One of the things I recall about Brooks' work from grad school, was this idea: that the world is its own best model. What that means is, that instead of trying to model the world on a computer then compute what to do based on the model, you should just do stuff and then see how the input from sensors changes. By acting, you interact directly with the "model" -- the world -- and therefore you can cut down on the computation enormously.
I have the feeling that this notion works well for simple robots, including lower life forms such as insects. Like Genghis, they simple do "simple" stuff based on simple neural computers that hardly warrant the name. But where Brooks' work falls short, as you can see in the review, is where neurons are clumped into serious computers that do model the world. The worst offenders, of course, are humans. The problem is that have no idea how to wire a robot to do that, and a lot of the behaviors we really want from robots rely on it.
AI still has a long, hard road ahead of it. But we will succeed, eventually, simply by virtue of reverse engineering if nothing else.
What's odd about satellite radio is they are attempting to do two big things at once: broadcast from satellites, *and* subscription based radio. It would make a heck of a lot more sense to just do one of those -- and the sensible one is satellite broadcasting.
Put up the satellites and create a dinosaur rock station (you know the station -- the place that plays Metallica now, but did not play them 10 years ago). Also create a country station, and a talk station or two, and a progressive rock station, etc. Just mimic what you find on the ground right now. Sure you cannot do traffic reports and local weather -- that's a cost. But your ad reach is huge -- advertisers will pay lots. And your running costs are minimal.
Another way to look at it: right now there seems to be at least one dinosaur rock, one "progressive" rock, one country, one... etc. station per city in the US, I would imagine at least 200 cities large enough. Imagine a business in which you can fire 99.5% of your labor force, and produce just as much output! And imagine that same output is worth 200 times as much to the customers! That's productivity!
I suspect the reason that the two satellite services are not providing ad supported free radio must be political.
Re:What we REALLY need . . .
on
Dashboard Linux
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· Score: 2
A sys admin at NASA where I worked for a while had the following vanity tag:
DEV CAR
My normal reaction to vanity tags is "loser"... this is the only one I have ever envied.
The Net is still young. Lamenting its lack of revolutionariness now is like complaining in 1955 that TV was just radio with pictures.
One way in which the Net will prove revoluntionary, I hope, is in lowering the skeptical boundaries we have all created for ourselves based on the huge cost of checking facts. But as more and more source materials go online, linking becomes possible to make facts asserted checkable at low cost. Therefore I expect beliefs that are true but counterintuitive to resurge based on the change of medium.
This explains, for instance, the online popularity of libertarian ideas. But I am sure there are many other domains of life where most people believe something false, or don't believe anything at all, due to lack of easy access to trustworthy authoritative sources.
While I have many games, I have not ended up playing most of them for more than a month or two. One of them which is a keeper, is Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord. The game is now over a year old, and no cheaper, but if you have any liking at all for strategy games or WWII, this is the game to have.
There is a very active community around the game, making "mods" for better looking terrain and armor, and putting out reams of scenarios, for free. You will never run out of new scenarios.
CM is available for purchase only on the web, at the battlefront website. It's not in stores. There is also a demo available there, with two playable scenarios. Try it out and see if you are not amazed and terrified the first time you get shelled. I certainly was.
This is the computer game that is the rightful heir to Squad Leader. Don't miss it. (Note I am not affiliated with BTS or battlefront in any way other than being a satisfied customer.)
The entire postmodern project of literary criticism has been aimed at proving this point- at proving that there is no such thing as a standardized set of meanings, and that every meaning is contextualized
(Rolling my eyes here.) Academics "prove" all sorts of things. They also argue well about the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead. Such things are good for getting tenure, but they don't necessarily relate to the real world at all.
You don't understand what the meaning of "the white space" was at all.
It is not culture dependent stuff, or at least not primarily. In fact much of it is your "contectualized" meaning -- though not in the rather trivial sense that postmodernists think is deep.
It is stuff like: "human beings usually sweat when they are hot". It is stuff like, "if an object moves, its sub-parts usually move with it". It is stuff like: "air is usually transparent". Please tell me a culture where any of these assertions are not true.
If you cannot, perhaps you will then admit that there is some knowledge which is in fact universal, at least to humans.
What is important about Cyc, is exactly that this sort of knowledge is so universal that it is hard to even realize we all have it. But we do, and you find that out mighty fast when you try to get a machine to do any kind of real-world reasoning.
My favorite Zelazny piece is still Jack of Shadows. Lord of Light is at heart a mythic restatement using fantasy dressed with elements of science fiction. That is to say that the "science" is not important, but rather, the fictional world is at the surface level scientific, while the plot and theme of the novel are (IIRC) purely uninterested in the mechanisms. (This allows Zelazny to concentrate on the human story of Sam, and to concentrate on reworking the myth to suit his authorial desires.)
In Jack of Shadows the opposite is the case. On the surface the fictional world is purely fantasy, but the plot itself is scientific: the main character is concerned (among other things) with finding out the rules that his world obeys, to use them to gain power. In this sense it is truer to science fiction than Lord of Light is.
"In the grand scheme of things, a third of century isn't that big of a deal."
Genre counts. Science fiction, among other things, deals with futurism. And futurism is probably the worst-aging element imaginable. (That, not just in fiction but anywhere.) So for a science fiction work to hold up even 1/3 century is pretty amazing.
That said, Lord of Light can be taken as an exemplar of the sort of scifi that can hold up for a long time. The key is to avoid futurism; rather, take the Asimovian truism to heart, and turn all your tech into magic, and simply remove any tech that may prove troublesome to predict. LoL's contemporary Dune is a great example. There are no serious machines to speak of because of a jihad (how handy!).
Most of the scifi of the sixties and seventies, though, today strikes a reader as rather strange due to the lack of computers. The real future has a terrible way of being unpredictable.
Until this law was passed, there were laws in place that
separated banks from the insurance and securities industries. That is, your
bank couldn't also be your stock broker or your insurance company. The
main law creating this situation was called the Glass-Steagall Act, and
was passed in 1933 right in the middle of the Great Depression.
Speculation in the stock market by banks was a major cause of the stock
market crash of 1929, and the goal of the law was to prevent another such
crash. Scores of banks failed when their stock investments turned sour at
the same time as depositors wanted their money out. When these three
industries are combined into single corporate entities, society is putting
all of its financial eggs into one basket - a crashing stock market leads to
rising insurance claims and makes the bank insolvent precisely at the time
that it needs to have lots of cash on hand. We as a society have learned
this lesson, and due to this law, sometime in the future we will learn it
again.
How very wrong you are. I would plead that rather than interjecting your (ignorant) editorial opinion, you might just stick to the facts.
