I was a huge Metallica fan, I guess I still am, but now I no longer buy Metallica cd's, tshirts, concert tickets, or anything else that might fund them. Why? Because now I see them as my enemy and I won't fund my enemy. I always liked Metallica and my exposure to MP3's caused me to go out and buy a bunch of new Metallica CD's and such which I have now gotten rid of. I always thought Metallica understood about the little guys being whipped around by jerks with cash. I guess they've joined the other side now. Sad but true. Any music talented people out there who can come up with good Metallica songs Weird-Al'd to poke fun at their MP3 stance?:P
If you have the server I can create you a SlashDot-like politics site. I've been thinking of something along that lines for a while yet I lack the funds to set up such a site or take off work long enough to properly code it. You could probably get PHPSlash up and running in a short time or if you like Perl (I like PHP much better myself. ) the original Slashdot's source is there for the taking.
I think it's to late to try to influence policy although it might work if we got enough Slashdot'ers in office. People who really could understand the technical and social issues involved. I know my vote doesn't count but when the presidential election comes around I'm going to vote for one of the American free software figures. Haven't decided who yet but I want my one vote to count so I'm going to pick carefully even if that person does get just my one vote. I hope everyone stops to think about what they're doing and picks the person they feel would really be good for the job. Don't vote for a canidate unless you think they are the best. They'd have quite a shock if they had a bunch of politically unknown geek-famed people show up with votes. It doesn't matter if the person you voted for wins or not as long as you vote your heart.
You can copyright the design that is still in software I'd imagine. Besides does it really matter? Thus far the GPL hasn't really been legally challenged. The main reasons many of us support it are moral issues. If you create a free work and someone steals it to create a commercial offering it still won't be likely to sell well if there is a free offering of the same thing. It's still have troubles with trying to add it's own extensions to try the kill the original project but if it did so it'd be rather hard to add the original projects own extensions in also.. it's just cheaper and easier for them to package and sell the original. When hardware designers get this into their thick heads most likely they'll follow up with open specifications for hardware similar to our current open source software. There is no viral GPL problem. Components of hardware are at least as easy to logically sepperate than software. A GNU BIOS for example is it's own chip so if you copied part of it to make a new un-free BIOS you'd be stealing. If you took it and added it to a machine with un-free parts you haven't stolen anything. It's the same way I can have Linux as my OS and still use commercial apps (if I had any reason too) and it doesn't make the commercial app GPL'd.
If you don't like the way the world is, and I certainly don't, then fight back. The first thing to do is to think about what you really want the system to be like and then find others who can agree with at least parts of what you want it to be like and work with them to iron out a real plan for an alternate system. Then look for ways to make it reality. At this point I think it's to late to clean the system up with small nudges to the government. We've let it go to far and now the world is controlled by a nameless devil. The only way to strike back is to resist the enemy in mass groups. We must first realize that we are the enemy every time we watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, use MS Office, buy from Wal-mart, etc. Every day when you go to work and you help build up a corporation you are contributing to the problem. Every time you vote for someone that you don't think will really do what you want them to you give them more power over your life. We've become lazy and now we as a people are suffering because of it.
Now here's some of my suggestions on what to replace the system with.. I don't think we could cleanly destroy the idea of money so I'd rather add to the idea.. by reordering a tax system that goes from dirt poor to filthy rich so that anybody undex the median gets extra money from the government and anyone over the media pays money to the government to fund this. This is somewhat like socialism except that it could be dropped on top of our capitalist system.. it's a highbreed of socialism and capitalism in fact.. that strives to make everyone 'mostly' equal finiancially. With this system I'd grant an offset by which people could contribute less or collect more depending on their trust relationship with society. Essentially I'd allow every citizen to vote for every other citizen so they can define how much they trust that person to look after the collective good of the society as a whole. Those with more trust would have more resources they could expend. The trust factor could go up and down both so if someone misused their resources they could lose access to them. That means if the DOJ found Bill Gates guilty of running a monopoly people could decide on their own to vote down their trust on Bill Gates and suddenly his $100 billion would be gone, assimilated into the society as a whole. For practical purposes I'd create a short-circuit system on such a trust system so that it could only go up or down by a given amount within a given time period so that the system would be harder to con or crash. So realisticlly Mr. Gates would likely find himself the controller of a mere $50 billion rather than lossing it all in one day. This would help keep the system stable. Rather than having elected officials I'd have the entire system democratic. Every citizen would be required to be a voter. In each election the system would select voters from the appropiate areas randomly to vote in the election rather than having everyone vote. This would keep daily life from getting spammed down by voting as well as making it harder for campaigners to focus their money and media on the voters to convince them to vote their way. Anyone who did not vote would lose trust points as they are not looking out for the best interest of the society.
This system would not be perfect but it'd be better as it'd keep any one group from easily running away with it. It'd of course require technology to exist, but then so does our current corporate republic. The primary forces in our current society that allow it to be ran off with is the abilty to control so much wealth in one place rather than dispensing it to all the people. Also the extreme bloat of our government has made it an easy target. Government really should not feel the need to take care of everything. Given enough resources to live most people can take care of themselves. We started out as farmers and thinkers who forged a world where we could be free. Lets not give it away to a minority that doesn't care for us as a whole just because they have stolen the most magic crystals. We can still work and think and that is why all the money in the world will not let them make us slaves unless we allow them to.
If Sony wanted to make a smart move they'd release the full specs to the PSX and the source to all their development tools for the unit. Since the PS2 is going to be soon replacing the PSX for most of their new games this wouldn't cost them any sales. It'd allow many programmers to begin learning to program for their systems. Some college's could even offer Comp Sci classes in PSx development. This could only lead to more games being available for future versions of the PS as programmers like to stay with technology they learned on. More programmers means more, and better, games. Give a little, take a little.
There have been several free BIOS projects as well as projects for freely available motherboard and CPU designs. It's only a matter of time before the whole computer is an open system. If engineers use a license for their software eventually they'll use it for their hardware. A lot of people are both hardware and software engineers. The hard part is getting a company to make and sell this hardware but there must be some company who'd like to drop the cost of R&D.
