Actually, you'd be surprised what get's done in the building controls world with blocks and lines.
Yes, but that is a dedicated setting. You're not doing general-purpose coding, are you? I'm not an expert, but AFAIK that is more comparable to editing a configuration file or a database than with programming.
Who knows, you may be surprised by what application may be developed by a high school girl.
My guess is: The same as operas written by computer geeks.
No, I don't mean the browser.
The basis of society as we know it is division of labour. Let people do what they are good at, and give the parts they aren't to someone else. We don't need 5 million nonsensical crap applications on the marketplace. What we need is a way to request applications. If 1000 people want a fart app and are willing to pay $0.99 for it, I'm sure someone will write one.
Right now, there's no way for the consumer to tell the market what you are looking for. Back when we came up with all this Internet thing, wasn't the fact that it makes bi-directional communication possible one of its best features? Instead of having only the big corporations being able to talk to the costumers via advertisement and press releases, the customer could talk back and the companies would listen?
Whatever happened to that? Wouldn't the app market with its thousands of small developers a fantastic place for this old dream? Tell them what you need, or what the available apps are lacking, and the chances that someone will set out to satisfy that need are better than ever before.
That would be a true innovation that drives the app store or marketplace or whatever you want to call it forward. Apple is too much into the uni-directional conversation for that to happen, Google could make it happen. Don't tell me that with all the very smart people they employ, nobody has dug up this idea from the 90s.
Do you really think that one, even just one application of quality or merit will be created with this? There will be a billion "look ma, I click this button and something happens" apps. Aside from that?
We've been there. Visual programming had its place, back when it was done by nerds. There were games, serious applications, the whole nine yards. Turns it it's all shit. Beyond trivialities, you can't model anything worth writing a program for with boxes. Even Minesweeper is too complicated for that, let alone anything that actually gets you something done.
The video is exactly the kind of apps we'll be seeing. I don't see how that is going to be a selling point for the devices.
Well, apparently these days one has to spell out everything on/. instead of being able to rely on basic intelligence in the reader.
I'm sure Brasil has a comparative pool of creativity to the US, Europe, Burma, Greenland or any other place on earth. There are some local differences depending on whether or not creativity is valued in a culture or not so much, but as it's a basic human trait, they are pretty small.
However, Brasil does not have a massive industry based on copyright. And copyright is, first and foremost and no matter what they try to tell you, an economic law. It gives you you a monopoly on commercial use of your works.
So, without an industry that is strong in copyright, the country has no major incentives to be a strong proponent of copyright. On the contrary, turning a blind eye to the use of foreign copyrights is a reasonable thing to do (less money flowing out of the country for goods with no tangible value).
The reason advertising works is because people are dumb, not because of advanced clandestine techniques.
It isn't magic, just applied science. And the reason it works is not that people are dumb, but that people are people. No matter what your IQ, you can not help but be startled at a sudden sound, or look into the direction of a movement in your peripheral vision. Your attention is drawn to certain things because a million or so years of evolution have selected for that kind of attention. There's great research out there on why we are making more false positives then false negatives in our judgements (the short version: Mistaking a rabbit for a lion isn't a fatal mistake, ignoring the lion because it could be just a rabbit is).
It isn't science, it is still just psychology.
Psychology happens to be a science, no matter how much it irks your computer-nerd arrogance.
Nor do I think Apple and China are in a conspiracy to censor technology -- they just seem to agree (quite publicly and openly) that computer users need to be protected from themselves, beyond the point of making it simpler and more usable, and to the point of removing choices.
Removing choices is what design is all about. In the words of Antoine de Saint Exupery: "You know you've achieved perfection in design. Not when you have nothing more to add. But when you have nothing more to take away."
A light switch works so well precisely because it gives you two options: "Lights on" or "Lights off", instead of presenting you with a spectrum of things you can do with electron flow through a wire.
Anything I want it to do, I can make it do.
Jailbroken?
*laugh* no. Why should I? Sure, some Apps would not be accepted in the App Store, but I can still put them on my own devices, no problem at all. Notice the "anything I want". There are certainly things that are not possible, but so far the limits I hit were all questions of technology (graphics performance, mostly) or design (e.g. no way to make a good interface of this on such a small screen).
You may have a point, but you lose a lot of credibility comparing a computer to a coffee machine. I know we're all sick of car analogies, but they're a lot closer.
The difference really isn't that massive. For the user, light switch, coffee machine, car, computer - all just tools to enable him to do what he wants to do. Sure, some of those tools have multiple functions, and computers probably the most. But still a tool.
From what I hear, phishing scams still work.
Here's the funny thing: A few years ago, a magazine did a test on phishing, giving well-made phishing mails to both novice users and security experts to let them say whether they think they're genuine or phishing. Turns out, the statistical difference between the two groups was not so high.
