Or the Mona Lisa? Or any other realistic or semi-realistic rendition of the world? Should both games and art be reduced to cartoons and cubism? After all, it's really the content, not the appearance that matters, right?
Different games have different styles and are appealing for different reasons. Some games are excellent with very abstract renditions, and others are interesting because of their immersive and/or realistic graphics.
To me, Myst and Riven were interesting only because of the graphics; I found the game play mind-numbingly dull. And nethack, to me, still has more interesting game play than any version of Diablo. Quake and HalfLife are somewhere in between: their game play can be interesting at times, and the graphics and "tourism" aspects also contribute significantly to the game.
Besides, I would think people who find current 3D games "realistic" must have had something other than a bagel with their morning coffee.
There are tens of thousands of species threatened with extiction. The resources wasted on (painfully) cloning a handful of extinct warm-and-fuzzy mammals would be much better spent keeping more species from becoming extinct.
Besides, it is naive to think that cloning "brings back" species. Species die out when their habitat disappears. Cloning a species isn't going to bring their habitat back. The only way we are going to keep species from becoming extinct is by preserving their habitats, and, more generally, the ecological diversity of our planet as a whole.
I think giving teachers copyright protection on what they teach is a dangerous road to go down. If teachers can claim copyright on the lecture notes, why can't they claim copyright on other expressions of those lectures? Maybe the next claim is that if you learned some subject in a particular way, you can't teach it in the same way to your students unless you get the permission of the professor that taught you. And further down the road, what would prevent professors from claiming intellectual property on other uses you put their lectures to--an introductory paragraph in a paper you write, an idea for a patent, etc.?
The notion that you have a copyright to some form of a recording of you is also not at all universally applicable. For example, if a photographer takes a picture of you, the photographer has the copyright, not you.
Nobody ever promised professors that they would be able to retain intellectual property rights on their lectures. The whole purpose of teaching is to convey information that the students record and further disseminate. Why on earth would we want to change the rules now and in this sensitive area?
I have had trouble finding a free, usable distribution of SuSE. All the CDs they hand out freely seem to be "evaluation" versions (install in a single file on a Windows partition--not very useful), and their web/ftp sites don't seem to have ISO images for the full distribution either. They do provide a large directory tree of packages on their site, but it isn't immediately obvious how to make your own distribution from that. And whether the CDs they distribution commercially are copyable is not clear to me either.
Compare that with RedHat, who is making ISO images of their distribution widely available and often hands them out at trade shows and other places. Of course, Debian is even more open, with "free live updating".
SuSE may technically be a reasonable distribution. But they seem to make getting free versions of their software more cumbersome than necessary. I don't think that kind of approach is good for Linux in the long run. I can't even figure out what they are trying to accomplish with their strategy, and that concerns me. I think I'll stick with RedHat and Debian for now.
If you had, say, a 100gb+ RAID full of data, a full fsck would take a very long time, especially if it was a
particularly active partition.
Well, first of all, people routinely use ext2 with 45G or 60G drives (I have one), and it doesn't seem to be a problem. Furthermore, boot time can't be such a big issue for the kinds of customers IBM is targetting because many of IBM's AIX machines used to take from minutes to hours (!) on every boot just to get their SCSI subsystems up (I hope they have improve this by now); in comparison, the time for any fsck is negligible.
But most importantly, just because JFS spreads out the time for maintaining file system accesses doesn't mean you aren't paying for the time. Each day, the transactioning that JFS may cost you a few hours in computer time, compared to a system that doesn't do transactioning. And with JFS you pay that cost whether your system crashes or not. In fact, the more reliable your hardware is, the higher the cost of JFS.
So, would you rather lose a few hours of computer time every day, or lose a few hours of computer time on the very rare occasion that the machine was not shut down properly?
The only question is, will we be able to have partitions grow themselves
automatically, like you can on AIX? Now that would be cool.
"Cool" maybe, but not very useful. Or are you in the habit of leaving most of your disk unpartitioned so that you can eventually grow into it? Last I used it, LVM/JFS couldn't even shrink file systems.
