It always strikes me as ironic when those who criticise copyright law are described as anti-Capitalist, in fact, the opposite is true. True Capitalists despise government intervention, yet IP law is pure government intervention.
Those within these corporations remind me of school bullies who tease anyone who dares to tell their parents, yet as soon as their classmates gang up on them they are the first to go crying to mommy.
If the people of Anniston simply stopped buying products from Monsanto, then they could use their "market forces" to stop this kind of activity.
You have just perfectly demonstrated the flaw in this kind of reasoning. The people of Anniston have no market force, it is a small town that nobody cares about and probably constitutes less than 0.001% of Monsanto's market (most likely, 0%).
And this perfectly demonstrates the flaw with your "Libertarian" philosophy, they assume that those hurt by something will have the market power to prevent it, but often those hurt by pollution and other products of the quest for profit aren't even born yet and therefore have no market power.
Don't trust the market, it doesn't care about you!
Re:Arithmetic? [was Re:Congrats to the Brits]
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
Are you saying that weak currencies are good?
No, I am saying that a disparity between currency values is bad. Of course the UK doesn't export much to Europe right now because of exactly the problem I am describing. Don't you think that it is better to export to countries closer to you, rather than those further away? So why can't the UK? Yes, you guessed it, because Sterling is overvalued against the Euro.
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
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· Score: 3, Troll
Like theyd did in 1940 ??
Yeah, you know, now I see the light. Hitler's suicide was a hoax, he actually went underground where he started to work on his plan to take over Europe - and on the 1st of January 2002, the result of Hitler's planning, the Euro, is unleashed upon the world, but yet again, those trusty Brits (aided by the Danes and the Swedes) resist the Nazi hoardes leaving them free to do whatever Bush tells them to do.
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The new anti-counterfeit measures contained in the Euro. This may seem like a good thing, but the larger Euro demoniations contain coils electromagnetically charged to a certain serial number. This can thus be tracked, and as much as consumers are worried about their privacy, merchants are worried about ours in respect to competitors.
Er no they don't, didn't you see the article here just a few days ago about how they were considering doing this, but didn't expect to see it before 2006?
The attitude here in London is mostly anti-Euro, as Brits object to this new prospect of a continental government.
Speak for yourself, there are many in the UK who are pro-Euro.
We've been independent for this long, and under no means do we want to be governed by someone higher than the Parliament
Such as, um, the WTO? Or perhaps the US government who seems to be making the decisions about how the UK uses its military these days?
This is such a short sighted view point. Only through cooperation can European countries have a say in world affairs, the UK, a country of about 60 million people, will be ignored in the face of trading blocks of 300 million people and upwards.
Sooner or later, the UK will come crawling into the Euro with its tail between its legs, and feeling rather stupid.
Yeah, well done Britain, who now can't export anything as their currency is overvalued against the Euro, and who will probably end up using the Euro whether they like it or not, despite having no control over it.
Yours is quite a narrow definition of Genetic Algorithms, the bitstring representation is just one popular option. I would say that Genetic Programming is a subset of the field of Genetic Algorithms.
I did my degree in artificial intelligence at Edinburgh University, and yes, the AI department does use a GA for this.
Interestingly, one of the reasons more people don't is that there are often criteria that need to be taken into account which people would rather not state explicitly (which they would need to do for a GA), such as the fact that more senior lecturers don't like supervising exams early in the morning.
More of a social than a technical problem I suppose.
It is funny you should mention this, because a few years ago I wrote a simple piece of software which attempted to evolve a regular expression (actually, it was a subset of the standard R.E language) that could filter spam. It never really got far beyond being a toy, although I did give the code to the Jazilla project, not sure if they did anything with it though...
Evolution could very well be the correct term, at a light speed rate of course. Could this be the first step into determining or simulating where the source of life came from, or could this lead to the destruction of it? (insert your favorite Sci-Fi scenario here)
Is it just me, or does this pseudo-scientific babble actually make any sense to anyone?
Genetic Algorithms, and the subset of the field called Genetic Programming has been around for a while, and there is some really amazing stuff out there. For example, Tierra is an artificial ecosystem in which computer programs evolve and compete with each-other, it has been around for over 10 years.
The curious thing is that despite GAs being widely researched for over 20 years, they seem to have found few practical applications that I am aware of. It is tempting to blame this on lack of computing power, but I am not sure that is the real reason. Either way, the possibility of automated design is very exciting indeed and I hope more people find ways to apply it in the real world.
Assuming you are not, you must see that if people were forced to attach their social security number to whatever information they distributed over Freenet (to make them "accountable") then it would be pointless. The authors of the Federalist Papers did so anonymously, because if they had been forced to use their own names their heads would promptly have been removed by the English king.
