I am intrigued by this post, but I can't get anything useful out of it. It might have helped to make more specific references. It is likely that the majority of your audience doesn't have a large library of Simpsons episodes memorized and accessable by season and producer.
What if you're a runaway success? You can't raise your price and not expect your customers to feel betrayed.
One possible way:
You think: I need $2000, and I have ~4000 listeners.
You say: "I need about one dollar from each of you."
Later, you think: I want to make five times as much, and I have ~40,000 listeners
You say: "Now, just 50 cents per person!"
In today's business model, it doesn't cost much more to listen to the most popular musicians (with the exception of live shows, and I'm not sure how much of that is venue-gouging). A CD is a CD, and the extra profit comes from volume.
As the author of the "abuse" post, I would like to express my agreement. I take it for granted that there are positive uses for this technology, and I would almost never go so far as to say that something is too dangerous to be developed.
I don't try to keep my kids from seeing porn by shutting down the internet. I'm not going to try to keep the government from abusing its power by suppressing invention. But if we are going to be this liberal in our treatment of new technologies, we are required to remain vigilant with regards to undesirable uses and to find other ways to prevent them. Hence my warning.
Conservatives often complain that Americans are constantly making up new rights. But technologies like this one are a perfect example of why our ideas of privacy and freedom have to keep changing and growing just to stay the same.
Fifty years ago, it was unacceptable for the police to conduct random pat-down searches of anyone walking down the street. But it was perfectly fine for them to look, which gave them access only to common information that couldn't be considered personal. If I were to object to having my thermal plume analyzed to see if I (or any of my friends) use drugs, I'm sure Rush would rant about "these crazy liberals! Now they want freedom from being looked at!" But if analysis from a distance now reveals just as much private information as putting me against a wall and stripping me naked, don't I have the same right to protest?
This has been happening for a long time. The police can't go around randomly opening up cars and searching for drugs. But properly-trained dogs can search a car without having to open it! We need to think hard: Do we want to be protected from specific acts -- or from specific inquiries.
The recent Napster debates have taught me that I must make this explicit: I'm not just trying to make life easier for criminals. Once a precedent is set, it's hard to overturn. The more we allow the authorities to find out about us, the more they'll want to find out. The more information they have, the greater the chance that it will be used against us. By all means, let's use anything we can to examine people who are already under suspicion (a very broad category, if a crime has just been committed), but let's also make sure we hold the line agains police intrusion into everyday life.
I suppose this reflects my belief that we have too many laws and too many people in prison already.
But there's the problem... they clearly will stop somewhere, even if the law doesn't make it clear why they should.
An Oklahoma law makes it illegal to possess anything that looks like an illegal drug. Clearly Oklahoma's finest don't spend all their time kicking down kitchen doors and putting people away for having powdered sugar, oregano, or water. But in 1998 they did throw George Singleton in jail for a month, even though he was able to prove that he made his living as an herb merchant and that the plants filling his car were rosemary and mullein, two legal plants that he grew to treat asthma (and which, incidentally, don't look at all like marijuana).
Anyone want to guess what color Singleton's skin was?
Making (e.g.) Clarke liable for Freenet would be disastrous. It would put us in a state where most coders and inventors would be legally liable for something, but few would ever be prosecuted. This would give the government vast latitude to punish anyone they disliked, under a legitimate but overly broad blanket -- kind of like prohibition, in which everyone drank but only undesirables got busted.
It's actually kind of unfortunate that NASA has chosen this time to implement extra safety features, since it makes it more difficult to tell if they work. Statisticians are familiar with the concept of regression to the mean (or just regression): after an extraordinary period, you're most likely to have an ordinary one.
This simply reflects the fact that most of the things you do are going to have an average outcome, due to the definition of average. So if you have a string of great victories, your ordinary, expected performance will look like you're going into decline. If you have a string of failures, it will look like you're improving.
The textbook regression foulup is an experiment in which people are punished for failure and rewarded for success. Since failure naturally leads to improvement, it ends up looking like punishment helps and reward hurts.
So... NASA will implement a lot of safety features. And the missions will be more successful even if the features do nothing at all, just because they're going to have to come out of their slump sometime.
