I'm happy to compromise, but first I have to be included in the debate. Most of the issues
that have driven Nader supporters away from the Democratic party are issues that neither
of the major candidates care to discuss. When was there an honest debate about involvement in
the WTO? Never -- the two parties agree on this issue. When has there been an honest debate about
corporate wellfare and unreasonable tax breaks for corporations? Again, the two major parties
have refused to take action on either issue, despite assurances that they would. When did either
major party debate the scope and abuse of IP laws? When did they discuss cracking down on US corps
commiting blatant human rights violations in third world contries? When did either Gore or Bush
have a public debate with Nader? When did they make any effort to appeal to young voters?
The Democrats have no right to complain about a lack of compromise from the left wing when they
are not willing to even engage in a discussion of the issues we care about.
I'm disturbed by the gratuitous use of the word 'socialist' in this article. P2P is constantly
being characterized as having 'socialist roots' and compared to Linux (another 'socialist' movement).
As a real live socialist (in the US!), I have to say that it's nice to get credit for such a great
movement and great technology, but I don't think it's really deserved. Since when are the ideals of
individual freedom and a distaste for corporate rule over communication exclusively socialist? Don't
libertarians and liberal capitalists also share these ideals? Libertarians hate it when I say this, but
libertarian philosophy (notice the small 'l', this is not the same as the Libertarian political party)
and socialism have a lot in common. Most socialists support strong civil liberties (this is not true
of the statist-socialists -- Stallinism falls into that category) as do libertarians. The distinction
is that socialism has an economic theory as well.
I think the one thing that free/open source developers have in common (myself included) is that
individuals are capable of producing things of value without a profit motive. They can even
enjoy producing without making a profit. This is not socialism (although socialists would agree that
it is good). People from nearly every economic/political background are capable of engaging in these
kinds of activities. I wish that the media would stop calling every non-corporate movement socialism
and stop using the word as a scare tactic to keep people away from the scary 'socialist' technologies.
The issue of what to block is always a tough one, which is why I mentioned "common-sense" rules to allow for the filters to be bypassed on request for specific information. At least until the filtering software gets several generations smarter about what it's doing.
"Common-sense" rules are notorious for getting mixed up with personal political/moral beliefs. One person's "common-sense" rule that Wicca is immoral and should be banned from library internet terminals would be a direct violation of another person's religious rights. There is no set of "common-sense" rules that people could agree on. The christian coalition, NOW, and who knows what other groups are always going to find a way to get their hands into what is appropriate for children to look at, and it will always come under the guise of "common-sense." I also pay taxes to support libraries, and I'm happy to do it. I don't want to decide what other people should be looking at, and I don't want them deciding for me or my children. Butt out of my business! Public libraries already have plenty of dead trees full of "immoral" content that children probably shouldn't be looking at. Why should computers be held to a different standard?
No one has an inherent right to Internet access. The libraries and schools offer it as a research tool, according to their rules of usage. If you can't afford a computer of your own, you will have to make do with the restrictions placed on publicly-funded computers.
We have a public library system because of the belief that people do have a fundamental right to information, regardless of their economic status. The homeless have just as much of a right to read a book as I do, which is why public libraries are called "public". Up until the past decade, the vast majority of information has been in the form of books. That's why libraries are full of them. Those books cover a wide range of topics, from serious research, to fiction. Most libraries even have books that most people would consider to be pornography. Now that we have information available on the internet, why shouldn't libraries have the right to also invest some money in computers to make it available to everyone? Why should we hold the new information to a different standard than the old stuff (especially since it costs more to filter it than to just leave it alone)? If people can go to a public library and get books (paid for with taxes) for non-research activties, why should that be restricted on computers? Publicly funded access to information has been around for the entire history of the US, and the tradition has long been not to censor it. We shouldn't change that tradition now.
Can we create cars that get 140 mpg? Probably, but not soon enough that we can continue to ignore petroleum issues. When we make them they will be pretty darn expensive, and they are not going to have any of the features YOU want in a car right now (unless you like your Ford Festiva).
140 mpg may be a bit much to do quickly, but there is no reason whatsoever for cars to be getting the horendous mileage they get now. Buckminster Fuller (one of my favorite geeks) built a car in the 1930s that got 70 mpg and seated 11 people. Why didn't the auto industry jump on it? Because Buckminster managed to roll it while showing it off to auto executives and they wanted nothing to do with him after that. The point is that if it could be done back then, there is no reason they can't do just as well or better now, without all the electric hybrid business that jacks up the price. Why not get rid of the internal combustion engine completely and use turbogen engines (or something else)? We have the technology now to improve efficiency, the auto industry is just choosing not to use it.
In artificial neural networks (simulated with digital computers),
the problem is finding the right network topology, and the right learning
algorithm to fit your problem. Maybe things have changed, but the last time
I worked with it (about five years ago), this problem was still a black art.
And not only do you have to get the network itself correct, you have to
encode your problem in the right way, in order to get the best results.
You have to do a lot of pre-programming (and maybe even some post-processing).
This (and the article) is interesting in light of the Mus Silicum contest that was
featured a couple of weeks ago. Hopfield has announced that he has discovered the
computational principle that neural networks use to do their work. Of course, he isn't
announcing just what the principle is until after the contest is over in December, but
he has said that once you know the principle, it makes the construction of a network to
solve a given problem obvious. In the case of the contest, the problem is word recognition. I've
been working on reproducing his network (part of the contest) and I have to say that it is fairly
easy principle, although I am not yet convinced that it is applicable to a wide range of problems.
I am probably missing something, though, so I'll reserve judgement until Hopfield gives his full
explanation.
In any case, just throwing together a bunch of neurons and trying to train them to do some task is
pretty silly. Network topology is very important to the kind of task you are dealing with. The
features of neurons are not enough. You probably could get a random collection of neurons to learn
a solution, but it would not be nearly as efficient as a smaller collection of correctly arranged
neurons. This is why different brain regions have such large variations in structure.
We have about 450 files, with 450 descriptions
of methods -- you know, our testing managing committee started working on this Wednesday morning, and it's
simply impossible to say whether this is true or this is false. Nobody knows! And when I say nobody, I mean
nobody, because it's 450 music files that have yet to be tested.
