I can't believe you guys are thinking this is possible. I thought geeks were smarter than that?
In the first place, we know very little about brain dynamics. Even if you can download the entire brain state (which I doubt you can't - see later), it does not mean that we can time-evolve the brain state. Given that the brain is such a hugely parallel _analog_ device, the parallelism that is needed to make the simlated brain run just as fast as the normal brain is staggering.
Now - do you think we know what exactly is a "brain state"? Is that the voltage level of each neuron? How many neurons are there? Or is that the sheath voltage of the neuron? How many numbers are required to simulate that? Ever think about that.
In conclusion: we still have a lot to go on before we can download or even upload our brain into silicon. I'll personally stake $1000 on the impossibility of it for the next century.
Sorry, but with what is being done to DeCSS, I can't help being exploited.
I don't care if Lucas releases Star Wars: TPM or not on DVD. I'm staying away from a product that essentially enslaves me to a particular region/particular players.
To the DVD control association, my finger. Oh yeah - don't come after me - I'm not mirroring DeCSS. I'm just being rude.:-P
It is inevitable really. To survive, to retain some control of their market Corporations will merge and merge to form huge behemoths. From their point of view, all of this is necessary. But in the long term, is this good for all of us? One has to wonder.
When Corporations merge, they combined assets add up. Their marketshare also does. But there are operations, their methods might not. A simple example - the board of a big company in Manhattan might have x board members, who need 2x secretaries to do their work. When they merge with someone else in LA with y board members (having 2y secretaries), the number of secretaries might not be 2(x+y). It doesn't scale. And many CEO's don't realize this.
Result - the corporation becomes too huge to manage. They become inefficient. and the smaller companies who can remain nimble will win.
This sounds like good news, until one realizes that we are talking about people and their livelihoods.
I don't necessarily think this is that bad. It all depends what this guy does with it. For example, he could try selling the idea to chip makers. That would be a fair way to get himself some reward for coming out with somthing so obviously useful.
OTOH, if he went after fellow researchers for using it in their algorithms, I see this as really holding back legitimate progress.
Ultimately, it is his call. Respect and fame or his name in mud. Kind of obvious choice really.
I am not a US Citizen, so I am not going to submit directly to that email. Nevertheless, I hope that my points will to the more intelligent American Slashdot readers, for them to think and submit if they agree,
Reverse engineering should be made totally legal. By reverse engineering, I refer to that done in a clean room, out of concern and respect for trade-secret and copyright holders. Whatever it is said, copyright is important, so we should bear in mind not to undermine it. (Subject to the legal restrictions of course. My finger to those who exploit IP/copyrights for their own selfish gain. e.g. Amazon 1-click nonsense).
Why should this be. Primarily becuase we live in a unfair world, where American businesses dominate a large part of the global economy. I think Americans should look beyond their shores and not see the world as people to exploit, but as partners, where there is great chance for mutual cooperation.
The point is that DMCA goes both ways. The US should not always assume that they will continue to be dominant players in all sectors of the economy. Neither should they wish to (It is unfair - no nation should have that great a burden to bear.:-) )
Today, someone in Norway reverse enginneers American technology, producing DeCSS. Someday, the tables are going to reversed. Is the US going to be a hypocritical and laughed at by the rest of the world when it decides to break their own laws?
Like it or not, the DMCA is going to be piece of international law. It is inevitable as we move towards a global, integrated economy. It is necessary and essential that the US sets a good example now, by upholding the principle of reverse engineering. For the reasons of competition, innovation and interoperability.
It might be look like that today, industries represented by the MPAA are getting the wrong end of the stick. But things will change. These businesses do not, and will not take the long-sighted view. They are short-sighted. They want to hold on to their dinosaur like hegemony. They want to extend it. The government of the US cannot allow itself to become subservient to these corporations.
Personally, I have always believed that the greatness of a country is measured by how well it treats firstly, its own people and then next other small countries. Get your act together!
Well I'm pretty amazed that a chip of that speed can take only 1 W of power to run. Forget the mobile market. If this chip does what it is touted to do, having it on the desktop would save tons of power in itself.
