Perhaps if you had a detailed enough simulation of the software's working environment (with the caveat that you REALLY have to trust your simulator...), then you could have hundreds (or thousands) of people trying to write code, and then the simulation tries to break everything.
You could have a dedicated bunch of people who deliberately try and break any proposed system (including setting up hardware glitches, like cosmic rays or something).
Over time, the software would probably evolve into something quite robust.
Good lord, if things are THAT complex they're DEFINITELY not going to want to write everything from scratch on their own! Do you have any idea how many bugs they'd have to work out on their own - bugs that have ALREADY been worked out for large & complicated systems which are put under severe stress every day.
More than likely, they picked something which was as simple in construction as possible, but still can get the job done, and then had their own people crawl over the architecture & source code with a fine-tooth comb. You'd better believe that they're not going to blindly trust a software company just because they SAY their code is mission-critical ready - they're going to want to look at the source code themselves.
Differences? Well, notice how the pro's image has colors that are incredibly washed out. Notice how the pro's image has no depth of field.
Actually, I would've thought that the lack of depth of field was on purpose - being a "pro", he/she was focusing on the player & deliberately allowing the background to blur. I agree with you about the washed-out coloring though.
Being a total amateur at taking pictures myself, I'll be happy when I can snap 100s of pictures & pick out the ones I like.
On the flip side, you've got a whole generation of kids trained to play video games - and for some of those games, their reaction speeds are downright frightening - almost Bruce Lee speed (w/o the devastating results though).
If the combat interface for all that equipment allows soldiers on an instinctive reaction basis, and feeding them all the information they need to make those snap decisions (like video games do), you're going to have some frightening automaton-like killers on your hands...
Like this is going to bother the military - "Hey, some loser is jamming our GPS! They've got to be putting out a pretty powerful signal to do that - where's that RF-seeking missile?"
There seems to be an underlying assumption that all people should have the rights to any work. This is right in line with a 5 year old's code of ethics. Everything that exists is mine.Ah yes, that must've been one of those "laws of physics" that I slept through during college. Get a grip - there's no "natural" law that enforces copyright. It's just a legal invention designed to encourage selfish people to use their creativity so that the rest of society can enjoy it.
"free" anything means a number of things, but I prefer Not controlled by obligation or the will of another. The open-source movement protects the investment of the first programmer, not his so-called rights. Programmer A invests his/her time into writing an app under the GPL. If Programmer B wants to take advantage of Programmer A's effort, s/he must provide their work back to "the community," thus providing Programmer A a nice return on their investment. Note that Programmer B did NOT get "free" code from Programmer A - Programmer B was obligated to provide service back to Programmer A.
Huh? Programmer B got to use the original code for free from Programmer A to make his/her changes. And the turnaround is fair too - Programmer A has to follow the same rules on Programmer B's code as Programmer B had to follow in Programmer A's code.
To Anne, her characters are a part of herself. For someone that's not her to write situations and events involving those characters that for all we know may completely destroy the chracterization set up for them is almost like abuse.
All I can say to an attitude like this, is "geez, get over it already!". There's no "natural" law enforcing copyrights - it's just a societal fabrication supposedly designed to increase the overall richness of the cultural landscape. Fanfics are a part of that cultural richness
A desperate desire to completely control ALL aspects of published stories or concepts is highly irrational (and controlling and/or selfish). Anybody who is _severely_ affected by such activity should probably check in with a good therapist to find out why he or she needs external validation through what are essentially figments of his or her imagination.
If you built this solar panel AS A SCREEN SHADE, then you could get your power & be able to see your screen (and keep other people from seeing it) at the same time!
Actually, although this thing won't provide enough power to use your laptop at full throttle all the time, I could see where you could use it to slow DOWN how fast your laptop uses power, and leave it charging your laptop when you're not using it.
It's too expensive for me though - if it were around ~$50 US, it'd be nice to have - but not at $395 US (over a 1/3rd of a typical laptop price!)
Keep in mind that capitalism requires growth to survive. It can't be in equilibrium with anything else - it must constantly grow.