So how is this work with emulators? If you wrote a PlayStation game but released it only for emulators say as a download from the net or burned to CD-R how does Sony have any right to block you if you aren't using any of their hardware or software to develop and you aren't including their trademark on the game? I don't see how they can legally do much to somebody who has never signed any agreement with them and who is using none of their intellectual property in their product. It'd be a pretty lame lawsuit to sue someone for using low level hardware specs in the programming of a game that they never claimed to work on your platform. What about a version of Linux that runs on PlayStation. Then if I code a Linux game and somebody figures out that they can burn a copy of PSX Linux and my game to cd-r and play it on their PSX is it my fault? I really hope that somebody is working on a PSX version of Linux that is API compat w/ the video/sound stuff Loki and others are working on for Linux.:)
First off you need to understand that the Internet opens written language up to the dynamic enviroment that spoken language has always had. Also it brings together people from a wide range of locations and experiences. There will be two primary forms that change the language as a whole: those who get their first, and those who get their in the largest groups. English, I think, will remain the basis for a large subset of the universal-language as will languages that already have wide-spread use on the Internet such as German and Spanish. I think for the most part languages that don't share the common alphabet will mostly be dropped or mutated to fit the common alphabet. Of course some new letters may be added also. As each new language adds to the Internet there will be a lot of pressure on the users of that language to learn the UL and as they do they'll fill holes where the UL doesn't have words for what they are meaning. Often words may be highbreeds of several words of one or more languages. Each group will make slightly less impact on the UL excepting large groups that can change the UL by the very size of their group. There will of course still be various sub-dialects, jargon, and slang that exists and new words that are invented over time. The basic idea is that most people won't or can't sit down and learn four or five new languages and people will never agree on a language that isn't already wide-spread. These people will still want to communicate and tools such as translation software will always fall short (I know, I write that kind of software.) so the languages will merge over a period of time. Expect these changes to the UL to reflect not only online but in real life (five years ago did you hear talk of URL's etc in public?). As our language changes so will the way our mind works, it'll be interesting to see happen. I hope to see the mental boundries between cultures and countries to continue to break down among other things.
I love this cover. If they had a page to buy the finished product as show in the photo I'd probably grab one. Anyone know where they got the image or if they can do customized images? Anime rocks.:)
I hate Windows mainly because it crashes. I love Linux partly because it is stable. For the most part X is stable w/ either KDE or Gnome (I use both E and Sawmill and both are great WM's) but now and then it just goes to hell. My number one bitch is because of Navigator. Mozilla runs far better though so I expect that to be a savior for me. But if the GUI could impose barriers on it's apps to keep them in line it'd be nice.
I've been waiting to see some WM that'll make it so programs can be written w/ discrete components plugged together where each of the components can be grabbed and dragged off to the menu bars or desktops or plugged together (if compatible) to form new components somewhat like the Lego Mindstorms programming interface. So if you wanted to grab the 'New' command from your spreadsheet app and drag it to the desktop it might form an icon called 'New Spreadsheet'. Of course fancier components could exist that'd do anything any app could do but that's the basic idea. These components should be able to be used by even fairly novice users to enhance and simplify their desktops. Of course advanced users could have a component editor where they could create more complex components either visually or with some scripting language. If Linux's desktop could work this way, copying Unix's tradition of pipes, then it'd blow everything else out of the water. IT'd certainly be a leapfrog over Windows and VB.:)
Seriously, IMO at least part of the human race will break off into a post-human species that will be much more of a super-organism as our brain power and communication abilities will be much more powerful. We're bound to have a much stronger super-ego as we communicate more and have fewer reasons to be defensive as individuals. Just imagine the borg but created by open source 'freedom nuts' so that everyone still has free will. Also remember that for the most part we won't be tied to individual bodies and may often avoid taking mass. I'm not saying that all of humanity will go this way. Many will avoid it for religious or social reasons. Others may avoid it because of fear of such a radical change. It may sound great being practical immortal with unimaginable powers but just imagine the new stresses it'd put on the (post-)human mind that it's never before had to deal with. Ever watch the Star Trek where that Q'ish guy wants to commit suicide? Not everyone will want to be immortal.
I think in this case he missed the most likely path, that of system evolution. I think that if we look we can see plenty of evidence of the fact that when systems form a symbiotic circle they will tend to merge together into a working super-organism rather than destroy each other. I'm not a biologist so this is probably all wrong but at least in my experience with writing AI-type software it works out perfectly. The human for instance is not a single organism but many organisms working together to form the whole. Humans have a lot to gain from a merge with their tools. A lone human without tools is not very strong. Our individual lives are short and for the most part pointless. Nanotech will create a small elite class of those who choose to evolve and the rest will remain human and will be protected by the post-humans more than likely. How this will effect the two societies it is hard to tell. If we try to back down from nanotech we will burn up our resources and fall back into a dark age so we have little choice. There is at least a 50% chance of not destroying ourselves I think. It's to late to put an argument together in any nice format.. maybe eventually I'll bother. IMO it doesn't really matter as the ball is rolling and nobody can stop it. It is vital that those who wish to give freedom reach the technology first. I fear what would happen to the world if the power hungry reach this point first.
Well I'm assuming that the system has a fairly fixed routine for talking to each kind of device on it's bus and that usually device drivers for the newest gizmo on the market layers itself on top of that low-level layer as a communications protocol with whatever that device happens to be and extends some sort of interface to which the OS or applications can bind to make use of that device without needing to know it's hardware specific communications. If this is the case then you should be able to have a abstract communications protocol representation that you could blow into flash memory and even upgrade by software. The you could have a run-time compiler that compiles that abstract representation (a logic tree or something) into a native binary driver the first time the device is put into the computer or has it's driver updated. This would be similar to the way Windows detects PnP devices and tries to load their drivers from it's list except in this case the device would store it's own driver and the driver would not be OS-specific. I don't think incompatabilities would really be a problem as this would mostly be a layer that translates between the low-level communications and the device specific API and then you'd probably layer a generic API over top of that such as a scanning interface that lets an application work with a number of different supported scanners.
