When you switch to Apple for an IT strategy you will be stuck with it.
I've seen this comment a lot with regard to apple. Me personally, I don't get it. You aren't ever "stuck" with something. You choose what you choose. If you're going to regret it before you even try it, then you'll never be happy, because no product/solution/etc. is ever perfect. It's pretty simple, really. You weigh the pros and cons, and if apple seems like the best solution, then you choose apple. If you're feeling that apple isn't for you, then just don't buy. Simple.
And switching to an other platform is expensive.
So? Life is expensive. You know why? Because nobody has all the answers when they first start out. You have to spend some money, try stuff, and see what happens. In fact, the only way ANYONE ever makes any progress in any area of life is to try and fail a few times, so they can figure out what works. There is no way to fore-know that something is going to work absolutely, 100% for you, until you get out there and actually try it. Does that cost money? Yes. But money spent figuring out what works is money well spent. Worse case scenario- if the damn thing doesn't work, ship it back! Or sell it to someone else. You always have options.
Sure right now Apple is making good quality products but down the line some other platform may exceed the quality in a large scale.
Yup. And the sky might fall tomorrow. Look, you can imagine any sort of doomsday scenario you want. I guarantee to you that 99% of the time, your worst fear is never going to happen. It just doesn't. So stop spending your energy wondering what sort of nightmare could possibly happen 20 years down the road, because you're wasting your time. If you wait and see if something will be better, if that killer app will come out or that magic product that will solve all your problems, then you'll be spending the rest of your life waiting. The smart people grab what is useful NOW, so they can USE IT NOW.
I'm not saying it isn't useful to plan for the future. But to quote Dumbledore from Harry Potter: "It does not do to dwell on dreams, and forget to live."
Companies want to be able to plan for things usually a year in advance. So if there is going to be a 5 ghz G5 coming out within a year or so they want to know that so they can budget the upgrade or wait an other year.
So I guess every other hardware company pre-announces their products a year in advance so that the people who rely on those products can plan appropriately? Um, sorry, but it doesn't work that way. EVERY company is secretive about their products, mostly because they don't want a competitor to beat them to market. Apple is not unique in this regard. All any business can do is look at the trends and make an educated guess as to what will most likely happen. I don't know about you, but for me it's obvious that, for the foreseeable future (1) Apple will be making macs and (2) Processors will get faster. If anything else, one can assume that if something has been happening for a while, then it will continue to happen. Once again, assuming that apple might suddenly go under tomorrow and you'll lose all your support is irrational. People have been predicting apple's death for years, and it's never happened. In all likelyhood, even if something bad does happen, apple will support you for a time while you transition to another platform. And since OS X is so good at working with windows, you can even use a mixed Mac/PC environment while you transition your Macs out of the company.
Some companies may not need to have the best of the best.
Correction: MOST companies. Companies are the slowest entities to upgrade their hardware and software. Why? Because they want something proven and stable, so they can be sure of their investment. Therefore, most companies hardly ever run the latest and greatest technology. If apple doesn't come out with a super-fast G5 tomorrow, most companies aren't really going to care. Heck, I knew a c
Your possible responses to this new "information age" are:
1) Live in fear and dread over the power this medium gives to "bad people" 2) Try to pass laws and cripple communication so people can't use the technology effectively 3) LEARN THE F**KING TECHNOLOGY and USE IT WISELY YOURSELF and REACH OUT AND LISTEN AND LEARN FROM OTHER PEOPLE
The internet has revealed what is wrong with our society. We are all a bunch of exclusionist, ignorant assholes who don't want to listen or learn from each other. We love companies and governments and power and status. IDENTITY: the things that seperate us, rather then the things that bring us together. We fear change because we don't see that we change every day and that we are changers rather then any fixed identity. We stop ourselves from feeling powerful by focusing all our resources on the negatives of the new technology vs the benifits.
No other (consumer) product besides software makes you sign a contract before you're able to use it. Services maybe have terms and conditions: "We'll cut off your service if you do something we don't like", but not products.
If piracy is illegal, why do they need to spell it out in a EULA? If it's illegal, it's illegal, regardless of the specific product. The truth is, the EULA's sole purpose is not to enforce the law, but to give special rights and privilages to software companies that they shouldn't have in the first place. Why should software companies get rights that other companies don't get?
It's bad enough that the average person often has to hire a lawyer to be able to understand the law. But imagine what would happen if we had to remember which laws applied to which products! "Now let me see, do I have the right to copy this product 3 times or was it only for that one? Hmmm. Let me go ahead and spend another 10 hours looking through my EULA collection to refresh myself of the exact wording."
Making me pay for something I didn't choose to buy, with no return for my money, isn't legal? Imagine that. Normally, when you buy something and don't receive the thing you bought, it's called fraud. How is that any different then taxing people to support the music industry- forcing them to effectively pay for music, which is then not delivered to them?
Some of these "solutions" which are supposed to solve the piracy problem are getting totally out of hand. Just because someone has an mp3 player does not mean they have an intent to pirate music. Push the offender, not the device that does the offending.