I don't quite see why this is necessary - why can't a capitalistic system be in some kind of equilibrium? Individual components (individuals/companies) of the system might grow & die, but the overall "energy" of the system stays about the same, with all the elements feeding each other.
I actually considered that there is some benefit to a perpetually semi-paralyzed government, but I think that there comes a point where it's gone downhill far enough that we need a real change.
I also thought this might be preferable, but I realized that this "paralysis" consists of large chunks of my tax money being flushed down a pork-smelling toilet.
Regarding your voting scheme, I vaguely remember reading about a similar voting scheme where everyone just assigned a numeric value based on preference to the candidates, and whoever got the most overall score won. It supposedly had similar characteristics to your stated preferences - fringe interests weren't likely to be elected, and widely popular candidates were likely to be elected no matter what party they belonged to (which might not be a good thing in some people's eyes:)
It would be cool if there was some kind of straightforward TEST (for both governing "skills" & ethics) we could make candidates take, except I haven't any clue how we would make such a test fairly.
I guess any system which involves humans in positions where they can collect too much power, is just ripe for exploitation.
Gods - just imagine if you could actually get EXERCISE moving through those multiplayer RPG worlds, or perhaps playing those virtual fighting martial arts games. You'd have entire generations of Conans & Bruce Lees, who might have never left their house!
The 80% the following term is an interesting concept - kind of a not-quite-term-limit (i.e., you have to be a damn popular incumbent to be allowed to keep the office). The % might be adjusted - maybe just 2/3?
We should also modify the election system to make sure that only candidates who are supported by a majority of the population can be elected - right now, by playing opponents against each other, candidates who represent distinctly minority views can gain positions of power over the majority. The CANDIDATES might enjoy the game, but I don't think it's good for the society as a whole to be in that situation.
I'm not convinced about the compulsory voting - there's a lot of people who I would prefer not be making decisions about my future - I wouldn't trust their judgement to order me my next McDonald's meal, much less decide whether or not I should be shot for attempting to cross the street. (Now perhaps compulsory EDUCATION about how to "get along" in a society?)
There's another issue in today's current setup, which is related to why incumbents keep getting reelected even though they keep screwing the country over and over - they really DO keep an eye out for their voters - by bribing them with "pork", if nothing else.
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that they behave in a manner which helps the society as a whole - just those people who they need the votes of. Therefore, you get a whole bunch of greedy, grasping politicans who do everything they can for their OWN voters, usually to the detriment of OTHER voters (and if your representative isn't strong or clever enough, you get screwed).
What you need is a way for all of the OTHER voters to kick out so-called "national" representatives if they are convinced that those representatives don't represent their best interests, even if they didn't vote them into office in the first place.
That way, you have a balance between the voters in a particular locale picking somebody to represent their interests, and everyone else having the ability to make sure that representative doesn't trample on THEIR interests.
Sounds like they need to fix the protocol - if you treat every client as potentially malicious, then the only data that client should be allowed receive or know about is data that the user would normally be allowed full access to anyway (not to mention that all data being received from the client should be checked very carefully for reasonableness).
I guess with the slow bandwidth issues, it might turn out to be almost impossible to implement certain kinds of effects w/o some cooperative processing from the client.
One of the comments above caught my eye, about the administration being tolerant of physical abuse by students "esp. those involved in athletics".
It occurred to me, that out of all the discussion in the media that I have read about trying to find the "dangerous" students, I have very rarely seen much discussion in the mainstream media about the ENVIRONMENTS which tend to produce such students.
If an environment sucks, the pressure of the people stuck in that environment will build until something(somebody) blows. If you just focus on the current "troublemakers", then you'll never fix the overall problem - the environment - and you'll always end up getting a new crop of troublemakers to deal with.
My thoughts that it might be a little more reliable to try and deduce systemic problems rather than come up with a set of tests which can reliably predict everyone who might become "violent".