That's what I hate about such "statistics". No information or context is given. One is not told how this estimate of "one billion" is gotten. No details about how the research methodology was forthcoming. Instead one is only supposed to stare slack-jawed in amazing at the touted figure of one billion an be impressed. That anyone can impress oneself that THIS is an achievement is amazing.
For all you know - the web has surpassed at least 1 webpage count. Big Fscking Deal!!!
I think you need to understand the spirit of free software. The GPL is just the "suited-up" version of this spirit, to fight proprietry software.
If what you are doing solves problems, and you just took a little bit of code, no one is going to care. Free code means you can look and can write code that has been shown to work. Any free software programmer that goes after such "transgressions" is a jerk, and just doesn't get it.
What the GPL expressedly forbids, is precisely what Sun did to Blackdown. Take an entire existing project, slap on a few minor enhancements, and call it theirs. A pity Blackdown is not GPLed.
There are websites out there which specifically distribute one type of file. Redhat's ftp sites distributes RPMs. Debian's distribute.debs. Why can't a site owner decide what he wants to distribute?
Granted, websites are not clients like Napster is. It's more like a search engine/pointer to MP3 files. How's like different like a say a streaming player that will only play.mov files?
Furthermore, content is not file format. A song in.wav and in.mp3 is the same song, and sounds the same (at the same sampling rate). If the song infringes copyright, it would be so, whether it's.wav or.mp3. It is the content that is copyrighted, not the file format.
It is this that the RIAA does not seem to get. Either that, or they get too well. In any case, they have a fully valid objection to copyright infringement. But it seems to me that they always cloud the issue by confounding it with the issue with purely technological products or processes like file-formats/distribution protocol, etc.
It appears that Blackdown wasn't releases as GPL code in the first place. Given that, and that Blackdown was based on code from Sun that is their SCSL, nothing was stolen.
So the LinuxToday's article that Sun "stole" Blackdown is simply wrong.
And yes, the spirit of free software is in the giving. If it was not the intent of the Blackdown developers, they are going to have a hard time taking back what was their effort.
This is how Napster can get themselves in more hot soup - change the source to link not just MP3's, but also JPG's. Nah - just kidding.:) I wonder if the p0rn hucksters care that Napster can and will infringe on their copyright. Just some ramblings.
To regard the GPL as existing in a logical vacuum is what is wrong with your argument.
You should look at the _history_ behind the license. The the history says what was exactly wrong with BSD style licenses. Unix vendors took free code, improved it, slapped on a license and prevented other programmers to likewise as they have done. (Note: they making money out of it has nothing to do with it.)
The GPL was designed to address this. And you have to understand history to see its logic.
This is not to say GPL is the best free license there is. I look forward to the day (no, I'll probably not live to see it) when all sources are open by default. And that is when the GPL becomes irrelevant.
This is why this matters. It is now possible to write software that runs specifically on one CPU and one CPU only.
Say MS decides to use the serial number. The MS Office install probes for the number, and writes this into the binary, in encrypted form. Then when MS Office starts up, it makes the comparison, and refuses to run when it detects it is running on another CPU. You can bet your bottom dollar that such brain-dead copy protection schemes will arise. The end result is that the user is screwed when he upgrades the hardware.
Doubtlessly, hackers and warez d00dz would create patches to "solve" this problem. And what can be gained from this pointless exercise? So that idiots can feel secure in that this serial number is protecting them.
Not just that, consider what sort of red-herring this is. It also is claimed that this helpes e-commerce. Presumably, they want to take this ID, and use it as part of the authentication.
What is there to prevent people from spoofing the ID? Does this mean that I cannot use any computer other then my own? Face it - there just is no conceivable way this ID help e-commerce whatsoever.
Either someone at Intel isn't thinking straight, or there is more to it than that.
Just becuase one is a good programmer, that does not immediately imply that one is good with signal processing, or algorithm design.
The worry is less about malicious data, then well meaning people who change the source without realizing that they have modified the fundamental algorithm in some manner.
