It was John Koza.
He was/is using Genetic Programming to evolve algorithms. I haven't seen if he has had any notable successes recently, but I doubt it. Evolving anything is tricky, much less evolving an algorithm which needs to be absolutely correct.
You found the paper, but you didn't look at any of the followup research.
Like this paper which details an experiment using an external clock and a wide variation in temperatures to evolve the same sort of circuit that Adrian evolved in his thesis paper.
And a complete list of his publications can be found here.
If you've bothered to read any of his work, you'd quickly realize that Adrian is interested in how evolution can use certain properties of the physical substrate in these chips to it's advantage. It's not looking to see if evolutionary type strategies can evolve something a human could build, but looking at how they can build things no human could imagine building.
DISCLAIMER: I am currently a Master's student at the University of Sussex, and had Adrian as a lecturer this past semester. However, I am in no way involved in his research, my interests lie in the software side of genetic algorithms.
Personally I think innovation comes in small steps. Examples:
I can disallow all javascript popups in my web-browser(Konqueror) with a single checkbox, or I can have it ask me before doing so. This is innovative to me because it gives power to me as a user and it stops me from having to chase never-ending popup boxes when surfing. A small detail but one that makes a huge amount of difference in the enjoyment of my computer.
I can browse the MP3 files on my Creative Jukebox using my filemanager (once again, Konqueror) without having to deal with Creative's software interface. This is innovative to me because it's one less interface I have to learn.
Furthermore, I think your post really isn't all that innovative. You bring a tired old argument against open source without adding anthing more to it in the way of evidence or wit.
Where in my post did I say that I believed in a "hardcore leftist lifestyle"? The point of the original post is that any "rights" you have to "property" are defined by the society in which you live. No all-knowing, all-mighty god came down from the heavens and said - "you have the right to make money off your property." It is a construct of humans, simply put. The value of property is based on the perspective of the buyer and the seller.
What Apple, as well as the entertainment business, is trying to do is raise the value of their product through artificial means - by using the legal system to protect their business. Is that right or is that wrong? Do we, as citizens, have a right to decide that, or do we simply allow large corporations to arbitrarily decide the value of their own products?
In the bigger picture, should we focus on the market process, or should we focus on the social problems. Somewhere between the two extremes is a balance point. This is what we need to find to move forward in society. There are bigger concerns then who owns what.
While, I grant you that my original post did not convey that well, I take offense to the fact that you attacked me, rather then my arguments.
The current state of economics says that I must have a computer to work, so I own a computer. The current marketplace says that I must own music, so I own music. The weather says that I must keep a roof over my head, so I have an apartment.
I am a child of this world, yes, I freely admit that, but does that mean that I cannot dream of a better one?
Let me preface this with saying that there are things in this world that are more important then money.
Now, to address your arguments:
No Direction: Just because there is a "focus group" means that a product is good. The focus group mentality has given us such products as "The Backstreet Boys" and "New Coke".
No Money: Hmmm... Linus got paid to develop the first versions of Linux? RMS got paid to develop the GNU tools? I bet fewer then 30% of open source programmers get paid to write the software they have released. Yet, for some strange reason people still program and release it as open source.
A mistaken belief to the ability of users: Yes, not all users are created equal. I have more ability to use my computer then most people out there. Why should I be forced to use a simplistic and inflexible GUI interface?
No Innovation: Some of the worlds best ideas have come from people with no money. Necessity is the mother of invention. There is a problem and it needs to be solved. Software is just another tool to solve that problem.
Thank you for once again giving us the Microsoft Party Line. Come back and see us again when you learn to think for yourself.
Just because I got my MCSE by studying the little red Exam Cram books for a week before I took the tests doesn't mean they are simple.
I mean, just because I got a score of 800 on the IIS 4.0 test without ever having used the product before doesn't mean the MCSE is a worthless certification (that was my lowest score).
For the record - I've been Microsoft free for two years. It's a liberating feeling.
I have a Model M as well, and mine was born on July 10 1987.
