The problem with HTTPS is that in the usual setup, only one side of the exchange verifies its identity, namely the server. For a session-like handling, I would want client certificates. Those, however, are by far not common enough to build something that demands it.
As I said: Give me something that takes care of your complaints and is as easy to use, and I will. Thousands of other developers think the same. I'm also a security guy (I do run a browser game as a hobby, that's the developer part) so I know the problems. But still, my focus is my game, not invention a new protocol. Besides, how many players would I get if it weren't playable through a browser?
Most of the crap we surround ourselves with (cookies, MIME, Windows and Office, etc.) are still there because they are there and the alternatives aren't.
What is the alternative to using cookies, really? Almost every framework for web-based development has session support that largely relies on cookies. Give me something more secure that works as easily and I will be using it right away.
That is the #1 problem with Facebook (and almost all other social networking sites): You only get a binary setting.
I have a few close friends, who by all means could see whatever they want to, if they'd ask I would tell them anyways.
But I also have a lot of not-so-close friends, acquaintances, people I'm friendly with. Whatever you want to call it, there are degrees of friendship. And Facebook doesn't recognize that.
I assume it won't. Look how far cell phones have come in the past 20 years. Since time travel is nowhere in sight, let's assume that it will be at least 50 years. That is 2.5 times the evolution from suitcase-sized phones to today. I don't think it is much of an exaggeration to assume you'll probably have a tiny speaker in your ear, much like a hearing aid today, wirelessly connected to a microphone that's implanted in a tooth or in your neck clothes as it's no larger than a pinhead, wirelessly connected to the actual phone that is somewhere on your body (probably the size of a button).
I still remember the evening I came home with my wife and the new game was there. After a while she went to bed. I was still playing when she got up the next morning.
Still, see my other reply further down. There is a difference between an addictive game and something that was designed specifically to be addictive, and is only dressed up as a game.
Granted, the lines blur with MMOs. However, last I checked there was still some gameplay in it, and then the grinding layer to make you come back. Wiht Zynga, it is the other way around: The whole game is just an afterthought to get you started and give you an excuse. Much like smokers and drinkers always claiming that their respective drugs are "social". Sure, people smoke and drink while talking to friends, but you can talk to friends without that. Zynga is someone who pretends to be a friend, but he only does it so you smoke more, because he owns the tobacco company. I do see a difference to friends who first are friends and second may incite you into a bit more drinking than you'd engage in otherwise.
Seriously, that would mean that time travel is so close that cell phones won't change considerably. The chance of that is even smaller than that for time travel per se.
We are pattern-matching machines. We see and interpret in practically the same thought. We are used to people using cell phones like that, so that is what we think we see.
The difference is that Civ III is a game. Farmville is a drug. Zynga employs full-time psychologists and their "games" serve one purpose: Make you return and return and return.
There've been some excellent articles including some with real research and investigative journalism. Anyone who still thinks that Zynga makes games has been living under a rock.
But I agree, SSL should've become the default long ago. Has someone already made a Firefox plugin that for every http:/// link tries the https:/// equivalent first and then falls back to http:/// only if that fails?
The language is either not Turing complete and then mostly useless for practical general computing, or it is Turing complete and then it provides no real security.
You say that based on what analysis?
Sure, a programming language alone will never bring you 100% perfect security. Neither does any other system, method or tool. Sure you and I can write great, safe code in C. But the large majority of programmers has too little experience, doesn't care all that much, and is under perpetual time pressure to deliver functionality. The choice of language can dramatically change the quality and security of your code.
And, without having studied it in detail so far, from what I see this new language does offer some very nice features that current software usually needs, but almost always never has, due to the effort required in adding it individually. Fine-grained access controls on individual data objects sounds like a fantastic concept to have. Of course it requires you already have some kind of data labelling and role models with defined accesses, so this is probably not for the home user, but in a corporate environment? Hell, yeah!
As experience teaches us, the first thing that people who need to share do is "chmod -R a+rwx."
Which is why I believe for a company, there is only one path to security - a combination of upper management understanding that security is important or they, not some lowly cubicle worker, could be out of a job, and Mandatory Access Controls.
"People" shouldn't even be allowed to determine the permissions of a file. And they absolutely should not ever be able to change the "a" value, which should be hardcoded to 0 everywhere. Remember "default deny"? We'd not dream of having firewalls like that, but our filesystems all allow it.
