The writer seems to describe how he would like the situation to be as a cyberpunk fan, and then using this as a basis for some rather outlandish predictions. He is ignoring that there is an important distinction between "virtual worlds" as predicted in various science fiction works, and online games as we play them today - the latter are games, played largely for entertainment and/or escapism and designed and balanced to form a more-or-less coherent universe suitable for these purposes. (I am aware that "worlds" that can only peripherally be said to be games exist - such as, IIRC, Second Life, but these are hardly as mainstream as the numerous MMORPGs that "millions of us commute to".)
If convergence between worlds were to happen, the "game" aspect would have to be marginalized or entirely eliminated: either one would have to reduce the rules of the game to the rules that are common to all the merged games, essentially ending up with a glorified chat room, or one would have to merge sets of rules for games modelling entirely different things, resulting in the kind of chaos that might be fun to read about in science fiction novels, but would probably not be very playable. Thus, unless something happens to create a demand for massively multiplayer non-games which is not there today, convergence between games will not happen.
I'd argue that virtual worlds such as described in fiction have not actually caught on, because context is important here: "virtual worlds" are not actually worlds in the sense of having functions parallel to those of the actual world unless people actually look upon them as such, and for now, the people who do are by far outnumbered by the people who look upon them as games where they strive to improve their avatar's abilities.
The House of Lords is indeed literally an unelected body. Some seats are inherited, others reserved for "honorary" positions(such as former PMs, I believe). If I remember correctly, however, their power is quite limited: their only significant power is that they may delay bills for a time, but not indefinitely. Many Brits in favour of this system feel that the House of Lords(which is, as another poster mentioned, fairly conservative) is a healthy dampening influence on radical governments, potentially stopping them from enacting radical laws and reforms before the populace can react through election. In a practical sense, I expect that this is quite similar to one of the roles the Supreme Court has in American politics. Obviously, however, having an indisputably undemocratic body with any power at all in a modern, democratic country such as Britain is quite controversial anyway, and the House of Lords has undergone reforms in recent years(1997 according to the BBC(second-to-last paragraph of the "in context" sidebar), ending up with a reduced number of seats(especially inherited seats) and reduced power. Many Brits are undoubtedly in favour of eventually getting rid of the House of Lords altogether, or reducing their role to a strictly ceremonial one.
(Disclaimer: Most of this post is based on what I could recall from school at the moment, and I don't have a particularly good memory, nor have I ever lived in Britain, so my ability to describe contemporary British politics might be a bit suspect. Apologies if I got something wrong.)
(Oh, and as for why: In addition to the "dampening influence" part which is mainly used to justify the existence of the House, tradition is obviously the reason why the house was there in the first place. The House of Lords is perhaps the last remnant of the important role the British nobility has played in British political life throughout history.)
I do agree that some of the cases were probably clear-cut; as you say, the Soviet Union undoubtedly had extensive espionage operations in the United States, and some of these cases have even been documented since the end of the Cold War. Now, not having in-depth knowledge of McCarthyism, I can't cite specific cases, but I feel fairly sure that a fair number of the persecuted have also later been shown to have been innocent.
That said, there are, in my opinion, gray areas. You say that propagandists and revolutionaries who are infiltrating a nation for a hostile government can legitimately be persecuted, which sounds reasonable in the case where someone obviously falls into this camp: i.e., they are being compensated by, or taking orders directly from, the hostile government, and committing acts that are illegal in the country they operate in(wherever there are laws against treason, this last point is pretty much open to interpretation, which is not unproblematic). I'd wager, however, that there were many communists in the United States in the fifties who did actively propagandize and advocate an eventual revolution(both being rather central tenet of the dominant communist ideology at the time) - but largely on account of their own ideology. Many of these undoubtedly fell for the propaganda of the USSR, believing that Stalin had achieved what they were dreaming of, but ignorance, naïveté and blind acceptance of things that should not be accepted blindly are not crimes when counted by themselves. Thus, they did sympathize with the USSR - but sympathy for a foreign and hostile government can't be a crime on its own in a country where freedom of speech is upheld, and the persecution of these people was (in my opinion) unjust.
In conclusion: My issue with McCarthyism is that I do not believe that it was primarily a counter-intelligence operation intended to weed out Soviet spies, but rather an attempt at a political cleansing of sorts, an operation against communist sympathizers - from one angle, people who might easily be turned to be Soviet spies, or from another, people who were simply uncomfortably outspoken with their views in favour of the enemy. Though I'd like to research that more thoroughly, I simply do not have the time to do this right now. I'd call your attention, however, to a quote by McCarthy in 1950 regarding whom he intended as targets for his campaign(Source: Wikiquote, though I feel the need to warn you that the selection of quotes was obviously done from an anti-McCarthy point of view, but I assume that the quotes themselves are legitimate): "...a list of 205 names that were known [...] as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."
These people are not being accused of being spies, at least not explicitly. They are being accused of being members of the Communist Party, and it is implied that, because they are members of a certain political party and subscribers to a certain ideology, they are incapable of loyalty to the state as their employer and unfit to work within the State Department.
I do know that communists in the United States enjoy freedom of speech today. But as I said, communists are hardly relevant in USA at the moment, and other groups may be threatened today the same way that communists were fifty years ago(though I am not claiming that this is happening to the same degree as in the fifties).
Furthermore, persecution of communists in democratic capitalist countries during the Cold War was not unique to the United States. To use an example from my own country: in Norway certain politicians were kept under surveillance apparently simply for being dangerously radical(ironically, the surveillance was probably done by a government which was dangerously radical by American standards) - these incidents have been heavily debated since the declassification of documents relatin
Err, the poem obviously does not refer directly to the Red Scare, it was written by Martin Niemöller about the Nazi regime in Germany. "First they came for the communists" refer quite literally to communists being put in concentration camps. The next stanzas are about social democrats and trade unionists, other - but perhaps less extreme - political enemies of fascism.
Furthermore, I'm horrified to see that many of you are quite willing to accept persecution of communists, and explaining this line away with things such as "it wasn't the persecution of the communists that was bad, but the persecution of the American people under the guise of communist infiltration". One of the other posters implied that equating the communists with the Jews in this sense was somehow wrong - do you not have both freedom of religion and freedom of (political) speech in America? If so, the two should indeed be equated, whether or not you like either.
Being a socialist myself, about the only thing I like about the United States politically speaking is the strong belief many people there have in freedom of speech. It would be a shame if that belief were to disappear as soon as it came to the issue of non-capitalist ideologies. (Obviously, persecution of communists is hardly a relevant issue in America today, since they are no longer a significant political force. But parallels can easily be drawn to other ideologies that are on the fringe from an American point of view.)
If all it took to defeat the NSA was some simple PGP....wouldn't that put the NSA out of business pretty quickly?
Well, no. It would certainly make the job of gathering information a lot harder. It probably does. But I am unsure of in what way you expect them to "go out of business" because of this. Obviously the U.S. isn't going to shut down its intelligence agency simply because the general population(or more accurately, a subset of it) vastly overestimates its capability, and obviously they aren't going to state publicly that what still-relevant ciphers they are able to break and on what kind of scale they can and do break them(which would be a puzzling move, anyway, since everyone would assume that they'd be lying if they did that). "If" all it took to defeat the NSA was some simple PGP, they wouldn't be the omniscient all-seeing eye that they tend to be portrayed as in fiction. But they would be fully operative, though perhaps not doing exactly the things that outsiders imagine them to do.
Now, I'm not trying to say that I know what the NSA does or can do. Rather, I'm trying to say is that I do not, and neither do you(unless you're not telling us something rather significant). So, not knowing what they're doing, we basically have (at least) two possible grounds for speculation: we can speculate based on what they do in fiction(The Digital Fortress being a prime example of the genre. I think I read about ten random pages of that book without encountering a single sentence that didn't either highly amuse me or make me cringe with its extreme lack of understanding of the subject matter(which I have only a cursory familiarity with myself - but you'd think that you'd take a week or two to do some reading before you start writing a novel about the stuff)), or we can speculate based on what is likely to be possible based on the science(or, to be paranoid, the part of the science which is publicly known).
I won't repeat those points here - someone else already did that in this thread - suffice it to say that unless the NSA are far, far ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to cryptographic theory and/or computing power, there are several commonplace ciphers that they cannot possibly decrypt. As far as I know, there are no strong indications that they are so far ahead that they can actually do things that we assume to be impossible given the current general technological level of mankind.
Another little eye-opener: it is quite easy to make a perfect encryption system(assuming a secure channel for the key, which is needed anyway). Have a randomly generated key as long as the message, and you have a one-time-pad, which the NSA cannot possibly break(this can, of course, be mathematically proved, which is the beauty of the argument). Given this knowledge, why haven't the NSA "gone out of business"? Surely, if I were a terrorist(or whomever the NSA is hunting these days), I would go to the hassle of setting up some kind of physical key exchange network for a one time pad system?
