I think that news such as these underline the fact that the American's are putting their money on the wrong kind of project for their "homeland security". I bet that monitoring the net and phone traffic of a huge number of people costs quite a great deal of money, money which could have been spent training people to better protect sensitive, or even not that sensitive systems (the tiniest security hole can always widen and become a real liability, if you ask me).
Wholesale monitoring of communications is as useful as trying to read all the content on the internet, for every useful bit of information you read, you get a 1000 useless bits. So training people to understand the subtleties of "the enemy" would seem a more sensible solution.
I know this might sound a bit offtopic, but since the post mentioned windows filesystems, I felt it might be a good place to throw this question...
Not many people know or have even used this, but NTFS has support for multiple streams of data in a single file, which is something that borrows concepts from object-oriented filesystems. This is scarcely, if at all, included in the regular windows documentation (it is documented in the MS knowledge base http://support.microsoft.com/kb/105763/). I thought it to be a nice idea for, say, media files, to store the audio in one stream the the video in another, or adding subtitles or metainformation in different streams in a very standard way. But for some reason nobody used that, not even Microsoft who designed the feature.
Does anybody have a clue as to why this has not been used?
I know this might sound a bit idealistic from me, but I think that the main issue at stake is not the monetary reward for the studios and artists, but rather, free speech. Of course I don't think that the studios are overly concerned about the messages movies send, I understand that their main goal is profit. But if I were a movie producer/director/writer/actor, I would like the content of my artwork to be preserved, and any modifications, if at all, should be done or authorised by me.
Of course, religious people have a right to see and hear what they want, and they are entitled to skip scenes they might find offensive, but doing this kind of mass sanitising paves way for much more damaging types of censorship and/or twisting the messages artists wanted to convene in the first place.
I agree with the first reply that his powers will probably be psychic in nature. After all, we all know that to get physical powers you need to be exposed to radiological or biological contamination, which, contrary to mainstream science will not cause you to suffer a more or less slow and painful death. Those prejudiced bigots who call themselves "Scientists"...
Perhaps they can use some kind of trust and reputation assessment tool. If you look at some papers on the http://www.springerlink.com/(wrwksw55m1sbuk55j3laz 1yi)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&bac kto=issue,3,6;journal,4,38;linkingpublicationresul ts,1:102852,1subject , there are some interesting approaches which have been proposed to validate systems of autonomous agents. I don't think it would be much of a problem to use them to validade people's opinions.
Of course, a high-level of collusion can jeopardise the system, but I remember having read that even in that case their reliability can be assessed based on who agrees with whom, in which case you will see pockets of people with 0 reliability (these people can then be banned from the system).
If that's what they are proposing, it would be a nice change on how information is gathered using the internet, because as it is, I am always suspicious of those product review sites.
I understood your joke, though from your list I would only question Tom Jones, the other are pretty fine musicians.
And I stand corrected about the honours, but come on, Sir sounds a lot more impressive:-).
I had other people in mind such as Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Charles Darwin, Sir Tim Berners Lee, even if you look at the latest list of honours in Britain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year_Honours_2006 / you will find a significant amount of people on research. I am yet to see great American thinkers to be honoured in a similar fashion. Most of the ones that have been honoured were done so by European countries (Nobel prizes, honorary knighthoods, etc).
Of course, I can be wrong out of ignorance regarding any american honours system, if that is the case, correct me.
I can't say whether or not Americans in general are better or worse programmers than the rest of the world, but some of those who are replying to this post definitely have insecurity issues, otherwise they would not devote some time bashing the competition or the competitors in General.
Having said that, I most definitely agree with the people who said that these contests (TopCoder, ACM, etc) prove high programming skills, a lot of the TopCoder problems require a great deal of knowledge on Physics and Mathematics. Granted, a good programmer will understand the spec and code something that solves the problem while taking care of corner cases and the works, but good maths and physics skills will give you an edge on these competitions.
On a side note, I think that even if American education was as good as education elsewhere, American culture is not very favourable to intellectual achievements, I mean American Presidents have always praised athletes and soldiers a lot more than they praised great thinkers (if at all). In a comparative example, researchers that achieve breakthroughs in the UK tend to get knighted. Even if it's not for the glory (which some people might not be too keen on getting), your paycheck will be much higher in America if you are an outstanding Basketball player or a Manager (that will outsource good programmers so they don't have to pay an American-class salary to an American).