I think the popularity of JFS/LVM on AIX is rooted in particular idiosyncracies of IBM culture and limitations of the AIX operating system. On Linux, easy backup/restore, GNU parted, fast fsck, and fast boots give you more flexibility than LVM and JFS, with less runtime overhead and less complexity.
Most 3D applications really require the ability to specify behaviors. VRML had some of that, but if you wanted to do anything fancy, you had to go back to JavaScript (real-time geometric programming in JavaScript???) or figure out how to talk to it from Java.
I suspect that if 3D on the web catches on at all, it will be driven by a system like Java3D, relying on VRML mainly as an interchange format for objects. Another approach that's kind of neat is what Yindo.com does: they take a small scripting language (Lua) and hook it up to OpenGL to get a very small 3D plugin; too bad it's proprietary.
Of course, in some sense 3D on the Internet is here already. Just look at Quake and all those other games.
I was using JFS under AIX for several years. I can't imagine why people would want to run it. It doesn't give you much more data security (only file system structure is journalled), and you pay a heavy price in terms of performance. In fact, running Linux and AIX side-by-side for several years, Linux with ext2 on a low-end IDE drive not only greatly out-performed AIX on a high-end workstation and SCSI drive, AIX even lost a file system during a crash.
Fsck on ext2 is pretty fast, crashes are very rare for server systems, and servers require regular backups anyway. It is more rational to run integrity checks in batch mode when necessary than to pay overhead on every file system access to deal with the possibility that the machine might crash at any moment. I think JFS (and its companion, LVM) are simply not good engineering tradeoffs for most (all?) applications.
The continued reliance of PC hardware on those outdated technologies for booting and installation then entails thousands of dollars in KVM switches. And operating systems like Windows NT compound the problem by not being easily remotely accessible.
Also, if you can run the bus over hundreds of feet of CAT 5 networks, that suggests that the bus is probably not running as fast as it should.
Save some money and get hardware and software that are designed for remote accessibility.
Well, I think you see the power of Microsoft's financial resources at work: without it, a platform like.NET would probably not be particularly attractive to researchers yet. After all, why expend much effort on porting to a platform whose commercial viability is uncertain and that is still bleeding edge compared to the available alternatives?
What this comes down to is that Microsoft is giving money to a research group and getting feedback on the language independent features of their runtime. That's good because it helps support programming language research, a chronically underfunded area. And if.NET ends up being a good, usable, open runtime after all because of the feedback, even better for everybody.
Scientists are hardly limited to single unit recording: in addition to single unit recording they can perform psychophysical experiments, do parallel recording, introspect, examine neuroanatomy, do genetics, perform functional imaging, perform in-situ staining, introduce various drugs, to name just a few. That doesn't make the problem of figuring out how brains work easy, but it certainly makes it a lot more tractable than single unit recording.
I believe some European nations make immigration procedures for US citizens particularly cumbersome, in retaliation for what their citizens have to go through in the US.
But, yes, European nations generally are not easy to immigrate to. That is, many people don't meet the criteria. But on the whole, my experience has been that if someone is eligible for a work permit or immigrant visa, unlike the US, adjudication is generally fairly predictable, and efficient.
Whether there is a shortage of programmers in the US or not, people who argue against raising H1B caps are making the assumption that restricting the influx of skilled foreign workers will raise the salaries of US workers because of supply and demand.
But if people can't work in the US, they'll just work for the same companies somewhere else. Every US company I have worked for has locations in Europe and Asia. If their employees have visa problems in the US, they just move the job (and associated budget) to a different country. Welcome to the new, global economy.
Not only does the US not gain a job from preventing a skilled foreign worker from working in the US, it loses out on tax revenues. And many foreign scientists and engineers make inventions that form the seed for startups and product lines, opportunities that will then go to other countries.
Skilled immigration into the US is a net gain for Americans: it creates jobs and opportunities for everybody. America's openness to foreigners is at the heart of its current predominance and success in the world: welcome it.
Anybody trying to hire programmers and system managers knows that Matloff is simply wrong: there is a shortage, both in the US and around the world.
As for Greenspun, he is right that most code is poorly written. But H1B holders don't write code that's any poorer than the code US citizens write. And, having seen lots of mainframe code, I can assure him that 1960's mainframe code wasn't particularly good either.