(Naturally, OTP implementations can be "broken" by not attacking them from a cryptographic angle, i.e. rather using keylogging, social engineering, etc. But this is probably what the NSA actually does with too-hard-to-break encryption as well, so if you somehow expect the NSA to perish instead of having to resort to it in the latter case, I can see no logical reason that you shouldn't expect them to do so in the former.)
Your argument hinges on the assumption that "the world is quite deterministic in any large enough scale", which tends not to be true, quite a few natural systems exhibit chaotic behaviour at any reasonable scale, and quantum mechanics dictate that we will always have incomplete information about the world. Currently, the "Oracle supercomputer" seems infeasible from a scientific point of view: there are simply too many factors to track(in infinite detail, if perfect accuracy is required) to run accurate simulations of complex systems on extreme scales. Note that this simulation of a virus is probably not "perfect": there are errors, and however small and insignificant they may be at this scale, they may introduce crippling inaccuracies the moment you try to simulate a larger system with a certain number of viruses(each introducing their own error factors), or one system over a more significant amount of time.
Philosophically, however, the question is interesting and has, as most interesting philosophical questions, been discussed before. Look up "Laplace's demon" sometime(the demon being the closest thing an 18th century mathematician could imagine to a supercomputer with access to infinite information): if one assumes that the world is inherently deterministic(from our point of view, this assumes the "hidden variables" interpretation of quantum mechanics) and proposes that some kind of being could in theory have access to unlimited information about it, then concepts such as time lose much of their meaning, since things are "destined" to happen before they actually do happen(and in what absolute sense can they then be said not to have happened already?).
Obviously, free will in the absolute sense is also non-existent from this point of view.
Er, while I agree that Google generally gives satisfactory results for searches about e.g. programming, I don't think Google actually applies whatever "knowledge" it has about you to as great a degree as you suggest.
Supporting this would be the fact that I get the exact same results from Google when I search for a word from Firefox(i.e. with my google-related cookies) as when I do from Links(with no cookies), unless you're suggesting that they track by IP adress, which would be a rather silly thing to do in this case. (It would be silly, among other causes, because not keeping the data in the cookie itself would mean yet another enormous database for Google to maintain, and because it wouldn't work for dialup users who change IP adresses regularly.)
When people talk about the applications of the data Google is collecting in its logs, I believe they are generally talking about the plans Google has for the future or even completely hypothetical applications that are considered possible - not ones that are actually implemented at the moment. Google - the search engine - is simply based on a quite finely tuned page ranking algorithm.
In other words: Google may give better results than other search engines for you when searching for programming-related keywords, but this is probably not because Google "knows" that you are a programmer.
You probably already know this, but your analogy is flawed. (Furthermore, analogies, even if aptly chosen, are not automatically valid arguments. Certainly not if they are "aptly chosen" mostly from a rhetorical point of view.)
One problem with it is that Swiss watches are not actually alive - they don't have to do things like finding food and shelter or even mate(which, you will have to admit, is a pretty central concept of evolution.) In other words, a Swiss-watch-in-training has no feedback system to judge whether it is failing or succeeding in being a watch.
Another is that the Swiss watch, for your analogy to be valid, must be the observer, not merely something which is observed. In other words: if twenty billion years of bag-shaking does NOT result in a Swiss watch, the Swiss-watch-which-was-not-to-be will never know. This means that probability is not really an issue: if life originates naturally - even on very, very rare occasions - we are not present to observe all the occurences of life not originating naturally. (Which is good, because I have a hunch it would be rather boring.) In other words, no matter the probability of life originating naturally in any one instance, if that is how life forms, it's perfectly natural that we will always observe at least one instance of it happening.
For the record, I'm an agnostic. I agree to some degree on the matter of atheists having faith - not specifically on the matter of the origin of life, but philosophically speaking. Atheists who vehemently deny any possibility of there being a "God" of any sort are guessing, because they are speculating about things that are by definition unobservable. I've never heard any convincing explanation to the contrary(though I've heard many atheists argue that there being no god is a "good guess", most often on the basis of applying physical experience to metaphysical matters).
(Oh, and please don't give me the line about "early evolution is unobservable". By "unobservable", I mean in the strictest sense unobservable - saying that early evolution is unobservable is, to me, cheapening the very concept of "God". To (ironically) make use of a counter-analogy: If I see a ball on the ground and hypothesise that it might have been dropped by someone, I can verify this as a possibility endlessly by dropping the ball again and again to confirm that gravity still works. Even if I can't observe the actual dropping of the actual ball at the precise moment it happened, I can recreate ways in which it might have happened and choose amongst the remaining possibilities what I believe to be likely scenarios. If I hypothesise that the ball was put there by God(in a personal sense), that is a logically perfectly reasonable explanation - but, but definition, as a mortal being, I am unable to recreate the scenario, which means that I cannot know whether this is actually possible. Science intentionally restricts itself to dealing with things it can, to some degree, verify as being possible.
In other words: it is a basic axiom of the natural sciences that the world makes sense without supernatural elements. If it does not, the conclusions we draw about it from science will be wrong - but from a scientific point of view, we will never notice. This, really, is not a problem: science concerns itself with a non-supernatural view of the world, whether or not that world view is correct. So far in history, science has been a fairly productive application of the human mind, so I don't think anyone can seriously argue that we ought to get rid of it.)
I'm a pacifist as well, and I'd love to believe that you were right about this - because that would mean ultraviolence in video games would be a fairly straightforward way to world peace. (Which, I guess, would make America's Army the single best effort by America's army to that end, ever.) Sadly, I believe you're taking a fairly naïve view of the situation.
The point is that this isn't all about the "fun factor". People don't generally wake up and tell themselves, "Hey, I'm rather enjoying killing sprees in video games, maybe I should consider that as a career choice." Rather, every bit of information they process - be it a movie, a game or a conversation with their friends, their neighbour or the girl at the supermarket checkout - subtly alters the way they think about the world and what they associate with various concepts - including concepts such as war and violence. There's nothing especially harmful about games, but then again, there's nothing especially harmless about them.
In other words: Are guns cool? Is peacefully resolving a conflict situation an option? Are all pacifists wusses or traitors(all right, that one is on the Final Fantasy series, not generally regarded as very violent)? Are there "bad guys" and "good guys"? If you encounter a person who is not on your "team", is the appropriate response to shoot on sight?
I believe that, say, an avid Counter-Strike player can't avoid letting the game - to some degree - influence the way he or she thinks about, say, "terrorists". I'm not saying that most CS players(above a certain level of maturity) can't think reasonably about complex issues, but I'm saying that CS is an influence, and it is largely an influence in the direction of "violent" or simplistic thought. (To pacify the non-pacifists here: I'm not necessarily(heh) saying that all violent thought is simplistic, but most violent games tend to inspire violent and simplistic thought - because there is a clear-cut, violent conflict which is the main focus of the game.)
As a personal example: While playing FPSes, I often find myself thinking that certain weapons are elegant, neat, cool, etc. I would never associate these qualities with weapons if I saw them in real life(remember that we're not counting movies and other forms of entertainment as "real life", this argument could be made for movies, etc. as well, but applies more to games for me personally) - it would be too obvious to me that they are tools meant for killing human beings, which I generally don't approve of as "neat" - but to some degree these connotations do last, and they do affect the way I think about weapons.
(The same, as already mentioned, applies to e.g. movies: There can be no doubt that, say, James Bond makes espionage cooler in the minds of most people. I find it hard to believe the argument that the unique element of interactivity in games plays that much of a role, but that, of course, is a (hard) question for statisticians to answer, not one which can be decided by random speculation.)
(Oh, and as I remember some old gaming magazine once pointing out: Civilization is horribly, horribly violent. When I'm playing it I generally wage wars that span hundreds or thousands of years and kill off what I assume are thousands of non-combatants every time I capture a city. I don't think I ever even went for the spaceship ending.)
(Please not that I am not at all saying that we should all stop playing violent games, or that we should all feel horrible when we do. What we all should stop doing, in my opinion, is saying that games are 'harmless'. Nothing is 'harmless', and that is an important thing to be aware of.)
(Perhaps we could amend that to 'mostly harmless'. Sorry.)
You say that as if it were a bad thing. If, statistically, people who listen to Pantera are significantly more likely to enjoy Dido than people who do not listen to Pantera, then last.fm should recommend Dido to people who listen to Pantera. (Note that it's not enough for a few people to like Dido and Pantera for last.fm to recommend the former to fans of the latter; fans of the latter have to generally listen more to Dido than to "more appropriate" recommendations for your scenario to work.)
