Nice to find someone who understands concepts without needing extensive elaboration. I like your poetry, do you have an email address ?
Just a couple of points - the term subconsious is misleading. Consciousness is a small sub-set of what our brains are doing. That we think of the rest of what happens in our minds as the subconsious betrays how inaccurate our representation of ourselves can be. It's like the 'ps' command thinking of the processes it monitors as being subroutines. This theory of consiousness is not philosphy, it's falsifiable.
Actually I don't believe a turing machine can be sentient, a quantum computer could be, but that's another story.
A small article I read by Susan Blackmoore 5 years ago gave me a better grasp of consciousness than a 4 year degree in AI. The article got me thinking along the right track, and eventually I cam to this conclusion: Consiousness is the process of updating your internal representation of yourself, and that's all.
When Hawking's "A brief history of time" came out most critics dismissed it as incomprehensible. What they meant was incomprehensible to their arty minds. Another Blackmoore book I read "education of a parapsychologist" was delightfully devoid of bullshit, so I find it hard to believe that she has changed so much. Are you sure it was empty psychobabble ? Maybe you just didn't understand it.
Cost/benefit... Benefit: freedom to say what you want without facing consequences. Cost: Sometimes people tell nasty lies
I think the benefits outweigh the costs. Sure malicious slander is unpleasant but when there is no truth to it and nobody will stand by the claims few people with brains will pay any attention. I would never have heard the rumours(?) that Xircom shipped shitty designs if they hadn't been so upset about it. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
You can clarify your thinking on this subject by asking "would anonymous posting be encouraged or discouraged by a totalitarian state ?"
I like this story. I read in New Scientist recently that some astronomers think that occasional hypernovas wipe out all advanced life in a galaxy every few billion years which explains why none have yet contacted us.
So they're not sure what is going on and the most likely explanation seem to be either its some ET trying to get our attention, or its some big bad hypernova which could conceivably irradicate us and finally answer the question of why you should use spare cycles to crack RC5 instead of SETI.
It seems like sending a radio message would be less work than making a star behave strangely, so my money is on the hypernova.
It's a shame, but we're NEVER going to be able to get non-techs (eg Katz) to understand the difference between hacker and cracker. Forget it, move along there folks. People have been brought up with the word "hacker" meaning "people who break into other people's computer systems" - they're not going to abandom the term just because there is an older, nobler meaning. Gay used refer to light-hearted happiness, but if you insist on saying "I'm gay" to mean that you're happy you can't blame people for misunderstanding you.
We need another word, the closest we have is "developer" but that doesn't cover many of the conotations of hacking - does anyone have any ideas ?
I would like to see several additions to pull down menu. First off, two clueless attractors:
Add "I agree" and "I disagree" to the menu but make them have zero effect.
Secondly, add "Unfairly punished" option. As well as incrementing the post (if it has been decremented) this option subtracts a point from the moderator who made the initial change. This would help counteract main problem with current moderation system - people who downgrade perfectly reasonable comments just because they disagree.
Sorry Katz, the ideas of individual liberty did not start with American or French revolutions. Note even close. Ever heard of the Magna Carter for instance. I'm sure that Russians used to be taught that true individual freedom began with the Russian revolution. Please try to remember that you are not talking Americans exclusively and every nation is raised on different propoganda. You should realise that the view of history you were raised with is just as questionable as that learnt by Japanese, Russian, English or anyone.
I agree with most the points in the article, but I also think that the net could result in the ultimate end of individuality which I rant about here .
I admit that the post was at a slight tangent to the story, but the RAM described IS especially suitable for a brain inplant.
- it has very low power useage - it's non-volatile - it has incredible storeage potential
for instance, it would be capable of storing every conversation you ever had in your entire life (not the sound [yet], but a voice recognition based transcipt of it). That kind of capability is sufficiently useful for some people to be willing to submit to brain surgery in order to obtain it.
Most of the discussion I have seen, and the proposed uses for the chip talk about replacing flash / hard-drives so we get things like much lighter laptops, MP3 players, or digital cameras that can store a lot of pictures. Personally I think that this is very short sighted. There are much more interesting uses for this technology, and these kinds of advances will have a more profound effect on society than people realise.
Maybe if I had stated all this in the initial post it would have been less likely to be moderated down, but this all seemed too obvious to state. Maybe I overestimated the intelligence of/.
BTW I read at -1 too, and it seems that people are much more likely to get moderated down for being funny than for being boring.
