I think another issue is: people already pay a lot of money for fast internet access. At least in the U.S., you pay anywhere from $30 to $50 monthly, depending on what services are available in the area.
Most people, after paying that amount of money, probably feel entitled to have a certain level of access to information. When you pay for a cable subscription, you get a bunch of channels as part of the deal. You then pay more for premium content without the ads. That seems to be the business model right now on the Internet: most ad-supported, the rest pay content.
If the majority of the internet switched to micro-payments, the situation would be reversed: most content would be 'premium' with a small majority free. That would be like paying a monthly fee for cable and then paying again for each channel, including local stuff you could have gotten with rabbit ears. I think most people would not like to be billed twice.
In a way, I think media companies and corporations are hurting themselves here. Let municipalities provide low-cost access to the Internet; that just frees capital to pay for really good services like video-on-demand or quality newspaper content.
Not to ignite a conflict which seems to have cooled a great deal in the last decade or so, but my understanding is the demographic of Catholic to Protestant is actually about even.
I took a class in college four or five years ago about the representation of the NI conflict in the media. One of the issues we discussed is that the demographic breakdown of Catholic to Protestant in NI is somewhat uncertain.
People are wary of determining what the real number is. If Protestants are found to be the majority, this could ignite Catholic violence since the Protestants will have a majority they can point to in order to stay in the UK and the Catholics would feel more repressed then they currently do. Conversely, violence from the Protestants could be sparked if they feel that the Catholics are making a move to join the Republic.
In the interests of peace and political stability, most people put the number about even. I've seen numbers that the Catholics actually have a narrow majority, but your information suggests different.
As an aside, the Catholic and Protestant labels are, in some sense, a convenience since each nation had strong religious ties. The whole conflict is over an original invasion by the English a few hundred years ago and the back and forth between the parties since then.
The fact that the two nations happened to have, at the time, strong opposing religious views probably contributes to the friction, but it is by no means the primary issue. The struggle is mostly an issue of class, especially in modern times.
There is a perception that the Protestants are generally higher class and better off than their Catholic neighbors. This is most likely a legacy of the English invasion and the redistribution of lands to transplanted Scottish clans. Again, the truth is that both groups are probably fairly even economically.
All that said, the information I have is now a few years old and it is possible some variables have changed.
To quote Monty Python: "Let's not go arguing over who killed who. This is supposed to be a happy occasion!". Peace is moving forward in NI and both sides seem to be satisfied or at least equally unhappy. Anything else is water under the bridge in my mind. Forget about getting out of NI, let's stop fighting and killing about something that happened hundreds of years ago and set about making life better for everyone.
Was a nice little summary about why ActiveX sucks, but the post is more than a year old. Either the submitter just discovered the Internet, or this is troll feeding right on the front page.
I was aware of that, though I realized after I posted that I wasn't clear on that point. In any case, it didn't appear very useful to me. In the time it takes to fly over usr, I could have used the find command to locate what I was looking for and execute it.
My first thought was: "Gee how original! Hadn't heard of a good idea like that since.... Mac OS X maybe."
I'd be surprised if they really went wild with 3d interfaces like the 'Jurassic Park' file browser, or the cube with web pages mapped on it that was posted here awhile ago. I think they are just going to do what Apple has already done and what Keith Packard is working on for X-Windows.
You are probably right. Microsoft will only use it for flashy effects. At least Apple eventually got to arguably useful things like Expose. But they had to put Quartz Extreme in place first before they could do it.
I'm not inclined to be charitable, but hopefully this is Microsoft laying the groundwork for interesting and useful user interface ideas.
By that argument, all human beings are is a lump of carbon and chemicals that can be bought fairly cheaply at a chemical supply store. Yet somehow this combination of chemicals is able to form arguments and post text to Slashdot.
Well, you can argue that human beings build computers; computers can't choose to build copies of themselves. We created it, we know all the details of how they work, so we can do as we like with them. We can pull a computer apart, reconfigure it and un-solder it.
True, but human beings can also be taken apart and reconfigured now, from whole organs down to limited genetic manipulation. We can also test zygotes and developing fetuses and choose to terminate ones with defects if we wish (leaving aside the moral question; we have the ability to do it. Whether using that ability is right or not is another discussion). When a child is born, it has rights of its own, even though its parents created it.
Computers do have the ability to make copies of themselves. Many computer components are partially designed and assembled with the aid of computers. Chip fabs couldn't work without them. All that is really lacking is the computer wanting to create another computer on its own. If Intel stopped pressing the buttons to make new chips, the fab would stop working.
The article author's point is that these issues are worth thinking about now, since the answers to these questions not only define what a dumb machine is, but also defines who we are. It could be considered as the next stage of philosophy, which is basically the study of what man is and why he is here.
If we have a meaningful definition of sentience, then we can answer questions about brain death, abortion, and coma patients. I hadn't considered that application of theoretical research into AI before reading this article, but it really brings home the practicality of thinking about these issues now.
In the short-term, the common sense test that you imply in your post is certainly adequate. I know that my desktop is not capable of conscience thought. But it does have its own way of responding to 'pain'. Spyware, misconfigured software, etc. can cause it to shut down. If I reconfigure its insides, the operating system might refuse to recognize new components. This kind of intelligence is probably no more then the average microbe or bacterium, and is certainly orders of magnitude lower than a gold fish or common house cat, but its a start.
