Researcher has succesfully grow a living nerve cells on silicon chip.
the chip has been able to read electrical pulse from the cell.
Could you please give me the citation for this? I read about several experiments along these lines a while ago, but have since lost the article references. This is very annoying, because I'm doing a project in a related field, and have been trying to track down the articles again off and on for over a year:).
Actually, i think the sensor parts they are talking about are the tiny ones that float around in your stomach or bloodstream, and other such implants. They would be able to be read from close range by a hand help device via short range radio signals.
I've since read the article, and I was more or less correct about what they were talking about. The sensors would be about the size of an integrated circuit chip; while they could be implanted, they couldn't be sent into the bloodstream to drift. Their usefulness stems from their ability to precicely measure in parallel the concentrations of many very distinct chemicals, including DNA fragments.
The other type of chip that they were talking about was again something the size of an integrated circuit chip, that had micromechanical chemical processing equipment on it. This too might be useful, but IMO is a bit farther away from practical fabrication and application.
rde writes "This week's (print edition of) New Scientist tells us that Motorola's BioChip Systems Unit are building a biochip that "will eventually produce hand-held machines that can perform genetic tests or detect disease" -- a tricorder by any other name.
Not by a fair margin, if they're talking about the kind of biological sensors that I've been hearing about. By combining biological components with integrated circuit chips, you can fabricate sensors on the chip that are sensitive to various complicated organic chemicals and the like - but you'd still have to do something like breathe on the chip or put a blood sample on the chip to get a reading. You can't just wave it at someone and get information.
This kind of device does have many applications. Detailed organic chemical analysis right now requires some fairly expensive equipment (gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, and IR and UV spectrometers). If you can do useful work with a smaller, cheaper component, then it will indeed quietly revolutionize substantial parts of the medical and forensic and chemical analysis industries. However, we're still a ways away from waving a lipstick container at somebody and getting a medical diagnosis. What this will mainly do is give you good quality readings on organic compounds suspended in a liquid or wafting through the air.
I'll have to read the specific article in question before making more detailed comments.
Darnit-I still need to know when I can put the network jack in my head. Writing all this e-mail through thought would be a lot nicer.
This is being worked on. Prof. Kensall Wise has been publishing papers on neural interfaces for over a decade, and at least one other group exists doing similar things. Heck, _I_ hope to be doing similar things (my fourth-year project; I'll post a link once it's underway). Reading thoughts electronically is probably impractical, but there are still a number of nifty things that you can do with regards to interfacing with peripherals.
Caveat - I repeat that I am *not* calling for the proprietary software model to be the only one used. I simply feel that it is just the most effective at repaying the programmers for the _majority_ of software projects. Exceptions exist.
"If an application is valuable to a large, disorganized user base, OTOH, then there is nobody among the users who can hire developers on behalf of all of them. What happens in this scenario?"
If an application is valuable to 'the people', then let 'the people' form cooperatives to fund it. Well, such cooperatives have been formed -- the governments (which are supposed to represent 'the people'). This is at least how they are SUPPOSED to work.
So start up such a co-operative, and then approach me to write software. You wind up with the same problems as in the simpler schemes described - most of your users don't care about the product and are peeved at you for spamming them with information about your co-operative, and a very large chunk of the rest want to freeload.
Propose a scheme and demonstrate that it actually works in _practice_. If you can make the above scheme work, then great! I'll be the first to congratulate you, as I'll be getting paid.
As far as getting the government to fund development of needed software... Do you really think that the government is capable of accurately and relatively quickly assessing the software needs of the public and commissioning the software to be written? The problem with organizations that large is that they operate very _slowly_. This and similar problems are why huge corporations also tend to be beaten out by smaller startups eventually. But, I digress.
Present a practical alternative to the proprietary software, and _show_that_it_works_. Preferably by implementing it.
You did not offer a rebuttal. At most, you have shown that there is an easy 'crutch' for the real problem; you did nothing to show that IP is not problemmatic. This would be a rebuttal -- showing that the original point is false.
I don't have to show that IP is not problematic. Only that it is better than any alternatives currently presented, which is what I have already done.
To prove me wrong, you have to present an alternative that is demonstratably better than the current one or the one that I proposed (shorter IP lifespans), and prove that it's practical.
"So, you are saying that the value of my work is only that which I can expect to get back if I freely distribute the result? (zero)?"
It is damned wrong that you can expect nothing back if you have free distribution. If Richard Stallman did not show it clearly enough, the whole OpenSource thing is to show you the contrary.
Nope. I've gone over this several times in other threads, and have yet to see a scheme proposed that would result in the same number of programmers being paid the same amount as under the present system. I'll post a link to the most detailed of these messages in a reply to this post.
The gist of the argument saying that open source provides ample revenue is that 1) coders will still be paid to code by people who need the software, and 2) coders can make back money on distribution and support. The first doesn't apply to disorganized markets - like the market for a word processor or for a game, that no single entity will foot the bill for - and the second doesn't provide enough jobs and doesn't provide anywhere close to the current pay scale. Programmers aren't overpaid by a long shot, either.
"By that logic, nobody should be paid to code. There aren't enough hobbyist programmers to fulfill users' desire for programs."
Programs have their use. This makes it more unnecessary to have IP laws on them. If distributing a painting earns you nothing, you might not have the motive to produce it (some will, anyway). But if distributing programs (say, a word processor) do not earn you a penny, there will still be places (say, in the office) where the need of the program exceed the cost of producing it. Programs still get written.
Again, nope. Not most of them. See above. How are you going to get ten thousand users to shell out a dollar each for the development of a word processor or simple game that takes four man-months? How about something that takes several man-years? There are various approaches to this, but what winds up working most effectively is something that looks a lot like the present system. See my other message.