I aquired it when a co-worker brought it to me saying he dropped it on the floor and it was broken. I didn't realize what it was at first due to all the grime that had accumlated on it, but I clued in when I saw one of the keys without the applique. I gave him a cheap 20 dollar keyboard, asked him to bring me the stuff had popped off. Took it home, cleaned it up, and I've been using it happily ever since.
I have so many disparate thoughts on this subject that I don't know where to begin...
Those in power wish to stay in power. We have traded the Kings for the Corporations. The government is propped up by the wishes of these corporations. (If you think otherwise, take a long hard look at corporate campaign contributions as opposed to individual campaign contributions)
The wishes of the corporations do not always agree with the wishes of the public and the consumers. Corporations desire to maximize profit. Consumers desire to minimize the cost of products. Real people wish to live and enjoy their life to the fullest without hassle.
This is exemplified best by my mother: I tried to talk to her about things like the DCMA and UCITA, her eyes glazed over and she said she was more worried about other things.
When will she start worring about the DCMA and UCITA? When it starts infringing on her lifestyle, i.e. when she can no longer record the shows she wishes to off the television. However, by that time, it will be far too late.
What are my thoughts on Napster and file sharing? The tools are there, they are available. Napster may make it easy to infinge on copyright, but, ultimately, it is the users download the music that are commiting the crime. Will copy music from other people on Napster? Yes, I will. Will I continue doing it even after they declare it "illegal" and slap fines on those that do it? Yes, I will.
Why? Because the music is a part of my culture, just as the TV shows I have watched are a part of my culture. And if the shenanegins that are going on right now with the DCMA continue, there will be a time where I cannot share that cultural legacy with my children - the corporations desire that each individual "license" material for themselves so that they can maximize profit.
And finally.. in the words of Utah Phillps speaking to a Young Writers convention - "You're about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resouces? Have you seen a strip mine, have you seen a clear cut in the forest, have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource. They're going to strip mine your soul, they're going to clear cut your thoughts for the sake of a profit unless you learn to resist."
but... what do I know? I'm just a citizen, I don't control billions of dollars of wealth.
So they have a business model based on the idea that nobody will reverse engineer their product. This may sound like a good business plan, but the response to this shows why it is flawed - they have no legal leg to stand on. Clean Room Reverse Engineering is perfectly legal, and this is what the linux developers have done.
If they were to sell the scanner at a reasonable price, I would buy one. $20 for a barcode scanner doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. However, they give them away. Is it my fault that they do that?
Your argument is basically an ethical argument. Is it right to put a company out of business because have made some flawed asumptions?
Not all business models are sound. This is a fact of life.
See... I hate this argument. It's a strawman argument.
Things change.. get over it. When the TV came along, a whole bunch of people in radio lost their jobs. But whole new careers opened up, TV producers, soundtrack directors, foleys, costume designers, etc, etc.
The money is now in the broadband, the cable companies, the media providers. A job in the network infrastructure business would be a good place to be in the near future. This is just change happening and the world dealing with it.
The second argument I despise is the "potential sales" argument. The money never "leaves" the economy because it was never there in the first place. You can't say "we lost 15 million dollars" in potential sales from piracy. Potential sales of what? If you whipped up 10,000 copies of MS Office, but didn't sell them because they burned in a fire, what would your losses be? A CD costs less then a dollar to physically make, so that's $10,000 dollars that you've lost. You can't count "potential" revenue until you've actually made it. Period. Until you sell it, there are no "potential sales."
Of course, there are many arguments that the pro-(freemusic/abortion/legalization) side makes that aren't sound. See if you can find them.
The most the record companies are going to do is draft a whole bunch of laws... Soon there will be people being arrested for "copyright violations" and thrown in jail.
Nothing in the MCSE tests prepare you to deal with real world problems.
That *IS* the problem. Too many people think that if someone has an MCSE after their name, they are automatically able to deal with any situation that arises with a Microsoft product.. This is nothing more then pure ignorance.
I have my MCSE, and to earn it, I went out and bought the Exam Cram books and studied each of them for about a week before I went and took the test. Prior to this I had maintained an NT network for about two years and taken many of the Microsoft classes.