It may be true that they have not yet tested all of the entries, but they don't have to do that to say whether or not every watermark has been cracked. Didn't they have around 6 watermarking schemes? That would mean that a minimum of 6 potential cracks have to be verified. If a watermark was cracked, it was cracked. There is no need to wait and see if 50 other people also found the hole before you know it's there. The hole is just as real if one person found it as it is if 500 found it. This sounds like stalling to me.
Idiot is a relative term. Slashdotters are of above average intelligence for the most part. The people running the country should be way above average. Most politicians (at least the ones who get to run for president) aren't. Look at Bush. He can name a few foreign countries and say that he's opposed to "Nation Building" and he's suddenly regarded as having competant knowledge of foreign policy. He's at the level that the average citizen should be at -- not a president. Gore isn't much better. He's good at memorizing numbers and knows his history, but rarely says anything original. Both of them had mediocre grades at a school they never would have been accepted into without rich daddies.
We have a country full of brilliant people, but this is the best we can do for an election? What is the problem here? This isn't just a matter of agreement or disagreement -- the people running (the ones likely to win, at least) really are idiotic. Pat Buchanin and Ralph Nader are both incredibly intellegent and are locked out. I think Pat's a fascist, but at least he can articulate his fascism. We even have more moderate smart people who could run. Just to name a few (people I disagree with, just so you know I'm not biased): Bill Buckley, John McCain, Thomas Friedman. We have plenty of smart leftists, also. Why are these people shut out of the presidential elections? Why are we consistently forced to choose between substandard candidates? How do people like Dan Quayle and GW Bush get taken seriously?
I think they're saying that the -reason- that it works so much better than expected is a
fairly novel reason (meaning not derivative of common neural net principles),
and the process of understanding why this novel method works is best understood by treating
the whole problem from a biology, rathern than compsci perspective. e.g. as you would go about
trying to figure out how some organism that does something in a novel way does what it does.
It looks like there are a couple of things that differentiate Hopfield's approach from the traditional
neural net approach. All NNs are biologically inspired to some degree, but so far the really common
implementations (like backprop) have been simplified too much to give an accurate reflection of what
really goes in a biological network.
The two big differences between this and traditional networks that I can see (based on a quick reading)
is that it is using spiking neurons and neurons are given specific computational roles. Spiking neurons
add up inputs over time and send out a spike to other neurons after the inputs have reached some threshold
value. Inputs also decay over time, so a few inputs occuring within a couple of miliseconds of each other
count for a lot more than hundreds of input spikes spread out over a number of seconds. Traditional nets
add up all of the inputs at once, decide whether or not to fire, and then reset (sometimes there is a
training step in there also). Since time dependence is built into spiking networks as a feature, they
are very good at detecting temporal patterns.
The second difference I noticed, computational roles, means that neurons in different parts of the
network may be specialized to do certain kinds of computation. One type of neuron could be used to detect
patterns in a small frequency range, while other neurons detect patterns relating to which frequency ranges
are currently active (I don't know if this is a realistic example, but you get the point). Traditional neural
nets treat all neurons the same -- they act more like complex switches than computational units.
This kind of setup is much closer to what goes on in biological networks. Neuroscientists used to believe
that neurons are much more simplistic than they have turned out to be. Individual neurons do all sorts of
computations that at one time were thought to be fairly complex. Edge detection and motion detection in
the visual system are examples of this. It was once thought that these tasks required collections of neurons,
but it has been discovered that individual neurons can detect motion in a particular direction and
pairs of neurons can detect edges.
I think there is also something interesting going on with the geometry of the network here, but I haven't
quite absorbed that yet. Maybe somebody else has noticed this also and can comment (or correct me).
the counter argument is that the owners of the music should retain control over how their work is distributed. Space shifting technology
circumvents this right
Lessig's point throughout the debate is that traditionally (and constitutionally), copyright holders have not had complete control over distribution and use of copyrighted materials. They have distribution rights, but those rights are limited. Copyright holders have the right to publish and to sell published works, but they do not have any right to control the use or distribution of the work after that point (the right of first sale). I can buy a book and do just about anything I want with it other than republishing. I can give it away. I can sell it to somebody else. I can photocopy a chapter (not the entire book) and give it to a friend. I can write my own book and quote passages (provided I give credit to the original author). The copyright holder has no right to stop any of this use or redistribution, whether he approves or not. The music companies may not like me to have a convenient way to listen to listen to music from multiple locations (they want me to buy a separate CD for each location), but that doesn't mean they should have the right to prevent that. They have the right to prevent me from republishing the work, but not all distribution is classified as publishing.
Lessig has made the point in some of his writings that copyright holders do not own the works they create -- it is public property. What they "own" ( a bad word in this case, but I'll use it anyway) is the exclusive right to publish for a limited time. That is the extent of their rights, despite the congressional attempts to extend copyright. Fair use will often reduce the profits that would be available to copyright holders if the principle did not exsist and publishers had unlimited rights, but the potential for profit should never be used as an excuse to circumvent the constitution or deny ordinary citizens their rights.
It seems plain to me this is abuse of the legal system on the part of Mattel/Microsystems. We're right back where we were, unsure if we're legally
OK or not. I have no idea of where we'll go from here. But I do know that I'm more frustrated with the American legal system than I've ever been.
This isn't a bad decision. It makes it clear that anybody not being sued by Mattel cannot be affected by the outcome of this particular lawsuit. Since you have no legal liability here, you don't get any legal rights to contest the outcome of the suit. This also means that no matter what the court finds, it does not apply to you. If you don't have the opportunity to defend yourself, you can't have any legal liability in a lawsuit (there may be exceptions, but this isn't one of them). The only thing you have to worry about is the legal precedent that will be set. But you will still have to be the defendant in a lawsuit before anything can be done to you.
You also have to remember that a cease-and-desist letter doesn't mean anything by itself. Corps sometimes use these for documentational purposes before a lawsuit is filed (to show they tried to do something before filing to resolve the problem). Sometimes these are nothing more than idle threats to try to frighten people into obedience and the companies know that they have no chance at winning a real lawsuit. Talk to a real lawyer to see what they think of the letter you have received.