Despite all of the sociological/antropological-prejudice/lifestyle discussions, I think that the people who made the point about dressing up for talking with the customer are the ones that got it right. Namely, dressing up for the customer is like dressing up to go on a date, it is a statement for "You matter to me". When you really care about somebody you will effect changes in small details of your attire to please them, and this is exactly what you are doing by dressing up to go to the customer. You don't have to necessarily put on a suit and a tie, but going well-shaved (or nicely trimming your beard if you have one) in well ironed clothes (rather than that "Unix Rocks!" scruffy t-shirt) says that you have taken the time to please the customer.
Please bear in mind that the way you dress in your workplace has nothing to do with that, because if you are a programmer and you are expected to do long hours of coding, well your workplace has become your second home, and it is your right to feel comfortable there. But that too is true only to a certain extent. Nobody is an island, and most companies where large projects take place, there will be a team of people doing the job alongside you, so taking the time to look pleasant to your colleagues also states that *they* matter to you, but there you are supposed to be among friends, so as long as you are not doing anything completely anti-social (like lacking personal hygiene to an extent that others notice...) sandals and lack of shaving will not be such a problem.
is that a lot of the mineral reserves in our planet are under rainforests or other ecologically significant portion of land on earth and/or in areas where conflict fuels and is fueled by the pursuit of mineral reserves. In Brazil at least, disputes over land in the Amazon for control of areas with potential for gold and iron is intense for years, if you look at Africa, you got a similar situation with regards for gold and diamonds. Finding an economically viable way of tapping into space minerals would provide a way of pushing down prices so that these earth-based conflicts become meaningless, and would take out most of the reasons why some people insist on destroying ever scarcer forests.
I might be saying complete rubbish, but it seems to me that once we find a cheaper way of sending the machinery out in space and of negotiating space-scale distances a bit faster. We could do most or all of the processes of refining and even manufacture outside the earth's atmosphere, and getting stuff back down is less of a problem once you got the materials processed in space. And I bet that moving tonnelades of raw minerals across space would be much cheaper than doing this on the surface of the earth. That does not seem to be such a blue sky dream to me at least.
This last bit might be somewhat of paranoid of me, but it is indeed unfortunate that the US is the only remaining super-power, because they don't have anything but corporation lobby to foster them and innovate on many technological fronts. So if we got companies that are doing just fine in the current model, the US is unlikely to invest significant amounts of money for breakthroughs in these technologies. Now why am I talking about the US, because they are probably the only ones who got a big enough budget and a level of political unity to try and do a coherent project of this magnitude. The EU push into space technologies has been too meek if you ask me, and the russians, who have the knowledge, don't have the money. China perhaps would do this, they are communists, but they know how to go after the big bucks.
(If you read up to here, I congratulate you, you got a lot of patience!)
It always seemed to me that the response to the american space shuttle was Buran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran which the russians purposedly capped down in order not to unbalance the scale of power of the time (so says wikipedia, anyway).
But all in all, I have much more confidence in Russian designs than in American ones, it's like that old comparison between a P-51 Mustang and a P-47 Thunderbolt. If you want to show it to your girlfriend, show the American designs, they are beautiful. If you want the job done and return home alive, go for the Russian stuff.
On top of that, the feeling I got, and let me emphasize that this might be very far away from the truth it's just my own personal bias, is that the Russians, and the Russian companies always had science and functionality in mind, whereas the Americans always seemed to have money and the desire to be glory hounds. This is one of the reasons in my mind, that have always made the Russias do much more, with much less money (At least as far as the space program goes).
Now bash me if you want, I know I have critisized the Americans using completely circunstantial arguments.
But what is pornography, really?
If you go to Japan, just showing genitalia is considered hard porn (while pissing onto somebody is not), in some Islamic countries showing a woman's hair is unconceivable, for me, there is art in pictures of naked women (e.g. http://domai.com./
You will get loads of different responses wherever you go, and considering that the US and Europe claim to me multi-cultural places, appeasing everybody will be next to impossible, or at the very least will place most of the websites portraying skin on the.xxx list.
This would be alike creating a "Red Light District" on the internet to try and ostracise content and people involved with that. On a local community level, this has (and I have serious doubts on this) marginally worked for millenia, but in the internet, unless we had a uniform culture everywhere on earth (god forbid), with every single internet user agreeing on the definition of every single aspect of society (freedom is irrelevant, self-determination is irrelevant, you must comply, stand down and be assimilated), I would brand this delusional at best.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that news such as these underline the fact that the American's are putting their money on the wrong kind of project for their "homeland security". I bet that monitoring the net and phone traffic of a huge number of people costs quite a great deal of money, money which could have been spent training people to better protect sensitive, or even not that sensitive systems (the tiniest security hole can always widen and become a real liability, if you ask me).