The GLB act does repeal Glass-Steagal. That is true. However, the cause of the depression was only proximately banks -- in fact it was the banking system, inflating the money supply wildly during the twenties. This was completely under the control of, and the fault of, the Fed.
The effect of pumping all that new money into the system was a boom: interest rates were artificially lowered, signalling entrepreneurs that goods were needed in the future. And so the entrepreneurs borrowed money directly, or obtained money via the markets (IPOs and bonds), and built productive facilities. However, a good fraction of this production was not needed, and hence, in time, businesses failed. Recession. That recession was then plunged into depression by more bad policies of the government. The Smoot-Hawley tariff is one large culprit. Another is the fault of the Fed, which panicked and started drastically contracting the money supply. Finally there was the problem of the continuing socialist ploys of FDR. Failing businesses needed to go bankrupt, and wages needed to adjust downward, in order for the labor market to clear. But the Federal government fought such market adjustments tooth and claw.
Meanwhile, the scapegoating search (which always follows government failure) was on, and it lit upon banks as culprits. Which is true, in the sense that they were all collectively responsible for the inflation that really caused the problem. But that's not what they were blamed for, of course. Glass-Steagal even at the time was known to be a crock. Politically popular, though. FDIC was a much more successful and meaningful intervention.
So all those years since then, America alone in the world has forbidden itegration of the financial sector. (So contrary to our local chickens little predicting a new depression, the question must be: where were all the depressions you would have expected in every other country in the world?)
With globalization, Glass-Steagal was finally starting to seriously affect the competitiveness of American insurance and banking. And so they agitated to get things changed. And so they did. In this case generally a good change.
People have a right to send email. It's speech. There is no "clear and present danger" or anything like that, so those people who are trying to analogize this to yelling "fire" in a theater are just plain wrong. As for taking your property: you do have a right to control your property, yes; property rights are human rights. But getting email does not take any of your property. By running a mail client you are, in fact, giving a clear indication that you want to get email.
As for happiness: there is no such right. What fools these mortals be. Even the pursuit of happiness you have no Constitutional right to, though Tom Jefferson liked the phrase as a substitute for the more controvertial "property".
Even if there was shown to be some compelling government interest in stopping spam, any law to that end would still have to deal with strict scrutiny from the courts. And in this case, technical means can deal with the problem. I think they can do so adequately now, but perhaps it is too hard for most people. Even so, they should do so fine in a year or two.
Let us regard the long sweep of time and realize how foolish it would be to sacrifice even a tiny chunk of our right of free speech for a few years of the security of slightly less spam.
Regarding rich and poor. What you are missing is that any expected inflation is already accounted for in the economy, including things like loan interest rates and interest rates on checking. That is, assume for the second that you have $10000 you want to loan to someone, and you have been informed by God Himself that inflation over the next 10 years will be 4%/year. What rate do you lend at? Maybe 9%, thereby asserting a real interest rate (nominal minus inflation) of 5%. Now assume the same setup, but God has informed you the inflation rate for the next 10 years will be 8%/year. Do you still lend at 9%? Hell no! You lend at 13%! In both cases, you have factored out inflation, in essence, so it does not affect your real earnings.
This cuts both ways, for both borrowers and lenders. As long as they foresee accurately what inflation will be, they will factor it out in deposits and loans.
So who does inflation really affect? Well, for one thing people that fail to accurately predict it. But this might be either rich or poor (though, which class as a group do you think can hire the better prognosticators??)
The second effect, is on cash holders. The money in your wallet, that is, is being degraded even as you read this. To the extent which your total assets are bound up in cash, inflation hurts you. Now, what class do you think has the larger percentage of its assets in cash, rich or poor?
The third large effect is on the people who are getting all the newly created cash first. This effect is in proportion to how close they are to the newly created money. The banks are closest; they are ones who create the new money out of thin air, by pyramiding on deposits. Imagine that with a flick of a switch, you are allowed to add a few $million to your balance at a bank. Does that help you? Well, no -- not yet. You have to spend it to get any real effect. But banks do; they loan it to people.
After the banks, there is some effect on the people lent to. Of course, if the proportion of the loan to their total assets is small, they don't benefit very much. But there is still an effect; even if everyone has predicted it, the price effect still has to ripple out into the economy, and all those that get the cash early still pay less than those that get it late.
One final effect worth mentioning, though it is a lot less class skewed. And that is, that by artificially affecting interest rates, partial reserve banking creates the business cycle. Bad investments are made due to bad predictions of future demand. These help nobody. This is really the main reason to be against inflationary banking, IMO, not the relatively small effect of robbing from the poor to give to the rich.
As for that 2% figure: that is essentially the inverse of productivity. Non inflated cash increases in value because the sum of all goods and services increases. You are correct that we mine gold, which does suppress that figure somewhat. Perhaps it is 1%. There is really no way to know, absent setting up an honest and large scale hard currency. Perhaps we shall find out, in the future, if egold of some sort proves to dominate the world.
I wonder how anyone could like the idea of a monetary system that's not under government control. If such a system were widely accepted, it would make money-laundering a breeze, and I'd hate to think what kind of power it would give those who control it.
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry about such a post.
What kind of power do you think it gives the government to control money? I will tell you the answer, since I doubt you know: a government fiat currency can be inflated, easily, cheaply, and most importantly, without the knowledge of the voters. Historically, fully gold backed money, on average deflates over time, at something like 2% or so per year. Even with the modern Fed emphasis on "low" inflation, we are still getting something like 3-4% per year. So that is something like 6% actual inflation.
The effect of inflation is a hidden tax on everyone who has money. How about that for a neat thing one can do with "control"? Take 6% of all the money in circulation, each and every year? Who do you think this affects more? Poor people, or rich? Do you think it is right for the government to tax poor people in a super slick hidden way? (Of course, part of the loot is returned to the poor in the form of welfare, food stamps, etc -- but most of it is spent on government programs (defense, interest on debt) which benefit the non poor.)
In contrast to your implied suggestion that a private currency would be just as bad, note that only a government can enforce inflation over time. A private money, inflating in the same manner in a competitive market, would become disfavored and finally abandoned for better competitors.
One of the great effects of globalization, incidentally, is the integration of the market for cash into a worldwide thing. A lot of the people in the world, who are stuck with a much more inflationary government than the US has, can and do use relatively sound US dollars instead. A huge number of the actual printed US notes are overseas serving as the world's cash of choice. In fact it was counterfeiting operations in the rest of the world, not in the US, that really drove the recent redesign of the notes to make them harder to copy. It appears the Treasury is getting a bit businesslike and fighting for its market!