This kind of set up is not useful for building huge volumes of synthetic molecules,
but it could be a step toward building molecules that can self-replicate and also
build molecular sized machines. Perhaps this could be used to build strands of
designer DNA that produce nanomachines instead of microorganisms. You wouldn't
need to build very many before you had enough to just grow more.
Of course, it would take quite a while to build even a short strand of DNA and we're
a long way off from even knowing how to design DNA to carry out some specific task, but
this at least moves us closer.
This is completely out of context for Nader. I went to the Nader speech in Seattle the other day,
and not only is the Hollywood violence bit a very small part of his platform, but when he did
mention it, it was in the larger context of corporate marketing to children as a whole. What he's
opposed to is the mass marketing tactics employed by major corporations, especially when it is
aimed at children. Not because children are in danger of moral corruption, but because they are
less able to critically evaluate the ads and resist mental manipulation. The marketing of violent
video games is just one example of this, but it is still just a symptom of a larger problem. Nader
doesn't give sound bites and he doesn't make simplistic statements such as "Hollywood is bad for
marketing violent video games."
As I said, this topic was a minor point and only accounted for a minute or two of his 45(?) minute
speech. What did he talk about? A $10 minimum wage. Removal of the legal classification of corporations
as humans. Getting corporations out of politics for good. And my favorite, a binding "none of the
above" option on every ballot. If people don't like anyone running for office, they can vote
none of the above, and if the majority does, the election has to be re-run with new candidates.
You're missing the point. Not only can this tool be used to violate the GPL (at least in
spirit), but Sun is distributing GPLed drivers as an example of how to use it. If they
provided their own proprietary drivers, then there would be no problem. The question
is not whether or not the tool can be used to violate the GPL by third parties (
gcc can be used for that purpose, after all), but whether or not Sun is violating the
GPL by linking GPLed drivers against the Solaris kernel in their usage example. It is
up to the users of the kit to avoid license violations, but in the case of the Sun-provided
example, Sun is the user and has to avoid violating the GPL.
Depending on the project, setting up a non-profit corporation to run it could address a lot of the problems you listed (at least in the US -- I don't know about other countries). This is especially good for protecting yourself against patent lawsuits and other standard corporate legal antics. The idea is that the non-profit holds the copyright on the code, so that is the entity that has to be sued. If the corp. doesn't have any assets, then not much can be lost. It could be forced to stop official development, but by that point the code will be out in the wild, anyway (assuming it was released as free software). Members of the non-profit and volunteers acting under its direction cannot generally be held liable for the actions of the non-profit, which protects individuals from lawsuits.
There are some exceptions to this to watch out for. Members aren't protected from blatantly illegal acts. You couldn't set up a non-profit to burglarize houses, for example, and expect to avoid jail time. You would also probably want to keep software generic enough that it is not obviously subverting one particular technology (I think this was mentioned in another post). You would also want to make sure that anyone publicly donating code (getting credit) is actually a member or an official volunteer, so that they will not get burned by a personal lawsuit.
As always, I'm not a real lawyer, I just play one on/. Please talk to a real lawyer before taking my advice.
You're missing two important points here. 1) A large number of protesters were arrested for either demonstrating without a permit or INTENDING to demonstrate without a permit. 2) The city was refusing to grant demonstration permits to most of the groups that requested them.
This is important, perhaps the most important part of the story. The first amendment states that Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.... No mention is made here or anywhere else in the US Constitution of the requirement of permits or of the ability of cities to beurocratically (sp?) overide the right to assemble. There is also no mention of any right to convenience, a right to shop, or a right to be free of bad traffic caused by large demonstrations (all of these were listed as "rights" of citizens that were being violated by protesters during the WTO).
So where do we draw the line with the right to protest? When people are no longer peacefull, they can be arrested or expelled from the demonstration. That does not mean that demonstrations can be prevented because they might turn violent. It does not mean they can be prevented because the demonstrating groups have been violent in the past. They cannot be prevented because groups that are promising violence may also show up. If a few people are engaging in violence, by all means, arrest those people. But that does not give the police any justification for labeling the entire group as violent and disbanding the entire demonstration.
One final note: the WTO protests turned ugly pretty quickly. There were a few small protests before the convention started that were allowed to go on without interference, but the big protest that ended with the police riot was on the first day of the official convention. That was also the last day of large WTO protests. After that, the protests were largely in response to the behavior of the police and the implementation of the "no-protest-zone." The anti-WTO slogans turned into chants of "shame on Seattle" and the police were confiscating signs about the virtues of free speech as well as the anti-WTO signs (I personally witnessed this on several occasions). So much for our american values.
We must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide to commit crimes. Anonymity must not be equated with privacy. As citizens, we have a right to privacy. We have no such right to anonymity.
From the American Heritage dictionary:
Privacy: 1.a. The quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others. b. The state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion.
Anonymity: 1. The quality or state of being unknown or unacknowledged.
In the context of the real and commonly used definitions of privacy and anonymity (not Bronfman's definition of anonymity as an instrument of crime), anonymity is nothing more than privacy of identity. If you have a right to privacy, then you also have a right to keep your identity private. What Bronfman suggests is that we should redefine 'anonymity' in such a way that it can only be used in the context of criminal behavior and use this redefinition as a justification for limiting privacy. Privacy is apparently alright, so long as it does not infringe upon corporate profits.
Technology exists that can trace every Internet download and tag every file. These tools make it possible to identify those who are using the Internet to improperly and illegally acquire music and other copyrighted information. While adhering to the principle of respect for individual privacy, we fully intend to exploit technology to protect the property which rightfully belongs to its owners.
I fail to see how tracing every download from the internet and tagging every file in existence (essentially tracking all online activity) is "adhering to the principle of respect for individual privacy." Perhaps he is using some newspeak definition of 'privacy' in addition to his newspeak 'anonymity.'
We're in agreement that the NYT shouldn't be regarded as an authority on scientific fact. I think we can also agree that this particular experiment is not, by any means, conclusive evidence that dark matter is primarily made up of WIMPs (even if it turns out to be true). However, you seem to be attacking WIMPs as merely a convienient explanation for dark matter concocted by a bunch of desperate astronomers. WIMPS were predicted by quantum mechanics long before they were proposed as an explanation for dark matter. Yes, the theory is far fetched, but so is the rest of QM. This is actually mundane compared to many of the things predicted by QM that have been proven to be true.
