The problem is that the present standard is all wrapped up in the copyright problems, and anything being pushed by the RIAA/MPAA folks will be just as bad. The reason I'm suggesting another standard is to get out from under their thumbs.
It would be really nice to have a drive that would hold gigabytes, and no nonsense about "its crippled and you'll go to jail if you fix it". I agree with you about too many standards, but I think we're already past the point of no return for the DVD. That article lists four major standards before this latest split, which seems (when I read between the lines) to be intended to keep us from making professional content. And that is what the DVD problems are all about: keeping the entertainment industry's stranglehold on distribution, as that felow Valenti argued so eloquently in the intervi ew earlier.
To ensure that prospective manufacturers aren't scared away by possible lawsuits, we should stay away from the movie industry's pet format. Think about the problems we're having getting cheap, portable MP3 players. They seem to come from fear of lawsuits, not just technical problems.
We wouldn't have to write new formats, unless we just weren't satisfied with the old. If we could just buy something like a Jazz disk that held 10 gigs for less than 20 bucks, we could use JPEG and MP3 or whatever to put stuff on it.
is some sort of open hardware storage standard, NOT linked to movies/music/copyrighted-stuff. It seems that all of these problems and delays in high-capacity removable media are caused by copyright problems, as the entertainment monopolists try to keep their monopoly profits.
I suspect that if some bright, cluefull outfit with a big research budget (maybe IBM?) were to bring out a 10Gbyte removable-media drive which wasn't too high priced, it would really sell. Once folks start keeping their home movies on these, using whatever format is handy, they'll sell like hotcakes. Once the hardware is out there, I think its just a matter of time before someone in the entertainment industry breaks ranks and starts selling their content on the new media. It might be old stooges movies, at first, but once someone starts making money there, the rest of the industry would have to follow, just as they've had to sell CD's even after CD-R's and MP3's came along.
So, we need to let it be known to manufacturers that we want really BIG removable-media drives, and we need to work on some open-source standard ways to put video on them, so us folks at home can lead the way.
Yes, I have gone there (your link is broken, by the way; here's one that works: blizzard.net). I don't see anything wrong with it. They certainly aren't sullying the good name of blizzard.anybody.
Blizzard.net certainly do seem to be trying to make money, and I don't see anything wrong with that. This looks neither offensive nor immoral, nor even fattening. I see no reason why any company named blizzard could legitimately object to this use of this name. It doesn't interfere with their business, won't confuse customers, and won't defame them.
This seems to me to be another case of greedy suits run amuk. I do see your point about Microsoft. If Bill Gates was trying to screw up a small software house by setting up a similar domain name, we would certainly be outraged, but that isn't the case here. We would also be outraged if Miserysoft tried to hijack the domain name Microsoft.net, run by a harmless provider of email services. That seems to be a closer parallel to this case, so far.
Does anyone know any hard facts about this? Please let us know.
Your memory must be fading in your old age, Corporal. In the first war, you were on the Western front, and in the second, you never made it to any front. I guess nostalgia isn't what it was in your day, eh?
Good advice, though, especially about winter. I'll be looking forward to more of it.
No, there won't be any lawsuits, at least not from RIAA et al. This is a very crippled device, according to a review linked here on Slashdot yesterday. The gist of it is that this uses the new, rip-off-enriched SDMI technology, which means that while you may own the hardware, Sony reserves the right to later cripple the software so that you can't use it. See the review here:
http://members.home.com/timruss/musicclip.html
Yes, it's neat, but let's don't encourage the crooks in the music industry by buying these things. Hold out for MP3 players, or we may never get any.
Have you run this by a lawyer? Does this mean that if I post something, we can each grant (separate) third parties an exclusive license to the same thing? Whoops!
It seems like a good thing, but I hope that it's spelled out in a little more detail somewhere.
answer provided, of course.
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 1
This is a problem in combinitorics, they said. Generating all possible combinations is trivial, though dull. The difficult question is: which of the 2^10 combinations are solutions? That's where the massive parallelism in the testtube comes in, I gather. I don't understand exactly how it works, but apparently his RNA winnows out the good answers and tosses(most of) the bad. That doesn't seem easy.
