Or perhaps the people (that is, government) should simply cease on their end of the bargain in return, and in light of technological DRM, revoke copyright laws
We, The People, already revoked copyright laws. As Robert Heinlein once wisely wrote:
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am responsible for everything I do." ("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Nothing like easily broken laws and internet anonymity to set a man free...
Paradoxes sometimes have explanations that aren't immediately obvious. Take, for instance, the twins paradox, which can be explained by the fact that one of the twins suffered accelerations and changed his velocity, therefore using two different frames of reference. Likewise, the site you linked has two different frames of reference, moving relative to each other. There are two different "ansible" communications, sharing one common event "B". Perhaps one event cannot have two ansible communications.
Let's say somehow an ansible is invented, based on entangled photons. In order to transmit instantaneous communications between two observers a source of entangled photons should be positioned exactly midway between both observers. If both ansibles send a message to event B, the sources of entangled photons should be physically positioned in a line between Me and Alice, the A-B source closer to Alice than the B-C source.
At event B, Alice and Carol are receiving photons from both sources at the same time coming from the same direction. Maybe that causes interference into the ansible communications? Without knowing how that "ansible" works, no one knows, but one can imagine an instantaneous communication system that has limitations that will not let it violate causality.
Also, it's important to note that, at a microscopic level, causality does not exist, only correlation exists. Causality, i.e. the "arrow of time", is a macroscopic phenomenon, microscopic effects are reversible. Maybe someday we will find limitations to causality that will permit some violations to the no-FTL rule. It will be a strange world, but no stranger than quantum mechanics seem to us now.
Any neuron, be it natural or artificial, hardware or software or wetware, performs a very simple task: what mathematicians call an "internal product", or "dot product".
fast artificial neurons use a less complex evaluation function than slow neurons
The difference between what you call "fast" and "slow" artificial neurons is, does it need to be differentiable for the training process? If the training process is some sort of gradient climbing algorithm, then the function needs to be differentiable, normally a sigmoid function is used. Otherwise a simple comparator will do.
Neural networks don't simply allow you to "throw more layers" at the problem, because performance (in terms of correctness) is highly dependent on network topology. Having a huge collection of crap neurons is not always a win.
The beauty of neurons, and the reason why intelligence arose in animals, is the simplicity of the neuron itself. A neuron is a neuron is a neuron, that's all there is to it. ALL the performance of the system comes from the connections in the network. "Throwing more layers" at the problem is *exactly* the way our own brains were made.
To call a neuron "crap" reminds me of those discussions you read in specialized audio magazines. "If you don't use oxygen free copper in your power cord, your audio system will sound like crap", etc.
with 150$ and a month you can steal 460billion dollars worth of mp3s. Or the yearly gdp of Sweden.
That's why one can say that people wouldn't buy the media if it weren't available as an unauthorized copy.
You don't even need to use that ridiculous $150k per mp3 the RIAA insists upon, just add the retail price of every work in a typical teen's computer and you'll see there's no way he or she could have bought it.
At $0.99 for a 3MB file that's typical of mp3 songs, every 100GB of media has a $30000 worth, if the retail price is used. How much do teens get as allowance? $100/week or so? Is it realistic to assume a kid would spend six years of his allowance on music, if he couldn't download it as P2P?
"Fair use" or not, the fact is that P2P harms no one. It doesn't take anything away from the legitimate owner, and there's no lost profit either.
That's like saying, "This is great for 3% of all users out there so EVERYONE should use it because of that." It totally ignores the needs of 97% of all users.
You are ignoring the fact that 100% of the users benefit from improvements made by the few that have the time and resources to get involved with the code.
at some point we may have to throw out the theories that require the existence of dark matter.
It's measured results, not theories, that require the existence of dark matter.
We have measured the speeds and masses of bodies in orbit around each other, here in our local planetary system. We have measured the speeds and masses of stars in orbit around each other in remote galaxies.
Those speeds imply that there should exist more mass than the stars we can see. Therefore we conclude that there exists some mass that is not just the visible stars out there.
... and written on the philosophy and sociology of science
Isaac Asimov was a scientist, he held a PhD in biochemistry, and, in the essay I mentioned, he wrote a bit on the philosophy and sociology of science.