Of course, I have read many stories about attempts to solve bad environments, which have failed due to lack of resources. It figures, though - the people with the resources usually aren't the one having problems - and the people with the problems don't usually have the resources to dig their way out of the hole (easily).
I realize this goes against the interactivity of the consoles, but there are times where I just like to take a video or DVD into my system & sit back & watch, w/o having to defeat three zillion different monsters to get through the story line.
With these cool graphics engines coming out, how long before we can see feature-length 3D CG movies, where the data on the CD represents the setup & movements of the 3D models instead of a frame-by-frame type of video? (In particular, how long before I can see these things in the US!)
I can see interactivity up to the point where you can move through the movie "set" looking at stuff during the course of the movie (and forwards & backwards the movie too, of course) - but for the most part, the storyline is linear (unless the director wants to explore storyline branches)?
Would such a setup actually be more efficient in terms of data storage than the frame-by-frame setups? As things got more realistic, would it slowly start supplanting "normal" movies? Would you get a hybrid of 3D & "real-life" stuff (where the real-life stuff was modeled into the 3D worlds)?
Folks, we have a problem. The companies which are porting their games to Linux are NOT your friends! They are working for MICROSOFT!
See, the REAL reason that Linux developers write so much code and find bugs so fast, is because they don't have any GAMES to hamper productivity!
By secretly financing the porting of these Windows-only games, with well-known addictive qualities, to Linux, Microsoft is hoping to destroy the productivity of all Linux developers.
No longer will the diehard Linux developer be able to boast that they commonly do the work of 10 Windows developers - between lack of focus & sleep, they'll be lucky if they can TALK intelligibly, much less write good code.
Oh man, I spent a day in Akihabara (on a two-week work visit to Japan) - I drooled so much I nearly died of dehydration.
Not only were their consumer electronics selection incredible (and MUCH flashier than anything I've seen in the US), but they had these HUMONGOUS electronics-part "flea markets" crammed into these multi-floor warehouse buildings, where you could buy Intel Pentium (loose!) from one booth (which was about 5 feet wide), and then go to the next booth & pick up a couple of DIMMs, then go to the next booth & pick up a handle of transistors/capacitors/surface mount resistors & a robotic arm, etc...
I was highly amused when I saw a 5-year Toddler talking to somebody on a Pokemon cell phone (these things are so small, you could hide them in the palm of your hand...)
One of the main things I noticed is that, for any given product type (like a watch or a cell phone or whatever), there were HUNDREDS of different variations of that product sitting right next to each other in each display case - some of the variations were pretty damn tiny. That seemed to be a fairly consistent pattern - for any given type of product, you could easily go into decision-paralysis trying to decide what was "best for you".
is free access to its operating system technology!
Although it's well known for its huge hardware patent portfolio, they've got incredibly cool behind-the-scenes stuff they've been using in their "Big Iron" for decades - load balancing between all the hardware (disks/processors/storage/communication), virtual machines, fault-tolerance - on and on. PCs & personal workstations are just becoming powerful enough to support a lot of this functionality in a cost-effective manner.
If IBM allows most of this technology to be consolidated in the main Linux distributions, and "refined" by 10,000 ecstatic geeks, you'll end up with a basic operating system which no company in the world would EVER be able to compete with.
With that much space, why in the world would you need to defrag anything? Just use a journaling file system & be able to recover versions of any given file 10,000 versions back...
Many states don't have sales taxes, period. Don't like sales tax? Move to another state.
Really? Out of the 50 states in the United States, how many DON'T have a sales tax? I live in one - Oregon - I believe there was one other (two at the most). I don't believe that falls into the category of "many states". I suspect that many non-US countries are even worse.
Taxation is *never* the answer.
Ah...then how do you propose government be funded? Usage fees? Then we can REALLY talk about how money buys government. Donations? Don't make me laugh!
I, for one, don't particular feel like living in an anarchy - I *like* having a stable society around me (although I don't like it when some members of that society have too much influence over everyone else). The only way to get that funding is through taxation - the only argument is how, how much, from & to who and why.