Every company I have been at has treated its H1B holders fairly and gone out of their way to help their employees to get green cards.
The problem is the INS: it takes them forever to complete even the simplest administrative processes. This results in a lot of uncertainty and hardship for foreign workers.
Of course, the INS itself also has a hard task: immigration rules are highly complex, and the INS is getting mixed messages from the other parts of government.
If there is any reason not to increase the H1Bs, it is that the INS cannot even handle its current paperwork. Doubling the number of H1B visas means that they will fall even further behind.
The first patent claim alone clearly claims NAT in general, not some specific variant. Even later claims do not seem to stray beyond what is (and was) standard practice: the "adaptive security algorithm" refers to the obvious methods needed to make ping, traceroute, and ftp work.
Watermarking technologies are inherently breakable. The only question is how much effort it takes, what information is available to break it, and how much loss of quality the users are willing to live with.
The HackSDMI challenge is meaningless because it doesn't provide people even with the minimal set of tools they would have once the system is deployed: thousands of recordings and software to actually test for the presence of the watermark.
If SDMI were to be really secure, they would also have to disclose the watermarking method as part of the challenge.
At best, the current "challenge" can be considered a sanity test: does some MP3 encoder or MP3 setting, or Ogg Vorbis, or some other simple method break their scheme?
In any case, if they want anybody who knows about this stuff to work for them, they should pay the going rate for consultants. A serious attack on SDMI by consultants would probably cost them in the millions, and they would have to pay whether the attack succeeds or not.
Even without all the other issues, the challenge is an insult. The $10k are to be shared among all the "winning" entries, and submitters have to assign all related intellectual property to SDMI. There is no legal recourse even to recover that money: by contract all decisions are made by SDMI.
$10k would get them about 30 hours of consulting, if the consultants where cheap, and they'd have to agree to an equitable contract and no guarantee of success.
SDMI and those big music companies are about to deploy billions of dollars in software, hardware, and content, and $10k is all they can cough up? If they add another three zeros to that, together with binding arbitration, we could start talking.
I think this shows us what we probably knew all along: Chiariglione is cheap. Chiariglione doesn't respect other people's work or intellectual property, he only cares about his own.
And to anybody thinking about participating in this challenge: don't sell yourself cheap.
Well, my experience as a foreign worker in a European country was that the process of getting a work permit was quick, efficient, and painless. Furthermore, foreign workers weren't forced to pay for all the benefits that they wouldn't be able to take advantage of.
Other countries may hand out work permits and immigration visas less easily, but they probably generally administer the ones they give out more efficiently.
It's simplistic to reduce all of this to standard of living. The US standard of living isn't all that great compared to Europe or Canada. Many people come to the US because the work is exciting, because they like the diversity, or for purely personal reasons (friends or family).
Maybe they exist, but I have also yet to see an exploited H1B employee. Everywhere I have worked, H1B's got paid like everybody else, and human resources would press hard to convert them to green cards as soon as possible.
That's indeed true.
But denaturalization proceedings can be instituted based on much weaker grounds than capital crimes.
The laws are pretty baroque: failure to disclose something like a past residence or membership in any kind of organization (however innocuous) can be sufficient cause for denaturalization.
In addition, denaturalization proceedings provide less legal protection to the accused than murder cases.
A naturalized US citizen is still subject to US laws, so if their past crimes are serious enough not to have statutes of limitations under US law, they can still be punished under US laws.
People shouldn't lose any sleep over it (a lot worse things can happen to someone in the US justice system than getting denaturalized). But I still think that the removal of a statute of limitations on denaturalization by Congress was indicative of a negative attitude towards immigrants.
For most skilled immigrants, there is no other track towards citizenship than to come on an H1B visa. Many businesses would love to hire people on green cards right away, but the INS makes it nearly impossible. The H1B, for practical purposes, has become the prelude to a skilled immigrant visa.
Immigration is not a contractual agreement: the US always has the power to change the rules unilaterally (and does so frequently), and immigrants have no place where they could turn for enforcement.
Therefore, the deal has always been that immigrants come here relying on the word and good will of the US.
If the US cannot fulfill the expectations created in people who came here on H1B visas, there is no legal problem, but it certainly harms the reputation of the US as being trustworthy and welcoming to foreigners.
