When I first heard about DRM it was in conjecture with entertainment products and how DRM reduce our fair use of them, which made me biased against it as a "evil" technology but recently I was thinking about it from the point of view of an OS designer targeting the military.
If you can design a system such that some people are allowed to read it but not to transmit it (well, they can always find a way to transmit it but it would be encrypted well enough to have the same effect) it goes a long way toward making sure that it doesn't leak to the enemy. Same thing with a leaked memo or e-mail (only the degree of importance is different). Of course, a spy could always photograph it or similar (copy it if it is text...) but it raise the level of difficulty for copying it.
Evidently, such a system is a form of DRM and a good one - you don't want all your military secrets to fall into enemy hands do you? And as soon as you can imagine one application that is a positive use with no or limited negative side effects you transform what was seen as a bad/evil idea as simply the tool that can be used for good or for evil that it really is.
I still think DRM is bad because the overwhelming majority of uses for it that directly affect us are detrimental to us but I don't see DRM as inherently bad anymore.
"With TTT out today, I'm surprised that every other Tolkien fan on/. hasn't touched on this yet."
That's because we were too busy watching the extended edition (about 3 hours and 10 minutes), empty our bowels (stay for three hours in the same spot, occasionally drinking a bit and you will understand) and then go to the cinema to see TTT (about 3 more hours).
Not only have the Americans bee nto the moon, but they also made us believe that the Apollo program was cancelled to make us feel it was worthless to go there. That way they can continue the construction of their military space station* on the dark side of the moon.
*Why did you think NASA cuts budget for ISS? They don't want to spend too much money to help a toy project that may compete with their military space base but they couldn't refuse to participate, so they went in and tried to sabotage the project from inside, making it look like the incompetence that they have been faking since the 70's**. They even bribed the Russian space agency, now that they also are capitalist pigs, so that people wouldn't put all the blame on them.
**Why do you think that so many Mars missions failed in the last few decades? It's because they wanted to get ultra secret gear there and if people believe that what they sent there was destroyed it won't be suspicious like if they had sent something without a cover story and every astronomer would have asked what it was.
Note: It's supposed to be funny but it's 5.20 AM, I didn't sleep yet and I'm French, so if it isn't funny I got some excuses, so give me a break, okay?
The first step, undoubtedly, what I meant is that even today there are human judges that confuse some human for computers but rereading the sentence it seems that there isn't any problem given that human judges do the same mistake sometimes.
Still, it would be better to reduce false positives, given that it means that the judging program doesn't make a good enough distinction between a human and a computer and that it therefore can be improved upon.
Maybe another view to the problem is to create two programs:
One that can discriminate a set of input as coming from a machine without discrimating any human input in such a way. Discriminating a human input is a bug and failing to discriminate a machine input as such is also a bug. You modify your program until it doesn't have any bugs (that is, forever).
The other is a classic AI program who must try to fool hte first program. It is bugged as long as it cannot do so.
Of course it means that a program considered bugless at one point can become bugged if a better opposing program appears.
The whole point is to create an arms race that allow incremental development. After all, it seems to work pretty well for protection/cracking, anti-cheaters/cheaters in online games,...
Having an AI pitted against a reasonably intelligent and knowledgeable human seems unfair, given that he is going to be way smarter than the AI for a long while to come, whereas the anti-AI program is going to be on a similar level of intelligence as the AI (both originate from a similar level of technological development).
It's like the difference between climbing a cliff and walking up a hill. The difference of altitude may be the same but one is way more dificult than the other and just because you have more distance to travel to go up the hill doesn't mean that you will get there slower (because you can run).
I hope this makes sence because it's 2:40 AM here in the UK and some sleep could do me good quite soon.
I think that that poll was indeed representative of the best graduate school in CS, after all, MIT won while coming in one day after CMU, thus proving that their bot was better and, by extension, that the product of their CS courses were better CS engineers than those at CMU.
And let's not talk of all these other CS schools who weren't even able to put a bot together to compete.
I don't know why it was modded as funny instead of insightful but whatever.
This is exactly the idea I suggested to my AI teacher as being probably a more rational step between current days AI and a hard AI.