Then it will look like space missions have to be expensive to succeed, and we'll be locked into this paradigm...
in order for the boycott to be economically effective you have to do the same for both their subsidiaries and their parent company.
That only follows if you are attempting to drive the target completely out of business. This is the bluntest and most difficult of boycotts. If you (and a large number of others) can boycott a single subsidiary, though, and make sure the parent knows why, they have just as much pressure to change their ways. More, perhaps, because a narrowly targeted boycott makes you seem more willing to compromise reasonably.
Really, a subsidiary should follow the same rules as any other company. If KFC stops making money due to boycotts, PepsiCo has no reason to keep pumping money into its upkeep. It will shut down. It's true that if you start going to Pizza Hut instead, you're still giving money to PepsiCo -- but if only KFC was engaging in objecionable activities, you've still achieved your goal!
You simply need to find out what you really object to and who, as specifically as possible, is responsible. In this case it's difficult, since presumably small companies that are bought up adopt the restrictive and unjust policies of the RIAA. Thus, a total boycott is indicated.
A recent study announced that American president Bill Clinton coughs more than any other American citizen. Clinton has been seen coughing in public and on television over ten times this year, compared to three for actress Julia Roberts, one for celebrity Regis Philbin, and an average of 0.0000001 for every other citizen.
As the discussion has gone on, people have described both Defender and Quake as being enthralling, enveloping games that bring you effortlessly into their world. How can it be that a primitive 2-D game and a modern graphical tour de force share this quality?
I'd like to bring up Scott McCloud's "simplification" paradigm from the seminal Understanding Comics. Simple, uncluttered cartoon images like Charlie Brown and Mickey Mouse have an immediate appeal that realistic drawings and live actors lack. A line drawing is just as compelling a face as a photo of a face. McCloud suggests that detailed images are what we see, but line drawings are what we feel -- my face looks like a photo of a face, but your face feels like two eyes and a mouth. Simple characters give us a place to insert ourselves into a comic's (or a game's) world.
The advent of RT3D that mimics our own perspective may eventually trump this abstraction. But it helps explain why classic arcade games could offer something we are only now recovering.
This isn't another generic Freenet-will-kill-intellectual-property article. The Uprizer project will sell music. The description is vague (and the spec is secret until December), but evidently it will use some form of Street Performer Protocol. Anyone want to guess how this will work?
Maybe artists will release two songs and "threaten" to sign with an RIAA distributor unless they get enough contributions to live on.
Maybe they'll release the really catchy refrain to a song, and withold the rest (so you can't get it out of your head by singing it).
Maybe they'll play half a fugue and request payment before returning to the tonic...
Nope. Radiodurans has lots of genetic-repair mechanisms built in to repair DNA that's broken by high-energy encounters. Check out this Science News Online article on Radiodurans' survival strategies.
On the other hand, the article did note that the bacteria that fared less well looked like the cells had actually ruptured. But I suppose that could be due to dysfunctional metabolism and other products of severe genetic damage.
Neither group of microbes came out of the trip unscathed. Even Deinococcus radiodurans, the species known for radiation endurance, lost 99.9% of its numbers. Clearly this isn't the stuff of interplanetary colonization yet. What we need to do is take these cultures, grow them back to strength, and send them up again. Maybe next time we'll only lose 99%. So we do it again. And again... Eventually, we may evolve something that can actually survive long space trips. Bear in mind that this might be much more similar to the natural bacteria on a non-magnetic, low-atmosphere planet, so it's a perfectly valid way to investigate the question.
Or, we might find that no matter what we do, there's a physically-imposed limit on how much radiation any bacterium can handle. This would mean that space-bacteria would have to exist inside rocks, under better shielding. Or that they couldn't exist at all -- but that possibility is welcome too, since it gives the theory falsifiability...
Hey, combine this with the previous article (bacteria can survive in orbit) and we could have computers seeding the cosmos! All those people who wanted to buy Seti@home coprocessors will be lining up to launch their boxes into the void, hoping to bring life to some distant planet...
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration...
But you probably already know that. And I already know the cruelty of simply telling someone not to fear. I'm no programmer, but your problem is universal.