I've analyzed that in a 2007 or so talk I've given in London. The main problem with phishing is that most of our e-mail programs seem to be designed to make phishing easy and noticing the details you need to notice to make the distinction as hard as possible. Almost all the information that is available that makes it possible to discern a phishing mail is hidden away somewhere. Meanwhile, all the information that triggers your mind that you need to react on this important mail - i.e. click on something - is large, in-your-face, middle-of-the-screen.
Phishing is mostly a failure of interface design.
I'm sorry, but there is no UI fix for that.
Not one, but if you'd re-design the UI so that it is more helpful to the user, that would help a ton.
And the only way around that is to move in the direction Apple and China seem to want to -- a whitelist.
That's nonsense. Where do you have any evidence for that claim?
That's not a technical problem. It's not a design problem. It's a social one.
I agree, and as long as there are people there will be stupid people and stupid people will always be exploited. That doesn't mean we can't do anything about it, make it more difficult to exploit people, or easier for the smarter people to protect themselves.
We protect morons from themselves, so that they can survive to breed.
That is true, and it irks me to no end. However, the real problem is not selection - most of the moronic things are not deadly. The real problem is that we encourage stupidity.
Just look at the idols of the day. Most of them are either dumb as shit, or at least pretend to be (I'm looking at you, Paris). Dumb is "cool". The whole football/soccer world cup has been a great example - otherwise smart people use it as an opportunity to become total idiot assholes for an evening, or several.
Selection does not only work by killing people off. It also works by encouraging positive traits. And in mental abilities, encouraging works better since they are at least partially (how much is still in debate) a matter of upbringing and training and not genetic.
The second problem is that the dumbfucks breed like rabbits, while the smart people get fewer kids, later in life. So what little selection you have is getting outpaced.
Really not surprising. When the US was a small, backwater english colony, it was also famous for its piracy (of books, in that time).
It is the countries with the massive content industries that have the strict copyright regimes. Brasil isn't home to Hollywood or very many international music superstars.
Is also a phrase you could say about slave owners fighting against the abolition of slavery. It doesn't make it moral, or right. And if you really care, there are almost always ways in which you can make ethics and business meet.
The problem with our society today is we're dumbing our tech to match the ever lowering intellect. This isn't so much a problem in other parts of the world as it is here in the US.
Ok, putting "don't dry hamsters in microwave oven" signs on every microwave is probably excessive. Then again, with a bit more of technology you could probably detect that there's a living being inside the oven and not turn it on. What is dumbing down, the sign or the automatic detection? I'm not arguing for the sign.
Now, don't equate that we need the government's blessing to use a browser and the internet, but I don't think we should shield the stupid who refuse to read the warning signs.
Why not? The example with the cars is only valid because it's a potentially deadly weapon to others. If you want to kill yourself because you didn't bother reading the instructions, by all means be my guest. It's endangering others where society gets interested, and governments become active.
For example, the iPhone and the Great Firewall of China, both of which claim to be making things more secure and stable for you by removing your choice. Even if the iPhone is more secure for the kind of user who would download BonziBuddy, I don't think it's worth it, and this is exactly what is meant by dumbing down.
Here's the funny thing: You're dead wrong. I'm an iPhone developer. There is no "dumbing down" here at all. Anything I want it to do, I can make it do. However what has happened, in comparison to 1980s computers, is that the user has most of the complicated stuff hidden away from him. That is not a conspiracy, it is the normal process by which things mature. Look at cars: Early on, you'd better know quite a bit about it, just to drive one. These days, you put your car into the ignition, and you care nothing about what goes on under the hood. Same with so many other things. Do you know how to make fire without matches? How to milk a cow? How to slaughter a pig? As our tools and our division of labour improve, the breadth of stuff you need to know reduces. There is nothing "dumb" in it. On the contrary, not burdening yourself with knowledge that has no use is a pretty smart thing to do.
Especially in computers, the number of people who can do low-level stuff is not decreasing. The percentage is, not because there are less experts, but because there are more non-expert users.
But for this to work, you need to educate people on a hell of a lot more than "Here's a colored border." You need to educate them on what privilege separation means, why they might trust or not trust a given program, why they should trust things as little as possible, etc.
No, that is geek-think again.
What you need to do is teach them which tasks require elevated priviledges and to become suspicious when something else, such as their mail program, suddenly has a red border.
Yes, you need some education. But the better support your tools give, the less education you need. The main failure of security (and I work in the security industry, so it's partly my fault as well) is that for decades we've made the user responsible for everything, applauded ourselves with "stupid looser" phrases, and thought that education and awareness would solve our problems.
But there's a limit to how much idiot-proofing you can do.
I agree.
However, I also insist that there is far more idiot-proofing possible than we tend to think. If you study design for a bit (not the computer stuff, the real-world stuff about light switches, doors, coffee machines, etc.) you are quickly surprised at how much a good design can solve. Our computer interfaces are worlds away from that at this time. They are crude, primitive, unhelpful and more of a hinderance than a support. Even the best of them. It's normal, we're still early in the development of computer technology as a whole.