Despite regular matter being a more straight-forward explanation of dark matter than WIMPS, there are a lot of problems with it. Gas can be ruled out because it's just too damned hard to hide. It both absorbs and emits enough radiation that it would be easily detected. Large quantities of dust are also difficult to hide. Neutron stars and black holes emit huge amounts of radiation (actually the matter around black holes), so we would notice those, also. That pretty much leaves large chunks of rock as the explanation of 'normal' dark matter. There are two huge problems with this. First, current cosmological theory predicts that at least 75% of baryonic matter, the stuff that atoms are made of, should be in the form of hydrogen. That has been confirmed numerous times by direct observation of the universe around us. And hydrogen gas has been ruled out as not being dark at all (as I said above). Second, there is absolutely no reason to believe that there are enough large chunks of rock out there to make up 90% of the mass of the universe. What we have observed is that rocky material makes up a very small percentage of the total mass. What you say about physics suggesting that dark matter is just plain old atoms is simply false.
WIMPs have the problem of very little expermental evidence supporting the theory. But there is some indirect evidence that gives the theory weight. We have observed weakly interacting particles that also have mass. The difficult part is determining how many of these particles exist and how massive they really are. Your hypotheses, on the other hand, are lacking in both theory and evidence.
The NYT is almost certain to get the story wrong, and some/.ers will jump on the band wagon of the 'new' theory (even though it isn't really new), but that doesn't warrant an immediate dismissal of WIMPs and modern astrophysics in general.
I'm just saying that I have a very difficult time believing that something with the mass of a nickel atom, can have less effect on the surrounding environment than a neutrino. Come on now, you have to admit, its pretty far fetched.
WIMPs, if they exist, have more of an effect on the surrounding environment than neutrinos because they have a much greater mass and can exert a gravitational force on surrounding matter as well as the weak force. The fact that neutrinos have little, if any, mass rules them out as dark matter -- they primarily interact weakly. This isn't far fetched at all. These kinds of particles probably do exist -- the only question is whether or not there are enough of them to account for dark matter.
I think this is a perfect example of science trying to fit things into place with a theory. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as the theory doesn't account for something thats easily explainable by something else. This whole dark matter issue is explainable by unseen dust, and unseen matter.
You're getting things backwards here. If WIMPs were invented solely as an explanation of dark matter, then they would indeed be suspicious. WIMPs are predicted by supersymetry theory, which is an extension of quantum mechanics. It was only after this that some physicists realized that they could be the source of dark matter if they exist in great enough quantities. The theoretical discovery of WIMPs was made independently of any study of dark matter. This isn't some new theory that has popped up out of no where as a convienient explanation of dark matter.
You are correct in saying that the whole dark matter problem is explainable by the presence of unseen matter. That's what WIMPs are. They are real particles that don't interact electromagnetically, so we don't notice their presence in normal life. Dust and gas were ruled out as sources for dark matter long ago. The density of the clouds would be high enough that the gas and dust would start to glow and we would be able to detect that light. Red dwarfs were also recently ruled out as the explanation of dark matter.
This particular physicist believes that WIMPs are one of the best theories of dark matter to come along so far. I am not convinced that this experiment has actually detected WIMPs, but that is an experimental problem, not a problem with the theory. BTW - this theory is not nearly as bizarre as the theory that tachyons (faster than light particles) are the source of dark matter.
Right now, I say its hoopla, simply because I have no reason to believe that billions of mysterious massive particles are flowing through me each second, and we have _yet_ to detect them.
The paper is about the detection of the particles. These types of particles are predicted by supersymmetry theory (as noted in the NYT) and this will be the first experimental confirmation of their existance if the results are reproducable. Detecting this type of particle is no easy matter, either. But you seem to imply that if they really did exist, somebody surely would have detected them by now. The fact that they only interact weakly (via the weak nuclear force) and gravitationaly with other particles makes them extremely difficult to detect. The only way to directly detect weak particles is to observe the aftermath of a direct colision with an atomic nucleus, which will produce a flash of light. This is an extremely rare event -- the average neutrino (another weak particle) could travel through a light year of solid lead before coliding with the nucleus of a lead atom. The existance of nuetrinos, by the way, has been well established for decades. They are easier to detect (indirectly) because they are byproducts of many nuclear reactions.
Blaming it on massive particles that weakly interact with regular mass is as valid as saying little elves are moving things around.
In the case of dark matter, the WIMPS are interacting with regular matter via gravity -- not just the weak force. The weak force has to be used to detect them experimentally because there is no way to differentiate the gravity from a weak particle from the gravity of a normal particle. We can, however, distinguish between particles that interact only weakly and those that interact weakly and electromagnetically. That's what this experiment does. The difference between WIMPs and elves is that WIMPs are predicted by theory, and elves are not. There is also evidence beyond this particular experiment that gives credence the the theories involved, although this is the first time that a WIMP may have been detected. If you can come up with a valid theory of elves and provide solid experimental evidence supporting it, then we can throw that in the dark matter pot also.
The big thing that gives away the amount of dark matter is the gravitational lensing effect near galaxies. If most of the mass in a galaxy could be attributed the the visible stars (including stars that emit only in the non-visible parts of the spectrum) then the lensing effect would be much smaller than what is observed.
The other thing that tipped off the astrophysicists about how much dark matter is out there is the dynamics of spiral galaxies. If normal orbital dynamics were at work, then based on the distributions of stars, the stars in the centers of galaxies should have a much shorter orbital period than the stars on the rim. But what is observed is something much closer to the rotation of a semi-rigid disk -- the stars on the rim don't take much longer to go full circle than the stars very near the center. This suggests that the distribution of mass in spiral galaxies does not correlate with the distribution of stars.
Is it possible that this matter is maybe some form of elementary particle that doesn't give off other particles (ie, the smallest particle which would not give off photons) and that's why we can't see it? Just my own questions on the subject. Wish I knew more about it.
The WIMPs are a type of elementary particle. Unlike protons quarks (making up protons and neutrons) and electrons which respond to gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces (strong and weak), WIMPs only respond to gravity and the weak nuclear force. The absence of electromagnetism is why they don't ever give off any light.