He starts the article mentioning what someone wrote him "he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but he felt he needed to teach me science".
I think you need to read that article, you really do, if you think something called "racial hygiene" is a science or ever had any claim to being a science. Let me tell you this: neither Phrenology nor Creationism are sciences, no matter what their proponents claim.
To be called "science" at least two criteria must be met, it must be verified by experiment, and it must produce results measured quantitatively. A qualitative result is just an extremely poor way of measuring a result. In this respect, string theory doesn't qualify as a science, it has never produced measurable quantitative experiments.
Once a field of knowledge is mature enough to produce results that can be measured quantitatively by experiment then it has reached the status of a true science, and it will never diverge substantially from what has been learned before. It will converge to the truth. This is what science is about. Quantitative results. Experimental checks.
How can you say that science converges asymptotically to the truth?
Read the essay I mentioned. You can say that because corrections to the current theory are smaller than the former corrections.
Asimov gives a concrete example, he mentions the difference in height when you measure the terrain a certain distance away. In a flat earth that difference should be zero. In a spherical earth that difference should be 8 inches per mile everywhere. In the best known figures when Asimov wrote that article the difference varied from 7.973 to 8.027 inches per mile, depending on which region of earth you are on.
The difference between zero and eight inches is more than the difference between 7.973 and 8.027.
Since that article was written we have learnt that we don't know what 96% of the Universe is made of.
And don't you think it's just amazing that scientists can look at stars that are hundreds of millions light years away and, from their measurements alone, they can calculate and conclude that twenty times more matter is needed to account for the way those stars are moving?
This "dark matter" problem that you mention does not show a weakness, but a *strong* point of science. The existence of dark matter does not invalidate one single fact of what was known before. Newtonian phisics is still valid, relativity is intact, quantum mechanics rules. But now we know of an additional fact that's extremely subtle, very very difficult to measure, and still adds some important facts to our scientific knowledge.
Asimov was right, we are getting closer to the truth.
I'm getting tired these kinds of posts every time something unexpected is observed
Me too. Those posts show nothing but the envy of people who wished they understood science, but do not have the needed energy and intelligence to study the necessary mathematics.
Their escape mechanism is to pretend no one really understand science. They think they don't look so stupid if they can pretend everybody is as stupid as they are.
I think the perfect answer to that kind of thinking was given by Isaac Asimov in an essay named "The Relativity of Wrong". In that article, Asimov shows that the difference between a flat earth and a spherical earth is much bigger than the difference between a spherical earth and the true shape of the earth. Although people who thought the earth was spherical were wrong, they were much *less* wrong than people who thought the earth was flat.
Science converges asymptotically to the truth. Even if scientists can never be absolutely certain of the truth, they are always getting nearer to absolute truth.
Misconceived ideas can be turned into accepted fact by flawed, or worse, deliberately contrived experimentation methodologies
It's much more likely that a misconceived idea will be turned into accepted fact by flawed reasoning than by flawed experiment. That's because experiments are repeated independently, while it's very difficult to verify reasoning in a truly independent manner.
This is nothing more than throwing more hardware at an existing problem. This has been emulated in software before, with nothing much to show for it.
How many neurons did they emulate? A cockroach brain has been done years ago, with pretty good results. But you don't see too many intelligent cockroaches in nature. That's because *more hardware*, i.e. more neurons, are needed for intelligence. As a matter of fact, so many neurons are needed that even animals with relatively large brains fall short of human intelligence.
If there are no small brains with human-like intelligence in nature, then why should artificial small brains exhibit high levels of intelligence?
There's no animal that has both the same or larger number of neurons and same or larger brain-to-body mass ratio than humans. Considering the large survival advantage that intelligence has given to humans, it seems logical that if it were possible to have human-like intelligence with less neurons some species would have done it.
The effect of censorship on people is a thousand times worse than the effect of romantic comedies, which is ten times worse than the effect of pr0n, which is one half as good as the effect of video games
You mentioned *fiction* works. What about a Book that a significant percentage of people not only claim is NOT fiction, but a work full of moral and ethical teachings? What if that Book has scenes of drunkenness, incest, genocide, murder, prostitution, debauchery? How much worse would be the effect of that?