You are finding it difficult to work. This is because, as you perceive it, the risks of continuing outweigh the benefits. You may explicitly tell yourself that this is not so ("I know I could just back up the code and write any old thing and throw it away if it's wrong"), but the horde of automatic thoughts that rise up when you contemplate doing it say different. You know that in a long-term sense, bearing down and getting through the work is the best thing by far. But when an individual's fears of failure become strong enough, it can force hir out of the long-term perspective and into a low-level, immediate world, the same way that you can be stopped from contemplating Rodin's Age of Bronze by a splinter. This is the point where you might just be told to shut up and work through it, but another way is to figure out what your fears are, whether they're reasonable, and whether they can be disproved or transformed.
If you were trapped in a situation where the alternatives were painful, awful failure and procrastination, your solution would be to procrastinate. You must acknowledge that this is reasonable. The first step is not to blame or criticize yourself, which only increases your paralysis, but to compassionately accept that you're in a bad situation and start working to get a handle on it. It sounds like you're already on that road.
Now, we have to find out why you're fearful and emotional about this project and whether it makes sense to be that way. The simplest of all tools in my field of study is the double-column technique. Just think about the automatic thoughts that go through your mind when you contemplate working, and get them written down on the left-hand side of a sheet of paper.
I don't know what your thoughts are, but for many people they may look like this:
1) I'm going to make a lot of mistakes and look stupid.
2) I won't be able to handle this problem at all, which will make me a failure as a programmer. 3) I'm going to reveal that I'm not as skillful as I pretended to be, and have been a fraud all these years.
These are frightening. Are they true? In fact, they contain cognitive distortions that all people make to some extent. The second and third show the especially insidious error of dichotomous thinking, the tendency to see things in an all-or-nothing sense. A single failure could be due to a specific hole in your education, emotional factors outside your work, a lingering virus, or all sorts of things. But even if you completely and utterly screwed up, would that erase thirteen years of success? Surely that makes no sense!
On the right-hand side of the sheet, write the best refutations you can think of to these statements. They should be compassionate, insightful, and constructive -- everything you'd tell a friend in your situation. In this example, they might be:
1) No one will see my mistakes but me, and I already know I'm not stupid. I'm an elite hacker! Doing things wrong is annoying, but ultimately it's how I learn to do them right.
2) If I do screw this up, it won't make all the things I've learned and all the successful projects I've done magically disappear. It will mean I did one thing wrong, and for a lot of possible reasons at that. 3) Which is more reasonable: that I've had a slump lately, or that everything I've done in my life has been some insane con game? I know that I have the skills to handle this. Even if it takes a lot of work, I can afford to do it calmly and happily, knowing that even missteps take me closer to my goal.
Keep your refutations with you at all times, and write them down as you think of new ones, or notice new automatic thoughts. What you have to do is take the most powerful and frightening thoughts you can uncover and argue them down. I mean seriously argue, bringing up the best refutations you can and trying to believe them wholeheartedly. Even if you don't buy them now, think how much more productive they can make you. This isn't really dishonest; if this rational optimism leads to repeated failure, you can always re-evaluate it and change to thinking you're a washout.
Fear and self-criticism are terrible motivators. Relaxed understanding allows you to work with an absorbed sense of flow. To put it tersely:
chill.
- Michael Cohn
Important note: I am a student, not a licensed or degree-holding psychologist. I am giving you a digest of other researchers and writers. This may be valid self-help advice but should not be relied upon for severe or life-threatening problems
Recommended reading on the subject of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy:
Beck, Judith: Cognitive Therapy, Basics and Beyond -- a textbook. Dry but comprehensible.
Burns, David: Feeling Good -- a self-help classic. Burns is a moron about a lot of things, but it's overflowing with useful techniques and arguments.
Ellis, Albert: A New Guide to Rational Living -- If you're sick of therapists who act like Deanna Troi, you'll be pleased when Ellis comes and kicks you in the ass.
The article, as well as other sources, confirm that the changes were made to the original anti free-speech bill, the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act. As far as I know, the Bankrupcy Reform Bill remains evil. Note that it doesn't make drug-use information illegal, so sites on needle exchange and such would theoretically be okay, but manufacture is still on the death list.