My point is that you have a 99% chance that whenever you think "what a stupid loser" about a user and his actions with a computer, there is something in the machine or the user interface that you can do to either solve the problem or make the user less stupid about it.
The Movie industry has been crying foul (one major studio CEO recently said in a speech that piracy is "killing the industry")... while that same industry has been racking up record profits. Sorry, but that made my bullshit detector go off the charts.
It should. Back in their lawsuit against the video recorder, the movie industry put in a sworn statement that they would go bancrupt unless the video recorder would be outlawed.
The fact that this perjury was never followed up on is one of the reasons they continue to think they can tell blatant lies in full view of everyone and nothing will happen to them.
No, what really happened was that Bungie used to be a Mac games studio before Microsoft bought them out for Halo, which it wanted on the Xbox. Of course, the Mac fans were furious. So they were appeased with promises that "of course" Halo would come out for the Mac. Which means they needed an excuse to stop doing that for the next titles. MS had all intentions of killing off the Mac part of Bungie. Two birds, one stone and all that.
For the strawman: The costs of providing server services to a pirate copy are non-zero, so piracy in online games hurts. But then again, it is trivial to get rid of them. And you still have the sales from the others. If you are profitable with the sales you have, then the business decision is to do it. If you aren't, then you don't. Notice the piracy doesn't figure in there. It doesn't matter. Even if your piracy rate were 1000:1, if you make a profit then continuing it is the right thing to do.
Stuff does not "tank" commercially because it is shared. It tanks if the sales are lackluster. Almost always, there are several reasons for this. One may be that people who would otherwise have bought the game are downloading it instead. So we are already at three levels of indirection.
If you want some honest estimates (and estimates is all you're going to get), approach the problem from both sides.
$450 gazillion of damage is certainly bonkers. But so is "no effect".
Both are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. But where do you find evidence? Sure you'll find plenty of games where someone claims that piracy hit it hard. However, to turn that claim into proof, you need to prove not only that it was pirated heavily, but also that at least a considerable portion of those people would have bought it otherwise. Just because everyone plays it doesn't mean everyone would've bought it. The cost/benefit analysis simply changes dramatically between $0 and, say, $49.95
I can't think of any way to make a serious calculation of how many people would have bought a game but didn't. Way too many variables, and you can't ask them, either - how do you get a representative sample of an anonymous crowd?
So, in short, I don't think you'll get actual evidence.
Or, you could educate the user that fire and gasoline don't mix.
Yes, and to only walk on green, and to install antivirus, and to have safe sex, insurance, not go into certain parts of town, keep the car in working condition, verify their patch level is current, check all money for forgery is easy as well, and two million other things.
There is only so much that a human brain can actually act on. Storage is not the problem, recall is. Sometimes, the right decision is to educate people, but it is not a panacea. If it is easier to simply design in a safety than to educate everyone and keep them educated, then building in the safety is the proper thing to do.
Also, often these things go hand in hand. I still don't understand why current operating systems don't indicate the priviledge level an application is running at by, say, a coloured border. You'd still need to educate people on what it means, but a fairly simple safety gives them a lot more options than the stupid "well, you could open a console and run ps" geek solution.
What happens if we dumb down the products to the point where people don't know how to create them anymore, or the knowledge is only in the hands of the far and few?
That's a philosophy that has never worked in all of human history. Sorry to say that. We always start out with new technology that only a few understand, be it fire, mathematics, science, cars or computers. At first, you need to be an expert just to use it. But then the rest of humanity wants a piece of the cake, too. That's when we "dumb down" the technology. Actually, it is not dumb at all, it is making it useable. I've written Linux kernel modules, and still I enjoy a good user interface design, because it makes my work easier, and more often than not I use the computer to actually accomplish something, not to mess with its interiors.
I don't see a dictatorship anywhere just because we have put fire into light bulbs instead of torches, and give people lighters instead of teaching them how to use flintstone.
Really, if you want to tinker with something, why not flat out say that you enjoy the tinkering? Why try to make it political?
The idea behind reality cracking is that if you can begin to understand how the adverts work, you can become more aware and wise to how supermarkets, adverts abuse and play on you.
I know. I've been reading stuff on searchlores before it was named searchlores.
But, even if you are aware of it, that doesn't mean you are immune. The only thing you can do is filtering it out, and I don't mean with your brain. I don't watch TV, due to the rampant advertising (and the fact that there's nothing worthwhile on). I browse with Adblock, I have spam filters everywhere.
Nevertheless, unless you live in a very remote area, you can not help but be bombarded by advertisement every day. And it works, even if you understand perfectly well how and why.
I try buy products that advertise less (like unheard of brands). I am a simpleton.
Doesn't matter. Even that is a demographic recognized and targeted by advertisement agencies. They just use different, less-obvious methods to reach you, that's all.
