But is there any real profit to be in social networks? I mean it's nice to have a basic 'conduit' to meet up with people online, but when I was a teenager, that was what IRC was for. For others it's Ventrilo or Steam Community. In the end, I see it as an application layer set atop the inherent power of the Internet, which is to connect random people with little effort (little effort in as much as without physical travel and what not for said random people), thus it doesn't give anything new in itself rather than a nicer 'wrapper' to access the same features of the Internet that have existed in one form or another. Be it USEnet, IRC, mailing lists, and what not.
I totally agree, because one of the issues I've had with propietary software is the fact that often the algorithms utilized for a given problem (Video editting, account management, DB management and so on) is exactly the same as the F/OSS version. The difference is that one has a piece of legal paper that says, "pay up or else." And the other says, "Just post the code additions/changes, please, when distributing."
Personally, I like the latter, because it allows me to keep track of the development of a piece of software and know if it's any good, whereas the propietary software has no method as to know if it's any good other than word of mouth, which can be faked by sock puppet blogs and the like.
Just a random thought, I notice that K-Meleon or Galeon were never mentioned by the author nor any posters here. What's your thoughts on those two browsers? I like K-Meleon myself, and it does seem leaner than most browsers, tbh.
People wanted the features involved? I mean, originally people were screaming for RSS feed support, and spell checking. As well as other features, which more or less come in the form of extensions. All in all, I don't necessarily blame the developers for giving what users want, but I think if they wanted to make it a 'cleaner' implementation, I would have gone the route of adding these as extensions only, so they could work on improving page rendering and load times, as well as reduce the "broken page" tolerance that it, IE, and even Opera (as a javascript) have in regards to web pages, which is probably the bigger culprit in the memory situation, but I think memory isn't as much an issue as memory management (Which is suppose to be an OS level job, right?... So why ask the application to do the management which it's the OS's job?), rather how often I had issues with Firefox on being friendly with the CPU sharing with other applications (like when I open a page in FF from a link I get in SecondLife or any other cross application interaction or just plain multitasking), which often makes me go to the task manager to kill FireFox, then restart it fresh. That too could be something outside of FireFox, such as some of the terribly designed sites where javascript is implemented in such a manner as to make the browser act in absurd ways.
All in all, I think it is time for the FF team to go back and look at cleaning up the code, more strictly defining extension versus application feature, and possibly removing from the core of the browser certain features (mainly things that other posters pointed out ought to be extensions anyways).
I mean most of the features I've seen in the so-called Web 2.0 hype tend to be very hard to conceive in respect to that they're really not integrated well. I mean even AJAX has seriously flaws anyone can exploit (most hinging on injection of malicious code) with very little understanding of it. So, this is why I think it's best to minimize its use and just focus on more realistic interfaces online. If you need to get something done on your bank account, then use something that is relatively secure, where you can set some sort of permissions on it, but AJAX isn't it. That's why I'm quite glad my bank doesn't use this web 2.0 junk, seriously.
Thanks, I'm getting tired of the walled garden attitude at SL anymore. I guess it's time to cut my baby teeth in programming on something, worthwhile or not.;)
I can say that the majority of so-called 'kiddie' porn is really just age play, considering the fact that the avatars can be altered to be as small or as tall as you like within their constraints. According to the article there is alleged real kiddie porn in the mix, but alleged doesn't count in my book, but then again I live in America were we're suppose to have an adversarial legal system [that probably doesn't count for much anymore sadly], but this case is in Germany, which probably has a completely different take on innocence of the accused, so that card won't work even if it's right. So all I can say is that in SL, an accusation is taken seriously by LL, and you can lose your account and all your IP in that domain by them, it's a sad state of affairs, but that's the course LL has chosen. It wants to look all squeaky clean, but the fact is that SL is primarily used for all sorts of fetishistic sex play.
