But then Google might not get to use its Google Ads program in China, either for technical reasons or because China might block Google. And that's a big market.
We've got to be friends with them, or we'll be enemies. Clinton knows that the Right in the US would love to demonize China, especially once we run out of middle eastern countries again. So he pre-empts that by publicly cooperating with them. So what if they've violated international human rights agreements? If we hate them for that we'd better stop turning our eyes from our own self-abuse. All large organizations prey on the populace, governments included, the US government included. Clinton is as sharp as he always was. He knows, as you should, that the general policies of a large country are dictated not only by necessity but by ugly politics. If he goes over there and makes nice, just like Bush Sr. did, then we can talk with them about their politics. If it becomes a cold war, then each side will treat the other as faceless, and their political machinery will be out-of-bounds. So let him go over there and talk. Let him say we like China. We do like China; they'd be a good friend, and they treat their citizens about as well as we treat ours. The treatment is different, but the indifference and disrespect is the same.
The other deal is that people would commit suicide all the time. This wouldn't just be wrist-slitting or other desperate actions, this would be, "I've lived a very full life, and nobody around me is dying, so I'm going to try the most reckless things I can think of so that I go out in style!" People would (assuming any of this ever happens) purposefully find novel ways of killing themselves. Just as young people plan out weddings years in advance, often decades, people would plan out not only their funeral ahead of time, but also their method of death. This is the normal human reaction to being able to control something: doing it in style, knowing that people are watching.
Yeah... It'll happen soon then. But I didn't say which way the transfer would go. With the Google desktop search agent in place, you could spam someone by placing public files on their private machine. It could be all kinds of nasty. There is so much potential for abuse still untouched... why must my talents lend themselves to its discovery? Just like [deleted to save the future from itself].
The problem is that if anyone can install just about anything on your computer without your consent, then any data on your computer can be redirected and exploited. Spyware is just the beginning. It's going to get ugly.
I would like right now to predict the next wave of spyware. Of course, this is tantamount to giving mean people ideas, which is never good. Shame on Heinlein for doing this in Job: a Comedy of Justice. But I digress...
Just as I predicted two-product commercials five years before their existence, I now predict that the next round (or round after next) of spyware will be geared towards infecting more than one system at once. A simple PC user's system will be infected, as will a public site, and information will be transferred from one to the other. This could go several ways, but it will happen. I have predicted.
If you want to see a picture, you check it out here, linked at the bottom of this post on 8-bit Theatre, which also has (below the comic) a long in-character account of WoW fandom.
The problem is, as the number of games distributed on Steam goes up, there's little benefit to a developer over doing it themselves. As the number of games goes down, there's greater benefit in terms of exposure and brand distinctiveness, but then Valve has more control anyway, and you're back to the status quo.
It wouldn't quite be the status quo. At the moment, the status quo is maintained by barriers to entering the industry. On the other hand, just as cafepress.com and lulu.com (link in grandparent, I'm lazy) can survive by taking a small cut of online sales of products which other people created, so could Valve. That is where things get interesting. Steam gives a sizable company the opportunity to make money by allowing small game development companies a chance to sell their goods. Valve will do what is profitable, because now someone else will if they don't. The critical issue here is that someone has created and popularized a technology which will make money and change an industry. We have seen this before, in Napster's case for instance. Even if the originating company stops, the technology will be recreated and marketed by those who see it as a way towards profits. The industry will be altered by people seeking personal profits, whether it is Valve or others.
This is the technological counterpart to the invisible hand of Adam Smith [or Harry Seldon, if you prefer - ed.]. Technology makes certain actions profitable, and once you determine that a technology can be used profitably, many people will try to. That is the reactionary stance towards technology that most companies have, and now that Valve and the rest of this media fever have helped Steam gain recognition, that technology is here to stay.
Even if Valve was the only company to run such a service, they would not greatly constrict the products which could be sold on steam. That would make less money, and drive their potential customers (in this case game developers as well as players) to substitute goods. So there will be widespread distribution of cheap low-budget games, it will be done online, and this will let small companies enter the game industry that couldn't enter it during the last half-decade or so.
Personally (and what other kind would I think?), I think people that say this are full of shit, or have the IT skills of your basic Windows user.