Many of the cracked binaries out there have taken a tremendous amount of effort and skill to crack. Given not as much as designing the original thing (with the exception of encryption algorithms). Don't those crackers deserve something for their labor?
For the vast majority of software, it takes _much_ less effort to crack it than it did to write it in the firstplace. Development of a good-sized application or game takes many, many man-months.
Now, re. your second point; by that argument, if I run a chip company and one of my employees steals the detailed plans for a processor made by one of my competitors, I should give him a bonus for his hard work.
What I would actually do is fire him.
The amount of effort that the employee puts into his action is overshadowed by the fact that he is doing something very illegal, for which he should be severely punished.
Software piracy (or theft, if you prefer that term) isn't as earth-shattering, but if Joe Cracker can take the product of _my_ effort, crack it, and then give it out to my clients, then I would certainly hope that the law stomps him for it. If he wants to compete with me, he is perfectly able to write his own software. If he wants free software to exist for the application, it _can_ - he just has to write it himself from scratch, devising his own code and his own algorithms in the process.
Forceful takeovers of companies deny the full rightful compensation to the creators of the companies, but it is completely legal. What the legal system does and what it should do are to non-necessarily intersecting issues.
This is quite correct. The remedy for this is for people to write to their representatives and lobby for the laws to be changed. This isn't perfect, but it does ensure that the laws at least approximately reflect the will of the people.
What I am asking is that people _think_ about what the laws should do, and act accordingly, instead of saying "gimmie!". Like I've said in other threads, I have no problem with free software existing, and I would be happy to see software patents expire after a couple of years instead of 20+. However, I think that there are good reasons for proprietary software and patents existing.
"If I spend a year of effort to produce a product, and somebody who has spent no effort either leeches the source or cracks the binary and distributes it, then they have most certainly harmed me by cutting off my rightful compensation for my efforts. It is most certainly within the purpose of the law to prevent this."
It's only your "rightful compensation" because currently the law gives you rights to restrict distribution and you would carry out the work in expectation of doing so. That doesn't justify continuing with such laws. In the absence of those laws you would not expect to be able to restrict distribution and if you chose to put in the work knowing that your return would be limited then that would be your problem, just as with any other unprofitable field of endeavour. And of course, if you could find a way to make money out of it in the absence of those laws then that would be your "rightful expectation" in those circumstances.
So, you are saying that the value of my work is only that which I can expect to get back if I freely distribute the result? (zero)?
By that logic, nobody should be paid to code. There aren't enough hobbyist programmers to fulfill users' desire for programs.
If I spend 40 hours a week writing useful code, then I had damned well better be paid for doing so.
[So, either you find a way of paying the programmers for their efforts, or else most of your code just doesn't get written.]
This has been done to death. Programmers of course also have to eat, but:
1) programmers can be paid to program (which they usually are anyway), rather than for programs -- paid for the services they render, not code they create. The payers, of course, would be those interested in having code that does certain stuff, not the least of them being the government (a-la NSA research grants).
This too was already addressed by another poster, responding to a previous article. As I felt the points were insightful, I'll cover them here:
If an application would be very valuable to a specific organization, then they will fund its development under this system. It will get written.
If an application is valuable to a large, disorganized user base, OTOH, then there is nobody among the users who can hire developers on behalf of all of them. What happens in this scenario?
One approach is for the developer to put a beg-screen in the product asking for donations, a la the old freeware programs that were floating around BBSs a decade ago. One problem with this is that, for an application that takes many man-months to develop, you aren't likely to recoup your investments this way (did _you_ dontate to the authours of any of the freeware that you used?). A more pressing problem is that I can't write the software and hope that money eventually comes in - I need a very substantial amount of money before I even start working, so that I'm sure that I won't starve while I code.
Another approach to solving this is to ask around for donations _before_ I start developing. The example in the original post was to pass around a contract to anyone who might be interested in the product asking them to pay me amount of money if they want me to start developing the product. There are several problems with this. One is spam. I have to distribute to all _prospective_ users. If only one in 10 is interested, then by statistics 90% of the offers that any user receives will be junk mail. Another is a guarantee that I will succeed in producing the product. If I'm writing a word processor, then this is pretty definite, but if I'm asking people to help me write a true AI, then it is considerably less certain. Less extreme projects may be better bets, but will still have risks. There is also the freeloading problem - people will be reluctant to pay me to develop the application if everyone else gets a copy anyways. By and large, most users would rather just sit back and let someone else do the development. People should be more altruistic than this? Maybe they _should_, but throughout all of history, on average, they _aren't_.
So, what if, to address the risk problem, I pass around a contract where people only have to pay me after I finish the product and make it available? Well, a huge fraction of these people will default on their contracts, as the product is now freely available. Can I hunt them down and make them pay up? Not for the $1 or $10 or $100 that I was charging them as a development share.
Now, what if I do something slightly different, and give each investing user a copy of the product, but restrict it so that it isn't distributed to the public for, say, 2 years? People who want to be able to use the software will be more likely to pay instead of freeloading, as freeloading involves waiting a couple of years. As I'm handing out physical CDs with the product on them, it's a fair bit harder for someone to stiff me on their development contribution, too.
And wait, this is sounding a lot like the standard commercial model, isn't it?
The only difference is that I'm postulating a 2-year expiry on copying instead of a 20+ year expiry, and I'm postulating that I'm charging a reasonable development price instead of gouging for what the market will bear. The first can be done if patent and copyright laws are reformed, and the second will occur if there is competition. Competition won't be hard, as my souce is available after two years, and if I'm gouging too heavily, someone else can step right in and make a cheaper product.
*That* is why I ask for reform of the current system instead of its abolition. The current system arose for a reason.
2) They can change money for services related to the code, not for code itself.