I remember doing a school lab which required me to write code a solving some partial differential equations. Unfortunately, the correct algorithm was not stable, and the stable algorithm introduces errors. Getting the stable algorithm to produce "correct enough" results required a great deal of tweaking, and slowing down of the code.
None of this is as straightfoward as I have made it out to be. So let's just let the SETI@Home guys do the correct, rigorous thing. Sure they are not perfect. But in that case, THEY get the blame, NOT YOU!:)
Slashdot Mirror
In the first place, we know very little about brain dynamics. Even if you can download the entire brain state (which I doubt you can't - see later), it does not mean that we can time-evolve the brain state. Given that the brain is such a hugely parallel _analog_ device, the parallelism that is needed to make the simlated brain run just as fast as the normal brain is staggering.
Now - do you think we know what exactly is a "brain state"? Is that the voltage level of each neuron? How many neurons are there? Or is that the sheath voltage of the neuron? How many numbers are required to simulate that? Ever think about that.
In conclusion: we still have a lot to go on before we can download or even upload our brain into silicon. I'll personally stake $1000 on the impossibility of it for the next century.
I don't care if Lucas releases Star Wars: TPM or not on DVD. I'm staying away from a product that essentially enslaves me to a particular region/particular players.
To the DVD control association, my finger. Oh yeah - don't come after me - I'm not mirroring DeCSS. I'm just being rude. :-P
The markets overlap a lot. If the Crusoe can do x86 at a decent speed, why can't we put it on desktops? The power savings can be huge!
When Corporations merge, they combined assets add up. Their marketshare also does. But there are operations, their methods might not. A simple example - the board of a big company in Manhattan might have x board members, who need 2x secretaries to do their work. When they merge with someone else in LA with y board members (having 2y secretaries), the number of secretaries might not be 2(x+y). It doesn't scale. And many CEO's don't realize this.
Result - the corporation becomes too huge to manage. They become inefficient. and the smaller companies who can remain nimble will win.
This sounds like good news, until one realizes that we are talking about people and their livelihoods.
Sad, but that's how the wheel turns.
OTOH, if he went after fellow researchers for using it in their algorithms, I see this as really holding back legitimate progress.
Ultimately, it is his call. Respect and fame or his name in mud. Kind of obvious choice really.
Reverse engineering should be made totally legal. By reverse engineering, I refer to that done in a clean room, out of concern and respect for trade-secret and copyright holders. Whatever it is said, copyright is important, so we should bear in mind not to undermine it. (Subject to the legal restrictions of course. My finger to those who exploit IP/copyrights for their own selfish gain. e.g. Amazon 1-click nonsense).
Why should this be. Primarily becuase we live in a unfair world, where American businesses dominate a large part of the global economy. I think Americans should look beyond their shores and not see the world as people to exploit, but as partners, where there is great chance for mutual cooperation.
The point is that DMCA goes both ways. The US should not always assume that they will continue to be dominant players in all sectors of the economy. Neither should they wish to (It is unfair - no nation should have that great a burden to bear. :-) )
Today, someone in Norway reverse enginneers American technology, producing DeCSS. Someday, the tables are going to reversed. Is the US going to be a hypocritical and laughed at by the rest of the world when it decides to break their own laws?
Like it or not, the DMCA is going to be piece of international law. It is inevitable as we move towards a global, integrated economy. It is necessary and essential that the US sets a good example now, by upholding the principle of reverse engineering. For the reasons of competition, innovation and interoperability.
It might be look like that today, industries represented by the MPAA are getting the wrong end of the stick. But things will change. These businesses do not, and will not take the long-sighted view. They are short-sighted. They want to hold on to their dinosaur like hegemony. They want to extend it. The government of the US cannot allow itself to become subservient to these corporations.
Personally, I have always believed that the greatness of a country is measured by how well it treats firstly, its own people and then next other small countries. Get your act together!
Well I'm pretty amazed that a chip of that speed can take only 1 W of power to run. Forget the mobile market. If this chip does what it is touted to do, having it on the desktop would save tons of power in itself.