Human history has show that reactive law making often has severe reprocussions. How many species were wiped off the face of the earth before we realized that we should exercise restraint? We shouldn't have needed a law to say that slavery is wrong, but the US and other countries condoned this practice until we passed laws to stop it.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Considering these questions may not be as pressing as civil rights legislation, freedom of speech, or even copyright law, but we should be prepared. It would be a shame to unplug the first truly conscious computer because we were too ignorant to recognize it.
At least for film work there is CinePaint which is a widely used fork of the Gimp that handles high dynamic range images. The list of films it has been used on is pretty impressive.
I am not a professional photographer, so perhaps there are aspects that aren't appropriate to print work, but the capabilities of it seem impressive:
8/16/32-bits of color per channel (up to 128-bits RGBA)
Of course, you may have quibbles with the Gimp's user interface, and I would say that those problems are probably as important as picture quality in the this use case. You need a user interface that lets you quickly and accurately edit pictures.
If Photoshop is more productive and accurate for you, then go for it. I think the latest Gimp compares much more favorably to Photoshop then later versions, but there are still things that are clunky. I remember in the old Gimp that the marching ants were annoyingly large by default. That, plus having to relearn all of the keyboard shortcuts that were second-nature from Photoshop made the Gimp tough for me.
Myth is split into a backend and frontend. You can add multiple backends and have one front-end access them.
The approach I've been thinking about is creating a MythTV box that is just a front-end and using it to play music through my home theater. Then gradually save the money to build a file server/Myth backend box that will do the DVR stuff. In the meantime, I can just share my music from my current workstation to the front-end.
If you are running Linux on your current fastest machine, you could do something similar. Spend the money on a nice small frontend with enough horsepower to display video (not encode it), and use your workstation to do that capture.
You could even have all of your old machines work as single-tuner backends if you wanted.
I think the market for this is that your OSX Keychain is only on one computer, so if you need to sign on using a friend's computer or a public terminal, you still have to remember all of your passwords.
Using single sign-on, you could go anywhere, sign into the main site with one password, and all of the other sites would know it was you. It's more of a global keyring, for better or worse.
Of course, the OSX keychain may have capabilities I'm not aware of... can you put it on a USB key to take around to other computers?
not really the speed. At the time I tried it, early in 2004, it seemed to be the only readily available distribution that actually worked with AMD64. Fedora Core claimed to have a distro for it, but I read a lot of horror stories; Mandrake and others only seemed to have commercial payware products for the platform.
I did have problems with Gentoo (when using USB2 the whole computer slowed down, hotplug didn't seem to work right, etc.), so perhaps this was more a reflection of the maturity of Linux distros in general on the AMD64 platform. I also didn't really find it much faster that other distributions I've used on x86 machines.
I guess I'll have to try again soon. I'm currently stuck on WinXP since I needed something that worked, but it may be time to survey the current 64 bit landscape.
I was wondering about this too. The FBI has basically stamped out kidnap for ransom in the US, so I would guess that there are probably two remaining motives: child custody or perversion.
It all comes down to how much time a kidnapper has before people realize a kid is missing. In a custody case, if the window is small then this might make a difference.
In the other case, well, those people may adapt to the shorter window, which is just horrible to think about. Right now, if I remember my "Without a Trace" correctly (I know, facts from TV shows), if a kidnap victim isn't found in between 6 and 8 hours, the odds they are alive decrease dramatically.
I really hope my second point isn't true. I think the Amber Alert system has had some success with rapidly notifying the public. If RFID's add to the effectiveness of the alert system it will be hard to argue with this.
I think the mention of a chip implantation system at the end of the article is too creepy for words. Implementing that system would mean that within a couple of generations, every American would be chipped. The privacy concerns with this are too scary to contemplate.
At the very least, the RFID implants should biodegrade when the recipient turns 18. Part of growing up is letting kids have incrementally more liberty in order for them to develop the skills to be independent as an adult. What kind of society would we have if kids don't learn to take care of themselves because they are constantly monitored?
This scheme is more commonly known as a one-time pad. Basically, you need to generate a set of random data that can be combined with your plain-text. A common implementation used to be pads of onion-skin paper with blocks of random letters on them. Onion-skin was used since it was possible to generate pairs of pads using carbons and also because the paper was easy to destroy. The pads usually had something like the date the pad was to be used on them.
Often these systems were broken because the pads were misused: the same pad used multiple times, or the same pad used with some variation.
IIRC, the scheme you are purposing is similar to the way that the red telephone communication between the Soviet Union and the US, as well as embassy communications, was secured. In that case, special vinyl records were distributed that had to be started at the same point. The length of the record determined how long you can talk.
This essay on Bruce Schneier's site highlights one of the chief weaknesses of the one-time pad: the key distribution problem. You have to figure out how to get your friend's CD to him without being intercepted. You also have to be sure that the computer that generated the CD's wasn't compromised; someone spying on your machine could just log what audio file you used, copy it, and generate their own key CD.
Considering that a CD can only hold around 700MB (for a standard audio CD), I would say the key space is small enough that even if an attacker doesn't know your position choosing scheme (your description of the system states that the position is part of the message, so I'm being generous here), it should be possible to brute force the message if he somehow gets access to the key.
Another problem is: you may suspect that you are being watched or the system is compromised, but your buddy may not. How do you communicate that information to your friend, especially if you aren't supposed to be in contact with them in the first place?
If the attacker has your key CD, he could send an encrypted message stating that you (the legitimate user) are the attacker? Then who would your buddy believe?