Perhaps paradoxically, the fact that the system itself concerns itself merely with statistics and not with music analysis is part of what makes the system work (for me). There is a large amount of music which sounds vaguely - perhaps to a listener who does not share my taste in music, or certainly to a machine - like things I'd like to listen to, but which actually doesn't appeal to me at all. Similarly, acoustic analysis ignores things like lyrics: the only differences an automated acoustical analysis system would note between, say, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, would be relatively superficial aspects of their work - their voice, their choice of musical backing, simple aspects of their melodies, and so on.
Generally, music is written for humans, so it makes sense that rating and comparing music should be a job for humans; certainly some music cannot be "comprehended" by nonsentient machines in any meaningful manner, and I'm sure this is applicable to important aspects of nearly any musical genre.
Not necessarily. Given an anthropocentric moral philosophy - which is, after all, fairly common(perhaps even moreso on Slashdot, where environmentalism seems to be ridiculed more often than not) and (to my mind) quite reasonable - the extinction of the species must be regarded as an "ultimate evil", that is, something which is to be avoided at any other cost. As we approach this "ultimate evil" in terms of loss of life, the acceptable price for the prevention of the disaster approaches infinity.
In other words: there is no price humanity will refuse to pay to prevent its own extinction, assuming that it is given a choice and that it is acting rationally(if only we could safely make that assumption, heh). The extinction of humanity, of course, is the same event as the loss of billions of lives, for a certain value of "billions".
Your capitalistic cynicism, then, is misplaced. Note that if we make assumptions regarding basic philosophy beyond anthropocentricism - such as introducing an instinct of self-preservation and/or the common human desire to protect loved ones - more things than this very general example become "ultimate evils" and lose their "price".
While I can't recall how exactly that 6,000 years figure came about(I've believe also heard 4,000 years from a Jehovah's Witness or similar), I feel confident it stems from what most Christians would consider to be a ridiculously literal interpretation of the Bible. (Such an interpretation of the Bible is popular among certain fundamentalist Christians, today perhaps most prominently in America.)
Wikipedia seems to assert that the Young Earth creationists - that I assume you are referring to - base their beliefs on the genealogies found in Genesis(and thus on the literal truth of creation with no element of analogy, which is surely not a requirement for all Christian faith). I've also heard another fundamentalist "Young Earth" theory which argues that the seven first days of creation directly correspond to periods of time in the literal creation of the Earth. Now, science can(and should - simple defense of scientific principles is not what I've dubbed "militant atheism") show that these theories are internally inconsistent, and very probably fundamentally false. But for the vast majority of Christians, that won't matter: the core of their faith is what you so eloquently summed up as the 'be kind to thy neighbor' message(which you'll have to admit might be a bit more complex than that). In other words: it's not at all uncontroversial that "the Bible says" this or that about scientific matters, even in cases where the actual text is less ambigous than in this case - because many Christians would argue that it's not meant to say anything about scientific matters. (Likewise, few Christians would argue that ancient laws not explicitly stated as such are somehow made divine by their description in the Bible.)
The essence being that for most Christians - at least the ones I've met - the "whole bunch of baloney" that is being used to ridicule their religion does not apply to their actual religion. Interestingly, the class of atheists I'm describing(the "militant" ones) tend to read the Bible in much the same way as some fundamentalist Christians would - as literal as possible, whether the results make sense or not.
The kind of "militant atheism" I describe isn't something I associate with scientific achievement, but purely with seemingly intentional theological ignorance. The Enlightenment was not brought about by "militant atheism"(the concept was hardly relevant at the time), but largely by Christians, deists, and some atheists - probably not "militant" ones in the sense that they didn't choose to ignore how people actually practiced religion when they criticised it. (Furthermore, I won't deny that proclaiming yourself a "militant atheist" would be, er, strategically unwise during the Dark Ages. But from this it logically follows that the renaissance was not, as you seem to imply, brought about by a horde of scientific atheists emerging from an intellectual and religious vacuum to save the world from the Church.)
As an example: Did Isaac Newton "happily prefer to keep mankind in the dark ages"? No, he did not. Was he a Christian? Yes, very much so. Your last sentence smacks of creative historical revisionism.
(Please note that I'm not saying that we should shy away from telling religious people that they're likely to be wrong if they hold views that encroach on well-known scientific ground and directly oppose the scientific explanations. Specifically, opposing creationism and similar fundamentalist pseudoscience is not "militant atheism". I'm just saying that if you wish to debate Christian theology or the history of the various Christian churches, you need to have some grasp of what you are trying to analyse before you start your critique.)
I'm sorry, you must be correct. Galileo was put under arrest for heresy for espousing views that conflict with nothing that the bible says. Thanks for clearing that one up!
I get the impression that you are trying to be sarcastic, but the statement you make above is - as far as I know - factually correct. Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy on account of contradicting the geocentric worldview that the Catholic church held at the time. This worldview, appropriately known as the Ptolemaic system, originated not with the Bible, but with the astronomer Ptolemy. (As I skimmed through the article I linked I noticed that it seems Catholic dogma was actually a variant of the Ptolemaic system, including a bit of Plato as well, either way, it's not from nor in the Bible.)
Catholic doctrine holds tradition in high regard, because it sees the Church as an organisation as divine(please bear with me with regards to the terminology, Catholic theology seems to be frightfully complex, so this quick description is most likely wrong). In other words; things that never were in the Bible have, on occasion, been quite openly admitted into the Catholic faith system. (If this seems outrageous to you, remember that this same organisation chose what texts were to go into what we today know as "the" Bible in the first place.)
However, Catholic beliefs change over time(albeit slowly and (formally) through obscure and bureaucratic means), and other Christians don't acknowledge Catholic beliefs at all. You would be very hard pressed to find a Christian of any denomination who has a geocentric worldview - or feels that the fact that the universe doesn't revolve around the Earth in itself challenges his or her religious beliefs - still alive today.
So, do you know something I don't, or might you have been speaking a tad too hastily?
Furthermore, with regards to your second comment; the Bible is quite obviously an Earth-centric book, written for humans about things that are relevant and understandable to them. That it describes the stars(and largely, the entire universe) as the framework supporting the Earth is unsurprising - the rest of the universe seen out of context would have been utterly meaningless to the people who were actually alive at the time that the book was written.
Atheists who try to "disprove religion" by finding scientific faults with the Bible are, in my humble opinion, missing the point of religion. The Bible is not a science textbook. (Yes, obviously creationists and fundamentalists ought to take this to heart as well.)
(By the way, lest I should be accused of religious bias: I'm an agnostic, I still find "militant atheism" silly and needlessly hostile.)
To me, that reads that they're not helping you with your personal perceptions. I'm not sure the poster is tremendously concerned about that.
Sure, I was just stating my personal motivations for participating in the discussion. But most atheists I've met love to be perceived as rational thinkers - some even go so far as to want atheism to be perceived as generally more rational than either agnosticism or religion: my statement implied that to me, he appeared to be lashing out rather irrationally.
As for whether or not religion historically has been a good thing for mankind - that's clearly endlessly debatable. From a materialist point of view, I'd personally tend to take the position that religion, historically, has been inevitable because some people are bound to find supernatural explanations for problems that are scientifically unexplainable at any given moment, and some - even many - people are bound to believe them. (If we consider the phenomenon truly inevitable, the question of whether it is "good" or "bad" might be viewed as moot.)
The original poster, however, seemed to be indicating that he or she thought religion was invented as an instrument of oppression and control, and this claim seems dubious to me.
Now, I'm not the GP, but unfounded aggressive anti-religious statements annoy me as an agnostic: I'd like to perceive atheism as being a rational alternative to religion, and broad, sweeping statements like that aren't helping. Furthermore, seeing as I agree with the GP, you seem to by extension assert that I am under the control of organised religion. Being, as I've mentioned, an agnostic, I find this idea counterintuitive and would like to hear the reasoning behind it.
First of all, you do realise that ad hominem arguments are rather obvious fallacies? The AC hadn't even brought his personal beliefs - which, after all, were irrelevant to the discussion - into the matter. You really shouldn't try to attack people for their beliefs before you even give them a chance to state them.
As for the actual question: The Bible doesn't concern itself with the physical space that lies beyond the Earth, for reasons that should be obvious to both believers and non-believers. The book was written before its intended audience had any idea that such a space existed in as concrete a form as we now know it does.
From a secular viewpoint, this means that the people who wrote it couldn't discuss concepts that were conceived after their deaths.
