game looked like any of those covers, and we all knew it.
It's like... I think the original box art for the board game "Clue" had pictures of the different characters on it. When I opened the box, I didn't say, "I've been cheated! There are no people in this box. The box doesn't unfold to create a life-sized library. It's just a board with some cards and some game pieces in it!"
Qualification in this case means that you go to college to endure an extended test that ultimately shows how dedicated and intelligent you were. Made it through four years of Harvard? You're pretty good, usually.
... or you have rich parents and/or are good at bullshitting.
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The sort of violence you're talking about stems from social, economic, and political factors. Religion is the excuse that people sometimes use to justify their own shitty actions. It just happens that, right now, Islam is prevalent in some really crappy countries. The situation can (and has been) reversed.
Nothing like that happens when you burn bibles.
When's the last time you heard of a major and highly-publicized protest where people were burning large numbers of Bibles just to piss off Christians? I would bet money that there would be death threats from someone. Some poor Muslim cabbie was almost murdered because of the "ground zero mosque"-- he didn't even have anything to do with the mosque. But no, you're right. No Christians have ever been violent.
Mainstream Islam is effectively represented by the Islamic nations around the world: Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc., not by the moderate Muslims in the US or Europe.
Says who? There's a long road to making the point you want to. You have to show (a) those countries are evil; and (b) the evil of those countries is as a result of the dominant religious beliefs, and not socio-economic factors. Then you can begin to blame Islam for those countries. Even then, you still have to show that to be the "mainstream" version of Islam.
And if you really want to make a point, after that, you'd have to show that other religions (e.g. Christianity) don't have similar negative effects. I see Christian nutjobs doing serious damage to the US, but I don't blame Christianity for it.
Freedom of speech and freedom of religion do not mean that you can say or do whatever you want and no one is allowed to react. The freedoms are only meant to protect you from governmental retaliation.
So, for example, you can criticize the government all you want, and e government can't throw you in jail for that. However, if you criticize me, your freedom of speech does not prevent me from ceasing to be your friend or refusing to do business with you. Your freedom to speak the way you want to does not necessarily trump my right to conduct myself the way I want to. As long as Rackspace has fulfilled it's legal obligations, it can cancel service whenever it wants.
And Islam is not "the only religion above criticism". First, it gets criticized all the time. Second, you're much more likely to get in trouble by criticizing Christianity than Islam. A bunch of terrifyingly ignorant bigots are going to burn books for no reason other than to insult a large and diverse group of people. It's stupid. Yeah, they have a constitutional right to say stupid, inflammatory, bigoted things, and nobody is stopping them. Still, I can't blame Rackspace for wanting to make sure no one thinks they're endorsing such things.
the idea that investing in education and infrastructure yields tangible benefits for society!
But it doesn't. You can't just throw money at a problem and find a solution...
I just want to point out that your response doesn't match what you're responding to. The idea was not "throwing money at the problem of education yields tangible benefits".
Or do you think that money spent on education is a waste? A society should not bother educating their citizenry? Is it all that simple, that investments in education are all simply waste?
Or would it be fair to say that education costs money, but an effective and efficient education system will ultimately be worth the resources directed toward its operation? Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right, and that private schools are better. So let's say I spend $120,000 putting my child through private school. Is that $120k not well spent? Could you not conceive of the possibility that, over the course of my child's lifetime, society will gain more that $120k worth of added societal value and productivity from my child's education?
Again, you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Sometimes the paper does not exactly "establish the fact", but you can assert that you're claiming a fact by virtue of it being claimed in some other academic work. By referencing that work, you allow your reader to do research of their own to evaluate the reliability of the claim.
If you think credentials don't enter into it, you're naive.
Thus, if infinitely adaptable levels *do* exist, they should exist as an extended option or potentially an expansion pack to existing games rather than having an entire game based on that.
Or this tech could be used by developers to aid in level creation. Instead of needing to start from scratch for each level, you could generate a bunch of levels, play through them, pick the best ones, and tweak/perfect them. Maybe some fluke in the procedural program will create a design that inspires the level designers.
