Laws are the "hack" solution. Strong encryption is the real solution.
Laws and Encryption can complement each other to provide more security/privacy than either could alone. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you enjoy security/privacy as long as you use encryption, regardless of what laws are passed.
Two American pilots did actually get into the air and manage to shoot down seven Japanese Zeros. However, I doubt they were in love with the same girl or that they both flew B-25's in the Doolittle (I think it's 2 o's) raid.
Another interesting bit of history is that after Miller won the Navy Cross for shooting down two Zeros he was reassigned to his old post as a cook! Just goes to show the level of racism that was present in the Navy back then.
This is where my understanding of QC fails. Since your really not generating 'output' in the classical sense, but rather probabilities of the correct output. What happens when the most probable output is not the correct one?
Does a MC (modern computer) have to check the work of a QC in order to ensure the QC got it right? For example, instead of letting the MC use the Number Field Sieve algorithm to factor primes, the QC tells the MC what the most probable answer is, then the MC makes sure that this answer meets all the qualities of the correct result. This is obviously still a huge gain for factoring primes, but there have got to be a huge amount of algorithms wherein testing if the QC has the right answer would be more expensive than the MC just finding it on its own due to communication/conversion costs between the two different platforms/processors.
Opt-out by default? You must be joking. For starters Google indexes around 1,346,966,000 web pages. Lets assume that an average URL length is 20 characters, my current address has over 100 characters, but lets just be conservative and say its 20 characters on average. If we want to allow half the internet to pass our filters, we require 1,346,966,000 / 2 * 20 bytes, roughly 13GB of storage. Now I suppose we could figure out a way of dividing these lists up a bit, but now our browser has to coordinate page requests not only with the web server, but with all the servers that hold these lists. Everytime you change your URL, you will need to certify it is a permitted page by searching through more than 13 GB of data. If a list server ever went down, it would essentially take with it every address that it was previously permitting. If your system ever caught on, the internet would grind to a halt within a matter of minutes.
Re:Databases are inherently . . .
on
SQL Over FreeNet
·
· Score: 1
Just about everything on Freenet is encrypted six ways to Sunday. By the time it reaches another computer it really resembles random noise more than 'data' in any real sense of the word.
The possible implications of this sort of utility are amazing.
Excuse me for being close-minded, but I feel this statement warrents a "Such as what?" reply. What will allowing SQL over FreeNet accomplish that cannot already be done? I would imagine that running a database over the internet would be fairly frustrating, why will running it over FreeNet (which is still at 0.3.9.1) be any better?
So where are we going to see this "amazing new utility" (Which is composed of 370 lines of perl) in action?
I hate to sound so pessimistic, but might this be a fair bit premature?
As has been mentioned before, this emulation layer has to run somewhere, if not in software, in hardware. The major reason why a Crusoe would run slower than a PIII is that it only has two ALUs and a single FPU. You would not buy this chip to play Quake with.
However, by having the "Code Morphing" technology run as software it allows for more aggressive run-time application tuning since more data can be retained on the given application. What this means is that the clock cycles on the Crusoe should be more efficient than conventional processors since it is executing more thoroughly optimized code.
The really cool possibility that this opens up is dynamically loading/unloading specialized processor code that is tuned to specific applications. That would be cool, l33t, sweet, and bitchin' all rolled into one.
We really don't need anymore code that tries to implement yet another anonymous, decentralized peer to peer network and comes up a little short of its potential.
What we really need is a good specification written in nice plain english.
While we may not have any right to reproduce, we certainly don't have have any obligation to accept the genes that nature has provided us with. Some parents did not want their children to miss out on what might just be the most important aspect to life. Who the hell are you to tell them they made the wrong decision?
I don't see you trying to solve whatever overpopulation problems the world is experiencing through suicide.
If Napster isn't peer to peer I really don't know what is. Peer to peer is a form of distribution which has absolutely nothing to do with technology or network topology.
Napster is a centralized search index that indexes a distributed database of mp3s. Gnutella is a distributed search index that indexes a distributed database of files. They are both peer to peer because they allow anyone with a client to both download and upload material.
Peer to peer and broadcast are methods of distribution. Centralized and distributed are types of network topologies.