Meanwhile, there is a second reaction possible to the dawning awareness that competition from other countries' currencies is reducing a nation's ability to inflate. And that is: arrange international agreements to inflate in tandem. As it happens, such agreements are hard to get done and hold to. So there is a better solution: monetary union. That way you can automatically inflate in tandem. I wonder if this sounds familiar to any of the Europeans reading this?
As for "money laundering", that's just another modern pseudocrime created by the insane War on Drugs. Even if you are the sort of conservative who thinks that it is just fine for the government to nationalize our bodies to keep out drugs, perhaps you should consider the blow to the human right of private property entailed in the criminalization of control over your own cash.
I have no idea where people picked up the idea that freedom of code == socialism, or communism,
or anything of the sort, and I fail to see the connection at all.
Socialist, no. That's the state ownership of the means of production. It is clear that no government owns Free software, nor is that even remotely possible with the net in anything like its current form.
But communism? Check the definition; m-w.com:
a: a theory advocating elimination of private property b : a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed
Sound familiar? It does to me. It is true that free stuff is in a legal sense private property, being copyrighted. But since the use of the copyright is to reveal and share rather than obscure and exclude, in any practical sense free software is commonly owned.
A lot of people seem to think that "socialism" and "communism" are free floating negative words roughly comparable to "bad" or "satanic". But they are not comparable; in fact they have definitions and therefore can be applied to everyday situations that their inventors could not foresee. It is true that public ownership of scarce goods has always been a bad thing when the "public" was larger than a few hundred people. But information is not scarce, at least in some of its forms. And there, the reasons why socialism fails in the real world of tangible objects simply do not apply.
Free software is communistic. But communism is not bad per se, rather, it is bad in certain real life applications.
Here you go at length about wanting a programmatic way to pluck "cool" out of a DB, by carefully tracking opinions to find opinion leaders. Fair enough. Though to tell the truth, I think a free ripoff of Firefly would be just fine for me. If it tells me "you really should try Perry Como", and it's right -- well, is that a problem?
But then you decry the very idea of "capital" choosing cool: "We'll never get rid of the top-down cool because there's just too much money in it." But what is the problem with top down cool? If it is cool, it is cool, no?
All I can see here is posturing. Joe Public's cool isn't as good as your cool because yours was picked by a machine whereas Joe's came from the imagination of some suit. Well from my meta-cool position (which is not cool at all), you are both chasing rainbows. You may be right that we may be evolutionarily programmed to chase cool. But even if so, as rational beings we should be able to step back and realize that if that is true, no cool is better or worse than any other; they are all equally valid, equally rewarding, and equally fatuous.
One other thing: this piece really wants an editor.
Riiiight. We all know how our American Indian brethren have rearmed in recent years; in fact they are suspected to have a nuclear device with which they are holding New York City hostage. And that is why the USA has grudgingly allowed them to win at various lawsuits to gain control of lands illegally stolen from their ancestors by ours, and why the USA is grudgingly allowing them the sovereignty to run gambling operations in spite of the shrill protests of their neighbors. After all, why would the powerful US government do anything nice to mere Indians unless they had some guns? It certainly couldn't be anything like "it was the right thing to do" -- could it?
May I suggest that ideas, and ideology, have something to do with sovereignty? There are always guns in the world, and weak peoples, but there is no pecking order of slavery. The naive view of Mao's saying predicts a world order like a henhouse; but we are more complicated than that.
For many things, the MPAA is right: you don't need all the bits to get fair use. If you just want to make reference to the overall image in some way, for instance, you could just make a cheap VCR recording.
But some uses do need all the bits.
Someone already mentioned creating histograms as one way of analyzing what is going on, onscreen. My thesis might be that in "Bladerunner", the average number of black pixels is higher than any other the other 5 most popular films that year.
Another case you would need the bits for, is steganography. What if I assert that the front page picture in the NYT is actually being used as a secret method to contact agents in another country, or even aliens? You certainly cannot prove anything about that picture one way or another without the exact bits.
Another possible example would be to analyze media for subliminal content. I claim that there are secret pro-smoking images in "Traffic", perhaps flashed up for only one frame. They might not be caught if I digitized from a TV screen.
And who knows what uses might be thought of in the future? For instance, with computer analysis you might be able to tell which scenes of "Titanic" were filmed in what order, by analyzing the amount of weathering on the sets. If this is possible at all, it is clear that you need as much information as possible.
Incidentally (or perhaps not), the issue of "all the bits" relates to code expressiveness. It is true that for the great majority of uses, all you need is the compiled version of code -- the "boiled down bits". But code is not just about running machines; it is about communicating stuff -- primarily algorithms -- to other humans. For that, you need all the bits.
The issue of fair use is not about the most common or expected use of an item. It is about all the other uses: the improbable, unexpected, low incidence ones. The ones that might not even be possible or thought of now, but which might happen in the future.
The article did not seem to be very up on Northwood, the planned P4 die-shrink (to.13u) and design refinement. But after the criticisms made in the article, it is a bit hard to see why:
they pointed out the fact that P4 performance is no greater than lower-clocked Athlon. This is true. However, with Northwood P4 should be scaling to 2G and above where it will eventually beat Athlon. (Of course, AMD is not sitting still, but P4 is supposed to have more headroom than Athlon due to its superlong pipes.)
They criticize the power throttling; this would be a moot issue after the processor is shrunk, at least for the lower end P4s.
They point out that nobody wants to buy the current P4 due to its dead-end packaging. This is also true, but presumably the new socket for Northwood will be around for a while. (I have no idea why Intel thought to introduce the 850 while admitting that it would be dropped in less than a year, but that's what they did.)
They even acknowledge the price drop. AMD competed for years with inferior processors priced low. Intel can certainly compete with Northwood.
The article says that a thermal diode is responsible for triggering the throttled-down performance. But then it also says that the throttling happens due to the power consumption. These are different things: power consumption only causes the temperature to rise if the cooling is not slurping off excess heat fast enough.
Anyone care to comment on this seeming discrepancy?
Assuming that it really is thermal throttling, I would love to see what a good tech site like Tom's might be able to determine about the throttled down CPU when using various heatsinks. If that feature is really there then you should expect more powerful heatsinks give the same temperature as lesser heatsinks, but higher performance.
In other words, it is possible to see this as a feature, not a bug. You get 1.5G when the processor is capable of it. You get half that when you are running hot; but with good enough cooling you should always get the highest performance possible.
"Overclocking" may go away, replaced by "overcooling".