For all you know - the web has surpassed at least 1 webpage count. Big Fscking Deal!!!
Actually, it tastes better _becuase_ it is your own cooking. :-) (And if you want dinner to taste good, just skip lunch.)
A sad story. This a yet another nugget of evidence on why the current registration system is so totally screwed.
If what you are doing solves problems, and you just took a little bit of code, no one is going to care. Free code means you can look and can write code that has been shown to work. Any free software programmer that goes after such "transgressions" is a jerk, and just doesn't get it.
What the GPL expressedly forbids, is precisely what Sun did to Blackdown. Take an entire existing project, slap on a few minor enhancements, and call it theirs. A pity Blackdown is not GPLed.
There are websites out there which specifically distribute one type of file. Redhat's ftp sites distributes RPMs. Debian's distribute .debs. Why can't a site owner decide what he wants to distribute?
Granted, websites are not clients like Napster is. It's more like a search engine/pointer to MP3 files. How's like different like a say a streaming player that will only play .mov files?
Furthermore, content is not file format. A song in .wav and in .mp3 is the same song, and sounds the same (at the same sampling rate). If the song infringes copyright, it would be so, whether it's .wav or .mp3. It is the content that is copyrighted, not the file format.
It is this that the RIAA does not seem to get. Either that, or they get too well. In any case, they have a fully valid objection to copyright infringement. But it seems to me that they always cloud the issue by confounding it with the issue with purely technological products or processes like file-formats/distribution protocol, etc.
So the LinuxToday's article that Sun "stole" Blackdown is simply wrong.
And yes, the spirit of free software is in the giving. If it was not the intent of the Blackdown developers, they are going to have a hard time taking back what was their effort.
This is how Napster can get themselves in more hot soup - change the source to link not just MP3's, but also JPG's. Nah - just kidding. :) I wonder if the p0rn hucksters care that Napster can and will infringe on their copyright. Just some ramblings.
You should look at the _history_ behind the license. The the history says what was exactly wrong with BSD style licenses. Unix vendors took free code, improved it, slapped on a license and prevented other programmers to likewise as they have done. (Note: they making money out of it has nothing to do with it.)
The GPL was designed to address this. And you have to understand history to see its logic.
This is not to say GPL is the best free license there is. I look forward to the day (no, I'll probably not live to see it) when all sources are open by default. And that is when the GPL becomes irrelevant.
Say MS decides to use the serial number. The MS Office install probes for the number, and writes this into the binary, in encrypted form. Then when MS Office starts up, it makes the comparison, and refuses to run when it detects it is running on another CPU. You can bet your bottom dollar that such brain-dead copy protection schemes will arise. The end result is that the user is screwed when he upgrades the hardware.
Doubtlessly, hackers and warez d00dz would create patches to "solve" this problem. And what can be gained from this pointless exercise? So that idiots can feel secure in that this serial number is protecting them.
Not just that, consider what sort of red-herring this is. It also is claimed that this helpes e-commerce. Presumably, they want to take this ID, and use it as part of the authentication.
What is there to prevent people from spoofing the ID? Does this mean that I cannot use any computer other then my own? Face it - there just is no conceivable way this ID help e-commerce whatsoever.
Either someone at Intel isn't thinking straight, or there is more to it than that.
Nothing except rumours. And a date of Dec 15 for release of the draft.
This assumes too much of too many programmers.
:)
Just becuase one is a good programmer, that does
not immediately imply that one is good with
signal processing, or algorithm design.
The worry is less about malicious data, then
well meaning people who change the source
without realizing that they have modified the fundamental algorithm in some manner.
I remember doing a school lab which required me
to write code a solving some partial differential
equations. Unfortunately, the correct algorithm
was not stable, and the stable algorithm introduces errors. Getting the stable algorithm
to produce "correct enough" results required
a great deal of tweaking, and slowing down of the
code.
None of this is as straightfoward as I have made
it out to be. So let's just let the SETI@Home
guys do the correct, rigorous thing. Sure they
are not perfect. But in that case, THEY get the
blame, NOT YOU!