AI is interesting as an intellectual curiosity, but the more immediate thing to look forward to is better human computer interaction. Much, much better HCI. Screw wearable PC's, bring on the implants. Now with this kind of information density, it's actually worthwhile. It would be nice to be able to remember everything I ever said, or was said to me. If nothing else, it would be a great help when I get into an argument with my wife. A little further down the line, and you'll be able to remember everything you ever saw.
And for all those out there who think we're going to evolve into a race of cyborgs: you're crazy... it'll go MUCH further than that.
After all, once people have got decent hardware implanted in their heads, do you think we're going to be satisfied with a 200baud connection (human speech). No, we'll use the hardware in our heads to communicate with other people (through the hardware in their heads). With sufficient communication, it stops making sense to talk about multiple communicating processors - you end up with a single, massively parallel computer. We will become the Borg, but not in a bad way. If you combine the properties of humans and computers and end up with something which does not have the best of both.. then you haven't done it right. The internet will evolve from being a global suppository of all human knowledge into actually being humanity. We will be the nodes on the network. It won't take long either. Just 150 years or so at this rate.
Of course, this is bound to cause a little friction during the transitional period. Some people will doubtless object, and probably consider the end of humanity as we know it to be a bad thing. I don't think the induhviduals (as Dogbert would have it) will stand much of a chance though, they'll be seriously out-smarted and the reliance which regular humanity places on computers will make them pathetically unable to fight against those who have plugged in. The HumaNet might have to annihilate them to protect itself. It's a bit like the old chestnut of being trapped in a room with a potential madman - you best kill him first in case he's thinking the same thing that you are. The HumaNet and humanity will essentially be different species so the potential for distrust and misunderstanding is high.
Personally I hope that won't be necessary. The HumaNet will probably be smart enough to protect itself without resorting to annihilation even if humanity tries to destroy it. The HumaNet will take pleasure in letting some loose humans roam free - in the same way that we like to think of Apes still living wild and free in the jungle.
Sorry guys, I seem to be losing it. I wonder how many MP3s you can get on that thing...
You have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion to that which I would draw. If physical resources could be replicated freely then the main argument supporting IP dissappears.
The whole notion of intellectual property is a social construct. However, this does not necessarily make it a bad thing.
The whole notion of standard property is a social construct - there are many societies that do not have any real notion of property. It is even more common to find societies for whom the concept of land ownership is unknown. They are not being dense, it's just that for hunter gatherer based societies, the concept of land ownership is not terribly useful.
We are so used to the idea of property that it is easy to forget that it is a social convention. There is nothing inherently natural about the concept, and we need police, locks, walls and fences to enforce it. The notion of property is so deeply engrained in our society that many other unquestioned social constructs are built on top of it: eg money.
You and I are both feel pretty comfortable with the concept of material property and agree that it is useful. Obviously "Intellectual Property" is also a social concept. As RMS is fond of pointing out, the very term "IP" is biased since it implies that the concept of IP is as natural and necessary as the concept of material property. Many special interest groups (eg RIAA) would like to halt the debate there: "IP is just like regular property, we all agree that property is necessary for society, so ownership of information is necessary and good."
Except we all know there is a difference: when information passes from one A to B, A still has the information. Should we treat ownership of information and material in the same way ? Probably not, and its an important question.
The only valid justification for social constructs are that they benefit society. If the construct is not beneficial, it should be discarded. For instance, land ownership provides an incentive for the owner to extract the maximum long term benefit from the land. Land is better managed when it is owned by someone so it benefits society as a whole for land to privately owned.
Two hundred years ago, society was based upon agriculture. Real wealth meant ownership of land. One hundred years ago, society was based upon industry, real wealth meant owning what Marx called "the means of production", ie factories. Today we live in the information age, real wealth means owning information.
It is necessary to clarify what is meant by ownership of information. There are really two forms of information ownership today. One is accessibility. If you can freely access a piece of information then in some sense, you own it. The internet has made us all much "richer". The other form of ownership is the IP sense of ownership. That is, not only can you access the information, but you have power over what other people can do with the information. For instance, you can sell others access, but retain sole rights to pass on the information.
The IP form of information ownership is a social construct. It is only possible because we have laws that enforce it. Are those laws a good idea ? Personally, I'm not sure. Some IP laws are certainly flawed (US software patents ???) while some are probably beneficial.
It's pointless to argue for IP on the grounds that IP is just like material property - its not.
It's also pointless to argue against IP on the grounds that IP is a social construct - yes it is, but so is just about everything else.
AFAIK the argments for and against can be summarised as:
FOR: Without IP there would be less incentive for information creators.