Indexing people is not as easy as it seems. How many "John Smiths" are there? Even which live at 200 Elm Street? How do you know if this John Smith is the one that lived at Elm street 10 years ago?
Well, it is all easy if every person could just be tagged with a number that they must -- under pain of jail time -- use in every substantial transaction.
The number exists. It is your SSN. And who created that?
So here is the reason that privacy is always a greater issue between the State and citizen, and between citizens or groups of citizens (including corps): the State can use force. Citizens can't. Isn't that distinction quite clear?
A large part of our current problem with privacy is the fact that even in our dealing with private entities, we are still required to use SSN. And that makes them perfectly able to index all significant facts on us. Furthermore, it opens the door to use of the SSN by others asking trusting-but-foolish consumers, to index all of their own information with that of the larger players.
Without a superkey, none of that would be possible. Naturally there would be tried to invent superkeys, by the Doubleclicks of the world. But people would instantly see the intent and avoid such things.
Regarding ownership of gold: yes, under the Roosevelt administration gold was nationalized in the USA. (And you thought the Constitution prevented "takings"!) The reason for this was rather simple: the government, mainly via the Fed, had horrifically mismanaged the (gold backed) dollar, creating a boom that was based on paper.
The (real) interest rate serves a market function, as other prices do: as a means to clear supply and demand. High prices call forth more of the good with the high price. Low prices get less of it.
In order to inflate the currency, however, the Federal reserve scheme uses bank-created money. Banks have certain amounts of real assets; they are allowed by law to loan out many times that much money (and they do). Thus each dollar saved becomes multiplied, sending a signal to the economy on the whole that not just $1 (plus interest) worth of goods are demanded in the future -- rather, that $6 (plus interest) are demanded. Hence, increased savings calls forth overinvestment, which results in a boom. But the boom is not based on anything real -- real consumer desires, that is. Remember that it is based on paper -- banks creating essentially fraudulent money. So in the long run, the massive future demand that the low interest rates predicted, fails to appear. And then the economy tanks. Businesses fail; capital is liquidated; people draw down savings (again with amplified effect). This is a recession; one must inevitably follow each inflationary boom.
Nowadays, there is no pretense that the dollar is based on anything (other than possibly the ability of the US government to tax a vast number of rich western citizens). But back then, the dollar was still tied to gold. In theory, you were supposed to be able to march in to a bank, hand it $20, and get an ounce of gold. That exchange rate ($1 == 1/20 gold ounce) had never changed. But after the inflation of the young Fed, it was not realistic, either, and could not be sustained. The bank failures early in the depression were a part of the adjustment.
The main response was to take the US off the gold standard, domestically. Banks no longer had to repay in gold, but only dollars. But the US government (along with foreign governments) still wanted to use gold for the international money, and so the demand for gold as the ultimate backing for money remained. And so in 1933, Roosevelt revalued the dollar to 1/35 gold ounce (for foreigners) and in order to boost its own supplies of gold the government simply banned its private possession and confiscated it. One of the biggest robberies of all time.
Just for the record, Linux (and free software in general) is communistic. Just look at the dictionary. Look at us talking about the linux "community".
The reason communism is associated with evil, is that regimes practicing forced communism were, in fact, evil. It is the force that was evil though, not the social ownership per se. However, it is also true that there is no workable method for allocating socially owned material objects. That is to say, that communism (as applied to material things) is inherently contradictory; and hence the association of communism with evil is not that ridiculous, since there was in fact no way of communism coming out good.
Except that now, in a domain of information instead of physical things, there is. And so we can expect the knee-jerk opposition of right-wing yahoos for a while more. Don't worry about it. The difference between information and physical things is apparent enough that in time, such complaints will simply melt away.
A lot of folks in this thread are concerned with the problem of high tech insurance in a free market.
Here is a succinct summation of the situation: in a free market, both the producers and consumers of insurance have an incentive to try to discover information about the insured, which will give them an edge. Consumers who know they are high risk are inclined to buy insurance, and have an incentive to hide their risk factors. Insurance companies, OTOH, try to ferret out all possible information from the consumers so as to accurately assess their risk.
With high tech, the situation evolves. To the extent that uncertainty is removed, insurance is no longer viable. At the one side, there are people who are fated to have something bad happen to them. Assuming the information is known, they can never insure. On the other hand, are people that don't have anything bad in their future. They can buy insurance, but they don't need it.
Of course we are nowhere near the point of being able to predict the future for everyone, and (IMO) we never will be. Large parts of the future are subject to our free wills, and other large parts are chaotic. And so the second result of high tech (of perfectly fated lucky people) is not really a problem. So there will always be insurance, and accidents to be insured against.
Now I want to talk about the main problem: that of a genetically fated occurance. Note that this can be problematic in different three ways.
The first is simply that it is unfair. It is unfair that I should die of cancer when I am 40, while you live to be 80. This is unfair, but it is not unjust. Injustice is a product of men's action; and unless we are willing to second guess God himself, all we can say about a person fated to die young is that it is a pity. To claim that personal misfortune gives an enforceable claim to the wealth of others is simply ludicrous. (Though I note that the current PC "victimhood sweepstakes" is an attempt to enshrine this very notion.)
The other two ways that a person's fatedness can be a problem is if that information is known assymmetrically. If only the insurance companies know it, then they can use it to deny the fated and exploit the healthy. If only the customer knows it, then we have the problem of adverse selection. So it is clear that any information the companies have, they should have to inform you of. Consumers should demand no less.
But again, back to the situation of uninsurables. The "problem" here is too much information. Many, many people here are saying that such information should simply not be allowed to exist. This is to stick one's head in the sand. That sort of information may be very important to have; i.e. there are very likely genetic risks which can be mitigated if known. So the consumers, at least, will have the information; and therefore they will act on it. And then we have the problem of adverse selection.
Others are proposing socialism. Socialism does not work, but it might stave off problems for a generation or two. But the reckoning always comes, and you need only to look at eastern europe to know that doing that to your grandchildren is the way of a coward.
The free market way of handling uninsurables is simple: just let the customers and insurers alone, and they will over time, gradually work out the right solution.
Now I know that will not satisfy a lot of you, being technocrats and unwilling to let things sit without a plan. So let me just suggest what I think will happen. We need to push back the point of buying insurance contracts to a time when there is true ignorance about outcomes. In the case of some of these genetic things, that may well be before a person is even conceived. That is to say, that prospective parents would insure their children-to-be, relying on the genetic lottery of sex to randomize the outcome enough so that it is sufficiently uncertain to buy insurance.
