Helianthus16

Is Groupon the new Kristen Stewart startup?

creative license for a catchy title doesn't mean the title ought to be a bit of a muddle. does Jesus mean Groupon died but will come back? does it mean Groupon has divine authority? does it mean it'll be betrayed? "Jesus startup" is not a coherent term and aids little in the pretty sensible analysis that followed.

[although now that I think about it, I'd read an article that went way too far with it. "Is Groupon the new 'Lindsey Lohan after the alcohol but before the cocaine' startup?" -- that could only go well.]

My judgment comes from the scant information in the article. I don't see his actual technical analysis, I see some claim that we can technically (mathematically) define code as good, fair, or poor, which sounds ridiculous.

You're cherry-picking my arguments anyway.

My point is that the press Stuxnet is getting is irrelevant to the actual stakes of the game that was played.

Whatever people say about the theoretically optimal nature of the virus, the fact is that it's practically the only example we have of governmental-level sabotage through black-hat arts.

This is direct action. It isn't script kiddies, it isn't Anonymous, it isn't a random 1337_h4xr pulling off some minor corporate sting. It's the real deal, it's programmers putting their lifeblood into an endeavor that changed the fate of nations.

So whatever flaws that happened to exist don't change the inherent absolute confidence of the maneuver, nor does it change the precision you praise in your post.

But it also means that it can't be perfect. Anything that's so grounded in reality will not be perfect. That's the rules of playing the big games--you can't please everyone, you can't perform to the theoretical maximum that the weak articles that call it "nothing special after all" espouse.

Because that theoretical maximum was out of the reach of stuxnet's writers from the beginning, and they fucking dealt with it. People writing articles now have had nothing to do with crippling Iran's nuclear capability, if even for a moment, and the hogwash in the blogosphere that exists is so much shallow posturing.

>Parker wrote a tool that analyzed similarities between the Stuxnet code and the code of some other well-known worms and applications and found that the code was fairly low quality.

well isn't that hand-wavy.

>For example, the command-and-control mechanism is poorly done and sends its traffic in the clear and the worm ended up propagating on the Internet, which was likely not the intent.

this is part speculative and part, in my subjective mind, stupid. propagating on the Internet seems a highly reasonable method to me. what do you expect it to use, facebook? maybe the constraint is that it has to express itself on the internet and therefore 'in the clear?'

>"This was probably not a western state. There were too many mistakes made. There's a lot that went wrong,"

Is that really so western-centric? this guy is seriously just reaching for criticism in order to grab headlines.

>Lawson concludes that whoever wrote Stuxnet likely was constrained by time and didn't think there was enough of a return to justify the investment of more time in advanced cloaking techniques.

That's at least reasonable, because in all honesty maybe there wasn't enough of a return. Lawson seems a better analyst than this Parker fellow.

>they're willing to put the time in and willing to learn.

People who can't learn programming will quickly decide it's not worth putting their time in--this criteria will select out those people you are looking for...

yeah, the keyboard/mouse question made me think "Which is more important, your body or your mind?"

Because in a really bizarre way we're investing in the utility of a company rather than the money it makes.

Sensationalist headlines are often a sign of poor writing/thinking.

There's no way _everything_ I think I know about the Dark Ages is wrong. Don't insult my intelligence just because a smug title has a bit of snap to it.

Good thing it seems like the actual book has a more scholarly title.

when you accept that the LOTR movies are just fanfics we've spent millions on, you'll understand why we need more fanfics.

Previously compelling, no longer convincing.

Lessig didn't ignore it, he overruled it.

>LOTR is being actively commercially exploited and the commercial exploitations are darn good.

Darn good, but not perfect. We are now denied the right to re-interpret LOTR, perhaps because we want to include the Scouring of the Shire--not because the movie was necessarily worse without it, but because we _want_ to.

And heck, take a better example: the Harry Potter movies are in great need of re-interpretation, but don't expect to see independent film-makers getting a bite at that apple anytime soon.

>Here's an alternative ethics. Nontrivial ideas are not natural resources but are created by an author; just as a physical object is the property of its creator, ideas are an intangible property owned by their author.

This is not an alternative ethics (if indeed this is an ethics instead of a system of legal ownership), it is the _dominant_ ethics.