The benefit of public-key cryptography is that it limits the amount of data that needs to be shared in order to communicate. The keys used for encryption never leave the possession of the person doing the encryption. It is also relatively simple to generate new keys.
Of course, man-in-the-middle attacks can still happen. But if you can establish the first public keys that you and your friend will use in a secure manner (e.g. face-to-face meeting), subsequent public keys can be encrypted using the last trusted key, or by using other key sharing schemes.
Another feature that I haven't seen on this thread is that FireFox can also highlight all matching results for your search term in your document. This may help a bit with long documents and accidentally losing your place.
As I think about it, a cool feature might be to add a bar like on the side of the page that displays little graphical jump points. The Eclipse IDE has this for various code editors; when you run a search it places little colored boxes in a bar next to the sidebar that indicates the matches. If you scroll the thumb of the scrollbar to one of the boxes you'll see one of the results in your window. You can also click on a box to jump to it. It's a little hard to explain, but if you get a chance to use it, it's very cool.
I think the issue really is, in the analog world, I could tape every episode of a TV series that I wanted and keep them as long as the tape lasted. I also could record every football game I was interested in and watch them when I wanted. Some games, like the Patriot's snow bowl, I might want to watch several times or edit together with all the moments of their Super Bowl year. With the advent of CD burners and VCDs I could even convert them to digital format and save some shelf space.
I know the argument about digital: every copy made is a perfect copy, indistinguisable from the original. In the analog world, I could just keep making copies of my original tape recording and only suffer 1 generational fall-off.
I'm not interested in taping movies off of PPV and then charging other people to show them. But I would like to be able to tape Game 4 of the World Series and send it to my grandmother. I might want to show friends a tape of the playoff game I went to where it was 20 below zero. Is the NFL really hurt by that?
The old joke is that nobody can figure out how to set the clock on their VCRs. Yet we still can record using VCRs even though some people don't use that functionality.
Want to stop piracy, MPAA, et. al.? Bust people who use mass duplicators and sell bootleg DVD's and CD's on street corners. Or look to your own people. How many people do you figure get to see a movie before its official release?
People who taped movies off of TV still bought commercial tapes and DVD's. The quality was usually better because the transfers were made off of the master copies and the tapes could be sized to accomodate a full standard play version and no more. DVD's can optimize bitrates and provide additional discs. The content producers can also provide extras that you might not get in an OTA broadcast.
Consumers are limited by compression used in broadcast, compression used by the Tivo to store files, and the expense involved to buy enough media or have enough storage to store content in at a desired quality level. Those prices may drop, but video files haven't been getting much smaller, especially with HD-quality video. Consumer writable DVD's and CD's use ink that degrades, as opposed to pressed plastic.
Also consider that the piracy loss numbers that the various associations throw out are frequently exposed as over-blown. Frequently, piracy numbers are followed by a report of record profits. I don't think my making a mix CD for a road trip or ripping DVD's to a portable video player is hurting the content producers all that much.
Accepting degraded functionality only makes it okay for the content distributors to take more capabilities away from you that you used to have. How long until you have to buy the right to Tivo an individual series? Or each episode in a series? Or not be able to timeshift a series at all? And all because you can now get cool sounds out of 6 speakers and can see every pore in Uma Thurman's skin.
That's a really great analysis. It reminds me a little of the idea (and I'm probably not articulating this correctly), that we can't truly understand the universe because we exist inside it and we think in terms of it.
So to see Stewart's points in the manner you've presented shows that his points aren't really a lot deeper than what you normally get on Crossfire. It also shows that he is as much a creature of media as Begala and Carlson are. Perhaps this is as high a critique as we can expect to get from the medium.
Is there a way that we can appreciate and understand Begala and Carlson's views than the format they are currently using? Does that make Crossfire a futile exercise? I wish I had an answer to those questions myself.
I checked IMDB and I can't find the serious news show that Jon Stewart tried before. If you can supply the name of it, I'm certainly willing to give you the point on that one.
In any case, I think it is perfectly valid for Stewart to take the news outlets to task for not doing their job. Having now see the show (my previous post was after reading the transcript), I agree that he didn't really rip them a new one, though I think he scored some points. He is a citizen of this country and a viewer of the program. He is entitled to his opinion and happens to have the renown to espouse it in a very public forum.
Every time I see a post like this, I am reminded about the book the Diamond Age by Stephenson. In that book, the leader of the Victorian enclave defends their way of life. He states that the biggest sin in the 20th and 21st centuries was hypocrisy.
He points out that hypocrisy isn't necessarily the worst evil. We never live in the best of all possible worlds, but we always strive to make it better. Just because we don't live to our ideals doesn't mean the ideals are bad or that we shouldn't try to be better.
How many people buy CD's from RIAA members even when they condemn the RIAA on this site? The truth is, even if the policies of that organization are bad, some of their members do put out good music. The rules say that if we want to listen to that music, we have to pay for it. So we may not like the RIAA, but until we change the music business, we should live by their rules when we want their music. If we can get their music in another way that we prefer more (iTunes, etc.), then we should do that.
By your argument, you can't post your opinion on Jon Stewart or Crossfire because, as far as I know, you've never done a comedy show OR a news program. Slashdot would certainly get quiet and less interesting to read if that were true.
I don't agree with your post, but I'm glad you posted it since it gave me an outlet to think about these issues and respond. I would be more interested in your opinion on whether you think Stewart's criticisms are valid. By which I mean, is the media doing their job or are they hurting America? Let's talk about what substance there was in his points, rather than his authority to make them.