Some people should not use this product:
Anyone who has ever experienced convulsive or epileptic fits or loss of consciousness from light flashes or oscillations. Anyone with a heart disorder, high blood pressure, a visual field impairment or an eye movement or alignment disorder. Anyone under 16 years of age
Guess they're worried about parental lawsuits... "studies show that pr0n is 67% more corrupting when viewed on an immersive virtual 52-inch screen"
Having a point and click physically modeled hand (one that can click a button or jam a wedge in a door) solves improvisation, because if a you don't get the designers puzzle strategy, you can work around it using anything you can think of.
Sounds to me like real-time 3-D is the least of your problems there. Even producing an accurate physics model is only a small step towards the goal of complete freedom of action. What this describes is nothing less than a world where the consequences of any action can be reasonably predicted, where NPCs have not just preprogrammed responses but full personalities and convincing AIs, and where the game knows the properties and uses of each and every item in the environment. RT3D games could give a better illusion of allowing free improvisation, if the creators are clever and the players are willing to stay within certain boundaries. But thinking these games cab offer the same kind of freedom as real life (where I could, this moment, stop reading/., take the case off my computer and wear it like a hat, and get on a plane for Chicago) is not reasonable.
Ironically, such goals migh cause games to look substantially worse... designers would have to do away with background scenery, costumes, complex weapons, and anything else they couldn't describe completely down to a nuts-and-bolts level (what does the wiring inside a BFG look like? Is the fuel for the flamethrower poisonous?). They'd have to limit characters' abilities severely, in order to stave off unforseen consequences.
I'm not entirely convinced by your reasons for space exploration. Pride can come from any number of things, and I'd rather --
note to those who are about to stop reading This is NOT a "we should feed the starving children first" argument
-- see us learn to take pride in all our accomplishments, even more mundane ones like raising the standard of living or making our government a bit less corrupt.
I think the major reason for space exploration and colonization is survival.
If you think rogue states and terrorists and pollution are problems now, they're only going to get worse. Industry will continue to grow heedlessly, and science's progress will inevitably make nukes easier to build and easier to hide. The possibility of some seriously huge, species-damaging shit going down on planet Earth continue to rise.
Colonizing space is a high-cost hedge against the highest-cost of all risks. No, it won't solve our problems, but it will give us some room to breathe.
Maybe if we're lucky we'll even have freedom to diversify (your frontier argument, perhaps) , and send some good social ideas back to the motherland.
Some people argue that we should try to solve our problems, rather than scattering them throughout the cosmos and despoiling virgin planets with our idiocy. That would indeed be nice, but we're not a monolithic species and those who do have solutions can't afford to wait for those who don't. In the final analysis, I say, the human race is more important than keeping planets entirely untouched. (note: not an anti-environmentalist argument because if we fail to keep things in good condition, we're screwed as well).
The article does not refute the argument that those who empower script kiddies are helping potential victims... it just proves they aren't being very nice about it. We might call the disclosure of vulnerabilities to kiddie-scripts security through threat. The idea, as I understand it, is that these holes will eventually be found out and exploited. No matter how quiet we try to be, eventually someone malicious will find them and exploit them, and if possible script that exploit. The longer this is put off, the more entrenched and widespread that hole will be, and the greater the potential damage. Okay, but what about the idea that they could be kept quiet for just a little while, while the good guys get it fixed? I think the STT people have decided that things don't work that way. Remember how effective it was when all the programmers quietly went to management and told them that there might be some problems coming up if they didn't start converting to four-digit dates? It took publicity and widespread fear before most businesses started putting serious resources into Y2K conversion, and it's not unreasonable that the same is true of security holes. Tell them that there's a potential problem, and get the runaround while the money goes to more immediately profitable things. But if the populace is whipped up over the prospect of another Melissa, there will be action.
I don't think that these grey-hat types are unaware that they're responsible for a lot of kiddie attacks. But perhaps if the kiddies are a force of nature, unstoppable by law or society, software companies will have no choice but to write good products, with competent security audits and up-to-date patches. That's a goal I can see someone willingly enduring a bunch of 1337 bullshit for.