Just think of the legal system as a big, poorly understood operating system, with all kinds of malicious processes with many different levels of access rights (usually associated with money:) - and the various licenses as attempts to protect the products from these malicious processes.
I spent some time trying to convince my brother (who decided to become a lawyer - I did my best to save him!) that laws should be written in an unambiguous computer-like language, but apparently he has a touch of a politician in him 'cause he said he LIKED the ambiguities. *Sigh*
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Too bad all these processes only allow companies w/billions of dollars in the bank to play.
Perhaps if you had a detailed enough simulation of the software's working environment (with the caveat that you REALLY have to trust your simulator...), then you could have hundreds (or thousands) of people trying to write code, and then the simulation tries to break everything.
You could have a dedicated bunch of people who deliberately try and break any proposed system (including setting up hardware glitches, like cosmic rays or something).
Over time, the software would probably evolve into something quite robust.
Good lord, if things are THAT complex they're DEFINITELY not going to want to write everything from scratch on their own! Do you have any idea how many bugs they'd have to work out on their own - bugs that have ALREADY been worked out for large & complicated systems which are put under severe stress every day.
More than likely, they picked something which was as simple in construction as possible, but still can get the job done, and then had their own people crawl over the architecture & source code with a fine-tooth comb. You'd better believe that they're not going to blindly trust a software company just because they SAY their code is mission-critical ready - they're going to want to look at the source code themselves.
Actually, I would've thought that the lack of depth of field was on purpose - being a "pro", he/she was focusing on the player & deliberately allowing the background to blur. I agree with you about the washed-out coloring though.
Being a total amateur at taking pictures myself, I'll be happy when I can snap 100s of pictures & pick out the ones I like.
On the flip side, you've got a whole generation of kids trained to play video games - and for some of those games, their reaction speeds are downright frightening - almost Bruce Lee speed (w/o the devastating results though).
If the combat interface for all that equipment allows soldiers on an instinctive reaction basis, and feeding them all the information they need to make those snap decisions (like video games do), you're going to have some frightening automaton-like killers on your hands...
Like this is going to bother the military - "Hey, some loser is jamming our GPS! They've got to be putting out a pretty powerful signal to do that - where's that RF-seeking missile?"
There seems to be an underlying assumption that all people should have the rights to any work. This is right in line with a 5 year old's code of ethics. Everything that exists is mine.Ah yes, that must've been one of those "laws of physics" that I slept through during college. Get a grip - there's no "natural" law that enforces copyright. It's just a legal invention designed to encourage selfish people to use their creativity so that the rest of society can enjoy it.
Huh? Programmer B got to use the original code for free from Programmer A to make his/her changes. And the turnaround is fair too - Programmer A has to follow the same rules on Programmer B's code as Programmer B had to follow in Programmer A's code.
All I can say to an attitude like this, is "geez, get over it already!". There's no "natural" law enforcing copyrights - it's just a societal fabrication supposedly designed to increase the overall richness of the cultural landscape. Fanfics are a part of that cultural richness
A desperate desire to completely control ALL aspects of published stories or concepts is highly irrational (and controlling and/or selfish). Anybody who is _severely_ affected by such activity should probably check in with a good therapist to find out why he or she needs external validation through what are essentially figments of his or her imagination.
If you built this solar panel AS A SCREEN SHADE, then you could get your power & be able to see your screen (and keep other people from seeing it) at the same time!
Actually, although this thing won't provide enough power to use your laptop at full throttle all the time, I could see where you could use it to slow DOWN how fast your laptop uses power, and leave it charging your laptop when you're not using it.
It's too expensive for me though - if it were around ~$50 US, it'd be nice to have - but not at $395 US (over a 1/3rd of a typical laptop price!)
I don't quite see why this is necessary - why can't a capitalistic system be in some kind of equilibrium? Individual components (individuals/companies) of the system might grow & die, but the overall "energy" of the system stays about the same, with all the elements feeding each other.
I also thought this might be preferable, but I realized that this "paralysis" consists of large chunks of my tax money being flushed down a pork-smelling toilet.