Hell, I play on a sim for a cyberpunk city called Midian City, which literally has an assortment of all kinds of sex play; vanilla (of all orientations), BDSM, pred/prey capture sexplay, and so on. Yet, it's still no the bread and butter of RP on that sim, despite being the primary audience attraction when it comes to general RP. So, I don't get most of the taboo and icky feeling that the folks at LL have about all this. If they want squeak clean just say so and put it in the AUP or whatever contract it needs to be in, and then I'll just take my leave to elsewhere because I do happen to be an adult and I do not want to be censored (oh noes, I might say b00bs one instance and offend some blue hair'd individual or a bible thumper or two...) among adults. SL use to be a fine idea for a 3d environment, but the more press it gets the more the chilling effect gets placed on adults in SL, despite the addition of a Teen/Kid-only grid which is separate from the main grid. In the end, the only way to resolve this issue is to have someone reverse engineer or make a completely independent version of SL. Frankly, I think that's its future, and LL knows it, they're just trying to rake in more cash before it's too late and everyone makes up their own little 'meta-verses.'
thing for the kids with PCs and too much time to crack. I give it two weeks when it rolls out. Anyone up for bids on the odds? Lemme call a bookie in Vegas.;)
Being a LOTRO player, I would state though that it's actually easier to grind in LOTRO than WOW for one reason: higher drop rates for all items. Now, this doesn't mean you get the uber weapons and armor immediately, but say you need x amount of y items to complete a quest. Well it's pretty easy to dust off even a 30 item quest (save for monster play raids on Free People's forts, which take impossible amounts of items to gain...) in about 20 minutes, unlike in WOW where it could take you better on a hour, even if you're on a low population server where your guildmates are helping you camp spawns. In essence, LOTRO refines WOW, which WOW was suppose to refine EQ and other 'first gen' MMO's own features, and so on. LOTRO was never billed as a next gen by Turbine, Turbine simply wanted to make money on a decent IP and made a decent version of it in an MMO environment. You don't need to reinvent the wheel to do that.
As much as anyone may say it's logical to run Windows on a computer, when we're talking about just setting up some basic educational software, including some basic office software for word processing. Why does anyone need Windows to do that function? Clearly someone at the OLPC just bought a "nice car" that day, considering that budget-wise any commercial OS would not have fit the bill of this project unless it had some real use in the third world and developing nations. Ultimately, I think OLPC will be overshadowed by even mobile phones, which will use Linux based kernels and open APIs to do the same functions as the OLPC itself, and probably at par or less cost, excluding distribution. So, I say the OLPC is DOA, and lets get back to the real world and making more function free/open software.:)
As a Cox customer here in Kansas, I never had issues with any bandwidth usage ever. Sometimes I noticed a throttling on my torrent, but I accept that as normal in that I have to share my bandwidth with others in the total customer base here in Kansas [specifically Wichita]. But I never had at any time been threatened for using too much bandwidth. I've been caught DLing stuff I "shouldn't", but that's it. So unless you got some evidence Cox does this, I'm going to have to file 13 your claim here.
As much as I love the Wikipedia model of allowing everyone to contribute to the content, there are some specialist fields of knowledge that need to be protected from unknown sources. Since the person in question claimed to be an expert in that field, as most others here have stated as well, this undermined the structure of the Wikipedia model in that the current administrators of the Wikipedia will listen to him more so than user134121 simply because of the plead to credentials. Now, that all being said, I do think this person ought to be banned from contribution to any part of the Wikipedia simply because he presented himself as something he was not that was pertanent[sp?] than anything else. We're not talking about someone who hides his/her age, or sex, or religion. We're talking about someone who set himself as a valid authority on a subject, which he was not by all reckoning as the article states. All in all, credentials sometimes do matter, but only if you check them to make sure. And sometimes the Wikipedia model does fail, only if those adhering to the model don't check sources, credentials, and articles.
As much as I like to hear that small businesses are more agile than larger ones, or governments, I think the fact that such devices are needed proves one fact: war is never cheap. Whether you count the cost in lives or the pieces of equipment that is lost, you will pay a hefty fee to make war. I'm not trying to diverge the general topic away from the article itself, rather I think the article gives way to this sort of assessment in that we're seeing that war takes a heavy toll on our infrastructure, public and private. Perhaps this war in Iraq will teach the next two or so generations to keep their butt out of it for a little while, or until it's absolutely necessary, but that's me for hoping.
What I'm more concerned about with the nature of Diebold's source code is whether or not their programmers even understand it. I mean, more often than not, companies layoff programmers, or shuffle them off to other projects. And I have grave doubts the original programmers of the voter machine software left behind significant documentation. So, if stronger encryption was needed to keep the possibility of hacking to change the vote count, I bet it would not be easy in a closed source model, where documentation sometimes is frowned upon.