Slashdot Mirror
I am intrigued by this post, but I can't get anything useful out of it. It might have helped to make more specific references. It is likely that the majority of your audience doesn't have a large library of Simpsons episodes memorized and accessable by season and producer.
- Michael Cohn
What if you're a runaway success? You can't raise your price and not expect your customers to feel betrayed.
One possible way:
You think: I need $2000, and I have ~4000 listeners.
You say: "I need about one dollar from each of you."
Later, you think: I want to make five times as much, and I have ~40,000 listeners
You say: "Now, just 50 cents per person!"
In today's business model, it doesn't cost much more to listen to the most popular musicians (with the exception of live shows, and I'm not sure how much of that is venue-gouging). A CD is a CD, and the extra profit comes from volume.
- Michael Cohn
... it could actually be Beowulf!
You mean... a B***olf cluster of those things? We could tell time like nobody's business!
As the author of the "abuse" post, I would like to express my agreement. I take it for granted that there are positive uses for this technology, and I would almost never go so far as to say that something is too dangerous to be developed.
I don't try to keep my kids from seeing porn by shutting down the internet. I'm not going to try to keep the government from abusing its power by suppressing invention. But if we are going to be this liberal in our treatment of new technologies, we are required to remain vigilant with regards to undesirable uses and to find other ways to prevent them. Hence my warning.
- Michael Cohn
Conservatives often complain that Americans are constantly making up new rights. But technologies like this one are a perfect example of why our ideas of privacy and freedom have to keep changing and growing just to stay the same.
Fifty years ago, it was unacceptable for the police to conduct random pat-down searches of anyone walking down the street. But it was perfectly fine for them to look, which gave them access only to common information that couldn't be considered personal. If I were to object to having my thermal plume analyzed to see if I (or any of my friends) use drugs, I'm sure Rush would rant about "these crazy liberals! Now they want freedom from being looked at!" But if analysis from a distance now reveals just as much private information as putting me against a wall and stripping me naked, don't I have the same right to protest?
This has been happening for a long time. The police can't go around randomly opening up cars and searching for drugs. But properly-trained dogs can search a car without having to open it! We need to think hard: Do we want to be protected from specific acts -- or from specific inquiries.
The recent Napster debates have taught me that I must make this explicit: I'm not just trying to make life easier for criminals. Once a precedent is set, it's hard to overturn. The more we allow the authorities to find out about us, the more they'll want to find out. The more information they have, the greater the chance that it will be used against us. By all means, let's use anything we can to examine people who are already under suspicion (a very broad category, if a crime has just been committed), but let's also make sure we hold the line agains police intrusion into everyday life.
I suppose this reflects my belief that we have too many laws and too many people in prison already.
- Michael Cohn
But there's the problem... they clearly will stop somewhere, even if the law doesn't make it clear why they should.
An Oklahoma law makes it illegal to possess anything that looks like an illegal drug. Clearly Oklahoma's finest don't spend all their time kicking down kitchen doors and putting people away for having powdered sugar, oregano, or water. But in 1998 they did throw George Singleton in jail for a month, even though he was able to prove that he made his living as an herb merchant and that the plants filling his car were rosemary and mullein, two legal plants that he grew to treat asthma (and which, incidentally, don't look at all like marijuana).
Anyone want to guess what color Singleton's skin was?
Making (e.g.) Clarke liable for Freenet would be disastrous. It would put us in a state where most coders and inventors would be legally liable for something, but few would ever be prosecuted. This would give the government vast latitude to punish anyone they disliked, under a legitimate but overly broad blanket -- kind of like prohibition, in which everyone drank but only undesirables got busted.
- Michael Cohn
It's actually kind of unfortunate that NASA has chosen this time to implement extra safety features, since it makes it more difficult to tell if they work. Statisticians are familiar with the concept of regression to the mean (or just regression): after an extraordinary period, you're most likely to have an ordinary one.
This simply reflects the fact that most of the things you do are going to have an average outcome, due to the definition of average. So if you have a string of great victories, your ordinary, expected performance will look like you're going into decline. If you have a string of failures, it will look like you're improving.