Think about it, most (all?) current AI are very easy to spot by humans because they use some formulaes and the input form the last two or three sentences. If we could make a program to detect this then you could test your AI against it, without having to set up a blind test where the guy testing the AI wouldn't know if it was an AI or not (and if he knows its an AI his judgement of its quality is already biased by that knowledge).
When you get a new generations of improved AI using better tricks that the anti-AI software doesn't recognise you have to adapt/rewrite it, so you can use it for testing the AI.
Goto start.
IMO the biggest problem would be false positives, when the program takes (stupid?) humans for AI.
No problem, I read your first post and was going to apologize and try to explain, but then I saw your second post so everything is ok.
" I promise you, though, if you follow the same steps I did you'll get the same result."
I don't intend to check, I don't really care anyway. It's just that when I saw the URL I thought about it as a clever troll (sorry) as some people post links with referrers to make a few cents but this one would have been much better because of the context (as explained in the first post) but then, while rereading the post while writing mine (yeah, I actually read posts I respond to a few times, English being my second _foreign_ langage (make that the third I learned including mother my tongue)) I saw it in a different light due to the fact that the URL wasn't concealed but in plain view, and then saw it as a rather good joke (again, assuming htat there was a referrer link there, which there wasn't).
Anyway, no bad feelings I hope, because there are none here.
If so, quite clever, saying that you have $20 to put in this stunt knowing that if the link gets slashdotted by people buying this book for Ralsky you will get a little bit of money from each, thus making more than the $20 that you won't shell out anyway.
Oh well, given that you put the whole link visible in the post I suppose I will take it as a rather good joke.
Menace the average modern American with anything halfway alarming -- terrorism, crime or any other of today's various boogeymen -- and in place of their forebearers' bravery, idealism and resolve, they will show cowardice, surrender and an astounding aptitude for cognative dissonence.
And all that because of, what? 10-20 terrorists? Atleast it took a whole army to get France to surrender.
Time to plant some trees on the boulevard leading to the White House for Osama's arrival;).
Yeah, but on average, counting all the computers for which Windows is sold twice (once for retail the second for a company site license) or once too much (used with Linux), it's not a few geeks installing Windows on machines preinstalled with Linux that's gonna make a difference.
Now, if Walmart start selling 10 or 100 times more Lindows PC's and everybody does that, I may change my mind, but a few thousand computers a month (if everybody did that) won't change much.
Yeah, but like I heard on TV about models the other day "They are like a sports car, most people can't afford them but wouldn't mind having a free ride".
Don't read further if you haven't read the book yet, go read it because it's good. Basically The End of Eternity ties up with the rest by using an alternate timeline, its not part of the plot but at the end of the story like a wink for his fans. Here is a reminder of how it links with the Robot/Empire/Fundation series:
In the timeline of the book the A-bomb wasn't discovered in the 20th century and space travel thus didn't occur, Eternity occured instead and once Humanity attained it (when they can't change time) they found a galaxy filled with other lifeforms, with no uncolonised planets for Humans to expand, thus leading to stagnation, decay and death for Humanity.
At the end of the book, an anonymous letter is sent to Fermi (the RL physicist) that helps him form his theories and leads to the discoveries of the bomb, thus leading to space travel (because of the cold war space race maybe? I don't remember and maybe it was written before that?) 70 000 years or so and giving the opportuniy of the Robot/Spacers Universe (which will lead to the Empire stories and then to the Foundation).
"I wished I'd worn a tie so I could strangle myself."
I'll be nice and warn you that there is a third movie going out christmas 2003, so you know what to do with the ties you are going to receive this christmas.
Brilliant, I love it and it is now in my citation file.
Just to be sure to attribute it properly, is it yours or did you find it somewhere else? The way you wrote it indicates that it is yours and so I have credited it as such, but it is so well written IMHO that I wonder if it is.
HEADLINE: Amsterdam's sex industry soon to be no more.
