I feel compelled at this point to recommend Progress Quest. It's the best of the online RPGs, every single annoying thing about the game has been abstracted out. What is perhaps most amazing is the way it combines the best bits of all other RPGs and yet somehow isn't rubbish. You will need a pretty decent graphics card to run the full version though.....
Progress Quest is a next generation computer role-playing game. Gamers who have played modern online role-playing games, or almost any computer role-playing game, or who have at any time installed or upgraded their operating system, will find themselves incredibly comfortable with Progress Quest's very familiar gameplay.
The BBC has a cool website that encourages action that sounds a little like this the action network that used to be called iCan. I also like they work for you, a great resource for holding your MP to account. Pledgebank gets to the root of empowerment - getting people to amplify their efforts by working together.
I have to say though, just from the Mission Statement, this "Wikia" really doesn't sound like anything new at all. Diverse people have been talking about politics on the internet since before there was an internet! Of course, just because it's not anything new, doesn't mean it might not be useful or be the first to make a big impact. Still any resource that helps hold politicians to account and encourages participation is important in modern democracies. Good luck to him I say, even if I am a little cynical about the ideas value.
It still mystifies me that such an important part of internet infrastructure has been left by us in the hands of corporations and governments. There is no compulsion to use Big Brothers DNS servers, and no need. There have been a number of open name services based on democratic principles that haven't taken off from lack of support.
These squabbles should be completely meaningless. In a case like this, we do not need their infrastructure, and the united peoples of the internet should be building our own.
I don't know what a system that would keep us free and remain true to the internets roots would look like, but perhaps the distributed dns project might be one option.
A few individuals with enthusiasm and a sympathetic cause is much better than a government.
I always thought that one of the benefits of language is that you can generate new sentences using words and grammar rules and expect people to understand you. Are you saying that people have to learn every single past usage of a phrase so they make sure that they don't collide with a earlier technical usage? My essential problem with the phrase "begging the question" is that the technical usage doesn't make sense. It requires obsolete definitions of both beg and question, whereas the modern usage does make sense with modern definitions.
This idea that technical usages should take precedence over common usage is ok in scholarly treatises, but this is slashdot, a public forum.
If orthodoxy were to say that I wasn't allowed to use "beg the question" in the new way, I would ignore orthodoxy. And this isn't because I don't care about the language - I do, and I dislike it when I hear someone use "whom" or "momentarily" in the modern way, but I don't just accept that everything that is old is right. Stupid things from the past should be let go.
Language does evolve, and the most important thing is that you convey your meaning (which can be done sometimes even with completely made up words - you don't always need a common understanding of language and phrases). It's ok for you to resist changes that you don't like in a language, you just shouldn't be arrogant about it. How about instead of telling people that they are 'wrong' you explain the old usage and tell them that you prefer it and see if they do too?
I'm pretty optimistic that the doomsday scenario won't happen. For one thing, if Google want to do this the right way, they can simply refuse to allow anyone with an IP address provided by an ISP trying to extort money from them to have access to Google. Perhaps even an Internet Death Sentence. I for one would set up my mail server so that it wouldn't send or receive mail to people on those ISPs, and my web services likewise. Can you imagine anyone using an ISP that can't provide them access to google, email, youtube or the web?
I suppose what they're trying to do is create a prisoners dilemma for providers - if nobody signs up then there is no change, if one signs up, it gains and the other loses, and if they both sign up, they both lose. I hope that the providers have the sense to stay firm. I encourage people to write emails to providers they think might be tempted to buy better access to warn them off.
Since we're talking about philosophy of science, let me quote extensively the one that makes most sense to me:
Now, Newton's theory of gravitation, Einstein's relativity theory, quantum mechanics, Marxism, Freudism, are all research programmes, each with a characteristic hard core stubbornly defended, each with its more flexible protective belt and each with its elaborate problem-solving machinery. Each of them, at any stage of its development, has unsolved problems and undigested anomalies. All theories, in this sense, are born refuted and die refuted. But are they equally good? Until now I have been describing what research programmes are like. But how can one distinguish a scientific or progressive programme from a pseudoscientific or degenerating one?