>they are contracts between an author and publisher, transferring specific and limited rights (not ownership). Publishers can be forced to pay the author royalties, not out of utilitarian reasons, but because they voluntarily agreed to such terms (the author having natural leverage, e.g. she can refuse to disclose his ideas).

Except in a market where ideas are not scarce and the publishing _is_ success, the creatives are exploited and their so-called property rights a joke.

We all understand the _theory_ behind your 'natural property,' the ownership of something you create. We just don't agree with it anymore, because in many cases it has failed and in the future it will not be relevant.

>Did you have that thought, or did the social collective assign it to you?

Missed it. He's pointing out the semi-fictional nature of idea ownership, not claiming originality for his ideas.

immune systems.

I disagree with the categorization of this attack as 'military' grade, though upon reflection this is largely semantic. By military you refer to the degree and purpose of the accomplished action.

But it isn't warfare proper in my mind. Military action has a nationality to it, and we don't know who it was [star]. Military action has an opposition with its own capacity for action, and Iran is not hacking at the reverse.

Maybe it's that I have a category in my mind for open cyberwarfare, and its character is absurd. It seems to me that the endgame is quick: disable the power or take control of computers and fill the country's network with garbage. That'd be a precise and deadly trick to pull off. Ah, there's another distinction then: this was a subtle effect designed solely for sabotage.

It's not outright war on their system. Outright cyberwarfare could only be a prelude to military action. Incapacitate a nation like the US for a mere 24 hours, and imagine what military possibilities that could yield...

Hopefully the cyberwarfare to come will be cyber-espionage--little tricks and turns, subtle but powerful changes--instead of cyber assault.

[star] except that it was probably the US or Israel. I'd bet it was the US, any takers?

[subfootnote] is the escaping of asterisks really turned off?

Man, that makes me feel all warm and nostalgic. Of course everyone's young, learning about the freedom of the internet and using their creativity for the first time. In my day it was LUE on the GameFAQs forum, though I was more of a Forumite at the time...

Interestingly this is actually untrue in a statistical sense. Purely statistically, we never prove an assertion, we merely find that we cannot disprove it for a certain strength of disproof.

The old adage that 'you can't disprove a negative' is more specific in scope than your allusion to it here.

Mostly, however, the nature of collaborative argument is such that yes, we are disproving and attempting to disprove each other all the time.

However, anecdotal evidence can point to a line of inquiry that might uncover important statistical evidence. It presents categories: "Crimes not addressed" as a cause of low incarceration.

Truly, to combat his assertion, you should find statistical evidence to show that his anecdotes are actually contrary to the trend.

Anecdotal evidence _is_ evidence. It is just not strong statistical evidence.

Well, that will shut down all those pirate sites that charge for their warez.

...

Can't prove it, that's the sort of thing that's dependant on how guided/misguided you are. ;)

Look at it this way. Our society can operate at at a high scale of efficiency, where everything is used to maximum utility and absolutely nothing is wasted, or it can operate extremely inefficiently. It _only_ makes sense to consider the societal-wide efficiency--as you say, the problem and question are macro. So we can posit some ranking, some percentage of total efficiency.

However, 'Will it blend' is hardly large enough to make a huge dent overall in the larger percent. The resources lost from one netbook per time segment are not comparable to the resources lost in even a tenth of a percent decrease in efficiency, if you pardon the approximation.

Furthermore, 'maximum utility' is rather difficult to determine because 'utility' is variable. It turns out that apparently there's enough 'utility' in making "Will It Blend?" videos that we could even argue that this is positive efficiency!

Do you also get upset when cars and pianos are destroyed for movies and tv shows? Would you have us exert _more_ energy to generate the illusion in order to save good tools?

>Very utopian without the least bit of practical sentiment.

Yeah. Welcome to the Internet. :)

My point is _that_ most answers to this question will be off topic.

>It's a question of copyright and how to enforce it properly

Many of our answers amount to 'Not at all!'

Because I personally want to kill the concept of copyright.

Hear me out, I'm articulating probably a more radical position than I probably personally believe. I don't want to upset the status quo by fiat. I don't want to just destroy the AAs in a flash of legislative or judicial action.

But the question of who owns art is getting pressurized. Why should any particular company be profiting off of the Beatles music now? That is _our_ music, _our_ culture. An artist does not create in a vacuum.