In a new survey studying the routes and streets used by Amsterdam inhabitants conducted over two months by the "waag society" a startling result is to be found: Less than five people are using the streets of the infamous "red light district". Following that discovery to its conclusion it is logical to predict the demise of the Amsterdam sex industry. Following the spread of this news, all the small entrepreneurs and owners of SME in the disctrict have formed an union to promote their wares and plan to combine forces to present the buyers with new incentives and and discounts like "buy one, get one free".
On the other hand, religious leaders around the world have rejoiced at the high moral Amsterdam inhabitants have chosen to follow despite the temptation, with the exception of his Holiness the Pope John Paul II who was heard muttering under his breath "damn, where will I go for my cardiovascular exercise now?" while the founder of the Church of Satan, Mr Anton Szandor LaVey, was found on the site of the tragedy where he issued a communique in which he deplored the current situation in Amsterdam and encouraged Amsterdams denizens of all sex to provide for the needy that may be left after the demise of this glorious industry by "taking a whore in your home and in your bed", and, "for the more evil of us blessed by your Dark Lord with pots of cash, to provide for the young, it is never too early to start a good education". He also encouraged those that do not have enough money to do so to "provide to the needs of the poor sod^H^H^Hconsumers who will suffer from the destruction of such a wonderful industry".
Ok, it didn't come ot as funny as I hoped but its 22:00 and my funny bone is already asleep, so bugger.
I can understand to have a duplicate here and there, or to have a story posted a few days after it was first posted, nobody is perfect, but posting a dupe with only two stories in between the original and the dupe, what are the editors thinking???
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't surprise me.
When I first heard about DRM it was in conjecture with entertainment products and how DRM reduce our fair use of them, which made me biased against it as a "evil" technology but recently I was thinking about it from the point of view of an OS designer targeting the military.
If you can design a system such that some people are allowed to read it but not to transmit it (well, they can always find a way to transmit it but it would be encrypted well enough to have the same effect) it goes a long way toward making sure that it doesn't leak to the enemy. Same thing with a leaked memo or e-mail (only the degree of importance is different). Of course, a spy could always photograph it or similar (copy it if it is text...) but it raise the level of difficulty for copying it.
Evidently, such a system is a form of DRM and a good one - you don't want all your military secrets to fall into enemy hands do you? And as soon as you can imagine one application that is a positive use with no or limited negative side effects you transform what was seen as a bad/evil idea as simply the tool that can be used for good or for evil that it really is.
I still think DRM is bad because the overwhelming majority of uses for it that directly affect us are detrimental to us but I don't see DRM as inherently bad anymore.
"With TTT out today, I'm surprised that every other Tolkien fan on /. hasn't touched on this yet."
That's because we were too busy watching the extended edition (about 3 hours and 10 minutes), empty our bowels (stay for three hours in the same spot, occasionally drinking a bit and you will understand) and then go to the cinema to see TTT (about 3 more hours).
Thanks for the info.
You got it wrong!
Not only have the Americans bee nto the moon, but they also made us believe that the Apollo program was cancelled to make us feel it was worthless to go there. That way they can continue the construction of their military space station* on the dark side of the moon.
*Why did you think NASA cuts budget for ISS? They don't want to spend too much money to help a toy project that may compete with their military space base but they couldn't refuse to participate, so they went in and tried to sabotage the project from inside, making it look like the incompetence that they have been faking since the 70's**. They even bribed the Russian space agency, now that they also are capitalist pigs, so that people wouldn't put all the blame on them.
**Why do you think that so many Mars missions failed in the last few decades? It's because they wanted to get ultra secret gear there and if people believe that what they sent there was destroyed it won't be suspicious like if they had sent something without a cover story and every astronomer would have asked what it was.
Note: It's supposed to be funny but it's 5.20 AM, I didn't sleep yet and I'm French, so if it isn't funny I got some excuses, so give me a break, okay?
The first step, undoubtedly, what I meant is that even today there are human judges that confuse some human for computers but rereading the sentence it seems that there isn't any problem given that human judges do the same mistake sometimes.
Still, it would be better to reduce false positives, given that it means that the judging program doesn't make a good enough distinction between a human and a computer and that it therefore can be improved upon.