Excellent post, first off. It is easy to forget that an antagonistic system is necessary. Republicans and Democrats can't agree all the time, otherwise the government moves too quickly in one direction and you get things like the Patriot Act. In effect the two party system would become a one party system.
I want the Republicans to call the Democrats on over-spending, higher taxes, and big government. And I want the Democrats to remind the Republicans that we have civil liberties and that you can't rely on amoral institutions like corporations to always do the right thing.
What I really want is for both parties to remember their positions on those things. Instead, both parties think the answer to problems is to form new government agencies and programs. The Democrats add more taxes, the Republicans make a show of not doing that, but don't slow down the spending either. So the choices are: take home a smaller paycheck, or live with a government that is constantly in debt.
So I think Stewart definitely led with his weakest argument, though perhaps more to bring a little levity in before getting into his reason for being there. If Begala and Carlson started to agree with each other all the time, not only would the show go off the air, but the canary would be singing about our government.
That said, I think he has valid points. At heart, I don't doubt that Crossfire is as much about entertainment as it is about news or politics. Really all news programs are about entertainment. People watch the news in hours when they aren't working; they want to know what is going on, but they don't want to hear Harvard professors presenting long, nuanced arguments.
I guess, in trying to address his weakest argument, I'm forming my own weakest argument. Can we hold the media accountable when they are only giving us what we ask for? The answer I guess, is a dialectic one: the media is giving the people what they want, but the people should be demanding more and the media should be giving the people more, even if they don't demand it.
Which gets into what I think are Stewart's better arguments. Nobody can deny that the political campaigns are major marketing machines with tightly controlled messages. The news media most often reports on the strategies of the campaigns rather than analyzing or presenting information on their actual positions. Political reporting is turning into sports reporting: We can expect Kerry to come on strong on this, because Bush said something on that.
What about what they said? What are the ramifications of the policies they are espousing? We don't get a lot of insight into that, we mostly get reports on what the other side says are the ramifications. Reporting doesn't mean finding out information any more, it means being a mouthpiece for both sides. And Fox News isn't even doing THAT anymore.
There have been many reports that the White House Press Corp is heavily under the thumb of Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. If reporters don't ask the right questions, they aren't heard from that much, if at all. Some may even be asked to leave. I don't really count the Democrats as immune from this. I doubt that the Democrats really want to answer the hard questions either. I expect they will also purposely avoid questions they don't like.
The truth is, the news media has let the American public down. The fact that Stewart is a trusted source of news at all is alarming. He is there to entertain and is very clear about that. Stewart notes that "[t]he show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls." He is on Comedy Central for Bob's sake! I think the show is popular because people recognize the satire of the media that it represents and they trust that more than the 'serious' news outlets.
Begala and Carlson attacked Stewart for not attacking Kerry, and I think Stewart's defense is perfect: it is not his job to do that. It's Begala and Carlson's job, and they don't really do it. They address the surface. If
Might be useful as a symbiote
on
OQO For Sale
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· Score: 1
I think what they are missing with the OQO is not providing a more capable dock. Why couldn't they put more smarts into the cradle? Add another processor, better graphics, and more RAM into the cradle. When it is undocked, the OQO could act like a more powerful PDA-like device.... pretty much like it is now.
When docked, however, it could use its on-board processor along with the dock's processor and add the dock's RAM to the pool of RAM available. A large hard disk could be in the cradle and a smaller disk could be in the unit. When you connected the palmtop to it, the hard drives could be sync'ed up seamlessly. Maybe the home directory is always on the palmtop, but the applications are in the base. Or the palmtop acts like a cache for active data.
What would be even cooler would be proximity detection. When the OQO is close to the main unit, it might off-load some work to it... it could use a faster Gigabit ethernet connection on the dock and act like a dumb terminal until it got out of range of the Bluetooth or WiFi. It could save files to the dock's disk until the transfer rate got too low and would then store data locally. It might be neat to start a movie in the DVD drive on the dock, and then undock to sit somewhere else or finish the movie on the train.
There would be a lot of technical challenges to doing all of those things, but I think the base idea is sound. When you are stationary, take advantage of that to include heavier, more capable hardware. When you are mobile, degrade functionality accordingly.
One of the benefits listed in the parent's link are:
Same-day package delivery
Umm... are they serious? I can just see a UPS spacecraft dropping into my front lawn, leaving a slip saying they couldn't deliver since no one was home, and blasting off again.
For some reason, when ever I see Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, I keep mentally transmuting it into Perl Sensitive Sunglasses. Which, considering some of the Perl I've seen, would be pretty useful.
Not trolling here, just sharing my mental state. I love you Perl guys, really. And your poetry. It's full of delightful visual imagery and appealing metaphors underlying this and highlighting the other and developing the theme.... oh never mind. Where's the nearest airlock?
1. Pick a popular Internet technology 2. Attach Google's name to it. 3. Profit!!!
Here are a few:
If Google made a MMORPG it would rule the earth!
If Google made a Linux distribution with Spotlight-like search, it would rule the earth!
If Google let me host all my MP3's it would rule the earth!
Seriously though, it might be interesting to have all of my IM history searchable, but I mostly use it for one-off conversations about things of limited importance.
Slashdot Mirror
I think another issue is: people already pay a lot of money for fast internet access. At least in the U.S., you pay anywhere from $30 to $50 monthly, depending on what services are available in the area.