I'm also very concerned that Diebold, being fairly close to home with Dick Cheney being a former company man for them, was just a pick'n'choose based on what Mr. Cheney felt were his friends, rather than on what is best for the nation. Technology can be useful in securing some things, but I think voter machines is not one of them. What if the machine goes down? What if the machine is 'poisoned' (as in the vote count was tampered with by individuals masking themselves as different people that they are not)? And so on. Does high technology warrant its use in a domain, where it adds no value and no security?
I really think this is just proof that technology can only go so far, and all the buzz over electronic voting and what not is just fluff, to be honest.
Hmm, I'm a troll eh? I'll ask the anon mod to explain his/her reason for the moderation because I have never seen a clear headed computer scientist, engineer, or any other scientist in other fields go for the Post-Modernist drivel.
Post-Modernism has never produced a single theory of epistemology, politics, ethics, and/or metaphysics that has not been done before. Post-Modernism has attacked science on so many levels that it took a man like Alan Sokal to take the fight to them. It is true that Mr. Sokal did something that was unethical, but in some respects it was necessary to get the point across to the Post-Modernists that have tried to 'rewind' the progress of the Enlightenment era to which we in the field of computer science depend on greatly. Many of the major mathematical theorems we use in CS depend on the philosophers and scholars of the Enlightenment era since those philosophers and scholars were the direct source, and writers, of these theorems.
Moreover, I haven't seen a Post-Modernist scientist in my life, let alone in print. And the reason for that is simple, because none of the tennets of the different Post-Modern 'philosophies' support Empiricism, Critical Thinking, and/or proper Reductionism.
So, if that makes me a troll, then good, because I rather be a troll where sc ience reigns as the standard and not sophistry like what the PoMos espouse.
I must be either very lucky or very insane not to be into the jive talk of Post-Modernism. Granted, I'm a Randroid, but atleast I don't assume every technological revolution/evolution/progression/refinement is due to Rand, Objectivism, or any particular philosophical idea. If Web 2.0 has anything to be based upon, it would be clear headed scientific naturalism, insomuch that computer science and the design of computer networks requires such a strict view of the world that doesn't fall for such fluffy nonsense.
Sorry, but I don't see how anyone can worship a game [and I do mean worship]. Sure, I've played many an MMO in my time; AC1, AC2, EQ2, SoR, DDO, and more, but I could not consider playing constantly for days on out on any of them. AC1 was the only one I came close to doing that and that was I because I was in high school.
The reason why WoW is 'destructive' is that like all games, it rewards impulsive behavior. Point, click. Point, click. People start to think that's how real life operates, thus their behavior adjusts to follow suit. But, I don't think this is true in every case. I think what this article is more proof of over-reporting a minority of players and under-reporting the majority of other players.
Now, I think this is a sorta 'see this is what you get when government decides who can and cannot get on the network' type of issue, but I think if the government of any sort is to be the main provider of domain names then it's the duty of said government not to censor that which it finds offensive. Granted, we can't have websites with criminal intent, but porn.ie? Come on, when's the last time someone got in a porn 'rage' and raped someone? Or stolen something? Or created a criminal organization to plot our collective doom?
I think this is indicative of Ireland, considering it's a conservative Catholic nation, but it needs to accept there is a strong minority of Irish citizens that are not so, and that it is the mandate of any decent republic to respect the minorities of the non-criminal kind in their rights to exist and to express themselves. Otherwise, it will have more in common with countries that chop folks' hands off and what not than with its EU neighbors.
I find it a sad time we all live in, where the networks are ultimately become more and more closed, whether it's the restriction of 'adult' content and file sharing or whether it's a restriction on open/free[libre] software and content. This is a time where the networks need to be more free not less free, because it's this time that our civilization is beginning to evolve and to improve itself. Yet, such censorship as it is going on in Ireland simply will not facilitate such a natural progression. And it only proves that a certain part of the species is unwilling and unable to move on with its arbitrary 'sensibilities.'
What real product does YouTube provide? The last time I checked, YouTube has no premium service with any perks.