It can always be turned back on when the threat has passed, or selectively turned on at specific times to allow for a strategic response.
Or it can be turned off to create a panic, get people thinking about terrorists, and futher push people's acceptance of anything the government does, no matter how damaging.
Honestly. Does it make any sense at all to cripple our own capablities to make sure an enemy doesn't use them? Why don't we all just set off EMPs around the world and bomb everyone back to the Stone Age? That might stop a terrorist attack. It might also cripple the world economy and create widespread destruction and chaos. But hey, if it stops the terrorists, we should do it, right?
The internet is a much more powerful tool when planning a terrorist attack then anything GPS can provide. Are we going to put a fail safe in to shut down the entire internet too?
GPS is just a tool like any other tool. It's PEOPLE that abuse the tools, not the fault of the tools themselves.
The US Terrorist Threat Level suddenly changed today from orange, to bright pink, to multicolored neon, then back to orange.
When asked about this alarming turn of events, Rumsfield stuck out his tongue, pointed at the cameras and loudly shouted "Made you look!"
(US terrorist threat warnings are about as frequent as SCO press releases.)
Re:Philosophy, semantics, yadda yadda
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Emergence
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· Score: 1
We cannot prove machines will think, in the same way that we cannot prove that we ourselves think. Philosophy has to solve one question before it can solve the other. (AI researchers have not come to a common agreement over what behaviors and actions can be considered intelligent, partially because this is a philosophical question.)
Unfortunately, we have only figured out how to make the machine carry out the intelligent behavior in the method that we program it to do. It's still a machine carrying out a programmed action, regardless if the behavior performed can be considered intelligent or not.
Interesting ideas
on
Emergence
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Kind of like the continuum going from observing at the atomic level to observing at the macroscopic level. The physics of the atomic level is VERY different then the physics of the macroscopic level. Understandably, when you get to a point where you can't use one model over the other, things can get pretty hairy.
Can you say that the atomic level CAUSES the macroscopic level, i.e. one level emerges out of the other? My feeling is, it doesn't make much of a difference. The interactions you get depend upon your level of observation- they don't necessarily depend on what the interactions are at a different level. Observing at both levels is useful for different reasons. For example, for most low-speed aerodynamics, the model of air that you use is streamlines in the flow. For this situation and it's goals, it doesn't much matter to the airplane what is going on at the atomic level. The airplane is on a macroscopic level, so what matters is the physics of the macroscopic level. You fit the model to the same level and dementions of the thing you're observing. Remember calculus and limits? The limit works because it creates a fundmental building block of experience in a relavant dimension. Ex: dt is an infinitely small measure of a direction in time. But time is relevant in the demensions of the thing you're observing (actions the real world), so it's useful for the theory about the real world you want to create.
Due to my study on how people work, and that there are fundamental principles of human interaction that apply regardless of the individual person, I think it's probable that they're are fundmental principles of the overall interactions of an ant colony (we may not know them yet, but they are there). It's just that if you observe the colony at the microscopic level, you may not find them, since you're looking in the wrong place. Chaos Theory shows that even when behavior appears random, there are principles which create the randomness.
I guess it's nice these people have their "new" science to investigate- emergence. Hey, if it creates some new thought and gets people interested, I'm all for it. But I don't think that one thing is emerging out of another: it's just observing that for this particular level of observation, traits that were appearent at other levels have a bearing on the problem.
It's all the same thing, just different levels with different rules. (For example, duality is pretty much a law in the universe. You can't really equate the things that compose the duality, you can only recognize that the duality exists.)
Passing laws like this serves no one but the government. It's the same thing as creating a law which is too complicated for the average person to understand. You need legal training just to have a ghost of a chance at fighting your charge. The same way here: those that are technologically-deficient and don't know how to install anti-spyware products, they are the ones that lose.
Call me crazy, but I believe that the capablities for government surveillance should only increase to the same level that people have capablity for counter surveillance. The government is not automatically right and the people wrong. People are supposed to be free from "unreasonable searches at seasures", yet I somehow doubt that the Founding Fathers could envision a time when searching would be undetectable by the person that was searched. How can a person be assured that the search was reasonable if they don't even know that they've been searched?
They had a concrete mission, but they also had the 98% of the population paniced over the bleeping soccerball floating around in the sky that could drop nukes on us in our sleep (sputnik). Fear is a much more powerful motivator then wonder, unfortunately.
(They also had Kennedy, whom the majority of the population of that time loved. Half our population didn't vote for Bush.)
Lets see what happened on his watch - Hubble was left to fend for itself, more money was poured into the money pit of ISS, and the X Prize totally stole the show.
Apparently, two Mars rover missions with 300+ days (each) of significant exploration isn't a success in your book. Neither is 6+ years of continued successful ISS operations. You may be upset that the general public shows little interest in these things, but that in no way diminishes their relative achievements.