Well you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Again, the point isn't necessarily that what you're quoting is 100% correct, but that when someone says, "where did you get that idea?" you can point to a particular person and say, "This is what he said and these are his credentials."
My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source.
My impression of the term "authoritative" in an academic context is that it usually doesn't mean "correct" so much as "citable". Someone is an "authority" in that they've actually done some research or survey or study, and they are citing their own work and their own conclusions, so you are thereby allowed to cite them citing their own work. When you cite them, it doesn't mean that what you've said is correct. It means that what you've said can be backed up by someone else with supposed expertise.
And so the problem with the Wikipedia (and encyclopedias in general) is that they are not primary sources, and generally no particular person is claiming responsibility for the articles. That doesn't necessarily make them less accurate or less reliable, but it does mean they're less authoritative.
If that doesn't make it clear, think about the word "official". You get an official statement from a business. Is it more true than an unofficial statement? Not necessarily. What's the difference? There is some official source of the statement that you can cite. I can go to the Apple website and find a claim that Apple iPads are "magical", and I can cite that as an official statement from Apple. I may be able to find a Wikipedia article that says that iPads are not "magical", which would not be official in any way. "Official" has nothing to do with truth, it's just about having a source. "Authoritative" is sometimes used with a similar meaning.
Good to know, but it'd still be good if there were a consistent, uniform, and comprehensive approach to these things.
Since Sony makes their money from games, a PS3 with Linux installed (whether by an individual owner or as part of some sort of cluster) wouldn't make any money for Sony, so they took away the option, even if the owner bought it just for the OtherOS option.
If it were really this nefarious, then Sony wouldn't have allowed you to install Linux in the first place. The most likely possibility is that the "OtherOS" option wasn't very popular, and Sony discontinued support for an unpopular feature.
Adding encryption, adding anything to allow anonymity and all you do is make it easier to poke holes in security.
You can always poke holes in any security scheme, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying. Locks can be picked. Passwords can be guessed. Social engineering is always going to be a problem. Still, we do these things.
Security is not about making unauthorized access impossible. It's about making unauthorized access difficult and risky so that fewer people try, and fewer still succeed.
Well there's also relatively small steps like providing some better/simpler schemes for encryption/signing. PGP is pretty good, but poorly supported in most email clients. SSL is good, but CAs are lazy and expensive. SFTP provides encryption, but you generally need to blindly trust the host on the first connect.
One of the suggestions I've read around here is to support public keys in DNS records. If the DNS records are signed, then you can verify the public key did, in fact, come from the domain owner. Not a perfect solution, but it seems like it could be a first step to getting rid of the current CA system, which sucks IMO.
Yes, that will work, but then you still need to install virtual machine software, have a Windows 98 disc (and technically license), and then you'll have to support and possibly troubleshoot a whole other environment.
Imagine 100 years from now. Someone wants to play Wing Commander in order to experience an early example of the art form we know as "video games". They'll still need to dig up a Windows 98 install disk? That's kind of shitty.
Or maybe, an option to harvest ratings already made (1-5 stars) from my iTunes library, instead of asking me to go wandering through the store?
I'd agree with this one. It seems like absolute common sense. On the other hand, you know if they did that, no matter how clearly it was labelled, people would be complaining about it as a privacy violation.
I would agree Apple should go back to the drawing board with iTunes. Not because I think it's horrible-- IMO it works fine on OSX-- but because it was designed primarily to store and play a music library. Since then, it has grown to store movies, TV shows, podcasts, sync calendars and other personal information, store and transfer applications to portable devices, backup the applications' data, transfer documents to portable devices, and now have a built-in social networking site. It's also used to do weird little things like sync photos to portable devices with iPhoto.
It's just a lot of stuff for one application to be doing, and if you want to use it for one thing, you need to install it all. The name doesn't really make sense anymore; iTunes does a lot that doesn't have to do with "tunes". Many things seem incongruous. For example, managing applications and transferring documents to an iPad are not the same sort of activity as listening to your music library. The method for transferring documents is kind of terrible, which I think it tied up with trying to do it in an application that was not intended for it.