Contrary to Popper, the difference cannot be that some are still unrefuted, while others are already refuted. {When Newton published his Principia, it was common knowledge that it could not properly explain even the motion of the moon; in fact, lunar motion refuted Newton.} Kaufmann, a distinguished physicist, refuted Einstein's relativity theory in the very year it was published. But all the research programmes I admire have one characteristic in common. They all predict novel facts, facts which had been either undreamt of, or have indeed been contradicted by previous or rival programmes. In 1686, when Newton published his theory of gravitation, there were, for instance, two current theories concerning comets. The more popular one regarded comets as a signal from an angry God warning that He will strike and bring disaster. A little known theory of Kepler's held that comets were celestial bodies moving along straight lines. Now according to Newtonian theory, some of them moved in hyperbolas or parabolas never to return; others moved in ordinary ellipses. Halley, working in Newton's programme, calculated on the basis of observing a brief stretch of a comet's path that it would return in seventy-two year's time; he calculated to the minute when it would be seen again at a well-defined point of the sky. This was incredible. But seventy-two years later, {when both Newton and Halley were long dead,} Halley's comet returned exactly as Halley predicted. Similarly, Newtonian scientists predicted the existence and exact motion of small planets which had never been observed before. Or let us take Einstein's programme. This programme made the stunning prediction that if one measures the distance between two stars in the night and if one measure the distance between them during the day (when they are visible during an eclipse of the sun), the two measurements will be different. Nobody had thought to make such an observation before Einstein's programme. Thus, in a progressive research programme, theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts.
How about something more modular. If we split everything down to it's components and all the components talk to each other, a cell phone only needs to be the size and shape to perfectly pick up what you're saying and play sound to you (including music from a seperate datastore). The radio can be seperate. A camera can be a small seperate device as well, that communicates to the data store that stays in your pocket/on your belt with a PAN. The PDA equivalent would be a touch screen of the size that it would fit in an inside pocket, it can talk to the radio and the datastore and the camera. Your laptop fits into this by being able to connect to the datastore and the radio.
Yes, maybe it'd be annoying to have to carry all these things around, although building them into clothes might help there, but at the moment if you want a good phone that is a camera and a decent PDA, then it's either the right shape for holding to your head but the wrong shape for taking pictures or PDAing, or it's completely the wrong shape for holding to your head.
Cameras, PDAs and phones all have different optimal form factors. We need a solution that recognises this.
In all the contests I did, the most difficult thing wasn't actually solving the problems, it was solving the problems so they were right first time, in the fastest time possible, when you only had control of a single computer, keyboard and mouse between 6 of you trying the same thing. No matter how l33t you are, you probably have difficulty writing a reasonably complex program so it's right first time. I know lots of fantastic programmers who couldn't write code that compiles without their IDE, so paper and pencil is going to be a challenge for them. You may have a simple problem, but the real skill is how long it takes you at the keyboard to have a working solution that will solve the pathological cases that you haven't seen yet. If it takes you a long time, you'll hold your other team members up so even if you get your one question perfect it may have been a pyhric victory. Oh yeah, and you can't concentrate either when you're in a mad rush coding at the machine, because people keep coming up to you trying to get control of the computer for their problem, and the slightest sign of weakness, that you're not going to get it done or that you're going to take longer than you thought, and they'll take it off you for their problem.
If you want to try this at home, take a pencil and few sheets of paper, give yourself 40 minutes. Now give yourself strictly 10 minutes at the keyboard (but try to be done in 5), and submit your first result.
That's the thing, there is a large resource management aspect to many of these competitions. And don't underestimate the difference between coding at home at your own pace, with the ability to test your code the whole time and coding in a competitive environment at top speed with very limited keyboard time. It's like the difference between composing a little tune in front of your instrument or writing a symphony which you only get to hear once at the public performance.