I have the IT skills of a BASIC, DOS 5.1-6.22, and Windows 3.1+ user, and I've installed Debian successfully in under an hour. That said, if I want to install Debian on a machine with hardware I don't know well, it will still take me all day, if not a week if it's a laptop. Linux is great and all, but it's only useful in my experience if you don't screw with it once it's installed.
It's an economics question, straight out of the textbooks. Assuming Valve will distribute games for a fledgling game company, Steam can drastically decrease the entrance cost to being a game company. This changes the industry, perhaps slowly.
At the moment a moderate-to-large sized game (like say F-Zero, La Pucelle:Tactics, Star Wars Galaxies) requires fifty employees for anywhere from six months to over two years. That requires a cash outlay of somewhere between $2 million (very cheap for such a game) to $10 million. Bigger games, like Halo 2 or Half-Life 2 might cost five to ten times that. To get a bank, venture capitalist, or stock owners to loan that kind of money, even a million dollars, you need to have a proven track record and stable profits already. The hardware on the major consoles now makes it extremely difficult to make a game for much less, so small companies have to find very creative ways to enter the market, or die trying.
There is another issue. Games must sell well in stores if those stores are going to keep them on the shelves. This means that in addition to shelf space, a game company needs massive advertising all over their target countries. This is a huge additional cost, and requires different and equally dedicated staff.
Steam can change this. Since the distribution cost (mostly bandwidth as opposed to physical production and shipping) scales with the number of sales, Valve can afford to act as a distributor for games that might only sell a hundred copies. Good examples of this happening in the retail industry are www.cafepress.com and www.lulu.com. This means that a small game company can write a simple game, advertise a little, contract with Valve to distribute it, and maybe sell enough to break even. This lets small game companies develop. And that's how Steam can change the gaming industry.
The really funny thing is, I'm a programmer, and I still start from pencil and paper almost every time. There's something much more free form about paper: you can throw it to the side knowing you can come back to it later, you can rearrange pages, and you can draw boxes or arrows or strike-throughs any way that you want. Once I know what the general structure of a program or large module will be, then I switch to the computer and start declaring types in Haskell. Maybe it's my ADHD, even though I'm 24 now, or maybe it's the fact that a desk can hold many square feet of diagrams while a screen can only hold a few.
Either way, I need the layout and design process to use tools that are much more flexible (literally) than a computer's display and input devices. With paper, you can actually develop tactile and spatial memory as to the location of various items, whereas using a computer requires me to use logic to find information. When I'm designing, logic and abstraction is at a premium, again maybe because of the ADHD, so I can't use a system that makes me break my train of logical thought. Just my experiences, but if I was ever going to use a computer to do the initial design for software, things would have to change, and I may not be the only one willing to pay for it.
Not quite true. Science, religion, and superstition have been at three opposite poles since civilization began. Each has had long periods of popular belief, and during each of those the other two were lumped together, as religion and superstition are now. Catch-phrases used for attack include "heretic" for religious zealouts, "irrational" for science devotees, and "ignorance" for those who hold superstitious beliefs. Currently, science has held the scene and lumped together religion and magic, although an undercurrent of superstition exists now that wasn't present fourty years ago.
Modern fundamentalist religions, like those that oppose abortion, stem cell research, or equality for women, are headed for a direct confrontation with people that want to believe in a wider range of spirituality. The issue of stem cell research highlights this, because many people now respond to it in terms of the soul, whereas that was not at issue when abortion was originally made illegal in the US in the the middle and late 1800s. This concern for the soul and the sanctity of life shows a trend towards more holistic and 'superstitious' views of the world.
This view has actually been encouraged by the emerge of recent sciences including chaos theory and quantum dynamics. The cycle will continue, but if you want to know what's coming, asking high school and college students their opinions. Not the ones that are eager to answer, but the ones that are reserved about their opinions. They're the ones that are still considering the issue, and their opinions will shape decision on the subject thirty years from now. Since I think that there are a lot of undecideds on this issue, I see a big fight coming once a large number of them have made up their minds and raised children with those views.
Check out the stuff someone else posted about security features:
http://www.skywebexpress.com/150i_security.shtml
It IS right out of Logan's Run... in that a 'system operator' can forcibly change your destination to the local police station. Now, mind you, I'm not paranoid enough (yet) to think that that's a bad thing. But that has a potential for abuse, and it's something to watch out for.