Wholesale monitoring of communications is as useful as trying to read all the content on the internet, for every useful bit of information you read, you get a 1000 useless bits. So training people to understand the subtleties of "the enemy" would seem a more sensible solution.
I know this might sound a bit offtopic, but since the post mentioned windows filesystems, I felt it might be a good place to throw this question...
Not many people know or have even used this, but NTFS has support for multiple streams of data in a single file, which is something that borrows concepts from object-oriented filesystems. This is scarcely, if at all, included in the regular windows documentation (it is documented in the MS knowledge base http://support.microsoft.com/kb/105763/). I thought it to be a nice idea for, say, media files, to store the audio in one stream the the video in another, or adding subtitles or metainformation in different streams in a very standard way. But for some reason nobody used that, not even Microsoft who designed the feature.
Does anybody have a clue as to why this has not been used?
I know this might sound a bit idealistic from me, but I think that the main issue at stake is not the monetary reward for the studios and artists, but rather, free speech. Of course I don't think that the studios are overly concerned about the messages movies send, I understand that their main goal is profit. But if I were a movie producer/director/writer/actor, I would like the content of my artwork to be preserved, and any modifications, if at all, should be done or authorised by me.
Of course, religious people have a right to see and hear what they want, and they are entitled to skip scenes they might find offensive, but doing this kind of mass sanitising paves way for much more damaging types of censorship and/or twisting the messages artists wanted to convene in the first place.
I agree with the first reply that his powers will probably be psychic in nature. After all, we all know that to get physical powers you need to be exposed to radiological or biological contamination, which, contrary to mainstream science will not cause you to suffer a more or less slow and painful death. Those prejudiced bigots who call themselves "Scientists"...
Perhaps they can use some kind of trust and reputation assessment tool. If you look at some papers on the http://www.springerlink.com/(wrwksw55m1sbuk55j3laz 1yi)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&bac kto=issue,3,6;journal,4,38;linkingpublicationresul ts,1:102852,1subject , there are some interesting approaches which have been proposed to validate systems of autonomous agents. I don't think it would be much of a problem to use them to validade people's opinions.
Of course, a high-level of collusion can jeopardise the system, but I remember having read that even in that case their reliability can be assessed based on who agrees with whom, in which case you will see pockets of people with 0 reliability (these people can then be banned from the system).
If that's what they are proposing, it would be a nice change on how information is gathered using the internet, because as it is, I am always suspicious of those product review sites.
I understood your joke, though from your list I would only question Tom Jones, the other are pretty fine musicians. And I stand corrected about the honours, but come on, Sir sounds a lot more impressive :-).
I had other people in mind such as Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Charles Darwin, Sir Tim Berners Lee, even if you look at the latest list of honours in Britain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year_Honours_2006 / you will find a significant amount of people on research. I am yet to see great American thinkers to be honoured in a similar fashion. Most of the ones that have been honoured were done so by European countries (Nobel prizes, honorary knighthoods, etc).
Of course, I can be wrong out of ignorance regarding any american honours system, if that is the case, correct me.
I can't say whether or not Americans in general are better or worse programmers than the rest of the world, but some of those who are replying to this post definitely have insecurity issues, otherwise they would not devote some time bashing the competition or the competitors in General. Having said that, I most definitely agree with the people who said that these contests (TopCoder, ACM, etc) prove high programming skills, a lot of the TopCoder problems require a great deal of knowledge on Physics and Mathematics. Granted, a good programmer will understand the spec and code something that solves the problem while taking care of corner cases and the works, but good maths and physics skills will give you an edge on these competitions. On a side note, I think that even if American education was as good as education elsewhere, American culture is not very favourable to intellectual achievements, I mean American Presidents have always praised athletes and soldiers a lot more than they praised great thinkers (if at all). In a comparative example, researchers that achieve breakthroughs in the UK tend to get knighted. Even if it's not for the glory (which some people might not be too keen on getting), your paycheck will be much higher in America if you are an outstanding Basketball player or a Manager (that will outsource good programmers so they don't have to pay an American-class salary to an American).