The purpose of a statute of limitations is not to let the guilty get away with something, but it is to protect the innocent from arbitrary, indefinite prosecution by government agencies.
So, yes, in principle, people who lie on their application should lose their citizenship. If the INS was perfect at determining this fact, there would be no problem with letting them bring charges like that until the end of time.
But the INS is anything but perfect, and they are subject to political pressures.
By restricting the ability of the INS to bring charges indefinitely, potential abuses by the INS and the executive branch are limited.
I think that if the INS hasn't discovered lying on an application for 10 years (the old statute of limitations), the presumption should be in favor of the applicant, just like it is in many other areas of law.
But clearly, your simplistic view has resonated with Congress. Apparently, limitations of government powers are a good idea for natural born citizens, but naturalized citizens don't quite deserve the same treatment.
US immigration law isn't a contractual agreement. In fact, during the time I have been here, Congress already has changed it several times unilaterally, to the disadvantage of immigrants.
Immigrants would also have no legal means of enforcing any such agreement: they have very limited legal standing.
So, there is no contractual agreement.
Any immigrant that comes to the US relies on the good will of Americans and the word and promises of the US government.
They start building their lives here because they have an expectation that if they behave well and are successful, they will be treated fairly.
In the past, that has been good enough.
Saying "you should have gotten it in writing" is therefore meaningless. There is nothing to get in writing, and hiding behind a legalistic phrase like that would not restore the good will that people lose when this sort of thing happens to them.
The rational thing would be for a skilled applicant with a job offer to apply directly for an employment based green card through the employer. Unfortunately, the INS doesn't work that way. For practical purposes, almost all
skill-based immigrants have to come in on H1B's first.
H1B visas were therefore used for many years as a temporary visa while the green card application was being processed by the INS. The current problem with H1B visas running out and deportations is that the INS isn't processing the green card applications in a timely manner anymore. What used to take months now takes years. Furthermore, that change came very suddenly and unexpectedly, so that a lot of people whose applications were on schedule were completely taken by surprise.
Many of the people facing deportation are currently employed with excellent, high-paying jobs and fall into the top skill-based immigration categories. There is no question that most of them would get a green card if the INS got around processing the application.
The expectation of skilled immigrants that they could come on an H1B visa and convert to a green card was rational. And while the US certainly doesn't have a legal commitment, if this avenue is closed, it will seriously damage the ability of the US to attract skilled immigrants.
Slashdot Mirror
Different games have different styles and are appealing for different reasons. Some games are excellent with very abstract renditions, and others are interesting because of their immersive and/or realistic graphics.
To me, Myst and Riven were interesting only because of the graphics; I found the game play mind-numbingly dull. And nethack, to me, still has more interesting game play than any version of Diablo. Quake and HalfLife are somewhere in between: their game play can be interesting at times, and the graphics and "tourism" aspects also contribute significantly to the game.
Besides, I would think people who find current 3D games "realistic" must have had something other than a bagel with their morning coffee.
Besides, it is naive to think that cloning "brings back" species. Species die out when their habitat disappears. Cloning a species isn't going to bring their habitat back. The only way we are going to keep species from becoming extinct is by preserving their habitats, and, more generally, the ecological diversity of our planet as a whole.
The notion that you have a copyright to some form of a recording of you is also not at all universally applicable. For example, if a photographer takes a picture of you, the photographer has the copyright, not you.
Nobody ever promised professors that they would be able to retain intellectual property rights on their lectures. The whole purpose of teaching is to convey information that the students record and further disseminate. Why on earth would we want to change the rules now and in this sensitive area?
Compare that with RedHat, who is making ISO images of their distribution widely available and often hands them out at trade shows and other places. Of course, Debian is even more open, with "free live updating".
SuSE may technically be a reasonable distribution. But they seem to make getting free versions of their software more cumbersome than necessary. I don't think that kind of approach is good for Linux in the long run. I can't even figure out what they are trying to accomplish with their strategy, and that concerns me. I think I'll stick with RedHat and Debian for now.