Non-recorded information is the #1 resource on the Net. Slashdot lives on this resource. I'm assuming that this student will also do some research online and in the library but the amount of information held in our collective mind that we have never written down is far more vast than all the recorded works made throughout all of our history. By asking this student is able to tap this collective to get new ideas, facts, and directions for his research. More than likely if he is seriously interested in this topic he'll meet some people with like interests which he can keep in contact with over the years. The next time a student wonders about this topic they'll be able to come here and look and see all this new previously unrecorded information and also gain from that. Sure the majority is probably spam like these people whining that students shouldn't ask for help but Slashdot's moderation system helps somewhat to pick out the best grains of information in such a discussion. Information wants to be free, don't take it from others but rather give away that which you have.
Of course any time you deal with such a powerful technology it will change everything and because of that any predictions we make will not be anywhere close to covering all the possibilites and of course no matter how correct or not we might be everyone will tend to see it as sci fi. As us geeks know, anything that we can imagine can eventually be. Some people ask why, we ask why not. Okay.. on to my opinion.. I think The Diamond Age is a great book that covers the second and third stages of nanotech. We are of course in the first stage now, a stage you might call the rock axe stage where we do everything the hard way and haven't really figured it all out yet. The next major stage I would agree will be the feed stage where nanotech will be tightly controlled by those in power and we'll see a painful transition period as we adjust as a species to having the power of god in our hands. The seed stage will be a large leap forward as it will decentralize nanotech and again this will very likely cause large social changes although I don't believe it'll be nearly as painful as the change to the feed stage. Unlike Stephenson I think the seed stage will follow shortly after the feed stage and that for a large part the two will overlap. You'll have the average person that will probably use the feed.. the M$ and AOL type people.. then you'll have the garage hackers like many of us that will be using seed technology to change the world. I expect to see the open source movement take a huge leap in this area as physical matter is reduced to software. How this will effect property laws might make our current fighting over IP laws seem like a tiny warning shot. Then as time passes we'll slowly evolve into a post-human era. It is only a matter of time before it is done. As people get sick or hurt they will want nanotech medicines and nanotech replacement organs. Combine that with our desire to always be wired and the extra computing power and exact research tools we have at our disposal and eventually we'll even have replacement brains and brain add-on's (Slashdot direct to your brain!) and that will essentially make us immortal and no longer forced to be human. This will probably go several ways as people try to come to grips with the fact they are no longer human and experiment with it. I expect eventually you'll have two sides, those who want to reject the post-human experience and those who want to make use of it. Those who reject it will most likely remain human and possibly revert to a somewhat less advanced culture. Those who accept it I think will eventually form bodies that are not very connected with what we consider the real world and that are almost impervious to damage. Possibly you could imagine us reducing out bodies to a utility cloud of smart processors that could form our brain and when called upon to do so could take on most given physical forms. That makes us shapeshifters, or better as we don't need to take on any form at all. Also take the human trend to want to communicate more. I suspect we'll form a sort of dynamic virtual world that we can paint as we want either alone or in groups. For an example try renting What Dreams May Come w/ Robin Williams. We'll probably evolve this reality to be at least as important to us as our own physical reality. Most likely by this point many of us hacker types will have been intergrating more and more with our tools and we'll have new brain centers added that'll give us an intuitive grasp over nano-engineering and we'll have some sort of matter compiler built into our bodies so that we can create physical objects by will alone. Myself I'd expect to see something along the lines of being oble to absorb raw materials into our body and converting them into small utility cloud type pieces that we'll be able to order to take whatever form we want and if we so desire to keep that form after we are done with them. So if you wanted to create a table you might absorb some already existing object and then think about the table you wanted and it'd simply take form. Of course this stage will utterly destroy any concept we can have of property ownership as property will be reduced down to being nothing more than dreams. For the most part I imagine the post-humans will be a non-violent race as we'll have such tight control over our own minds that we'll be able to easily tune out negative emotions as desired. Also since property will have so little meaning to us we'll have little greed and as we have almost no way of being seriously hurt or killed we'll have no major fears which as everyone who watches Star Wars knows is the root of all evil. Animal instincts and all that will no longer play a large part in our society. To the mortals post-humans will probably seem like spirits, gods, or plants. Well there is my slightly odd but hopefulyl interesting guess at the future w/ nanotech.:)
I've often wondered why there can't be an abstract language for creating device drivers and possibly simple Internet protocols. I admit to never having written a device driver but I've read some books on it and worked with the electronics side of things and I never understood how device drivers are different from a low level communications protocol? I've written abstract bot lang's before that worked sort of on the theory of input's and output's that can either trigger an auto response or create a hook for more complex software layers. I'd think you'd could at least have it provide an API for low level communications that'd be portable across platforms. Anyone know?
I never played with a movie but when younger some friends and I added images we made to the walls in Doom. We then hypnotized some of our group and showed them copies of each image and encouraged them to feel certain emotions such as anger and pain when we saw those symbols. Then after those of us that were hypnotized were waken we would feel that our games of Doom were much more vivid for a few days afterwards. It might be possible to semi-hypnotize people using a movie or game and feed them extra emotions or desires. As some people mentioned some good movies use short cuts here and there as well as symbolic items and whatever in the movies. It isn't quite the same thing but it is similar. I think totally hidden messages will be doubtful to effect people but mostly hidden messages work better.
First off, if schools aren't making a profit with the cost that most of them run the students then they must be majorly mismanaged. Possibly this is as much because of the way things have been changing in the past twenty years or so towards vastly more compressed schedules and trying to handle the fact that everyone and their dog is now told to go to college despite the profession they hope to go into. Science/technology classes especially must be a challenge to handle as they change so quickly. Hopefully more colleges will learn to handle this gracefully but right now I think most of them kludge it. Trying to grow and scale to handle the increased demand has doubtlessly made classes and dorms tend to be overpacked and costs higher than they should be. Hopefully the change towards more Internet-centric teaching will help this situation. I think it is important for professors to balance research (and keeping up to date) with their students. Many of my professors have been so badly out of date that their classes were useless to me. If I am teaching my professor it is hardly worth my money to take the class. On the other hand a professor that is so into their own research can ignore students. I've had a couple professors that were really great at balancing the two but not many. Possibly universities could make an effort to help the professors balance things better. I don't mind if dorms are expensive, but I do mind if they are expensive and the university forces students to live there. Also I mind secondary services such as the university phone co and university stamped credit cards being given to all new students. A lot of students are on their own for their first time. If they are going to give them long distance and credit cards they should take the time to offer free classes to teach the students how to use them responsibly. Sure a lot of it is common sense but a lot of the time people just don't realize the amount of debt they can rack up. Also limits should be low on such services to keep students from getting in trouble. If they ask to raise the limit then that is cool but make them ask so they have to stop and consider their actions a little. IMO college is more useful as a way to learn to handle being an adult than for a degree. Lets not take advantage of young people in the process. They are smart but often unfamiliar with the way these things work.:)
I am always making various backgrounds and tiles just to kill extra time. Some are horrid but others are nifty. Maybe we could make a site that allowed you to upload various backgrounds and let them be voted on and the best hundred that haven't yet been in a package for every six months or so get made into a package? Maybe could have various themes too. Some of the ones I made were grabbed up and spread across the university I usda work for so I guess they were okay. I don't see a point to a lot of spam in a web site attached to such a project but to actually just collect backgrounds would be fun. Anyone already doing this? If not we could get together and make us a site for it.:) Let me know.:)
For instance I got a free DVD of the Matrix and didn't yet have a DVD player so I wanted to convert it to VHS until I got my DVD player..