And when they do, we'll find a way to grab it, put it on a p2p service, and have search engines pull from the stream rather than the LOC site. Then we'll change the torrent application to let computer users house a small part of the LOC even though they haven't requested anything. The combined resilience will keep the LOC up forever. As long as they have a computer, ever child in school, every college student, every researcher, and every enthusiast (defined loosely) will have guaranteed access not only to information that people currently value, but to data which at some point people valued enough to record. We will have conquered the barrier on (one-way) communication imposed by time and space. One of the goals of a greater, more enlightened society will be achieved.
I'm assuming a few things. 1. MIT, LOC, and others aren't trying to do this for profit. 2. The p2p application in question gets good PR, like SETI at Home did. 3. The children in school (and the people in libraries) are not forced to use sucky internet filters.
We must take notice of events that would invalidate these assumptions.
The other barrier of note is cultural and linguistic differences. I believe that increased internet usage by children will (ever so) slowly erode that one as well.
About babies and RFID... well, I have to say, I wouldn't say no to an RFID in the _bracelet_ that they already put on babies for identification. Certainly it'll come off as soon as it leaves hospital grounds, but I wouldn't mind it in a health-care setting. Heck, I wouldn't mind it in all patient's bracelets. But I'd cut out an implant with a knife.
Here's something to watch out for: when a commercial (for-profit) organization requires RFID identification in order to access a product or service, we are screwed. In the US, we won't get RFID enforced in driver's licenses or such since technically the government is supposed to service those people who don't drive and can't require a national ID card. But corporations are free to require such things. If we are complacent until some corporation finds a way to require tags in order to access something and decides it's a good idea, we will not be able to turn back the clock. Therefore, we must be constantly vocal about not wanting this whenever it shows up.
Damnit, now I can actually think of just what I didn't want anyone to think of. Help!
Simple solution: sit the girls in front, so they think they are in a single-sex classroom.
That doesn't quite work, since guys at the back of the room will talk loudly to attract attention from all the kids that aren't looking at them. The other students (notably the girls) are looking forward, not back at the attention-desiring guys. That minority of guys will make even more noise than they usually would because of the severe lack of attention.
Of course, you could try to prevent the students from talking, but that hurts students in all grade levels and is completely counter-productive in most cases.
Have you not noticed the trend? First, a technology is introduced that carries information. Second, people notice that the extra information is useful. Third, the technology is relentlessly expanded. Fourth, profit for tin-foil hat salespeople. We're at the first stage right now with this particular thing. But think... once RFID scanners have been purchased and tested in every grocery store pharmacy for major chains, it will be very tempting to start using that technology elsewhere. That's definitely going to happen, and the 'tin-foil hat crowd' is looking for ways to make sure that when it does, rights are not violated. This story is a notice of things to come, and thus very appropriate for a news site, especially a section of it concerning privacy rights.
Just go to a convention. I'm sure having a look-alike (or two, or three) in a hologram in appropriate poses would be good enough. Or would those be inappropriate poses? Dang, porn seems to keep cropping up in these posts! When will our imaginations move on to more practical... uh...
Hahaha, yeah right. Practical considerations are for making sure that the real considerations get achieved. Okay, that's all here. Go support your local weirdos at a convention. On a related note, I'm off to a small-scale Star Trek gathering. It's in Texas, near Austin. So I am putting my money where my mouth is. Too bad I don't have those hologram-making things right now. I guess I might bring a camera. Hope to see some of you there!
Except we don't have a way to stream it. Right? You can't digitize holograms, right?
Hmm... that sounds like an interesting assurance of identity, at least among conspirators. "I have the ring of Kazu Kazu!" he announces, holding his hand out for all to see... with the laser thing turned on so you could see it.
Of course I've worked with them. Heck, I've worked IT and tech support. But it's been a few years, and I thought maybe things could get better. I suppose I'm an optimist in that regard. I thought that eventually enough people might use computers from childhood that these security issues would be known among normal users. I suppose that's quite a ways off, even though my first experiences with computer internals were in elementary school.
They will listen, but they will still respond as you suggest. The article will be ignored, and when record labels are asked for comment they will downplay its accuracy and relevance.