Most people, after paying that amount of money, probably feel entitled to have a certain level of access to information. When you pay for a cable subscription, you get a bunch of channels as part of the deal. You then pay more for premium content without the ads. That seems to be the business model right now on the Internet: most ad-supported, the rest pay content.
If the majority of the internet switched to micro-payments, the situation would be reversed: most content would be 'premium' with a small majority free. That would be like paying a monthly fee for cable and then paying again for each channel, including local stuff you could have gotten with rabbit ears. I think most people would not like to be billed twice.
In a way, I think media companies and corporations are hurting themselves here. Let municipalities provide low-cost access to the Internet; that just frees capital to pay for really good services like video-on-demand or quality newspaper content.
Not to ignite a conflict which seems to have cooled a great deal in the last decade or so, but my understanding is the demographic of Catholic to Protestant is actually about even.
I took a class in college four or five years ago about the representation of the NI conflict in the media. One of the issues we discussed is that the demographic breakdown of Catholic to Protestant in NI is somewhat uncertain.
People are wary of determining what the real number is. If Protestants are found to be the majority, this could ignite Catholic violence since the Protestants will have a majority they can point to in order to stay in the UK and the Catholics would feel more repressed then they currently do. Conversely, violence from the Protestants could be sparked if they feel that the Catholics are making a move to join the Republic.
In the interests of peace and political stability, most people put the number about even. I've seen numbers that the Catholics actually have a narrow majority, but your information suggests different.
As an aside, the Catholic and Protestant labels are, in some sense, a convenience since each nation had strong religious ties. The whole conflict is over an original invasion by the English a few hundred years ago and the back and forth between the parties since then.
The fact that the two nations happened to have, at the time, strong opposing religious views probably contributes to the friction, but it is by no means the primary issue. The struggle is mostly an issue of class, especially in modern times.
There is a perception that the Protestants are generally higher class and better off than their Catholic neighbors. This is most likely a legacy of the English invasion and the redistribution of lands to transplanted Scottish clans. Again, the truth is that both groups are probably fairly even economically.
All that said, the information I have is now a few years old and it is possible some variables have changed.
To quote Monty Python: "Let's not go arguing over who killed who. This is supposed to be a happy occasion!". Peace is moving forward in NI and both sides seem to be satisfied or at least equally unhappy. Anything else is water under the bridge in my mind. Forget about getting out of NI, let's stop fighting and killing about something that happened hundreds of years ago and set about making life better for everyone.
Saw this quote at the bottom of the page when reading the comments on this article:
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener
Slashcode doesn't pick quotes based on context, right? Never seen a quote that seems to fit the discussion so perfectly.
Was a nice little summary about why ActiveX sucks, but the post is more than a year old. Either the submitter just discovered the Internet, or this is troll feeding right on the front page.
This is "news for nerds"?
I was aware of that, though I realized after I posted that I wasn't clear on that point. In any case, it didn't appear very useful to me. In the time it takes to fly over usr, I could have used the find command to locate what I was looking for and execute it.
My first thought was: "Gee how original! Hadn't heard of a good idea like that since.... Mac OS X maybe."
I'd be surprised if they really went wild with 3d interfaces like the 'Jurassic Park' file browser, or the cube with web pages mapped on it that was posted here awhile ago. I think they are just going to do what Apple has already done and what Keith Packard is working on for X-Windows.
You are probably right. Microsoft will only use it for flashy effects. At least Apple eventually got to arguably useful things like Expose. But they had to put Quartz Extreme in place first before they could do it.
I'm not inclined to be charitable, but hopefully this is Microsoft laying the groundwork for interesting and useful user interface ideas.
Naaaah, that is too nice.
By that argument, all human beings are is a lump of carbon and chemicals that can be bought fairly cheaply at a chemical supply store. Yet somehow this combination of chemicals is able to form arguments and post text to Slashdot.
Well, you can argue that human beings build computers; computers can't choose to build copies of themselves. We created it, we know all the details of how they work, so we can do as we like with them. We can pull a computer apart, reconfigure it and un-solder it.
True, but human beings can also be taken apart and reconfigured now, from whole organs down to limited genetic manipulation. We can also test zygotes and developing fetuses and choose to terminate ones with defects if we wish (leaving aside the moral question; we have the ability to do it. Whether using that ability is right or not is another discussion). When a child is born, it has rights of its own, even though its parents created it.
Computers do have the ability to make copies of themselves. Many computer components are partially designed and assembled with the aid of computers. Chip fabs couldn't work without them. All that is really lacking is the computer wanting to create another computer on its own. If Intel stopped pressing the buttons to make new chips, the fab would stop working.
The article author's point is that these issues are worth thinking about now, since the answers to these questions not only define what a dumb machine is, but also defines who we are. It could be considered as the next stage of philosophy, which is basically the study of what man is and why he is here.
If we have a meaningful definition of sentience, then we can answer questions about brain death, abortion, and coma patients. I hadn't considered that application of theoretical research into AI before reading this article, but it really brings home the practicality of thinking about these issues now.
In the short-term, the common sense test that you imply in your post is certainly adequate. I know that my desktop is not capable of conscience thought. But it does have its own way of responding to 'pain'. Spyware, misconfigured software, etc. can cause it to shut down. If I reconfigure its insides, the operating system might refuse to recognize new components. This kind of intelligence is probably no more then the average microbe or bacterium, and is certainly orders of magnitude lower than a gold fish or common house cat, but its a start.