Also VHS is widespread and sometimes you might want to watch the movie you paid for and not want to carry your DVD player with you.. sort of how sometimes I listen to my CD's copied to tape or MP3 rather than as a CD just because it is handier for what I'm doing.. If I had kids I'd probably copy my movies to VHS and give them an old VCR to watch the movies on so that my originals wouldn't get scratches and grubby finger marks all over them..:)
DSL and other forms of high-speed connections are diferent than dial-up IMO.. they are connected all the time and have a single connection point so the whole thing about using up all the modems is moot. It could be said that allowing a LAN or multiple users raises the amount of bandwidth used but this is nonsense. I'm sure I use more bandwidth than any 10 normal users, even those who play lots of online games. Besides it is a high-speed high-bandwidth connection and use of that bandwidth should be expected. The way you use your connection is none of the ISP's business as long as you stay within the limits of the connection they sell you. If I pay for 1Mb/sec transfer rate then it should be expected that I'll use this to it's most 24 hours a day unless my contract says otherwise. If I want to connect a LAN, host my web site, play net games, whatever it is none of the ISP's business regardless of what they put in their TOS contract. Since more often than not this service is provided as something you can't buy from any competitor they are a monopoly (or cartel in the better cases) and anything you are forced to sign to get the service you need is not valid. Oh sure if you don't like our agreement you can use smoke signals to connect to the Internet doesn't cut it. It is no better than forcing someone to sign a contract against their will for your own profit margins. What next, I have to pay a per-viewer license for people to watch my tv because I hook to your cable company? When I pay for an unlimited Internet account I leave it connected 24/7 and let it do background downloading/uploading while it's idle. ISP's are mostly dead anyway. GTE, AOL, etc bought them all out. Until we evolve the net to be completely peer to peer we'll be stuck with such big boys. One of my favorites was a few years ago when they arrested some teenager for knocking the phone service out for a few hours supposedly costing them millions of dollars in lost income from services.. and then soon after were trying to get the government to tax modem users to fund increasing the bandwidth they could support. Wow maybe I can't count but that seems twisted by greed.:P
Indeed. The university system does do its hardest to screw young people out of money. Why else would they charge so much for classes, price dorms higher than nearby apartments (usually smaller, noisier, etc and freshmen are often forced to live there), force students to use student phone co rather than Internet phone, offer tons of student credit cards and books/food/etc on school credit etc. All very good at sticking young people with a bill they'll be paying off for many years after they graduate. In return of course the students get to learn in often overfilled, run-down classrooms to get a degree that is almost worthless. Take computers as one example. I remember friends that weren't at all interested in, or good at, computers being told to take computer science as their major so they could get a good job. Ohhh that is brilliant, so now when I try to get a good job my education is worth almost nothing and when they get a job in computers and flop their degree is worth even less and it makes everyone else with such a degree look bad. I guess these days you have to get yourself a Ph.D in order to find a decent job. Actually in my experience companies are much more interested in practical experience so being able to show things I coded does much more for me than anything education related. Unfortunately about half the companies ask for at least a Masters degree before they'll even look at your project experience unless you can get your name posted all over Slashdot. If only I didn't have to make a living I'd take the time to write some nifty OSS app so I could get a decent job but unfortunately I don't live in my parents garage so that never seems to work for me. I keep looking for a part time job that pays decently and doesn't require I work 60 hours a week.:)
Has anyone ever bought a 300ft ethernet cable? It almost surely costs more than $24.
Also I must agree that they already had access to the network so they could hardly be stealing access. This reminds me of the stupid companies that will sell you DSL or whatever other type of connection but they consider it theft if you hook your connection to a LAN and hook the rest of your homes computers to the network. Small-minded people shouldn't be allowed to hand out the keys to the Internet. It is my opinion that communication with fellow man is a right we are born with and that includes Internet access. In this case they were even paying for it.
They were sent to jail over $24/semester fee for something the university claims they can't access because they can't afford to run the cables? So, the students ran the cables themselves and on top of that offered the services free of charge to other students who wanted to check their email and such. How much would it have cost the university to pay technicians to run the cable? Sounds like $100 was a pretty good bargain to me. If the university was smart they'd make the students wire the all the dorm rooms in that building without being paid for their labor and then drop it. Everyone would have what they wanted.
In college the apartment complex we students stayed at had really bad phone switches so that only a small portion of the people living there could use their phones at once so Internet was rather a pain. Often we received a signal that the switches were full for hours. It made calling a friend or ordering a pizza impossible, I can't imagine what would happen if you needed to call 911. Anyway we decided to fix the problem by putting ethernet in all the apartments. We ran the lines all without permission, including drilling holes in walls. We went together to get a T1 and shared and the phone lines were fianlly usable. Sure it was probably illegal but by the same merit it cleared up the problems with the phone lines and added a valuable addition to the apartment complex.