When you are a free-thinker living under an oppressive government, signing everything you write with your own name is essentially signing your death warrent. Free speech requires anonymous speech.
Freenet has been taking donations for a while, and has already used some of these funds to hire two developers to work full-time on the project for two months each (for less money than they could earn at Starbucks). The project is nearing its next major release, 0.5, and could really use your help financially to allow more developers to devote more of their time to the project.
I'm getting pissed off with people attacking Kevin Warwick. Yes, even those who know him affectionately refer to him as 'Mad' Kevin. But it's not like he's attacked anyone, has exibited aggressive behaviour in public, or has really done anything to deserve such harsh criticism. (Such as, oh, Derek Smart.)
People are not attacking him because he has exhibited aggressive behavior, but because he makes wild and unsubstantiated self-serving claims thus discrediting everyone else in his field of study.
Yes, some of his ideas are bit outlandish.
The problem is that his ideas are only outlandish in the sense that he presents them as new or innovative, when they are not. For example, what is so innovative about implanting a device in his arm that people have been implanting in dogs for quite a while? The only value of such a thing is to get him more exposure in the popular press, it certainly does not have any scientific value.
The field of cybernetics needs evangelists to attract attention and to help it to grow.
Perhaps, but not evangelists who misrepresent their own achievements, and make unsubstantiated claims of the type Warwick does. Such "evangelism" only serves to devalue the field's standing when it fails to realise the expectations created by such claims.
it's merely a matter of when the technology will catch up to his ideas, as is the case with 90% of science-fiction.
And many of his ideas are indeed from science fiction. Fiction written by other people but presented as his own creations by Warwick.
Although, no, I don't eventually think that robots will enslave humans - but I still think we need to think about such things.
Perhaps we should think about such things, but that doesn't justify misrepresenting the liklihood of it happening anytime soon as Warwick did in his book "March of the Machines".
Nobody knows what pace progress will take. Cybernetics is an artificial science just like computer science - the limit is effectively the limits of our imagination and how long our species exists to dream.
Unfortunately Warwick's imagination only seems to extend to how he can appropriate and misrepresent other people's ideas as his own to further his quest for publicity.
Past lecturers include the world renowed cybernetics engineer, Prof. Kevin Warwick.
*Snigger*
You clearly don't read The Register. Warwick is a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community, regarded by most as little more than a publicity hound. He used to go around saying that we would all be human slaves in a robot nation by the year 2000. At the time he came to my university to debate some of the professors in our Artificial Intelligence department, and they mopped the floor with him.
Having milked the world of Artificial Intelligence for all the publicity it was worth, he then installed one of those chips they use for tracking dogs in his arm and started claiming that he was the first Cyborg...
Do a search for "Captain Cyborg" at The Register to learn more about this guy, he gives science a bad name.
180 Kbyte/second data transfer rate per T1 x 3600 seconds/hour x 24 hours/day x 30.5 days/month = 452 gigabytes/month. So, they need a T1 for every 452 gigabytes of data their customers try to download each month.
A T1 is about $700/month.
So, ballpark figure, it costs them $1.55 for every gigabyte of data their customers download.
Any ISP with significant throughput who pays that is an idiot. You can get the cost down to about $0.25 per GB if you buy in bulk, and the cost of bandwidth is falling fast.
They cut the rate being charged to consumers by 33 percent.
And that is the only good thing they did, personally I would rather have a proper Internet connection and reasonable service charges than save a few dollars every month.
Why do you NEED a VPN for private use?
Why should you not limit bandwidth...if you don't want to have a limit, go get a buisness line...
The ISP can do what they want, their customers will vote with their feet.
All in all I agree w/ the engineer. Ppl are stupid and use up too much bandwidth. Until the 'public' pays for the backbone lines I do not see why we should be complaining.
There is no issue with backbone lines, there is more unlit backbone fiber than people know what to do with in the US right now.
Yes we pay Sprint and blah blah blah so the lines are ours...but no their not. Sprint owns them...not an public organization...
In many cases these companies use public resources, or were granted monopolies by governments.
Get your foot out of your mouth and start thinking, instead of whining.
I am not whining, I am merely pointing out that the glib assumption that ISPs can push their customers around will soon be tested as customers become better educated.
Congratulations on screwing some more money out of your customers by quietly degrading the service they are paying you for.
With any luck, however, people will soon get wise to this. You might find that you can take advantage of uneducated consumers in the short term, but in the longer term expect people to start caring whether their ISP is crippling their Internet access.
Remember that much of the motivation for people to spend the extra money on broadband is created by P2P file-sharing applications. It will only be a matter of time before ISPs which haven't opted to cripple their user's Internet access will start to educate consumers about these issues.