I submitted this late last week, when I found it mentioned on Ars Technica. I guess that sounds like sour grapes because it is. Anyway, here are some additional links:
First, the principle researcher's lab page. FRS 120 looks particularly interesting. The course outline has lots of neat links.
http://www.princeton.edu/~lfl/
Then her homepage, with information on her work, in this area and others:
We are none of us lawyers, so clarification from someone who is a lawyer would be helpfull. I'm no lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt.
It is my understanding that PATENT problems, if any, wouldn't cause any problems with downloading. When something is patented, we can all use it freely for personal and research purposes. We must license a patented invention if we want to profit by it. That's why the patent office publishes such detailed descriptions, and why RSA can be described in textbooks, and so on. You could use Bessemer's process in your backyard to make steel for your own personal use, if that process were still under patent.
Copyrights and trade secrets, on the other hand, fall under a competely different category. Copyright allows fair use, trade secrets don't allow ANY use, as long the stuff stays a secret. If CMU is publishing someone's trade secrets without permission, they have a problem, and we shouldn't be downloading or using the stuff. Otherwise, I think that it's probably ok for us to look and learn.
Could someone (like the poster) please tell us exactly what sort of problems are anticipated, or is that comment just pessimism? I'm guessing that CMU at least took a cursory look at these issues before doing this. Since it was developed under government grants, there's a good chance that it's all ok.
How about a translator program? c2hindi to change the keywords in c-code to Hindi equivalents, and hindi2c to take c-code written using those Hindi equivalents and translate back to standard c. Table-driven, of course, so it could be Inuit-2-c or Urdu-2-c just as quickly and easily.
This would internationalize the functional part of the source code quickly and easily, and let the international version stay just hours behind the english version. Translating the comments would be many orders of magnitude harder, so this isn't a complete solution, but at least someone who is literate in Hindi could look at the source code and get a clue about what's going on.
This might be a great project for the Linux internationalization effort, since it might simplify teaching programming. You wouldn't have to learn english to learn c, and you wouldn't have to make some strange, non-standard language for non-english speakers.
Do any programmers from non-english-speaking countries have any thoughts on this?
Any Chinese who aren't "fine with it" in public will be murdered, in public, by their government. Therefore, the intelligent Chinese ARE "fine with it". The rest are dead. They've let their government have a monopoly on the means of violence. That's why Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Rosevelt, Pol Pot, Castro, the several Kennedys, Idi Amin, and on and on have all made gun control a top priority. It's a necessary first step to making sure that the citizens are "fine with" the next steps. Australia has disarmed their people in the last few years, now internet censorship, I wonder what's next for them?
I'm not an artist. But I am an economist. The reason that record companies were able to prosper for so many years it that they provided a valuable service to consumers: they filtered out a lot of garbage. Magazines were expensive, too, and information was generally hard to come by. You couldn't easily get trustworthy opinions about an artist before you bought the cylinder or the 45 or the lp. Records were necessarily expensive, to make and to distribute, so folks couldn't buy and try and toss if bad.
Today, the situation has changed. Anyone can set up a site, load his music, and distribute it to the entire world, at (roughly) no marginal cost. It's equally easy for a music expert to set up a site with links to good stuff, for advertising bucks or just personal satisfaction. Slashdot is a non-musical example of this sort of site.
If an artist is really good, he should be able to build a reputation just as easily under the new system as under the old. Anyone who has a good reputation will be able to charge for his work, under either system. Under the new system, I think that neither the artist nor the consumer needs the middleman. This means much lower prices. Given the same technology, piracy will be a SMALLER problem under the new system, since the cost of content and incentive to pirate will be smaller.
It's true that the average band won't be able to make any significant bucks under the new system. My cousin, who IS a musician, found that's true under the old system too. The difference between old and new is that my cousin's band never got the chance to be pirated! They didn't even get the satisfaction of knowing that a million people had heard them via pirate copies. I should ask him whether that's good or bad, I suppose.
I think that once we have a standard way for artists to distribute music to the masses themselves, we'll all (except RIAA) be at least as well off. I think that MP3 will be there when I can get an MP3 walkman as cheaply as a CD walkman.