Look, to us tech people, these things are obvious. But everyone else out there doesn't have a clue. You have to design the car so that the user doesn't get the idea of looking into the fuel tank with a lighter, or if he does get that idea, that he can't do it. No matter how silly it sounds. This is why our society works, because we can safely use tools without having to be experts in them.
Then you should immediately report to the nearest psychology lab and make a living being examined for this highly unusual trait.
Advertisement today contains more science than Spirit and Opportunity. It practically is a science of its own - the science of manipulating masses, often unconsciously, and especially in such a way that they are either unaware of it or in complete denial.
Ockhams Razor says you are not immune, you are in denial.
It always amazes me that both laymen and scientists as well talk about such things as if we KNOW whats going on.
We don't. We have theories.
In science, "theory" has a very different meaning. If you talk on the street and say something is a "theory", you mean it's unproven, an idea, it could work like that but you're not sure. Scientists call that a "hypothesis". A theory in science is as close to fact as we'll ever come (since science is always open for learning).
It's the same mistake the ID fanatics exploit. Evolution is not a "theory" in the common-sense meaning of the word, only in the scientific meaning.
In other words: Yes, we know what's going on, at least as far as current science and instruments permit. Which is always several orders of magnitude and sometimes tens of orders of magnitude larger than any other human attempt to explain the world. Most current scientific theories are correct to more decimal places than your pocket calculator can display. Given that religion, magic, superstition, intuition, "common sense" and all the other modes of explanation have a great day if they're correct to one decimal place, and routinely score worse than chance, the argument "it is only a theory", aka "yes, but here in the 20th decimal place we are not really certain, are we?" is patently ridiculous.
iPhone users are not a protected class under US disability statutes, and I highly doubt that they are in the UK, either. Despite the strong evidence of mental retardation evident in actually owning an iPhone, there is probably no compelling reason to so classify and protect iPhone owners.
You missed the point. By a parsec or two.
The government does a lot of things for kids, elderly, people who like to walk in parks, people who enjoy football, people who drive cars and a whole long list of other minorities and large groups. Very little of what the government does really benefits everyone, and a large portion of government activities only benefits minorities, protected or not.
And you completely ignored the part about cost/benefit.
it's not, but the idea is great. For a whistleblowing service, Wikileaks like thing or something similar, incorporating your public key into the logo would be a great way to spread it.
Not everyone has an iPhone, so an iPhone-only app is stupid.
Errr, what?
Who modded this up? Please go and give your license back. Any license. Actually, all of them.
So, things that is only useful to a minority of people should not be done by the government, yes? Which means they should stop spending any money that helps the blind or disabled. Or the unemployed. Heck, I'm neither blind nor unemployed, so what the fuck is the government doing spending my money on this shit?
Oh yes, I am picking extreme examples, but the point remains. Very few government actions are really intended for everyone, or even the majority.
If this were about dumping the existing options and leaving only an iPhone app as your way to, say, get unemployment benefits, then yes by all means the outcry would be justified.
But it isn't.
So all the bullshit jealousy whining is just that.
The rational look should be exactly what the government did: Check what the costs are, check what the benefits to how many people would be, then decide whether the costs are worth the benefit. If it costs £1000 to do something, and 100 people will each have a benefit of £50, then the government just saved its citizen £4000. As long as it is not always the same group of people that benefit, that's perfectly good.
Because, you know, otherwise they could never get anything done, especially not with new technologies.
We don't need a new computer type. We need a little bit of innovation regarding connections.
If you have a computer in your computer room, and a flatscreen TV in your living room, why can the computer not use the TV as an output device? Wire, wireless, don't care. Why invent a new device if it does nothing you don't already have?
It is being in the position of the one asking if by rights it should be the other way around.
Example: If you want to smoke in a restaurant, the proper thing to do is to ask around if anyone minds. It is not ok to just start and see if someone asks you to stop.
It's a question of exercising power. Standing somewhere where people can be expected to stand and being asked to step aside is not a problem for either party. However, standing around in the middle of a traffic area and expecting to be asked politely to step aside each time is obnoxious. Here you are putting a burden on other people by standing where you should not be standing.
It's a bit of a subtle thing, but it is also part of society. Society works because we do not have to negotiate every single detail with everyone we meet, over and over again. We have customs to solve that kind of things. We have standards for greeting someone, we drive on the same side of the road, we walk at green and stop at red. All that is just arbitrary customs because society as a whole works more smoothly if people agree on how to do things.
So, if the custom is to stand on the right and walk on the left, and you stand on the right, you're behaving in an anti-social matter. Most of us are too nice to give you any trouble, but quite frankly, there are days where I wish ill on all the antisocial assholes who move around in society as if nobody except themselves existed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you'd be surprised what get's done in the building controls world with blocks and lines.
Yes, but that is a dedicated setting. You're not doing general-purpose coding, are you? I'm not an expert, but AFAIK that is more comparable to editing a configuration file or a database than with programming.