However, the labels will take notice. Now the people in the recording industry who have wanted to alter the course of industry have something big to point to. They will slowly attract the attention of the executives to alternatives, and eventually, the recording industry will be prepared to handle the current state of technology and science.
Right before the world changes out from under them again.
And what about events that erase or alter your own fingerprints? Baby oil or knife cuts and the like, for instance. The average person might not realize soon enough that that means they have to re-key all fingerprint-based locks.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan, as opposed to China, apparently has no problem with video games that depict their history in not-so-glorious ways.
The post wasn't talking about a Chinese ruler.
But then Google might not get to use its Google Ads program in China, either for technical reasons or because China might block Google. And that's a big market.
We've got to be friends with them, or we'll be enemies. Clinton knows that the Right in the US would love to demonize China, especially once we run out of middle eastern countries again. So he pre-empts that by publicly cooperating with them. So what if they've violated international human rights agreements? If we hate them for that we'd better stop turning our eyes from our own self-abuse. All large organizations prey on the populace, governments included, the US government included. Clinton is as sharp as he always was. He knows, as you should, that the general policies of a large country are dictated not only by necessity but by ugly politics. If he goes over there and makes nice, just like Bush Sr. did, then we can talk with them about their politics. If it becomes a cold war, then each side will treat the other as faceless, and their political machinery will be out-of-bounds. So let him go over there and talk. Let him say we like China. We do like China; they'd be a good friend, and they treat their citizens about as well as we treat ours. The treatment is different, but the indifference and disrespect is the same.
The other deal is that people would commit suicide all the time. This wouldn't just be wrist-slitting or other desperate actions, this would be, "I've lived a very full life, and nobody around me is dying, so I'm going to try the most reckless things I can think of so that I go out in style!" People would (assuming any of this ever happens) purposefully find novel ways of killing themselves. Just as young people plan out weddings years in advance, often decades, people would plan out not only their funeral ahead of time, but also their method of death. This is the normal human reaction to being able to control something: doing it in style, knowing that people are watching.
Yeah... It'll happen soon then. But I didn't say which way the transfer would go. With the Google desktop search agent in place, you could spam someone by placing public files on their private machine. It could be all kinds of nasty. There is so much potential for abuse still untouched... why must my talents lend themselves to its discovery? Just like [deleted to save the future from itself].
I would like right now to predict the next wave of spyware. Of course, this is tantamount to giving mean people ideas, which is never good. Shame on Heinlein for doing this in Job: a Comedy of Justice. But I digress...
Just as I predicted two-product commercials five years before their existence, I now predict that the next round (or round after next) of spyware will be geared towards infecting more than one system at once. A simple PC user's system will be infected, as will a public site, and information will be transferred from one to the other. This could go several ways, but it will happen. I have predicted.
If you want to see a picture, you check it out here, linked at the bottom of this post on 8-bit Theatre, which also has (below the comic) a long in-character account of WoW fandom.
It wouldn't quite be the status quo. At the moment, the status quo is maintained by barriers to entering the industry. On the other hand, just as cafepress.com and lulu.com (link in grandparent, I'm lazy) can survive by taking a small cut of online sales of products which other people created, so could Valve. That is where things get interesting. Steam gives a sizable company the opportunity to make money by allowing small game development companies a chance to sell their goods. Valve will do what is profitable, because now someone else will if they don't. The critical issue here is that someone has created and popularized a technology which will make money and change an industry. We have seen this before, in Napster's case for instance. Even if the originating company stops, the technology will be recreated and marketed by those who see it as a way towards profits. The industry will be altered by people seeking personal profits, whether it is Valve or others.
This is the technological counterpart to the invisible hand of Adam Smith [or Harry Seldon, if you prefer - ed.]. Technology makes certain actions profitable, and once you determine that a technology can be used profitably, many people will try to. That is the reactionary stance towards technology that most companies have, and now that Valve and the rest of this media fever have helped Steam gain recognition, that technology is here to stay.
Even if Valve was the only company to run such a service, they would not greatly constrict the products which could be sold on steam. That would make less money, and drive their potential customers (in this case game developers as well as players) to substitute goods. So there will be widespread distribution of cheap low-budget games, it will be done online, and this will let small companies enter the game industry that couldn't enter it during the last half-decade or so.