"Cause" can be defined in several different scopes. When one reads a death certificate, for instance, the cause of death could be listed as a hemorrhage in the brain, or one could say the cause was a bullet, or a drunken brawl which ended in a gun being shot, etc.
Instead of saying a wrongly set relay was *the* cause, perhaps it would be best to say it was a precipitating factor. If that relay had not been set wrong, there was a large number of factors that could have triggered a similar blackout.
I guess what the AC called "foolish regulation" was the fact that electricity prices were set by law at such a low level that discouraged investment in the power system. Low investment means, among other things, that technicians will not receive good wages, they will not be motivated enough to pay close attention on what they are doing and will commit mistakes.
Low investments also mean that companies will not build new power plants and lines. They will try to stretch existing systems to the limit, reaching a point where relatively small failures might cascade to system-wide blackouts.
Generally, when people bemoan regulation or deregulation they are looking at just one side of the issue. If you regulate, then you must make sure that the regulations will not kill the companies. If you deregulate, make sure to deregulate *everything*, including prices. The problem with what has been called "deregulation" is that removing the regulations that impose quality levels while keeping regulated prices is more or less guaranteed to cause failures in the system.
In 1971 Steve 'Woz' Wozniak designed a device called the 'Blue Box'. It allowed -- of course illegal -- phone calls free of charge by faking the signals used by the phone companies. His friend Steve Jobs instantly realized that there must be a huge market for something that useful. He bought the parts for $40, Woz built the boxes and Jobs sold them to his fellow students at the University of California in Berkeley for $150.
This well known anecdote is what made me think of the market for an electricity meter hacking device. $150 in 1971 dollars would be about $800 today.
its' the power grid from the future? More like 1990.
Actually, power systems is a mature technology. The "bible" that every power engineer has is this book, first published in 1955. Notice that the book on sale is the fourth edition, printed in 1982. Nothing is changing very fast in this field.
The problem that could arise from a large number of Smart Grid computers being pwned is if a worm triggered them off at exactly the same time, this is called a "load rejection" event. It would cause oscillations in the power flow which could end in a blackout but, generally, load rejection is not as bad as generation rejection, which happens when a power plant is cut off.
Another problem that would cause much more harm to the companies than to users is if the worm instructed power meters to register less power consumption. I see a large black-market arising, if someone figures out how to write this exploit.
the original post i responded to was written in english, so i went with it. had it been written in portuguese, i probably would've passed.
After looking through all the menu items, I found the sequence of commands you mentioned, under the "EDIT" menu, so your post actually helped me after all, thanks again.
But still, this is a problem with Gimp. There's no denying it, the user interface *IS* confusing. *AND* the (very little) existing documentation is not translated to other languages than English. *PLUS* they move commands from one menu to another, apparently at random, from one version to the next.
The Gimp would be an awesome graphics editor, if only it would be just a little bit easier to use.
using the ellipse select tool, draw your circle. open the paths dialog click 'selection to path' click 'paint along the path'
Your post is quite informative, but it doesn't help me, for reasons that are very typical of Gimp.
My Gimp installation is in Brazilian Portuguese language. There are 25 entries in the Dialogs menu, but none that even remotely resembles anything like "path" translated to Portuguese. There is no option in the Preferences menu to change the language to English.
So, thank you for your helpful attitude, but unfortunately it didn't solve my problem. And I've found that this is very typical of the convoluted Gimp user interface. Year ago I read "Grokking the Gimp", and did some work based on what I read there. But there were always those problems. First, the instructions are in English, the Gimp is localized, there's no clear way to find the corresponding menus in the international version. Second, items are frequently moved from one menu to the other in different versions. Unless you have the exact Gimp version the author used, there's no guarantee that you will find the tool you need in the same places.
It's sad but true, the Gimp needs an intensive reworking in the user interface to become useful, and this situation does not seem to be improving in newer versions.
So, surely this is a case of mutually assured destruction for both isn't?
Only if it comes to a final shootout, which will never happen.
But considering what usually happens when a show of force happens, the bigger guy wins. In this case, Intel. It's Intel who forced a confrontation, and they probably will gain better conditions in small print in a contract somewhere.
Otherwise, nothing to see here, please move along.