Driven by engineers, eh? Like Fujitsu and Ericcson and your-favorite-example-here (all huge names in personal computing in the US, right?)? In the past, that has usually meant a superior product, which flopped on the market. When I think of a personal computer company which is marketing driven, I think of Microsoft, and possibly Intel.
I'm not sure that a product in a market with network externalities can make it without placing marketing uber alles. It'll be fascinating to watch.
Remember that this library is funded with tax dollars. That means that you are forcing people to pay for whatever goes on there, even if they don't like it. That's pretty heavy-handed, even though pretty common. I don't think that it's unreasonable for those local folks to put some limits on what is allowed IN THE LIBRARY. I don't think that anyone is suggesting that you should censor the internet, just that you should limit what sort of thing the folks in the area are forced to pay for. Again, this isn't a limit on what you can do with your own, personal resources, just a limit on what you can do with something provided by someone else.
About the American Library Association: I have never heard them say that children should be forced to look at pornography. They are adamant that NO ONE, including the child's parents, should be allowed to keep them from seeing it. That's insane. My understanding of the ALA's view is that censorship is 'failure to buy everything available'. I'm not sure how they distinguish between a limited budget and censorship, if they do. This is along the lines of saying 'not forcing people to pay for art is censoring the arts'.
By the way, I think that bonds is a great keyword to search on if you want nasty porn. Much better than hardcore, nude, I bet. A filter that let me search for info on securities without getting that garbage could be handy. Unfortunately, no automated filter can be perfect. Those filters, even if they're on there, are no substitute for parental supervision and control.
I'm not surprised to hear that you don't have much of a porn problem there. If you did, I don't think that this proposal would cure it. I do think that if the locals want to, they should implement a 'no porn for minors' policy, or a 'no porn at all policy', or even a 'mandatory porn for all users' policy. It's their money. If you don't want these decisions made political, make the library private.
I have an inspiron 3200. I have had the power supply and floppy drive die. Each time, Dell airfreighted me a replacement, no questions asked. I just had to slap the return label on the box and ship back the old part. The extended warrenty is GREAT.
Unfortunately, the support for linux is not retroactive! They have nothing for my older machine. This is true for software and hardware alike. I think one should NOT buy Dell if upgrading is part of your plan; providing an upgrade for older machines doesn't seem to be part of their plan.
and have been happy with them. I have what they call a SchwabOne account: free checking, debit card available (debit cards are generally a BAD idea), mutual fund supermarket, full brokerage services, and so on. This brokerage account is our only 'bank' account. They have fairly good services, and give us everything we want. The only problem for young students is that this requires a $5000 US minimum. I suggest steering clear of commercial banks unless you have a specific need for the services they provide, such as international money transfers, and so on. We need such services occasionally, and go to a commercial bank to pay for them. God luck,and shop around. Nels
Just from idle curiosity, WHY don't you want to disclose what you earn? Even if I knew your name and salary, what difference would it make to you? Again, I'm not curious about your salary, but about your reason for not telling us. Nels
Let's assume that no-one is trying to give a false reading. Let's also assume that violent kids are one in a million. Finally let's assume that the test catches 95% of the really violent ones, but gives a false positive on 10% of the not violent kids. Then the probability that some random kid is _NOT_ really violent, given that his sscore says he is, is (probability of false positive)/((probability of true positive)+(probability of false positive)) = ((1-10^-6)(0.1))/((1-10^-6)(0.1)+(0.95(10^-6))) = 0.9999905, which is pretty close to a sure thing. (That was Bayes theorem in action.) What's driving that result, that almost all positives will be false positives, is the rarity of true positives. It's my assumption that really violent kids are one in a million that makes it work, not the assumption about 10% false positives. Any reasonable numbers in there will give qualitatively similar results. How many school principals do you think would say that the probability that some random kid with a failing score is really nonviolent is only 10%, just because the principal doesn't understand conditional probability? I think that calculation above suggests that if a kid fails the test, someone should sit him down and explain that it's not nice to try to fool us. Any other reaction seems unjustifiable _if_based_on_this_test_alone_.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the present standard is all wrapped up in the copyright problems, and anything being pushed by the RIAA/MPAA folks will be just as bad. The reason I'm suggesting another standard is to get out from under their thumbs.