Working as a computer tech for a university later on I would have loved to see students take such responsibility for wiring their own rooms. Often the university just can't afford the man hours to wire all the rooms as fast as they'd like to and having student help would be a wonderful way to speed the process up and save money.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a huge Metallica fan, I guess I still am, but now I no longer buy Metallica cd's, tshirts, concert tickets, or anything else that might fund them. Why? Because now I see them as my enemy and I won't fund my enemy. I always liked Metallica and my exposure to MP3's caused me to go out and buy a bunch of new Metallica CD's and such which I have now gotten rid of. I always thought Metallica understood about the little guys being whipped around by jerks with cash. I guess they've joined the other side now. Sad but true. Any music talented people out there who can come up with good Metallica songs Weird-Al'd to poke fun at their MP3 stance? :P
If you have the server I can create you a SlashDot-like politics site. I've been thinking of something along that lines for a while yet I lack the funds to set up such a site or take off work long enough to properly code it. You could probably get PHPSlash up and running in a short time or if you like Perl (I like PHP much better myself. ) the original Slashdot's source is there for the taking.
I think it's to late to try to influence policy although it might work if we got enough Slashdot'ers in office. People who really could understand the technical and social issues involved. I know my vote doesn't count but when the presidential election comes around I'm going to vote for one of the American free software figures. Haven't decided who yet but I want my one vote to count so I'm going to pick carefully even if that person does get just my one vote. I hope everyone stops to think about what they're doing and picks the person they feel would really be good for the job. Don't vote for a canidate unless you think they are the best. They'd have quite a shock if they had a bunch of politically unknown geek-famed people show up with votes. It doesn't matter if the person you voted for wins or not as long as you vote your heart.
You can copyright the design that is still in software I'd imagine. Besides does it really matter? Thus far the GPL hasn't really been legally challenged. The main reasons many of us support it are moral issues. If you create a free work and someone steals it to create a commercial offering it still won't be likely to sell well if there is a free offering of the same thing. It's still have troubles with trying to add it's own extensions to try the kill the original project but if it did so it'd be rather hard to add the original projects own extensions in also.. it's just cheaper and easier for them to package and sell the original. When hardware designers get this into their thick heads most likely they'll follow up with open specifications for hardware similar to our current open source software. There is no viral GPL problem. Components of hardware are at least as easy to logically sepperate than software. A GNU BIOS for example is it's own chip so if you copied part of it to make a new un-free BIOS you'd be stealing. If you took it and added it to a machine with un-free parts you haven't stolen anything. It's the same way I can have Linux as my OS and still use commercial apps (if I had any reason too) and it doesn't make the commercial app GPL'd.
If you don't like the way the world is, and I certainly don't, then fight back. The first thing to do is to think about what you really
want the system to be like and then find others who can agree with at least parts of what you want it to be like and work with them to
iron out a real plan for an alternate system. Then look for ways to make it reality. At this point I think it's to late to clean the system
up with small nudges to the government. We've let it go to far and now the world is controlled by a nameless devil. The only way to strike
back is to resist the enemy in mass groups. We must first realize that we are the enemy every time we watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, use
MS Office, buy from Wal-mart, etc. Every day when you go to work and you help build up a corporation you are contributing to the problem.
Every time you vote for someone that you don't think will really do what you want them to you give them more power over your life. We've
become lazy and now we as a people are suffering because of it.
Now here's some of my suggestions on what to replace the system with.. I don't think we could cleanly destroy the idea of money so I'd
rather add to the idea.. by reordering a tax system that goes from dirt poor to filthy rich so that anybody undex the median gets extra
money from the government and anyone over the media pays money to the government to fund this. This is somewhat like socialism except that
it could be dropped on top of our capitalist system.. it's a highbreed of socialism and capitalism in fact.. that strives to make everyone
'mostly' equal finiancially. With this system I'd grant an offset by which people could contribute less or collect more depending on their
trust relationship with society. Essentially I'd allow every citizen to vote for every other citizen so they can define how much they
trust that person to look after the collective good of the society as a whole. Those with more trust would have more resources they could
expend. The trust factor could go up and down both so if someone misused their resources they could lose access to them. That means if the
DOJ found Bill Gates guilty of running a monopoly people could decide on their own to vote down their trust on Bill Gates and suddenly his
$100 billion would be gone, assimilated into the society as a whole. For practical purposes I'd create a short-circuit system on such a
trust system so that it could only go up or down by a given amount within a given time period so that the system would be harder to con or
crash. So realisticlly Mr. Gates would likely find himself the controller of a mere $50 billion rather than lossing it all in one day. This
would help keep the system stable. Rather than having elected officials I'd have the entire system democratic. Every citizen would be
required to be a voter. In each election the system would select voters from the appropiate areas randomly to vote in the election rather
than having everyone vote. This would keep daily life from getting spammed down by voting as well as making it harder for campaigners to
focus their money and media on the voters to convince them to vote their way. Anyone who did not vote would lose trust points as they are
not looking out for the best interest of the society.
This system would not be perfect but it'd be better as it'd keep any one group from easily running away with it. It'd of course require
technology to exist, but then so does our current corporate republic. The primary forces in our current society that allow it to be ran off
with is the abilty to control so much wealth in one place rather than dispensing it to all the people. Also the extreme bloat of our
government has made it an easy target. Government really should not feel the need to take care of everything. Given enough resources to
live most people can take care of themselves. We started out as farmers and thinkers who forged a world where we could be free. Lets not
give it away to a minority that doesn't care for us as a whole just because they have stolen the most magic crystals. We can still work and
think and that is why all the money in the world will not let them make us slaves unless we allow them to.
If Sony wanted to make a smart move they'd release the full specs to the PSX and the source to all their development tools for the unit. Since the PS2 is going to be soon replacing the PSX for most of their new games this wouldn't cost them any sales. It'd allow many programmers to begin learning to program for their systems. Some college's could even offer Comp Sci classes in PSx development. This could only lead to more games being available for future versions of the PS as programmers like to stay with technology they learned on. More programmers means more, and better, games. Give a little, take a little.
There have been several free BIOS projects as well as projects for freely available motherboard and CPU designs. It's only a matter of time before the whole computer is an open system. If engineers use a license for their software eventually they'll use it for their hardware. A lot of people are both hardware and software engineers. The hard part is getting a company to make and sell this hardware but there must be some company who'd like to drop the cost of R&D.