Consider. A picture, on a computer, is a file. A file is string of ones and zeros. It is a number. So, to "ban kiddie porn", is the equivalent of banning a certain set of numbers. Nobody can have these numbers; they are too dangerous. I.e., consider the number X = 2^15359991. Perhaps that is really "Raping Little Susie", as encoded in some format. Since we don't like pedophiles, we ban X. That's OK, though, right? After all X is huge -- it is very, very unlikely that X is actually a number anyone would really want to use.
But wait. How about X/2? Should that number be allowed? Given the fact that one can easily convert it to X (just multiply by two), if X is banned, it must also be banned or the ban is worked around trivially.
In fact, given any encoding scheme as complex as gzip or as simple as "divide by two", to really "get rid of" a number, we need to ban all possible encodings of that number.
But the possible encodings of X change, based on the possible encoders. That means that some numbers might OK today, but kiddie porn just as soon as bzip3 comes out.
Now consider that an encoder can use lookup tables. It is therefore possible to encode any number as any other number; which one encodes which is simply an implementation detail. So, for example, I might then write a gzip variant which encodes X as 17. I have the code right here; I could do that. So that would mean banning 17, in order to ban X.
I think it is pretty clear that the world needs 17.
So how you gonna ban kiddie porn? Unencrypted only? What good is *that*? Rot13 anyone?
Commentators widely expect Bush to get anywhere from 2 to 4 nomination to the supreme court. Bush has publicly stated that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas will be the models for his appointments. What will this do to the court?
Of the current members, Rehnquist (age 75) will certainly retire. John Paul Stevens (80) is also widely expected to leave, with the possibility of Sandra Day O'Connor (70) and also Bader-Ginburg (67), who recently had cancer.
If we look at a report from the Institute for Justice (the thinking man's ACLU; give them money!), we find that the current court has a slight working majority that have voted fairly consistently for freedom: Thomas, Kennedy, Scalia, O'Conner, and Rehnquist all scoring above 50% voting the "right" way (according to the IJ).
Of the two fairly odds-on retirees, Rehnquist is the least good of the freedom bloc (he is the second worse judge on Free Speech and Association, otherwise solid), and Stevens is among the minority generally opposed to expanding liberty. Considering that both Scalia and Thomas are both above Rhenquist in the rankings, replacing these two judges with Thomas clones would be a large advance for liberty.
Of the female judges who might leave, O'Conner would be a mild loss (though again Scalia and Thomas rank ahead of her), and Bader-Ginsburg a gain, being the second most anti-liberty justice.
All in all, assuming the Bush team is capable of finding appointments like Thomas, the Bush administration should be a huge long-term benefit to American liberty in spite of whatever foolish laws they manage to pass. But note that neither Dems nor Republicans have shown much consistent ability to appoint judges that do what they expect.
However, with luck we may yet see the Supreme Court gradually return to the doctrine of enumerated powers and limited government, enforcing the constitutional limits on the federal government.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the feeling that this notion works well for simple robots, including lower life forms such as insects. Like Genghis, they simple do "simple" stuff based on simple neural computers that hardly warrant the name. But where Brooks' work falls short, as you can see in the review, is where neurons are clumped into serious computers that do model the world. The worst offenders, of course, are humans. The problem is that have no idea how to wire a robot to do that, and a lot of the behaviors we really want from robots rely on it.
AI still has a long, hard road ahead of it. But we will succeed, eventually, simply by virtue of reverse engineering if nothing else.
I agree completely with you. Moderator!
What's odd about satellite radio is they are attempting to do two big things at once: broadcast from satellites, *and* subscription based radio. It would make a heck of a lot more sense to just do one of those -- and the sensible one is satellite broadcasting.
Put up the satellites and create a dinosaur rock station (you know the station -- the place that plays Metallica now, but did not play them 10 years ago). Also create a country station, and a talk station or two, and a progressive rock station, etc. Just mimic what you find on the ground right now. Sure you cannot do traffic reports and local weather -- that's a cost. But your ad reach is huge -- advertisers will pay lots. And your running costs are minimal.
Another way to look at it: right now there seems to be at least one dinosaur rock, one "progressive" rock, one country, one... etc. station per city in the US, I would imagine at least 200 cities large enough. Imagine a business in which you can fire 99.5% of your labor force, and produce just as much output! And imagine that same output is worth 200 times as much to the customers! That's productivity!
I suspect the reason that the two satellite services are not providing ad supported free radio must be political.
DEV CAR
My normal reaction to vanity tags is "loser"... this is the only one I have ever envied.
The Net is still young. Lamenting its lack of revolutionariness now is like complaining in 1955 that TV was just radio with pictures.
One way in which the Net will prove revoluntionary, I hope, is in lowering the skeptical boundaries we have all created for ourselves based on the huge cost of checking facts. But as more and more source materials go online, linking becomes possible to make facts asserted checkable at low cost. Therefore I expect beliefs that are true but counterintuitive to resurge based on the change of medium.
This explains, for instance, the online popularity of libertarian ideas. But I am sure there are many other domains of life where most people believe something false, or don't believe anything at all, due to lack of easy access to trustworthy authoritative sources.
There is a very active community around the game, making "mods" for better looking terrain and armor, and putting out reams of scenarios, for free. You will never run out of new scenarios.
CM is available for purchase only on the web, at the battlefront website. It's not in stores. There is also a demo available there, with two playable scenarios. Try it out and see if you are not amazed and terrified the first time you get shelled. I certainly was.
This is the computer game that is the rightful heir to Squad Leader. Don't miss it. (Note I am not affiliated with BTS or battlefront in any way other than being a satisfied customer.)
You don't understand what the meaning of "the white space" was at all.
It is not culture dependent stuff, or at least not primarily. In fact much of it is your "contectualized" meaning -- though not in the rather trivial sense that postmodernists think is deep.
It is stuff like: "human beings usually sweat when they are hot". It is stuff like, "if an object moves, its sub-parts usually move with it". It is stuff like: "air is usually transparent". Please tell me a culture where any of these assertions are not true.
If you cannot, perhaps you will then admit that there is some knowledge which is in fact universal, at least to humans.
What is important about Cyc, is exactly that this sort of knowledge is so universal that it is hard to even realize we all have it. But we do, and you find that out mighty fast when you try to get a machine to do any kind of real-world reasoning.
In Jack of Shadows the opposite is the case. On the surface the fictional world is purely fantasy, but the plot itself is scientific: the main character is concerned (among other things) with finding out the rules that his world obeys, to use them to gain power. In this sense it is truer to science fiction than Lord of Light is.
It is also a very good read.
Genre counts. Science fiction, among other things, deals with futurism. And futurism is probably the worst-aging element imaginable. (That, not just in fiction but anywhere.) So for a science fiction work to hold up even 1/3 century is pretty amazing.