Maybe another view to the problem is to create two programs:
One that can discriminate a set of input as coming from a machine without discrimating any human input in such a way. Discriminating a human input is a bug and failing to discriminate a machine input as such is also a bug. You modify your program until it doesn't have any bugs (that is, forever).
The other is a classic AI program who must try to fool hte first program. It is bugged as long as it cannot do so.
Of course it means that a program considered bugless at one point can become bugged if a better opposing program appears.
The whole point is to create an arms race that allow incremental development. After all, it seems to work pretty well for protection/cracking, anti-cheaters/cheaters in online games,...
Having an AI pitted against a reasonably intelligent and knowledgeable human seems unfair, given that he is going to be way smarter than the AI for a long while to come, whereas the anti-AI program is going to be on a similar level of intelligence as the AI (both originate from a similar level of technological development).
It's like the difference between climbing a cliff and walking up a hill. The difference of altitude may be the same but one is way more dificult than the other and just because you have more distance to travel to go up the hill doesn't mean that you will get there slower (because you can run).
I hope this makes sence because it's 2:40 AM here in the UK and some sleep could do me good quite soon.
"DS9 movies wouldn't really work unlesss they plan to resurrect Ben Sisko."
Didn't he says that he would return someday?
"Not to mention, if you are going to have an evil Piccard, the evil Piccard has to have a goatee."
It really would be more evil if he had a goatse, you know, but I guess its way too evil for Star Trek to deal with (luckily).
I think that that poll was indeed representative of the best graduate school in CS, after all, MIT won while coming in one day after CMU, thus proving that their bot was better and, by extension, that the product of their CS courses were better CS engineers than those at CMU.
And let's not talk of all these other CS schools who weren't even able to put a bot together to compete.
I don't know why it was modded as funny instead of insightful but whatever.
This is exactly the idea I suggested to my AI teacher as being probably a more rational step between current days AI and a hard AI.
Think about it, most (all?) current AI are very easy to spot by humans because they use some formulaes and the input form the last two or three sentences. If we could make a program to detect this then you could test your AI against it, without having to set up a blind test where the guy testing the AI wouldn't know if it was an AI or not (and if he knows its an AI his judgement of its quality is already biased by that knowledge).
When you get a new generations of improved AI using better tricks that the anti-AI software doesn't recognise you have to adapt/rewrite it, so you can use it for testing the AI.
Goto start.
IMO the biggest problem would be false positives, when the program takes (stupid?) humans for AI.
No problem, I read your first post and was going to apologize and try to explain, but then I saw your second post so everything is ok.
" I promise you, though, if you follow the same steps I did you'll get the same result."
I don't intend to check, I don't really care anyway. It's just that when I saw the URL I thought about it as a clever troll (sorry) as some people post links with referrers to make a few cents but this one would have been much better because of the context (as explained in the first post) but then, while rereading the post while writing mine (yeah, I actually read posts I respond to a few times, English being my second _foreign_ langage (make that the third I learned including mother my tongue)) I saw it in a different light due to the fact that the URL wasn't concealed but in plain view, and then saw it as a rather good joke (again, assuming htat there was a referrer link there, which there wasn't).
Anyway, no bad feelings I hope, because there are none here.
Isn't that ref=sr... a referrer link on Amazon?
If so, quite clever, saying that you have $20 to put in this stunt knowing that if the link gets slashdotted by people buying this book for Ralsky you will get a little bit of money from each, thus making more than the $20 that you won't shell out anyway.
Oh well, given that you put the whole link visible in the post I suppose I will take it as a rather good joke.
Menace the average modern American with anything halfway alarming -- terrorism, crime or any other of today's various boogeymen -- and in place of their forebearers' bravery, idealism and resolve, they will show cowardice, surrender and an astounding aptitude for cognative dissonence.
;).
And all that because of, what? 10-20 terrorists? Atleast it took a whole army to get France to surrender.
Time to plant some trees on the boulevard leading to the White House for Osama's arrival
Yeah, but on average, counting all the computers for which Windows is sold twice (once for retail the second for a company site license) or once too much (used with Linux), it's not a few geeks installing Windows on machines preinstalled with Linux that's gonna make a difference.