Despite all of the sociological/antropological-prejudice/lifestyle discussions, I think that the people who made the point about dressing up for talking with the customer are the ones that got it right. Namely, dressing up for the customer is like dressing up to go on a date, it is a statement for "You matter to me". When you really care about somebody you will effect changes in small details of your attire to please them, and this is exactly what you are doing by dressing up to go to the customer. You don't have to necessarily put on a suit and a tie, but going well-shaved (or nicely trimming your beard if you have one) in well ironed clothes (rather than that "Unix Rocks!" scruffy t-shirt) says that you have taken the time to please the customer.
Please bear in mind that the way you dress in your workplace has nothing to do with that, because if you are a programmer and you are expected to do long hours of coding, well your workplace has become your second home, and it is your right to feel comfortable there. But that too is true only to a certain extent. Nobody is an island, and most companies where large projects take place, there will be a team of people doing the job alongside you, so taking the time to look pleasant to your colleagues also states that *they* matter to you, but there you are supposed to be among friends, so as long as you are not doing anything completely anti-social (like lacking personal hygiene to an extent that others notice...) sandals and lack of shaving will not be such a problem.
is that a lot of the mineral reserves in our planet are under rainforests or other ecologically significant portion of land on earth and/or in areas where conflict fuels and is fueled by the pursuit of mineral reserves. In Brazil at least, disputes over land in the Amazon for control of areas with potential for gold and iron is intense for years, if you look at Africa, you got a similar situation with regards for gold and diamonds. Finding an economically viable way of tapping into space minerals would provide a way of pushing down prices so that these earth-based conflicts become meaningless, and would take out most of the reasons why some people insist on destroying ever scarcer forests. I might be saying complete rubbish, but it seems to me that once we find a cheaper way of sending the machinery out in space and of negotiating space-scale distances a bit faster. We could do most or all of the processes of refining and even manufacture outside the earth's atmosphere, and getting stuff back down is less of a problem once you got the materials processed in space. And I bet that moving tonnelades of raw minerals across space would be much cheaper than doing this on the surface of the earth. That does not seem to be such a blue sky dream to me at least. This last bit might be somewhat of paranoid of me, but it is indeed unfortunate that the US is the only remaining super-power, because they don't have anything but corporation lobby to foster them and innovate on many technological fronts. So if we got companies that are doing just fine in the current model, the US is unlikely to invest significant amounts of money for breakthroughs in these technologies. Now why am I talking about the US, because they are probably the only ones who got a big enough budget and a level of political unity to try and do a coherent project of this magnitude. The EU push into space technologies has been too meek if you ask me, and the russians, who have the knowledge, don't have the money. China perhaps would do this, they are communists, but they know how to go after the big bucks. (If you read up to here, I congratulate you, you got a lot of patience!)
It always seemed to me that the response to the american space shuttle was Buran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran which the russians purposedly capped down in order not to unbalance the scale of power of the time (so says wikipedia, anyway). But all in all, I have much more confidence in Russian designs than in American ones, it's like that old comparison between a P-51 Mustang and a P-47 Thunderbolt. If you want to show it to your girlfriend, show the American designs, they are beautiful. If you want the job done and return home alive, go for the Russian stuff. On top of that, the feeling I got, and let me emphasize that this might be very far away from the truth it's just my own personal bias, is that the Russians, and the Russian companies always had science and functionality in mind, whereas the Americans always seemed to have money and the desire to be glory hounds. This is one of the reasons in my mind, that have always made the Russias do much more, with much less money (At least as far as the space program goes). Now bash me if you want, I know I have critisized the Americans using completely circunstantial arguments.
But what is pornography, really? If you go to Japan, just showing genitalia is considered hard porn (while pissing onto somebody is not), in some Islamic countries showing a woman's hair is unconceivable, for me, there is art in pictures of naked women (e.g. http://domai.com./ You will get loads of different responses wherever you go, and considering that the US and Europe claim to me multi-cultural places, appeasing everybody will be next to impossible, or at the very least will place most of the websites portraying skin on the .xxx list.
This would be alike creating a "Red Light District" on the internet to try and ostracise content and people involved with that. On a local community level, this has (and I have serious doubts on this) marginally worked for millenia, but in the internet, unless we had a uniform culture everywhere on earth (god forbid), with every single internet user agreeing on the definition of every single aspect of society (freedom is irrelevant, self-determination is irrelevant, you must comply, stand down and be assimilated), I would brand this delusional at best.