That said, Lord of Light can be taken as an exemplar of the sort of scifi that can hold up for a long time. The key is to avoid futurism; rather, take the Asimovian truism to heart, and turn all your tech into magic, and simply remove any tech that may prove troublesome to predict. LoL's contemporary Dune is a great example. There are no serious machines to speak of because of a jihad (how handy!).
Most of the scifi of the sixties and seventies, though, today strikes a reader as rather strange due to the lack of computers. The real future has a terrible way of being unpredictable.
The GLB act does repeal Glass-Steagal. That is true. However, the cause of the depression was only proximately banks -- in fact it was the banking system, inflating the money supply wildly during the twenties. This was completely under the control of, and the fault of, the Fed.
The effect of pumping all that new money into the system was a boom: interest rates were artificially lowered, signalling entrepreneurs that goods were needed in the future. And so the entrepreneurs borrowed money directly, or obtained money via the markets (IPOs and bonds), and built productive facilities. However, a good fraction of this production was not needed, and hence, in time, businesses failed. Recession. That recession was then plunged into depression by more bad policies of the government. The Smoot-Hawley tariff is one large culprit. Another is the fault of the Fed, which panicked and started drastically contracting the money supply. Finally there was the problem of the continuing socialist ploys of FDR. Failing businesses needed to go bankrupt, and wages needed to adjust downward, in order for the labor market to clear. But the Federal government fought such market adjustments tooth and claw.
Meanwhile, the scapegoating search (which always follows government failure) was on, and it lit upon banks as culprits. Which is true, in the sense that they were all collectively responsible for the inflation that really caused the problem. But that's not what they were blamed for, of course. Glass-Steagal even at the time was known to be a crock. Politically popular, though. FDIC was a much more successful and meaningful intervention.
So all those years since then, America alone in the world has forbidden itegration of the financial sector. (So contrary to our local chickens little predicting a new depression, the question must be: where were all the depressions you would have expected in every other country in the world?)
With globalization, Glass-Steagal was finally starting to seriously affect the competitiveness of American insurance and banking. And so they agitated to get things changed. And so they did. In this case generally a good change.
As for happiness: there is no such right. What fools these mortals be. Even the pursuit of happiness you have no Constitutional right to, though Tom Jefferson liked the phrase as a substitute for the more controvertial "property".
Even if there was shown to be some compelling government interest in stopping spam, any law to that end would still have to deal with strict scrutiny from the courts. And in this case, technical means can deal with the problem. I think they can do so adequately now, but perhaps it is too hard for most people. Even so, they should do so fine in a year or two.
Let us regard the long sweep of time and realize how foolish it would be to sacrifice even a tiny chunk of our right of free speech for a few years of the security of slightly less spam.
This cuts both ways, for both borrowers and lenders. As long as they foresee accurately what inflation will be, they will factor it out in deposits and loans.
So who does inflation really affect? Well, for one thing people that fail to accurately predict it. But this might be either rich or poor (though, which class as a group do you think can hire the better prognosticators??)
The second effect, is on cash holders. The money in your wallet, that is, is being degraded even as you read this. To the extent which your total assets are bound up in cash, inflation hurts you. Now, what class do you think has the larger percentage of its assets in cash, rich or poor?
The third large effect is on the people who are getting all the newly created cash first. This effect is in proportion to how close they are to the newly created money. The banks are closest; they are ones who create the new money out of thin air, by pyramiding on deposits. Imagine that with a flick of a switch, you are allowed to add a few $million to your balance at a bank. Does that help you? Well, no -- not yet. You have to spend it to get any real effect. But banks do; they loan it to people.
After the banks, there is some effect on the people lent to. Of course, if the proportion of the loan to their total assets is small, they don't benefit very much. But there is still an effect; even if everyone has predicted it, the price effect still has to ripple out into the economy, and all those that get the cash early still pay less than those that get it late.
One final effect worth mentioning, though it is a lot less class skewed. And that is, that by artificially affecting interest rates, partial reserve banking creates the business cycle. Bad investments are made due to bad predictions of future demand. These help nobody. This is really the main reason to be against inflationary banking, IMO, not the relatively small effect of robbing from the poor to give to the rich.
As for that 2% figure: that is essentially the inverse of productivity. Non inflated cash increases in value because the sum of all goods and services increases. You are correct that we mine gold, which does suppress that figure somewhat. Perhaps it is 1%. There is really no way to know, absent setting up an honest and large scale hard currency. Perhaps we shall find out, in the future, if egold of some sort proves to dominate the world.
What kind of power do you think it gives the government to control money? I will tell you the answer, since I doubt you know: a government fiat currency can be inflated, easily, cheaply, and most importantly, without the knowledge of the voters. Historically, fully gold backed money, on average deflates over time, at something like 2% or so per year. Even with the modern Fed emphasis on "low" inflation, we are still getting something like 3-4% per year. So that is something like 6% actual inflation.
The effect of inflation is a hidden tax on everyone who has money. How about that for a neat thing one can do with "control"? Take 6% of all the money in circulation, each and every year? Who do you think this affects more? Poor people, or rich? Do you think it is right for the government to tax poor people in a super slick hidden way? (Of course, part of the loot is returned to the poor in the form of welfare, food stamps, etc -- but most of it is spent on government programs (defense, interest on debt) which benefit the non poor.)
In contrast to your implied suggestion that a private currency would be just as bad, note that only a government can enforce inflation over time. A private money, inflating in the same manner in a competitive market, would become disfavored and finally abandoned for better competitors.
One of the great effects of globalization, incidentally, is the integration of the market for cash into a worldwide thing. A lot of the people in the world, who are stuck with a much more inflationary government than the US has, can and do use relatively sound US dollars instead. A huge number of the actual printed US notes are overseas serving as the world's cash of choice. In fact it was counterfeiting operations in the rest of the world, not in the US, that really drove the recent redesign of the notes to make them harder to copy. It appears the Treasury is getting a bit businesslike and fighting for its market!
Meanwhile, there is a second reaction possible to the dawning awareness that competition from other countries' currencies is reducing a nation's ability to inflate. And that is: arrange international agreements to inflate in tandem. As it happens, such agreements are hard to get done and hold to. So there is a better solution: monetary union. That way you can automatically inflate in tandem. I wonder if this sounds familiar to any of the Europeans reading this?
As for "money laundering", that's just another modern pseudocrime created by the insane War on Drugs. Even if you are the sort of conservative who thinks that it is just fine for the government to nationalize our bodies to keep out drugs, perhaps you should consider the blow to the human right of private property entailed in the criminalization of control over your own cash.