However, all the skills I use daily were never taught to me, were not in any of those exam cram books, and never were tested. What are these skills? Basic troubleshooting. The facts that I learned while studying for my MCSE help with that troubleshooting. If you don't know the how's and why's of something that is giving you a problem, then it is hard to fix. But just having the facts alone doesn't make you a good troubleshooter.
What does make you a good troubleshooter? Experience. Plain and simple. I've used and programmed personal computers for about 12 years now.
That is why many slashdotters make the correlation that MCSE=easy to get. Getting your MCSE is nothing more then memorizing a bunch of facts.
Really troubleshooting a problem requires an understanding of those facts and the concepts behind them.
A friend and I took time out last Sunday and stopped down to the Virginia Senate Committee on Courts and Justice.
The process was very informative, as well as downright scary. The person that summerized the bill for the commitee was from AOL. That should give you some sort of idea of who is behind this sucker.
Also, I have been spreading news of this bill around campus here at VCU. The head of the Computer Science and Mathematics department had not even heard of the bill. It is getting very little lip service in traditional news media. Here at slashdot we know about it, but there are thousands that don't know about for each one who does.
A little bit about the bill that is being proposed in Virigina -
It has a delayed enactment time. It will not go into effect until June, 2001. During that time the implications will be study and amendments may be made.
The self-help section of the bill has been changed. Licensee's must seperately agree to the self-help clause in any license, and then be able to specify the contact person, address, and method of delivery of notification for failure to comply with the license. (this is the repossesion that the orginal article was talking about)
It is not clear whether federal copyright law superceeds the UCITA when it comes to fair use of a product, as well as reviews of that product. There were some questions raised about this during the session, but there was no satisfactory answer given.
The good news is that the people that got up and spoke out against the bill changed at least on Senator's mind. However, the rest of the Senators voted to introduce the bill to the general Senate.
We need help to change these peoples minds. Tell your parents, your friends, your teachers about this bill. The more people we can get to contact the Senators, the more chance we have of defeating this bill.
I have used every Microsoft Operating system since DOS 2.1. (That would 1984 for those of you who are too young to remember that) I've used Linux for 2 years. I haven't looked back once.
What happens if you just shift all the characters in the file left one character, or up by a value of 0x10. Would the source still be under copyright?
You have modified the bit string of the source to represent something that is not usable to a human. Thus, it is no longer reconizable as the orginal source code without applying an algorithm to it to return it to it's original form.
Could you distribute the bit shifted file then or would this represent a derivative work?
If it did represent a derivative work, then the argument could be made that all programs are just derived code from other programs, since there exists an algorithm to convert one bitstream to any other bitstream.
This is the problem with digital representations. The same bitstream could represent an infinite number of different copyrighted works. Which of these copyrights are valid?
So does the act of interpreting a bitstream into a human readable form cause the condition of copyright to come about? What constitutes human readable form? If I can read the bitstream of an MP3 of copyrighted song, am I violating copyright? If I had an equally valid interpretation of the bitstream that represents a song in MP3 format, am I still violating copyright?
I personally think the whole idea of digital copyright is null and void. Welcome to the freedom of bits.
I just had a realization as I was sitting here browsing through this article. In the whole debate about the Corel Linux licensing issues, a statement was made. In order to preserve the validity of the license, a person under 18 was prohibited from "purchasing" the software. If I remember correctly from my buisiness law class, this is because people under 18 are not permitted to enter into a contract without the consent of a parent or guardian. A license is a form of a contract, and thus, this holds true here also. What are the ramifications of this on the entire software industry? Most software programs I know of come with some sort of license agreement. If I was under 18 and went out and bought a copy of Quake 3, then started copying it and distrubiting it, would I be subject to penalty under law? If this law were to be passed, would it be illegal for people under 18 to purchase software?
They have a caste system there that is supported by law. Also, if you've read the book, you'll notice that the people in it are quite happy with their lot in life.
Do you remember how they controlled the population? Suliminal conditioning from the time they were infants. Legalized drug use, etc, etc..
From the day we are born, those of us in the United States have been subjected to the "mass consumer training program" where you are told daily what you need and why you need it.