Earilier, someone used the analogy of a bomb to express the same point. The bombers are always held accountable regardless of whether they learned directly out of a book on how to make bombs.
However, the difference between the bomb and the program is of accountability. When a bomb goes off, law enforcement agencies tend to notice. They can find evidence within the wreckage and begin to track down the criminal who will then be held accountable. While the criminal may have learned to make the bomb from the book, the law (rightfully IMHO) places greater weight upon their actions than the books information.
This scenario does not occur on the web. A DVD cannot call 911 when someone tries to run DeCSS on it. It is currently impossible to hold individual users accountable for actions performed entirely on their home PC. This is why the law is suggesting to take the accountability one level higher and stop the actual program from entering the users hands, where all practical sense of accountability is lost.
Everyone accepts that they are responsible for their actions in the world. While we may or may not accept that same responsibility for our actions on our computers it does not matter since laws are currently unenforceable on computers and the majority of the internet.
I have been following the IP debates on/. for quite a while now. I don't see a good resolution to this issue anytime soon. Perhaps if we where to develop an OS that reported illegal activity to law enforcement agencies the government would be more receptive to shifting accountability from programs to users. Personally, I would just rather break the DMCA everyday.
Just when I thought code could get complex I take a look at law...
I stopped calling technical support about a year and a half ago. Between IBM, Packard Bell, Comcast, and @Home I was about ready to lose it.
Since then I have been looking for the answers to all my (computer-related;) problems on Usenet and Google. I could not be happier. I almost always find exactly what I am looking for, from people who actually want to help you out because they have experienced the same problems, without having to provide any customer identification. It's usually faster as well.
When evaluating software/hardware I always look at how large the support community is, it can really make the difference (even if most of them tell you to RTFM:P).
I don't see how this is really going to help retail stores. You can figure out whats selling by the purchases and I can't imagine how it could help rate promotions as the article suggested. It is definately impressive technology, but it seems to add a good amount of indirection towards generating additional revenue. In short, I really don't see a strong correlation between emotions and shopping, maybe thats just me.
Where this could really shine would be at a amusement park. Analyzing the emotions of both people on rides as well as getting off of rides would really help give you a more direct picture of how fun, scary, or boring your park is.
I think your dead on. Freenet displays such amazingly backwards geek logic.
Your concerned that your country is not allowing true freedom of speech, so you write a program? What? Did I miss something, or does this sound like the most ridiculously large amount of indirection ever used to solve a problem?
Besides, if your government doesn't have a problem making free spech illegal, what makes you think your program is safe?
If you cannot influence your government through political channels then its time to sell your computer and buy a plane ticket.
I think most people are so hostile towards him because he is laughing at us for making a new realization about our world.
Yesterday, it was widely accepted that genes have almost total control over our bodies growth and traits.
Today, we think that the manifestation of genetic code within proteins posesses that control.
How utterly stupid we were to to ever believe that the workings of our bodies were entirely governed by genes. I mean, how can you respect a theory that doesn't hold up for more than two centuries? Christianity has been preaching the same hypocritical bullshit for over a millenium, it is obviously a superior explanation of life. To hold such an arrogant view towards the situation shows nothing but complete disrepect to the dedicated scientists that have brought us this far.
Personally, I don't understand why everyone is so upset. We have taken a major conceptual step forward in the field of genetics. We could never have made it this far had some people not seen an easy victory with genetics initially. Genetic research has basically received a huge jumpstart from corporations that were eager to make a buck.
I must admit that I have never really taken much time to learn about automatic methods of identifying and eliminating spam. Nevertheless, it seems that human judgement is required to consisently identify all of the various forms of spam.
While it is fairly painless to delete spam, (you can usually identify it by only reading the header) the real problem is that it is not only you deleting it from your mail account; its also tens of millions of other people deleting the exact same message. If someone else has already taken the time to figure out that the message is spam, why should you have to be bothered with duplicating their effort?
If we ever want to get serious about eliminating the amount of spam in our inboxes we are going to have to integrate spam identification functionality within our mail clients, not just within our mail servers.