AGAINST: IP laws make everybody poorer because information that is freely passed around becomes available to everyone.
Both of those arguments can be expanded upon endlessly. I've got no idea which is better.
I suspect that society might be in a bit local minima at the moment. We would be better off as a whole if information was generally shared and freely available rather than jealously hoarded, but it's not clear how to achieve this.
On a side note, its amusing to see opponents of IP being branded as communist because they believe that information should be free. The argument has got virtually nothing to do with left/right wing. The notion that there should be restrictions on copying of information is a form of protectionism. The arguments to justify IP ie "protect the creators" seem more socialist to me than the anti-IP arguments (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that).
Jon, this virtual property thing is interesting, but it's only surprising if you have forgotten that money is a virtual concept anyway. Whenever someone trades a new abstraction some slow witted people will be astounded ("people will never swap real food for paper money, bring back the gold standard...").
Money is traded for scarce items, when resources are limitless then value becomes limitless anyway. The scarcity in virtual property is completely contrived, minor changes to the software could multiply the available amount of property 1000000x causing the value to dissappear. The importance of this can be exaggerated though - artifical scarcity is commonplace in finance - eg diamond prices would collapse if DeBeers did not maintain artifical scarcity.
Agreed, its the main thing missing from Linux dev tools IMHO. I've been asking them to port for a long time, but they need more requests.
And for those who suggest Java, hahahaha. Check out the jdk bug lists on image manipulation memory leaks with java if you really believe that Java will solve all your problems.
I don't see what's so amazing about this. BTW Jon, the standard term is Intellectual Property although Virtual Property sounds more exciting. The "property" part is debatable too, but that's another story...
Property, money, IP.. they are all social constructions anyway. We're more used to some than others, and some have more dubious justifications. When paper money was introduced people were amazed that someone would be prepared to swap real food for paper money. The amazing thing is not so much that people pay money for virtual property, but that people even think of money as a concrete entity.
Not a bad article, balanced, researched, etc, but how do you certify a field which changes so quickly ? By the time anybody has set up a reasonable professional board and exam for a particular skill, the skill would be redundant. Only the lowest common denominator skills (eg write a quicksort routine) could possibly be tested.
Professional qualifications have very little to do with protecting the public, and are much more designed to protect the profession. Professions which change slowly (eg medicine, civil engineering etc) can get away with it and justify themselves by pretending to protect the public while simply placing a nice bar to entry to maintain nice fat fees. Do you really think the American medical association wants to force you to get a prescription before you buy vitamins in order to "protect the consumer".
In some ways it sounds wonderful though. Imagine being able to say to a manager - "no, we cannot release this software for another 6 months, your opinion is irrelevent since I am the certified computer professional here". However, its just a fantasy, it flat won't work for IT and if the government tried to legislate it they would do such a crap job that it would be worse than useless. You would be forced to learn redundant skills so less competent people than yourself could judge you according to their standards.
Not a badly written article, quite balanced etc. But... some experts say it is not clear that certification would have prevented the year 2000 problem.
Give me a fscking break. Have you actually tried running it or do you just believe every piece of propoganda you hear. I have been using java on and off for 4 years (hey Swing/AWT IS better than MFC, but thats about it) The design of Swing is fine, but the actual implementation is SHIT - try reading the bug list on JDC, look at the actual source code if you like - or even better actually try to produce a significant commerical quality working application with Java and maintain your sanity. It's not impossible, it's just very very difficult and it takes YEARS to learn the workarounds to all the bugs. Try printing from java at anything other than 70 dpi, explain to me the appropriate times to call update(), invalidate(), repaint(), paint(), and then tell me which Swing components work as intended and which ones require you to invalidate() the parent container explicitly.
Java - how to turn a Xeon into a 386. Server side java is worthwhile, but as an environment for writing industrial strength client applications it SUCKS. It is much slower, less reliable, and less expressive (ie it takes 500 lines of java to do the equivalent of 50 lines of STL intensive C++ - try writing something like blitz - http://monet.uwaterloo.ca/blitz/ in java...) However the main problem is that the system libraries (AWT/Swing especially) are just not reliable. I really think MS has better programmers than Sun.
As for C/C++ being outdated - well I might believe it when I see one decent application written in Java.
Personally I think getting rid of guns in US, though probably desirable would be virtually impossible politically. However, taxing the fuck out of them so that you had to be rich to own one (and therefore less likely to kill someone for the sake of a few cigarettes*) would probably be politically feasible and would solve most the problems.