I agree that NASA needs to bring back the "wonder" of space (with manned missions to the moon and Mars), and O'Keefe is probably not the right leader to execute that vision, but that doesn't make the complaint about the Bush plan being full of hot air invalid. At a time when the economy is down, people are losing jobs, uncertainty in Iraq, and the national debt the highest it's ever been, there are a lot of people wondering where all the money to fund these grand schemes is going to come from. While I want space exploration as much as the next guy, and the best way to get people interested is to create a large goal (like getting a person on Mars), it doesn't make any sense to tackle something on that kind of scale if NASA is going to become crippled at the last minute due to lack of funding. Politicans have a spectacular history of killing off the goose (the engineering organization, which requires appropriate funding) before it can lay the golden eggs (the noteriety of being President at a time when man sets foot on Mars).
Prior to 9/11, there had been no comparable act of terrorism.
The severity of 9-11 is irrelvant. Security issues are important, regardless of the magnitude of any one possible threat. Proper security procedures should stop ALL threats, not just the bigger, more visable ones.
...there is a general feeling in the cyber security community that our day will come.
And your factual justification for such a dramatic and wide-sweaping forecast is?
Proper security procedures correctly determine the difference between IMAGINED and ACTUAL threats.
You might not see it as terrorism... until the 911 systems go down. Until the IRS systems are compromised and your entire identity is stolen and abused. Until major systems are undergo a DDoS when you suddenly need them. That is why these preventative measures need to be in place...
I don't doubt there is a need to take preventative measures. If anything, hopefully 9-11 served as a much needed wake up call to the security industry. But most of your fears here are quite irrational. The problem our government faces is not the doomsday scenarios popularized by politicians anxious to obtain funding for their pet security project. The problem is RECOGNIZING THE SIGNS of a potential criminal act, which are often staring them in the face. I.E. there was a crapload of info suggesting a plane attack prior to 9-11, yet our leaders did nothing. It's not like they didn't have any warning. So is the same with cybersecurity.
for once working with other countries on security, instead of operating under the delusional belief that any laws they pass are going to be effective since the majority of the world's population isn't going to have to abide by them?
Yes it is. In NJ (my state) if you are doing the speed limit, 90% of the people on the road will pass you.
Speed Limit laws are a joke. There's no scientific proof that going slower causes less accidents, especially on long interstate highway-type roads. Morons who get into accidents are going to be morons anyway, regardless of what the speed limit is. If anything, it just cripples people who can drive fast AND safe at the same time. (Though it makes a hell of a lot of money for the state, since they get to pump out tickets non-stop.)
My feeling is that it should be about twice as hard to get a driving licence- people should be TRAINED on how to drive at fast speeds, rather then leaving them to figure it out on their own and taxing them once they do.
This should be done via a software solution on the desktop that keeps track of all your passwords and inputs them for you automatically (a la Mac OS X Keychains). Uploading all your personal passwords to the net (no matter how many claims the company makes regarding their trustworthiness) is suicide.
Seriously, I think companies are going to lose this battle. The internet started life as an anonymous network, and there are many people (myself included) who want to keep things that way. Though it would be convient, the major reason I don't want a single online indentity is that there is too much potential for abuse by companies who LOVE to track the movements of their customers. A company searching the internet for my online identity can basically trace everywhere I've gone and everything I've done while online, no matter how many years back it was. Nobody should have that kind of power. You can't even get this kind of info on someone in the real world (unless you're a government spy agency), so why should anyone need it in the virtual world?
How about you registering for this special case when your company collapses? You are given a fixed timeframe for when you must start selling the software again, otherwise the software enters the public domain.
In other words, there are ways to prop up the special cases without blanketly giving everyone unnecessary copywrite protections. This is exactly what they are arguing: the law changed the "opt in" to a "opt out". The case you've described would be an "opt in" case.
(BTW, you could always embed your name in the software somewhere so that when you come back you can prove that you were the original author.)
The Constitution is pretty clear on the issue... Congress gets to regulate these issues as they see fit.
CAN regulate is a completely different thing then SHOULD regulate. The Constitution can specify that Congress has the power to pass intercourse laws, but that doesn't make it a good idea to pass a law which requires everyone in the US to have anal sex with a pink monkey every Saturday at midnight, with Frank Sanatra music playing seductively in the background, now does it?
Laws need to make sense and promote the welfare of ALL the people the law affects. If those conditions cannot be met, then the matter should be left unregulated, plain and simple.
One more thing. I disagree strongly that the courts should not have any say with regard to the actions of Congress. The whole premise of Checks and Balances is to make sure that no one single government entity has all the legislative power. The courts have just as much responsiblity to protect and defend the rights of the people as Congress does.
A license agreement is non-negotiable. In other words, the company who makes the terms and conditions has all the power. I can not disagree with a single thing they say.
And your answer to this problem is that I simply not buy the product? Then maybe I should simply not buy ANY products. Because very few products that are offered have agreements that I would choose to accept, if I had the choice to accept the agreement or not while still managing to obtain the product.