Like what?
People keep bringing this up, but I have yet to see something that will pay me my current programming wage. And I'm currently working as an intern for the equivalent of $14 US/hr. Tech support pays considerably less. The 'net makes distribution at near-zero cost easy. Further, there is a huge disparity between the number of coders needing to be employed and the number of personnel that Red Had or pick-your-free-software-related-company employs with other tasks.
Fundamentally, these are answers to the ethical problem concerning ownership of information. The problem does exist, and simply ignoring it (and treating information no differently from other forms of property) is not an answer.
And these are my rebuttals to those answers. I have nothing against Open Source and Free Software existing - but unless you can demonstrate a workable system that employs the same number of programmers as the present one for the same wages, I'm not going to abandon the proprietary model completely. I *do* need to eat.
Also, eliminating IP would not force anyone to reveal anything that they want to keep private. If you want to keep your source code a secret and release only binaries, you can. What you lose is the legal right to prevent people from copying the software and possibly reseling it. Though I suppose you could use license agreements: "I will sell you this if you agree... ".
There are other problems with this that are just as large. Binaries can be decompiled and the algorithms extracted. This is a fair bit of work, but as was illustrated in a previous thread, it can still be a lot less work than developing, testing, and fine-tuning a very complex algorithm in the first place. Also, industry spying would be legal under this scenario. If a competitor manages to extract the idea, though any of several espionage methods, you can't punish them, as the idea is declared to be free.
There is also the stagnation effect that stems from trade secrets that another poster referred to previously, but that's another issue.
Eliminating IP may not explicitly force people to reveal private information, but in practice it winds up having the same effect (providing detailed information at a cost lower than that required to come up with it originally, without compensating the original researchers/developers/etc. for their work).
Point two: The guarantee that the inventor will be able to get a return on investment. This is completely silly. Lawmakers are not responsible for making sure you succeed.
The purpose of law is to prevent someone from harming me (for arbitrary values of "me"). If I spend a year of effort to produce a product, and somebody who has spent no effort either leeches the source or cracks the binary and distributes it, then they have most certainly harmed me by cutting off my rightful compensation for my efforts. It is most certainly within the purpose of the law to prevent this.
Independent invention? Well, for an algorithm complex enough to be non-obvious, or for code that implements an algorithm or application, the Perl rule applies - There's More Than One Way To Do It. Somebody wanting to accomplish the same goal can _do_ so by other, equally good, methods. They don't have to copy my work and leave me starving on the street and owing large amouns of money to investors. Might they accidentally use the same approach that I did? For something sufficiently complex, that's not likely, but as long as they do their _research_ first, it's a non-issue. They can see what approach I used in the patents, and make sure that they use another.
Now, patenting the obvious. I agree that this is a problem and that this is wrong. However, this is a problem with the patent office, not with patents. Consider carefully who to chew out and for what.
But the time I have spent creating that source is gone, lost to me. Those minutes, hours, days and weeks spent designing, debugging, and coding the final item are the cost of that item - not the few cents needed to make a printed or electronic copy.
That time is gone no matter what you do -- restricting (or not restricting) others' access to the fruit of your labor will neither return that time to you, nor require more time and effort from you.
On the contrary - if I write proprietary software, then the investment in time and effort is repaid financially by the people who of their own free will, even with alternatives choose to pay me for what I have produced.
Further, on the basis of this expected return, I can get backers to fork over money _now_ so that I don't starve while spending months developing my product.
If the product was to be given away, then virtually all of the expected returns would disappear (distribution is free on the 'net, and tech support doesn't cut it finanically). There go my backers, which means that I can't afford to write the software in the first place.
Would the free source community develop the software itself? Possibly. But not for all projects. Think of how much coding effort is done by all paid programmers in any given year. Some of this coding is redundant; working on competing products with identical features or feature sets that are perfect subsets of other products. However, most of it isn't redundant. This represents the total strong demand for programming (there is additional demand, but not enough that someone actually forked over the money to have the programs written). Now, think about it. In order to satisfy this demand, you would have to have _that_ _many_ programmers working full-time, or several times as many programmers working in their spare time. Assume that someone waves a magic wand and declares that software may *only* be developed with open source and can be duplicated at the cost of duplication by anyone who sees fit. I don't see enough free-time programmers to fill the demand for coding. I seriously doubt that the masses that were formerly paid coders will put in 40-hour weeks for free. They have to eat.
So, either you find a way of paying the programmers for their efforts, or else most of your code just doesn't get written.
As far as methods of paying programmers are concerned, someone posted an interesting exploration of that a while ago. As you work through the problems that arise and their logical solutions, you wind up with something that looks a lot like a proprietary/capitalistic model. Think carefully about this.
It seems that Canada's socialist government is doing fine. We have one of the best health care systems in the world. Socialism does not "encourage everyone to aspire to the same level of mediocraty [sic]", it allows everyone, yes, even the *poor* to have the same chance as the wealthy to prosper.
Actually, Canada is a hybrid, leaning strongly towards Capitalism. The economy is primarily capitalistic, but the "social safety net" guarantees minimum necessities to everyone (living on Welfare isn't fun, but it can be done, and essential medical services are free). If you want to have spending money, you'll need to work for it. OTOH, if you start a business venture and it fails, or if you get laid off from where you're working, there's a limit to how far you can fall.
It is the direct reward for effort that capitalism provides that drives production. In a _purely_ socialistic economy, altruism is the only incentive for effort, and production suffers badly.
However, the safety net is nice to have. It makes walking the tightrope a lot less stressful.
Thats ounds good, right? Why don't they do it? Alpha is an "open" architecture, supposedly. If they don't make BeOS for the G3 because Apple wont release the G3 specs, will Compaq release the Alpha system specs to Be? Is there an interest in Be/Alpha or am I mistaken?