*Once when I lived in the California the neighbourhood 7-11 was robbed for cigarettes and 2 staff got shot - I reckon if you're so poor you kill people for cigarettes then you shoudn't be able to afford a gun.
Jove is an optimizing native compiler for java. Except I don't think they're actually selling it yet. www.instantiations.com/javaspeed/jovereport.htm
Yeah, I do know about pizza and JGL. Attempting to do STL without templates just doesn't work too well. If someone wrote a version of stl for pizza though, that would take away a lot of my antagonism towards java. Maybe if I get some spare time...
QT does seem pretty good. I don't think gtk-- is ready for prime time yet, and if you need the option of deploying on win32... On the other hand, I really don't like the fact that the code has to go through a pre-processor in QT, you're not really using C++ - I cannot believe this is necessary. Does anybody know if they fixed this in QT2.0 ?
Cool, I sent their customer service dept email asking for this a while back, I should now be able to ditch the bitch (NT) at the client's site.
I use JBuilder2 all the time, its got good visual-edit/code-edit integration but has crappy performance/reliability at times. I'm pretty sure that this is because JBuilder2 itself was mostly written in Java. Does anybody know if the JB3 will come with the JOVE technology on Linux. That would be cool, maybe the speed will become bareable.
Apologies for being off topic, and a bit troll-like, but I can't pass up this opportunity to bitch about Java. What a flaky, slow, confused, badly documented piece of shit. It's not the language that's the main problem - it's the system libraries (awt/swing/etc). They seem to written without a thought for speed/efficiency and are often broken in arbitrary ways. AWT/Swing with new event model has a great design, but crummy implementation. The alternative was MFC(euch), I'm still glad we went with Java, but I wish I had known about fltk a year ago.
If I see one more fucking student thesis repeating Sun's propoganda wrt C++/java comparison I will scream. When I work in java I miss STL so badly - it takes 500 lines of java to do 50 lines of STL based C++, and the C++ will be much faster and more reliable (compile-time v. run-time errors). It's easier to write truly abysmal code with C++ than with java, and there are hundreds of pitfalls in C++ but you can make the same argument about pascal compared to C - power requires responsibility. Java and pascal are great languages for beginners, but experienced developers prefer to work without training wheels.
Yes, you're right about the "don't understand effects" argument slowing progress, but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong. I'm usually in favour of virtually any kind of scientific progress. For instance I have no problem with genetically engineering children so they come out smarter and better looking. I have no problem with people implanting chips in their brain to improve memory etc. I am not worried about these things because the effects are largely predicatable and mostly restricted to those involved.
However, I do take exception to companies farting about with stuff they plainly don't understand for no better motivation than to make a quick buck when there is a non-negligable chance that they will completely alter the course of evolution on the planet. I take exception to them spending large sums on political campaigns in order to force GM foods down everybodies throats (as it were). Various initiatives from GM industry are trying to:
1 prevent people even being told whether food is GM or not.
2 impose trade sanctions against countries that don't want it.
3 eliminate restrictions, controls and monitoring efforts.
Maybe that makes me anti-science, but the fact remains I don't trust these companies to fully evaluate the dangers inherent in what they are doing or to have our best interests at heart. When one of the most respected scientists in the field comes out and says that this stuff is dangerous then it seems reasonable to pay some attention.
Genetic algorithms can be improved upon
on
Gene Leakage
·
· Score: 2
I am very familiar with genetic algorithms, and for many tasks they are not particuarly effective. Why the hell do you think companies are bothering with GM foods in the first place. They ARE producing plants/animals which are "fitter" than the ones produced by evolution.
Let me put it another way. The parameters for natural evolution (particuarly the mutation operator) are not at all optimized. Natural evolution occurs within a very limited set of gene sequences. If you take a pre-optimized solution to a particular problem and add it to an existing GA then you can make huge improvements.
It may well be unlikely that they will produce anything tremendously dangerous, but it isn't like the Shakesperian monkeys. These aren't random combinations but the calculated addition of highly effective solutions from different spheres. For instance, one of things they are doing is combining plant and animal DNA. Plants have far more DNA than animals, there are likely to be some pretty effective strands in there.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice to find someone who understands concepts without needing extensive elaboration. I like your poetry, do you have an email address ?
Just a couple of points - the term subconsious is misleading. Consciousness is a small sub-set of what our brains are doing. That we think of the rest of what happens in our minds as the subconsious betrays how inaccurate our representation of ourselves can be. It's like the 'ps' command thinking of the processes it monitors as being subroutines. This theory of consiousness is not philosphy, it's falsifiable.