And with the amount of money Google soaked into this deal, I think they've over-reached themselves considering the same amount of money could have been invested in their current Google Video service to provide similar, if not superior, applications. In fact, I prefer Google Video considering I can access many physics lectures [Theory of Acoustic Blackholes, clips of Feynman interviews, and much more], and other academic material that's often buried in the university webpage directories. I can also grab clips of Bloomberg, and other news sites [Spore Demo, Al-jaazera's latest English telecast, BBC telecast, etc...] through Google Video, not through YouTube. Frankly, I wonder if Google was more into buying YouTube to make sure they don't copy Google's model of searching for already existing videos. I see no value in YouTube, it's just MySpace set to low frame rate, low detail motion.:-P
Okay, now I'm not much of a big name coder here, but from my experience here at university in learning how to code data structures one thing is always true; it's not what you code, it's how you code. Open Source does not mean good tidy coding practices, open documentation, and etc. It just means everyone else can see your code, that's all. As for it being better at finding bugs, that would be true if documentation practices were more strict, but many closed source projects have the same ailment of not being able or willing to document features, patches, and bugs of their program. Ultimately, whenever I read something like this I realize their assumption is based on that some how certain practices are automatic to open source vs closed source, which is not true since open source licenses do not require the programmer at anytime to program a certain style, it only handles the release of the source code and nothing else.
If the author of this article knew that, then the article would probably not exist at all. So, the tag [FUD] fits perfectly.:)
As much as I love science fiction [realistic and fantastic styles], the fact remains that predicting the future is a damn hard thing to do. Consider how people thought that cars would be made obsolete and replaced with flying cars or 'air buses' over half a century ago, yet today cars are getting more and more specialized in composition and function. Then the predictions that robots would be commonly used in every facet of society, yet the fact remains the power constraints for even the least electric motorized platform limits their economical viability. And so on.
Now, lets look at the current things none of the futurists predicted; wireless communication being common [even in the least developed nations], advancements in cancer research [The stem-cell theory of cancer is becoming the prominent paradigm in diagnosis and treatment of cancers.], and even the slow [but steady] advancements [mostly indirect, but a few direct] in life extension [quality and quantity]. Just these three areas weren't even considered possible or predicted by many if any so-called future studies expert. But other discoveries, such as the advancement of negative refraction meta-materials, weren't even on the 'radar' of these experts at all. So, as much as I love guessing what's over the next hill in the future, I don't take it seriously, nor will I take it without a giant lump of salt.
As much as I wish MMOs to be designed with community development in mind, the reality is that the majority of MMOs are built around two functions: to insure a form of 'entertainment' for the player [singular], and to insure the player will come again to be 'entertained.' The multiplayer aspect, guild/party system, and even the instancing are all just secondary functions that fulfill the single player experience among a vast number of other single player users. What I mean by that is that functionally you can have WoW or any other MMO offline and the same experience with regard to the actual combat, level advancement, and quests, and they would operated fully as designed. What wouldn't operate is the obvious player interaction. Oddly, most developers take advantage of this and claim it's their intention to bring players together. Yet, to be honest, I have yet to see a single MMO that let a user design a map, campaign, and quest within the game all on their own with the exception of Saga of Ryzom [Ryzom Ring]. Because of that glaring problem, MMOs will never become the Metaverse/Cyberspace of cyberpunk fiction because of their inherent limitation(s).
VRML and other 3d 'markup' languages were the first attempts at this idea, but it never went anywhere either due to the fact that despite powerful PC computers, the immersive factor was not dependent on if it was realistic or not, but rather solely dependent on the given user's belief in the simulation (Oi, I'm sounding like a French Post-Modernist!). So, before anyone exclaims that MMOs are original, please study your history and notice the numerous failed attempts at the virtual community system. Many are still around, in lesser forms, and many have been absorbed into other systems. I think MMOs will see the same fate as well.
But seriously, I think the fact that they're going to entrust a hardware mechanism to 'protect' data is flawed beyond compare. It's just one more doodad for the crackers to take on. Just one more challange to get under their belts... I hope you get the picture. Enjoy the 'fun' US Army... ^_^
Slashdot Mirror
But is there any real profit to be in social networks? I mean it's nice to have a basic 'conduit' to meet up with people online, but when I was a teenager, that was what IRC was for. For others it's Ventrilo or Steam Community. In the end, I see it as an application layer set atop the inherent power of the Internet, which is to connect random people with little effort (little effort in as much as without physical travel and what not for said random people), thus it doesn't give anything new in itself rather than a nicer 'wrapper' to access the same features of the Internet that have existed in one form or another. Be it USEnet, IRC, mailing lists, and what not.