Might it really have something to do with Intels "investment" in Be?
I doubt it. Alpha systems are mainly used for research and as servers; BeOS is intended for personal use for people doing multimedia-related design. There just isn't any overlap. As far as Be is concerned, there is no market for an Alpha port of BeOS.
If Alphas actually do start showing up on desktops in quantity, then this will probably change. I know *I'd* like one.
I read in Pop. Sci..... The government has the tech to read residules untill it has been overwritten *7* passes.
This might be true if there wasn't a deliberate attempt to permanently erase the data. As the article mentions, you can get residual information stored at the edges of tracks, or deep within the magnetic medium if the temperature has changed in just the right way since the original recording.
However, the erasure methods described in the article seem pretty thorough.
Also, the default method given uses on the order of 20 passes IIRC, with 20 different patterns.
Tim can't see the moral dimension, and he's proud of that?
Whenever phrases like "moral dimension" start cropping up, I get worried, because it generally leads to a lot of vague arguing with little basis on anything tangible - including morals, ethics, or what-have-you. So, I'm going to list a few questions that I think all posters would do well to consider before using "morality" as a justification for their arguments. I don't think that such arguments are necessarily invalid - only that a lot of justification and reasoning tends to be skipped, with the result that the final positions are precarious at best.
Questions that should be addressed are:
What is "morality"?
Why is that the definition of "morality" that should be used, as opposed to the myriad of other definitions?
How do you determine whether something is "moral" or not? (Or, for definitions of morality that use sliding scales, how do you determine how "moral" something is?)
Why is that the best way to determine the morality of something? (As opposed to all other possible methods.)
How does the issue that you are debating relate to morality, and what are the effects of this relation?
How important is morality compared to other factors influencing whether position (x) is "good" or "bad"?
Why is this the correct level of importance?
What other factors influence whether position (x) is "good" or "bad", and to what degree do they contribute?
Why are these other factors important, and why are these their correct levels of importance?
Substitute "ethics" or whatever other word you're using for "morality" above if you like. If you appeal to several entities in your argument (e.g. both "morality" and "ethics", if you have different definitions to them), then duplicate the "morality" section above and answer the questions for each of the entities you are appealing to.
These questions represent the groundwork that determines how and to what extent various factors can be used as support in arguments. The importance and reasons for importance of things like money are well-understood and generally agreed upon by most people, so these arguments are usually skipped. OTOH, the importance and reasons for importance of things like morality are hazy, and different people will tend to have _very_ different opinions on them. This doesn't mean that that things like morality *aren't* important - just that you can't skip the above steps if you want to invoke morality, ethics, or what-have-you in an argument.
So, it would behoove all involved to re-state their arguments with this information explicitly spelled out, if they want to be able to effectively debate with each other.
Meanwhile, I'll step back from this thread. Precisely because few people agree on these points and everyone tends to just assume arbitrary positions, discussions based on "morality" tend to lead to Holy Wars and little else.
What is with this constant insistance that goes on, that only people who write software can have opinions?
If free software is really in the interests of users, then the opinions of the users must count.
IMO, whether or not a person has actually written code _does_ influence the weight of their opinions.
Someone who uses software but doesn't write it has a strong vested interest in one side of the issue - the user's - and very little in another - the programmer's. From a _practical_ standpoint, free software really is free beer to the user, as they don't contribute much back to the development community (5 minutes of beta testing does not equal 5 hours or 5 days of coding). This doesn't mean that their opinions have no value - but it means that I'll take rabidly pro-free-software posts from people who have never written software with a large grain of salt. Well-reasoned posts I'll still listen to. These do appear every so often, for both sides.
Coders, no matter which side of the open/free/proprietary fence they sit on, at least have the experience of both using and _writing_ software. They know exactly how much effort goes into it, and what most of the issues involved are. IMO, this makes them intrinsically better able to understand the merits and drawbacks of both positions, and so I personally give their opinions more weight (though I'll still ignore blatantly irrational posts, from both sides). The ideal poster would be one who has written both (open and/or free) and proprietary software on a regular basis, and who uses many software packages regularly. Regrettably, I don't yet fall into this category, but a few people here do.
Call me fascist if you like, but at some point common sense has to step in. Is this unfairly discriminatory? IMO, no, as anyone who wants me to take them more seriously has the option of either presenting a well-thought out argument, writing actual code, or both.
Sorry for the rant, but a large number of the posts on slashdot have demonstrated a nearly complete absence of thought, and it's starting to get to me:).
What's the best way, short of the furnace, to securely erase an 8mm tape? Shred doesn't look like it's designed for that sorta thing...
I think that the best way winds up being the furnace, actually. I doubt that your tape drive will let you move the tape head to make sure that the edges of the tracks are wiped, and as far as decaussing goes, the article claims that high-quality magnetic tapes require absurdly high field strengths to erase.
You could play with some of the EMP gadgets described in a previous slashdot article, but I think that chucking the tape in the fireplace and buying a new one would be the path of least cost/effort if you really want the data irrevocably eradicated.
OTOH, I don't personally see why this is a concern to most users. I doubt that NSA goons are going to be taking your hard drives and floppies into the lab any time soon:>.
Papers on similar things
on
Wearable PCs
·
· Score: 2
I don't have a citation for the article that you mentioned, but if you look up Professor Kensall Wise in the IEEE Journel of Solid State Circuits, you'll find about ten years worth of research and development in neural implants.
If you find citations for other groups, btw, please post them. I'm doing a project in a related field, and am having trouble tracking other groups down (there is at least one other group making devices that interface neurons and circuitry in addition to Prof. Wise's, but I don't know who they are).
Disclaimer: I fully realize that this is a silly thing to be debating, but I'm doing it anyway for the heck of it:).