Well, first of all, people routinely use ext2 with 45G or 60G drives (I have one), and it doesn't seem to be a problem. Furthermore, boot time can't be such a big issue for the kinds of customers IBM is targetting because many of IBM's AIX machines used to take from minutes to hours (!) on every boot just to get their SCSI subsystems up (I hope they have improve this by now); in comparison, the time for any fsck is negligible.
But most importantly, just because JFS spreads out the time for maintaining file system accesses doesn't mean you aren't paying for the time. Each day, the transactioning that JFS may cost you a few hours in computer time, compared to a system that doesn't do transactioning. And with JFS you pay that cost whether your system crashes or not. In fact, the more reliable your hardware is, the higher the cost of JFS.
So, would you rather lose a few hours of computer time every day, or lose a few hours of computer time on the very rare occasion that the machine was not shut down properly?
"Cool" maybe, but not very useful. Or are you in the habit of leaving most of your disk unpartitioned so that you can eventually grow into it? Last I used it, LVM/JFS couldn't even shrink file systems.
I think the popularity of JFS/LVM on AIX is rooted in particular idiosyncracies of IBM culture and limitations of the AIX operating system. On Linux, easy backup/restore, GNU parted, fast fsck, and fast boots give you more flexibility than LVM and JFS, with less runtime overhead and less complexity.
I suspect that if 3D on the web catches on at all, it will be driven by a system like Java3D, relying on VRML mainly as an interchange format for objects. Another approach that's kind of neat is what Yindo.com does: they take a small scripting language (Lua) and hook it up to OpenGL to get a very small 3D plugin; too bad it's proprietary.
Of course, in some sense 3D on the Internet is here already. Just look at Quake and all those other games.
Fsck on ext2 is pretty fast, crashes are very rare for server systems, and servers require regular backups anyway. It is more rational to run integrity checks in batch mode when necessary than to pay overhead on every file system access to deal with the possibility that the machine might crash at any moment. I think JFS (and its companion, LVM) are simply not good engineering tradeoffs for most (all?) applications.
Also, if you can run the bus over hundreds of feet of CAT 5 networks, that suggests that the bus is probably not running as fast as it should.
Save some money and get hardware and software that are designed for remote accessibility.
What this comes down to is that Microsoft is giving money to a research group and getting feedback on the language independent features of their runtime. That's good because it helps support programming language research, a chronically underfunded area. And if .NET ends up being a good, usable, open runtime after all because of the feedback, even better for everybody.
Scientists are hardly limited to single unit recording: in addition to single unit recording they can perform psychophysical experiments, do parallel recording, introspect, examine neuroanatomy, do genetics, perform functional imaging, perform in-situ staining, introduce various drugs, to name just a few. That doesn't make the problem of figuring out how brains work easy, but it certainly makes it a lot more tractable than single unit recording.
But, yes, European nations generally are not easy to immigrate to. That is, many people don't meet the criteria. But on the whole, my experience has been that if someone is eligible for a work permit or immigrant visa, unlike the US, adjudication is generally fairly predictable, and efficient.
But if people can't work in the US, they'll just work for the same companies somewhere else. Every US company I have worked for has locations in Europe and Asia. If their employees have visa problems in the US, they just move the job (and associated budget) to a different country. Welcome to the new, global economy.
Not only does the US not gain a job from preventing a skilled foreign worker from working in the US, it loses out on tax revenues. And many foreign scientists and engineers make inventions that form the seed for startups and product lines, opportunities that will then go to other countries.
Skilled immigration into the US is a net gain for Americans: it creates jobs and opportunities for everybody. America's openness to foreigners is at the heart of its current predominance and success in the world: welcome it.
As for Greenspun, he is right that most code is poorly written. But H1B holders don't write code that's any poorer than the code US citizens write. And, having seen lots of mainframe code, I can assure him that 1960's mainframe code wasn't particularly good either.
The problem is the INS: it takes them forever to complete even the simplest administrative processes. This results in a lot of uncertainty and hardship for foreign workers. Of course, the INS itself also has a hard task: immigration rules are highly complex, and the INS is getting mixed messages from the other parts of government.
If there is any reason not to increase the H1Bs, it is that the INS cannot even handle its current paperwork. Doubling the number of H1B visas means that they will fall even further behind.