If we allowed users to inform the mail client that they regard a piece of incoming mail as spam our program could respond by (obviously) deleting the message, then propagating the information that this piece of mail is spam to mail servers. Our mail servers would then be able to delete the message before the remainder of its clients downloaded it into their inboxes.
Unfortunately, this system would not be reponsive enough to block spam as it arrived at mail servers. Accordingly, it would most likely help to augment, not replace, existing spam filtering technologies.
Another observation is that initially, this system would generate almost as much information as the spam had done in the first place. While this is true, when spammers realize that only the first few of their millions of messages are being read, they might decide its time to look for a real job. Eventually, the net gains in both human time/effort as well as computational resources would be tremendous.
BTW, I have provided my real e-mail address. While never directly providing your true address anywhere on the web might save you some grief, it seems to remind me of an ostrich burying its head in the sand. We should not all be forced to learn clever ways of how to encrypt our e-mail addresses to avoid spam. You certainly don't consider changing your PO box because it gets too much junk mail. If spam has grown so far out of control as to force us to change our actual addresses, how can it be that so little has been done to stop it?
Recently, I attended a programming contest at Penn University and besides walking away with a full copy of Visual Studio 6.0 for my efforts, I got to talk with one of the programmers on the Tele-immersion project (Hi Raj!). Everything about it seemed really cool. Although personally, I think I am going to hold out for a Neural Interface:)
Well, my personal take on the social implications that come with the advancement of technology, in this case nanotechnology, is that as oppossed to (Oh, I dunno..) religion which attempts to explain and "lock" the definition of what it means to be human, technology allows us to expose and whittle away that definition until we have realized that there is no clear definition between human and non-human on a physical level, but rather on a meta-physical level.
Now, if you want additional information for your report; I would suggest checking out Bill Joy's article which appeared in the Febuary (I think) issue of Wired and the sci.nanotech usenet group.
As a general note, I think that many of the posters on/. would have been more receptive to your question if they had perceived an attitude of "Hey, I have a genuine interest in the social implications of nanotech, whats your guys take on it?" as oppossed to an attitude of "Aww crap, I gotta write this big report so that some college will think im tha bomb. Quick, tell me everything you know about the social implications of nanotech".
I don't mean to offend you, but it seems to me that the area where "Artificial Intelligence" is being "used" the most is in computer games. Within the scope of games, AI usually refers to some type of code that chooses which route a bot (FPS) or forces (RTS) should travel in order to reach a specified destination. Now, although this may seem intelligent to the average player, I doubt it seems very intelligent to the programmer who wrote the code, or to another person who reads the code; the computer is merely following his/her instructions to the letter. I would assume that some "AI Scripts" would call some type of random function to provide odds for taking separate paths, but this is still not Artificial Intelligence in the true meaning of the word. With this background I would like to ask:
How could it be possible for computer hardware or software to perform an action that it is not explicitly told to do? In other words, how can the computer say to the programmer: "Hey buddy, your doing this all wrong, here, let me show you how it's done"?
How can Humans ever hope to model and physically present Intelligence, something that they do not understand, in any form?
I think that what really would have been funny is instead of posting all of these articles in 1337 speak and in foreign languages that take forever to read, you should have taken our comments and warped them into another language, having everyone trying to post w/o using their 26 character keys would have been hilarious.
I think that most of us would agree that Linux is an excellent choice of operating system for programmers, but that it would prove an exercise in frustration for most "end-users". It seems to me that (as I also consider myself a gamer), like programmers, gamers try to learn the most about their hardware and squeeze as much performance out of their OS as possible. I believe that because gamers user habits closely resemble programmers user habits, emphasis should be placed upon making Linux a viable gaming platform. Now my question is two fold:
1. Do you believe that gamers are the "missing link" between programmers and end-users, and does that in anyway affect your companies efforts?
2. What needs to be done by game companies such as your own and by the Linux community to establish Linux as a top-notch gaming platform?
Note: This is my first post to/., so I probably screwed it up somehow, please keep the laughter to a minimum.
Slashdot Mirror
Laws are the "hack" solution. Strong encryption is the real solution.
Laws and Encryption can complement each other to provide more security/privacy than either could alone. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you enjoy security/privacy as long as you use encryption, regardless of what laws are passed.