By your reasoning virtually everything is "sound" since if it doesn't meet people's needs, it can be extended to do so.
If Unix security was so sound then why is it so easy for me to write a virus, put it in a.deb or an.rpm, and gain control over someone's computer? The only thing which makes Unix appear more secure is the relative lack of insecure applications such as MS Outlook, and the relative disinterest virus writers seem to have in writing Unix viruses.
Of course, anything is possible with the right extension, ACL isn't included as standard with any Unix AFAIK and certainly isn't a standard part of Linux. If standard Unix security was truly a "fundamentally sound design" then surely it wouldn't require extensions to perform such a simple task?
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Those within these corporations remind me of school bullies who tease anyone who dares to tell their parents, yet as soon as their classmates gang up on them they are the first to go crying to mommy.
Ah, I think I have just been the victim of a troll....
And this perfectly demonstrates the flaw with your "Libertarian" philosophy, they assume that those hurt by something will have the market power to prevent it, but often those hurt by pollution and other products of the quest for profit aren't even born yet and therefore have no market power.
Don't trust the market, it doesn't care about you!
This is such a short sighted view point. Only through cooperation can European countries have a say in world affairs, the UK, a country of about 60 million people, will be ignored in the face of trading blocks of 300 million people and upwards.
Sooner or later, the UK will come crawling into the Euro with its tail between its legs, and feeling rather stupid.
Yeah, well done Britain, who now can't export anything as their currency is overvalued against the Euro, and who will probably end up using the Euro whether they like it or not, despite having no control over it.
Yours is quite a narrow definition of Genetic Algorithms, the bitstring representation is just one popular option. I would say that Genetic Programming is a subset of the field of Genetic Algorithms.
Interestingly, one of the reasons more people don't is that there are often criteria that need to be taken into account which people would rather not state explicitly (which they would need to do for a GA), such as the fact that more senior lecturers don't like supervising exams early in the morning.
More of a social than a technical problem I suppose.
It is funny you should mention this, because a few years ago I wrote a simple piece of software which attempted to evolve a regular expression (actually, it was a subset of the standard R.E language) that could filter spam. It never really got far beyond being a toy, although I did give the code to the Jazilla project, not sure if they did anything with it though...
The curious thing is that despite GAs being widely researched for over 20 years, they seem to have found few practical applications that I am aware of. It is tempting to blame this on lack of computing power, but I am not sure that is the real reason. Either way, the possibility of automated design is very exciting indeed and I hope more people find ways to apply it in the real world.
Assuming you are not, you must see that if people were forced to attach their social security number to whatever information they distributed over Freenet (to make them "accountable") then it would be pointless. The authors of the Federalist Papers did so anonymously, because if they had been forced to use their own names their heads would promptly have been removed by the English king.
When you are a free-thinker living under an oppressive government, signing everything you write with your own name is essentially signing your death warrent. Free speech requires anonymous speech.
Freenet has been taking donations for a while, and has already used some of these funds to hire two developers to work full-time on the project for two months each (for less money than they could earn at Starbucks). The project is nearing its next major release, 0.5, and could really use your help financially to allow more developers to devote more of their time to the project.
Just from reading the story posted above it seems that in-fact, Channel 4, ITV's cousin, is now broadcasting these lectures...
I have been reading it all morning.
You clearly don't read The Register. Warwick is a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community, regarded by most as little more than a publicity hound. He used to go around saying that we would all be human slaves in a robot nation by the year 2000. At the time he came to my university to debate some of the professors in our Artificial Intelligence department, and they mopped the floor with him.
Having milked the world of Artificial Intelligence for all the publicity it was worth, he then installed one of those chips they use for tracking dogs in his arm and started claiming that he was the first Cyborg...
Do a search for "Captain Cyborg" at The Register to learn more about this guy, he gives science a bad name.
With any luck, however, people will soon get wise to this. You might find that you can take advantage of uneducated consumers in the short term, but in the longer term expect people to start caring whether their ISP is crippling their Internet access.
Remember that much of the motivation for people to spend the extra money on broadband is created by P2P file-sharing applications. It will only be a matter of time before ISPs which haven't opted to cripple their user's Internet access will start to educate consumers about these issues.
[-1 Flamebait]
If Unix security was so sound then why is it so easy for me to write a virus, put it in a .deb or an .rpm, and gain control over someone's computer? The only thing which makes Unix appear more secure is the relative lack of insecure applications such as MS Outlook, and the relative disinterest virus writers seem to have in writing Unix viruses.
Of course, anything is possible with the right extension, ACL isn't included as standard with any Unix AFAIK and certainly isn't a standard part of Linux. If standard Unix security was truly a "fundamentally sound design" then surely it wouldn't require extensions to perform such a simple task?