Therefore, hackers gravitate toward drugs because the religious authorities say that drugs are immoral and the government says drugs are illegal. In order to justify drug use, they invent benefits (like enhanced "insight" or "intelligence").
I agree with you about hackers tending toward drug use because of anti-authoritarian attitudes, but I think you're way off on the business about drug users lacking insight and/or intelligence in general. There are good reasons to believe that mind altering substances do, in fact, lead to greater creativity and insight in many individuals due to the nature of the substances and the situations in which they are used. Mind altering drugs, by definition, alter the users' perceptions of themselves and the world around them. It is this alteration that allows them to view problems in new and radical ways and to ask questions that they would not normally ask. Sometimes this will lead to new innovations and sometimes it will not. I suspect that people who tend to be creative in the first place have a far greater enhancement to their creativity than those who are not naturally creative. The drug use doesn't cause creativity, it only helps it.
There is also a great deal of factual evidence that supports the link between creativity and drug use. One good example of this is the last 200 years of art and music. Nearly all of the Romantic poets were opium users (Samuel Coleridge wrote 'Kubla Khan' under the influence of laudanum, which also contributed to 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'). Jazz would probably not exist without the influence of drugs and alcohol (there's a reason that so many of the original jazz musicians died young), and Louie Armstrong was known to get his band stoned before some performances. The influence of drugs in the cubist and surrealist movements should be obvious. Rock music, again, has an obvious drug influence and most of the songs that become 'classics' are not only influenced by drugs, but are about drugs. Since many hackers tend to identify more with artists than scientists or engineers, it is not surprising that there would be a tradition of drug use in some segments of the programming community.
What about the influence of drugs on non-artists? The March 1990 issue of Scientific American reported that working marijuanna users: 1)cost less in health insurance benefits; 2) had a higher than average rate of promotion; 3) exhibited less absenteeism; and 4) were fired for cause less often than workers who did not test positive. The same article noted that there is no correlation between illegal drug use and household income (this particular statistic came from a drug policy official in the Bush administration).
As for drugs being 'bad' for you, yes, it is true that some drugs do have negative effects on your body. Heroine, nicotine, and alcohol (in excess) are the worst offenders. Caffine isn't all that great, either, and marijuanna certainly isn't good for you, but has only mild short term effects. There may be a weak correlation with lung cancer if it is smoked, but this has only been established in the last couple of years and with only a few studies. Saturated fat (a non-drug) has had a far more devestating effect on health in the general population than any drug, resulting in over 500,000 deaths a year (in the US) from heart disease and stroke. I don't see any rush to stigmatize people who like to eat bacon burgers as unintelligent and harmful to society.
While it is true that there are an awful lot of losers out there who do nothing but get high all day, those are also the people who are the most likely to be bragging about their drug use. Intelligent drug users rarely announce their recreational activities to co-workers and friends who may be shocked or annoyed by such behavior.
Re:Information *IS* Darwinian
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The Regulon
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This is all an example of an analogy taken well beyond the point of usefulness.
Information is not Darwinian because it is not biological. It does not reproduce or proliferate on
its own. It is copied and moved around by the creatures (mostly us) who use it. No 'Natural Laws' are
being violated here. The amount of information that can be retained in information space is limited
only by our ability to store it (server space, libraries) and that is something we can control
and limit if we need to. If we do run out of information space (unlikely), the less useful information
and extra copies will be removed to make room for new stuff. This ability to easily expand and modify the environment that information 'lives' in puts it at odds with the analogy of biological environments, which are severely limited in size and resources.
We do have a problem of information pollution, which makes it difficult to sort out what is useful
and what is just noise. But that is a different problem and indescriminantly destroying (predating)
existing information is not the solution.
Besides that, what would a 'media predator' be, anyway? A genetically engineered vampire (probably
created by the MPAA) that preys selectively on journalists?
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The Democrats have no right to complain about a lack of compromise from the left wing when they are not willing to even engage in a discussion of the issues we care about.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I'm not a US citizen. Thank you for clearing that up for me.
I think the one thing that free/open source developers have in common (myself included) is that individuals are capable of producing things of value without a profit motive. They can even enjoy producing without making a profit. This is not socialism (although socialists would agree that it is good). People from nearly every economic/political background are capable of engaging in these kinds of activities. I wish that the media would stop calling every non-corporate movement socialism and stop using the word as a scare tactic to keep people away from the scary 'socialist' technologies.
"Common-sense" rules are notorious for getting mixed up with personal political/moral beliefs. One person's "common-sense" rule that Wicca is immoral and should be banned from library internet terminals would be a direct violation of another person's religious rights. There is no set of "common-sense" rules that people could agree on. The christian coalition, NOW, and who knows what other groups are always going to find a way to get their hands into what is appropriate for children to look at, and it will always come under the guise of "common-sense." I also pay taxes to support libraries, and I'm happy to do it. I don't want to decide what other people should be looking at, and I don't want them deciding for me or my children. Butt out of my business! Public libraries already have plenty of dead trees full of "immoral" content that children probably shouldn't be looking at. Why should computers be held to a different standard?
No one has an inherent right to Internet access. The libraries and schools offer it as a research tool, according to their rules of usage. If you can't afford a computer of your own, you will have to make do with the restrictions placed on publicly-funded computers.
We have a public library system because of the belief that people do have a fundamental right to information, regardless of their economic status. The homeless have just as much of a right to read a book as I do, which is why public libraries are called "public". Up until the past decade, the vast majority of information has been in the form of books. That's why libraries are full of them. Those books cover a wide range of topics, from serious research, to fiction. Most libraries even have books that most people would consider to be pornography. Now that we have information available on the internet, why shouldn't libraries have the right to also invest some money in computers to make it available to everyone? Why should we hold the new information to a different standard than the old stuff (especially since it costs more to filter it than to just leave it alone)? If people can go to a public library and get books (paid for with taxes) for non-research activties, why should that be restricted on computers? Publicly funded access to information has been around for the entire history of the US, and the tradition has long been not to censor it. We shouldn't change that tradition now.