So how is this work with emulators? If you wrote a PlayStation game but released it only for emulators say as a download from the net or burned to CD-R how does Sony have any right to block you if you aren't using any of their hardware or software to develop and you aren't including their trademark on the game? I don't see how they can legally do much to somebody who has never signed any agreement with them and who is using none of their intellectual property in their product. It'd be a pretty lame lawsuit to sue someone for using low level hardware specs in the programming of a game that they never claimed to work on your platform. What about a version of Linux that runs on PlayStation. Then if I code a Linux game and somebody figures out that they can burn a copy of PSX Linux and my game to cd-r and play it on their PSX is it my fault? I really hope that somebody is working on a PSX version of Linux that is API compat w/ the video/sound stuff Loki and others are working on for Linux. :)
First off you need to understand that the Internet opens written language up to the dynamic enviroment that spoken language has always had. Also it brings together people from a wide range of locations and experiences. There will be two primary forms that change the language as a whole: those who get their first, and those who get their in the largest groups. English, I think, will remain the basis for a large subset of the universal-language as will languages that already have wide-spread use on the Internet such as German and Spanish. I think for the most part languages that don't share the common alphabet will mostly be dropped or mutated to fit the common alphabet. Of course some new letters may be added also. As each new language adds to the Internet there will be a lot of pressure on the users of that language to learn the UL and as they do they'll fill holes where the UL doesn't have words for what they are meaning. Often words may be highbreeds of several words of one or more languages. Each group will make slightly less impact on the UL excepting large groups that can change the UL by the very size of their group. There will of course still be various sub-dialects, jargon, and slang that exists and new words that are invented over time. The basic idea is that most people won't or can't sit down and learn four or five new languages and people will never agree on a language that isn't already wide-spread. These people will still want to communicate and tools such as translation software will always fall short (I know, I write that kind of software.) so the languages will merge over a period of time. Expect these changes to the UL to reflect not only online but in real life (five years ago did you hear talk of URL's etc in public?). As our language changes so will the way our mind works, it'll be interesting to see happen. I hope to see the mental boundries between cultures and countries to continue to break down among other things.
I love this cover. If they had a page to buy the finished product as show in the photo I'd probably grab one. Anyone know where they got the image or if they can do customized images? Anime rocks. :)
I hate Windows mainly because it crashes. I love Linux partly because it is stable. For the most part X is stable w/ either KDE or Gnome (I use both E and Sawmill and both are great WM's) but now and then it just goes to hell. My number one bitch is because of Navigator. Mozilla runs far better though so I expect that to be a savior for me. But if the GUI could impose barriers on it's apps to keep them in line it'd be nice.
I've been waiting to see some WM that'll make it so programs can be written w/ discrete components plugged together where each of the components can be grabbed and dragged off to the menu bars or desktops or plugged together (if compatible) to form new components somewhat like the Lego Mindstorms programming interface. So if you wanted to grab the 'New' command from your spreadsheet app and drag it to the desktop it might form an icon called 'New Spreadsheet'. Of course fancier components could exist that'd do anything any app could do but that's the basic idea. These components should be able to be used by even fairly novice users to enhance and simplify their desktops. Of course advanced users could have a component editor where they could create more complex components either visually or with some scripting language. If Linux's desktop could work this way, copying Unix's tradition of pipes, then it'd blow everything else out of the water. IT'd certainly be a leapfrog over Windows and VB. :)
Seriously, IMO at least part of the human race will break off into a post-human species that will be much more of a super-organism as our brain power and communication abilities will be much more powerful. We're bound to have a much stronger super-ego as we communicate more and have fewer reasons to be defensive as individuals. Just imagine the borg but created by open source 'freedom nuts' so that everyone still has free will. Also remember that for the most part we won't be tied to individual bodies and may often avoid taking mass. I'm not saying that all of humanity will go this way. Many will avoid it for religious or social reasons. Others may avoid it because of fear of such a radical change. It may sound great being practical immortal with unimaginable powers but just imagine the new stresses it'd put on the (post-)human mind that it's never before had to deal with. Ever watch the Star Trek where that Q'ish guy wants to commit suicide? Not everyone will want to be immortal.
I think in this case he missed the most likely path, that of system evolution. I think that if we look we can see plenty of evidence of the fact that when systems form a symbiotic circle they will tend to merge together into a working super-organism rather than destroy each other. I'm not a biologist so this is probably all wrong but at least in my experience with writing AI-type software it works out perfectly. The human for instance is not a single organism but many organisms working together to form the whole. Humans have a lot to gain from a merge with their tools. A lone human without tools is not very strong. Our individual lives are short and for the most part pointless. Nanotech will create a small elite class of those who choose to evolve and the rest will remain human and will be protected by the post-humans more than likely. How this will effect the two societies it is hard to tell. If we try to back down from nanotech we will burn up our resources and fall back into a dark age so we have little choice. There is at least a 50% chance of not destroying ourselves I think. It's to late to put an argument together in any nice format.. maybe eventually I'll bother. IMO it doesn't really matter as the ball is rolling and nobody can stop it. It is vital that those who wish to give freedom reach the technology first. I fear what would happen to the world if the power hungry reach this point first.
Well I'm assuming that the system has a fairly fixed routine for talking to each kind of device on it's bus and that usually device drivers for the newest gizmo on the market layers itself on top of that low-level layer as a communications protocol with whatever that device happens to be and extends some sort of interface to which the OS or applications can bind to make use of that device without needing to know it's hardware specific communications. If this is the case then you should be able to have a abstract communications protocol representation that you could blow into flash memory and even upgrade by software. The you could have a run-time compiler that compiles that abstract representation (a logic tree or something) into a native binary driver the first time the device is put into the computer or has it's driver updated. This would be similar to the way Windows detects PnP devices and tries to load their drivers from it's list except in this case the device would store it's own driver and the driver would not be OS-specific. I don't think incompatabilities would really be a problem as this would mostly be a layer that translates between the low-level communications and the device specific API and then you'd probably layer a generic API over top of that such as a scanning interface that lets an application work with a number of different supported scanners.