Human history has show that reactive law making often has severe reprocussions. How many species were wiped off the face of the earth before we realized that we should exercise restraint? We shouldn't have needed a law to say that slavery is wrong, but the US and other countries condoned this practice until we passed laws to stop it.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Considering these questions may not be as pressing as civil rights legislation, freedom of speech, or even copyright law, but we should be prepared. It would be a shame to unplug the first truly conscious computer because we were too ignorant to recognize it.
I am not a professional photographer, so perhaps there are aspects that aren't appropriate to print work, but the capabilities of it seem impressive:
Of course, you may have quibbles with the Gimp's user interface, and I would say that those problems are probably as important as picture quality in the this use case. You need a user interface that lets you quickly and accurately edit pictures.
If Photoshop is more productive and accurate for you, then go for it. I think the latest Gimp compares much more favorably to Photoshop then later versions, but there are still things that are clunky. I remember in the old Gimp that the marching ants were annoyingly large by default. That, plus having to relearn all of the keyboard shortcuts that were second-nature from Photoshop made the Gimp tough for me.
Myth is split into a backend and frontend. You can add multiple backends and have one front-end access them.
The approach I've been thinking about is creating a MythTV box that is just a front-end and using it to play music through my home theater. Then gradually save the money to build a file server/Myth backend box that will do the DVR stuff. In the meantime, I can just share my music from my current workstation to the front-end.
If you are running Linux on your current fastest machine, you could do something similar. Spend the money on a nice small frontend with enough horsepower to display video (not encode it), and use your workstation to do that capture.
You could even have all of your old machines work as single-tuner backends if you wanted.
I think the market for this is that your OSX Keychain is only on one computer, so if you need to sign on using a friend's computer or a public terminal, you still have to remember all of your passwords.
Using single sign-on, you could go anywhere, sign into the main site with one password, and all of the other sites would know it was you. It's more of a global keyring, for better or worse.
Of course, the OSX keychain may have capabilities I'm not aware of... can you put it on a USB key to take around to other computers?
not really the speed. At the time I tried it, early in 2004, it seemed to be the only readily available distribution that actually worked with AMD64. Fedora Core claimed to have a distro for it, but I read a lot of horror stories; Mandrake and others only seemed to have commercial payware products for the platform.
I did have problems with Gentoo (when using USB2 the whole computer slowed down, hotplug didn't seem to work right, etc.), so perhaps this was more a reflection of the maturity of Linux distros in general on the AMD64 platform. I also didn't really find it much faster that other distributions I've used on x86 machines.
I guess I'll have to try again soon. I'm currently stuck on WinXP since I needed something that worked, but it may be time to survey the current 64 bit landscape.
I was wondering about this too. The FBI has basically stamped out kidnap for ransom in the US, so I would guess that there are probably two remaining motives: child custody or perversion.
It all comes down to how much time a kidnapper has before people realize a kid is missing. In a custody case, if the window is small then this might make a difference.
In the other case, well, those people may adapt to the shorter window, which is just horrible to think about. Right now, if I remember my "Without a Trace" correctly (I know, facts from TV shows), if a kidnap victim isn't found in between 6 and 8 hours, the odds they are alive decrease dramatically.
I really hope my second point isn't true. I think the Amber Alert system has had some success with rapidly notifying the public. If RFID's add to the effectiveness of the alert system it will be hard to argue with this.
I think the mention of a chip implantation system at the end of the article is too creepy for words. Implementing that system would mean that within a couple of generations, every American would be chipped. The privacy concerns with this are too scary to contemplate.
At the very least, the RFID implants should biodegrade when the recipient turns 18. Part of growing up is letting kids have incrementally more liberty in order for them to develop the skills to be independent as an adult. What kind of society would we have if kids don't learn to take care of themselves because they are constantly monitored?
This scheme is more commonly known as a one-time pad. Basically, you need to generate a set of random data that can be combined with your plain-text. A common implementation used to be pads of onion-skin paper with blocks of random letters on them. Onion-skin was used since it was possible to generate pairs of pads using carbons and also because the paper was easy to destroy. The pads usually had something like the date the pad was to be used on them.
Often these systems were broken because the pads were misused: the same pad used multiple times, or the same pad used with some variation.
IIRC, the scheme you are purposing is similar to the way that the red telephone communication between the Soviet Union and the US, as well as embassy communications, was secured. In that case, special vinyl records were distributed that had to be started at the same point. The length of the record determined how long you can talk.
This essay on Bruce Schneier's site highlights one of the chief weaknesses of the one-time pad: the key distribution problem. You have to figure out how to get your friend's CD to him without being intercepted. You also have to be sure that the computer that generated the CD's wasn't compromised; someone spying on your machine could just log what audio file you used, copy it, and generate their own key CD.
Considering that a CD can only hold around 700MB (for a standard audio CD), I would say the key space is small enough that even if an attacker doesn't know your position choosing scheme (your description of the system states that the position is part of the message, so I'm being generous here), it should be possible to brute force the message if he somehow gets access to the key.
Another problem is: you may suspect that you are being watched or the system is compromised, but your buddy may not. How do you communicate that information to your friend, especially if you aren't supposed to be in contact with them in the first place?
If the attacker has your key CD, he could send an encrypted message stating that you (the legitimate user) are the attacker? Then who would your buddy believe?
The benefit of public-key cryptography is that it limits the amount of data that needs to be shared in order to communicate. The keys used for encryption never leave the possession of the person doing the encryption. It is also relatively simple to generate new keys.