But communism? Check the definition; m-w.com:
Sound familiar? It does to me. It is true that free stuff is in a legal sense private property, being copyrighted. But since the use of the copyright is to reveal and share rather than obscure and exclude, in any practical sense free software is commonly owned.A lot of people seem to think that "socialism" and "communism" are free floating negative words roughly comparable to "bad" or "satanic". But they are not comparable; in fact they have definitions and therefore can be applied to everyday situations that their inventors could not foresee. It is true that public ownership of scarce goods has always been a bad thing when the "public" was larger than a few hundred people. But information is not scarce, at least in some of its forms. And there, the reasons why socialism fails in the real world of tangible objects simply do not apply.
Free software is communistic. But communism is not bad per se, rather, it is bad in certain real life applications.
But then you decry the very idea of "capital" choosing cool: "We'll never get rid of the top-down cool because there's just too much money in it." But what is the problem with top down cool? If it is cool, it is cool, no?
All I can see here is posturing. Joe Public's cool isn't as good as your cool because yours was picked by a machine whereas Joe's came from the imagination of some suit. Well from my meta-cool position (which is not cool at all), you are both chasing rainbows. You may be right that we may be evolutionarily programmed to chase cool. But even if so, as rational beings we should be able to step back and realize that if that is true, no cool is better or worse than any other; they are all equally valid, equally rewarding, and equally fatuous.
One other thing: this piece really wants an editor.
Riiiight. We all know how our American Indian brethren have rearmed in recent years; in fact they are suspected to have a nuclear device with which they are holding New York City hostage. And that is why the USA has grudgingly allowed them to win at various lawsuits to gain control of lands illegally stolen from their ancestors by ours, and why the USA is grudgingly allowing them the sovereignty to run gambling operations in spite of the shrill protests of their neighbors. After all, why would the powerful US government do anything nice to mere Indians unless they had some guns? It certainly couldn't be anything like "it was the right thing to do" -- could it? May I suggest that ideas, and ideology, have something to do with sovereignty? There are always guns in the world, and weak peoples, but there is no pecking order of slavery. The naive view of Mao's saying predicts a world order like a henhouse; but we are more complicated than that.
For many things, the MPAA is right: you don't need all the bits to get fair use. If you just want to make reference to the overall image in some way, for instance, you could just make a cheap VCR recording.
But some uses do need all the bits.
Someone already mentioned creating histograms as one way of analyzing what is going on, onscreen. My thesis might be that in "Bladerunner", the average number of black pixels is higher than any other the other 5 most popular films that year.
Another case you would need the bits for, is steganography. What if I assert that the front page picture in the NYT is actually being used as a secret method to contact agents in another country, or even aliens? You certainly cannot prove anything about that picture one way or another without the exact bits.
Another possible example would be to analyze media for subliminal content. I claim that there are secret pro-smoking images in "Traffic", perhaps flashed up for only one frame. They might not be caught if I digitized from a TV screen.
And who knows what uses might be thought of in the future? For instance, with computer analysis you might be able to tell which scenes of "Titanic" were filmed in what order, by analyzing the amount of weathering on the sets. If this is possible at all, it is clear that you need as much information as possible.
Incidentally (or perhaps not), the issue of "all the bits" relates to code expressiveness. It is true that for the great majority of uses, all you need is the compiled version of code -- the "boiled down bits". But code is not just about running machines; it is about communicating stuff -- primarily algorithms -- to other humans. For that, you need all the bits.
The issue of fair use is not about the most common or expected use of an item. It is about all the other uses: the improbable, unexpected, low incidence ones. The ones that might not even be possible or thought of now, but which might happen in the future.
- they pointed out the fact that P4 performance is no greater than lower-clocked Athlon. This is true. However, with Northwood P4 should be scaling to 2G and above where it will eventually beat Athlon. (Of course, AMD is not sitting still, but P4 is supposed to have more headroom than Athlon due to its superlong pipes.)
- They criticize the power throttling; this would be a moot issue after the processor is shrunk, at least for the lower end P4s.
- They point out that nobody wants to buy the current P4 due to its dead-end packaging. This is also true, but presumably the new socket for Northwood will be around for a while. (I have no idea why Intel thought to introduce the 850 while admitting that it would be dropped in less than a year, but that's what they did.)
They even acknowledge the price drop. AMD competed for years with inferior processors priced low. Intel can certainly compete with Northwood.Anyone care to comment on this seeming discrepancy?
Assuming that it really is thermal throttling, I would love to see what a good tech site like Tom's might be able to determine about the throttled down CPU when using various heatsinks. If that feature is really there then you should expect more powerful heatsinks give the same temperature as lesser heatsinks, but higher performance.
In other words, it is possible to see this as a feature, not a bug. You get 1.5G when the processor is capable of it. You get half that when you are running hot; but with good enough cooling you should always get the highest performance possible.
"Overclocking" may go away, replaced by "overcooling".
Well, it is all easy if every person could just be tagged with a number that they must -- under pain of jail time -- use in every substantial transaction.
The number exists. It is your SSN. And who created that?
So here is the reason that privacy is always a greater issue between the State and citizen, and between citizens or groups of citizens (including corps): the State can use force. Citizens can't. Isn't that distinction quite clear?
A large part of our current problem with privacy is the fact that even in our dealing with private entities, we are still required to use SSN. And that makes them perfectly able to index all significant facts on us. Furthermore, it opens the door to use of the SSN by others asking trusting-but-foolish consumers, to index all of their own information with that of the larger players.
Without a superkey, none of that would be possible. Naturally there would be tried to invent superkeys, by the Doubleclicks of the world. But people would instantly see the intent and avoid such things.
The (real) interest rate serves a market function, as other prices do: as a means to clear supply and demand. High prices call forth more of the good with the high price. Low prices get less of it.
In order to inflate the currency, however, the Federal reserve scheme uses bank-created money. Banks have certain amounts of real assets; they are allowed by law to loan out many times that much money (and they do). Thus each dollar saved becomes multiplied, sending a signal to the economy on the whole that not just $1 (plus interest) worth of goods are demanded in the future -- rather, that $6 (plus interest) are demanded. Hence, increased savings calls forth overinvestment, which results in a boom. But the boom is not based on anything real -- real consumer desires, that is. Remember that it is based on paper -- banks creating essentially fraudulent money. So in the long run, the massive future demand that the low interest rates predicted, fails to appear. And then the economy tanks. Businesses fail; capital is liquidated; people draw down savings (again with amplified effect). This is a recession; one must inevitably follow each inflationary boom.