I agree. When eBay sends me an email saying "Congratulations, you have Won!", I read "Congratulations, you're prepared to pay more for this item than anyone else in the entire world". I suppose they phrase it nicely just to stop you from feeling like a loser.
You may find this page useful in understanding why it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of ID cards.
It's the nature of governments to continually increase their power, and it's the responsibility of the people to limit a governments power to the absolute minimum required to fulfill its function.
Remember as well, when you give a government that you trust powers, you aren't just giving them the powers, but also all the future governments that you may or may not trust.
Why should I need to show papers to authorities when I'm walking down the street? Is the street theirs and I get to walk on it only at their sufferance, or are they my servants that exist to make sure that I can walk down the street freely?
If the US feels so strongly about this, why not provide longrange wifi connections to China over borders? It seems to me that it's about time that 'cyberspace' which promised never to bow to the demands of petty empires and not to halt it's advance at border checkpoints actually started to show some teeth. Perhaps some of the crazies that created NetSukuku could amplify one or two wifi connections over borders into an anarchic net that covers much of China. Now that we have wifi, we really don't have to put up with this nonsense from our governments.
The only way we'll sort this out is for programs like Thunderbird to come with GnuPG and enigmail installed as default. As long as it requires an hour of extra downloading and fiddling with the setup to be able to encrypt email and files well, then of course any encrypted file or email will draw official attention.
If we want freedom of speech on the internet then encryption must become pervasive, and fast - before the laws solidify.
The only way for this to happen is if every open source program that can sensibly make use of encryption insists on having it set up during the install step.
Now this confuses me. The BitKeeper "free" license says that you can't use BK to work on a competing product after using BK. Isn't this exactly what Linus has just done?
Will McVoy ask Linus's employer to sack him? He should at least threaten legal action.
Slashdot Mirror
17 mistakes Microsoft made in the xbox security system. Perhaps it doesn't surprise you that it's quite a long article, but it's fascinating stuff.
kyb
The BBC has a cool website that encourages action that sounds a little like this the action network that used to be called iCan. I also like they work for you, a great resource for holding your MP to account. Pledgebank gets to the root of empowerment - getting people to amplify their efforts by working together.
I have to say though, just from the Mission Statement, this "Wikia" really doesn't sound like anything new at all. Diverse people have been talking about politics on the internet since before there was an internet! Of course, just because it's not anything new, doesn't mean it might not be useful or be the first to make a big impact. Still any resource that helps hold politicians to account and encourages participation is important in modern democracies. Good luck to him I say, even if I am a little cynical about the ideas value.
These squabbles should be completely meaningless. In a case like this, we do not need their infrastructure, and the united peoples of the internet should be building our own.
I don't know what a system that would keep us free and remain true to the internets roots would look like, but perhaps the distributed dns project might be one option.
A few individuals with enthusiasm and a sympathetic cause is much better than a government.
I always thought that one of the benefits of language is that you can generate new sentences using words and grammar rules and expect people to understand you. Are you saying that people have to learn every single past usage of a phrase so they make sure that they don't collide with a earlier technical usage? My essential problem with the phrase "begging the question" is that the technical usage doesn't make sense. It requires obsolete definitions of both beg and question, whereas the modern usage does make sense with modern definitions. This idea that technical usages should take precedence over common usage is ok in scholarly treatises, but this is slashdot, a public forum. If orthodoxy were to say that I wasn't allowed to use "beg the question" in the new way, I would ignore orthodoxy. And this isn't because I don't care about the language - I do, and I dislike it when I hear someone use "whom" or "momentarily" in the modern way, but I don't just accept that everything that is old is right. Stupid things from the past should be let go. Language does evolve, and the most important thing is that you convey your meaning (which can be done sometimes even with completely made up words - you don't always need a common understanding of language and phrases). It's ok for you to resist changes that you don't like in a language, you just shouldn't be arrogant about it. How about instead of telling people that they are 'wrong' you explain the old usage and tell them that you prefer it and see if they do too?