You misspelled "rampant institutionalized corruption at all levels of government".
Which is a consequence of an economic system where the profit motive has been officially eliminated. Steal $1000 and you got that much for yourself, the whole country lost $1000 and your own share of that loss is $1000 divided by the country population.
The same works for capitalist systems too, of course. In a big corporation where no one has a majority share, decisions are often made by directors who have a bigger interest in getting a fat bonus than in improving the company's situation.
The solution, IMHO, would be a system where the controllers are directly affected by the results, a system where the directors are the owners. In current capitalist countries, companies are often owned by other companies or pension funds. The ultimate decisions are made too far removed from the people who actually own the capital involved.
Slashdot Mirror
We, The People, already revoked copyright laws. As Robert Heinlein once wisely wrote:
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am responsible for everything I do."
("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Nothing like easily broken laws and internet anonymity to set a man free...
Paradoxes sometimes have explanations that aren't immediately obvious. Take, for instance, the twins paradox, which can be explained by the fact that one of the twins suffered accelerations and changed his velocity, therefore using two different frames of reference. Likewise, the site you linked has two different frames of reference, moving relative to each other. There are two different "ansible" communications, sharing one common event "B". Perhaps one event cannot have two ansible communications.
Let's say somehow an ansible is invented, based on entangled photons. In order to transmit instantaneous communications between two observers a source of entangled photons should be positioned exactly midway between both observers. If both ansibles send a message to event B, the sources of entangled photons should be physically positioned in a line between Me and Alice, the A-B source closer to Alice than the B-C source.
At event B, Alice and Carol are receiving photons from both sources at the same time coming from the same direction. Maybe that causes interference into the ansible communications? Without knowing how that "ansible" works, no one knows, but one can imagine an instantaneous communication system that has limitations that will not let it violate causality.
Also, it's important to note that, at a microscopic level, causality does not exist, only correlation exists. Causality, i.e. the "arrow of time", is a macroscopic phenomenon, microscopic effects are reversible. Maybe someday we will find limitations to causality that will permit some violations to the no-FTL rule. It will be a strange world, but no stranger than quantum mechanics seem to us now.
Any neuron, be it natural or artificial, hardware or software or wetware, performs a very simple task: what mathematicians call an "internal product", or "dot product".
The difference between what you call "fast" and "slow" artificial neurons is, does it need to be differentiable for the training process? If the training process is some sort of gradient climbing algorithm, then the function needs to be differentiable, normally a sigmoid function is used. Otherwise a simple comparator will do.
The beauty of neurons, and the reason why intelligence arose in animals, is the simplicity of the neuron itself. A neuron is a neuron is a neuron, that's all there is to it. ALL the performance of the system comes from the connections in the network. "Throwing more layers" at the problem is *exactly* the way our own brains were made.
To call a neuron "crap" reminds me of those discussions you read in specialized audio magazines. "If you don't use oxygen free copper in your power cord, your audio system will sound like crap", etc.
That's why one can say that people wouldn't buy the media if it weren't available as an unauthorized copy.
You don't even need to use that ridiculous $150k per mp3 the RIAA insists upon, just add the retail price of every work in a typical teen's computer and you'll see there's no way he or she could have bought it.
At $0.99 for a 3MB file that's typical of mp3 songs, every 100GB of media has a $30000 worth, if the retail price is used. How much do teens get as allowance? $100/week or so? Is it realistic to assume a kid would spend six years of his allowance on music, if he couldn't download it as P2P?
"Fair use" or not, the fact is that P2P harms no one. It doesn't take anything away from the legitimate owner, and there's no lost profit either.
That depends on which period of history you are considering.
You are ignoring the fact that 100% of the users benefit from improvements made by the few that have the time and resources to get involved with the code.
It's measured results, not theories, that require the existence of dark matter.
We have measured the speeds and masses of bodies in orbit around each other, here in our local planetary system. We have measured the speeds and masses of stars in orbit around each other in remote galaxies.
Those speeds imply that there should exist more mass than the stars we can see. Therefore we conclude that there exists some mass that is not just the visible stars out there.
Isaac Asimov was a scientist, he held a PhD in biochemistry, and, in the essay I mentioned, he wrote a bit on the philosophy and sociology of science.