OTOH, I can see three problems with trying to revive "worm" in this sense. It already has an established meaning in computing jargon, so adding another could lead to confusion. It didn't stick the first time. And it sounds perhaps a bit too perjorative for use except specifically as an insult.
IMO, this probably wouldn't stick this time either, partly because it is perjorative. The trick is finding a name that these people wouldn't mind calling _themselves_, which IMO is one of the reasons that "hacker" caught on. "System-breaker" has a chance, though that would probably be abbreviated and mutated among the WaReZ d00dz crowd that it's aimed at. Other labels that have a chance undoubtedly also exist.
And how about "maggot" as the emphatic form?
IMO not a good idea, as it's too close to "faggot" (a perjorative term for homosexuals, for readers who aren't in North America).
Other suggestions from our copious lurkers?
Linux wearables and more.
on
Wearable PCs
·
· Score: 2
There have actually been quite a few articles about this on Slashdot recently, and a few comments. I remember mentioning the Linux "wearcomps" from U of T a while back.
Here is a list of relevant slashdot articles, including this one:
Wearable PCs by CmdrTaco on Monday March 22, @02:00PM EST
New Low-Power Wearable Monitor by CmdrTaco on Thursday March 11, @12:53PM EST
Wearable Computers in Canada by CmdrTaco on Sunday January 24, @12:46PM EST
More Wearable PC by CmdrTaco on Sunday November 29, @12:04PM EST
Wearable Linux Computer by CmdrTaco on Thursday November 12, @09:58AM EST
Wearable Computing Central by CmdrTaco on Thursday November 05, @10:45AM EST
A Real Wearable? by CmdrTaco on Sunday October 18, @02:34PM EST
World's Smallest Web Server by CmdrTaco on Sunday January 24, @05:35PM EST
Tiny PPC Motherboards by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 07, @02:34PM EST
The PDA Revolution hits InfoWorld by CmdrTaco on Monday December 21, @05:01PM EST
IBM enters the fashion world with wearable PC by CmdrTaco on Monday September 14, @08:01PM EST
I dislike the term "cracker" because it sounds either like a food product or like the British term "crackers" (meaning "insane"). I hadn't known about the use of "cracker" as a racist term, as it doesn't seem to be that common up here.
How about "System-Breaker"? That nicely describes what these people are, is probably catchy enough for the media, and doesn't step on the toes of old-guard hackers or sound silly.
Slashdot Mirror
the chip has been able to read electrical pulse from the cell.
Could you please give me the citation for this? I read about several experiments along these lines a while ago, but have since lost the article references. This is very annoying, because I'm doing a project in a related field, and have been trying to track down the articles again off and on for over a year
Any help is appreciated.
I've since read the article, and I was more or less correct about what they were talking about. The sensors would be about the size of an integrated circuit chip; while they could be implanted, they couldn't be sent into the bloodstream to drift. Their usefulness stems from their ability to precicely measure in parallel the concentrations of many very distinct chemicals, including DNA fragments.
The other type of chip that they were talking about was again something the size of an integrated circuit chip, that had micromechanical chemical processing equipment on it. This too might be useful, but IMO is a bit farther away from practical fabrication and application.
Not by a fair margin, if they're talking about the kind of biological sensors that I've been hearing about. By combining biological components with integrated circuit chips, you can fabricate sensors on the chip that are sensitive to various complicated organic chemicals and the like - but you'd still have to do something like breathe on the chip or put a blood sample on the chip to get a reading. You can't just wave it at someone and get information.
This kind of device does have many applications. Detailed organic chemical analysis right now requires some fairly expensive equipment (gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, and IR and UV spectrometers). If you can do useful work with a smaller, cheaper component, then it will indeed quietly revolutionize substantial parts of the medical and forensic and chemical analysis industries. However, we're still a ways away from waving a lipstick container at somebody and getting a medical diagnosis. What this will mainly do is give you good quality readings on organic compounds suspended in a liquid or wafting through the air.
I'll have to read the specific article in question before making more detailed comments.
Darnit-I still need to know when I can put the network jack in my head. Writing all this e-mail through thought would be a lot nicer.
This is being worked on. Prof. Kensall Wise has been publishing papers on neural interfaces for over a decade, and at least one other group exists doing similar things. Heck, _I_ hope to be doing similar things (my fourth-year project; I'll post a link once it's underway). Reading thoughts electronically is probably impractical, but there are still a number of nifty things that you can do with regards to interfacing with peripherals.
Caveat - I repeat that I am *not* calling for the proprietary software model to be the only one used. I simply feel that it is just the most effective at repaying the programmers for the _majority_ of software projects. Exceptions exist.
If an application is valuable to 'the people', then let 'the people' form cooperatives to fund it. Well, such cooperatives have been formed -- the governments (which are supposed to represent 'the people'). This is at least how they are SUPPOSED to work.
So start up such a co-operative, and then approach me to write software. You wind up with the same problems as in the simpler schemes described - most of your users don't care about the product and are peeved at you for spamming them with information about your co-operative, and a very large chunk of the rest want to freeload.
Propose a scheme and demonstrate that it actually works in _practice_. If you can make the above scheme work, then great! I'll be the first to congratulate you, as I'll be getting paid.
As far as getting the government to fund development of needed software... Do you really think that the government is capable of accurately and relatively quickly assessing the software needs of the public and commissioning the software to be written? The problem with organizations that large is that they operate very _slowly_. This and similar problems are why huge corporations also tend to be beaten out by smaller startups eventually. But, I digress.
Present a practical alternative to the proprietary software, and _show_that_it_works_. Preferably by implementing it.