140 mpg may be a bit much to do quickly, but there is no reason whatsoever for cars to be getting the horendous mileage they get now. Buckminster Fuller (one of my favorite geeks) built a car in the 1930s that got 70 mpg and seated 11 people. Why didn't the auto industry jump on it? Because Buckminster managed to roll it while showing it off to auto executives and they wanted nothing to do with him after that. The point is that if it could be done back then, there is no reason they can't do just as well or better now, without all the electric hybrid business that jacks up the price. Why not get rid of the internal combustion engine completely and use turbogen engines (or something else)? We have the technology now to improve efficiency, the auto industry is just choosing not to use it.
This (and the article) is interesting in light of the Mus Silicum contest that was featured a couple of weeks ago. Hopfield has announced that he has discovered the computational principle that neural networks use to do their work. Of course, he isn't announcing just what the principle is until after the contest is over in December, but he has said that once you know the principle, it makes the construction of a network to solve a given problem obvious. In the case of the contest, the problem is word recognition. I've been working on reproducing his network (part of the contest) and I have to say that it is fairly easy principle, although I am not yet convinced that it is applicable to a wide range of problems. I am probably missing something, though, so I'll reserve judgement until Hopfield gives his full explanation.
In any case, just throwing together a bunch of neurons and trying to train them to do some task is pretty silly. Network topology is very important to the kind of task you are dealing with. The features of neurons are not enough. You probably could get a random collection of neurons to learn a solution, but it would not be nearly as efficient as a smaller collection of correctly arranged neurons. This is why different brain regions have such large variations in structure.
It may be true that they have not yet tested all of the entries, but they don't have to do that to say whether or not every watermark has been cracked. Didn't they have around 6 watermarking schemes? That would mean that a minimum of 6 potential cracks have to be verified. If a watermark was cracked, it was cracked. There is no need to wait and see if 50 other people also found the hole before you know it's there. The hole is just as real if one person found it as it is if 500 found it. This sounds like stalling to me.
We have a country full of brilliant people, but this is the best we can do for an election? What is the problem here? This isn't just a matter of agreement or disagreement -- the people running (the ones likely to win, at least) really are idiotic. Pat Buchanin and Ralph Nader are both incredibly intellegent and are locked out. I think Pat's a fascist, but at least he can articulate his fascism. We even have more moderate smart people who could run. Just to name a few (people I disagree with, just so you know I'm not biased): Bill Buckley, John McCain, Thomas Friedman. We have plenty of smart leftists, also. Why are these people shut out of the presidential elections? Why are we consistently forced to choose between substandard candidates? How do people like Dan Quayle and GW Bush get taken seriously?
It looks like there are a couple of things that differentiate Hopfield's approach from the traditional neural net approach. All NNs are biologically inspired to some degree, but so far the really common implementations (like backprop) have been simplified too much to give an accurate reflection of what really goes in a biological network.
The two big differences between this and traditional networks that I can see (based on a quick reading) is that it is using spiking neurons and neurons are given specific computational roles. Spiking neurons add up inputs over time and send out a spike to other neurons after the inputs have reached some threshold value. Inputs also decay over time, so a few inputs occuring within a couple of miliseconds of each other count for a lot more than hundreds of input spikes spread out over a number of seconds. Traditional nets add up all of the inputs at once, decide whether or not to fire, and then reset (sometimes there is a training step in there also). Since time dependence is built into spiking networks as a feature, they are very good at detecting temporal patterns.
The second difference I noticed, computational roles, means that neurons in different parts of the network may be specialized to do certain kinds of computation. One type of neuron could be used to detect patterns in a small frequency range, while other neurons detect patterns relating to which frequency ranges are currently active (I don't know if this is a realistic example, but you get the point). Traditional neural nets treat all neurons the same -- they act more like complex switches than computational units.
This kind of setup is much closer to what goes on in biological networks. Neuroscientists used to believe that neurons are much more simplistic than they have turned out to be. Individual neurons do all sorts of computations that at one time were thought to be fairly complex. Edge detection and motion detection in the visual system are examples of this. It was once thought that these tasks required collections of neurons, but it has been discovered that individual neurons can detect motion in a particular direction and pairs of neurons can detect edges.
I think there is also something interesting going on with the geometry of the network here, but I haven't quite absorbed that yet. Maybe somebody else has noticed this also and can comment (or correct me).
Lessig's point throughout the debate is that traditionally (and constitutionally), copyright holders have not had complete control over distribution and use of copyrighted materials. They have distribution rights, but those rights are limited. Copyright holders have the right to publish and to sell published works, but they do not have any right to control the use or distribution of the work after that point (the right of first sale). I can buy a book and do just about anything I want with it other than republishing. I can give it away. I can sell it to somebody else. I can photocopy a chapter (not the entire book) and give it to a friend. I can write my own book and quote passages (provided I give credit to the original author). The copyright holder has no right to stop any of this use or redistribution, whether he approves or not. The music companies may not like me to have a convenient way to listen to listen to music from multiple locations (they want me to buy a separate CD for each location), but that doesn't mean they should have the right to prevent that. They have the right to prevent me from republishing the work, but not all distribution is classified as publishing.
Lessig has made the point in some of his writings that copyright holders do not own the works they create -- it is public property. What they "own" ( a bad word in this case, but I'll use it anyway) is the exclusive right to publish for a limited time. That is the extent of their rights, despite the congressional attempts to extend copyright. Fair use will often reduce the profits that would be available to copyright holders if the principle did not exsist and publishers had unlimited rights, but the potential for profit should never be used as an excuse to circumvent the constitution or deny ordinary citizens their rights.
This isn't a bad decision. It makes it clear that anybody not being sued by Mattel cannot be affected by the outcome of this particular lawsuit. Since you have no legal liability here, you don't get any legal rights to contest the outcome of the suit. This also means that no matter what the court finds, it does not apply to you. If you don't have the opportunity to defend yourself, you can't have any legal liability in a lawsuit (there may be exceptions, but this isn't one of them). The only thing you have to worry about is the legal precedent that will be set. But you will still have to be the defendant in a lawsuit before anything can be done to you.
You also have to remember that a cease-and-desist letter doesn't mean anything by itself. Corps sometimes use these for documentational purposes before a lawsuit is filed (to show they tried to do something before filing to resolve the problem). Sometimes these are nothing more than idle threats to try to frighten people into obedience and the companies know that they have no chance at winning a real lawsuit. Talk to a real lawyer to see what they think of the letter you have received.