I totally agree, because one of the issues I've had with propietary software is the fact that often the algorithms utilized for a given problem (Video editting, account management, DB management and so on) is exactly the same as the F/OSS version. The difference is that one has a piece of legal paper that says, "pay up or else." And the other says, "Just post the code additions/changes, please, when distributing."
Personally, I like the latter, because it allows me to keep track of the development of a piece of software and know if it's any good, whereas the propietary software has no method as to know if it's any good other than word of mouth, which can be faked by sock puppet blogs and the like.
-- Brede
Just a random thought, I notice that K-Meleon or Galeon were never mentioned by the author nor any posters here. What's your thoughts on those two browsers? I like K-Meleon myself, and it does seem leaner than most browsers, tbh.
-- Brede
People wanted the features involved? I mean, originally people were screaming for RSS feed support, and spell checking. As well as other features, which more or less come in the form of extensions. All in all, I don't necessarily blame the developers for giving what users want, but I think if they wanted to make it a 'cleaner' implementation, I would have gone the route of adding these as extensions only, so they could work on improving page rendering and load times, as well as reduce the "broken page" tolerance that it, IE, and even Opera (as a javascript) have in regards to web pages, which is probably the bigger culprit in the memory situation, but I think memory isn't as much an issue as memory management (Which is suppose to be an OS level job, right? ... So why ask the application to do the management which it's the OS's job?), rather how often I had issues with Firefox on being friendly with the CPU sharing with other applications (like when I open a page in FF from a link I get in SecondLife or any other cross application interaction or just plain multitasking), which often makes me go to the task manager to kill FireFox, then restart it fresh. That too could be something outside of FireFox, such as some of the terribly designed sites where javascript is implemented in such a manner as to make the browser act in absurd ways.
All in all, I think it is time for the FF team to go back and look at cleaning up the code, more strictly defining extension versus application feature, and possibly removing from the core of the browser certain features (mainly things that other posters pointed out ought to be extensions anyways).
-- Brede
I mean most of the features I've seen in the so-called Web 2.0 hype tend to be very hard to conceive in respect to that they're really not integrated well. I mean even AJAX has seriously flaws anyone can exploit (most hinging on injection of malicious code) with very little understanding of it. So, this is why I think it's best to minimize its use and just focus on more realistic interfaces online. If you need to get something done on your bank account, then use something that is relatively secure, where you can set some sort of permissions on it, but AJAX isn't it. That's why I'm quite glad my bank doesn't use this web 2.0 junk, seriously.
-- Brede
Thanks, I'm getting tired of the walled garden attitude at SL anymore. I guess it's time to cut my baby teeth in programming on something, worthwhile or not. ;)
-- Brede
I can say that the majority of so-called 'kiddie' porn is really just age play, considering the fact that the avatars can be altered to be as small or as tall as you like within their constraints. According to the article there is alleged real kiddie porn in the mix, but alleged doesn't count in my book, but then again I live in America were we're suppose to have an adversarial legal system [that probably doesn't count for much anymore sadly], but this case is in Germany, which probably has a completely different take on innocence of the accused, so that card won't work even if it's right. So all I can say is that in SL, an accusation is taken seriously by LL, and you can lose your account and all your IP in that domain by them, it's a sad state of affairs, but that's the course LL has chosen. It wants to look all squeaky clean, but the fact is that SL is primarily used for all sorts of fetishistic sex play.
Hell, I play on a sim for a cyberpunk city called Midian City, which literally has an assortment of all kinds of sex play; vanilla (of all orientations), BDSM, pred/prey capture sexplay, and so on. Yet, it's still no the bread and butter of RP on that sim, despite being the primary audience attraction when it comes to general RP. So, I don't get most of the taboo and icky feeling that the folks at LL have about all this. If they want squeak clean just say so and put it in the AUP or whatever contract it needs to be in, and then I'll just take my leave to elsewhere because I do happen to be an adult and I do not want to be censored (oh noes, I might say b00bs one instance and offend some blue hair'd individual or a bible thumper or two...) among adults. SL use to be a fine idea for a 3d environment, but the more press it gets the more the chilling effect gets placed on adults in SL, despite the addition of a Teen/Kid-only grid which is separate from the main grid. In the end, the only way to resolve this issue is to have someone reverse engineer or make a completely independent version of SL. Frankly, I think that's its future, and LL knows it, they're just trying to rake in more cash before it's too late and everyone makes up their own little 'meta-verses.'