Or maybe I should enlist a laywer to help me determine if the licence agreement is non-toxic to my enjoyment of the product? The company certainly has no problems paying for lawers to write the licence for them. Since last I checked, I don't have the finatial resources to investigate every minute clause in the agreement.
Does it say on the licence that Valve will refund my money if they erroneously delete my account? No, it doesn't. That basically means that Valve has free raign to in effect, STEAL MY MONEY FROM ME. Since what I bought is now rendered basically worthless. Do you think I should have to agree that Valve can steal my money at any time, as a clause in a licence agreement? Because that's effectively what's happening.
Before you spout how "it's all fair and clearly stated in the licence agreement before you installed", use your friggin head. A licence agreement is basically a forced contract. The user has NO power over the contract what so ever. Unless you'd like everyone in the world to sit in little caves and never buy any more products, then I suggest you stop saying that the person has a choice over if they can agree to the licence agreement or not. If they want to use the product, they HAVE to agree, regardless of the terms.
I've come to an interesting conclusion regarding piracy. It comes down to basic beliefs about who people are and their involvement in the economy.
You basically have two types of people:
1) Users - people who typically have one job and limited finantial resources. Often called "consumers" because their role is simply to gobble things up without contributing anything back. (Mainly because they don't believe they have anything of value to offer.) 2) Producers - people who are actively involved in the economy by selling a product/service of their own and making money from it. These people give as well as take.
Most people THINK they are a #1, when in reality they are a #2. Even if you work for someone else, you ARE selling something: what you are selling is your time and experience. Time and experience are just as valuable as money, because they BRING you money. (Simple mathematics.)
I used to be pretty firmly in the #1 mindset. But I realized, the reason I didn't place all that much value in the product I was pirating was because I don't sell anything of value myself. If I sold something myself, I bet I would realize that my contribution is just as valuable as someone else's. The economy is a ballance, after all. You always give and receive SOMETHING. Even if you offered a product for free, your reward is the happiness of your users, rather then money. Piraters gain the satisfaction of beating the system by going to the trouble of cracking a program. The reality is, nobody does something without getting something out of it that they can keep for themselves, whether it be money, happiness, etc.
I don't think people fundamentally want to cheat other people. Where the economy gets screwed up is when we lose sight of the basic idea of just contribution and just compensation. Companies have moved towards hording money, and in reaction, users have moved towards screwing the hording companies. But being "screwed" by not being paid well for your valuable time (no raise, etc.) is just as "screwed" as stealing a valuable product worth money from someone else. People who rip off "greedy" companies, in reality, are just as bad as the greedy company who is ripping off them.
So what is the solution? Stealing products as a way of "leveling the playing field", isn't going ever produce that ballence. The only thing that happens is you get an arms race between the businesses and the users (anti-piracy vs piracy). What IS going to produce a ballance is getting out there and either starting or affilating with a business, so you can get to a point where you make enough money to be able to pay for others' contributions. That's a much better way to beat the system then to pirate everything. Instead of bringing rich people down to your level, why do you go up to theirs?
Anyone in business going to back up what I'm saying here?
Another thing. I am not able to negotiate with an author to accept what features I pay for. Yet authors are able to negotiate with me by making me accept an EULA before I use their product. The authors have lawyers who draft the EULA, I do not have a laywer to advise me if I should accept it or not.
So who has all the power? The author.
If people truely read and had to adhere to all of the wording in a EULA, nobody would buy anything. Authors know this, which is why they can force you into accepting the EULA whether you agree with it's language or not.
Unrealistic. People who make this kind of comment have no concept of what they are actually suggesting, which is basically a world without any entertainment products at all.
Honestly, are you telling me you have NEVER bought a product where you liked part of it but didn't like a different part? That you've NEVER had a feeling that you wanted to change the bad parts of a product into something else you DO like? Then why is it so wrong for people to want to hack around and do what they please with a product which doesn't meet all of their expectations? To improve their experience with the product?
You either view the world one of two ways:
1) The artist is always right. You have to take the good with the bad, and if you don't like it, then you should stop buying the artist's products. (Which basically can be extended to say that you should never buy any products ever again, because ALL products have flaws.) Since the artist wills it (EULAs are contracts!), that means you must view commercials, view pop-up adds, adhere to protections no matter how inconvienent, read product offer spam emails, etc. Be the good little citizen, and always do what is true and right.
2) The user is always right. Once I buy something, it's mine. I OWN IT, and should be able to do whatever I want to do with it, regardless of the artist's intent. If I want to trade it, change it, hack it, crash it, nuke it, or whatever else I feel like doing, I will do it because that will make the product truely mine. I have the freedom that I paid for when I purchased the product. The artist, in selling their product, accepts all this. (EULAs are NOT contracts!)
Sorry folks, but I'm with #2. Changing a product as I want to is something that goes along with the price I paid for the product. If that upsets you, then it's not my problem. You have to make your own choice which way you believe.