So, any security which requires signing of code to run will become looser and looser over time as problems are encountered.
If that degradation is acknowledge and managed properly, it will stop at the point where further loosening would become more dangerous than profitable. Of course that's the theory. To make it reality, you need a commitment from up high. Which you don't get in these days because most top-level management knows the shareholders only care much about this quarter, and a bit about next, so fuck any long-term perspective.
That is the real problem. An owner-owned company seldom has that problem, the guy wants to have his retirement one day.
True, the high-speed traders only make fractions of a cent per share - but they make it ten, twenty or a hundred times a day, and they are often high-volume traders, too (an algorithmic trading company a friend of mine works at once held 10% of a major industrial corporation - for a few minutes).
Two, I'm not invested in any public companies. I used to work at the stock exchange, I know better than to put my future into what is basically a casino. If you want to get rich at the casino, you have to be the casino.
For an investor with much more at stake, it is easy enough to see how a one-second interval could be make-or-break.
Seriously? If a one-second price difference can make or break an investor, don't you think that is ample proof that the markets are way, way too volatile? There is nothing left of real price-finding if these differences can happen in those times. The real world doesn't change that fast, and last I checked investments are about real-world things (companies, goods, etc.)
'Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?'"
Firefox 4
You don't get into the Office market without something that is entirely non-geeky: A strict design philosophy, a very solid idea of what office users really need (and which the 90% of functionality are that almost nobody ever uses), and an innovative streamlined and blowing-you-away UI concept.
Here's why:
You need a strict design because Office software suffers from bloat and feature creep even more than browsers do. Just look at Word - it can compete with Emacs in bullshit functions that nobody ever uses but some coder thought would be really cool. To prevent that, you need a very good idea of what the fuck you want to accomplish, and both the competence and the rigour to keep everything out that doesn't fit the design.
You need a solid idea of what the core functionality is in order to align your design (s.a.) with the user needs. In fact, extensions or plugins would be an excellent way to keep the 10% users interested that need some obscure functionality that nobody else ever needs. Find some way to embed references to the needed plugins and an auto-update or heck if they are small even embed the plugins (or parts of it) themselves so other users can at least read the file. But whatever you do, keep the core simple and easy to understand. This is why I personally am a fan of the Mac office software - Pages, Numbers. Numbers has by far not the functionality of Excel, but it has what I need and it has a select few additional features that, as soon as you've used them once, are killer features (seperation between table and document, allowing you to put as many tables on a page as you want, for example).
Blow-Away UI is what you'll need to get users interested who already have an office suite, which let's face it is almost everyone. You don't get the majority of people with "cheap!" (OO has that, look how much good it does them) or with "features!" (both OO and MS office have more features than anyone can possibly ever need). But being more productive because it is easier and better to use - that would get a lot of people interested. It's what is lacking from the current competitors, they are both abominations in usability.
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value.
It might, if the trading were actually being done at the exchange, for market prices. It isn't. Most trading today is only registered at the exchange, but the actual deal is brokered elsewhere.
Also, the amount of liquidity a market needs is subject to discussion. Do you really need to have a counterpart available this second for a market to work? That is nonsense, the market (the real market, not the speculative one) wouldn't burn and die if you had to wait a second or two or even *gasp* five for a deal to go through.
Providing liquidity is a valuable role. However, you are ignoring the fact that everyone is in it for the money. If the cost of liquidity, i.e. the amount of profit the high-speed traders extract from the market, becomes too high, the market also suffers. Somewhere, there is an optimal point between the positive (more liquidity) and the negative (the cost of this liquidity).
One shouldn't forget that these high speed tradings are not in the interest of investors, companies being traded or other market participants with a real-world interest. They serve only the high-speed/high-volume speculative traders, specifically algorithmic or automated traders.
I think it's fair to assume that the foetus would opt not to be aborted.
No, it is not fair. It pre-supposes a critical element of the discussion, namely whether or not the foetus is a being capable of making conscious decisions. But I'm not here to repeat that discussion.
We can't implement multiple definitions of personhood in the real world. Wikipedia can.