I think they need to break things up a bit. Maybe they could make the media store software, music management software, video management software, and the device syncing software into 4 different pieces of software, each optimized for its task? Or maybe some things could be built into the OS better?
I don't know, really. It seems like there are always trade-offs between trying to put everything into one application vs. trying to make a separate application for each task. You can go too far either way.
I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
How about a compromise? A touchy-feely hippie ultra-authoritarian regime that prevents rape, gang fights, and drug dealing while providing education and therapy.
There's a big overlap between bad guys, people with emotional/psychological problems, and people who have horrible lives with no opportunities for betterment. While we're locking up the bad guys, we might want to try to make them less bad.
Also, let's lock up fewer guys. Legalize drugs, do away with mandatory sentencing. Save prison time for violent offenders.
Well the Stanford prison experiment shows something a little more extreme than "people in power will often abuse authority." It's more like "oppressed people tend to rebel, while people in power tend to dehumanize and abuse those they have power over."
The famous Milgram experiment showed that people will tend to obey authority, even when being asked to do something immoral (to the point of killing another person).
Well I'd assume that's just a start-- a possible first step. I don't know what the final limit would be. Maybe eventually we end up with a small army of robots that hop from asteroid to asteroid, pulling out valuable materials, and nudging them back towards earth. If gravity isn't very significant, the energy requirements to get stuff back to earth might not be huge, especially if you're not in a rush. Then you just need to devise a system to collect it and bring it down to the surface without burning too much up on re-entry.
It is ironic that a course on using computer communications would be thought of as being taught from a textbook.
I also think you should have them learn by doing. Let them get their hands dirty trying to accomplish a specific goal.
I know it's problematic and potentially expensive, but if I were teaching about computers, the first thing I'd do is give a student a bunch of computer parts and an install CD. Make a project out of screwing the motherboard into the case, installing RAM and the video card, and hooking up all the drives. Troubleshoot any problems that arise, actually explaining how you figure out what the problem is. Then have them install something a little hairy, like an old version of Gentoo (I'm assuming the new versions are easier, but I haven't used it in a long time). Let them experiment.
An ideal education isn't all theory from textbooks.
I didn't say "shifty-looking". Anyway, "Don't hire the shifty guy because he's a little cheaper," was just an example. You can't be 100% sure, but I've heard employers express a lack of confidence in their IT people only to say something like, "but he was cheaper than the guy we wanted."
So instead of sending good money after bad, it can be immensely sensible to let things be and instead try to ensure that the employees don't leave disgruntled.
Well step #1 is to try to hire some IT people who are generally trustworthy. Don't hire the shifty guy because he's a little cheaper. *Then* you try to make sure that your IT staff is gruntled.
It's also good if you can hire 2 people to work together. Though it might not be a viable option because of a shortage of work to go around, a person's honesty generally goes up if they're working with a partner. If you have 2 network admins, each will be more hesitant to do something shady for fear of the other one catching on. If one does do something shady, the other might also notice and alert you to it.
So that's the prevention aspect. After the fact, there are things you can do (check firewall rules, rotate all passwords, etc), but to some extent you're going to rely on your ex-employee's lack of cleverness, foresight, and malice. Either that, or you're going to be rebuilding your entire network.
Just when you think quiet electric cars are going to help diminish the noise pollution problem, they go and do this.
Yeah, I don't think it was intended to be dishonest or misleading. Given the state of computer games, there was absolutely zero chance that the game looked like any of those covers, and we all knew it.
It's like... I think the original box art for the board game "Clue" had pictures of the different characters on it. When I opened the box, I didn't say, "I've been cheated! There are no people in this box. The box doesn't unfold to create a life-sized library. It's just a board with some cards and some game pieces in it!"
Sounds like a variation on Mark Twain's quote, "Never let your schooling interfere with your education."
Qualification in this case means that you go to college to endure an extended test that ultimately shows how dedicated and intelligent you were. Made it through four years of Harvard? You're pretty good, usually.
... or you have rich parents and/or are good at bullshitting.