-- Brede
thing for the kids with PCs and too much time to crack. I give it two weeks when it rolls out. Anyone up for bids on the odds? Lemme call a bookie in Vegas. ;)
-- Brede
Being a LOTRO player, I would state though that it's actually easier to grind in LOTRO than WOW for one reason: higher drop rates for all items. Now, this doesn't mean you get the uber weapons and armor immediately, but say you need x amount of y items to complete a quest. Well it's pretty easy to dust off even a 30 item quest (save for monster play raids on Free People's forts, which take impossible amounts of items to gain...) in about 20 minutes, unlike in WOW where it could take you better on a hour, even if you're on a low population server where your guildmates are helping you camp spawns. In essence, LOTRO refines WOW, which WOW was suppose to refine EQ and other 'first gen' MMO's own features, and so on. LOTRO was never billed as a next gen by Turbine, Turbine simply wanted to make money on a decent IP and made a decent version of it in an MMO environment. You don't need to reinvent the wheel to do that.
-- Brede
As much as anyone may say it's logical to run Windows on a computer, when we're talking about just setting up some basic educational software, including some basic office software for word processing. Why does anyone need Windows to do that function? Clearly someone at the OLPC just bought a "nice car" that day, considering that budget-wise any commercial OS would not have fit the bill of this project unless it had some real use in the third world and developing nations. Ultimately, I think OLPC will be overshadowed by even mobile phones, which will use Linux based kernels and open APIs to do the same functions as the OLPC itself, and probably at par or less cost, excluding distribution. So, I say the OLPC is DOA, and lets get back to the real world and making more function free/open software. :)
-- Brede
As a Cox customer here in Kansas, I never had issues with any bandwidth usage ever. Sometimes I noticed a throttling on my torrent, but I accept that as normal in that I have to share my bandwidth with others in the total customer base here in Kansas [specifically Wichita]. But I never had at any time been threatened for using too much bandwidth. I've been caught DLing stuff I "shouldn't", but that's it. So unless you got some evidence Cox does this, I'm going to have to file 13 your claim here.
-- Bridget
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6
Now, take it with a grain of salt [or a whole salt lick...], but the list of features here in the wiki-article about IPv6 looks good to me. o_O
As much as I love the Wikipedia model of allowing everyone to contribute to the content, there are some specialist fields of knowledge that need to be protected from unknown sources. Since the person in question claimed to be an expert in that field, as most others here have stated as well, this undermined the structure of the Wikipedia model in that the current administrators of the Wikipedia will listen to him more so than user134121 simply because of the plead to credentials. Now, that all being said, I do think this person ought to be banned from contribution to any part of the Wikipedia simply because he presented himself as something he was not that was pertanent[sp?] than anything else. We're not talking about someone who hides his/her age, or sex, or religion. We're talking about someone who set himself as a valid authority on a subject, which he was not by all reckoning as the article states. All in all, credentials sometimes do matter, but only if you check them to make sure. And sometimes the Wikipedia model does fail, only if those adhering to the model don't check sources, credentials, and articles.
As much as I like to hear that small businesses are more agile than larger ones, or governments, I think the fact that such devices are needed proves one fact: war is never cheap. Whether you count the cost in lives or the pieces of equipment that is lost, you will pay a hefty fee to make war. I'm not trying to diverge the general topic away from the article itself, rather I think the article gives way to this sort of assessment in that we're seeing that war takes a heavy toll on our infrastructure, public and private. Perhaps this war in Iraq will teach the next two or so generations to keep their butt out of it for a little while, or until it's absolutely necessary, but that's me for hoping.
-- Bridget
What I'm more concerned about with the nature of Diebold's source code is whether or not their programmers even understand it. I mean, more often than not, companies layoff programmers, or shuffle them off to other projects. And I have grave doubts the original programmers of the voter machine software left behind significant documentation. So, if stronger encryption was needed to keep the possibility of hacking to change the vote count, I bet it would not be easy in a closed source model, where documentation sometimes is frowned upon.