Just like Wikipedia, we can consider multiple possibilities, and take into account that none of us is in posession of the whole truth. While in the end, we have to settle down to one law or rule, in deciding which one it should be we can take multiple dimensions of the problem and various points-of-view into account.
In fact, in many cases we already do. That is the common approach in less emotionally charged topics. And in many countries, we have managed to do that even for the difficult ones. For example, it is entirely irrational to believe that a sperm and an egg cell are not a human being, while the second they fuse suddenly a human being comes into existence. That is an entirely arbitrary line to draw in what really is a gradual development. It is, however, not the worst line. Certainly better than any random number of weeks, because it marks the spot where two DNAs combine.
I don't, however, see much argument along those lines. Usually, the discussion is more of the "you are evil satanists" vs. "you are religious nutjobs" kind.
The point remains that the anti-abortionists think that their point should apply to someone else, both the foetus and its mother.
That's not evil. In fact, the whole concept of a society rests on groups of people agreeing to follow common rules. The problem is the absolutism inherit in that.
You could make it per block, we have the information processing capacity. Heck, you could make it by individual person. Oh, wait. That's the problem, isn't it? The anti-abortionists (or any other kind of people, I'm just using them as an example) are not furious that they could have an abortion if they wanted to, they want to regulate other people's lives.
What would really happen is that a lot of innocent people would get killed because a) some idiot with a gun (if you give everyone guns, you also give them to the idiots) thinks there is a bad situation and starts shooting b) there really is a bad situation, but due to fuck-ups, bad aiming or plain-old stupid friendly fire, some of the upstanding citizens shoot each other instead of the criminal
The problem with simple solutions is that the unintended consequences tend to go ignored, and an idealised situation is assumed, instead of the confusing, unclear and stressful thing that will actually occur in the real world.
One (w/ a gun) vs. Many (w/ guns) is a losing proposition to start with and soon criminals and the criminally-insane would realize it and not bother.
Funny how we have zero evidence that this is working anywhere in the world. Not in the USA where a lot of people carry guns, not even in those countries in Africa or the Middle East where you can find an AK47 in almost every home.
A guy who commits a crime armed with a gun is either a pro who thinks he knows what he's doing and has already calculated in the odds of other people with guns, or someone who's out of his mind at that time and doesn't care.
It would do a lot to bring all sorts of crime rates down
Evidence.
Right now, all the statistics available show that countries with strict firearms controls have equal or lower crime and especially violent crime rates than countries with less restrictive laws.
I'd like to see the country that tries to invade a country where just about every citizen is trained on how to use and required to own a firearm.
Turn on the TV and check out the latest footage from Afghanistan. Yes, for this purpose it works well. Which is why Switzerland has what you propose: Every citizen is required to have a gun - locked away at home. Because the part about everyone carrying a gun bringing down crime is bullshit spread by the NRA and the like to further their agenda, there is no evidence that I know of that supports it, and quite a bit of evidence that refutes it. But everyone having a gun at home in case the country gets invaded - yes, that works.
Maybe. But if I _don't_ try to stop him, I've got no chance of doing so -- and still a good chance of ending up on the victim list.
The OP mentioned advise that is very likely aimed at people who are not already in the line of fire. If you are already a target, you would of course be dumb to not fight back with whatever you have. But if two guys storm the McD you work at, start shooting and demand cash, you'd be an idiot to get involved, and if you already are (say, you are at the register and they're pointing their guns at you), you'd best give them the cash and suppress the smartass "do you want fries with that?" remark.
Is this actually true, or is it just something repeated ad nauseum by the "authorities"?
To the best of my knowledge, it is true. There are a few "heroic citizen saves..." stories in the news, but there are equally many where if you read closely, you see that the wannabe hero ended up not so heroically. In fact, a big news story last year was when such a "hero" got himself killed. He was the only dead in that event.
I mean, the attacker likely isn't trained either.
But you don't know that. And many attackers may not be formally trained, but they have experience. They may not be doing this for the first time, and may have been beating up people (and been beaten up) since they were kids.
The exact details are crucial.
Yes, they are. The one thing you should make sure of is that you know what you're doing. For example, almost everyone underestimates the lethality of knives. In a close-range fight, a knife is considerably more dangerous than most guns.
A big part of this is because most "martial arts" are pretty useless in a real fight, black belt or no. Giving someone false confidence can be pretty dangerous.