Who knows, you may be surprised by what application may be developed by a high school girl.
My guess is: The same as operas written by computer geeks.
No, I don't mean the browser.
The basis of society as we know it is division of labour. Let people do what they are good at, and give the parts they aren't to someone else. We don't need 5 million nonsensical crap applications on the marketplace. What we need is a way to request applications. If 1000 people want a fart app and are willing to pay $0.99 for it, I'm sure someone will write one.
Right now, there's no way for the consumer to tell the market what you are looking for. Back when we came up with all this Internet thing, wasn't the fact that it makes bi-directional communication possible one of its best features? Instead of having only the big corporations being able to talk to the costumers via advertisement and press releases, the customer could talk back and the companies would listen?
Whatever happened to that? Wouldn't the app market with its thousands of small developers a fantastic place for this old dream? Tell them what you need, or what the available apps are lacking, and the chances that someone will set out to satisfy that need are better than ever before.
That would be a true innovation that drives the app store or marketplace or whatever you want to call it forward. Apple is too much into the uni-directional conversation for that to happen, Google could make it happen. Don't tell me that with all the very smart people they employ, nobody has dug up this idea from the 90s.
errr... because?
Do you really think that one, even just one application of quality or merit will be created with this? There will be a billion "look ma, I click this button and something happens" apps. Aside from that?
We've been there. Visual programming had its place, back when it was done by nerds. There were games, serious applications, the whole nine yards. Turns it it's all shit. Beyond trivialities, you can't model anything worth writing a program for with boxes. Even Minesweeper is too complicated for that, let alone anything that actually gets you something done.
The video is exactly the kind of apps we'll be seeing. I don't see how that is going to be a selling point for the devices.
Well, apparently these days one has to spell out everything on /. instead of being able to rely on basic intelligence in the reader.
I'm sure Brasil has a comparative pool of creativity to the US, Europe, Burma, Greenland or any other place on earth. There are some local differences depending on whether or not creativity is valued in a culture or not so much, but as it's a basic human trait, they are pretty small.
However, Brasil does not have a massive industry based on copyright. And copyright is, first and foremost and no matter what they try to tell you, an economic law. It gives you you a monopoly on commercial use of your works.
So, without an industry that is strong in copyright, the country has no major incentives to be a strong proponent of copyright. On the contrary, turning a blind eye to the use of foreign copyrights is a reasonable thing to do (less money flowing out of the country for goods with no tangible value).
The reason advertising works is because people are dumb, not because of advanced clandestine techniques.
It isn't magic, just applied science. And the reason it works is not that people are dumb, but that people are people. No matter what your IQ, you can not help but be startled at a sudden sound, or look into the direction of a movement in your peripheral vision. Your attention is drawn to certain things because a million or so years of evolution have selected for that kind of attention. There's great research out there on why we are making more false positives then false negatives in our judgements (the short version: Mistaking a rabbit for a lion isn't a fatal mistake, ignoring the lion because it could be just a rabbit is).
It isn't science, it is still just psychology.
Psychology happens to be a science, no matter how much it irks your computer-nerd arrogance.
Nor do I think Apple and China are in a conspiracy to censor technology -- they just seem to agree (quite publicly and openly) that computer users need to be protected from themselves, beyond the point of making it simpler and more usable, and to the point of removing choices.
Removing choices is what design is all about. In the words of Antoine de Saint Exupery: "You know you've achieved perfection in design. Not when you have nothing more to add. But when you have nothing more to take away."
A light switch works so well precisely because it gives you two options: "Lights on" or "Lights off", instead of presenting you with a spectrum of things you can do with electron flow through a wire.
Anything I want it to do, I can make it do.
Jailbroken?
*laugh* no. Why should I? Sure, some Apps would not be accepted in the App Store, but I can still put them on my own devices, no problem at all. Notice the "anything I want". There are certainly things that are not possible, but so far the limits I hit were all questions of technology (graphics performance, mostly) or design (e.g. no way to make a good interface of this on such a small screen).
You may have a point, but you lose a lot of credibility comparing a computer to a coffee machine. I know we're all sick of car analogies, but they're a lot closer.
The difference really isn't that massive. For the user, light switch, coffee machine, car, computer - all just tools to enable him to do what he wants to do. Sure, some of those tools have multiple functions, and computers probably the most. But still a tool.
From what I hear, phishing scams still work.
Here's the funny thing: A few years ago, a magazine did a test on phishing, giving well-made phishing mails to both novice users and security experts to let them say whether they think they're genuine or phishing. Turns out, the statistical difference between the two groups was not so high.
I've analyzed that in a 2007 or so talk I've given in London. The main problem with phishing is that most of our e-mail programs seem to be designed to make phishing easy and noticing the details you need to notice to make the distinction as hard as possible. Almost all the information that is available that makes it possible to discern a phishing mail is hidden away somewhere. Meanwhile, all the information that triggers your mind that you need to react on this important mail - i.e. click on something - is large, in-your-face, middle-of-the-screen.