From a Judeo-Christian viewpoint, it means that the existence of planets beyond our own would be a silly thing for a god to talk about to the human race. While I'm not very well versed in theology, I think it's safe to say that the Judeo-Christian god tends not to concern himself with scientific discoveries past, present or future, but rather with moral codes and prophecies of the future of humanity(in both the physical and the metaphysical spheres).
As far as I know, the idea that Christianity and extraterrestrial life are incompatible is a myth. (Christianity, of course, would hold that God, being all-seeing and all-powerful, is also the god that ultimately was the creator of whatever other planets and creatures that may exist - but this is not logically incompatible with the rest of the set of beliefs.) It may not have been so at one time - I daresay that Christianity at the time of Copernicus was generally hostile to all kinds of astronomy - but I've yet to find a single Christian who thinks that extraterrestrial life would invalidate his or her beliefs, and the Christianity of the present, like it or not, is defined by the beliefs of those who currently consider themselves Christians.
As for your closing paragraph: while a case can be made for the Marxist view of organised religion, you are approaching it far too naïvely. Saying that it was created for one thing only is simplifying the issue. Even from a thoroughly anti-religious point of view, you'll have to agree that religion throughout history has - to take a stunningly arbitrary example - provided comfort to believers who otherwise would have felt trapped in a world they had no chance of understanding, therefore causing them to cling to it. You can't simplify religion - or even superstition, which religion is indistinguishable from from a materialist viewpoint - down to a conspiracy theory.
(You can try, of course, but then you'll be playing "make believe" without even asserting that you have felt a supernatural influence - which is logically provably silly.)
I didn't say that Civilization was non-violent, I said it was, ironically, perceived as such, which is generally true. The concept of war is inherently violent, and even from a pacifist viewpoint it would seem pointless not to have games depicting it as long at is actually is such a prominent part of our culture.
Anyway, what you describe as "realism" is basically "blood and gore", which is only a small part of visual and aural realism. I certainly think we should allow this, but it's not always appropriate - either because certain games are meant for younger audiences or because it doesn't fit in all settings.
It is obvious that we will approach photorealism in games in the years to come, but please don't call this "realism" in a general sense. You could make a photorealistic version of Pac-Man, and the resultant product would be thoroughly surreal because of the clash of the "realism" in the gameplay and in the visual style. Realism is not only a question of looks, but one of possibilities: only a game that allows me to do all that I might be able to in the real world, and then reacts like the real world would react, is truly fully realistic. Games trying to approach this ideal will probably be unfocused, uninteresting and very obviously unsuccessful at achieving their goal. (This - possibly with the exception of the "unsuccessful" part - might also be true of graphical realism. It's possible that as we approach photorealism, gamers will want to see innovative visual approaches à la Sin City instead of the traditional look.)
Well, no. But by that argument, is violence necessary in movies? Even though excellent movies can be made without anything we'd perceive as objectionable violence(Citizen Kane, Donnie Darko), that doesn't mean that filmmakers should stop making violent movies entirely. We'd lose masterpieces like Pulp Fiction, to take a relatively uncontroversial example.
Generally, I think it's a bad idea to put absolute restrictions on art, or to employ self-censorship to such a degree that the restrictions are practically absolute. And even though most video-games are rather low-brow entertainment at the moment, they very obviously are a form of artistic expression. If I want to make a videogame out of some inherently violent scenario, shouldn't I be allowed to make and distribute that game(to an appropriate audience)?
To revisit the original question - whether or not violence is needed in games - even that isn't as easy to answer as it seems. Because it's a game, it has to be played - i.e. the player has to take part in some kind of conflict. If we assume that we don't want to abstract that conflict(which can be a legitimate artistic choice - abstraction generally kills off emotional responses rather effectively), we have to portray some kind of conflict that parallels an aspect of the real world. Sports, economics and military strategy(ironically) are real-world conflicts that generally produce games that are perceived to be non-violent(think Capitalism and Civilization). However, direct, physical conflict lends itself very well to a game which is based on similar direct conflicts(generally action games of various kinds), and so war, crime and other violent settings become appropriate to a large number of genres. How would you make a basically non-violent fighting game? Or a first-person shooter? Or would you have to "kill off" these genres entirely?
Now, you can of course "cartoonise" this violence if you want to(you won't necessarily degrade the quality of the game, but you'll limit yourself to certain settings), but that really isn't the point. Mario throwing a turtle shell at his enemies is - in principle - violent, in much the same way that, e.g., superhero cartoons meant for children are. Arguing that the theme should be kept cartoonish, simply because that is one possibility, is overly limiting to game creators, especially because the "adult" themes lend themselves so well to certain popular types of gaming.
Actually, this probably won't be too much of a problem if they base their system on ratios rather than individual complaints, which I assume they will given the huge number of individual flaggings that will necessarily take place.
The ratio of flaggings to unique visitors in a given timeframe will generally be higher for spam than controversial opinions. This is because people are more likely to report sites that will actually be deleted, instead of pointless political demonstrations to a one-man audience of some random Blogger employee, and because there is no significant number of unique visitors to a spam site that "agree" with the site's content(as there generally is for a political blog).
So, for normal circumstances, having an employee periodically go through the sites with the highest flagging ratios will give pretty good results.
Now, one could also expect campaigning, i.e. higher-traffic sites directing their audience to report lower-traffic sites with "undesirable opinions", but this could only be done for a manageable number of sites. These, after being inspected to make sure that they actually are not spam, could be flagged with an 'innocent' flag by the employee, exempting them from further inspection(after all, political blogs aren't likely to suddenly turn into spam blogs).
Sure, the purpose of schoolwork is education, not entertainment. The two, however, are neither opposites nor inherently incompatible: Many people theorise that if learning does not entertain the student in any way, he or she will lose interest in the subject being taught and learn less efficiently. A simple demonstration of this is that people tend to perform worse in subjects they find uninteresting or boring.
While I enjoy the stringently logical fields of study as well, throughout my entire education I've personally loathed the equivalents of "those pages with numbers and operators". To me, they appeared to be mindless and horribly repetetive exercises that served no real educational purpose. Worse: being very time-intensive because of the sheer mass of calculations students were asked to do, they took away time that could have been spent focusing on more interesting aspects of, e.g., mathematics.
That said, most attempts at making school "fun" fail miserably and end up having little entertainment value and little educational value. Furthermore, a video game can't tailor the level and focus of the education to the individual student like a good teacher can, no matter what the sticker on the box says, so I'm generally skeptical of spending time on such "automated education".
It's just important not to fall into the trap of thinking that because school wasn't meant to be fun, school can't be, or shouldn't be, fun - those are reactionary ideas that are hard to justify.
Hm, I had momentarily forgotten about the "near-death" state(its name eludes me too at the moment). That would certainly eliminate the benefits gained by port-hopping almost entirely, and put a serious dent in any capability to react to a detected scan. If we're picky, though: I don't know too much about TCP/IP implementation, but wouldn't it be possible for an intricate rootkit to patch the stack to actually remove the connection when the rootkit requests it? (It's not as if the rootkit would care about technical reliability in such a case.)
Regarding the client/server version, that wouldn't alleviate my biggest concern: a patched network stack that does an inspect/pass on of interesting packets. If the rootkit is capable of saying "hey, thats mine!" and holding packets that it knows are intended for it and simply passes on all other packets to the "real" port, it wouldn't need to worry about whether or not the machines talking to it were rootkitted or not. They could concievably simply use the Evil Bit for that determination.
Hm, I don't really understand this. If we assume that the rootkit can recognise its own packets(which I agree should be trivial) and trick a listener into believing that it is the sole listener on a port which it is actually sharing with the "evil" connection - both of which seem required for the concept you're describing - wouldn't that fool the combined client/server just as efficiently? The entire scheme seems to hinge upon the assumption that a "listener" can't be tricked into believing that it is alone on a port when it's actually not.
I do agree that actual rootkits are probably not going to be as clever as this - it's certainly easier to talk about this stuff than implement it.
Quite clever, and as far as I can see it'd work well at the moment.
Theoretically, though, I suppose it could be bypassed by secretly remapping the ports actually used when attempting either to listen on a 'bad' port, or to connect to a 'bad' port on localhost. If this technique were to go into widespread use, that possibility might go from theoretical to practical. You could presumably make the technique more secure very simply by using two entirely different scripts instead of multithreading, allowing the user to run the "caller" from another machine. (Even if that machine too were compromised, the rootkit couldn't remap outgoing connections because it has no way of knowing whether the remote host has had the rootkit applied or not.)
Going into the less practical ways of defeating your scanning method; it assumes that the port used is constant. If, as you say, it takes a fair bit of time to do the scan, it is theoretically possible to have a chance of escaping it by periodically having the connection/open port hop around in the port numbers, still remaining accessible to the outside by using a deterministic algorithm based on time or some such input that is relatively predictable from the outside. This won't ever give the illicit connection more than a chance at dodging the scan, however, and the idea has other significant problems, so I'll wager it's not really a consideration of great importance.