I've lived the last 5 months without commercials, other then those on websites. No TV, no Radio. I feel happy with what I have now.:)
I've never thought of things that way, but it does make sense...
A Utopia is inherently stable, nothing changes, there is no progress made to some goal, since everyone is "happy". I'm not sure happy is the right word here, maybe content. Happiness implies that there is sadness (that whole black-white, ying-yang thing), thus there must be sadness somewhere. Maybe sadness is portrayed by the "savage"?
Humans thrive on emotion, artists gain inspiration from their own personal happiness and sadness. It seems to me that being content (not changing either way) would effectively put an end to good art.
Gattaca was a good movie but... Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is everything Gattaca hoped to be and more.
Take genetic engineering, a cup of assembly line production, add a heaping spoonful of social engineering, and you have a (scary) view of our future.
Perhaps the most interesting passage in that book to me was about the island that was set up with just Alphas on it. Within 6 years they were had a civil war which killed off almost 90% of the population. Nobody wanted to do the mundane jobs and and everyone was trying to get the interesting jobs. Laws weren't obeyed, anarchy reigned, etc, etc...
Is the future as portrayed in that book what we have in store for us? Think about it, if we can make our offspring smart or dumb regarding to our wishes, it's just one small little step to mandating castes.
Slashdot Mirror
It was John Koza.
He was/is using Genetic Programming to evolve algorithms. I haven't seen if he has had any notable successes recently, but I doubt it. Evolving anything is tricky, much less evolving an algorithm which needs to be absolutely correct.
You found the paper, but you didn't look at any of the followup research.
Like this paper which details an experiment using an external clock and a wide variation in temperatures to evolve the same sort of circuit that Adrian evolved in his thesis paper.
And a complete list of his publications can be found here.
If you've bothered to read any of his work, you'd quickly realize that Adrian is interested in how evolution can use certain properties of the physical substrate in these chips to it's advantage. It's not looking to see if evolutionary type strategies can evolve something a human could build, but looking at how they can build things no human could imagine building.
DISCLAIMER: I am currently a Master's student at the University of Sussex, and had Adrian as a lecturer this past semester. However, I am in no way involved in his research, my interests lie in the software side of genetic algorithms.
Personally I think innovation comes in small steps. Examples:
I can disallow all javascript popups in my web-browser(Konqueror) with a single checkbox, or I can have it ask me before doing so. This is innovative to me because it gives power to me as a user and it stops me from having to chase never-ending popup boxes when surfing. A small detail but one that makes a huge amount of difference in the enjoyment of my computer.
I can browse the MP3 files on my Creative Jukebox using my filemanager (once again, Konqueror) without having to deal with Creative's software interface. This is innovative to me because it's one less interface I have to learn.
Furthermore, I think your post really isn't all that innovative. You bring a tired old argument against open source without adding anthing more to it in the way of evidence or wit.
Score : -1 Non-innovative.
Where in my post did I say that I believed in a "hardcore leftist lifestyle"? The point of the original post is that any "rights" you have to "property" are defined by the society in which you live. No all-knowing, all-mighty god came down from the heavens and said - "you have the right to make money off your property." It is a construct of humans, simply put. The value of property is based on the perspective of the buyer and the seller.
What Apple, as well as the entertainment business, is trying to do is raise the value of their product through artificial means - by using the legal system to protect their business. Is that right or is that wrong? Do we, as citizens, have a right to decide that, or do we simply allow large corporations to arbitrarily decide the value of their own products?
In the bigger picture, should we focus on the market process, or should we focus on the social problems. Somewhere between the two extremes is a balance point. This is what we need to find to move forward in society. There are bigger concerns then who owns what.
While, I grant you that my original post did not convey that well, I take offense to the fact that you attacked me, rather then my arguments.
Is it though?
The current state of economics says that I must have a computer to work, so I own a computer. The current marketplace says that I must own music, so I own music. The weather says that I must keep a roof over my head, so I have an apartment.
I am a child of this world, yes, I freely admit that, but does that mean that I cannot dream of a better one?
Okay.. I'll bite.
Let me preface this with saying that there are things in this world that are more important then money.