You did not offer a rebuttal. At most, you have shown that there is an easy 'crutch' for the real problem; you did nothing to show that IP is not problemmatic. This would be a rebuttal -- showing that the original point is false.
I don't have to show that IP is not problematic. Only that it is better than any alternatives currently presented, which is what I have already done.
To prove me wrong, you have to present an alternative that is demonstratably better than the current one or the one that I proposed (shorter IP lifespans), and prove that it's practical.
http://www.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/03/23/
freely distribute the result? (zero)?"
It is damned wrong that you can expect nothing back if you have free distribution. If Richard Stallman did not show it clearly enough, the whole OpenSource thing is to show you the contrary.
Nope. I've gone over this several times in other threads, and have yet to see a scheme proposed that would result in the same number of programmers being paid the same amount as under the present system. I'll post a link to the most detailed of these messages in a reply to this post.
The gist of the argument saying that open source provides ample revenue is that 1) coders will still be paid to code by people who need the software, and 2) coders can make back money on distribution and support. The first doesn't apply to disorganized markets - like the market for a word processor or for a game, that no single entity will foot the bill for - and the second doesn't provide enough jobs and doesn't provide anywhere close to the current pay scale. Programmers aren't overpaid by a long shot, either.
"By that logic, nobody should be paid to code.
There aren't enough hobbyist programmers to
fulfill users' desire for programs."
Programs have their use. This makes it more unnecessary to have IP laws on them. If distributing a painting earns you nothing, you might not have the motive to produce it (some will, anyway). But if distributing programs (say, a word processor) do not earn you a penny, there will still be places (say, in the office) where the need of the program exceed the cost of producing it. Programs still get written.
Again, nope. Not most of them. See above. How are you going to get ten thousand users to shell out a dollar each for the development of a word processor or simple game that takes four man-months? How about something that takes several man-years? There are various approaches to this, but what winds up working most effectively is something that looks a lot like the present system. See my other message.
For the vast majority of software, it takes _much_ less effort to crack it than it did to write it in the firstplace. Development of a good-sized application or game takes many, many man-months.
Now, re. your second point; by that argument, if I run a chip company and one of my employees steals the detailed plans for a processor made by one of my competitors, I should give him a bonus for his hard work.
What I would actually do is fire him.
The amount of effort that the employee puts into his action is overshadowed by the fact that he is doing something very illegal, for which he should be severely punished.
Software piracy (or theft, if you prefer that term) isn't as earth-shattering, but if Joe Cracker can take the product of _my_ effort, crack it, and then give it out to my clients, then I would certainly hope that the law stomps him for it. If he wants to compete with me, he is perfectly able to write his own software. If he wants free software to exist for the application, it _can_ - he just has to write it himself from scratch, devising his own code and his own algorithms in the process.
This is quite correct. The remedy for this is for people to write to their representatives and lobby for the laws to be changed. This isn't perfect, but it does ensure that the laws at least approximately reflect the will of the people.
What I am asking is that people _think_ about what the laws should do, and act accordingly, instead of saying "gimmie!". Like I've said in other threads, I have no problem with free software existing, and I would be happy to see software patents expire after a couple of years instead of 20+. However, I think that there are good reasons for proprietary software and patents existing.
It's only your "rightful compensation" because currently the law gives you rights to restrict distribution and you would carry out the work in expectation of doing so. That doesn't justify continuing with such laws. In the absence of those laws you would not expect to be able to restrict distribution and if you chose to put in the work knowing that your return would be limited then that would be your problem, just as with any other unprofitable field of endeavour. And of course, if you could find a way to make money out of it in the absence of those laws then that would be your "rightful expectation" in those circumstances.
So, you are saying that the value of my work is only that which I can expect to get back if I freely distribute the result? (zero)?
By that logic, nobody should be paid to code. There aren't enough hobbyist programmers to fulfill users' desire for programs.
If I spend 40 hours a week writing useful code, then I had damned well better be paid for doing so.
This has been done to death. Programmers of course also have to eat, but:
1) programmers can be paid to program (which they usually are anyway), rather than for programs -- paid for the services they render, not code they create. The payers, of course, would be those interested in having code that does certain stuff, not the least of them being the government (a-la NSA research grants).
This too was already addressed by another poster, responding to a previous article. As I felt the points were insightful, I'll cover them here:
If an application would be very valuable to a specific organization, then they will fund its development under this system. It will get written.
If an application is valuable to a large, disorganized user base, OTOH, then there is nobody among the users who can hire developers on behalf of all of them. What happens in this scenario?
One approach is for the developer to put a beg-screen in the product asking for donations, a la the old freeware programs that were floating around BBSs a decade ago. One problem with this is that, for an application that takes many man-months to develop, you aren't likely to recoup your investments this way (did _you_ dontate to the authours of any of the freeware that you used?). A more pressing problem is that I can't write the software and hope that money eventually comes in - I need a very substantial amount of money before I even start working, so that I'm sure that I won't starve while I code.
Another approach to solving this is to ask around for donations _before_ I start developing. The example in the original post was to pass around a contract to anyone who might be interested in the product asking them to pay me amount of money if they want me to start developing the product. There are several problems with this. One is spam. I have to distribute to all _prospective_ users. If only one in 10 is interested, then by statistics 90% of the offers that any user receives will be junk mail. Another is a guarantee that I will succeed in producing the product. If I'm writing a word processor, then this is pretty definite, but if I'm asking people to help me write a true AI, then it is considerably less certain. Less extreme projects may be better bets, but will still have risks. There is also the freeloading problem - people will be reluctant to pay me to develop the application if everyone else gets a copy anyways. By and large, most users would rather just sit back and let someone else do the development. People should be more altruistic than this? Maybe they _should_, but throughout all of history, on average, they _aren't_.