The textbook regression foulup is an experiment in which people are punished for failure and rewarded for success. Since failure naturally leads to improvement, it ends up looking like punishment helps and reward hurts.
So... NASA will implement a lot of safety features. And the missions will be more successful even if the features do nothing at all, just because they're going to have to come out of their slump sometime.
Then it will look like space missions have to be expensive to succeed, and we'll be locked into this paradigm...
- MC
That was no troll! My condolences to the poster.
- MC
in order for the boycott to be economically effective you have to do the same for both their subsidiaries and their parent company.
That only follows if you are attempting to drive the target completely out of business. This is the bluntest and most difficult of boycotts. If you (and a large number of others) can boycott a single subsidiary, though, and make sure the parent knows why, they have just as much pressure to change their ways. More, perhaps, because a narrowly targeted boycott makes you seem more willing to compromise reasonably.
Really, a subsidiary should follow the same rules as any other company. If KFC stops making money due to boycotts, PepsiCo has no reason to keep pumping money into its upkeep. It will shut down. It's true that if you start going to Pizza Hut instead, you're still giving money to PepsiCo -- but if only KFC was engaging in objecionable activities, you've still achieved your goal!
You simply need to find out what you really object to and who, as specifically as possible, is responsible. In this case it's difficult, since presumably small companies that are bought up adopt the restrictive and unjust policies of the RIAA. Thus, a total boycott is indicated.
- Michael Cohn
In other news:
A recent study announced that American president Bill Clinton coughs more than any other American citizen. Clinton has been seen coughing in public and on television over ten times this year, compared to three for actress Julia Roberts, one for celebrity Regis Philbin, and an average of 0.0000001 for every other citizen.
As the discussion has gone on, people have described both Defender and Quake as being enthralling, enveloping games that bring you effortlessly into their world. How can it be that a primitive 2-D game and a modern graphical tour de force share this quality?
I'd like to bring up Scott McCloud's "simplification" paradigm from the seminal Understanding Comics. Simple, uncluttered cartoon images like Charlie Brown and Mickey Mouse have an immediate appeal that realistic drawings and live actors lack. A line drawing is just as compelling a face as a photo of a face. McCloud suggests that detailed images are what we see, but line drawings are what we feel -- my face looks like a photo of a face, but your face feels like two eyes and a mouth. Simple characters give us a place to insert ourselves into a comic's (or a game's) world.
The advent of RT3D that mimics our own perspective may eventually trump this abstraction. But it helps explain why classic arcade games could offer something we are only now recovering.
- Michael Cohn
This isn't another generic Freenet-will-kill-intellectual-property article. The Uprizer project will sell music. The description is vague (and the spec is secret until December), but evidently it will use some form of Street Performer Protocol. Anyone want to guess how this will work?
Maybe artists will release two songs and "threaten" to sign with an RIAA distributor unless they get enough contributions to live on.
Maybe they'll release the really catchy refrain to a song, and withold the rest (so you can't get it out of your head by singing it).
Maybe they'll play half a fugue and request payment before returning to the tonic...
- Michael Cohn
Nope. Radiodurans has lots of genetic-repair mechanisms built in to repair DNA that's broken by high-energy encounters. Check out this Science News Online article on Radiodurans' survival strategies.
On the other hand, the article did note that the bacteria that fared less well looked like the cells had actually ruptured. But I suppose that could be due to dysfunctional metabolism and other products of severe genetic damage.
- Michael Cohn
Neither group of microbes came out of the trip unscathed. Even Deinococcus radiodurans, the species known for radiation endurance, lost 99.9% of its numbers. Clearly this isn't the stuff of interplanetary colonization yet. What we need to do is take these cultures, grow them back to strength, and send them up again. Maybe next time we'll only lose 99%. So we do it again. And again... Eventually, we may evolve something that can actually survive long space trips. Bear in mind that this might be much more similar to the natural bacteria on a non-magnetic, low-atmosphere planet, so it's a perfectly valid way to investigate the question.