Now, to address your arguments:
No Direction: Just because there is a "focus group" means that a product is good. The focus group mentality has given us such products as "The Backstreet Boys" and "New Coke".
No Money: Hmmm... Linus got paid to develop the first versions of Linux? RMS got paid to develop the GNU tools? I bet fewer then 30% of open source programmers get paid to write the software they have released. Yet, for some strange reason people still program and release it as open source.
A mistaken belief to the ability of users: Yes, not all users are created equal. I have more ability to use my computer then most people out there. Why should I be forced to use a simplistic and inflexible GUI interface?
No Innovation: Some of the worlds best ideas have come from people with no money. Necessity is the mother of invention. There is a problem and it needs to be solved. Software is just another tool to solve that problem.
Thank you for once again giving us the Microsoft Party Line. Come back and see us again when you learn to think for yourself.
I whole-heartedly agree with this comment.
Just because I got my MCSE by studying the little red Exam Cram books for a week before I took the tests doesn't mean they are simple.
I mean, just because I got a score of 800 on the IIS 4.0 test without ever having used the product before doesn't mean the MCSE is a worthless certification (that was my lowest score).
For the record - I've been Microsoft free for two years. It's a liberating feeling.
Try an opening an Access 2000 database in Access 97.
Yes.. that is correct. They owned a company called Link Flight Simulation from at least 1975 until the 1980's sometime.
My father worked for Link then, and I could never figure out the connection between my mother's sewing machines and dad working Singer Link.
I have a Model M as well, and mine was born on July 10 1987.
I aquired it when a co-worker brought it to me saying he dropped it on the floor and it was broken. I didn't realize what it was at first due to all the grime that had accumlated on it, but I clued in when I saw one of the keys without the applique. I gave him a cheap 20 dollar keyboard, asked him to bring me the stuff had popped off. Took it home, cleaned it up, and I've been using it happily ever since.
How's that for a heart warming story?
I have so many disparate thoughts on this subject that I don't know where to begin...
Those in power wish to stay in power. We have traded the Kings for the Corporations. The government is propped up by the wishes of these corporations. (If you think otherwise, take a long hard look at corporate campaign contributions as opposed to individual campaign contributions)
The wishes of the corporations do not always agree with the wishes of the public and the consumers. Corporations desire to maximize profit. Consumers desire to minimize the cost of products. Real people wish to live and enjoy their life to the fullest without hassle.
This is exemplified best by my mother: I tried to talk to her about things like the DCMA and UCITA, her eyes glazed over and she said she was more worried about other things.
When will she start worring about the DCMA and UCITA? When it starts infringing on her lifestyle, i.e. when she can no longer record the shows she wishes to off the television. However, by that time, it will be far too late.
What are my thoughts on Napster and file sharing? The tools are there, they are available. Napster may make it easy to infinge on copyright, but, ultimately, it is the users download the music that are commiting the crime. Will copy music from other people on Napster? Yes, I will. Will I continue doing it even after they declare it "illegal" and slap fines on those that do it? Yes, I will.
Why? Because the music is a part of my culture, just as the TV shows I have watched are a part of my culture. And if the shenanegins that are going on right now with the DCMA continue, there will be a time where I cannot share that cultural legacy with my children - the corporations desire that each individual "license" material for themselves so that they can maximize profit.
And finally.. in the words of Utah Phillps speaking to a Young Writers convention - "You're about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resouces? Have you seen a strip mine, have you seen a clear cut in the forest, have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource. They're going to strip mine your soul, they're going to clear cut your thoughts for the sake of a profit unless you learn to resist."
but... what do I know? I'm just a citizen, I don't control billions of dollars of wealth.
So they have a business model based on the idea that nobody will reverse engineer their product. This may sound like a good business plan, but the response to this shows why it is flawed - they have no legal leg to stand on. Clean Room Reverse Engineering is perfectly legal, and this is what the linux developers have done.
If they were to sell the scanner at a reasonable price, I would buy one. $20 for a barcode scanner doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. However, they give them away. Is it my fault that they do that?