I have the IT skills of a BASIC, DOS 5.1-6.22, and Windows 3.1+ user, and I've installed Debian successfully in under an hour. That said, if I want to install Debian on a machine with hardware I don't know well, it will still take me all day, if not a week if it's a laptop. Linux is great and all, but it's only useful in my experience if you don't screw with it once it's installed.
At the moment a moderate-to-large sized game (like say F-Zero, La Pucelle:Tactics, Star Wars Galaxies) requires fifty employees for anywhere from six months to over two years. That requires a cash outlay of somewhere between $2 million (very cheap for such a game) to $10 million. Bigger games, like Halo 2 or Half-Life 2 might cost five to ten times that. To get a bank, venture capitalist, or stock owners to loan that kind of money, even a million dollars, you need to have a proven track record and stable profits already. The hardware on the major consoles now makes it extremely difficult to make a game for much less, so small companies have to find very creative ways to enter the market, or die trying.
There is another issue. Games must sell well in stores if those stores are going to keep them on the shelves. This means that in addition to shelf space, a game company needs massive advertising all over their target countries. This is a huge additional cost, and requires different and equally dedicated staff.
Steam can change this. Since the distribution cost (mostly bandwidth as opposed to physical production and shipping) scales with the number of sales, Valve can afford to act as a distributor for games that might only sell a hundred copies. Good examples of this happening in the retail industry are www.cafepress.com and www.lulu.com. This means that a small game company can write a simple game, advertise a little, contract with Valve to distribute it, and maybe sell enough to break even. This lets small game companies develop. And that's how Steam can change the gaming industry.
The really funny thing is, I'm a programmer, and I still start from pencil and paper almost every time. There's something much more free form about paper: you can throw it to the side knowing you can come back to it later, you can rearrange pages, and you can draw boxes or arrows or strike-throughs any way that you want. Once I know what the general structure of a program or large module will be, then I switch to the computer and start declaring types in Haskell. Maybe it's my ADHD, even though I'm 24 now, or maybe it's the fact that a desk can hold many square feet of diagrams while a screen can only hold a few.
Either way, I need the layout and design process to use tools that are much more flexible (literally) than a computer's display and input devices. With paper, you can actually develop tactile and spatial memory as to the location of various items, whereas using a computer requires me to use logic to find information. When I'm designing, logic and abstraction is at a premium, again maybe because of the ADHD, so I can't use a system that makes me break my train of logical thought. Just my experiences, but if I was ever going to use a computer to do the initial design for software, things would have to change, and I may not be the only one willing to pay for it.
Modern fundamentalist religions, like those that oppose abortion, stem cell research, or equality for women, are headed for a direct confrontation with people that want to believe in a wider range of spirituality. The issue of stem cell research highlights this, because many people now respond to it in terms of the soul, whereas that was not at issue when abortion was originally made illegal in the US in the the middle and late 1800s. This concern for the soul and the sanctity of life shows a trend towards more holistic and 'superstitious' views of the world.
This view has actually been encouraged by the emerge of recent sciences including chaos theory and quantum dynamics. The cycle will continue, but if you want to know what's coming, asking high school and college students their opinions. Not the ones that are eager to answer, but the ones that are reserved about their opinions. They're the ones that are still considering the issue, and their opinions will shape decision on the subject thirty years from now. Since I think that there are a lot of undecideds on this issue, I see a big fight coming once a large number of them have made up their minds and raised children with those views.
Check out the stuff someone else posted about security features:
l
http://www.skywebexpress.com/150i_security.shtm
It IS right out of Logan's Run... in that a 'system operator' can forcibly change your destination to the local police station. Now, mind you, I'm not paranoid enough (yet) to think that that's a bad thing. But that has a potential for abuse, and it's something to watch out for.
And when they do, we'll find a way to grab it, put it on a p2p service, and have search engines pull from the stream rather than the LOC site. Then we'll change the torrent application to let computer users house a small part of the LOC even though they haven't requested anything. The combined resilience will keep the LOC up forever. As long as they have a computer, ever child in school, every college student, every researcher, and every enthusiast (defined loosely) will have guaranteed access not only to information that people currently value, but to data which at some point people valued enough to record. We will have conquered the barrier on (one-way) communication imposed by time and space. One of the goals of a greater, more enlightened society will be achieved.
I'm assuming a few things.