Check out The Anatomy of a Search Engine.
Two American pilots did actually get into the air and manage to shoot down seven Japanese Zeros. However, I doubt they were in love with the same girl or that they both flew B-25's in the Doolittle (I think it's 2 o's) raid.
Another interesting bit of history is that after Miller won the Navy Cross for shooting down two Zeros he was reassigned to his old post as a cook! Just goes to show the level of racism that was present in the Navy back then.
This is where my understanding of QC fails. Since your really not generating 'output' in the classical sense, but rather probabilities of the correct output. What happens when the most probable output is not the correct one?
Does a MC (modern computer) have to check the work of a QC in order to ensure the QC got it right? For example, instead of letting the MC use the Number Field Sieve algorithm to factor primes, the QC tells the MC what the most probable answer is, then the MC makes sure that this answer meets all the qualities of the correct result. This is obviously still a huge gain for factoring primes, but there have got to be a huge amount of algorithms wherein testing if the QC has the right answer would be more expensive than the MC just finding it on its own due to communication/conversion costs between the two different platforms/processors.
Will MCs need to check the work of QCs?
Opt-out by default? You must be joking. For starters Google indexes around 1,346,966,000 web pages. Lets assume that an average URL length is 20 characters, my current address has over 100 characters, but lets just be conservative and say its 20 characters on average. If we want to allow half the internet to pass our filters, we require 1,346,966,000 / 2 * 20 bytes, roughly 13GB of storage. Now I suppose we could figure out a way of dividing these lists up a bit, but now our browser has to coordinate page requests not only with the web server, but with all the servers that hold these lists. Everytime you change your URL, you will need to certify it is a permitted page by searching through more than 13 GB of data. If a list server ever went down, it would essentially take with it every address that it was previously permitting. If your system ever caught on, the internet would grind to a halt within a matter of minutes.
Just about everything on Freenet is encrypted six ways to Sunday. By the time it reaches another computer it really resembles random noise more than 'data' in any real sense of the word.
The possible implications of this sort of utility are amazing.
Excuse me for being close-minded, but I feel this statement warrents a "Such as what?" reply. What will allowing SQL over FreeNet accomplish that cannot already be done? I would imagine that running a database over the internet would be fairly frustrating, why will running it over FreeNet (which is still at 0.3.9.1) be any better?
So where are we going to see this "amazing new utility" (Which is composed of 370 lines of perl) in action?
I hate to sound so pessimistic, but might this be a fair bit premature?
As has been mentioned before, this emulation layer has to run somewhere, if not in software, in hardware. The major reason why a Crusoe would run slower than a PIII is that it only has two ALUs and a single FPU. You would not buy this chip to play Quake with.
However, by having the "Code Morphing" technology run as software it allows for more aggressive run-time application tuning since more data can be retained on the given application. What this means is that the clock cycles on the Crusoe should be more efficient than conventional processors since it is executing more thoroughly optimized code.
The really cool possibility that this opens up is dynamically loading/unloading specialized processor code that is tuned to specific applications. That would be cool, l33t, sweet, and bitchin' all rolled into one.
For more info, see Ars-Technica's Crusoe Review.
Dead on.
We really don't need anymore code that tries to implement yet another anonymous, decentralized peer to peer network and comes up a little short of its potential.
What we really need is a good specification written in nice plain english.
Damn Natural Selection.
Damn eugenics.
Damn luddites.
And most of all, damn your arrogance.
While we may not have any right to reproduce, we certainly don't have have any obligation to accept the genes that nature has provided us with. Some parents did not want their children to miss out on what might just be the most important aspect to life. Who the hell are you to tell them they made the wrong decision?
I don't see you trying to solve whatever overpopulation problems the world is experiencing through suicide.
If Napster isn't peer to peer I really don't know what is. Peer to peer is a form of distribution which has absolutely nothing to do with technology or network topology.
Napster is a centralized search index that indexes a distributed database of mp3s. Gnutella is a distributed search index that indexes a distributed database of files. They are both peer to peer because they allow anyone with a client to both download and upload material.
Peer to peer and broadcast are methods of distribution. Centralized and distributed are types of network topologies.
I agree with you completely.