So, what if, to address the risk problem, I pass around a contract where people only have to pay me after I finish the product and make it available? Well, a huge fraction of these people will default on their contracts, as the product is now freely available. Can I hunt them down and make them pay up? Not for the $1 or $10 or $100 that I was charging them as a development share.
Now, what if I do something slightly different, and give each investing user a copy of the product, but restrict it so that it isn't distributed to the public for, say, 2 years? People who want to be able to use the software will be more likely to pay instead of freeloading, as freeloading involves waiting a couple of years. As I'm handing out physical CDs with the product on them, it's a fair bit harder for someone to stiff me on their development contribution, too.
And wait, this is sounding a lot like the standard commercial model, isn't it?
The only difference is that I'm postulating a 2-year expiry on copying instead of a 20+ year expiry, and I'm postulating that I'm charging a reasonable development price instead of gouging for what the market will bear. The first can be done if patent and copyright laws are reformed, and the second will occur if there is competition. Competition won't be hard, as my souce is available after two years, and if I'm gouging too heavily, someone else can step right in and make a cheaper product.
*That* is why I ask for reform of the current system instead of its abolition. The current system arose for a reason.
2) They can change money for services related to the code, not for code itself.
Like what?
People keep bringing this up, but I have yet to see something that will pay me my current programming wage. And I'm currently working as an intern for the equivalent of $14 US/hr. Tech support pays considerably less. The 'net makes distribution at near-zero cost easy. Further, there is a huge disparity between the number of coders needing to be employed and the number of personnel that Red Had or pick-your-free-software-related-company employs with other tasks.
Fundamentally, these are answers to the ethical problem concerning ownership of information. The problem does exist, and simply ignoring it (and treating information no differently from other forms of property) is not an answer.
And these are my rebuttals to those answers. I have nothing against Open Source and Free Software existing - but unless you can demonstrate a workable system that employs the same number of programmers as the present one for the same wages, I'm not going to abandon the proprietary model completely. I *do* need to eat.
There are other problems with this that are just as large. Binaries can be decompiled and the algorithms extracted. This is a fair bit of work, but as was illustrated in a previous thread, it can still be a lot less work than developing, testing, and fine-tuning a very complex algorithm in the first place. Also, industry spying would be legal under this scenario. If a competitor manages to extract the idea, though any of several espionage methods, you can't punish them, as the idea is declared to be free.
There is also the stagnation effect that stems from trade secrets that another poster referred to previously, but that's another issue.
Eliminating IP may not explicitly force people to reveal private information, but in practice it winds up having the same effect (providing detailed information at a cost lower than that required to come up with it originally, without compensating the original researchers/developers/etc. for their work).
The purpose of law is to prevent someone from harming me (for arbitrary values of "me"). If I spend a year of effort to produce a product, and somebody who has spent no effort either leeches the source or cracks the binary and distributes it, then they have most certainly harmed me by cutting off my rightful compensation for my efforts. It is most certainly within the purpose of the law to prevent this.
Independent invention? Well, for an algorithm complex enough to be non-obvious, or for code that implements an algorithm or application, the Perl rule applies - There's More Than One Way To Do It. Somebody wanting to accomplish the same goal can _do_ so by other, equally good, methods. They don't have to copy my work and leave me starving on the street and owing large amouns of money to investors. Might they accidentally use the same approach that I did? For something sufficiently complex, that's not likely, but as long as they do their _research_ first, it's a non-issue. They can see what approach I used in the patents, and make sure that they use another.
Now, patenting the obvious. I agree that this is a problem and that this is wrong. However, this is a problem with the patent office, not with patents. Consider carefully who to chew out and for what.
That time is gone no matter what you do -- restricting (or not restricting) others' access to the fruit of your labor will neither return that time to you, nor require more time and effort from you.
On the contrary - if I write proprietary software, then the investment in time and effort is repaid financially by the people who of their own free will, even with alternatives choose to pay me for what I have produced.
Further, on the basis of this expected return, I can get backers to fork over money _now_ so that I don't starve while spending months developing my product.
If the product was to be given away, then virtually all of the expected returns would disappear (distribution is free on the 'net, and tech support doesn't cut it finanically). There go my backers, which means that I can't afford to write the software in the first place.
Would the free source community develop the software itself? Possibly. But not for all projects. Think of how much coding effort is done by all paid programmers in any given year. Some of this coding is redundant; working on competing products with identical features or feature sets that are perfect subsets of other products. However, most of it isn't redundant. This represents the total strong demand for programming (there is additional demand, but not enough that someone actually forked over the money to have the programs written). Now, think about it. In order to satisfy this demand, you would have to have _that_ _many_ programmers working full-time, or several times as many programmers working in their spare time. Assume that someone waves a magic wand and declares that software may *only* be developed with open source and can be duplicated at the cost of duplication by anyone who sees fit. I don't see enough free-time programmers to fill the demand for coding. I seriously doubt that the masses that were formerly paid coders will put in 40-hour weeks for free. They have to eat.
So, either you find a way of paying the programmers for their efforts, or else most of your code just doesn't get written.
As far as methods of paying programmers are concerned, someone posted an interesting exploration of that a while ago. As you work through the problems that arise and their logical solutions, you wind up with something that looks a lot like a proprietary/capitalistic model. Think carefully about this.
Actually, Canada is a hybrid, leaning strongly towards Capitalism. The economy is primarily capitalistic, but the "social safety net" guarantees minimum necessities to everyone (living on Welfare isn't fun, but it can be done, and essential medical services are free). If you want to have spending money, you'll need to work for it. OTOH, if you start a business venture and it fails, or if you get laid off from where you're working, there's a limit to how far you can fall.
It is the direct reward for effort that capitalism provides that drives production. In a _purely_ socialistic economy, altruism is the only incentive for effort, and production suffers badly.