Of course, man-in-the-middle attacks can still happen. But if you can establish the first public keys that you and your friend will use in a secure manner (e.g. face-to-face meeting), subsequent public keys can be encrypted using the last trusted key, or by using other key sharing schemes.
Another feature that I haven't seen on this thread is that FireFox can also highlight all matching results for your search term in your document. This may help a bit with long documents and accidentally losing your place.
As I think about it, a cool feature might be to add a bar like on the side of the page that displays little graphical jump points. The Eclipse IDE has this for various code editors; when you run a search it places little colored boxes in a bar next to the sidebar that indicates the matches. If you scroll the thumb of the scrollbar to one of the boxes you'll see one of the results in your window. You can also click on a box to jump to it. It's a little hard to explain, but if you get a chance to use it, it's very cool.
I think the issue really is, in the analog world, I could tape every episode of a TV series that I wanted and keep them as long as the tape lasted. I also could record every football game I was interested in and watch them when I wanted. Some games, like the Patriot's snow bowl, I might want to watch several times or edit together with all the moments of their Super Bowl year. With the advent of CD burners and VCDs I could even convert them to digital format and save some shelf space.
I know the argument about digital: every copy made is a perfect copy, indistinguisable from the original. In the analog world, I could just keep making copies of my original tape recording and only suffer 1 generational fall-off.
I'm not interested in taping movies off of PPV and then charging other people to show them. But I would like to be able to tape Game 4 of the World Series and send it to my grandmother. I might want to show friends a tape of the playoff game I went to where it was 20 below zero. Is the NFL really hurt by that?
The old joke is that nobody can figure out how to set the clock on their VCRs. Yet we still can record using VCRs even though some people don't use that functionality.
Want to stop piracy, MPAA, et. al.? Bust people who use mass duplicators and sell bootleg DVD's and CD's on street corners. Or look to your own people. How many people do you figure get to see a movie before its official release?
People who taped movies off of TV still bought commercial tapes and DVD's. The quality was usually better because the transfers were made off of the master copies and the tapes could be sized to accomodate a full standard play version and no more. DVD's can optimize bitrates and provide additional discs. The content producers can also provide extras that you might not get in an OTA broadcast.
Consumers are limited by compression used in broadcast, compression used by the Tivo to store files, and the expense involved to buy enough media or have enough storage to store content in at a desired quality level. Those prices may drop, but video files haven't been getting much smaller, especially with HD-quality video. Consumer writable DVD's and CD's use ink that degrades, as opposed to pressed plastic.
Also consider that the piracy loss numbers that the various associations throw out are frequently exposed as over-blown. Frequently, piracy numbers are followed by a report of record profits. I don't think my making a mix CD for a road trip or ripping DVD's to a portable video player is hurting the content producers all that much.
Accepting degraded functionality only makes it okay for the content distributors to take more capabilities away from you that you used to have. How long until you have to buy the right to Tivo an individual series? Or each episode in a series? Or not be able to timeshift a series at all? And all because you can now get cool sounds out of 6 speakers and can see every pore in Uma Thurman's skin.
You know pinkkitty5555 too? She told me I was the only one she chatted with 'that way'!
I feel so.. betrayed.
That's a really great analysis. It reminds me a little of the idea (and I'm probably not articulating this correctly), that we can't truly understand the universe because we exist inside it and we think in terms of it.
So to see Stewart's points in the manner you've presented shows that his points aren't really a lot deeper than what you normally get on Crossfire. It also shows that he is as much a creature of media as Begala and Carlson are. Perhaps this is as high a critique as we can expect to get from the medium.
Is there a way that we can appreciate and understand Begala and Carlson's views than the format they are currently using? Does that make Crossfire a futile exercise? I wish I had an answer to those questions myself.
I checked IMDB and I can't find the serious news show that Jon Stewart tried before. If you can supply the name of it, I'm certainly willing to give you the point on that one.
In any case, I think it is perfectly valid for Stewart to take the news outlets to task for not doing their job. Having now see the show (my previous post was after reading the transcript), I agree that he didn't really rip them a new one, though I think he scored some points. He is a citizen of this country and a viewer of the program. He is entitled to his opinion and happens to have the renown to espouse it in a very public forum.
Every time I see a post like this, I am reminded about the book the Diamond Age by Stephenson. In that book, the leader of the Victorian enclave defends their way of life. He states that the biggest sin in the 20th and 21st centuries was hypocrisy.
He points out that hypocrisy isn't necessarily the worst evil. We never live in the best of all possible worlds, but we always strive to make it better. Just because we don't live to our ideals doesn't mean the ideals are bad or that we shouldn't try to be better.
How many people buy CD's from RIAA members even when they condemn the RIAA on this site? The truth is, even if the policies of that organization are bad, some of their members do put out good music. The rules say that if we want to listen to that music, we have to pay for it. So we may not like the RIAA, but until we change the music business, we should live by their rules when we want their music. If we can get their music in another way that we prefer more (iTunes, etc.), then we should do that.
By your argument, you can't post your opinion on Jon Stewart or Crossfire because, as far as I know, you've never done a comedy show OR a news program. Slashdot would certainly get quiet and less interesting to read if that were true.
I don't agree with your post, but I'm glad you posted it since it gave me an outlet to think about these issues and respond. I would be more interested in your opinion on whether you think Stewart's criticisms are valid. By which I mean, is the media doing their job or are they hurting America? Let's talk about what substance there was in his points, rather than his authority to make them.
Excellent post, first off. It is easy to forget that an antagonistic system is necessary. Republicans and Democrats can't agree all the time, otherwise the government moves too quickly in one direction and you get things like the Patriot Act. In effect the two party system would become a one party system.