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I've seen this comment a lot with regard to apple. Me personally, I don't get it. You aren't ever "stuck" with something. You choose what you choose. If you're going to regret it before you even try it, then you'll never be happy, because no product/solution/etc. is ever perfect. It's pretty simple, really. You weigh the pros and cons, and if apple seems like the best solution, then you choose apple. If you're feeling that apple isn't for you, then just don't buy. Simple.
And switching to an other platform is expensive.
So? Life is expensive. You know why? Because nobody has all the answers when they first start out. You have to spend some money, try stuff, and see what happens. In fact, the only way ANYONE ever makes any progress in any area of life is to try and fail a few times, so they can figure out what works. There is no way to fore-know that something is going to work absolutely, 100% for you, until you get out there and actually try it. Does that cost money? Yes. But money spent figuring out what works is money well spent. Worse case scenario- if the damn thing doesn't work, ship it back! Or sell it to someone else. You always have options.
Sure right now Apple is making good quality products but down the line some other platform may exceed the quality in a large scale.
Yup. And the sky might fall tomorrow. Look, you can imagine any sort of doomsday scenario you want. I guarantee to you that 99% of the time, your worst fear is never going to happen. It just doesn't. So stop spending your energy wondering what sort of nightmare could possibly happen 20 years down the road, because you're wasting your time. If you wait and see if something will be better, if that killer app will come out or that magic product that will solve all your problems, then you'll be spending the rest of your life waiting. The smart people grab what is useful NOW, so they can USE IT NOW.
I'm not saying it isn't useful to plan for the future. But to quote Dumbledore from Harry Potter: "It does not do to dwell on dreams, and forget to live."
Companies want to be able to plan for things usually a year in advance. So if there is going to be a 5 ghz G5 coming out within a year or so they want to know that so they can budget the upgrade or wait an other year.
So I guess every other hardware company pre-announces their products a year in advance so that the people who rely on those products can plan appropriately? Um, sorry, but it doesn't work that way. EVERY company is secretive about their products, mostly because they don't want a competitor to beat them to market. Apple is not unique in this regard. All any business can do is look at the trends and make an educated guess as to what will most likely happen. I don't know about you, but for me it's obvious that, for the foreseeable future (1) Apple will be making macs and (2) Processors will get faster. If anything else, one can assume that if something has been happening for a while, then it will continue to happen. Once again, assuming that apple might suddenly go under tomorrow and you'll lose all your support is irrational. People have been predicting apple's death for years, and it's never happened. In all likelyhood, even if something bad does happen, apple will support you for a time while you transition to another platform. And since OS X is so good at working with windows, you can even use a mixed Mac/PC environment while you transition your Macs out of the company.
Some companies may not need to have the best of the best.
Correction: MOST companies. Companies are the slowest entities to upgrade their hardware and software. Why? Because they want something proven and stable, so they can be sure of their investment. Therefore, most companies hardly ever run the latest and greatest technology. If apple doesn't come out with a super-fast G5 tomorrow, most companies aren't really going to care. Heck, I knew a c
Your possible responses to this new "information age" are:
1) Live in fear and dread over the power this medium gives to "bad people"
2) Try to pass laws and cripple communication so people can't use the technology effectively
3) LEARN THE F**KING TECHNOLOGY and USE IT WISELY YOURSELF and REACH OUT AND LISTEN AND LEARN FROM OTHER PEOPLE
The internet has revealed what is wrong with our society. We are all a bunch of exclusionist, ignorant assholes who don't want to listen or learn from each other. We love companies and governments and power and status. IDENTITY: the things that seperate us, rather then the things that bring us together. We fear change because we don't see that we change every day and that we are changers rather then any fixed identity. We stop ourselves from feeling powerful by focusing all our resources on the negatives of the new technology vs the benifits.
No other (consumer) product besides software makes you sign a contract before you're able to use it. Services maybe have terms and conditions: "We'll cut off your service if you do something we don't like", but not products.
If piracy is illegal, why do they need to spell it out in a EULA? If it's illegal, it's illegal, regardless of the specific product. The truth is, the EULA's sole purpose is not to enforce the law, but to give special rights and privilages to software companies that they shouldn't have in the first place. Why should software companies get rights that other companies don't get?
It's bad enough that the average person often has to hire a lawyer to be able to understand the law. But imagine what would happen if we had to remember which laws applied to which products! "Now let me see, do I have the right to copy this product 3 times or was it only for that one? Hmmm. Let me go ahead and spend another 10 hours looking through my EULA collection to refresh myself of the exact wording."
Utter BS.
Everyone knows the gaming industry is loosing millions of dollars a year due to piracy. Nobody buys games any more. Oh, wait....
Making me pay for something I didn't choose to buy, with no return for my money, isn't legal? Imagine that. Normally, when you buy something and don't receive the thing you bought, it's called fraud. How is that any different then taxing people to support the music industry- forcing them to effectively pay for music, which is then not delivered to them?
Some of these "solutions" which are supposed to solve the piracy problem are getting totally out of hand. Just because someone has an mp3 player does not mean they have an intent to pirate music. Push the offender, not the device that does the offending.