It would be really nice to have a drive that would hold gigabytes, and no nonsense about "its crippled and you'll go to jail if you fix it". I agree with you about too many standards, but I think we're already past the point of no return for the DVD. That article lists four major standards before this latest split, which seems (when I read between the lines) to be intended to keep us from making professional content. And that is what the DVD problems are all about: keeping the entertainment industry's stranglehold on distribution, as that felow Valenti argued so eloquently in the intervi ew earlier.
To ensure that prospective manufacturers aren't scared away by possible lawsuits, we should stay away from the movie industry's pet format. Think about the problems we're having getting cheap, portable MP3 players. They seem to come from fear of lawsuits, not just technical problems.
We wouldn't have to write new formats, unless we just weren't satisfied with the old. If we could just buy something like a Jazz disk that held 10 gigs for less than 20 bucks, we could use JPEG and MP3 or whatever to put stuff on it.
is some sort of open hardware storage standard, NOT linked to movies/music/copyrighted-stuff. It seems that all of these problems and delays in high-capacity removable media are caused by copyright problems, as the entertainment monopolists try to keep their monopoly profits.
I suspect that if some bright, cluefull outfit with a big research budget (maybe IBM?) were to bring out a 10Gbyte removable-media drive which wasn't too high priced, it would really sell. Once folks start keeping their home movies on these, using whatever format is handy, they'll sell like hotcakes. Once the hardware is out there, I think its just a matter of time before someone in the entertainment industry breaks ranks and starts selling their content on the new media. It might be old stooges movies, at first, but once someone starts making money there, the rest of the industry would have to follow, just as they've had to sell CD's even after CD-R's and MP3's came along.
So, we need to let it be known to manufacturers that we want really BIG removable-media drives, and we need to work on some open-source standard ways to put video on them, so us folks at home can lead the way.
Blizzard.net certainly do seem to be trying to make money, and I don't see anything wrong with that. This looks neither offensive nor immoral, nor even fattening. I see no reason why any company named blizzard could legitimately object to this use of this name. It doesn't interfere with their business, won't confuse customers, and won't defame them.
This seems to me to be another case of greedy suits run amuk. I do see your point about Microsoft. If Bill Gates was trying to screw up a small software house by setting up a similar domain name, we would certainly be outraged, but that isn't the case here. We would also be outraged if Miserysoft tried to hijack the domain name Microsoft.net, run by a harmless provider of email services. That seems to be a closer parallel to this case, so far.
Does anyone know any hard facts about this? Please let us know.
Your memory must be fading in your old age, Corporal. In the first war, you were on the Western front, and in the second, you never made it to any front. I guess nostalgia isn't what it was in your day, eh?
Good advice, though, especially about winter. I'll be looking forward to more of it.
No, there won't be any lawsuits, at least not from RIAA et al. This is a very crippled device, according to a review linked here on Slashdot yesterday. The gist of it is that this uses the new, rip-off-enriched SDMI technology, which means that while you may own the hardware, Sony reserves the right to later cripple the software so that you can't use it. See the review here:
http://members.home.com/timruss/musicclip.html
Yes, it's neat, but let's don't encourage the crooks in the music industry by buying these things. Hold out for MP3 players, or we may never get any.
Have you run this by a lawyer? Does this mean that if I post something, we can each grant (separate) third parties an exclusive license to the same thing? Whoops!
It seems like a good thing, but I hope that it's spelled out in a little more detail somewhere.
This is a problem in combinitorics, they said. Generating all possible combinations is trivial, though dull. The difficult question is: which of the 2^10 combinations are solutions? That's where the massive parallelism in the testtube comes in, I gather. I don't understand exactly how it works, but apparently his RNA winnows out the good answers and tosses(most of) the bad. That doesn't seem easy.