Of course, it would take quite a while to build even a short strand of DNA and we're a long way off from even knowing how to design DNA to carry out some specific task, but this at least moves us closer.
As I said, this topic was a minor point and only accounted for a minute or two of his 45(?) minute speech. What did he talk about? A $10 minimum wage. Removal of the legal classification of corporations as humans. Getting corporations out of politics for good. And my favorite, a binding "none of the above" option on every ballot. If people don't like anyone running for office, they can vote none of the above, and if the majority does, the election has to be re-run with new candidates.
You're missing the point. Not only can this tool be used to violate the GPL (at least in spirit), but Sun is distributing GPLed drivers as an example of how to use it. If they provided their own proprietary drivers, then there would be no problem. The question is not whether or not the tool can be used to violate the GPL by third parties ( gcc can be used for that purpose, after all), but whether or not Sun is violating the GPL by linking GPLed drivers against the Solaris kernel in their usage example. It is up to the users of the kit to avoid license violations, but in the case of the Sun-provided example, Sun is the user and has to avoid violating the GPL.
There are some exceptions to this to watch out for. Members aren't protected from blatantly illegal acts. You couldn't set up a non-profit to burglarize houses, for example, and expect to avoid jail time. You would also probably want to keep software generic enough that it is not obviously subverting one particular technology (I think this was mentioned in another post). You would also want to make sure that anyone publicly donating code (getting credit) is actually a member or an official volunteer, so that they will not get burned by a personal lawsuit.
As always, I'm not a real lawyer, I just play one on /. Please talk to a real lawyer before taking my advice.
This is important, perhaps the most important part of the story. The first amendment states that Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.... No mention is made here or anywhere else in the US Constitution of the requirement of permits or of the ability of cities to beurocratically (sp?) overide the right to assemble. There is also no mention of any right to convenience, a right to shop, or a right to be free of bad traffic caused by large demonstrations (all of these were listed as "rights" of citizens that were being violated by protesters during the WTO).
So where do we draw the line with the right to protest? When people are no longer peacefull, they can be arrested or expelled from the demonstration. That does not mean that demonstrations can be prevented because they might turn violent. It does not mean they can be prevented because the demonstrating groups have been violent in the past. They cannot be prevented because groups that are promising violence may also show up. If a few people are engaging in violence, by all means, arrest those people. But that does not give the police any justification for labeling the entire group as violent and disbanding the entire demonstration.
One final note: the WTO protests turned ugly pretty quickly. There were a few small protests before the convention started that were allowed to go on without interference, but the big protest that ended with the police riot was on the first day of the official convention. That was also the last day of large WTO protests. After that, the protests were largely in response to the behavior of the police and the implementation of the "no-protest-zone." The anti-WTO slogans turned into chants of "shame on Seattle" and the police were confiscating signs about the virtues of free speech as well as the anti-WTO signs (I personally witnessed this on several occasions). So much for our american values.
From the American Heritage dictionary:
Privacy: 1.a. The quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others. b. The state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion.
Anonymity: 1. The quality or state of being unknown or unacknowledged.
In the context of the real and commonly used definitions of privacy and anonymity (not Bronfman's definition of anonymity as an instrument of crime), anonymity is nothing more than privacy of identity. If you have a right to privacy, then you also have a right to keep your identity private. What Bronfman suggests is that we should redefine 'anonymity' in such a way that it can only be used in the context of criminal behavior and use this redefinition as a justification for limiting privacy. Privacy is apparently alright, so long as it does not infringe upon corporate profits.
Technology exists that can trace every Internet download and tag every file. These tools make it possible to identify those who are using the Internet to improperly and illegally acquire music and other copyrighted information. While adhering to the principle of respect for individual privacy, we fully intend to exploit technology to protect the property which rightfully belongs to its owners.
I fail to see how tracing every download from the internet and tagging every file in existence (essentially tracking all online activity) is "adhering to the principle of respect for individual privacy." Perhaps he is using some newspeak definition of 'privacy' in addition to his newspeak 'anonymity.'
Despite regular matter being a more straight-forward explanation of dark matter than WIMPS, there are a lot of problems with it. Gas can be ruled out because it's just too damned hard to hide. It both absorbs and emits enough radiation that it would be easily detected. Large quantities of dust are also difficult to hide. Neutron stars and black holes emit huge amounts of radiation (actually the matter around black holes), so we would notice those, also. That pretty much leaves large chunks of rock as the explanation of 'normal' dark matter. There are two huge problems with this. First, current cosmological theory predicts that at least 75% of baryonic matter, the stuff that atoms are made of, should be in the form of hydrogen. That has been confirmed numerous times by direct observation of the universe around us. And hydrogen gas has been ruled out as not being dark at all (as I said above). Second, there is absolutely no reason to believe that there are enough large chunks of rock out there to make up 90% of the mass of the universe. What we have observed is that rocky material makes up a very small percentage of the total mass. What you say about physics suggesting that dark matter is just plain old atoms is simply false.
WIMPs have the problem of very little expermental evidence supporting the theory. But there is some indirect evidence that gives the theory weight. We have observed weakly interacting particles that also have mass. The difficult part is determining how many of these particles exist and how massive they really are. Your hypotheses, on the other hand, are lacking in both theory and evidence.
The NYT is almost certain to get the story wrong, and some /.ers will jump on the band wagon of the 'new' theory (even though it isn't really new), but that doesn't warrant an immediate dismissal of WIMPs and modern astrophysics in general.
WIMPs, if they exist, have more of an effect on the surrounding environment than neutrinos because they have a much greater mass and can exert a gravitational force on surrounding matter as well as the weak force. The fact that neutrinos have little, if any, mass rules them out as dark matter -- they primarily interact weakly. This isn't far fetched at all. These kinds of particles probably do exist -- the only question is whether or not there are enough of them to account for dark matter.
I think this is a perfect example of science trying to fit things into place with a theory. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as the theory doesn't account for something thats easily explainable by something else. This whole dark matter issue is explainable by unseen dust, and unseen matter.
You're getting things backwards here. If WIMPs were invented solely as an explanation of dark matter, then they would indeed be suspicious. WIMPs are predicted by supersymetry theory, which is an extension of quantum mechanics. It was only after this that some physicists realized that they could be the source of dark matter if they exist in great enough quantities. The theoretical discovery of WIMPs was made independently of any study of dark matter. This isn't some new theory that has popped up out of no where as a convienient explanation of dark matter.