It's not in the arts - most of them were historically used to fight real fights. But the way they are taught today, especially in the west, is geared towards having an opponent who follows the same style you do, in a regulated fight. Very few schools train in fighting an unknown opponent who won't stop until you're down and who'll use any trick he can think off.
Plus most western-taught martial arts are crap against tackles and holds, which is precisely what most experienced street fighters use.
Wikipedia can present all valid views. The world can't implement all possible policies.
Not in the same place. But the world is pretty large, why can't we have abortions legal here and illegal over there and you move to wherever the laws are the way you want them? Ah, I see, the problem is that those kinds of people think their truth should be everyone's truth. An anti-abortionists couldn't sleep knowing that abortions are legal across the border.
But that's got nothing to do with the world. In fact, in this regard Wikipedia actually is a start (some of the time) in teaching them that theirs is not the only opinion and the other side will be present as well.
I'm not into chat-lingo, but "LOL" seems the only appropriate answer to the question asked in the summary.
If Wikipedia were the model for a society, it would be a strict oligarchy covered in a thin layer of pseudo-democracy. And I mean even thinner than our current so-called democracies where you actually can become a part of the in-group through nothing more than popular support.
It would also be a society hostile to science, dominated by porn on every street corner, and one in which a lot of people and sometimes even places "disappear" suddenly with only a note left behind saying "he wasn't notable" or, in some cases, just "WP:SD". If his wife complains to the authorities, she will find herself tagged "citation needed" and will have to supply several relatives who can vouch that she exists, or she will follow. Strangely, producing a birth certificate will be rejected as "original research".
Also, the official language of the administration, that you need to speak if you want anything from the authorities, will not be the language of the land but a derivative full of strange acrynoms and grammar traps so any bureaucrat who doesn't like you can always find some flaw in whatever you said and reject your request based on formalities.
No, thanks. Even though in many respects our current pseudo-democracies aren't too different, I still prefer them.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with HTTPS is that in the usual setup, only one side of the exchange verifies its identity, namely the server. For a session-like handling, I would want client certificates. Those, however, are by far not common enough to build something that demands it.
As I said: Give me something that takes care of your complaints and is as easy to use, and I will. Thousands of other developers think the same. I'm also a security guy (I do run a browser game as a hobby, that's the developer part) so I know the problems. But still, my focus is my game, not invention a new protocol. Besides, how many players would I get if it weren't playable through a browser?
Most of the crap we surround ourselves with (cookies, MIME, Windows and Office, etc.) are still there because they are there and the alternatives aren't.
What is the alternative to using cookies, really? Almost every framework for web-based development has session support that largely relies on cookies. Give me something more secure that works as easily and I will be using it right away.
That is the #1 problem with Facebook (and almost all other social networking sites): You only get a binary setting.
I have a few close friends, who by all means could see whatever they want to, if they'd ask I would tell them anyways.
But I also have a lot of not-so-close friends, acquaintances, people I'm friendly with. Whatever you want to call it, there are degrees of friendship. And Facebook doesn't recognize that.
You assume that will matter.
I assume it won't. Look how far cell phones have come in the past 20 years. Since time travel is nowhere in sight, let's assume that it will be at least 50 years. That is 2.5 times the evolution from suitcase-sized phones to today. I don't think it is much of an exaggeration to assume you'll probably have a tiny speaker in your ear, much like a hearing aid today, wirelessly connected to a microphone that's implanted in a tooth or in your neck clothes as it's no larger than a pinhead, wirelessly connected to the actual phone that is somewhere on your body (probably the size of a button).
I still remember the evening I came home with my wife and the new game was there. After a while she went to bed. I was still playing when she got up the next morning.
Still, see my other reply further down. There is a difference between an addictive game and something that was designed specifically to be addictive, and is only dressed up as a game.
Granted, the lines blur with MMOs. However, last I checked there was still some gameplay in it, and then the grinding layer to make you come back. Wiht Zynga, it is the other way around: The whole game is just an afterthought to get you started and give you an excuse.
Much like smokers and drinkers always claiming that their respective drugs are "social". Sure, people smoke and drink while talking to friends, but you can talk to friends without that. Zynga is someone who pretends to be a friend, but he only does it so you smoke more, because he owns the tobacco company. I do see a difference to friends who first are friends and second may incite you into a bit more drinking than you'd engage in otherwise.