I want the Republicans to call the Democrats on over-spending, higher taxes, and big government. And I want the Democrats to remind the Republicans that we have civil liberties and that you can't rely on amoral institutions like corporations to always do the right thing.
What I really want is for both parties to remember their positions on those things. Instead, both parties think the answer to problems is to form new government agencies and programs. The Democrats add more taxes, the Republicans make a show of not doing that, but don't slow down the spending either. So the choices are: take home a smaller paycheck, or live with a government that is constantly in debt.
So I think Stewart definitely led with his weakest argument, though perhaps more to bring a little levity in before getting into his reason for being there. If Begala and Carlson started to agree with each other all the time, not only would the show go off the air, but the canary would be singing about our government.
That said, I think he has valid points. At heart, I don't doubt that Crossfire is as much about entertainment as it is about news or politics. Really all news programs are about entertainment. People watch the news in hours when they aren't working; they want to know what is going on, but they don't want to hear Harvard professors presenting long, nuanced arguments.
I guess, in trying to address his weakest argument, I'm forming my own weakest argument. Can we hold the media accountable when they are only giving us what we ask for? The answer I guess, is a dialectic one: the media is giving the people what they want, but the people should be demanding more and the media should be giving the people more, even if they don't demand it.
Which gets into what I think are Stewart's better arguments. Nobody can deny that the political campaigns are major marketing machines with tightly controlled messages. The news media most often reports on the strategies of the campaigns rather than analyzing or presenting information on their actual positions. Political reporting is turning into sports reporting: We can expect Kerry to come on strong on this, because Bush said something on that.
What about what they said? What are the ramifications of the policies they are espousing? We don't get a lot of insight into that, we mostly get reports on what the other side says are the ramifications. Reporting doesn't mean finding out information any more, it means being a mouthpiece for both sides. And Fox News isn't even doing THAT anymore.
There have been many reports that the White House Press Corp is heavily under the thumb of Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. If reporters don't ask the right questions, they aren't heard from that much, if at all. Some may even be asked to leave. I don't really count the Democrats as immune from this. I doubt that the Democrats really want to answer the hard questions either. I expect they will also purposely avoid questions they don't like.
The truth is, the news media has let the American public down. The fact that Stewart is a trusted source of news at all is alarming. He is there to entertain and is very clear about that. Stewart notes that "[t]he show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls." He is on Comedy Central for Bob's sake! I think the show is popular because people recognize the satire of the media that it represents and they trust that more than the 'serious' news outlets.
Begala and Carlson attacked Stewart for not attacking Kerry, and I think Stewart's defense is perfect: it is not his job to do that. It's Begala and Carlson's job, and they don't really do it. They address the surface. If
I think what they are missing with the OQO is not providing a more capable dock. Why couldn't they put more smarts into the cradle? Add another processor, better graphics, and more RAM into the cradle. When it is undocked, the OQO could act like a more powerful PDA-like device.... pretty much like it is now.
When docked, however, it could use its on-board processor along with the dock's processor and add the dock's RAM to the pool of RAM available. A large hard disk could be in the cradle and a smaller disk could be in the unit. When you connected the palmtop to it, the hard drives could be sync'ed up seamlessly. Maybe the home directory is always on the palmtop, but the applications are in the base. Or the palmtop acts like a cache for active data.
What would be even cooler would be proximity detection. When the OQO is close to the main unit, it might off-load some work to it... it could use a faster Gigabit ethernet connection on the dock and act like a dumb terminal until it got out of range of the Bluetooth or WiFi. It could save files to the dock's disk until the transfer rate got too low and would then store data locally. It might be neat to start a movie in the DVD drive on the dock, and then undock to sit somewhere else or finish the movie on the train.
There would be a lot of technical challenges to doing all of those things, but I think the base idea is sound. When you are stationary, take advantage of that to include heavier, more capable hardware. When you are mobile, degrade functionality accordingly.
Hmm.. seems like a concrete example of what Terry Pratchett calls 'anti-crime' like: breaking-and-decorating.
One of the benefits listed in the parent's link are:
Same-day package delivery
Umm... are they serious? I can just see a UPS spacecraft dropping into my front lawn, leaving a slip saying they couldn't deliver since no one was home, and blasting off again.
I think a few video stores carry that already.
Oh.
You mean the Mel Brooks movie.
Nevermind.
*whistles nonchalantly*
For some reason, when ever I see Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, I keep mentally transmuting it into Perl Sensitive Sunglasses. Which, considering some of the Perl I've seen, would be pretty useful.
Not trolling here, just sharing my mental state. I love you Perl guys, really. And your poetry. It's full of delightful visual imagery and appealing metaphors underlying this and highlighting the other and developing the theme.... oh never mind. Where's the nearest airlock?
1. Pick a popular Internet technology
2. Attach Google's name to it.
3. Profit!!!
Here are a few:
If Google made a MMORPG it would rule the earth!
If Google made a Linux distribution with Spotlight-like search, it would rule the earth!
If Google let me host all my MP3's it would rule the earth!
Seriously though, it might be interesting to have all of my IM history searchable, but I mostly use it for one-off conversations about things of limited importance.
Besides, as general benevolent as Google seems to be, do we really want to route sensitive messages through a central place? Especially with the recent Slashdot articles about VOIP being required to support wire taps. Do we want adwords showing up keyed off of our IM conversations? How could we secure such a system?