You are correct in saying that the whole dark matter problem is explainable by the presence of unseen matter. That's what WIMPs are. They are real particles that don't interact electromagnetically, so we don't notice their presence in normal life. Dust and gas were ruled out as sources for dark matter long ago. The density of the clouds would be high enough that the gas and dust would start to glow and we would be able to detect that light. Red dwarfs were also recently ruled out as the explanation of dark matter.
This particular physicist believes that WIMPs are one of the best theories of dark matter to come along so far. I am not convinced that this experiment has actually detected WIMPs, but that is an experimental problem, not a problem with the theory. BTW - this theory is not nearly as bizarre as the theory that tachyons (faster than light particles) are the source of dark matter.
The paper is about the detection of the particles. These types of particles are predicted by supersymmetry theory (as noted in the NYT) and this will be the first experimental confirmation of their existance if the results are reproducable. Detecting this type of particle is no easy matter, either. But you seem to imply that if they really did exist, somebody surely would have detected them by now. The fact that they only interact weakly (via the weak nuclear force) and gravitationaly with other particles makes them extremely difficult to detect. The only way to directly detect weak particles is to observe the aftermath of a direct colision with an atomic nucleus, which will produce a flash of light. This is an extremely rare event -- the average neutrino (another weak particle) could travel through a light year of solid lead before coliding with the nucleus of a lead atom. The existance of nuetrinos, by the way, has been well established for decades. They are easier to detect (indirectly) because they are byproducts of many nuclear reactions.
Blaming it on massive particles that weakly interact with regular mass is as valid as saying little elves are moving things around.
In the case of dark matter, the WIMPS are interacting with regular matter via gravity -- not just the weak force. The weak force has to be used to detect them experimentally because there is no way to differentiate the gravity from a weak particle from the gravity of a normal particle. We can, however, distinguish between particles that interact only weakly and those that interact weakly and electromagnetically. That's what this experiment does. The difference between WIMPs and elves is that WIMPs are predicted by theory, and elves are not. There is also evidence beyond this particular experiment that gives credence the the theories involved, although this is the first time that a WIMP may have been detected. If you can come up with a valid theory of elves and provide solid experimental evidence supporting it, then we can throw that in the dark matter pot also.
The other thing that tipped off the astrophysicists about how much dark matter is out there is the dynamics of spiral galaxies. If normal orbital dynamics were at work, then based on the distributions of stars, the stars in the centers of galaxies should have a much shorter orbital period than the stars on the rim. But what is observed is something much closer to the rotation of a semi-rigid disk -- the stars on the rim don't take much longer to go full circle than the stars very near the center. This suggests that the distribution of mass in spiral galaxies does not correlate with the distribution of stars.
Is it possible that this matter is maybe some form of elementary particle that doesn't give off other particles (ie, the smallest particle which would not give off photons) and that's why we can't see it? Just my own questions on the subject. Wish I knew more about it.
The WIMPs are a type of elementary particle. Unlike protons quarks (making up protons and neutrons) and electrons which respond to gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces (strong and weak), WIMPs only respond to gravity and the weak nuclear force. The absence of electromagnetism is why they don't ever give off any light.
I agree with you about hackers tending toward drug use because of anti-authoritarian attitudes, but I think you're way off on the business about drug users lacking insight and/or intelligence in general. There are good reasons to believe that mind altering substances do, in fact, lead to greater creativity and insight in many individuals due to the nature of the substances and the situations in which they are used. Mind altering drugs, by definition, alter the users' perceptions of themselves and the world around them. It is this alteration that allows them to view problems in new and radical ways and to ask questions that they would not normally ask. Sometimes this will lead to new innovations and sometimes it will not. I suspect that people who tend to be creative in the first place have a far greater enhancement to their creativity than those who are not naturally creative. The drug use doesn't cause creativity, it only helps it.
There is also a great deal of factual evidence that supports the link between creativity and drug use. One good example of this is the last 200 years of art and music. Nearly all of the Romantic poets were opium users (Samuel Coleridge wrote 'Kubla Khan' under the influence of laudanum, which also contributed to 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'). Jazz would probably not exist without the influence of drugs and alcohol (there's a reason that so many of the original jazz musicians died young), and Louie Armstrong was known to get his band stoned before some performances. The influence of drugs in the cubist and surrealist movements should be obvious. Rock music, again, has an obvious drug influence and most of the songs that become 'classics' are not only influenced by drugs, but are about drugs. Since many hackers tend to identify more with artists than scientists or engineers, it is not surprising that there would be a tradition of drug use in some segments of the programming community.
What about the influence of drugs on non-artists? The March 1990 issue of Scientific American reported that working marijuanna users: 1)cost less in health insurance benefits; 2) had a higher than average rate of promotion; 3) exhibited less absenteeism; and 4) were fired for cause less often than workers who did not test positive. The same article noted that there is no correlation between illegal drug use and household income (this particular statistic came from a drug policy official in the Bush administration).
As for drugs being 'bad' for you, yes, it is true that some drugs do have negative effects on your body. Heroine, nicotine, and alcohol (in excess) are the worst offenders. Caffine isn't all that great, either, and marijuanna certainly isn't good for you, but has only mild short term effects. There may be a weak correlation with lung cancer if it is smoked, but this has only been established in the last couple of years and with only a few studies. Saturated fat (a non-drug) has had a far more devestating effect on health in the general population than any drug, resulting in over 500,000 deaths a year (in the US) from heart disease and stroke. I don't see any rush to stigmatize people who like to eat bacon burgers as unintelligent and harmful to society.
While it is true that there are an awful lot of losers out there who do nothing but get high all day, those are also the people who are the most likely to be bragging about their drug use. Intelligent drug users rarely announce their recreational activities to co-workers and friends who may be shocked or annoyed by such behavior.
We do have a problem of information pollution, which makes it difficult to sort out what is useful and what is just noise. But that is a different problem and indescriminantly destroying (predating) existing information is not the solution.
Besides that, what would a 'media predator' be, anyway? A genetically engineered vampire (probably created by the MPAA) that preys selectively on journalists?