1. MIT, LOC, and others aren't trying to do this for profit.
2. The p2p application in question gets good PR, like SETI at Home did.
3. The children in school (and the people in libraries) are not forced to use sucky internet filters.
We must take notice of events that would invalidate these assumptions.
The other barrier of note is cultural and linguistic differences. I believe that increased internet usage by children will (ever so) slowly erode that one as well.
About babies and RFID... well, I have to say, I wouldn't say no to an RFID in the _bracelet_ that they already put on babies for identification. Certainly it'll come off as soon as it leaves hospital grounds, but I wouldn't mind it in a health-care setting. Heck, I wouldn't mind it in all patient's bracelets. But I'd cut out an implant with a knife.
Here's something to watch out for: when a commercial (for-profit) organization requires RFID identification in order to access a product or service, we are screwed. In the US, we won't get RFID enforced in driver's licenses or such since technically the government is supposed to service those people who don't drive and can't require a national ID card. But corporations are free to require such things. If we are complacent until some corporation finds a way to require tags in order to access something and decides it's a good idea, we will not be able to turn back the clock. Therefore, we must be constantly vocal about not wanting this whenever it shows up.
Damnit, now I can actually think of just what I didn't want anyone to think of. Help!
Simple solution: sit the girls in front, so they think they are in a single-sex classroom.
That doesn't quite work, since guys at the back of the room will talk loudly to attract attention from all the kids that aren't looking at them. The other students (notably the girls) are looking forward, not back at the attention-desiring guys. That minority of guys will make even more noise than they usually would because of the severe lack of attention.
Of course, you could try to prevent the students from talking, but that hurts students in all grade levels and is completely counter-productive in most cases.
Have you not noticed the trend? First, a technology is introduced that carries information. Second, people notice that the extra information is useful. Third, the technology is relentlessly expanded. Fourth, profit for tin-foil hat salespeople. We're at the first stage right now with this particular thing. But think... once RFID scanners have been purchased and tested in every grocery store pharmacy for major chains, it will be very tempting to start using that technology elsewhere. That's definitely going to happen, and the 'tin-foil hat crowd' is looking for ways to make sure that when it does, rights are not violated. This story is a notice of things to come, and thus very appropriate for a news site, especially a section of it concerning privacy rights.
Just go to a convention. I'm sure having a look-alike (or two, or three) in a hologram in appropriate poses would be good enough. Or would those be inappropriate poses? Dang, porn seems to keep cropping up in these posts! When will our imaginations move on to more practical... uh...
Hahaha, yeah right. Practical considerations are for making sure that the real considerations get achieved. Okay, that's all here. Go support your local weirdos at a convention. On a related note, I'm off to a small-scale Star Trek gathering. It's in Texas, near Austin. So I am putting my money where my mouth is. Too bad I don't have those hologram-making things right now. I guess I might bring a camera. Hope to see some of you there!
Except we don't have a way to stream it. Right? You can't digitize holograms, right?
Hmm... that sounds like an interesting assurance of identity, at least among conspirators. "I have the ring of Kazu Kazu!" he announces, holding his hand out for all to see... with the laser thing turned on so you could see it.
Of course I've worked with them. Heck, I've worked IT and tech support. But it's been a few years, and I thought maybe things could get better. I suppose I'm an optimist in that regard. I thought that eventually enough people might use computers from childhood that these security issues would be known among normal users. I suppose that's quite a ways off, even though my first experiences with computer internals were in elementary school.
They will listen, but they will still respond as you suggest. The article will be ignored, and when record labels are asked for comment they will downplay its accuracy and relevance.
However, the labels will take notice. Now the people in the recording industry who have wanted to alter the course of industry have something big to point to. They will slowly attract the attention of the executives to alternatives, and eventually, the recording industry will be prepared to handle the current state of technology and science.
Right before the world changes out from under them again.
From their own report, it doesn't look like it:
"It is unrealistic to assume that users will become cautious about running unknown files."
p. 6, last line of second paragraph
Even the NSA thinks ordinary people won't get smart about computer security.
And what about events that erase or alter your own fingerprints? Baby oil or knife cuts and the like, for instance. The average person might not realize soon enough that that means they have to re-key all fingerprint-based locks.
If that was in 1988, how much longer will that patent last?