He starts the article mentioning what someone wrote him "he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but he felt he needed to teach me science".
I think you need to read that article, you really do, if you think something called "racial hygiene" is a science or ever had any claim to being a science. Let me tell you this: neither Phrenology nor Creationism are sciences, no matter what their proponents claim.
To be called "science" at least two criteria must be met, it must be verified by experiment, and it must produce results measured quantitatively. A qualitative result is just an extremely poor way of measuring a result. In this respect, string theory doesn't qualify as a science, it has never produced measurable quantitative experiments.
Once a field of knowledge is mature enough to produce results that can be measured quantitatively by experiment then it has reached the status of a true science, and it will never diverge substantially from what has been learned before. It will converge to the truth. This is what science is about. Quantitative results. Experimental checks.
Read the essay I mentioned. You can say that because corrections to the current theory are smaller than the former corrections.
Asimov gives a concrete example, he mentions the difference in height when you measure the terrain a certain distance away. In a flat earth that difference should be zero. In a spherical earth that difference should be 8 inches per mile everywhere. In the best known figures when Asimov wrote that article the difference varied from 7.973 to 8.027 inches per mile, depending on which region of earth you are on.
The difference between zero and eight inches is more than the difference between 7.973 and 8.027.
And don't you think it's just amazing that scientists can look at stars that are hundreds of millions light years away and, from their measurements alone, they can calculate and conclude that twenty times more matter is needed to account for the way those stars are moving?
This "dark matter" problem that you mention does not show a weakness, but a *strong* point of science. The existence of dark matter does not invalidate one single fact of what was known before. Newtonian phisics is still valid, relativity is intact, quantum mechanics rules. But now we know of an additional fact that's extremely subtle, very very difficult to measure, and still adds some important facts to our scientific knowledge.
Asimov was right, we are getting closer to the truth.
>>> math.log10(192*2**30/(640*2**10))
5.4977200635299006
Doh. The difference is in the fourth decimal place in the order of magnitude
Me too. Those posts show nothing but the envy of people who wished they understood science, but do not have the needed energy and intelligence to study the necessary mathematics.
Their escape mechanism is to pretend no one really understand science. They think they don't look so stupid if they can pretend everybody is as stupid as they are.
I think the perfect answer to that kind of thinking was given by Isaac Asimov in an essay named "The Relativity of Wrong". In that article, Asimov shows that the difference between a flat earth and a spherical earth is much bigger than the difference between a spherical earth and the true shape of the earth. Although people who thought the earth was spherical were wrong, they were much *less* wrong than people who thought the earth was flat.
Science converges asymptotically to the truth. Even if scientists can never be absolutely certain of the truth, they are always getting nearer to absolute truth.
It's much more likely that a misconceived idea will be turned into accepted fact by flawed reasoning than by flawed experiment. That's because experiments are repeated independently, while it's very difficult to verify reasoning in a truly independent manner.
No.
Just 5.477 orders of magnitude more RAM.
How many neurons did they emulate? A cockroach brain has been done years ago, with pretty good results. But you don't see too many intelligent cockroaches in nature. That's because *more hardware*, i.e. more neurons, are needed for intelligence. As a matter of fact, so many neurons are needed that even animals with relatively large brains fall short of human intelligence.
If there are no small brains with human-like intelligence in nature, then why should artificial small brains exhibit high levels of intelligence?
There's no animal that has both the same or larger number of neurons and same or larger brain-to-body mass ratio than humans. Considering the large survival advantage that intelligence has given to humans, it seems logical that if it were possible to have human-like intelligence with less neurons some species would have done it.
Why is it that every time a scientific discovery is mentioned someone has to say that Tesla discovered it first?
If every invention someone attributes to Tesla really existed we would have had flying cars a hundred years ago.
Being derived from a person's name, the unit joule is written with a lowercase j, but the abbreviation is written with a capital J
And the square root of (-1) is j. Ask Python:
Although Python does accept a capital J as sqrt(-1). Perhaps someone should write a PEP about that.
You mentioned *fiction* works. What about a Book that a significant percentage of people not only claim is NOT fiction, but a work full of moral and ethical teachings? What if that Book has scenes of drunkenness, incest, genocide, murder, prostitution, debauchery? How much worse would be the effect of that?