However, the safety net is nice to have. It makes walking the tightrope a lot less stressful.
And yes, I'm Canadian.
Might it really have something to do with Intels "investment" in Be?
I doubt it. Alpha systems are mainly used for research and as servers; BeOS is intended for personal use for people doing multimedia-related design. There just isn't any overlap. As far as Be is concerned, there is no market for an Alpha port of BeOS.
If Alphas actually do start showing up on desktops in quantity, then this will probably change. I know *I'd* like one.
The government has the tech to read residules untill it has been overwritten *7* passes.
This might be true if there wasn't a deliberate attempt to permanently erase the data. As the article mentions, you can get residual information stored at the edges of tracks, or deep within the magnetic medium if the temperature has changed in just the right way since the original recording.
However, the erasure methods described in the article seem pretty thorough.
Also, the default method given uses on the order of 20 passes IIRC, with 20 different patterns.
Whenever phrases like "moral dimension" start cropping up, I get worried, because it generally leads to a lot of vague arguing with little basis on anything tangible - including morals, ethics, or what-have-you. So, I'm going to list a few questions that I think all posters would do well to consider before using "morality" as a justification for their arguments. I don't think that such arguments are necessarily invalid - only that a lot of justification and reasoning tends to be skipped, with the result that the final positions are precarious at best.
Questions that should be addressed are:
Substitute "ethics" or whatever other word you're using for "morality" above if you like. If you appeal to several entities in your argument (e.g. both "morality" and "ethics", if you have different definitions to them), then duplicate the "morality" section above and answer the questions for each of the entities you are appealing to.
These questions represent the groundwork that determines how and to what extent various factors can be used as support in arguments. The importance and reasons for importance of things like money are well-understood and generally agreed upon by most people, so these arguments are usually skipped. OTOH, the importance and reasons for importance of things like morality are hazy, and different people will tend to have _very_ different opinions on them. This doesn't mean that that things like morality *aren't* important - just that you can't skip the above steps if you want to invoke morality, ethics, or what-have-you in an argument.
So, it would behoove all involved to re-state their arguments with this information explicitly spelled out, if they want to be able to effectively debate with each other.
Meanwhile, I'll step back from this thread. Precisely because few people agree on these points and everyone tends to just assume arbitrary positions, discussions based on "morality" tend to lead to Holy Wars and little else.
If free software is really in the interests of users, then the opinions of the users must count.
IMO, whether or not a person has actually written code _does_ influence the weight of their opinions.
Someone who uses software but doesn't write it has a strong vested interest in one side of the issue - the user's - and very little in another - the programmer's. From a _practical_ standpoint, free software really is free beer to the user, as they don't contribute much back to the development community (5 minutes of beta testing does not equal 5 hours or 5 days of coding). This doesn't mean that their opinions have no value - but it means that I'll take rabidly pro-free-software posts from people who have never written software with a large grain of salt. Well-reasoned posts I'll still listen to. These do appear every so often, for both sides.
Coders, no matter which side of the open/free/proprietary fence they sit on, at least have the experience of both using and _writing_ software. They know exactly how much effort goes into it, and what most of the issues involved are. IMO, this makes them intrinsically better able to understand the merits and drawbacks of both positions, and so I personally give their opinions more weight (though I'll still ignore blatantly irrational posts, from both sides). The ideal poster would be one who has written both (open and/or free) and proprietary software on a regular basis, and who uses many software packages regularly. Regrettably, I don't yet fall into this category, but a few people here do.
Call me fascist if you like, but at some point common sense has to step in. Is this unfairly discriminatory? IMO, no, as anyone who wants me to take them more seriously has the option of either presenting a well-thought out argument, writing actual code, or both.
Sorry for the rant, but a large number of the posts on slashdot have demonstrated a nearly complete absence of thought, and it's starting to get to me
I think that the best way winds up being the furnace, actually. I doubt that your tape drive will let you move the tape head to make sure that the edges of the tracks are wiped, and as far as decaussing goes, the article claims that high-quality magnetic tapes require absurdly high field strengths to erase.
You could play with some of the EMP gadgets described in a previous slashdot article, but I think that chucking the tape in the fireplace and buying a new one would be the path of least cost/effort if you really want the data irrevocably eradicated.
OTOH, I don't personally see why this is a concern to most users. I doubt that NSA goons are going to be taking your hard drives and floppies into the lab any time soon
If you find citations for other groups, btw, please post them. I'm doing a project in a related field, and am having trouble tracking other groups down (there is at least one other group making devices that interface neurons and circuitry in addition to Prof. Wise's, but I don't know who they are).
OTOH, I can see three problems with trying to revive "worm" in this sense. It already has an established meaning in computing jargon, so adding another could lead to confusion. It didn't stick the first time. And it sounds perhaps a bit too perjorative for use except specifically as an insult.
IMO, this probably wouldn't stick this time either, partly because it is perjorative. The trick is finding a name that these people wouldn't mind calling _themselves_, which IMO is one of the reasons that "hacker" caught on. "System-breaker" has a chance, though that would probably be abbreviated and mutated among the WaReZ d00dz crowd that it's aimed at. Other labels that have a chance undoubtedly also exist.
And how about "maggot" as the emphatic form?
IMO not a good idea, as it's too close to "faggot" (a perjorative term for homosexuals, for readers who aren't in North America).
Other suggestions from our copious lurkers?
Here is a list of relevant slashdot articles, including this one:
How about "System-Breaker"? That nicely describes what these people are, is probably catchy enough for the media, and doesn't step on the toes of old-guard hackers or sound silly.
Just my 2 cents / 1.3 cents US.
The point re. Open Source tending to be disorganized is IMO quite valid, and the poster was reasonably polite. Why is this post at -1?