It can always be turned back on when the threat has passed, or selectively turned on at specific times to allow for a strategic response.
Or it can be turned off to create a panic, get people thinking about terrorists, and futher push people's acceptance of anything the government does, no matter how damaging.
Honestly. Does it make any sense at all to cripple our own capablities to make sure an enemy doesn't use them? Why don't we all just set off EMPs around the world and bomb everyone back to the Stone Age? That might stop a terrorist attack. It might also cripple the world economy and create widespread destruction and chaos. But hey, if it stops the terrorists, we should do it, right?
The internet is a much more powerful tool when planning a terrorist attack then anything GPS can provide. Are we going to put a fail safe in to shut down the entire internet too?
GPS is just a tool like any other tool. It's PEOPLE that abuse the tools, not the fault of the tools themselves.
The US Terrorist Threat Level suddenly changed today from orange, to bright pink, to multicolored neon, then back to orange.
When asked about this alarming turn of events, Rumsfield stuck out his tongue, pointed at the cameras and loudly shouted "Made you look!"
(US terrorist threat warnings are about as frequent as SCO press releases.)
We cannot prove machines will think, in the same way that we cannot prove that we ourselves think. Philosophy has to solve one question before it can solve the other. (AI researchers have not come to a common agreement over what behaviors and actions can be considered intelligent, partially because this is a philosophical question.) Unfortunately, we have only figured out how to make the machine carry out the intelligent behavior in the method that we program it to do. It's still a machine carrying out a programmed action, regardless if the behavior performed can be considered intelligent or not.
Kind of like the continuum going from observing at the atomic level to observing at the macroscopic level. The physics of the atomic level is VERY different then the physics of the macroscopic level. Understandably, when you get to a point where you can't use one model over the other, things can get pretty hairy.
Can you say that the atomic level CAUSES the macroscopic level, i.e. one level emerges out of the other? My feeling is, it doesn't make much of a difference. The interactions you get depend upon your level of observation- they don't necessarily depend on what the interactions are at a different level. Observing at both levels is useful for different reasons. For example, for most low-speed aerodynamics, the model of air that you use is streamlines in the flow. For this situation and it's goals, it doesn't much matter to the airplane what is going on at the atomic level. The airplane is on a macroscopic level, so what matters is the physics of the macroscopic level. You fit the model to the same level and dementions of the thing you're observing. Remember calculus and limits? The limit works because it creates a fundmental building block of experience in a relavant dimension. Ex: dt is an infinitely small measure of a direction in time. But time is relevant in the demensions of the thing you're observing (actions the real world), so it's useful for the theory about the real world you want to create.
Due to my study on how people work, and that there are fundamental principles of human interaction that apply regardless of the individual person, I think it's probable that they're are fundmental principles of the overall interactions of an ant colony (we may not know them yet, but they are there). It's just that if you observe the colony at the microscopic level, you may not find them, since you're looking in the wrong place. Chaos Theory shows that even when behavior appears random, there are principles which create the randomness.
I guess it's nice these people have their "new" science to investigate- emergence. Hey, if it creates some new thought and gets people interested, I'm all for it. But I don't think that one thing is emerging out of another: it's just observing that for this particular level of observation, traits that were appearent at other levels have a bearing on the problem.
It's all the same thing, just different levels with different rules. (For example, duality is pretty much a law in the universe. You can't really equate the things that compose the duality, you can only recognize that the duality exists.)
Passing laws like this serves no one but the government. It's the same thing as creating a law which is too complicated for the average person to understand. You need legal training just to have a ghost of a chance at fighting your charge. The same way here: those that are technologically-deficient and don't know how to install anti-spyware products, they are the ones that lose.
Call me crazy, but I believe that the capablities for government surveillance should only increase to the same level that people have capablity for counter surveillance. The government is not automatically right and the people wrong. People are supposed to be free from "unreasonable searches at seasures", yet I somehow doubt that the Founding Fathers could envision a time when searching would be undetectable by the person that was searched. How can a person be assured that the search was reasonable if they don't even know that they've been searched?
They had a concrete mission, but they also had the 98% of the population paniced over the bleeping soccerball floating around in the sky that could drop nukes on us in our sleep (sputnik). Fear is a much more powerful motivator then wonder, unfortunately.
(They also had Kennedy, whom the majority of the population of that time loved. Half our population didn't vote for Bush.)
Lets see what happened on his watch - Hubble was left to fend for itself, more money was poured into the money pit of ISS, and the X Prize totally stole the show.
Apparently, two Mars rover missions with 300+ days (each) of significant exploration isn't a success in your book. Neither is 6+ years of continued successful ISS operations. You may be upset that the general public shows little interest in these things, but that in no way diminishes their relative achievements.