Phishing is mostly a failure of interface design.
I'm sorry, but there is no UI fix for that.
Not one, but if you'd re-design the UI so that it is more helpful to the user, that would help a ton.
And the only way around that is to move in the direction Apple and China seem to want to -- a whitelist.
That's nonsense. Where do you have any evidence for that claim?
That's not a technical problem. It's not a design problem. It's a social one.
I agree, and as long as there are people there will be stupid people and stupid people will always be exploited. That doesn't mean we can't do anything about it, make it more difficult to exploit people, or easier for the smarter people to protect themselves.
We protect morons from themselves, so that they can survive to breed.
That is true, and it irks me to no end. However, the real problem is not selection - most of the moronic things are not deadly. The real problem is that we encourage stupidity.
Just look at the idols of the day. Most of them are either dumb as shit, or at least pretend to be (I'm looking at you, Paris). Dumb is "cool". The whole football/soccer world cup has been a great example - otherwise smart people use it as an opportunity to become total idiot assholes for an evening, or several.
Selection does not only work by killing people off. It also works by encouraging positive traits. And in mental abilities, encouraging works better since they are at least partially (how much is still in debate) a matter of upbringing and training and not genetic.
The second problem is that the dumbfucks breed like rabbits, while the smart people get fewer kids, later in life. So what little selection you have is getting outpaced.
Really not surprising. When the US was a small, backwater english colony, it was also famous for its piracy (of books, in that time).
It is the countries with the massive content industries that have the strict copyright regimes. Brasil isn't home to Hollywood or very many international music superstars.
Alternatively "protecting your investment"
Is also a phrase you could say about slave owners fighting against the abolition of slavery. It doesn't make it moral, or right. And if you really care, there are almost always ways in which you can make ethics and business meet.
The problem with our society today is we're dumbing our tech to match the ever lowering intellect. This isn't so much a problem in other parts of the world as it is here in the US.
Ok, putting "don't dry hamsters in microwave oven" signs on every microwave is probably excessive. Then again, with a bit more of technology you could probably detect that there's a living being inside the oven and not turn it on. What is dumbing down, the sign or the automatic detection? I'm not arguing for the sign.
Now, don't equate that we need the government's blessing to use a browser and the internet, but I don't think we should shield the stupid who refuse to read the warning signs.
Why not? The example with the cars is only valid because it's a potentially deadly weapon to others. If you want to kill yourself because you didn't bother reading the instructions, by all means be my guest. It's endangering others where society gets interested, and governments become active.
For example, the iPhone and the Great Firewall of China, both of which claim to be making things more secure and stable for you by removing your choice. Even if the iPhone is more secure for the kind of user who would download BonziBuddy, I don't think it's worth it, and this is exactly what is meant by dumbing down.
Here's the funny thing: You're dead wrong. I'm an iPhone developer. There is no "dumbing down" here at all. Anything I want it to do, I can make it do. However what has happened, in comparison to 1980s computers, is that the user has most of the complicated stuff hidden away from him. That is not a conspiracy, it is the normal process by which things mature. Look at cars: Early on, you'd better know quite a bit about it, just to drive one. These days, you put your car into the ignition, and you care nothing about what goes on under the hood. Same with so many other things. Do you know how to make fire without matches? How to milk a cow? How to slaughter a pig? As our tools and our division of labour improve, the breadth of stuff you need to know reduces. There is nothing "dumb" in it. On the contrary, not burdening yourself with knowledge that has no use is a pretty smart thing to do.
Especially in computers, the number of people who can do low-level stuff is not decreasing. The percentage is, not because there are less experts, but because there are more non-expert users.
But for this to work, you need to educate people on a hell of a lot more than "Here's a colored border." You need to educate them on what privilege separation means, why they might trust or not trust a given program, why they should trust things as little as possible, etc.
No, that is geek-think again.
What you need to do is teach them which tasks require elevated priviledges and to become suspicious when something else, such as their mail program, suddenly has a red border.
Yes, you need some education. But the better support your tools give, the less education you need. The main failure of security (and I work in the security industry, so it's partly my fault as well) is that for decades we've made the user responsible for everything, applauded ourselves with "stupid looser" phrases, and thought that education and awareness would solve our problems.
But there's a limit to how much idiot-proofing you can do.
I agree.
However, I also insist that there is far more idiot-proofing possible than we tend to think. If you study design for a bit (not the computer stuff, the real-world stuff about light switches, doors, coffee machines, etc.) you are quickly surprised at how much a good design can solve. Our computer interfaces are worlds away from that at this time. They are crude, primitive, unhelpful and more of a hinderance than a support. Even the best of them. It's normal, we're still early in the development of computer technology as a whole.