I'm also very concerned that Diebold, being fairly close to home with Dick Cheney being a former company man for them, was just a pick'n'choose based on what Mr. Cheney felt were his friends, rather than on what is best for the nation. Technology can be useful in securing some things, but I think voter machines is not one of them. What if the machine goes down? What if the machine is 'poisoned' (as in the vote count was tampered with by individuals masking themselves as different people that they are not)? And so on. Does high technology warrant its use in a domain, where it adds no value and no security?
I really think this is just proof that technology can only go so far, and all the buzz over electronic voting and what not is just fluff, to be honest.
-- Bridget
Hmm, I'm a troll eh? I'll ask the anon mod to explain his/her reason for the moderation because I have never seen a clear headed computer scientist, engineer, or any other scientist in other fields go for the Post-Modernist drivel.
Post-Modernism has never produced a single theory of epistemology, politics, ethics, and/or metaphysics that has not been done before. Post-Modernism has attacked science on so many levels that it took a man like Alan Sokal to take the fight to them. It is true that Mr. Sokal did something that was unethical, but in some respects it was necessary to get the point across to the Post-Modernists that have tried to 'rewind' the progress of the Enlightenment era to which we in the field of computer science depend on greatly. Many of the major mathematical theorems we use in CS depend on the philosophers and scholars of the Enlightenment era since those philosophers and scholars were the direct source, and writers, of these theorems.
Moreover, I haven't seen a Post-Modernist scientist in my life, let alone in print. And the reason for that is simple, because none of the tennets of the different Post-Modern 'philosophies' support Empiricism, Critical Thinking, and/or proper Reductionism.
So, if that makes me a troll, then good, because I rather be a troll where sc ience reigns as the standard and not sophistry like what the PoMos espouse.
-- Bridget
I must be either very lucky or very insane not to be into the jive talk of Post-Modernism. Granted, I'm a Randroid, but atleast I don't assume every technological revolution/evolution/progression/refinement is due to Rand, Objectivism, or any particular philosophical idea. If Web 2.0 has anything to be based upon, it would be clear headed scientific naturalism, insomuch that computer science and the design of computer networks requires such a strict view of the world that doesn't fall for such fluffy nonsense.
-- Bridget
Sorry, but I don't see how anyone can worship a game [and I do mean worship]. Sure, I've played many an MMO in my time; AC1, AC2, EQ2, SoR, DDO, and more, but I could not consider playing constantly for days on out on any of them. AC1 was the only one I came close to doing that and that was I because I was in high school.
The reason why WoW is 'destructive' is that like all games, it rewards impulsive behavior. Point, click. Point, click. People start to think that's how real life operates, thus their behavior adjusts to follow suit. But, I don't think this is true in every case. I think what this article is more proof of over-reporting a minority of players and under-reporting the majority of other players.
-- Bridget
Now, I think this is a sorta 'see this is what you get when government decides who can and cannot get on the network' type of issue, but I think if the government of any sort is to be the main provider of domain names then it's the duty of said government not to censor that which it finds offensive. Granted, we can't have websites with criminal intent, but porn.ie? Come on, when's the last time someone got in a porn 'rage' and raped someone? Or stolen something? Or created a criminal organization to plot our collective doom?
I think this is indicative of Ireland, considering it's a conservative Catholic nation, but it needs to accept there is a strong minority of Irish citizens that are not so, and that it is the mandate of any decent republic to respect the minorities of the non-criminal kind in their rights to exist and to express themselves. Otherwise, it will have more in common with countries that chop folks' hands off and what not than with its EU neighbors.
I find it a sad time we all live in, where the networks are ultimately become more and more closed, whether it's the restriction of 'adult' content and file sharing or whether it's a restriction on open/free[libre] software and content. This is a time where the networks need to be more free not less free, because it's this time that our civilization is beginning to evolve and to improve itself. Yet, such censorship as it is going on in Ireland simply will not facilitate such a natural progression. And it only proves that a certain part of the species is unwilling and unable to move on with its arbitrary 'sensibilities.'
What real product does YouTube provide? The last time I checked, YouTube has no premium service with any perks.