I'm pretty optimistic that the doomsday scenario won't happen. For one thing, if Google want to do this the right way, they can simply refuse to allow anyone with an IP address provided by an ISP trying to extort money from them to have access to Google. Perhaps even an Internet Death Sentence. I for one would set up my mail server so that it wouldn't send or receive mail to people on those ISPs, and my web services likewise. Can you imagine anyone using an ISP that can't provide them access to google, email, youtube or the web? I suppose what they're trying to do is create a prisoners dilemma for providers - if nobody signs up then there is no change, if one signs up, it gains and the other loses, and if they both sign up, they both lose. I hope that the providers have the sense to stay firm. I encourage people to write emails to providers they think might be tempted to buy better access to warn them off.
Urmmm, I don't think you've got the hang of the "In Soviet Russia" meme.....
Yes, maybe it'd be annoying to have to carry all these things around, although building them into clothes might help there, but at the moment if you want a good phone that is a camera and a decent PDA, then it's either the right shape for holding to your head but the wrong shape for taking pictures or PDAing, or it's completely the wrong shape for holding to your head.
Cameras, PDAs and phones all have different optimal form factors. We need a solution that recognises this.
If you want to try this at home, take a pencil and few sheets of paper, give yourself 40 minutes. Now give yourself strictly 10 minutes at the keyboard (but try to be done in 5), and submit your first result.
That's the thing, there is a large resource management aspect to many of these competitions. And don't underestimate the difference between coding at home at your own pace, with the ability to test your code the whole time and coding in a competitive environment at top speed with very limited keyboard time. It's like the difference between composing a little tune in front of your instrument or writing a symphony which you only get to hear once at the public performance.
Fortunately Robin, I took the precaution of listing my favourites a long time ago.
I agree. When eBay sends me an email saying "Congratulations, you have Won!", I read "Congratulations, you're prepared to pay more for this item than anyone else in the entire world". I suppose they phrase it nicely just to stop you from feeling like a loser.
It's the nature of governments to continually increase their power, and it's the responsibility of the people to limit a governments power to the absolute minimum required to fulfill its function.
Remember as well, when you give a government that you trust powers, you aren't just giving them the powers, but also all the future governments that you may or may not trust.
Why should I need to show papers to authorities when I'm walking down the street? Is the street theirs and I get to walk on it only at their sufferance, or are they my servants that exist to make sure that I can walk down the street freely?
If the US feels so strongly about this, why not provide longrange wifi connections to China over borders? It seems to me that it's about time that 'cyberspace' which promised never to bow to the demands of petty empires and not to halt it's advance at border checkpoints actually started to show some teeth. Perhaps some of the crazies that created NetSukuku could amplify one or two wifi connections over borders into an anarchic net that covers much of China. Now that we have wifi, we really don't have to put up with this nonsense from our governments.
Hey, but when he oppresses you, at least Dick Cheney has the class to do it in person.
That's unfortunate - I cooked mine a while back.
Have you seen the windows gimp deweirdifier plugin? http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=3892 It might help if you're using GIMP on windows. The latest gimpShop for windows includes it by default. http://blog.yumdap.net/archives/20-GIMPshop-for-Wi ndows.html
They've already bribed me - I'm passionately grateful that they subsidized the XBox - my cheap linux computer.
The only way we'll sort this out is for programs like Thunderbird to come with GnuPG and enigmail installed as default. As long as it requires an hour of extra downloading and fiddling with the setup to be able to encrypt email and files well, then of course any encrypted file or email will draw official attention.
If we want freedom of speech on the internet then encryption must become pervasive, and fast - before the laws solidify.
The only way for this to happen is if every open source program that can sensibly make use of encryption insists on having it set up during the install step.
Will McVoy ask Linus's employer to sack him? He should at least threaten legal action.