Or, we might find that no matter what we do, there's a physically-imposed limit on how much radiation any bacterium can handle. This would mean that space-bacteria would have to exist inside rocks, under better shielding. Or that they couldn't exist at all -- but that possibility is welcome too, since it gives the theory falsifiability...
- Michael Cohn
Hey, combine this with the previous article (bacteria can survive in orbit) and we could have computers seeding the cosmos! All those people who wanted to buy Seti@home coprocessors will be lining up to launch their boxes into the void, hoping to bring life to some distant planet...
- Michael Cohn
But you probably already know that. And I already know the cruelty of simply telling someone not to fear. I'm no programmer, but your problem is universal.
You are finding it difficult to work. This is because, as you perceive it, the risks of continuing outweigh the benefits. You may explicitly tell yourself that this is not so ("I know I could just back up the code and write any old thing and throw it away if it's wrong"), but the horde of automatic thoughts that rise up when you contemplate doing it say different. You know that in a long-term sense, bearing down and getting through the work is the best thing by far. But when an individual's fears of failure become strong enough, it can force hir out of the long-term perspective and into a low-level, immediate world, the same way that you can be stopped from contemplating Rodin's Age of Bronze by a splinter. This is the point where you might just be told to shut up and work through it, but another way is to figure out what your fears are, whether they're reasonable, and whether they can be disproved or transformed.
If you were trapped in a situation where the alternatives were painful, awful failure and procrastination, your solution would be to procrastinate. You must acknowledge that this is reasonable. The first step is not to blame or criticize yourself, which only increases your paralysis, but to compassionately accept that you're in a bad situation and start working to get a handle on it. It sounds like you're already on that road.
Now, we have to find out why you're fearful and emotional about this project and whether it makes sense to be that way. The simplest of all tools in my field of study is the double-column technique. Just think about the automatic thoughts that go through your mind when you contemplate working, and get them written down on the left-hand side of a sheet of paper.
I don't know what your thoughts are, but for many people they may look like this:These are frightening. Are they true? In fact, they contain cognitive distortions that all people make to some extent. The second and third show the especially insidious error of dichotomous thinking, the tendency to see things in an all-or-nothing sense. A single failure could be due to a specific hole in your education, emotional factors outside your work, a lingering virus, or all sorts of things. But even if you completely and utterly screwed up, would that erase thirteen years of success? Surely that makes no sense!
On the right-hand side of the sheet, write the best refutations you can think of to these statements. They should be compassionate, insightful, and constructive -- everything you'd tell a friend in your situation. In this example, they might be:Keep your refutations with you at all times, and write them down as you think of new ones, or notice new automatic thoughts. What you have to do is take the most powerful and frightening thoughts you can uncover and argue them down. I mean seriously argue, bringing up the best refutations you can and trying to believe them wholeheartedly. Even if you don't buy them now, think how much more productive they can make you. This isn't really dishonest; if this rational optimism leads to repeated failure, you can always re-evaluate it and change to thinking you're a washout.
Fear and self-criticism are terrible motivators. Relaxed understanding allows you to work with an absorbed sense of flow. To put it tersely:
chill.
- Michael Cohn
Important note: I am a student, not a licensed or degree-holding psychologist. I am giving you a digest of other researchers and writers. This may be valid self-help advice but should not be relied upon for severe or life-threatening problems
Recommended reading on the subject of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy:
Beck, Judith: Cognitive Therapy, Basics and Beyond -- a textbook. Dry but comprehensible.
Burns, David: Feeling Good -- a self-help classic. Burns is a moron about a lot of things, but it's overflowing with useful techniques and arguments.
Ellis, Albert: A New Guide to Rational Living -- If you're sick of therapists who act like Deanna Troi, you'll be pleased when Ellis comes and kicks you in the ass.
The article, as well as other sources, confirm that the changes were made to the original anti free-speech bill, the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act. As far as I know, the Bankrupcy Reform Bill remains evil. Note that it doesn't make drug-use information illegal, so sites on needle exchange and such would theoretically be okay, but manufacture is still on the death list.
- Michael Cohn
- Michael Cohn
And deathly shy! How many more interplanetary balls of dirt must die before we stop this cruel exploitation? Boycott the Hubble Space Telescope now!