I submitted this late last week, when I found it mentioned on Ars Technica. I guess that sounds like sour grapes because it is. Anyway, here are some additional links:
g e/landweber.html
P NAS.pdf
First, the principle researcher's lab page. FRS 120 looks particularly interesting. The course outline has lots of neat links.
http://www.princeton.edu/~lfl/
Then her homepage, with information on her work, in this area and others:
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/research/fellowatlar
and a page with links to a LOT of papers, in this area and others:
http://www.princeton.edu/~lfl/research.html
Finally, here is the particular paper which the eetimes article is based on (I think):
ftp://rnaworld.princeton.edu/pub/export/Knights
I don't do html, so just cut'em and paste'em.
Nels
We are none of us lawyers, so clarification from someone who is a lawyer would be helpfull. I'm no lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt.
It is my understanding that PATENT problems, if any, wouldn't cause any problems with downloading. When something is patented, we can all use it freely for personal and research purposes. We must license a patented invention if we want to profit by it. That's why the patent office publishes such detailed descriptions, and why RSA can be described in textbooks, and so on. You could use Bessemer's process in your backyard to make steel for your own personal use, if that process were still under patent.
Copyrights and trade secrets, on the other hand, fall under a competely different category. Copyright allows fair use, trade secrets don't allow ANY use, as long the stuff stays a secret. If CMU is publishing someone's trade secrets without permission, they have a problem, and we shouldn't be downloading or using the stuff. Otherwise, I think that it's probably ok for us to look and learn.
Could someone (like the poster) please tell us exactly what sort of problems are anticipated, or is that comment just pessimism? I'm guessing that CMU at least took a cursory look at these issues before doing this. Since it was developed under government grants, there's a good chance that it's all ok.
How about a translator program? c2hindi to change the keywords in c-code to Hindi equivalents, and hindi2c to take c-code written using those Hindi equivalents and translate back to standard c. Table-driven, of course, so it could be Inuit-2-c or Urdu-2-c just as quickly and easily.
This would internationalize the functional part of the source code quickly and easily, and let the international version stay just hours behind the english version. Translating the comments would be many orders of magnitude harder, so this isn't a complete solution, but at least someone who is literate in Hindi could look at the source code and get a clue about what's going on.
This might be a great project for the Linux internationalization effort, since it might simplify teaching programming. You wouldn't have to learn english to learn c, and you wouldn't have to make some strange, non-standard language for non-english speakers.
Do any programmers from non-english-speaking countries have any thoughts on this?
Nels
Any Chinese who aren't "fine with it" in public will be murdered, in public, by their government. Therefore, the intelligent Chinese ARE "fine with it". The rest are dead. They've let their government have a monopoly on the means of violence. That's why Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Rosevelt, Pol Pot, Castro, the several Kennedys, Idi Amin, and on and on have all made gun control a top priority. It's a necessary first step to making sure that the citizens are "fine with" the next steps. Australia has disarmed their people in the last few years, now internet censorship, I wonder what's next for them?
I'm not an artist. But I am an economist. The reason that record companies were able to prosper for so many years it that they provided a valuable service to consumers: they filtered out a lot of garbage. Magazines were expensive, too, and information was generally hard to come by. You couldn't easily get trustworthy opinions about an artist before you bought the cylinder or the 45 or the lp. Records were necessarily expensive, to make and to distribute, so folks couldn't buy and try and toss if bad.
Today, the situation has changed. Anyone can set up a site, load his music, and distribute it to the entire world, at (roughly) no marginal cost. It's equally easy for a music expert to set up a site with links to good stuff, for advertising bucks or just personal satisfaction. Slashdot is a non-musical example of this sort of site.
If an artist is really good, he should be able to build a reputation just as easily under the new system as under the old. Anyone who has a good reputation will be able to charge for his work, under either system. Under the new system, I think that neither the artist nor the consumer needs the middleman. This means much lower prices. Given the same technology, piracy will be a SMALLER problem under the new system, since the cost of content and incentive to pirate will be smaller.
It's true that the average band won't be able to make any significant bucks under the new system. My cousin, who IS a musician, found that's true under the old system too. The difference between old and new is that my cousin's band never got the chance to be pirated! They didn't even get the satisfaction of knowing that a million people had heard them via pirate copies. I should ask him whether that's good or bad, I suppose.
I think that once we have a standard way for artists to distribute music to the masses themselves, we'll all (except RIAA) be at least as well off. I think that MP3 will be there when I can get an MP3 walkman as cheaply as a CD walkman.
