Mmm.. I didn't make my point very clearly. Hadn't had any coffee at the time.
You're absolutely right, but I wasn't implying that the "real" value (i.e. in the millions) would be unaffected by the painting being exposed as a fake - I was saying that it's value to me (i.e. the few thousand I'd be prepared to pay for it, rather than the millions it would get in reality) would be unaffected, because it's still a nice painting, no matter who painted it.
My point is that art is subjective and in my opinion (which this has to be, because it's subjective, but as my opinion is the only one that matters..) saying that art is not as good and/or less valuable purely because it wasn't painted by a famous artist is bollocks. It might be interesting from an academic point of view, but there are any number of things I'd rather computer scientists spent their time researching.
The method... promises to reduce the subjectivity of art assessments made by human experts.
Pointless from a purely art standpoint, albeit potentially highly amusing from the financial standpoint.
Art is subjective. This software might be able to fingerprint an artist's style, but it's up to me/you/us to decide whether a painting is "good".
I can go out, buy a canvas and some paints, come back home and paint something abstract. If it's interesting or pleasing to the eye, I might be able to sell it to a small gallery or at an art fair and even make a profit over the cost of my materials. However, if someone like Damien Hirst does the same thing, it's going to sell for tens of thousands of pounds, purely because of the artist's name.
So, what if this software reveals that the Sunflowers weren't actually painted by Van Gogh? One thing's for sure - the painting would be worth a lot less, even though it's the same painting. The valuations are all artificial.
In general, I kinda like a lot of Monet's paintings. I'll buy a print of one of his "Houses of Parliament" paintings, or "San Giorgio Maggiore at dusk". If the opportunity arose, I wouldn't mind owning one of the originals and I'd even be prepared to shell out quite a few readies for it, because he's a popular artist, lots of people like his paintings and, therefore, other people are going to want to own it as well. So, for argument's sake, let's say I'm prepared to pay up to the equivalent of, say, 4% of my annual salary (before tax), for one of those paintings. That's never going to happen, because original Monets are valued in the millions.
But, the thing is, if it turned out that Monet hadn't painted that painting after all, I'd still be prepared to pay the same amount of money, because it doesn't really matter to me whether it was painted by Monet or by some unknown artist - I still like the painting and that's what it's worth to me as a piece of art.
Locust is a profit-making company. It's in their interests to maintain the status quo, because it provides them with a model for making money.
Locust's Terms and Conditions say include the statement that Locust reserves the right to change price plans or service features at any time if required, yet when Orange exercise the same right, they start kicking and screaming.
There are other mobile phone network operators in the UK - Vodafone, Cellnet, One2One. Why doesn't Locust talk to one of them with a view to switching providers?
I'm sorry, but I don't really see what the big deal is here. Seems to be another case of people wanting something without having to pay for it, both in terms of the disgruntled Locust users, and the people who profit from it.
I've worked on systems used by police and other organisations to catalogue people. They've already got all the classification methods they need for describing people - height, build, hair colour and length...
You get mugged, you walk into a police station to report it. They can sit you down in front of a computer, ask you a bunch of questions about your assailant and bring up mugshots of the people on their database who match that description.
Sounds terrible, doesn't it? Well, one day, I got a call because the system had gone tits-up just as a witness positively identified a man who had carried out a racially-motivated murder. I had no qualms whatsoever about delving in and pulling out the guy's details so they could send a car around to arrest him.
It's not the technology that's at fault when it comes to invasion of privacy - it's the manner in which the technology is used.
*sigh* You guys just don't get this whole quantum thing...
They might hit Radio Shack eventually.. and then again, they might not. Either way, you might be able to buy them, if not in Radio Shack, then somewhere else. Maybe.
You're fucked if they go wrong, though, because you'll take them back to where you might have bought them and they'll say "Did you buy this product here, sir?" and you'll have to say "Well, I might have...", at which point, they'll say, well, it might not be our responsibility...
Y'see, noone thinks about these practical day-to-day issues when they invent new technologies. They just do the press release and noone thinks about the logistics of manufacturing, shipping, stock control ("We might have run out of quantum chips.."), after-sales support, etc.
Well, not unless you start banging two sub-critical pieces of the stuff together in an attempt to start a fire...
Plutonium emits alpha radiation, which can't penetrate the skin - it just feels warm. Ingesting plutonium is a bad idea, or course, but you can quite safely handle the stuff.
Actually, you're probably better off not handling the stuff directly - it oxidises readily, and has a nasty habit of bursting into flame, which is a problem, as water can cause it to explode.