Actually I don't believe a turing machine can be sentient, a quantum computer could be, but that's another story.
A small article I read by Susan Blackmoore 5 years ago gave me a better grasp of consciousness than a 4 year degree in AI. The article got me thinking along the right track, and eventually I cam to this conclusion: Consiousness is the process of updating your internal representation of yourself, and that's all.
When Hawking's "A brief history of time" came out most critics dismissed it as incomprehensible. What they meant was incomprehensible to their arty minds. Another Blackmoore book I read "education of a parapsychologist" was delightfully devoid of bullshit, so I find it hard to believe that she has changed so much. Are you sure it was empty psychobabble ? Maybe you just didn't understand it.
Cost/benefit...
Benefit: freedom to say what you want without facing consequences.
Cost: Sometimes people tell nasty lies
I think the benefits outweigh the costs. Sure malicious slander is unpleasant but when there is no truth to it and nobody will stand by the claims few people with brains will pay any attention. I would never have heard the rumours(?) that Xircom shipped shitty designs if they hadn't been so upset about it. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
You can clarify your thinking on this subject by asking "would anonymous posting be encouraged or discouraged by a totalitarian state ?"
I like this story. I read in New Scientist recently that some astronomers think that occasional hypernovas wipe out all advanced life in a galaxy every few billion years which explains why none have yet contacted us.
So they're not sure what is going on and the most likely explanation seem to be either its some ET trying to get our attention, or its some big bad hypernova which could conceivably irradicate us and finally answer the question of why you should use spare cycles to crack RC5 instead of SETI.
It seems like sending a radio message would be less work than making a star behave strangely, so my money is on the hypernova.
It's a shame, but we're NEVER going to be able to get non-techs (eg Katz) to understand the difference between hacker and cracker. Forget it, move along there folks. People have been brought up with the word "hacker" meaning "people who break into other people's computer systems" - they're not going to abandom the term just because
there is an older, nobler meaning. Gay used refer to light-hearted happiness, but if you insist on saying "I'm gay" to mean that you're happy you can't blame people for misunderstanding you.
We need another word, the closest we have is "developer" but that doesn't cover many of the conotations of hacking - does anyone have any ideas ?
I would like to see several additions to pull down menu. First off, two clueless attractors:
Add "I agree" and "I disagree" to the menu but make them have zero effect.
Secondly, add "Unfairly punished" option. As well as incrementing the post (if it has been decremented) this option subtracts a point from the moderator who made the initial change. This would help counteract main problem with current moderation system - people who downgrade perfectly reasonable comments just because they disagree.
Sorry Katz, the ideas of individual liberty did not start with American or French
revolutions. Note even close. Ever heard of the Magna Carter for instance.
I'm sure that Russians used to be taught that true individual
freedom began with the Russian revolution. Please try to remember that
you are not talking Americans exclusively and every nation is raised on
different propoganda. You should realise that the view of history you
were raised with is just as questionable as that learnt by Japanese, Russian,
English or anyone.
I agree with most the points in the article, but I also think that the net
could result in the ultimate end of individuality which I rant about
here .
I admit that the post was at a slight tangent to the story, but the RAM described IS especially suitable for a brain inplant.
/.
- it has very low power useage
- it's non-volatile
- it has incredible storeage potential
for instance, it would be capable of storing every conversation you ever had in your entire life (not the sound [yet], but a voice recognition based transcipt of it). That kind of capability is sufficiently useful for some people to be willing to submit to brain surgery in order to obtain it.
Most of the discussion I have seen, and the proposed uses for the chip talk about replacing flash / hard-drives so we get things like much lighter laptops, MP3 players, or digital cameras that can store a lot of pictures. Personally I think that this is very short sighted. There are much more interesting uses for this technology, and these kinds of advances will have a more profound effect on society than people realise.
Maybe if I had stated all this in the initial post it would have been less likely to be moderated down, but this all seemed too obvious to state.
Maybe I overestimated the intelligence of
BTW I read at -1 too, and it seems that people are much more likely to get moderated down for being funny than for being boring.
AI is interesting as an intellectual curiosity, but the
more immediate thing to look forward to is better human computer
interaction. Much, much better HCI. Screw wearable PC's, bring
on the implants. Now with this kind of information density, it's actually
worthwhile. It would be nice to be able to remember everything I ever said, or
was said to me. If nothing else, it would be a great help when I get into an
argument with my wife. A little further down the line, and you'll be able to
remember everything you ever saw.