/. for quite a while now. I don't see a good resolution to this issue anytime soon. Perhaps if we where to develop an OS that reported illegal activity to law enforcement agencies the government would be more receptive to shifting accountability from programs to users. Personally, I would just rather break the DMCA everyday.
Earilier, someone used the analogy of a bomb to express the same point. The bombers are always held accountable regardless of whether they learned directly out of a book on how to make bombs.
However, the difference between the bomb and the program is of accountability. When a bomb goes off, law enforcement agencies tend to notice. They can find evidence within the wreckage and begin to track down the criminal who will then be held accountable. While the criminal may have learned to make the bomb from the book, the law (rightfully IMHO) places greater weight upon their actions than the books information.
This scenario does not occur on the web. A DVD cannot call 911 when someone tries to run DeCSS on it. It is currently impossible to hold individual users accountable for actions performed entirely on their home PC. This is why the law is suggesting to take the accountability one level higher and stop the actual program from entering the users hands, where all practical sense of accountability is lost.
Everyone accepts that they are responsible for their actions in the world. While we may or may not accept that same responsibility for our actions on our computers it does not matter since laws are currently unenforceable on computers and the majority of the internet.
I have been following the IP debates on
Just when I thought code could get complex I take a look at law...
I stopped calling technical support about a year and a half ago. Between IBM, Packard Bell, Comcast, and @Home I was about ready to lose it.
;) problems on Usenet and Google. I could not be happier. I almost always find exactly what I am looking for, from people who actually want to help you out because they have experienced the same problems, without having to provide any customer identification. It's usually faster as well.
:P).
Since then I have been looking for the answers to all my (computer-related
When evaluating software/hardware I always look at how large the support community is, it can really make the difference (even if most of them tell you to RTFM
I don't see how this is really going to help retail stores. You can figure out whats selling by the purchases and I can't imagine how it could help rate promotions as the article suggested. It is definately impressive technology, but it seems to add a good amount of indirection towards generating additional revenue. In short, I really don't see a strong correlation between emotions and shopping, maybe thats just me.
Where this could really shine would be at a amusement park. Analyzing the emotions of both people on rides as well as getting off of rides would really help give you a more direct picture of how fun, scary, or boring your park is.
I think your dead on. Freenet displays such amazingly backwards geek logic.
Your concerned that your country is not allowing true freedom of speech, so you write a program? What? Did I miss something, or does this sound like the most ridiculously large amount of indirection ever used to solve a problem?
Besides, if your government doesn't have a problem making free spech illegal, what makes you think your program is safe?
If you cannot influence your government through political channels then its time to sell your computer and buy a plane ticket.
I think most people are so hostile towards him because he is laughing at us for making a new realization about our world.
Yesterday, it was widely accepted that genes have almost total control over our bodies growth and traits.
Today, we think that the manifestation of genetic code within proteins posesses that control.
How utterly stupid we were to to ever believe that the workings of our bodies were entirely governed by genes. I mean, how can you respect a theory that doesn't hold up for more than two centuries? Christianity has been preaching the same hypocritical bullshit for over a millenium, it is obviously a superior explanation of life. To hold such an arrogant view towards the situation shows nothing but complete disrepect to the dedicated scientists that have brought us this far.
Personally, I don't understand why everyone is so upset. We have taken a major conceptual step forward in the field of genetics. We could never have made it this far had some people not seen an easy victory with genetics initially. Genetic research has basically received a huge jumpstart from corporations that were eager to make a buck.
I must admit that I have never really taken much time to learn about automatic methods of identifying and eliminating spam. Nevertheless, it seems that human judgement is required to consisently identify all of the various forms of spam.
While it is fairly painless to delete spam, (you can usually identify it by only reading the header) the real problem is that it is not only you deleting it from your mail account; its also tens of millions of other people deleting the exact same message. If someone else has already taken the time to figure out that the message is spam, why should you have to be bothered with duplicating their effort?
If we ever want to get serious about eliminating the amount of spam in our inboxes we are going to have to integrate spam identification functionality within our mail clients, not just within our mail servers.