"Cause" can be defined in several different scopes. When one reads a death certificate, for instance, the cause of death could be listed as a hemorrhage in the brain, or one could say the cause was a bullet, or a drunken brawl which ended in a gun being shot, etc.
Instead of saying a wrongly set relay was *the* cause, perhaps it would be best to say it was a precipitating factor. If that relay had not been set wrong, there was a large number of factors that could have triggered a similar blackout.
I guess what the AC called "foolish regulation" was the fact that electricity prices were set by law at such a low level that discouraged investment in the power system. Low investment means, among other things, that technicians will not receive good wages, they will not be motivated enough to pay close attention on what they are doing and will commit mistakes.
Low investments also mean that companies will not build new power plants and lines. They will try to stretch existing systems to the limit, reaching a point where relatively small failures might cascade to system-wide blackouts.
Generally, when people bemoan regulation or deregulation they are looking at just one side of the issue. If you regulate, then you must make sure that the regulations will not kill the companies. If you deregulate, make sure to deregulate *everything*, including prices. The problem with what has been called "deregulation" is that removing the regulations that impose quality levels while keeping regulated prices is more or less guaranteed to cause failures in the system.
Problem is old time hackers did things for money, too. Pricing details here:
This well known anecdote is what made me think of the market for an electricity meter hacking device. $150 in 1971 dollars would be about $800 today.
Actually, power systems is a mature technology. The "bible" that every power engineer has is this book, first published in 1955. Notice that the book on sale is the fourth edition, printed in 1982. Nothing is changing very fast in this field.
The problem that could arise from a large number of Smart Grid computers being pwned is if a worm triggered them off at exactly the same time, this is called a "load rejection" event. It would cause oscillations in the power flow which could end in a blackout but, generally, load rejection is not as bad as generation rejection, which happens when a power plant is cut off.
Another problem that would cause much more harm to the companies than to users is if the worm instructed power meters to register less power consumption. I see a large black-market arising, if someone figures out how to write this exploit.
After looking through all the menu items, I found the sequence of commands you mentioned, under the "EDIT" menu, so your post actually helped me after all, thanks again.
But still, this is a problem with Gimp. There's no denying it, the user interface *IS* confusing. *AND* the (very little) existing documentation is not translated to other languages than English. *PLUS* they move commands from one menu to another, apparently at random, from one version to the next.
The Gimp would be an awesome graphics editor, if only it would be just a little bit easier to use.
Your post is quite informative, but it doesn't help me, for reasons that are very typical of Gimp.
My Gimp installation is in Brazilian Portuguese language. There are 25 entries in the Dialogs menu, but none that even remotely resembles anything like "path" translated to Portuguese. There is no option in the Preferences menu to change the language to English.
So, thank you for your helpful attitude, but unfortunately it didn't solve my problem. And I've found that this is very typical of the convoluted Gimp user interface. Year ago I read "Grokking the Gimp", and did some work based on what I read there. But there were always those problems. First, the instructions are in English, the Gimp is localized, there's no clear way to find the corresponding menus in the international version. Second, items are frequently moved from one menu to the other in different versions. Unless you have the exact Gimp version the author used, there's no guarantee that you will find the tool you need in the same places.
It's sad but true, the Gimp needs an intensive reworking in the user interface to become useful, and this situation does not seem to be improving in newer versions.
Only if it comes to a final shootout, which will never happen.
But considering what usually happens when a show of force happens, the bigger guy wins. In this case, Intel. It's Intel who forced a confrontation, and they probably will gain better conditions in small print in a contract somewhere.
Otherwise, nothing to see here, please move along.
Which is a consequence of an economic system where the profit motive has been officially eliminated. Steal $1000 and you got that much for yourself, the whole country lost $1000 and your own share of that loss is $1000 divided by the country population.
The same works for capitalist systems too, of course. In a big corporation where no one has a majority share, decisions are often made by directors who have a bigger interest in getting a fat bonus than in improving the company's situation.
The solution, IMHO, would be a system where the controllers are directly affected by the results, a system where the directors are the owners. In current capitalist countries, companies are often owned by other companies or pension funds. The ultimate decisions are made too far removed from the people who actually own the capital involved.