Non-recorded information is the #1 resource on the Net. Slashdot lives on this resource. I'm assuming that this student will also do some research online and in the library but the amount of information held in our collective mind that we have never written down is far more vast than all the recorded works made throughout all of our history. By asking this student is able to tap this collective to get new ideas, facts, and directions for his research. More than likely if he is seriously interested in this topic he'll meet some people with like interests which he can keep in contact with over the years. The next time a student wonders about this topic they'll be able to come here and look and see all this new previously unrecorded information and also gain from that. Sure the majority is probably spam like these people whining that students shouldn't ask for help but Slashdot's moderation system helps somewhat to pick out the best grains of information in such a discussion. Information wants to be free, don't take it from others but rather give away that which you have.
Of course any time you deal with such a powerful technology it will change everything and because of that any predictions we make will not be anywhere close to covering all the possibilites and of course no matter how correct or not we might be everyone will tend to see it as sci fi. As us geeks know, anything that we can imagine can eventually be. Some people ask why, we ask why not. Okay.. on to my opinion.. I think The Diamond Age is a great book that covers the second and third stages of nanotech. We are of course in the first stage now, a stage you might call the rock axe stage where we do everything the hard way and haven't really figured it all out yet. The next major stage I would agree will be the feed stage where nanotech will be tightly controlled by those in power and we'll see a painful transition period as we adjust as a species to having the power of god in our hands. The seed stage will be a large leap forward as it will decentralize nanotech and again this will very likely cause large social changes although I don't believe it'll be nearly as painful as the change to the feed stage. Unlike Stephenson I think the seed stage will follow shortly after the feed stage and that for a large part the two will overlap. You'll have the average person that will probably use the feed.. the M$ and AOL type people.. then you'll have the garage hackers like many of us that will be using seed technology to change the world. I expect to see the open source movement take a huge leap in this area as physical matter is reduced to software. How this will effect property laws might make our current fighting over IP laws seem like a tiny warning shot. Then as time passes we'll slowly evolve into a post-human era. It is only a matter of time before it is done. As people get sick or hurt they will want nanotech medicines and nanotech replacement organs. Combine that with our desire to always be wired and the extra computing power and exact research tools we have at our disposal and eventually we'll even have replacement brains and brain add-on's (Slashdot direct to your brain!) and that will essentially make us immortal and no longer forced to be human. This will probably go several ways as people try to come to grips with the fact they are no longer human and experiment with it. I expect eventually you'll have two sides, those who want to reject the post-human experience and those who want to make use of it. Those who reject it will most likely remain human and possibly revert to a somewhat less advanced culture. Those who accept it I think will eventually form bodies that are not very connected with what we consider the real world and that are almost impervious to damage. Possibly you could imagine us reducing out bodies to a utility cloud of smart processors that could form our brain and when called upon to do so could take on most given physical forms. That makes us shapeshifters, or better as we don't need to take on any form at all. Also take the human trend to want to communicate more. I suspect we'll form a sort of dynamic virtual world that we can paint as we want either alone or in groups. For an example try renting What Dreams May Come w/ Robin Williams. We'll probably evolve this reality to be at least as important to us as our own physical reality. Most likely by this point many of us hacker types will have been intergrating more and more with our tools and we'll have new brain centers added that'll give us an intuitive grasp over nano-engineering and we'll have some sort of matter compiler built into our bodies so that we can create physical objects by will alone. Myself I'd expect to see something along the lines of being oble to absorb raw materials into our body and converting them into small utility cloud type pieces that we'll be able to order to take whatever form we want and if we so desire to keep that form after we are done with them. So if you wanted to create a table you might absorb some already existing object and then think about the table you wanted and it'd simply take form. Of course this stage will utterly destroy any concept we can have of property ownership as property will be reduced down to being nothing more than dreams. For the most part I imagine the post-humans will be a non-violent race as we'll have such tight control over our own minds that we'll be able to easily tune out negative emotions as desired. Also since property will have so little meaning to us we'll have little greed and as we have almost no way of being seriously hurt or killed we'll have no major fears which as everyone who watches Star Wars knows is the root of all evil. Animal instincts and all that will no longer play a large part in our society. To the mortals post-humans will probably seem like spirits, gods, or plants. Well there is my slightly odd but hopefulyl interesting guess at the future w/ nanotech. :)
I've often wondered why there can't be an abstract language for creating device drivers and possibly simple Internet protocols. I admit to never having written a device driver but I've read some books on it and worked with the electronics side of things and I never understood how device drivers are different from a low level communications protocol? I've written abstract bot lang's before that worked sort of on the theory of input's and output's that can either trigger an auto response or create a hook for more complex software layers. I'd think you'd could at least have it provide an API for low level communications that'd be portable across platforms. Anyone know?
I never played with a movie but when younger some friends and I added images we made to the walls in Doom. We then hypnotized some of our group and showed them copies of each image and encouraged them to feel certain emotions such as anger and pain when we saw those symbols. Then after those of us that were hypnotized were waken we would feel that our games of Doom were much more vivid for a few days afterwards. It might be possible to semi-hypnotize people using a movie or game and feed them extra emotions or desires. As some people mentioned some good movies use short cuts here and there as well as symbolic items and whatever in the movies. It isn't quite the same thing but it is similar. I think totally hidden messages will be doubtful to effect people but mostly hidden messages work better.