Regarding your voting scheme, I vaguely remember reading about a similar voting scheme where everyone just assigned a numeric value based on preference to the candidates, and whoever got the most overall score won. It supposedly had similar characteristics to your stated preferences - fringe interests weren't likely to be elected, and widely popular candidates were likely to be elected no matter what party they belonged to (which might not be a good thing in some people's eyes :)
It would be cool if there was some kind of straightforward TEST (for both governing "skills" & ethics) we could make candidates take, except I haven't any clue how we would make such a test fairly.
I guess any system which involves humans in positions where they can collect too much power, is just ripe for exploitation.
Gods - just imagine if you could actually get EXERCISE moving through those multiplayer RPG worlds, or perhaps playing those virtual fighting martial arts games. You'd have entire generations of Conans & Bruce Lees, who might have never left their house!
The 80% the following term is an interesting concept - kind of a not-quite-term-limit (i.e., you have to be a damn popular incumbent to be allowed to keep the office). The % might be adjusted - maybe just 2/3?
We should also modify the election system to make sure that only candidates who are supported by a majority of the population can be elected - right now, by playing opponents against each other, candidates who represent distinctly minority views can gain positions of power over the majority. The CANDIDATES might enjoy the game, but I don't think it's good for the society as a whole to be in that situation.
I'm not convinced about the compulsory voting - there's a lot of people who I would prefer not be making decisions about my future - I wouldn't trust their judgement to order me my next McDonald's meal, much less decide whether or not I should be shot for attempting to cross the street. (Now perhaps compulsory EDUCATION about how to "get along" in a society?)
There's another issue in today's current setup, which is related to why incumbents keep getting reelected even though they keep screwing the country over and over - they really DO keep an eye out for their voters - by bribing them with "pork", if nothing else.
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that they behave in a manner which helps the society as a whole - just those people who they need the votes of. Therefore, you get a whole bunch of greedy, grasping politicans who do everything they can for their OWN voters, usually to the detriment of OTHER voters (and if your representative isn't strong or clever enough, you get screwed).
What you need is a way for all of the OTHER voters to kick out so-called "national" representatives if they are convinced that those representatives don't represent their best interests, even if they didn't vote them into office in the first place.
That way, you have a balance between the voters in a particular locale picking somebody to represent their interests, and everyone else having the ability to make sure that representative doesn't trample on THEIR interests.
Sounds like they need to fix the protocol - if you treat every client as potentially malicious, then the only data that client should be allowed receive or know about is data that the user would normally be allowed full access to anyway (not to mention that all data being received from the client should be checked very carefully for reasonableness).
I guess with the slow bandwidth issues, it might turn out to be almost impossible to implement certain kinds of effects w/o some cooperative processing from the client.
One of the comments above caught my eye, about the administration being tolerant of physical abuse by students "esp. those involved in athletics".
It occurred to me, that out of all the discussion in the media that I have read about trying to find the "dangerous" students, I have very rarely seen much discussion in the mainstream media about the ENVIRONMENTS which tend to produce such students.
If an environment sucks, the pressure of the people stuck in that environment will build until something(somebody) blows. If you just focus on the current "troublemakers", then you'll never fix the overall problem - the environment - and you'll always end up getting a new crop of troublemakers to deal with.
My thoughts that it might be a little more reliable to try and deduce systemic problems rather than come up with a set of tests which can reliably predict everyone who might become "violent".
Of course, I have read many stories about attempts to solve bad environments, which have failed due to lack of resources. It figures, though - the people with the resources usually aren't the one having problems - and the people with the problems don't usually have the resources to dig their way out of the hole (easily).
I realize this goes against the interactivity of the consoles, but there are times where I just like to take a video or DVD into my system & sit back & watch, w/o having to defeat three zillion different monsters to get through the story line.
With these cool graphics engines coming out, how long before we can see feature-length 3D CG movies, where the data on the CD represents the setup & movements of the 3D models instead of a frame-by-frame type of video? (In particular, how long before I can see these things in the US!)