Another thing to consider is that the rootkit, having hidden the 'real' netstat functionality, might still have access to it. If it does, a sufficiently advanced rootkit could detect a scan - not having to be as indiscreet about the matter as your program - and shut all network functionality down for a moment as the scan passes it.
Writing generic tools to detect rootkits on the systems that they are running on is certainly an interesting problem. In principle, the rootkit has all the advantages, in effect preparing a virtual machine to deceive your program. The fact that the computer might be on a network, however, changes things slightly in your favour: the rootkit now has to operate correctly vis-a-vis the legitimate network, while hiding the illegitimate activity, and in certain circumstances, that might be nearly impossible. Your task in writing a network-based rootkit detector, then, would be to alter the 'legitimate' network patterns to make the existence of an illegitimate network as hard as possible.
(The ideal state, I suppose, would be to have the legitimate network suddenly expect all 2^16 ports to operate correctly at once, but this is impossible due to technical limitations.)
Note: I might have said something silly in the above, given that I'm not a security expert in any way. Sorry if I did. Just consider it random thoughts on the matter from a complete amateur. (Also, I confess I didn't read the entire source of your script - it might have addressed some of these issues already.)
While I can't say that I'm particularly pleased with the current U.S. government, Slashdot and slashdotters have a tendency to blow privacy issues way out of proportion, at least in regards to democratic politics(i.e. popular opinion).
While my belief that there are better reasons for a "big revolution" than the privacy-invasion-du-jour of the administration is personal and subjective, I think we can state pretty objectively that there's no chance that these kinds of issues will incite any revolutions in the United States in the foreseeable future. The general public - not just in the United States - tends to have a rather high level of tolerance when it comes to this sort of stuff.
Sure, the U.S. could do with better privacy legislation, but pretending that the U.S. is on the brink of revolution over an IT issue is a laughable exaggeration of the importance of IT both in politics and in people's lives more generally.
Slashdot Mirror
The writer seems to describe how he would like the situation to be as a cyberpunk fan, and then using this as a basis for some rather outlandish predictions. He is ignoring that there is an important distinction between "virtual worlds" as predicted in various science fiction works, and online games as we play them today - the latter are games, played largely for entertainment and/or escapism and designed and balanced to form a more-or-less coherent universe suitable for these purposes. (I am aware that "worlds" that can only peripherally be said to be games exist - such as, IIRC, Second Life, but these are hardly as mainstream as the numerous MMORPGs that "millions of us commute to".)
If convergence between worlds were to happen, the "game" aspect would have to be marginalized or entirely eliminated: either one would have to reduce the rules of the game to the rules that are common to all the merged games, essentially ending up with a glorified chat room, or one would have to merge sets of rules for games modelling entirely different things, resulting in the kind of chaos that might be fun to read about in science fiction novels, but would probably not be very playable. Thus, unless something happens to create a demand for massively multiplayer non-games which is not there today, convergence between games will not happen.
I'd argue that virtual worlds such as described in fiction have not actually caught on, because context is important here: "virtual worlds" are not actually worlds in the sense of having functions parallel to those of the actual world unless people actually look upon them as such, and for now, the people who do are by far outnumbered by the people who look upon them as games where they strive to improve their avatar's abilities.
(Disclaimer: Most of this post is based on what I could recall from school at the moment, and I don't have a particularly good memory, nor have I ever lived in Britain, so my ability to describe contemporary British politics might be a bit suspect. Apologies if I got something wrong.)
(Oh, and as for why: In addition to the "dampening influence" part which is mainly used to justify the existence of the House, tradition is obviously the reason why the house was there in the first place. The House of Lords is perhaps the last remnant of the important role the British nobility has played in British political life throughout history.)
That said, there are, in my opinion, gray areas. You say that propagandists and revolutionaries who are infiltrating a nation for a hostile government can legitimately be persecuted, which sounds reasonable in the case where someone obviously falls into this camp: i.e., they are being compensated by, or taking orders directly from, the hostile government, and committing acts that are illegal in the country they operate in(wherever there are laws against treason, this last point is pretty much open to interpretation, which is not unproblematic). I'd wager, however, that there were many communists in the United States in the fifties who did actively propagandize and advocate an eventual revolution(both being rather central tenet of the dominant communist ideology at the time) - but largely on account of their own ideology. Many of these undoubtedly fell for the propaganda of the USSR, believing that Stalin had achieved what they were dreaming of, but ignorance, naïveté and blind acceptance of things that should not be accepted blindly are not crimes when counted by themselves. Thus, they did sympathize with the USSR - but sympathy for a foreign and hostile government can't be a crime on its own in a country where freedom of speech is upheld, and the persecution of these people was (in my opinion) unjust.
In conclusion: My issue with McCarthyism is that I do not believe that it was primarily a counter-intelligence operation intended to weed out Soviet spies, but rather an attempt at a political cleansing of sorts, an operation against communist sympathizers - from one angle, people who might easily be turned to be Soviet spies, or from another, people who were simply uncomfortably outspoken with their views in favour of the enemy. Though I'd like to research that more thoroughly, I simply do not have the time to do this right now. I'd call your attention, however, to a quote by McCarthy in 1950 regarding whom he intended as targets for his campaign(Source: Wikiquote, though I feel the need to warn you that the selection of quotes was obviously done from an anti-McCarthy point of view, but I assume that the quotes themselves are legitimate): "...a list of 205 names that were known [...] as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."
These people are not being accused of being spies, at least not explicitly. They are being accused of being members of the Communist Party, and it is implied that, because they are members of a certain political party and subscribers to a certain ideology, they are incapable of loyalty to the state as their employer and unfit to work within the State Department.
I do know that communists in the United States enjoy freedom of speech today. But as I said, communists are hardly relevant in USA at the moment, and other groups may be threatened today the same way that communists were fifty years ago(though I am not claiming that this is happening to the same degree as in the fifties).
Furthermore, persecution of communists in democratic capitalist countries during the Cold War was not unique to the United States. To use an example from my own country: in Norway certain politicians were kept under surveillance apparently simply for being dangerously radical(ironically, the surveillance was probably done by a government which was dangerously radical by American standards) - these incidents have been heavily debated since the declassification of documents relatin
Furthermore, I'm horrified to see that many of you are quite willing to accept persecution of communists, and explaining this line away with things such as "it wasn't the persecution of the communists that was bad, but the persecution of the American people under the guise of communist infiltration". One of the other posters implied that equating the communists with the Jews in this sense was somehow wrong - do you not have both freedom of religion and freedom of (political) speech in America? If so, the two should indeed be equated, whether or not you like either.
Being a socialist myself, about the only thing I like about the United States politically speaking is the strong belief many people there have in freedom of speech. It would be a shame if that belief were to disappear as soon as it came to the issue of non-capitalist ideologies. (Obviously, persecution of communists is hardly a relevant issue in America today, since they are no longer a significant political force. But parallels can easily be drawn to other ideologies that are on the fringe from an American point of view.)
Now, I'm not trying to say that I know what the NSA does or can do. Rather, I'm trying to say is that I do not, and neither do you(unless you're not telling us something rather significant). So, not knowing what they're doing, we basically have (at least) two possible grounds for speculation: we can speculate based on what they do in fiction(The Digital Fortress being a prime example of the genre. I think I read about ten random pages of that book without encountering a single sentence that didn't either highly amuse me or make me cringe with its extreme lack of understanding of the subject matter(which I have only a cursory familiarity with myself - but you'd think that you'd take a week or two to do some reading before you start writing a novel about the stuff)), or we can speculate based on what is likely to be possible based on the science(or, to be paranoid, the part of the science which is publicly known).
I won't repeat those points here - someone else already did that in this thread - suffice it to say that unless the NSA are far, far ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to cryptographic theory and/or computing power, there are several commonplace ciphers that they cannot possibly decrypt. As far as I know, there are no strong indications that they are so far ahead that they can actually do things that we assume to be impossible given the current general technological level of mankind.
Another little eye-opener: it is quite easy to make a perfect encryption system(assuming a secure channel for the key, which is needed anyway). Have a randomly generated key as long as the message, and you have a one-time-pad, which the NSA cannot possibly break(this can, of course, be mathematically proved, which is the beauty of the argument). Given this knowledge, why haven't the NSA "gone out of business"? Surely, if I were a terrorist(or whomever the NSA is hunting these days), I would go to the hassle of setting up some kind of physical key exchange network for a one time pad system?