So, what you do, is you encase it in glass. Simple. You could use it instead of a hot water bottle. Never need refilling.;-)
Well, you'd never catch me doing that. I sure as hell wouldn't want to give anyone who intercepted my email the information they require to clone me! The NSA would have a fucking field day!
God, imagine what havoc an Evil Dodger would cause. Or a Minidodger! One eighth my size - a bit to my byte!
D.
Iain Banks as a satirist?
on
The Business
·
· Score: 3
If you do decide to read this book, try doing a bit of reading up on subjects such as the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum, maybe read a bit of Noreena Hertz, etc., beforehand.
I'm not saying anything - it's just food for thought.
Personally I'm all for highly targetted advertising.
Of course, the problem with targetted advertising is that, in order to be able to target you, the advertiser has to know something about you. Presumably, this info will be gathered automatically - e.g. the system will keep track of what films you watch on DVD/cable and if, for example, you watched Clerks, Mallrats and Chasking Amy, it would advertise Dogma to you.
So, where does it end? Supermarkets already use loyalty cards to track what we buy. The credit card companies can look at our accounts to see what we buy and where. Our mobile phones betray our position to the mobile phone companies and their records details who we speak to and when.
You might wonder 'So what if my supermarket, credit card issuer or mobile phone company has this information?' Or whether DoubleClick has data on all my watching, listening, browsing and online shopping habits. Well, to be perfectly honest, the possibility that someone, like a Government, or a cracker, could access this information and use it to profile me, isn't a very alluring prospect.
In Robert A Heinlein's novel, Friday, one of the characters suggests that every individual has a duty to do what they can to disrupt the governments' data-gathering efforts - using cash, paying a little bit too much tax if you can't get away with paying less - anything to disrupt the system.
Otherwise, you're guilty of complicity in violation of individuals' privacy on a massive scale. Worse than that, you're a sheep. And, in the end, sheep get slaughtered.
Patrick McGoohan said it best - I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.
I think Katz does this shit deliberately just to take the piss...
"Hyperreal" is a mathematical term. I'm not going to go into nonstandard analysis and infinitesimals here - those who care can Google.
Let's take a look at the context in which Katz uses the word "hyperreal":
"The state is hyperreal -- it operates like software. It seems stable enough while the power is on and it hasn't run into any major bugs, but interrupt the power supply or corrupt it, and the state falls apart."
"If states are hyperreal, then so are agreements and understandings between nationalist governments."
"The U.S., birthplace of much of the digital revolution and of the idea of the virtual state, doesn't appear either fragile or hyperreal, but Americans are historically narcissistic and ignorant of other countries, blithely imposing their own traditions, values and practices on other parts of the world."
Finally, he instructs us to "Talk about hyperreal."
At no point does his use of the word make any sense. He does not define it directly, and it's real meaning does not match the context in which he has used it.
I therefore conclude that Katz has coined this word (not realising that it is already in use) as a means of sounding knowledgable.
Basically, he's wanking (as defined by Bobby Shaftoe in Cryptonomicon). I wish I had time to sit around, reading obscure books about the Internet, theorising, philosophising, wanking and inventing new words, but I'm too fucking busy dealing with the real world, earning shitloads of money.
Yes there would be a small problem, no more bugs in the software. MS$ would be out of business.
That's not really what I was thinking about. But I'll refrain from saying anything further, lest anyone get any ideas...
I recently read (I think in Forbes or/.) about fuzzy logic being used as a replacement, for profiling new job applicants. This I feel is unfair.
My attitude is that, companies have the right to choose their own recruitment/selection mechanism. As long as it's not illegal (e.g. if ($applicant's_gender = "female") then reject $applicant; elsif ($applicant's_sexual_orientation = "homosexual") then reject $applicant; elsif ($applicant's skin colour != "white") then reject $applicant; fi), then it's up to them how they recruit.
If they're stupid enough to employ a system that's going to automatically reject all the interesting, creative, talented people just because they didn't finish their degrees or have a gap in their work history because they went trekking in Nepal for six months, then it's probably not going to be the sort of place I want to work at anyway - after all, would you want to work with a bunch of Stepford graduates?
Think of it like this - if they're not smart enough to realise how fucking good you are, then they're not worth working for.;-)
Letting a computer evolve it's own algorithms and reprogram it's own hardware to run those algorithms isn't that big a deal. It's not it's going to suddenly sprout legs, grow a soldering iron and McGuyver the coffee-pot into a flamethrower with which to kill everything in sight.
Now, if you were to take these sort of genetic algorithms in a purely software form, give them networking libraries to enable peer-to-peer communications and propogation throughout a network, and subscribed them to Bugtraq, and you might have a problem.;-)
Fucking around with genetics is different. The risks are infinitely greater, due to the scope a rogue genetically-engineered organism has, when compared with a deskbound FPGA. Do a search for Monsanto on Slashdot. Go read Zodiac by Neal Stephenson. Open your mind and consider the possibilities, potential and danger.