Nowadays, there is no pretense that the dollar is based on anything (other than possibly the ability of the US government to tax a vast number of rich western citizens). But back then, the dollar was still tied to gold. In theory, you were supposed to be able to march in to a bank, hand it $20, and get an ounce of gold. That exchange rate ($1 == 1/20 gold ounce) had never changed. But after the inflation of the young Fed, it was not realistic, either, and could not be sustained. The bank failures early in the depression were a part of the adjustment.
The main response was to take the US off the gold standard, domestically. Banks no longer had to repay in gold, but only dollars. But the US government (along with foreign governments) still wanted to use gold for the international money, and so the demand for gold as the ultimate backing for money remained. And so in 1933, Roosevelt revalued the dollar to 1/35 gold ounce (for foreigners) and in order to boost its own supplies of gold the government simply banned its private possession and confiscated it. One of the biggest robberies of all time.
Not a great year for liberty.
The reason communism is associated with evil, is that regimes practicing forced communism were, in fact, evil. It is the force that was evil though, not the social ownership per se. However, it is also true that there is no workable method for allocating socially owned material objects. That is to say, that communism (as applied to material things) is inherently contradictory; and hence the association of communism with evil is not that ridiculous, since there was in fact no way of communism coming out good.
Except that now, in a domain of information instead of physical things, there is. And so we can expect the knee-jerk opposition of right-wing yahoos for a while more. Don't worry about it. The difference between information and physical things is apparent enough that in time, such complaints will simply melt away.
Though it is not that private schools "could" choose to be different. It is that at least some would so choose, to try to get a competitive advantage.
Here is a succinct summation of the situation: in a free market, both the producers and consumers of insurance have an incentive to try to discover information about the insured, which will give them an edge. Consumers who know they are high risk are inclined to buy insurance, and have an incentive to hide their risk factors. Insurance companies, OTOH, try to ferret out all possible information from the consumers so as to accurately assess their risk.
With high tech, the situation evolves. To the extent that uncertainty is removed, insurance is no longer viable. At the one side, there are people who are fated to have something bad happen to them. Assuming the information is known, they can never insure. On the other hand, are people that don't have anything bad in their future. They can buy insurance, but they don't need it.
Of course we are nowhere near the point of being able to predict the future for everyone, and (IMO) we never will be. Large parts of the future are subject to our free wills, and other large parts are chaotic. And so the second result of high tech (of perfectly fated lucky people) is not really a problem. So there will always be insurance, and accidents to be insured against.
Now I want to talk about the main problem: that of a genetically fated occurance. Note that this can be problematic in different three ways.
The first is simply that it is unfair. It is unfair that I should die of cancer when I am 40, while you live to be 80. This is unfair, but it is not unjust. Injustice is a product of men's action; and unless we are willing to second guess God himself, all we can say about a person fated to die young is that it is a pity. To claim that personal misfortune gives an enforceable claim to the wealth of others is simply ludicrous. (Though I note that the current PC "victimhood sweepstakes" is an attempt to enshrine this very notion.)
The other two ways that a person's fatedness can be a problem is if that information is known assymmetrically. If only the insurance companies know it, then they can use it to deny the fated and exploit the healthy. If only the customer knows it, then we have the problem of adverse selection. So it is clear that any information the companies have, they should have to inform you of. Consumers should demand no less.
But again, back to the situation of uninsurables. The "problem" here is too much information. Many, many people here are saying that such information should simply not be allowed to exist. This is to stick one's head in the sand. That sort of information may be very important to have; i.e. there are very likely genetic risks which can be mitigated if known. So the consumers, at least, will have the information; and therefore they will act on it. And then we have the problem of adverse selection.
Others are proposing socialism. Socialism does not work, but it might stave off problems for a generation or two. But the reckoning always comes, and you need only to look at eastern europe to know that doing that to your grandchildren is the way of a coward.
The free market way of handling uninsurables is simple: just let the customers and insurers alone, and they will over time, gradually work out the right solution.
Now I know that will not satisfy a lot of you, being technocrats and unwilling to let things sit without a plan. So let me just suggest what I think will happen. We need to push back the point of buying insurance contracts to a time when there is true ignorance about outcomes. In the case of some of these genetic things, that may well be before a person is even conceived. That is to say, that prospective parents would insure their children-to-be, relying on the genetic lottery of sex to randomize the outcome enough so that it is sufficiently uncertain to buy insurance.
But wait. How about X/2? Should that number be allowed? Given the fact that one can easily convert it to X (just multiply by two), if X is banned, it must also be banned or the ban is worked around trivially.
In fact, given any encoding scheme as complex as gzip or as simple as "divide by two", to really "get rid of" a number, we need to ban all possible encodings of that number.
But the possible encodings of X change, based on the possible encoders. That means that some numbers might OK today, but kiddie porn just as soon as bzip3 comes out.
Now consider that an encoder can use lookup tables. It is therefore possible to encode any number as any other number; which one encodes which is simply an implementation detail. So, for example, I might then write a gzip variant which encodes X as 17. I have the code right here; I could do that. So that would mean banning 17, in order to ban X.
I think it is pretty clear that the world needs 17.
So how you gonna ban kiddie porn? Unencrypted only? What good is *that*? Rot13 anyone?
Of the current members, Rehnquist (age 75) will certainly retire. John Paul Stevens (80) is also widely expected to leave, with the possibility of Sandra Day O'Connor (70) and also Bader-Ginburg (67), who recently had cancer.
If we look at a report from the Institute for Justice (the thinking man's ACLU; give them money!), we find that the current court has a slight working majority that have voted fairly consistently for freedom: Thomas, Kennedy, Scalia, O'Conner, and Rehnquist all scoring above 50% voting the "right" way (according to the IJ).
Of the two fairly odds-on retirees, Rehnquist is the least good of the freedom bloc (he is the second worse judge on Free Speech and Association, otherwise solid), and Stevens is among the minority generally opposed to expanding liberty. Considering that both Scalia and Thomas are both above Rhenquist in the rankings, replacing these two judges with Thomas clones would be a large advance for liberty.
Of the female judges who might leave, O'Conner would be a mild loss (though again Scalia and Thomas rank ahead of her), and Bader-Ginsburg a gain, being the second most anti-liberty justice.
All in all, assuming the Bush team is capable of finding appointments like Thomas, the Bush administration should be a huge long-term benefit to American liberty in spite of whatever foolish laws they manage to pass. But note that neither Dems nor Republicans have shown much consistent ability to appoint judges that do what they expect.
However, with luck we may yet see the Supreme Court gradually return to the doctrine of enumerated powers and limited government, enforcing the constitutional limits on the federal government.