I can see interactivity up to the point where you can move through the movie "set" looking at stuff during the course of the movie (and forwards & backwards the movie too, of course) - but for the most part, the storyline is linear (unless the director wants to explore storyline branches)?
Would such a setup actually be more efficient in terms of data storage than the frame-by-frame setups? As things got more realistic, would it slowly start supplanting "normal" movies? Would you get a hybrid of 3D & "real-life" stuff (where the real-life stuff was modeled into the 3D worlds)?
Folks, we have a problem. The companies which are porting their games to Linux are NOT your friends! They are working for MICROSOFT!
See, the REAL reason that Linux developers write so much code and find bugs so fast, is because they don't have any GAMES to hamper productivity!
By secretly financing the porting of these Windows-only games, with well-known addictive qualities, to Linux, Microsoft is hoping to destroy the productivity of all Linux developers.
No longer will the diehard Linux developer be able to boast that they commonly do the work of 10 Windows developers - between lack of focus & sleep, they'll be lucky if they can TALK intelligibly, much less write good code.
Save yourself, before it's too late!
Oh man, I spent a day in Akihabara (on a two-week work visit to Japan) - I drooled so much I nearly died of dehydration.
Not only were their consumer electronics selection incredible (and MUCH flashier than anything I've seen in the US), but they had these HUMONGOUS electronics-part "flea markets" crammed into these multi-floor warehouse buildings, where you could buy Intel Pentium (loose!) from one booth (which was about 5 feet wide), and then go to the next booth & pick up a couple of DIMMs, then go to the next booth & pick up a handle of transistors/capacitors/surface mount resistors & a robotic arm, etc...
I was highly amused when I saw a 5-year Toddler talking to somebody on a Pokemon cell phone (these things are so small, you could hide them in the palm of your hand...)
One of the main things I noticed is that, for any given product type (like a watch or a cell phone or whatever), there were HUNDREDS of different variations of that product sitting right next to each other in each display case - some of the variations were pretty damn tiny. That seemed to be a fairly consistent pattern - for any given type of product, you could easily go into decision-paralysis trying to decide what was "best for you".
They'll just have to cap the bandwidth of each user. Then people will miss the freedom they were allowed before :)
is free access to its operating system technology!
Although it's well known for its huge hardware patent portfolio, they've got incredibly cool behind-the-scenes stuff they've been using in their "Big Iron" for decades - load balancing between all the hardware (disks/processors/storage/communication), virtual machines, fault-tolerance - on and on. PCs & personal workstations are just becoming powerful enough to support a lot of this functionality in a cost-effective manner.
If IBM allows most of this technology to be consolidated in the main Linux distributions, and "refined" by 10,000 ecstatic geeks, you'll end up with a basic operating system which no company in the world would EVER be able to compete with.
With that much space, why in the world would you need to defrag anything? Just use a journaling file system & be able to recover versions of any given file 10,000 versions back...
Really? Out of the 50 states in the United States, how many DON'T have a sales tax? I live in one - Oregon - I believe there was one other (two at the most). I don't believe that falls into the category of "many states". I suspect that many non-US countries are even worse.
Ah...then how do you propose government be funded? Usage fees? Then we can REALLY talk about how money buys government. Donations? Don't make me laugh!
I, for one, don't particular feel like living in an anarchy - I *like* having a stable society around me (although I don't like it when some members of that society have too much influence over everyone else). The only way to get that funding is through taxation - the only argument is how, how much, from & to who and why.
Just think of the legal system as a big, poorly understood operating system, with all kinds of malicious processes with many different levels of access rights (usually associated with money :) - and the various licenses as attempts to protect the products from these malicious processes.
I spent some time trying to convince my brother (who decided to become a lawyer - I did my best to save him!) that laws should be written in an unambiguous computer-like language, but apparently he has a touch of a politician in him 'cause he said he LIKED the ambiguities. *Sigh*
Maybe combine it with that "Freenet" idea that was being posted on Freshmeat.net.