(Naturally, OTP implementations can be "broken" by not attacking them from a cryptographic angle, i.e. rather using keylogging, social engineering, etc. But this is probably what the NSA actually does with too-hard-to-break encryption as well, so if you somehow expect the NSA to perish instead of having to resort to it in the latter case, I can see no logical reason that you shouldn't expect them to do so in the former.)
Philosophically, however, the question is interesting and has, as most interesting philosophical questions, been discussed before. Look up "Laplace's demon" sometime(the demon being the closest thing an 18th century mathematician could imagine to a supercomputer with access to infinite information): if one assumes that the world is inherently deterministic(from our point of view, this assumes the "hidden variables" interpretation of quantum mechanics) and proposes that some kind of being could in theory have access to unlimited information about it, then concepts such as time lose much of their meaning, since things are "destined" to happen before they actually do happen(and in what absolute sense can they then be said not to have happened already?).
Obviously, free will in the absolute sense is also non-existent from this point of view.
Er, while I agree that Google generally gives satisfactory results for searches about e.g. programming, I don't think Google actually applies whatever "knowledge" it has about you to as great a degree as you suggest.
Supporting this would be the fact that I get the exact same results from Google when I search for a word from Firefox(i.e. with my google-related cookies) as when I do from Links(with no cookies), unless you're suggesting that they track by IP adress, which would be a rather silly thing to do in this case. (It would be silly, among other causes, because not keeping the data in the cookie itself would mean yet another enormous database for Google to maintain, and because it wouldn't work for dialup users who change IP adresses regularly.)
When people talk about the applications of the data Google is collecting in its logs, I believe they are generally talking about the plans Google has for the future or even completely hypothetical applications that are considered possible - not ones that are actually implemented at the moment. Google - the search engine - is simply based on a quite finely tuned page ranking algorithm.
In other words: Google may give better results than other search engines for you when searching for programming-related keywords, but this is probably not because Google "knows" that you are a programmer.
You probably already know this, but your analogy is flawed. (Furthermore, analogies, even if aptly chosen, are not automatically valid arguments. Certainly not if they are "aptly chosen" mostly from a rhetorical point of view.)
One problem with it is that Swiss watches are not actually alive - they don't have to do things like finding food and shelter or even mate(which, you will have to admit, is a pretty central concept of evolution.) In other words, a Swiss-watch-in-training has no feedback system to judge whether it is failing or succeeding in being a watch.
Another is that the Swiss watch, for your analogy to be valid, must be the observer, not merely something which is observed. In other words: if twenty billion years of bag-shaking does NOT result in a Swiss watch, the Swiss-watch-which-was-not-to-be will never know. This means that probability is not really an issue: if life originates naturally - even on very, very rare occasions - we are not present to observe all the occurences of life not originating naturally. (Which is good, because I have a hunch it would be rather boring.) In other words, no matter the probability of life originating naturally in any one instance, if that is how life forms, it's perfectly natural that we will always observe at least one instance of it happening.
For the record, I'm an agnostic. I agree to some degree on the matter of atheists having faith - not specifically on the matter of the origin of life, but philosophically speaking. Atheists who vehemently deny any possibility of there being a "God" of any sort are guessing, because they are speculating about things that are by definition unobservable. I've never heard any convincing explanation to the contrary(though I've heard many atheists argue that there being no god is a "good guess", most often on the basis of applying physical experience to metaphysical matters).
(Oh, and please don't give me the line about "early evolution is unobservable". By "unobservable", I mean in the strictest sense unobservable - saying that early evolution is unobservable is, to me, cheapening the very concept of "God". To (ironically) make use of a counter-analogy: If I see a ball on the ground and hypothesise that it might have been dropped by someone, I can verify this as a possibility endlessly by dropping the ball again and again to confirm that gravity still works. Even if I can't observe the actual dropping of the actual ball at the precise moment it happened, I can recreate ways in which it might have happened and choose amongst the remaining possibilities what I believe to be likely scenarios. If I hypothesise that the ball was put there by God(in a personal sense), that is a logically perfectly reasonable explanation - but, but definition, as a mortal being, I am unable to recreate the scenario, which means that I cannot know whether this is actually possible. Science intentionally restricts itself to dealing with things it can, to some degree, verify as being possible.
In other words: it is a basic axiom of the natural sciences that the world makes sense without supernatural elements. If it does not, the conclusions we draw about it from science will be wrong - but from a scientific point of view, we will never notice. This, really, is not a problem: science concerns itself with a non-supernatural view of the world, whether or not that world view is correct. So far in history, science has been a fairly productive application of the human mind, so I don't think anyone can seriously argue that we ought to get rid of it.)
I'm a pacifist as well, and I'd love to believe that you were right about this - because that would mean ultraviolence in video games would be a fairly straightforward way to world peace. (Which, I guess, would make America's Army the single best effort by America's army to that end, ever.) Sadly, I believe you're taking a fairly naïve view of the situation.
The point is that this isn't all about the "fun factor". People don't generally wake up and tell themselves, "Hey, I'm rather enjoying killing sprees in video games, maybe I should consider that as a career choice." Rather, every bit of information they process - be it a movie, a game or a conversation with their friends, their neighbour or the girl at the supermarket checkout - subtly alters the way they think about the world and what they associate with various concepts - including concepts such as war and violence. There's nothing especially harmful about games, but then again, there's nothing especially harmless about them.
In other words: Are guns cool? Is peacefully resolving a conflict situation an option? Are all pacifists wusses or traitors(all right, that one is on the Final Fantasy series, not generally regarded as very violent)? Are there "bad guys" and "good guys"? If you encounter a person who is not on your "team", is the appropriate response to shoot on sight?
I believe that, say, an avid Counter-Strike player can't avoid letting the game - to some degree - influence the way he or she thinks about, say, "terrorists". I'm not saying that most CS players(above a certain level of maturity) can't think reasonably about complex issues, but I'm saying that CS is an influence, and it is largely an influence in the direction of "violent" or simplistic thought. (To pacify the non-pacifists here: I'm not necessarily(heh) saying that all violent thought is simplistic, but most violent games tend to inspire violent and simplistic thought - because there is a clear-cut, violent conflict which is the main focus of the game.)
As a personal example: While playing FPSes, I often find myself thinking that certain weapons are elegant, neat, cool, etc. I would never associate these qualities with weapons if I saw them in real life(remember that we're not counting movies and other forms of entertainment as "real life", this argument could be made for movies, etc. as well, but applies more to games for me personally) - it would be too obvious to me that they are tools meant for killing human beings, which I generally don't approve of as "neat" - but to some degree these connotations do last, and they do affect the way I think about weapons.
(The same, as already mentioned, applies to e.g. movies: There can be no doubt that, say, James Bond makes espionage cooler in the minds of most people. I find it hard to believe the argument that the unique element of interactivity in games plays that much of a role, but that, of course, is a (hard) question for statisticians to answer, not one which can be decided by random speculation.)
(Oh, and as I remember some old gaming magazine once pointing out: Civilization is horribly, horribly violent. When I'm playing it I generally wage wars that span hundreds or thousands of years and kill off what I assume are thousands of non-combatants every time I capture a city. I don't think I ever even went for the spaceship ending.)
(Please not that I am not at all saying that we should all stop playing violent games, or that we should all feel horrible when we do. What we all should stop doing, in my opinion, is saying that games are 'harmless'. Nothing is 'harmless', and that is an important thing to be aware of.)
(Perhaps we could amend that to 'mostly harmless'. Sorry.)
You say that as if it were a bad thing. If, statistically, people who listen to Pantera are significantly more likely to enjoy Dido than people who do not listen to Pantera, then last.fm should recommend Dido to people who listen to Pantera. (Note that it's not enough for a few people to like Dido and Pantera for last.fm to recommend the former to fans of the latter; fans of the latter have to generally listen more to Dido than to "more appropriate" recommendations for your scenario to work.)
Perhaps paradoxically, the fact that the system itself concerns itself merely with statistics and not with music analysis is part of what makes the system work (for me). There is a large amount of music which sounds vaguely - perhaps to a listener who does not share my taste in music, or certainly to a machine - like things I'd like to listen to, but which actually doesn't appeal to me at all. Similarly, acoustic analysis ignores things like lyrics: the only differences an automated acoustical analysis system would note between, say, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, would be relatively superficial aspects of their work - their voice, their choice of musical backing, simple aspects of their melodies, and so on.
Generally, music is written for humans, so it makes sense that rating and comparing music should be a job for humans; certainly some music cannot be "comprehended" by nonsentient machines in any meaningful manner, and I'm sure this is applicable to important aspects of nearly any musical genre.