I agree that NASA needs to bring back the "wonder" of space (with manned missions to the moon and Mars), and O'Keefe is probably not the right leader to execute that vision, but that doesn't make the complaint about the Bush plan being full of hot air invalid. At a time when the economy is down, people are losing jobs, uncertainty in Iraq, and the national debt the highest it's ever been, there are a lot of people wondering where all the money to fund these grand schemes is going to come from. While I want space exploration as much as the next guy, and the best way to get people interested is to create a large goal (like getting a person on Mars), it doesn't make any sense to tackle something on that kind of scale if NASA is going to become crippled at the last minute due to lack of funding. Politicans have a spectacular history of killing off the goose (the engineering organization, which requires appropriate funding) before it can lay the golden eggs (the noteriety of being President at a time when man sets foot on Mars).
the retired director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency tops a list of five men that President Bush is considering to take over the space agency
Will someone please inform Bush that NASA does NOT need to become any more militaristic then it already is?
EXPLORATION, NOT DEVISTATION!
Prior to 9/11, there had been no comparable act of terrorism.
...there is a general feeling in the cyber security community that our day will come.
The severity of 9-11 is irrelvant. Security issues are important, regardless of the magnitude of any one possible threat. Proper security procedures should stop ALL threats, not just the bigger, more visable ones.
And your factual justification for such a dramatic and wide-sweaping forecast is?
Proper security procedures correctly determine the difference between IMAGINED and ACTUAL threats.
You might not see it as terrorism... until the 911 systems go down. Until the IRS systems are compromised and your entire identity is stolen and abused. Until major systems are undergo a DDoS when you suddenly need them. That is why these preventative measures need to be in place...
I don't doubt there is a need to take preventative measures. If anything, hopefully 9-11 served as a much needed wake up call to the security industry. But most of your fears here are quite irrational. The problem our government faces is not the doomsday scenarios popularized by politicians anxious to obtain funding for their pet security project. The problem is RECOGNIZING THE SIGNS of a potential criminal act, which are often staring them in the face. I.E. there was a crapload of info suggesting a plane attack prior to 9-11, yet our leaders did nothing. It's not like they didn't have any warning. So is the same with cybersecurity.
for once working with other countries on security, instead of operating under the delusional belief that any laws they pass are going to be effective since the majority of the world's population isn't going to have to abide by them?
Yes it is. In NJ (my state) if you are doing the speed limit, 90% of the people on the road will pass you.
Speed Limit laws are a joke. There's no scientific proof that going slower causes less accidents, especially on long interstate highway-type roads. Morons who get into accidents are going to be morons anyway, regardless of what the speed limit is. If anything, it just cripples people who can drive fast AND safe at the same time. (Though it makes a hell of a lot of money for the state, since they get to pump out tickets non-stop.)
My feeling is that it should be about twice as hard to get a driving licence- people should be TRAINED on how to drive at fast speeds, rather then leaving them to figure it out on their own and taxing them once they do.
This should be done via a software solution on the desktop that keeps track of all your passwords and inputs them for you automatically (a la Mac OS X Keychains). Uploading all your personal passwords to the net (no matter how many claims the company makes regarding their trustworthiness) is suicide.
Seriously, I think companies are going to lose this battle. The internet started life as an anonymous network, and there are many people (myself included) who want to keep things that way. Though it would be convient, the major reason I don't want a single online indentity is that there is too much potential for abuse by companies who LOVE to track the movements of their customers. A company searching the internet for my online identity can basically trace everywhere I've gone and everything I've done while online, no matter how many years back it was. Nobody should have that kind of power. You can't even get this kind of info on someone in the real world (unless you're a government spy agency), so why should anyone need it in the virtual world?
How about you registering for this special case when your company collapses? You are given a fixed timeframe for when you must start selling the software again, otherwise the software enters the public domain.
In other words, there are ways to prop up the special cases without blanketly giving everyone unnecessary copywrite protections. This is exactly what they are arguing: the law changed the "opt in" to a "opt out". The case you've described would be an "opt in" case.
(BTW, you could always embed your name in the software somewhere so that when you come back you can prove that you were the original author.)
The Constitution is pretty clear on the issue... Congress gets to regulate these issues as they see fit.
CAN regulate is a completely different thing then SHOULD regulate. The Constitution can specify that Congress has the power to pass intercourse laws, but that doesn't make it a good idea to pass a law which requires everyone in the US to have anal sex with a pink monkey every Saturday at midnight, with Frank Sanatra music playing seductively in the background, now does it?
Laws need to make sense and promote the welfare of ALL the people the law affects. If those conditions cannot be met, then the matter should be left unregulated, plain and simple.
One more thing. I disagree strongly that the courts should not have any say with regard to the actions of Congress. The whole premise of Checks and Balances is to make sure that no one single government entity has all the legislative power. The courts have just as much responsiblity to protect and defend the rights of the people as Congress does.
A contract is negotiable.
A license agreement is non-negotiable. In other words, the company who makes the terms and conditions has all the power. I can not disagree with a single thing they say.
And your answer to this problem is that I simply not buy the product? Then maybe I should simply not buy ANY products. Because very few products that are offered have agreements that I would choose to accept, if I had the choice to accept the agreement or not while still managing to obtain the product.