The first patent claim alone clearly claims NAT in general, not some specific variant. Even later claims do not seem to stray beyond what is (and was) standard practice: the "adaptive security algorithm" refers to the obvious methods needed to make ping, traceroute, and ftp work.
The HackSDMI challenge is meaningless because it doesn't provide people even with the minimal set of tools they would have once the system is deployed: thousands of recordings and software to actually test for the presence of the watermark. If SDMI were to be really secure, they would also have to disclose the watermarking method as part of the challenge.
At best, the current "challenge" can be considered a sanity test: does some MP3 encoder or MP3 setting, or Ogg Vorbis, or some other simple method break their scheme?
In any case, if they want anybody who knows about this stuff to work for them, they should pay the going rate for consultants. A serious attack on SDMI by consultants would probably cost them in the millions, and they would have to pay whether the attack succeeds or not.
SDMI and those big music companies are about to deploy billions of dollars in software, hardware, and content, and $10k is all they can cough up? If they add another three zeros to that, together with binding arbitration, we could start talking.
I think this shows us what we probably knew all along: Chiariglione is cheap. Chiariglione doesn't respect other people's work or intellectual property, he only cares about his own.
And to anybody thinking about participating in this challenge: don't sell yourself cheap.
Other countries may hand out work permits and immigration visas less easily, but they probably generally administer the ones they give out more efficiently.
Maybe they exist, but I have also yet to see an exploited H1B employee. Everywhere I have worked, H1B's got paid like everybody else, and human resources would press hard to convert them to green cards as soon as possible.
A naturalized US citizen is still subject to US laws, so if their past crimes are serious enough not to have statutes of limitations under US law, they can still be punished under US laws.
People shouldn't lose any sleep over it (a lot worse things can happen to someone in the US justice system than getting denaturalized). But I still think that the removal of a statute of limitations on denaturalization by Congress was indicative of a negative attitude towards immigrants.
For most skilled immigrants, there is no other track towards citizenship than to come on an H1B visa. Many businesses would love to hire people on green cards right away, but the INS makes it nearly impossible. The H1B, for practical purposes, has become the prelude to a skilled immigrant visa.
Therefore, the deal has always been that immigrants come here relying on the word and good will of the US. If the US cannot fulfill the expectations created in people who came here on H1B visas, there is no legal problem, but it certainly harms the reputation of the US as being trustworthy and welcoming to foreigners.
So, yes, in principle, people who lie on their application should lose their citizenship. If the INS was perfect at determining this fact, there would be no problem with letting them bring charges like that until the end of time. But the INS is anything but perfect, and they are subject to political pressures.
By restricting the ability of the INS to bring charges indefinitely, potential abuses by the INS and the executive branch are limited. I think that if the INS hasn't discovered lying on an application for 10 years (the old statute of limitations), the presumption should be in favor of the applicant, just like it is in many other areas of law.
But clearly, your simplistic view has resonated with Congress. Apparently, limitations of government powers are a good idea for natural born citizens, but naturalized citizens don't quite deserve the same treatment.
So, there is no contractual agreement. Any immigrant that comes to the US relies on the good will of Americans and the word and promises of the US government. They start building their lives here because they have an expectation that if they behave well and are successful, they will be treated fairly. In the past, that has been good enough.
Saying "you should have gotten it in writing" is therefore meaningless. There is nothing to get in writing, and hiding behind a legalistic phrase like that would not restore the good will that people lose when this sort of thing happens to them.
H1B visas were therefore used for many years as a temporary visa while the green card application was being processed by the INS. The current problem with H1B visas running out and deportations is that the INS isn't processing the green card applications in a timely manner anymore. What used to take months now takes years. Furthermore, that change came very suddenly and unexpectedly, so that a lot of people whose applications were on schedule were completely taken by surprise.
Many of the people facing deportation are currently employed with excellent, high-paying jobs and fall into the top skill-based immigration categories. There is no question that most of them would get a green card if the INS got around processing the application.
The expectation of skilled immigrants that they could come on an H1B visa and convert to a green card was rational. And while the US certainly doesn't have a legal commitment, if this avenue is closed, it will seriously damage the ability of the US to attract skilled immigrants.