Seriously, that would mean that time travel is so close that cell phones won't change considerably. The chance of that is even smaller than that for time travel per se.
We are pattern-matching machines. We see and interpret in practically the same thought. We are used to people using cell phones like that, so that is what we think we see.
The difference is that Civ III is a game. Farmville is a drug. Zynga employs full-time psychologists and their "games" serve one purpose: Make you return and return and return.
There've been some excellent articles including some with real research and investigative journalism. Anyone who still thinks that Zynga makes games has been living under a rock.
https://facebook.com/ works just fine.
https://slashdot.org/ doesn't, it redirects to http:///
But I agree, SSL should've become the default long ago. Has someone already made a Firefox plugin that for every http:/// link tries the https:/// equivalent first and then falls back to http:/// only if that fails?
The language is either not Turing complete and then mostly useless for practical general computing, or it is Turing complete and then it provides no real security.
You say that based on what analysis?
Sure, a programming language alone will never bring you 100% perfect security. Neither does any other system, method or tool. Sure you and I can write great, safe code in C. But the large majority of programmers has too little experience, doesn't care all that much, and is under perpetual time pressure to deliver functionality. The choice of language can dramatically change the quality and security of your code.
And, without having studied it in detail so far, from what I see this new language does offer some very nice features that current software usually needs, but almost always never has, due to the effort required in adding it individually. Fine-grained access controls on individual data objects sounds like a fantastic concept to have. Of course it requires you already have some kind of data labelling and role models with defined accesses, so this is probably not for the home user, but in a corporate environment? Hell, yeah!
As experience teaches us, the first thing that people who need to share do is "chmod -R a+rwx ."
Which is why I believe for a company, there is only one path to security - a combination of upper management understanding that security is important or they, not some lowly cubicle worker, could be out of a job, and Mandatory Access Controls.
"People" shouldn't even be allowed to determine the permissions of a file. And they absolutely should not ever be able to change the "a" value, which should be hardcoded to 0 everywhere. Remember "default deny"? We'd not dream of having firewalls like that, but our filesystems all allow it.
So, any security which requires signing of code to run will become looser and looser over time as problems are encountered.
If that degradation is acknowledge and managed properly, it will stop at the point where further loosening would become more dangerous than profitable. Of course that's the theory. To make it reality, you need a commitment from up high. Which you don't get in these days because most top-level management knows the shareholders only care much about this quarter, and a bit about next, so fuck any long-term perspective.
That is the real problem. An owner-owned company seldom has that problem, the guy wants to have his retirement one day.
Good points there, except for a few details:
True, the high-speed traders only make fractions of a cent per share - but they make it ten, twenty or a hundred times a day, and they are often high-volume traders, too (an algorithmic trading company a friend of mine works at once held 10% of a major industrial corporation - for a few minutes).
Two, I'm not invested in any public companies. I used to work at the stock exchange, I know better than to put my future into what is basically a casino. If you want to get rich at the casino, you have to be the casino.
For an investor with much more at stake, it is easy enough to see how a one-second interval could be make-or-break.
Seriously? If a one-second price difference can make or break an investor, don't you think that is ample proof that the markets are way, way too volatile? There is nothing left of real price-finding if these differences can happen in those times. The real world doesn't change that fast, and last I checked investments are about real-world things (companies, goods, etc.)
'Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?'"
Firefox 4
You don't get into the Office market without something that is entirely non-geeky: A strict design philosophy, a very solid idea of what office users really need (and which the 90% of functionality are that almost nobody ever uses), and an innovative streamlined and blowing-you-away UI concept.
Here's why:
You need a strict design because Office software suffers from bloat and feature creep even more than browsers do. Just look at Word - it can compete with Emacs in bullshit functions that nobody ever uses but some coder thought would be really cool. To prevent that, you need a very good idea of what the fuck you want to accomplish, and both the competence and the rigour to keep everything out that doesn't fit the design.