For a brief while in my life I was able to access just about any piece of work--music, TV, movies--in my culture. It changed how I viewed intellectual property (along with the usual litany of Lessig et al literature).

Right now our culture is trapped. It is owned by companies that taint our viewing experience with commercialism, piggy-backing their own signal on _our_ discussion. Marketing means war for your mind, which comes out a lot more paranoid than I mean it, but I hope you'll see the point. I don't want to have to think about which car is sexiest for my socio-economic position while catching up on [Show].

More to the point I don't want to leave a really emotional, poignant moment in a TV show directly into noise about which razor I should buy. It's like having a loud friend at the movie theater--except that you can choose your friends, you can only fast forward through commercials.

And this only happens because of copyright, because some men in suits have the right to determine what we see.

Copyright isn't about protecting intellectual property, it's about maintaining control.

Now I've attacked advertisements, which means someone will point out that advertising funds mosts of our TV shows and movies. As far as I can tell, it just doesn't have to be that way. We'll be able to set up our own TV studios soon at minimal cost, and then we won't need anything more than our own talent.

So you see, the people who are against domain seizures may partially be angry at the rights violation, the government regulation. But they're probably also for the open internet--an open internet where copyright becomes less and less important.

In our lifetimes, we will see the end of copyright. It will come naturally and effortlessly; it will not be a bloody revolution.

I found the adulatory tone of the article more than a little annoying, as well.

Optimization: don't find the guy who thinks he is the smartest person in the room.

>I wasn't aware that listing a set of things I've done counts as impressing people

this is what he said.

your statement is essentially 'i think i am a polymath and so are my friends'

>My response was that I think there are, and that while the current generation of Internet People is still young, there's a hell of a lot of promise there

man, when did i get so old that i'm cynical of generational pride? every generation feels this way, at the edge of the new and exciting.

He brought in a capuchin monkey to the office on his birthday.

(I work in the same building)

>nope. It is just that we didn't have strong enough competition from other predator species to force the efficiency increase. Instead we use the extensive way of increasing the size, even if it is accompanied by decreased efficiency. Like going cheap low-tech V8 instead of efficiently increasing horsepower of a V6 engine.

ok, sure. point is our engine beats the pants off a dogs no matter how you slice it.

>yep. that one. The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc...

like I said, debbie downer. you have this absurd fixation on killings.

>I have an MS in Math, and spent enough time on QM to get a "grasp".

In other words you are not a physicist. The saying that no one understands QM is not a joke. Mathematics is useless without reality; it's like literary analysis without story-telling.

I've been joking and condescending in my responses to you, but I'm going to get a little serious now:

>If you look into the history of human species, it is a continuous blood-shed

Yes, it's continuous bloodshed. You know what? It's not your right to determine that what people fought for was meaningless, or too "violent" for your modern middle-class tastes. It's not your right to prissily look down on the human race from your ivory tower of Math and grumble about killing.

What I see when I look upon our history is a series of people taking their actions seriously. I see a series of people that slowly, agonizingly, painstakingly turned away from violence in order to serve those 'side-effects' that you think we killers disregard.

And that's the crux of it. Do you really think you're any better than the killers you despise? Maybe you don't, maybe you lump yourself in with us savages; if so, though, you must have some self-hatred issues that'll keep your therapist employed well beyond his retirement.

If all you see when you look at history is the pain, then all you will _feel_ is pain.

How will we know the singularity is here unless we can authenticate its identity?

I'm always amazed by such blatant anthropo-deprecating-centric (?) statements.

-The difference in efficiency should tell you that that power spent is _worth_ something, like astonishingly superior abstraction capabilities and the ability to speak and write.

-The ugliness (read; complexity) of QM could easily be interpreted as a tribute. Whether you like it or not, it is the best we have. To paraphrase HHG2G, if it's ugly, then it's the universe that got it wrong, not us. (I'm partially joking, mostly because I don't suspect you really have a firm enough grasp of QM, let alone QFT, to determine its aesthetic beauty.)

I mean, I'm all for a little humbling perspective. We are a race of people descended from stupider people unto apehood (and before that, lizards!) that are stuck on a rock in a universe fantastically larger than us.

That doesn't mean we should be debbie downers.

This is true but does not conflict with my assertion. The Declaration of Independence was an act of political power and influence. This is an idealistic essay that might spur actual acts of political power and influence.

Veneration of a document must be earned.