My point is that you have a 99% chance that whenever you think "what a stupid loser" about a user and his actions with a computer, there is something in the machine or the user interface that you can do to either solve the problem or make the user less stupid about it.
The Movie industry has been crying foul (one major studio CEO recently said in a speech that piracy is "killing the industry")... while that same industry has been racking up record profits. Sorry, but that made my bullshit detector go off the charts.
It should. Back in their lawsuit against the video recorder, the movie industry put in a sworn statement that they would go bancrupt unless the video recorder would be outlawed.
The fact that this perjury was never followed up on is one of the reasons they continue to think they can tell blatant lies in full view of everyone and nothing will happen to them.
That is so obviously a strawman that it hurts.
No, what really happened was that Bungie used to be a Mac games studio before Microsoft bought them out for Halo, which it wanted on the Xbox. Of course, the Mac fans were furious. So they were appeased with promises that "of course" Halo would come out for the Mac. Which means they needed an excuse to stop doing that for the next titles. MS had all intentions of killing off the Mac part of Bungie. Two birds, one stone and all that.
For the strawman: The costs of providing server services to a pirate copy are non-zero, so piracy in online games hurts. But then again, it is trivial to get rid of them. And you still have the sales from the others. If you are profitable with the sales you have, then the business decision is to do it. If you aren't, then you don't. Notice the piracy doesn't figure in there. It doesn't matter. Even if your piracy rate were 1000:1, if you make a profit then continuing it is the right thing to do.
You are asking an unanswerable question.
Stuff does not "tank" commercially because it is shared. It tanks if the sales are lackluster. Almost always, there are several reasons for this. One may be that people who would otherwise have bought the game are downloading it instead. So we are already at three levels of indirection.
If you want some honest estimates (and estimates is all you're going to get), approach the problem from both sides.
$450 gazillion of damage is certainly bonkers.
But so is "no effect".
Both are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. But where do you find evidence? Sure you'll find plenty of games where someone claims that piracy hit it hard. However, to turn that claim into proof, you need to prove not only that it was pirated heavily, but also that at least a considerable portion of those people would have bought it otherwise. Just because everyone plays it doesn't mean everyone would've bought it. The cost/benefit analysis simply changes dramatically between $0 and, say, $49.95
I can't think of any way to make a serious calculation of how many people would have bought a game but didn't. Way too many variables, and you can't ask them, either - how do you get a representative sample of an anonymous crowd?
So, in short, I don't think you'll get actual evidence.
Or, you could educate the user that fire and gasoline don't mix.
Yes, and to only walk on green, and to install antivirus, and to have safe sex, insurance, not go into certain parts of town, keep the car in working condition, verify their patch level is current, check all money for forgery is easy as well, and two million other things.
There is only so much that a human brain can actually act on. Storage is not the problem, recall is. Sometimes, the right decision is to educate people, but it is not a panacea. If it is easier to simply design in a safety than to educate everyone and keep them educated, then building in the safety is the proper thing to do.
Also, often these things go hand in hand. I still don't understand why current operating systems don't indicate the priviledge level an application is running at by, say, a coloured border. You'd still need to educate people on what it means, but a fairly simple safety gives them a lot more options than the stupid "well, you could open a console and run ps" geek solution.
What happens if we dumb down the products to the point where people don't know how to create them anymore, or the knowledge is only in the hands of the far and few?
That's a philosophy that has never worked in all of human history. Sorry to say that. We always start out with new technology that only a few understand, be it fire, mathematics, science, cars or computers. At first, you need to be an expert just to use it. But then the rest of humanity wants a piece of the cake, too. That's when we "dumb down" the technology. Actually, it is not dumb at all, it is making it useable. I've written Linux kernel modules, and still I enjoy a good user interface design, because it makes my work easier, and more often than not I use the computer to actually accomplish something, not to mess with its interiors.
I don't see a dictatorship anywhere just because we have put fire into light bulbs instead of torches, and give people lighters instead of teaching them how to use flintstone.
Really, if you want to tinker with something, why not flat out say that you enjoy the tinkering? Why try to make it political?
The idea behind reality cracking is that if you can begin to understand how the adverts work, you can become more aware and wise to how supermarkets, adverts abuse and play on you.
I know. I've been reading stuff on searchlores before it was named searchlores.
But, even if you are aware of it, that doesn't mean you are immune. The only thing you can do is filtering it out, and I don't mean with your brain. I don't watch TV, due to the rampant advertising (and the fact that there's nothing worthwhile on). I browse with Adblock, I have spam filters everywhere.
Nevertheless, unless you live in a very remote area, you can not help but be bombarded by advertisement every day. And it works, even if you understand perfectly well how and why.
I try buy products that advertise less (like unheard of brands). I am a simpleton.
Doesn't matter. Even that is a demographic recognized and targeted by advertisement agencies. They just use different, less-obvious methods to reach you, that's all.
Does it surprise anyone
Yes, anyone who is not a geek.