You need a solid idea of what the core functionality is in order to align your design (s.a.) with the user needs. In fact, extensions or plugins would be an excellent way to keep the 10% users interested that need some obscure functionality that nobody else ever needs. Find some way to embed references to the needed plugins and an auto-update or heck if they are small even embed the plugins (or parts of it) themselves so other users can at least read the file. But whatever you do, keep the core simple and easy to understand. This is why I personally am a fan of the Mac office software - Pages, Numbers. Numbers has by far not the functionality of Excel, but it has what I need and it has a select few additional features that, as soon as you've used them once, are killer features (seperation between table and document, allowing you to put as many tables on a page as you want, for example).
Blow-Away UI is what you'll need to get users interested who already have an office suite, which let's face it is almost everyone. You don't get the majority of people with "cheap!" (OO has that, look how much good it does them) or with "features!" (both OO and MS office have more features than anyone can possibly ever need). But being more productive because it is easier and better to use - that would get a lot of people interested. It's what is lacking from the current competitors, they are both abominations in usability.
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value.
It might, if the trading were actually being done at the exchange, for market prices. It isn't. Most trading today is only registered at the exchange, but the actual deal is brokered elsewhere.
Also, the amount of liquidity a market needs is subject to discussion. Do you really need to have a counterpart available this second for a market to work? That is nonsense, the market (the real market, not the speculative one) wouldn't burn and die if you had to wait a second or two or even *gasp* five for a deal to go through.
Providing liquidity is a valuable role. However, you are ignoring the fact that everyone is in it for the money. If the cost of liquidity, i.e. the amount of profit the high-speed traders extract from the market, becomes too high, the market also suffers. Somewhere, there is an optimal point between the positive (more liquidity) and the negative (the cost of this liquidity).
One shouldn't forget that these high speed tradings are not in the interest of investors, companies being traded or other market participants with a real-world interest. They serve only the high-speed/high-volume speculative traders, specifically algorithmic or automated traders.
Even Wall Street is slowly waking up to the problem:
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052970203952604575552190237324972.html?mod=BOL_twm_mw
This was a bomb about a week ago when it was published, the guy making those statements is a Wall Street billionaire, not a hippie communist.
I think it's fair to assume that the foetus would opt not to be aborted.
No, it is not fair. It pre-supposes a critical element of the discussion, namely whether or not the foetus is a being capable of making conscious decisions. But I'm not here to repeat that discussion.
We can't implement multiple definitions of personhood in the real world. Wikipedia can.
Just like Wikipedia, we can consider multiple possibilities, and take into account that none of us is in posession of the whole truth. While in the end, we have to settle down to one law or rule, in deciding which one it should be we can take multiple dimensions of the problem and various points-of-view into account.
In fact, in many cases we already do. That is the common approach in less emotionally charged topics. And in many countries, we have managed to do that even for the difficult ones. For example, it is entirely irrational to believe that a sperm and an egg cell are not a human being, while the second they fuse suddenly a human being comes into existence. That is an entirely arbitrary line to draw in what really is a gradual development. It is, however, not the worst line. Certainly better than any random number of weeks, because it marks the spot where two DNAs combine.
I don't, however, see much argument along those lines. Usually, the discussion is more of the "you are evil satanists" vs. "you are religious nutjobs" kind.
I'm familiar with the argument.
The point remains that the anti-abortionists think that their point should apply to someone else, both the foetus and its mother.
That's not evil. In fact, the whole concept of a society rests on groups of people agreeing to follow common rules. The problem is the absolutism inherit in that.
You could make it per block, we have the information processing capacity. Heck, you could make it by individual person. Oh, wait. That's the problem, isn't it? The anti-abortionists (or any other kind of people, I'm just using them as an example) are not furious that they could have an abortion if they wanted to, they want to regulate other people's lives.
What would really happen is that a lot of innocent people would get killed because
a) some idiot with a gun (if you give everyone guns, you also give them to the idiots) thinks there is a bad situation and starts shooting
b) there really is a bad situation, but due to fuck-ups, bad aiming or plain-old stupid friendly fire, some of the upstanding citizens shoot each other instead of the criminal
The problem with simple solutions is that the unintended consequences tend to go ignored, and an idealised situation is assumed, instead of the confusing, unclear and stressful thing that will actually occur in the real world.
One (w/ a gun) vs. Many (w/ guns) is a losing proposition to start with and soon criminals and the criminally-insane would realize it and not bother.
Funny how we have zero evidence that this is working anywhere in the world. Not in the USA where a lot of people carry guns, not even in those countries in Africa or the Middle East where you can find an AK47 in almost every home.