Not necessarily. Given an anthropocentric moral philosophy - which is, after all, fairly common(perhaps even moreso on Slashdot, where environmentalism seems to be ridiculed more often than not) and (to my mind) quite reasonable - the extinction of the species must be regarded as an "ultimate evil", that is, something which is to be avoided at any other cost. As we approach this "ultimate evil" in terms of loss of life, the acceptable price for the prevention of the disaster approaches infinity.
In other words: there is no price humanity will refuse to pay to prevent its own extinction, assuming that it is given a choice and that it is acting rationally(if only we could safely make that assumption, heh). The extinction of humanity, of course, is the same event as the loss of billions of lives, for a certain value of "billions".
Your capitalistic cynicism, then, is misplaced. Note that if we make assumptions regarding basic philosophy beyond anthropocentricism - such as introducing an instinct of self-preservation and/or the common human desire to protect loved ones - more things than this very general example become "ultimate evils" and lose their "price".
While I can't recall how exactly that 6,000 years figure came about(I've believe also heard 4,000 years from a Jehovah's Witness or similar), I feel confident it stems from what most Christians would consider to be a ridiculously literal interpretation of the Bible. (Such an interpretation of the Bible is popular among certain fundamentalist Christians, today perhaps most prominently in America.)
Wikipedia seems to assert that the Young Earth creationists - that I assume you are referring to - base their beliefs on the genealogies found in Genesis(and thus on the literal truth of creation with no element of analogy, which is surely not a requirement for all Christian faith). I've also heard another fundamentalist "Young Earth" theory which argues that the seven first days of creation directly correspond to periods of time in the literal creation of the Earth. Now, science can(and should - simple defense of scientific principles is not what I've dubbed "militant atheism") show that these theories are internally inconsistent, and very probably fundamentally false. But for the vast majority of Christians, that won't matter: the core of their faith is what you so eloquently summed up as the 'be kind to thy neighbor' message(which you'll have to admit might be a bit more complex than that). In other words: it's not at all uncontroversial that "the Bible says" this or that about scientific matters, even in cases where the actual text is less ambigous than in this case - because many Christians would argue that it's not meant to say anything about scientific matters. (Likewise, few Christians would argue that ancient laws not explicitly stated as such are somehow made divine by their description in the Bible.)
The essence being that for most Christians - at least the ones I've met - the "whole bunch of baloney" that is being used to ridicule their religion does not apply to their actual religion. Interestingly, the class of atheists I'm describing(the "militant" ones) tend to read the Bible in much the same way as some fundamentalist Christians would - as literal as possible, whether the results make sense or not.
The kind of "militant atheism" I describe isn't something I associate with scientific achievement, but purely with seemingly intentional theological ignorance. The Enlightenment was not brought about by "militant atheism"(the concept was hardly relevant at the time), but largely by Christians, deists, and some atheists - probably not "militant" ones in the sense that they didn't choose to ignore how people actually practiced religion when they criticised it. (Furthermore, I won't deny that proclaiming yourself a "militant atheist" would be, er, strategically unwise during the Dark Ages. But from this it logically follows that the renaissance was not, as you seem to imply, brought about by a horde of scientific atheists emerging from an intellectual and religious vacuum to save the world from the Church.)
As an example: Did Isaac Newton "happily prefer to keep mankind in the dark ages"? No, he did not. Was he a Christian? Yes, very much so. Your last sentence smacks of creative historical revisionism.
(Please note that I'm not saying that we should shy away from telling religious people that they're likely to be wrong if they hold views that encroach on well-known scientific ground and directly oppose the scientific explanations. Specifically, opposing creationism and similar fundamentalist pseudoscience is not "militant atheism". I'm just saying that if you wish to debate Christian theology or the history of the various Christian churches, you need to have some grasp of what you are trying to analyse before you start your critique.)
I get the impression that you are trying to be sarcastic, but the statement you make above is - as far as I know - factually correct. Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy on account of contradicting the geocentric worldview that the Catholic church held at the time. This worldview, appropriately known as the Ptolemaic system, originated not with the Bible, but with the astronomer Ptolemy. (As I skimmed through the article I linked I noticed that it seems Catholic dogma was actually a variant of the Ptolemaic system, including a bit of Plato as well, either way, it's not from nor in the Bible.)
Catholic doctrine holds tradition in high regard, because it sees the Church as an organisation as divine(please bear with me with regards to the terminology, Catholic theology seems to be frightfully complex, so this quick description is most likely wrong). In other words; things that never were in the Bible have, on occasion, been quite openly admitted into the Catholic faith system. (If this seems outrageous to you, remember that this same organisation chose what texts were to go into what we today know as "the" Bible in the first place.)
However, Catholic beliefs change over time(albeit slowly and (formally) through obscure and bureaucratic means), and other Christians don't acknowledge Catholic beliefs at all. You would be very hard pressed to find a Christian of any denomination who has a geocentric worldview - or feels that the fact that the universe doesn't revolve around the Earth in itself challenges his or her religious beliefs - still alive today.
So, do you know something I don't, or might you have been speaking a tad too hastily?
Furthermore, with regards to your second comment; the Bible is quite obviously an Earth-centric book, written for humans about things that are relevant and understandable to them. That it describes the stars(and largely, the entire universe) as the framework supporting the Earth is unsurprising - the rest of the universe seen out of context would have been utterly meaningless to the people who were actually alive at the time that the book was written.
Atheists who try to "disprove religion" by finding scientific faults with the Bible are, in my humble opinion, missing the point of religion. The Bible is not a science textbook. (Yes, obviously creationists and fundamentalists ought to take this to heart as well.)
(By the way, lest I should be accused of religious bias: I'm an agnostic, I still find "militant atheism" silly and needlessly hostile.)
Sure, I was just stating my personal motivations for participating in the discussion. But most atheists I've met love to be perceived as rational thinkers - some even go so far as to want atheism to be perceived as generally more rational than either agnosticism or religion: my statement implied that to me, he appeared to be lashing out rather irrationally.
As for whether or not religion historically has been a good thing for mankind - that's clearly endlessly debatable. From a materialist point of view, I'd personally tend to take the position that religion, historically, has been inevitable because some people are bound to find supernatural explanations for problems that are scientifically unexplainable at any given moment, and some - even many - people are bound to believe them. (If we consider the phenomenon truly inevitable, the question of whether it is "good" or "bad" might be viewed as moot.)
The original poster, however, seemed to be indicating that he or she thought religion was invented as an instrument of oppression and control, and this claim seems dubious to me.
Now, I'm not the GP, but unfounded aggressive anti-religious statements annoy me as an agnostic: I'd like to perceive atheism as being a rational alternative to religion, and broad, sweeping statements like that aren't helping. Furthermore, seeing as I agree with the GP, you seem to by extension assert that I am under the control of organised religion. Being, as I've mentioned, an agnostic, I find this idea counterintuitive and would like to hear the reasoning behind it.
First of all, you do realise that ad hominem arguments are rather obvious fallacies? The AC hadn't even brought his personal beliefs - which, after all, were irrelevant to the discussion - into the matter. You really shouldn't try to attack people for their beliefs before you even give them a chance to state them.
As for the actual question: The Bible doesn't concern itself with the physical space that lies beyond the Earth, for reasons that should be obvious to both believers and non-believers. The book was written before its intended audience had any idea that such a space existed in as concrete a form as we now know it does.
From a secular viewpoint, this means that the people who wrote it couldn't discuss concepts that were conceived after their deaths.
From a Judeo-Christian viewpoint, it means that the existence of planets beyond our own would be a silly thing for a god to talk about to the human race. While I'm not very well versed in theology, I think it's safe to say that the Judeo-Christian god tends not to concern himself with scientific discoveries past, present or future, but rather with moral codes and prophecies of the future of humanity(in both the physical and the metaphysical spheres).
As far as I know, the idea that Christianity and extraterrestrial life are incompatible is a myth. (Christianity, of course, would hold that God, being all-seeing and all-powerful, is also the god that ultimately was the creator of whatever other planets and creatures that may exist - but this is not logically incompatible with the rest of the set of beliefs.) It may not have been so at one time - I daresay that Christianity at the time of Copernicus was generally hostile to all kinds of astronomy - but I've yet to find a single Christian who thinks that extraterrestrial life would invalidate his or her beliefs, and the Christianity of the present, like it or not, is defined by the beliefs of those who currently consider themselves Christians.
As for your closing paragraph: while a case can be made for the Marxist view of organised religion, you are approaching it far too naïvely. Saying that it was created for one thing only is simplifying the issue. Even from a thoroughly anti-religious point of view, you'll have to agree that religion throughout history has - to take a stunningly arbitrary example - provided comfort to believers who otherwise would have felt trapped in a world they had no chance of understanding, therefore causing them to cling to it. You can't simplify religion - or even superstition, which religion is indistinguishable from from a materialist viewpoint - down to a conspiracy theory.