Your argument is basically an ethical argument. Is it right to put a company out of business because have made some flawed asumptions?
Not all business models are sound. This is a fact of life.
See... I hate this argument. It's a strawman argument.
Things change.. get over it. When the TV came along, a whole bunch of people in radio lost their jobs. But whole new careers opened up, TV producers, soundtrack directors, foleys, costume designers, etc, etc.
The money is now in the broadband, the cable companies, the media providers. A job in the network infrastructure business would be a good place to be in the near future. This is just change happening and the world dealing with it.
The second argument I despise is the "potential sales" argument.
The money never "leaves" the economy because it was never there in the first place. You can't say "we lost 15 million dollars" in potential sales from piracy. Potential sales of what? If you whipped up 10,000 copies of MS Office, but didn't sell them because they burned in a fire, what would your losses be? A CD costs less then a dollar to physically make, so that's $10,000 dollars that you've lost. You can't count "potential" revenue until you've actually made it. Period. Until you sell it, there are no "potential sales."
Of course, there are many arguments that the pro-(freemusic/abortion/legalization) side makes that aren't sound. See if you can find them.
The most the record companies are going to do is draft a whole bunch of laws... Soon there will be people being arrested for "copyright violations" and thrown in jail.
Personally, I advocate the extinction of the human race. If there is nobody left alive to commit illegal acts, the world would be safe.
BTW: Technology is not for the benefit of all. It is for the benefit of the people that make it and those people that can afford to buy it.
But what do I know?
The scarier thing that no-one has seemed to mention is that AOL is trying very hard to get UCITA passed.
Here in Virginia, a representative of AOL gave the review of the bill to the senate committe. Think about the implications of *that* for a while.
Nothing in the MCSE tests prepare you to deal with real world problems.
That *IS* the problem. Too many people think that if someone has an MCSE after their name, they are automatically able to deal with any situation that arises with a Microsoft product.. This is nothing more then pure ignorance.
I have my MCSE, and to earn it, I went out and bought the Exam Cram books and studied each of them for about a week before I went and took the test. Prior to this I had maintained an NT network for about two years and taken many of the Microsoft classes.
However, all the skills I use daily were never taught to me, were not in any of those exam cram books, and never were tested. What are these skills? Basic troubleshooting. The facts that I learned while studying for my MCSE help with that troubleshooting. If you don't know the how's and why's of something that is giving you a problem, then it is hard to fix. But just having the facts alone doesn't make you a good troubleshooter.
What does make you a good troubleshooter? Experience. Plain and simple. I've used and programmed personal computers for about 12 years now.
That is why many slashdotters make the correlation that MCSE=easy to get. Getting your MCSE is nothing more then memorizing a bunch of facts.
Really troubleshooting a problem requires an understanding of those facts and the concepts behind them.
A friend and I took time out last Sunday and stopped down to the Virginia Senate Committee on Courts and Justice.
The process was very informative, as well as downright scary. The person that summerized the bill for the commitee was from AOL. That should give you some sort of idea of who is behind this sucker.
Also, I have been spreading news of this bill around campus here at VCU. The head of the Computer Science and Mathematics department had not even heard of the bill. It is getting very little lip service in traditional news media. Here at slashdot we know about it, but there are thousands that don't know about for each one who does.
A little bit about the bill that is being proposed in Virigina -
It has a delayed enactment time. It will not go into effect until June, 2001. During that time the implications will be study and amendments may be made.
The self-help section of the bill has been changed. Licensee's must seperately agree to the self-help clause in any license, and then be able to specify the contact person, address, and method of delivery of notification for failure to comply with the license. (this is the repossesion that the orginal article was talking about)
It is not clear whether federal copyright law superceeds the UCITA when it comes to fair use of a product, as well as reviews of that product. There were some questions raised about this during the session, but there was no satisfactory answer given.
The good news is that the people that got up and spoke out against the bill changed at least on Senator's mind. However, the rest of the Senators voted to introduce the bill to the general Senate.
We need help to change these peoples minds. Tell your parents, your friends, your teachers about this bill. The more people we can get to contact the Senators, the more chance we have of defeating this bill.