A guy who commits a crime armed with a gun is either a pro who thinks he knows what he's doing and has already calculated in the odds of other people with guns, or someone who's out of his mind at that time and doesn't care.
It would do a lot to bring all sorts of crime rates down
Evidence.
Right now, all the statistics available show that countries with strict firearms controls have equal or lower crime and especially violent crime rates than countries with less restrictive laws.
I'd like to see the country that tries to invade a country where just about every citizen is trained on how to use and required to own a firearm.
Turn on the TV and check out the latest footage from Afghanistan. Yes, for this purpose it works well. Which is why Switzerland has what you propose: Every citizen is required to have a gun - locked away at home. Because the part about everyone carrying a gun bringing down crime is bullshit spread by the NRA and the like to further their agenda, there is no evidence that I know of that supports it, and quite a bit of evidence that refutes it. But everyone having a gun at home in case the country gets invaded - yes, that works.
Maybe. But if I _don't_ try to stop him, I've got no chance of doing so -- and still a good chance of ending up on the victim list.
The OP mentioned advise that is very likely aimed at people who are not already in the line of fire. If you are already a target, you would of course be dumb to not fight back with whatever you have. But if two guys storm the McD you work at, start shooting and demand cash, you'd be an idiot to get involved, and if you already are (say, you are at the register and they're pointing their guns at you), you'd best give them the cash and suppress the smartass "do you want fries with that?" remark.
Is this actually true, or is it just something repeated ad nauseum by the "authorities"?
To the best of my knowledge, it is true. There are a few "heroic citizen saves ..." stories in the news, but there are equally many where if you read closely, you see that the wannabe hero ended up not so heroically. In fact, a big news story last year was when such a "hero" got himself killed. He was the only dead in that event.
I mean, the attacker likely isn't trained either.
But you don't know that. And many attackers may not be formally trained, but they have experience. They may not be doing this for the first time, and may have been beating up people (and been beaten up) since they were kids.
The exact details are crucial.
Yes, they are. The one thing you should make sure of is that you know what you're doing. For example, almost everyone underestimates the lethality of knives. In a close-range fight, a knife is considerably more dangerous than most guns.
A big part of this is because most "martial arts" are pretty useless in a real fight, black belt or no. Giving someone false confidence can be pretty dangerous.
It's not in the arts - most of them were historically used to fight real fights. But the way they are taught today, especially in the west, is geared towards having an opponent who follows the same style you do, in a regulated fight. Very few schools train in fighting an unknown opponent who won't stop until you're down and who'll use any trick he can think off.
Plus most western-taught martial arts are crap against tackles and holds, which is precisely what most experienced street fighters use.
Wikipedia can present all valid views. The world can't implement all possible policies.
Not in the same place. But the world is pretty large, why can't we have abortions legal here and illegal over there and you move to wherever the laws are the way you want them? Ah, I see, the problem is that those kinds of people think their truth should be everyone's truth. An anti-abortionists couldn't sleep knowing that abortions are legal across the border.
But that's got nothing to do with the world. In fact, in this regard Wikipedia actually is a start (some of the time) in teaching them that theirs is not the only opinion and the other side will be present as well.
I'm not into chat-lingo, but "LOL" seems the only appropriate answer to the question asked in the summary.
If Wikipedia were the model for a society, it would be a strict oligarchy covered in a thin layer of pseudo-democracy. And I mean even thinner than our current so-called democracies where you actually can become a part of the in-group through nothing more than popular support.
It would also be a society hostile to science, dominated by porn on every street corner, and one in which a lot of people and sometimes even places "disappear" suddenly with only a note left behind saying "he wasn't notable" or, in some cases, just "WP:SD". If his wife complains to the authorities, she will find herself tagged "citation needed" and will have to supply several relatives who can vouch that she exists, or she will follow. Strangely, producing a birth certificate will be rejected as "original research".
Also, the official language of the administration, that you need to speak if you want anything from the authorities, will not be the language of the land but a derivative full of strange acrynoms and grammar traps so any bureaucrat who doesn't like you can always find some flaw in whatever you said and reject your request based on formalities.
No, thanks. Even though in many respects our current pseudo-democracies aren't too different, I still prefer them.