Well, they do say that a fool and his money are easily-parted...
D.
What about Open Exams and Qualifications?
on
Open Courses at MIT
·
· Score: 2
Putting the coursework online for free is fantastic. The next logical step would be to publish curricula and allow anyone who wants to take exams to obtain MIT-approved qualifications.
Obviously this sort of thing couldn't be free, as there would be costs involved in exam locations, supervision and marking, but I bet it would be popular.
Two problems, however.
Firstly, I bet that MIT's management would fear that something like this would dilute the perceived quality and value of MIT degrees, but at the end of the day, if the Open students are taking the same exams and being marked by the same criteria, as the "real" MIT students, then there's no real difference.
Secondly, tutorials, labs, workshops and ongoing/coursework assessment are being used more and more in educational institutions. However, the UK's Open University holds tutorials in countries other than the UK, so there's no reason why MIT couldn't follow suit.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right, but I wasn't implying that the "real" value (i.e. in the millions) would be unaffected by the painting being exposed as a fake - I was saying that it's value to me (i.e. the few thousand I'd be prepared to pay for it, rather than the millions it would get in reality) would be unaffected, because it's still a nice painting, no matter who painted it.
My point is that art is subjective and in my opinion (which this has to be, because it's subjective, but as my opinion is the only one that matters..) saying that art is not as good and/or less valuable purely because it wasn't painted by a famous artist is bollocks. It might be interesting from an academic point of view, but there are any number of things I'd rather computer scientists spent their time researching.
D.
Art is subjective. This software might be able to fingerprint an artist's style, but it's up to me/you/us to decide whether a painting is "good".
I can go out, buy a canvas and some paints, come back home and paint something abstract. If it's interesting or pleasing to the eye, I might be able to sell it to a small gallery or at an art fair and even make a profit over the cost of my materials. However, if someone like Damien Hirst does the same thing, it's going to sell for tens of thousands of pounds, purely because of the artist's name.
So, what if this software reveals that the Sunflowers weren't actually painted by Van Gogh? One thing's for sure - the painting would be worth a lot less, even though it's the same painting. The valuations are all artificial.
In general, I kinda like a lot of Monet's paintings. I'll buy a print of one of his "Houses of Parliament" paintings, or "San Giorgio Maggiore at dusk". If the opportunity arose, I wouldn't mind owning one of the originals and I'd even be prepared to shell out quite a few readies for it, because he's a popular artist, lots of people like his paintings and, therefore, other people are going to want to own it as well. So, for argument's sake, let's say I'm prepared to pay up to the equivalent of, say, 4% of my annual salary (before tax), for one of those paintings. That's never going to happen, because original Monets are valued in the millions.
But, the thing is, if it turned out that Monet hadn't painted that painting after all, I'd still be prepared to pay the same amount of money, because it doesn't really matter to me whether it was painted by Monet or by some unknown artist - I still like the painting and that's what it's worth to me as a piece of art.
D.
Your leader is a dangerous crazy with access to WMDs.
D.
Locust is a profit-making company. It's in their interests to maintain the status quo, because it provides them with a model for making money.
Locust's Terms and Conditions say include the statement that Locust reserves the right to change price plans or service features at any time if required, yet when Orange exercise the same right, they start kicking and screaming.
There are other mobile phone network operators in the UK - Vodafone, Cellnet, One2One. Why doesn't Locust talk to one of them with a view to switching providers?
I'm sorry, but I don't really see what the big deal is here. Seems to be another case of people wanting something without having to pay for it, both in terms of the disgruntled Locust users, and the people who profit from it.
Interesting side effect of this is that these communications can't be intercepted, unlike RF/microwave broadcasts.
D.
You think you already aren't?
I've worked on systems used by police and other organisations to catalogue people. They've already got all the classification methods they need for describing people - height, build, hair colour and length...
You get mugged, you walk into a police station to report it. They can sit you down in front of a computer, ask you a bunch of questions about your assailant and bring up mugshots of the people on their database who match that description.
Sounds terrible, doesn't it? Well, one day, I got a call because the system had gone tits-up just as a witness positively identified a man who had carried out a racially-motivated murder. I had no qualms whatsoever about delving in and pulling out the guy's details so they could send a car around to arrest him.
It's not the technology that's at fault when it comes to invasion of privacy - it's the manner in which the technology is used.
Jack
Well, it just goes to show how stupid you are, then, doesn't it? D.