First off, if schools aren't making a profit with the cost that most of them run the students then they must be majorly mismanaged. Possibly this is as much because of the way things have been changing in the past twenty years or so towards vastly more compressed schedules and trying to handle the fact that everyone and their dog is now told to go to college despite the profession they hope to go into. Science/technology classes especially must be a challenge to handle as they change so quickly. Hopefully more colleges will learn to handle this gracefully but right now I think most of them kludge it. Trying to grow and scale to handle the increased demand has doubtlessly made classes and dorms tend to be overpacked and costs higher than they should be. Hopefully the change towards more Internet-centric teaching will help this situation. I think it is important for professors to balance research (and keeping up to date) with their students. Many of my professors have been so badly out of date that their classes were useless to me. If I am teaching my professor it is hardly worth my money to take the class. On the other hand a professor that is so into their own research can ignore students. I've had a couple professors that were really great at balancing the two but not many. Possibly universities could make an effort to help the professors balance things better. I don't mind if dorms are expensive, but I do mind if they are expensive and the university forces students to live there. Also I mind secondary services such as the university phone co and university stamped credit cards being given to all new students. A lot of students are on their own for their first time. If they are going to give them long distance and credit cards they should take the time to offer free classes to teach the students how to use them responsibly. Sure a lot of it is common sense but a lot of the time people just don't realize the amount of debt they can rack up. Also limits should be low on such services to keep students from getting in trouble. If they ask to raise the limit then that is cool but make them ask so they have to stop and consider their actions a little. IMO college is more useful as a way to learn to handle being an adult than for a degree. Lets not take advantage of young people in the process. They are smart but often unfamiliar with the way these things work. :)
I am always making various backgrounds and tiles just to kill extra time. Some are horrid but others are nifty. Maybe we could make a site that allowed you to upload various backgrounds and let them be voted on and the best hundred that haven't yet been in a package for every six months or so get made into a package? Maybe could have various themes too. Some of the ones I made were grabbed up and spread across the university I usda work for so I guess they were okay. I don't see a point to a lot of spam in a web site attached to such a project but to actually just collect backgrounds would be fun. Anyone already doing this? If not we could get together and make us a site for it. :) Let me know. :)
For instance I got a free DVD of the Matrix and didn't yet have a DVD player so I wanted to convert it to VHS until I got my DVD player..
:)
Also VHS is widespread and sometimes you might want to watch the movie you paid for and not want to carry your DVD player with you.. sort of how sometimes I listen to my CD's copied to tape or MP3 rather than as a CD just because it is handier for what I'm doing.. If I had kids I'd probably copy my movies to VHS and give them an old VCR to watch the movies on so that my originals wouldn't get scratches and grubby finger marks all over them..
DSL and other forms of high-speed connections are diferent than dial-up IMO.. they are connected all the time and have a single connection point so the whole thing about using up all the modems is moot. It could be said that allowing a LAN or multiple users raises the amount of bandwidth used but this is nonsense. I'm sure I use more bandwidth than any 10 normal users, even those who play lots of online games. Besides it is a high-speed high-bandwidth connection and use of that bandwidth should be expected. The way you use your connection is none of the ISP's business as long as you stay within the limits of the connection they sell you. If I pay for 1Mb/sec transfer rate then it should be expected that I'll use this to it's most 24 hours a day unless my contract says otherwise. If I want to connect a LAN, host my web site, play net games, whatever it is none of the ISP's business regardless of what they put in their TOS contract. Since more often than not this service is provided as something you can't buy from any competitor they are a monopoly (or cartel in the better cases) and anything you are forced to sign to get the service you need is not valid. Oh sure if you don't like our agreement you can use smoke signals to connect to the Internet doesn't cut it. It is no better than forcing someone to sign a contract against their will for your own profit margins. What next, I have to pay a per-viewer license for people to watch my tv because I hook to your cable company? When I pay for an unlimited Internet account I leave it connected 24/7 and let it do background downloading/uploading while it's idle. ISP's are mostly dead anyway. GTE, AOL, etc bought them all out. Until we evolve the net to be completely peer to peer we'll be stuck with such big boys. One of my favorites was a few years ago when they arrested some teenager for knocking the phone service out for a few hours supposedly costing them millions of dollars in lost income from services.. and then soon after were trying to get the government to tax modem users to fund increasing the bandwidth they could support. Wow maybe I can't count but that seems twisted by greed. :P
Indeed. The university system does do its hardest to screw young people out of money. Why else would they charge so much for classes, price dorms higher than nearby apartments (usually smaller, noisier, etc and freshmen are often forced to live there), force students to use student phone co rather than Internet phone, offer tons of student credit cards and books/food/etc on school credit etc. All very good at sticking young people with a bill they'll be paying off for many years after they graduate. In return of course the students get to learn in often overfilled, run-down classrooms to get a degree that is almost worthless. Take computers as one example. I remember friends that weren't at all interested in, or good at, computers being told to take computer science as their major so they could get a good job. Ohhh that is brilliant, so now when I try to get a good job my education is worth almost nothing and when they get a job in computers and flop their degree is worth even less and it makes everyone else with such a degree look bad. I guess these days you have to get yourself a Ph.D in order to find a decent job. Actually in my experience companies are much more interested in practical experience so being able to show things I coded does much more for me than anything education related. Unfortunately about half the companies ask for at least a Masters degree before they'll even look at your project experience unless you can get your name posted all over Slashdot. If only I didn't have to make a living I'd take the time to write some nifty OSS app so I could get a decent job but unfortunately I don't live in my parents garage so that never seems to work for me. I keep looking for a part time job that pays decently and doesn't require I work 60 hours a week. :)
Has anyone ever bought a 300ft ethernet cable? It almost surely costs more than $24.
Also I must agree that they already had access to the network so they could hardly be stealing access. This reminds me of the stupid companies that will sell you DSL or whatever other type of connection but they consider it theft if you hook your connection to a LAN and hook the rest of your homes computers to the network. Small-minded people shouldn't be allowed to hand out the keys to the Internet. It is my opinion that communication with fellow man is a right we are born with and that includes Internet access. In this case they were even paying for it.
They were sent to jail over $24/semester fee for something the university claims they can't access because they can't afford to run the cables? So, the students ran the cables themselves and on top of that offered the services free of charge to other students who wanted to check their email and such. How much would it have cost the university to pay technicians to run the cable? Sounds like $100 was a pretty good bargain to me. If the university was smart they'd make the students wire the all the dorm rooms in that building without being paid for their labor and then drop it. Everyone would have what they wanted.
In college the apartment complex we students stayed at had really bad phone switches so that only a small portion of the people living there could use their phones at once so Internet was rather a pain. Often we received a signal that the switches were full for hours. It made calling a friend or ordering a pizza impossible, I can't imagine what would happen if you needed to call 911. Anyway we decided to fix the problem by putting ethernet in all the apartments. We ran the lines all without permission, including drilling holes in walls. We went together to get a T1 and shared and the phone lines were fianlly usable. Sure it was probably illegal but by the same merit it cleared up the problems with the phone lines and added a valuable addition to the apartment complex.
Working as a computer tech for a university later on I would have loved to see students take such responsibility for wiring their own rooms. Often the university just can't afford the man hours to wire all the rooms as fast as they'd like to and having student help would be a wonderful way to speed the process up and save money.