Or maybe I should enlist a laywer to help me determine if the licence agreement is non-toxic to my enjoyment of the product? The company certainly has no problems paying for lawers to write the licence for them. Since last I checked, I don't have the finatial resources to investigate every minute clause in the agreement.
Does it say on the licence that Valve will refund my money if they erroneously delete my account? No, it doesn't. That basically means that Valve has free raign to in effect, STEAL MY MONEY FROM ME. Since what I bought is now rendered basically worthless. Do you think I should have to agree that Valve can steal my money at any time, as a clause in a licence agreement? Because that's effectively what's happening.
Before you spout how "it's all fair and clearly stated in the licence agreement before you installed", use your friggin head. A licence agreement is basically a forced contract. The user has NO power over the contract what so ever. Unless you'd like everyone in the world to sit in little caves and never buy any more products, then I suggest you stop saying that the person has a choice over if they can agree to the licence agreement or not. If they want to use the product, they HAVE to agree, regardless of the terms.
I've come to an interesting conclusion regarding piracy. It comes down to basic beliefs about who people are and their involvement in the economy.
You basically have two types of people:
1) Users - people who typically have one job and limited finantial resources. Often called "consumers" because their role is simply to gobble things up without contributing anything back. (Mainly because they don't believe they have anything of value to offer.)
2) Producers - people who are actively involved in the economy by selling a product/service of their own and making money from it. These people give as well as take.
Most people THINK they are a #1, when in reality they are a #2. Even if you work for someone else, you ARE selling something: what you are selling is your time and experience. Time and experience are just as valuable as money, because they BRING you money. (Simple mathematics.)
I used to be pretty firmly in the #1 mindset. But I realized, the reason I didn't place all that much value in the product I was pirating was because I don't sell anything of value myself. If I sold something myself, I bet I would realize that my contribution is just as valuable as someone else's. The economy is a ballance, after all. You always give and receive SOMETHING. Even if you offered a product for free, your reward is the happiness of your users, rather then money. Piraters gain the satisfaction of beating the system by going to the trouble of cracking a program. The reality is, nobody does something without getting something out of it that they can keep for themselves, whether it be money, happiness, etc.
I don't think people fundamentally want to cheat other people. Where the economy gets screwed up is when we lose sight of the basic idea of just contribution and just compensation. Companies have moved towards hording money, and in reaction, users have moved towards screwing the hording companies. But being "screwed" by not being paid well for your valuable time (no raise, etc.) is just as "screwed" as stealing a valuable product worth money from someone else. People who rip off "greedy" companies, in reality, are just as bad as the greedy company who is ripping off them.
So what is the solution? Stealing products as a way of "leveling the playing field", isn't going ever produce that ballence. The only thing that happens is you get an arms race between the businesses and the users (anti-piracy vs piracy). What IS going to produce a ballance is getting out there and either starting or affilating with a business, so you can get to a point where you make enough money to be able to pay for others' contributions. That's a much better way to beat the system then to pirate everything. Instead of bringing rich people down to your level, why do you go up to theirs?
Anyone in business going to back up what I'm saying here?
Really, Bill should listen to his spam once and a while ;-)
Another thing. I am not able to negotiate with an author to accept what features I pay for. Yet authors are able to negotiate with me by making me accept an EULA before I use their product. The authors have lawyers who draft the EULA, I do not have a laywer to advise me if I should accept it or not. So who has all the power? The author. If people truely read and had to adhere to all of the wording in a EULA, nobody would buy anything. Authors know this, which is why they can force you into accepting the EULA whether you agree with it's language or not.
Unrealistic. People who make this kind of comment have no concept of what they are actually suggesting, which is basically a world without any entertainment products at all.
Honestly, are you telling me you have NEVER bought a product where you liked part of it but didn't like a different part? That you've NEVER had a feeling that you wanted to change the bad parts of a product into something else you DO like? Then why is it so wrong for people to want to hack around and do what they please with a product which doesn't meet all of their expectations? To improve their experience with the product?
You either view the world one of two ways:
1) The artist is always right. You have to take the good with the bad, and if you don't like it, then you should stop buying the artist's products. (Which basically can be extended to say that you should never buy any products ever again, because ALL products have flaws.) Since the artist wills it (EULAs are contracts!), that means you must view commercials, view pop-up adds, adhere to protections no matter how inconvienent, read product offer spam emails, etc. Be the good little citizen, and always do what is true and right.
2) The user is always right. Once I buy something, it's mine. I OWN IT, and should be able to do whatever I want to do with it, regardless of the artist's intent. If I want to trade it, change it, hack it, crash it, nuke it, or whatever else I feel like doing, I will do it because that will make the product truely mine. I have the freedom that I paid for when I purchased the product. The artist, in selling their product, accepts all this. (EULAs are NOT contracts!)
Sorry folks, but I'm with #2. Changing a product as I want to is something that goes along with the price I paid for the product. If that upsets you, then it's not my problem. You have to make your own choice which way you believe.