And for all those out there who think we're going to evolve into a race of cyborgs:
you're crazy... it'll go MUCH further than that.
After all, once people have got decent hardware implanted in their heads, do you
think we're going to be satisfied with a 200baud connection (human speech).
No, we'll use the hardware in our heads to communicate with other people (through
the hardware in their heads). With sufficient communication, it stops making sense
to talk about multiple communicating processors - you end up with a single, massively
parallel computer. We will become the Borg, but not in a bad way. If you combine the
properties of humans and computers and end up with something which does not have the
best of both.. then you haven't done it right. The internet will evolve from being
a global suppository of all human knowledge into actually being humanity. We will be the
nodes on the network. It won't take long either. Just 150 years or so at this rate.
Of course, this is bound to cause a little friction during the transitional period.
Some people will doubtless object, and probably consider the end of humanity
as we know it to be a bad thing. I don't think the induhviduals (as Dogbert would have it)
will stand much of a chance though, they'll be seriously out-smarted and the
reliance which regular humanity places on computers will make them pathetically
unable to fight against those who have plugged in. The HumaNet might have to
annihilate them to protect itself. It's a bit like the old chestnut of being trapped
in a room with a potential madman - you best kill him first in case he's thinking
the same thing that you are. The HumaNet and humanity will essentially be different
species so the potential for distrust and misunderstanding is high.
Personally I hope that won't be necessary. The HumaNet will probably be smart
enough to protect itself without resorting to annihilation even if humanity tries to destroy it.
The HumaNet will take pleasure in letting some loose humans roam free - in the same way
that we like to think of Apes still living wild and free in the jungle.
Sorry guys, I seem to be losing it.
I wonder how many MP3s you can get on that thing...
You can avoid reading all the other comments, here is a summary:
Cool, I want one
How many MP3s ?
First comment
But how long to fsck ?
But does it run Linux ?
What about beowulf
No, that only removes java from the current directory. My command removes any java source from the entire system :-)
I should probably add use rm -f though.
You have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion to that which I would draw. If physical resources could be replicated freely then the main argument supporting IP dissappears.
The whole notion of intellectual property is a social construct.
However, this does not necessarily make it a bad thing.
The whole notion of standard property is a social construct -
there are many societies that do not have any real notion of property.
It is even more common to find societies for whom the concept of land ownership
is unknown. They are not being dense, it's just that for hunter gatherer based
societies, the concept of land ownership is not terribly useful.
We are so used to the idea of property that it is easy to forget that it is
a social convention. There is nothing inherently natural about the concept, and
we need police, locks, walls and fences to enforce it. The notion of property
is so deeply engrained in our society that many other unquestioned social
constructs are built on top of it: eg money.
You and I are both feel pretty comfortable with the concept of material property
and agree that it is useful. Obviously "Intellectual Property" is also a social
concept. As RMS is fond of pointing out, the very term "IP" is biased since it
implies that the concept of IP is as natural and necessary as the concept of
material property. Many special interest groups (eg RIAA) would
like to halt the debate there:
"IP is just like regular property, we all agree that property is necessary
for society, so ownership of information is necessary and good."
Except we all know there is a difference: when information passes
from one A to B, A still has the information. Should we treat ownership
of information and material in the same way ? Probably not, and its an
important question.
The only valid justification for social constructs are that they benefit society.
If the construct is not beneficial, it should be discarded. For instance,
land ownership provides an incentive for the owner to extract the maximum
long term benefit from the land. Land is better managed when it is owned
by someone so it benefits society as a whole for land to privately owned.
Two hundred years ago, society was based upon agriculture. Real wealth
meant ownership of land. One hundred years ago, society was based upon industry,
real wealth meant owning what Marx called "the means of production", ie factories.
Today we live in the information age, real wealth means owning information.
It is necessary to clarify what is meant by ownership of information.
There are really two forms of information ownership today.
One is accessibility. If you can freely access a piece of information
then in some sense, you own it. The internet has made us all much "richer".
The other form of ownership is the IP sense of ownership. That is, not only
can you access the information, but you have power over what other people
can do with the information. For instance, you can sell others access, but retain
sole rights to pass on the information.
The IP form of information ownership is a social construct. It is only
possible because we have laws that enforce it. Are those laws a good idea ?
Personally, I'm not sure. Some IP laws are certainly flawed (US software patents ???)
while some are probably beneficial.
It's pointless to argue for IP on the grounds that IP is just like material
property - its not.