:-P
And with the amount of money Google soaked into this deal, I think they've over-reached themselves considering the same amount of money could have been invested in their current Google Video service to provide similar, if not superior, applications. In fact, I prefer Google Video considering I can access many physics lectures [Theory of Acoustic Blackholes, clips of Feynman interviews, and much more], and other academic material that's often buried in the university webpage directories. I can also grab clips of Bloomberg, and other news sites [Spore Demo, Al-jaazera's latest English telecast, BBC telecast, etc...] through Google Video, not through YouTube. Frankly, I wonder if Google was more into buying YouTube to make sure they don't copy Google's model of searching for already existing videos. I see no value in YouTube, it's just MySpace set to low frame rate, low detail motion.
-- Bridget
Okay, now I'm not much of a big name coder here, but from my experience here at university in learning how to code data structures one thing is always true; it's not what you code, it's how you code. Open Source does not mean good tidy coding practices, open documentation, and etc. It just means everyone else can see your code, that's all. As for it being better at finding bugs, that would be true if documentation practices were more strict, but many closed source projects have the same ailment of not being able or willing to document features, patches, and bugs of their program. Ultimately, whenever I read something like this I realize their assumption is based on that some how certain practices are automatic to open source vs closed source, which is not true since open source licenses do not require the programmer at anytime to program a certain style, it only handles the release of the source code and nothing else.
:)
If the author of this article knew that, then the article would probably not exist at all. So, the tag [FUD] fits perfectly.
As much as I love science fiction [realistic and fantastic styles], the fact remains that predicting the future is a damn hard thing to do. Consider how people thought that cars would be made obsolete and replaced with flying cars or 'air buses' over half a century ago, yet today cars are getting more and more specialized in composition and function. Then the predictions that robots would be commonly used in every facet of society, yet the fact remains the power constraints for even the least electric motorized platform limits their economical viability. And so on.
Now, lets look at the current things none of the futurists predicted; wireless communication being common [even in the least developed nations], advancements in cancer research [The stem-cell theory of cancer is becoming the prominent paradigm in diagnosis and treatment of cancers.], and even the slow [but steady] advancements [mostly indirect, but a few direct] in life extension [quality and quantity]. Just these three areas weren't even considered possible or predicted by many if any so-called future studies expert. But other discoveries, such as the advancement of negative refraction meta-materials, weren't even on the 'radar' of these experts at all. So, as much as I love guessing what's over the next hill in the future, I don't take it seriously, nor will I take it without a giant lump of salt.
-- Attis
As much as I wish MMOs to be designed with community development in mind, the reality is that the majority of MMOs are built around two functions: to insure a form of 'entertainment' for the player [singular], and to insure the player will come again to be 'entertained.' The multiplayer aspect, guild/party system, and even the instancing are all just secondary functions that fulfill the single player experience among a vast number of other single player users. What I mean by that is that functionally you can have WoW or any other MMO offline and the same experience with regard to the actual combat, level advancement, and quests, and they would operated fully as designed. What wouldn't operate is the obvious player interaction. Oddly, most developers take advantage of this and claim it's their intention to bring players together. Yet, to be honest, I have yet to see a single MMO that let a user design a map, campaign, and quest within the game all on their own with the exception of Saga of Ryzom [Ryzom Ring]. Because of that glaring problem, MMOs will never become the Metaverse/Cyberspace of cyberpunk fiction because of their inherent limitation(s).
VRML and other 3d 'markup' languages were the first attempts at this idea, but it never went anywhere either due to the fact that despite powerful PC computers, the immersive factor was not dependent on if it was realistic or not, but rather solely dependent on the given user's belief in the simulation (Oi, I'm sounding like a French Post-Modernist!). So, before anyone exclaims that MMOs are original, please study your history and notice the numerous failed attempts at the virtual community system. Many are still around, in lesser forms, and many have been absorbed into other systems. I think MMOs will see the same fate as well.
-- Bridget
that the military had/has any intelligence?
But seriously, I think the fact that they're going to entrust a hardware mechanism to 'protect' data is flawed beyond compare. It's just one more doodad for the crackers to take on. Just one more challange to get under their belts... I hope you get the picture. Enjoy the 'fun' US Army... ^_^
-- Bridget
Alert The Internets!
-- Bridget