Having a point and click physically modeled hand (one that can click a button or jam a wedge in a door) solves improvisation, because if a you don't get the designers puzzle strategy, you can work around it using anything you can think of.
/., take the case off my computer and wear it like a hat, and get on a plane for Chicago) is not reasonable.
Sounds to me like real-time 3-D is the least of your problems there. Even producing an accurate physics model is only a small step towards the goal of complete freedom of action. What this describes is nothing less than a world where the consequences of any action can be reasonably predicted, where NPCs have not just preprogrammed responses but full personalities and convincing AIs, and where the game knows the properties and uses of each and every item in the environment. RT3D games could give a better illusion of allowing free improvisation, if the creators are clever and the players are willing to stay within certain boundaries. But thinking these games cab offer the same kind of freedom as real life (where I could, this moment, stop reading
Ironically, such goals migh cause games to look substantially worse... designers would have to do away with background scenery, costumes, complex weapons, and anything else they couldn't describe completely down to a nuts-and-bolts level (what does the wiring inside a BFG look like? Is the fuel for the flamethrower poisonous?). They'd have to limit characters' abilities severely, in order to stave off unforseen consequences.
- Michael Cohn
I'm not entirely convinced by your reasons for space exploration. Pride can come from any number of things, and I'd rather --
note to those who are about to stop reading
This is NOT a "we should feed the starving children first" argument
-- see us learn to take pride in all our accomplishments, even more mundane ones like raising the standard of living or making our government a bit less corrupt.
I think the major reason for space exploration and colonization is survival.
If you think rogue states and terrorists and pollution are problems now, they're only going to get worse. Industry will continue to grow heedlessly, and science's progress will inevitably make nukes easier to build and easier to hide. The possibility of some seriously huge, species-damaging shit going down on planet Earth continue to rise.
Colonizing space is a high-cost hedge against the highest-cost of all risks. No, it won't solve our problems, but it will give us some room to breathe.
Maybe if we're lucky we'll even have freedom to diversify (your frontier argument, perhaps) , and send some good social ideas back to the motherland.
Some people argue that we should try to solve our problems, rather than scattering them throughout the cosmos and despoiling virgin planets with our idiocy. That would indeed be nice, but we're not a monolithic species and those who do have solutions can't afford to wait for those who don't. In the final analysis, I say, the human race is more important than keeping planets entirely untouched. (note: not an anti-environmentalist argument because if we fail to keep things in good condition, we're screwed as well).
- Michael Cohn
The article does not refute the argument that those who empower script kiddies are helping potential victims... it just proves they aren't being very nice about it. We might call the disclosure of vulnerabilities to kiddie-scripts security through threat. The idea, as I understand it, is that these holes will eventually be found out and exploited. No matter how quiet we try to be, eventually someone malicious will find them and exploit them, and if possible script that exploit. The longer this is put off, the more entrenched and widespread that hole will be, and the greater the potential damage.
Okay, but what about the idea that they could be kept quiet for just a little while, while the good guys get it fixed? I think the STT people have decided that things don't work that way. Remember how effective it was when all the programmers quietly went to management and told them that there might be some problems coming up if they didn't start converting to four-digit dates? It took publicity and widespread fear before most businesses started putting serious resources into Y2K conversion, and it's not unreasonable that the same is true of security holes. Tell them that there's a potential problem, and get the runaround while the money goes to more immediately profitable things. But if the populace is whipped up over the prospect of another Melissa, there will be action.
I don't think that these grey-hat types are unaware that they're responsible for a lot of kiddie attacks. But perhaps if the kiddies are a force of nature, unstoppable by law or society, software companies will have no choice but to write good products, with competent security audits and up-to-date patches. That's a goal I can see someone willingly enduring a bunch of 1337 bullshit for.
- Michael Cohn
Huh, and here I was thinking that the hoax had been broken the very day it was released on /. Must be that pesky precognition again...
- Michael Cohn
New Star Wars RPG? Quick, get the tents! The sleeping bags! The MREs and survival gear!
2002 is a long way off, but I can make it!
This will be the best line ever!