(You can try, of course, but then you'll be playing "make believe" without even asserting that you have felt a supernatural influence - which is logically provably silly.)
I didn't say that Civilization was non-violent, I said it was, ironically, perceived as such, which is generally true. The concept of war is inherently violent, and even from a pacifist viewpoint it would seem pointless not to have games depicting it as long at is actually is such a prominent part of our culture.
Anyway, what you describe as "realism" is basically "blood and gore", which is only a small part of visual and aural realism. I certainly think we should allow this, but it's not always appropriate - either because certain games are meant for younger audiences or because it doesn't fit in all settings.
It is obvious that we will approach photorealism in games in the years to come, but please don't call this "realism" in a general sense. You could make a photorealistic version of Pac-Man, and the resultant product would be thoroughly surreal because of the clash of the "realism" in the gameplay and in the visual style. Realism is not only a question of looks, but one of possibilities: only a game that allows me to do all that I might be able to in the real world, and then reacts like the real world would react, is truly fully realistic. Games trying to approach this ideal will probably be unfocused, uninteresting and very obviously unsuccessful at achieving their goal. (This - possibly with the exception of the "unsuccessful" part - might also be true of graphical realism. It's possible that as we approach photorealism, gamers will want to see innovative visual approaches à la Sin City instead of the traditional look.)
Well, no. But by that argument, is violence necessary in movies? Even though excellent movies can be made without anything we'd perceive as objectionable violence(Citizen Kane, Donnie Darko), that doesn't mean that filmmakers should stop making violent movies entirely. We'd lose masterpieces like Pulp Fiction, to take a relatively uncontroversial example.
Generally, I think it's a bad idea to put absolute restrictions on art, or to employ self-censorship to such a degree that the restrictions are practically absolute. And even though most video-games are rather low-brow entertainment at the moment, they very obviously are a form of artistic expression. If I want to make a videogame out of some inherently violent scenario, shouldn't I be allowed to make and distribute that game(to an appropriate audience)?
To revisit the original question - whether or not violence is needed in games - even that isn't as easy to answer as it seems. Because it's a game, it has to be played - i.e. the player has to take part in some kind of conflict. If we assume that we don't want to abstract that conflict(which can be a legitimate artistic choice - abstraction generally kills off emotional responses rather effectively), we have to portray some kind of conflict that parallels an aspect of the real world. Sports, economics and military strategy(ironically) are real-world conflicts that generally produce games that are perceived to be non-violent(think Capitalism and Civilization). However, direct, physical conflict lends itself very well to a game which is based on similar direct conflicts(generally action games of various kinds), and so war, crime and other violent settings become appropriate to a large number of genres. How would you make a basically non-violent fighting game? Or a first-person shooter? Or would you have to "kill off" these genres entirely?
Now, you can of course "cartoonise" this violence if you want to(you won't necessarily degrade the quality of the game, but you'll limit yourself to certain settings), but that really isn't the point. Mario throwing a turtle shell at his enemies is - in principle - violent, in much the same way that, e.g., superhero cartoons meant for children are. Arguing that the theme should be kept cartoonish, simply because that is one possibility, is overly limiting to game creators, especially because the "adult" themes lend themselves so well to certain popular types of gaming.
Actually, this probably won't be too much of a problem if they base their system on ratios rather than individual complaints, which I assume they will given the huge number of individual flaggings that will necessarily take place.
The ratio of flaggings to unique visitors in a given timeframe will generally be higher for spam than controversial opinions. This is because people are more likely to report sites that will actually be deleted, instead of pointless political demonstrations to a one-man audience of some random Blogger employee, and because there is no significant number of unique visitors to a spam site that "agree" with the site's content(as there generally is for a political blog).
So, for normal circumstances, having an employee periodically go through the sites with the highest flagging ratios will give pretty good results.
Now, one could also expect campaigning, i.e. higher-traffic sites directing their audience to report lower-traffic sites with "undesirable opinions", but this could only be done for a manageable number of sites. These, after being inspected to make sure that they actually are not spam, could be flagged with an 'innocent' flag by the employee, exempting them from further inspection(after all, political blogs aren't likely to suddenly turn into spam blogs).
Sure, the purpose of schoolwork is education, not entertainment. The two, however, are neither opposites nor inherently incompatible: Many people theorise that if learning does not entertain the student in any way, he or she will lose interest in the subject being taught and learn less efficiently. A simple demonstration of this is that people tend to perform worse in subjects they find uninteresting or boring.
While I enjoy the stringently logical fields of study as well, throughout my entire education I've personally loathed the equivalents of "those pages with numbers and operators". To me, they appeared to be mindless and horribly repetetive exercises that served no real educational purpose. Worse: being very time-intensive because of the sheer mass of calculations students were asked to do, they took away time that could have been spent focusing on more interesting aspects of, e.g., mathematics.
That said, most attempts at making school "fun" fail miserably and end up having little entertainment value and little educational value. Furthermore, a video game can't tailor the level and focus of the education to the individual student like a good teacher can, no matter what the sticker on the box says, so I'm generally skeptical of spending time on such "automated education".
It's just important not to fall into the trap of thinking that because school wasn't meant to be fun, school can't be, or shouldn't be, fun - those are reactionary ideas that are hard to justify.
Hm, I don't really understand this. If we assume that the rootkit can recognise its own packets(which I agree should be trivial) and trick a listener into believing that it is the sole listener on a port which it is actually sharing with the "evil" connection - both of which seem required for the concept you're describing - wouldn't that fool the combined client/server just as efficiently? The entire scheme seems to hinge upon the assumption that a "listener" can't be tricked into believing that it is alone on a port when it's actually not.
I do agree that actual rootkits are probably not going to be as clever as this - it's certainly easier to talk about this stuff than implement it.
Quite clever, and as far as I can see it'd work well at the moment.
Theoretically, though, I suppose it could be bypassed by secretly remapping the ports actually used when attempting either to listen on a 'bad' port, or to connect to a 'bad' port on localhost. If this technique were to go into widespread use, that possibility might go from theoretical to practical. You could presumably make the technique more secure very simply by using two entirely different scripts instead of multithreading, allowing the user to run the "caller" from another machine. (Even if that machine too were compromised, the rootkit couldn't remap outgoing connections because it has no way of knowing whether the remote host has had the rootkit applied or not.)
Going into the less practical ways of defeating your scanning method; it assumes that the port used is constant. If, as you say, it takes a fair bit of time to do the scan, it is theoretically possible to have a chance of escaping it by periodically having the connection/open port hop around in the port numbers, still remaining accessible to the outside by using a deterministic algorithm based on time or some such input that is relatively predictable from the outside. This won't ever give the illicit connection more than a chance at dodging the scan, however, and the idea has other significant problems, so I'll wager it's not really a consideration of great importance.
Another thing to consider is that the rootkit, having hidden the 'real' netstat functionality, might still have access to it. If it does, a sufficiently advanced rootkit could detect a scan - not having to be as indiscreet about the matter as your program - and shut all network functionality down for a moment as the scan passes it.
Writing generic tools to detect rootkits on the systems that they are running on is certainly an interesting problem. In principle, the rootkit has all the advantages, in effect preparing a virtual machine to deceive your program. The fact that the computer might be on a network, however, changes things slightly in your favour: the rootkit now has to operate correctly vis-a-vis the legitimate network, while hiding the illegitimate activity, and in certain circumstances, that might be nearly impossible. Your task in writing a network-based rootkit detector, then, would be to alter the 'legitimate' network patterns to make the existence of an illegitimate network as hard as possible.
(The ideal state, I suppose, would be to have the legitimate network suddenly expect all 2^16 ports to operate correctly at once, but this is impossible due to technical limitations.)
Note: I might have said something silly in the above, given that I'm not a security expert in any way. Sorry if I did. Just consider it random thoughts on the matter from a complete amateur. (Also, I confess I didn't read the entire source of your script - it might have addressed some of these issues already.)
While I can't say that I'm particularly pleased with the current U.S. government, Slashdot and slashdotters have a tendency to blow privacy issues way out of proportion, at least in regards to democratic politics(i.e. popular opinion).
While my belief that there are better reasons for a "big revolution" than the privacy-invasion-du-jour of the administration is personal and subjective, I think we can state pretty objectively that there's no chance that these kinds of issues will incite any revolutions in the United States in the foreseeable future. The general public - not just in the United States - tends to have a rather high level of tolerance when it comes to this sort of stuff.
Sure, the U.S. could do with better privacy legislation, but pretending that the U.S. is on the brink of revolution over an IT issue is a laughable exaggeration of the importance of IT both in politics and in people's lives more generally.