I have to disagree with that one.
I have used every Microsoft Operating system since DOS 2.1. (That would 1984 for those of you who are too young to remember that) I've used Linux for 2 years. I haven't looked back once.
I want my flexability. I want my source.
I wonder....
What happens if you just shift all the characters in the file left one character, or up by a value of 0x10. Would the source still be under copyright?
You have modified the bit string of the source to represent something that is not usable to a human.
Thus, it is no longer reconizable as the orginal source code without applying an algorithm to it to return it to it's original form.
Could you distribute the bit shifted file then or would this represent a derivative work?
If it did represent a derivative work, then the argument could be made that all programs are just derived code from other programs, since there exists an algorithm to convert one bitstream to any other bitstream.
This is the problem with digital representations. The same bitstream could represent an infinite number of different copyrighted works. Which of these copyrights are valid?
So does the act of interpreting a bitstream into a human readable form cause the condition of copyright to come about? What constitutes human readable form? If I can read the bitstream of an MP3 of copyrighted song, am I violating copyright? If I had an equally valid interpretation of the bitstream that represents a song in MP3 format, am I still violating copyright?
I personally think the whole idea of digital copyright is null and void. Welcome to the freedom of bits.
I just had a realization as I was sitting here browsing through this article. In the whole debate about the Corel Linux licensing issues, a statement was made. In order to preserve the validity of the license, a person under 18 was prohibited from "purchasing" the software. If I remember correctly from my buisiness law class, this is because people under 18 are not permitted to enter into a contract without the consent of a parent or guardian. A license is a form of a contract, and thus, this holds true here also. What are the ramifications of this on the entire software industry? Most software programs I know of come with some sort of license agreement. If I was under 18 and went out and bought a copy of Quake 3, then started copying it and distrubiting it, would I be subject to penalty under law? If this law were to be passed, would it be illegal for people under 18 to purchase software?
FYI: The Brain is by Natrificial. Pretty cool little program, too bad it's windows only. I actually hacked around with the file format and got it pretty much flushed out. I would make a version for Linux, but they have patented the UI.
I'd like to nominate two projects from the XMMS plug-in competition.
Blursk - More configurability then you can imagine and seamless transitions between functions.
Blur Scope MAX - Trippy visuals combined with a build your own favorites philosophy.
(DISCLAIMER: I wrote the Blur Scope MAX plug-in)
Check them both out (and all the other great plug-ins) at the XMMS site.
Err.. Have you taken a look at India?
:)
They have a caste system there that is supported by law. Also, if you've read the book, you'll notice that the people in it are quite happy with their lot in life.
Do you remember how they controlled the population? Suliminal conditioning from the time they were infants. Legalized drug use, etc, etc..
From the day we are born, those of us in the United States have been subjected to the "mass consumer training program" where you are told daily what you need and why you need it.
I've lived the last 5 months without commercials, other then those on websites. No TV, no Radio. I feel happy with what I have now.
I've never thought of things that way, but it does make sense...
A Utopia is inherently stable, nothing changes, there is no progress made to some goal, since everyone is "happy". I'm not sure happy is the right word here, maybe content. Happiness implies that there is sadness (that whole black-white, ying-yang thing), thus there must be sadness somewhere. Maybe sadness is portrayed by the "savage"?
Humans thrive on emotion, artists gain inspiration from their own personal happiness and sadness. It seems to me that being content (not changing either way) would effectively put an end to good art.
Gattaca was a good movie but... Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is everything Gattaca hoped to be and more.
Take genetic engineering, a cup of assembly line production, add a heaping spoonful of social engineering, and you have a (scary) view of our future.
Perhaps the most interesting passage in that book to me was about the island that was set up with just Alphas on it. Within 6 years they were had a civil war which killed off almost 90% of the population. Nobody wanted to do the mundane jobs and and everyone was trying to get the interesting jobs. Laws weren't obeyed, anarchy reigned, etc, etc...
Is the future as portrayed in that book what we have in store for us? Think about it, if we can make our offspring smart or dumb regarding to our wishes, it's just one small little step to mandating castes.
Scary stuff...