Look, to us tech people, these things are obvious. But everyone else out there doesn't have a clue. You have to design the car so that the user doesn't get the idea of looking into the fuel tank with a lighter, or if he does get that idea, that he can't do it. No matter how silly it sounds. This is why our society works, because we can safely use tools without having to be experts in them.
What if I am NOT influenced by adverts,
Then you should immediately report to the nearest psychology lab and make a living being examined for this highly unusual trait.
Advertisement today contains more science than Spirit and Opportunity. It practically is a science of its own - the science of manipulating masses, often unconsciously, and especially in such a way that they are either unaware of it or in complete denial.
Ockhams Razor says you are not immune, you are in denial.
It always amazes me that both laymen and scientists as well talk about such things as if we KNOW whats going on.
We don't. We have theories.
In science, "theory" has a very different meaning. If you talk on the street and say something is a "theory", you mean it's unproven, an idea, it could work like that but you're not sure. Scientists call that a "hypothesis". A theory in science is as close to fact as we'll ever come (since science is always open for learning).
It's the same mistake the ID fanatics exploit. Evolution is not a "theory" in the common-sense meaning of the word, only in the scientific meaning.
In other words: Yes, we know what's going on, at least as far as current science and instruments permit. Which is always several orders of magnitude and sometimes tens of orders of magnitude larger than any other human attempt to explain the world. Most current scientific theories are correct to more decimal places than your pocket calculator can display. Given that religion, magic, superstition, intuition, "common sense" and all the other modes of explanation have a great day if they're correct to one decimal place, and routinely score worse than chance, the argument "it is only a theory", aka "yes, but here in the 20th decimal place we are not really certain, are we?" is patently ridiculous.
Uh, obviously, yes. No proof reader. :-)
iPhone users are not a protected class under US disability statutes, and I highly doubt that they are in the UK, either. Despite the strong evidence of mental retardation evident in actually owning an iPhone, there is probably no compelling reason to so classify and protect iPhone owners.
You missed the point. By a parsec or two.
The government does a lot of things for kids, elderly, people who like to walk in parks, people who enjoy football, people who drive cars and a whole long list of other minorities and large groups. Very little of what the government does really benefits everyone, and a large portion of government activities only benefits minorities, protected or not.
And you completely ignored the part about cost/benefit.
it's not, but the idea is great. For a whistleblowing service, Wikileaks like thing or something similar, incorporating your public key into the logo would be a great way to spread it.
Not everyone has an iPhone, so an iPhone-only app is stupid.
Errr, what?
Who modded this up? Please go and give your license back. Any license. Actually, all of them.
So, things that is only useful to a minority of people should not be done by the government, yes? Which means they should stop spending any money that helps the blind or disabled. Or the unemployed. Heck, I'm neither blind nor unemployed, so what the fuck is the government doing spending my money on this shit?
Oh yes, I am picking extreme examples, but the point remains. Very few government actions are really intended for everyone, or even the majority.
If this were about dumping the existing options and leaving only an iPhone app as your way to, say, get unemployment benefits, then yes by all means the outcry would be justified.
But it isn't.
So all the bullshit jealousy whining is just that.
The rational look should be exactly what the government did: Check what the costs are, check what the benefits to how many people would be, then decide whether the costs are worth the benefit. If it costs £1000 to do something, and 100 people will each have a benefit of £50, then the government just saved its citizen £4000. As long as it is not always the same group of people that benefit, that's perfectly good.
Because, you know, otherwise they could never get anything done, especially not with new technologies.
what a piece of nonsense.
We don't need a new computer type. We need a little bit of innovation regarding connections.
If you have a computer in your computer room, and a flatscreen TV in your living room, why can the computer not use the TV as an output device? Wire, wireless, don't care. Why invent a new device if it does nothing you don't already have?
The problem is never asking people for something.
It is being in the position of the one asking if by rights it should be the other way around.
Example: If you want to smoke in a restaurant, the proper thing to do is to ask around if anyone minds. It is not ok to just start and see if someone asks you to stop.
It's a question of exercising power. Standing somewhere where people can be expected to stand and being asked to step aside is not a problem for either party. However, standing around in the middle of a traffic area and expecting to be asked politely to step aside each time is obnoxious. Here you are putting a burden on other people by standing where you should not be standing.
It's a bit of a subtle thing, but it is also part of society. Society works because we do not have to negotiate every single detail with everyone we meet, over and over again. We have customs to solve that kind of things. We have standards for greeting someone, we drive on the same side of the road, we walk at green and stop at red. All that is just arbitrary customs because society as a whole works more smoothly if people agree on how to do things.
So, if the custom is to stand on the right and walk on the left, and you stand on the right, you're behaving in an anti-social matter. Most of us are too nice to give you any trouble, but quite frankly, there are days where I wish ill on all the antisocial assholes who move around in society as if nobody except themselves existed.