If we allowed users to inform the mail client that they regard a piece of incoming mail as spam our program could respond by (obviously) deleting the message, then propagating the information that this piece of mail is spam to mail servers. Our mail servers would then be able to delete the message before the remainder of its clients downloaded it into their inboxes.
Unfortunately, this system would not be reponsive enough to block spam as it arrived at mail servers. Accordingly, it would most likely help to augment, not replace, existing spam filtering technologies.
Another observation is that initially, this system would generate almost as much information as the spam had done in the first place. While this is true, when spammers realize that only the first few of their millions of messages are being read, they might decide its time to look for a real job. Eventually, the net gains in both human time/effort as well as computational resources would be tremendous.
BTW, I have provided my real e-mail address. While never directly providing your true address anywhere on the web might save you some grief, it seems to remind me of an ostrich burying its head in the sand. We should not all be forced to learn clever ways of how to encrypt our e-mail addresses to avoid spam. You certainly don't consider changing your PO box because it gets too much junk mail. If spam has grown so far out of control as to force us to change our actual addresses, how can it be that so little has been done to stop it?
-Angelo Torres
As a few people have said, this has been done before:
m l
:)
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/18/2232258.sht
Recently, I attended a programming contest at Penn University and besides walking away with a full copy of Visual Studio 6.0 for my efforts, I got to talk with one of the programmers on the Tele-immersion project (Hi Raj!). Everything about it seemed really cool. Although personally, I think I am going to hold out for a Neural Interface
Penn's Tele-Immersion Page
National Tele-Immersion Initiative
Well, my personal take on the social implications that come with the advancement of technology, in this case nanotechnology, is that as oppossed to (Oh, I dunno..) religion which attempts to explain and "lock" the definition of what it means to be human, technology allows us to expose and whittle away that definition until we have realized that there is no clear definition between human and non-human on a physical level, but rather on a meta-physical level.
Now, if you want additional information for your report; I would suggest checking out Bill Joy's article which appeared in the Febuary (I think) issue of Wired and the sci.nanotech usenet group.
As a general note, I think that many of the posters on /. would have been more receptive to your question if they had perceived an attitude of "Hey, I have a genuine interest in the social implications of nanotech, whats your guys take on it?" as oppossed to an attitude of "Aww crap, I gotta write this big report so that some college will think im tha bomb. Quick, tell me everything you know about the social implications of nanotech".
Angelo Torres
Hello,
I don't mean to offend you, but it seems to me that the area where "Artificial Intelligence" is being "used" the most is in computer games. Within the scope of games, AI usually refers to some type of code that chooses which route a bot (FPS) or forces (RTS) should travel in order to reach a specified destination. Now, although this may seem intelligent to the average player, I doubt it seems very intelligent to the programmer who wrote the code, or to another person who reads the code; the computer is merely following his/her instructions to the letter. I would assume that some "AI Scripts" would call some type of random function to provide odds for taking separate paths, but this is still not Artificial Intelligence in the true meaning of the word. With this background I would like to ask:
How could it be possible for computer hardware or software to perform an action that it is not explicitly told to do? In other words, how can the computer say to the programmer: "Hey buddy, your doing this all wrong, here, let me show you how it's done"?
How can Humans ever hope to model and physically present Intelligence, something that they do not understand, in any form?
Angelo Torres
I think that what really would have been funny is instead of posting all of these articles in 1337 speak and in foreign languages that take forever to read, you should have taken our comments and warped them into another language, having everyone trying to post w/o using their 26 character keys would have been hilarious.
AngeloI think that most of us would agree that Linux is an excellent choice of operating system for programmers, but that it would prove an exercise in frustration for most "end-users". It seems to me that (as I also consider myself a gamer), like programmers, gamers try to learn the most about their hardware and squeeze as much performance out of their OS as possible. I believe that because gamers user habits closely resemble programmers user habits, emphasis should be placed upon making Linux a viable gaming platform. Now my question is two fold:
1. Do you believe that gamers are the "missing link" between programmers and end-users, and does that in anyway affect your companies efforts?
2. What needs to be done by game companies such as your own and by the Linux community to establish Linux as a top-notch gaming platform?
Note: This is my first post to /., so I probably screwed it up somehow, please keep the laughter to a minimum.