It's also pointless to argue against IP on the grounds that IP is a social
construct - yes it is, but so is just about everything else.
AFAIK the argments for and against can be summarised as:
FOR: Without IP there would be less incentive for information creators.
AGAINST: IP laws make everybody poorer because information that is
freely passed around becomes available to everyone.
Both of those arguments can be expanded upon endlessly. I've got no
idea which is better.
I suspect that society might be in a bit local minima at the moment.
We would be better off as a whole if information was generally shared
and freely available rather than jealously hoarded, but it's not clear
how to achieve this.
On a side note, its amusing to see opponents of IP being branded as
communist because they believe that information should be free. The
argument has got virtually nothing to do with left/right wing.
The notion that there should be restrictions on copying of
information is a form of protectionism. The arguments to justify IP
ie "protect the creators" seem more socialist to me than the anti-IP
arguments (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that).
Jon, this virtual property thing is interesting, but it's only surprising if you have forgotten that money is a virtual concept anyway. Whenever someone trades a new abstraction some slow witted people will be astounded ("people will never swap real food for paper money, bring back the gold standard...").
Money is traded for scarce items, when resources are limitless then value becomes limitless anyway. The scarcity in virtual property is completely contrived, minor changes to the software could multiply the available amount of property 1000000x causing the value to dissappear. The importance of this can be exaggerated though - artifical scarcity is commonplace in finance - eg diamond prices would collapse if DeBeers did not maintain artifical scarcity.
does anyone have a fix for this ?
Agreed, its the main thing missing from Linux dev tools IMHO. I've been asking them to port for a long time, but they need more requests.
And for those who suggest Java, hahahaha. Check out the jdk bug lists on image manipulation memory leaks with java if you really believe that Java will solve all your problems.
I don't see what's so amazing about this. BTW Jon, the standard term is Intellectual Property although Virtual Property sounds more exciting. The "property" part is debatable too, but that's another story...
Property, money, IP.. they are all social constructions anyway. We're more used to some than others, and some have more dubious justifications. When paper money was introduced people were amazed that someone would be prepared to swap real food for paper money. The amazing thing is not so much that people pay money for virtual property, but that people even think of money as a concrete entity.
Not a bad article, balanced, researched, etc, but how do you certify a field which changes so quickly ? By the time anybody has set up a reasonable professional board and exam for a particular skill, the skill would be redundant. Only the lowest common denominator skills (eg write a quicksort routine) could possibly be tested.
Professional qualifications have very little to do with protecting the public, and are much more designed to protect the profession. Professions which change slowly (eg medicine, civil engineering etc) can get away with it and justify themselves by pretending to protect the public while simply placing a nice bar to entry to maintain nice fat fees. Do you really think the American medical association wants to force you to get a prescription before you buy vitamins in order to "protect the consumer".
In some ways it sounds wonderful though. Imagine being able to say to a manager - "no, we cannot release this software for another 6 months, your opinion is irrelevent since I am the certified computer professional here". However, its just a fantasy, it flat won't work for IT and if the government tried to legislate it they would do such a crap job that it would be worse than useless. You would be forced to learn redundant skills so less competent people than yourself could judge you according to their standards.
Not a badly written article, quite balanced etc.
But...
some experts
say it is not clear that
certification would have
prevented the year 2000
problem.
Give me a fscking break. Have you actually tried running it or do you just believe every piece of propoganda you hear. I have been using java on and off for 4 years (hey Swing/AWT IS better than MFC, but thats about it) The design of Swing is fine, but the actual implementation is SHIT - try reading the bug list on JDC, look at the actual source code if you like - or even better actually try to produce a significant commerical quality working application with Java and maintain your sanity. It's not impossible, it's just very very difficult and it takes YEARS to learn the workarounds to all the bugs. Try printing from java at anything other than 70 dpi, explain to me the appropriate times to call update(), invalidate(), repaint(), paint(), and then tell me which Swing components work as intended and which ones require you to invalidate() the parent container explicitly.
Java - how to turn a Xeon into a 386. Server side java is worthwhile, but as an environment for writing industrial strength client applications it SUCKS. It is much slower, less reliable, and less expressive (ie it takes 500 lines of java to do the equivalent of 50 lines of STL intensive C++ - try writing something like blitz - http://monet.uwaterloo.ca/blitz/ in java...)
However the main problem is that the system libraries (AWT/Swing especially) are just not reliable. I really think MS has better programmers than Sun.
As for C/C++ being outdated - well I might believe it when I see one decent application written in Java.