Nels
Driven by engineers, eh? Like Fujitsu and Ericcson and your-favorite-example-here (all huge names in personal computing in the US, right?)? In the past, that has usually meant a superior product, which flopped on the market. When I think of a personal computer company which is marketing driven, I think of Microsoft, and possibly Intel.
I'm not sure that a product in a market with network externalities can make it without placing marketing uber alles. It'll be fascinating to watch.
Remember that this library is funded with tax dollars. That means that you are forcing people to pay for whatever goes on there, even if they don't like it. That's pretty heavy-handed, even though pretty common. I don't think that it's unreasonable for those local folks to put some limits on what is allowed IN THE LIBRARY. I don't think that anyone is suggesting that you should censor the internet, just that you should limit what sort of thing the folks in the area are forced to pay for. Again, this isn't a limit on what you can do with your own, personal resources, just a limit on what you can do with something provided by someone else.
About the American Library Association: I have never heard them say that children should be forced to look at pornography. They are adamant that NO ONE, including the child's parents, should be allowed to keep them from seeing it. That's insane. My understanding of the ALA's view is that censorship is 'failure to buy everything available'. I'm not sure how they distinguish between a limited budget and censorship, if they do. This is along the lines of saying 'not forcing people to pay for art is censoring the arts'.
By the way, I think that bonds is a great keyword to search on if you want nasty porn. Much better than hardcore, nude, I bet. A filter that let me search for info on securities without getting that garbage could be handy. Unfortunately, no automated filter can be perfect. Those filters, even if they're on there, are no substitute for parental supervision and control.
I'm not surprised to hear that you don't have much of a porn problem there. If you did, I don't think that this proposal would cure it. I do think that if the locals want to, they should implement a 'no porn for minors' policy, or a 'no porn at all policy', or even a 'mandatory porn for all users' policy. It's their money. If you don't want these decisions made political, make the library private.
I have an inspiron 3200. I have had the power supply and floppy drive die. Each time, Dell airfreighted me a replacement, no questions asked. I just had to slap the return label on the box and ship back the old part. The extended warrenty is GREAT.
Unfortunately, the support for linux is not retroactive! They have nothing for my older machine. This is true for software and hardware alike. I think one should NOT buy Dell if upgrading is part of your plan; providing an upgrade for older machines doesn't seem to be part of their plan.
Nels
and have been happy with them. I have what they call a SchwabOne account: free checking, debit card available (debit cards are generally a BAD idea), mutual fund supermarket, full brokerage services, and so on. This brokerage account is our only 'bank' account. They have fairly good services, and give us everything we want. The only problem for young students is that this requires a $5000 US minimum. I suggest steering clear of commercial banks unless you have a specific need for the services they provide, such as international money transfers, and so on. We need such services occasionally, and go to a commercial bank to pay for them.
God luck,and shop around.
Nels
Just from idle curiosity, WHY don't you want to disclose what you earn? Even if I knew your name and salary, what difference would it make to you? Again, I'm not curious about your salary, but about your reason for not telling us.
Nels
Let's assume that no-one is trying to give a false reading. Let's also assume that violent kids are one in a million. Finally let's assume that the test catches 95% of the really violent ones, but gives a false positive on 10% of the not violent kids. Then the probability that some random kid is _NOT_ really violent, given that his sscore says he is, is (probability of false positive)/((probability of true positive)+(probability of false positive)) = ((1-10^-6)(0.1))/((1-10^-6)(0.1)+(0.95(10^-6))) = 0.9999905, which is pretty close to a sure thing. (That was Bayes theorem in action.) What's driving that result, that almost all positives will be false positives, is the rarity of true positives. It's my assumption that really violent kids are one in a million that makes it work, not the assumption about 10% false positives. Any reasonable numbers in there will give qualitatively similar results. How many school principals do you think would say that the probability that some random kid with a failing score is really nonviolent is only 10%, just because the principal doesn't understand conditional probability? I think that calculation above suggests that if a kid fails the test, someone should sit him down and explain that it's not nice to try to fool us. Any other reaction seems unjustifiable _if_based_on_this_test_alone_.