So bullets and guns should be expensive.
Personally I think getting rid of guns in US, though probably desirable would be virtually impossible politically. However, taxing the fuck out of them so that you had to be rich to own one (and therefore less likely to kill someone for the sake of a few cigarettes*) would probably be politically feasible and would solve most the problems.
*Once when I lived in the California the neighbourhood 7-11 was robbed for cigarettes and 2 staff got shot - I reckon if you're so poor you kill people for cigarettes then you shoudn't be able to afford a gun.
Jove is an optimizing native compiler for java. Except I don't think they're actually selling it yet.
www.instantiations.com/javaspeed/jovereport.htm
Yeah, I do know about pizza and JGL. Attempting to do STL without templates just doesn't work too well. If someone wrote a version of stl for pizza though, that would take away a lot of my antagonism towards java. Maybe if I get some spare time...
QT does seem pretty good. I don't think gtk-- is ready for prime time yet, and if you need the option of deploying on win32... On the other hand, I really don't like the fact that the code has to go through a pre-processor in QT, you're not really using C++ - I cannot believe this is necessary. Does anybody know if they fixed this in QT2.0 ?
You should definitely take a look at a fast, high quality, cross platform, toolkit. It's not very rich in widgets, but you can write your own, and it comes with a deceptively powerful GUI builder.
Cool, I sent their customer service dept email asking for this a while back, I should now be able to ditch the bitch (NT) at the client's site.
I use JBuilder2 all the time, its got good visual-edit/code-edit integration but has crappy performance/reliability at times. I'm pretty sure that this is because JBuilder2 itself was mostly written in Java. Does anybody know if the JB3 will come with the JOVE technology on Linux. That would be cool, maybe the speed will become bareable.
Apologies for being off topic, and a bit troll-like, but I can't pass up this opportunity to bitch about Java. What a flaky, slow, confused, badly documented piece of shit. It's not the language that's the main problem - it's the system libraries (awt/swing/etc). They seem to written without a thought for speed/efficiency and are often broken in arbitrary ways. AWT/Swing with new event model has a great design, but crummy implementation. The alternative was MFC(euch), I'm still glad we went with Java, but I wish I had known about fltk a year ago.
If I see one more fucking student thesis repeating Sun's propoganda wrt C++/java comparison I will scream. When I work in java I miss STL so badly - it takes 500 lines of java to do 50 lines of STL based C++, and the C++ will be much faster and more reliable (compile-time v. run-time errors). It's easier to write truly abysmal code with C++ than with java, and there are hundreds of pitfalls in C++ but you can make the same argument about pascal compared to C - power requires responsibility. Java and pascal are great languages for beginners, but experienced developers prefer to work without training wheels.
Yes, you're right about the "don't understand effects" argument slowing progress, but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong. I'm usually in favour of virtually any kind of scientific progress. For instance I have no problem with genetically engineering children so they come out smarter and better looking. I have no problem with people implanting chips in their brain to improve memory etc. I am not worried about these things because the effects are largely predicatable and mostly restricted to those involved.
However, I do take exception to companies farting about with stuff they plainly don't understand for no better motivation than to make a quick buck when there is a non-negligable chance that they will completely alter the course of evolution on the planet. I take exception to them spending large sums on political campaigns in order to force GM foods down everybodies throats (as it were). Various initiatives from GM industry are trying to:
1 prevent people even being told whether food is GM or not.
2 impose trade sanctions against countries that don't want it.
3 eliminate restrictions, controls and monitoring efforts.
Maybe that makes me anti-science, but the fact remains I don't trust these companies to fully evaluate the dangers inherent in what they are doing or to have our best interests at heart. When one of the most respected scientists in the field comes out and says that this stuff is dangerous then it seems reasonable to pay some attention.
I am very familiar with genetic algorithms, and for many tasks they are not particuarly effective. Why the hell do you think companies are bothering with GM foods in the first place. They ARE producing plants/animals which are "fitter" than the ones produced by evolution.
Let me put it another way. The parameters for natural evolution (particuarly the mutation operator) are not at all optimized. Natural evolution occurs within a very limited set of gene sequences. If you take a pre-optimized solution to a particular problem and add it to an existing GA then you can make huge improvements.
It may well be unlikely that they will produce anything tremendously dangerous, but it isn't like the Shakesperian monkeys. These aren't random combinations but the calculated addition of highly effective solutions from different spheres. For instance, one of things they are doing is combining plant and animal DNA. Plants have far more DNA than animals, there are likely to be some pretty effective strands in there.