Now, if Walmart start selling 10 or 100 times more Lindows PC's and everybody does that, I may change my mind, but a few thousand computers a month (if everybody did that) won't change much.
"it's [Lindows] just an attempt to provide a *very badly designed* system that looks as closely as possible to Windows."
Yeah, but so is Windows, a very badly designed system that looks *exactly* like Windows.
"and sometimes men wear socks."
Given that it is the natural state for many men to wear socks during sex I wouldn't read too much in that.
"But what makes my "bullshit" meter go off is whether there is that much water in the air in the first place"
This is England we are talking about, the answer is obvious.
Yeah, but like I heard on TV about models the other day "They are like a sports car, most people can't afford them but wouldn't mind having a free ride".
Yeah, but you didn't say what everybody wants to know:
DID YOU GET THE F*CKING GIRL!!!
Don't read further if you haven't read the book yet, go read it because it's good. Basically The End of Eternity ties up with the rest by using an alternate timeline, its not part of the plot but at the end of the story like a wink for his fans. Here is a reminder of how it links with the Robot/Empire/Fundation series:
In the timeline of the book the A-bomb wasn't discovered in the 20th century and space travel thus didn't occur, Eternity occured instead and once Humanity attained it (when they can't change time) they found a galaxy filled with other lifeforms, with no uncolonised planets for Humans to expand, thus leading to stagnation, decay and death for Humanity.
At the end of the book, an anonymous letter is sent to Fermi (the RL physicist) that helps him form his theories and leads to the discoveries of the bomb, thus leading to space travel (because of the cold war space race maybe? I don't remember and maybe it was written before that?) 70 000 years or so and giving the opportuniy of the Robot/Spacers Universe (which will lead to the Empire stories and then to the Foundation).
And the real names of Merry and Pippin are R2D2 and C3PO.
"I wished I'd worn a tie so I could strangle myself."
I'll be nice and warn you that there is a third movie going out christmas 2003, so you know what to do with the ties you are going to receive this christmas.
"Or wait, should they be The Silmarillion Episodes III, IV and V
Or maybe..."
Or maybe we should take in account all the "lost tales" and other unfinished stories and rename FOTR such:
"The Silmarillion: Episode XXXIV: The Lord of The Ring: The Fellowship of The Ring"
and rename TTT:
"The Silmarillion: Episode XXXV: The Lord of The Ring: The Two Towers".
Brilliant, I love it and it is now in my citation file.
Just to be sure to attribute it properly, is it yours or did you find it somewhere else? The way you wrote it indicates that it is yours and so I have credited it as such, but it is so well written IMHO that I wonder if it is.
HEADLINE: Amsterdam's sex industry soon to be no more.
In a new survey studying the routes and streets used by Amsterdam inhabitants conducted over two months by the "waag society" a startling result is to be found: Less than five people are using the streets of the infamous "red light district". Following that discovery to its conclusion it is logical to predict the demise of the Amsterdam sex industry. Following the spread of this news, all the small entrepreneurs and owners of SME in the disctrict have formed an union to promote their wares and plan to combine forces to present the buyers with new incentives and and discounts like "buy one, get one free".
On the other hand, religious leaders around the world have rejoiced at the high moral Amsterdam inhabitants have chosen to follow despite the temptation, with the exception of his Holiness the Pope John Paul II who was heard muttering under his breath "damn, where will I go for my cardiovascular exercise now?" while the founder of the Church of Satan, Mr Anton Szandor LaVey, was found on the site of the tragedy where he issued a communique in which he deplored the current situation in Amsterdam and encouraged Amsterdams denizens of all sex to provide for the needy that may be left after the demise of this glorious industry by "taking a whore in your home and in your bed", and, "for the more evil of us blessed by your Dark Lord with pots of cash, to provide for the young, it is never too early to start a good education". He also encouraged those that do not have enough money to do so to "provide to the needs of the poor sod^H^H^Hconsumers who will suffer from the destruction of such a wonderful industry".
Ok, it didn't come ot as funny as I hoped but its 22:00 and my funny bone is already asleep, so bugger.
I can understand to have a duplicate here and there, or to have a story posted a few days after it was first posted, nobody is perfect, but posting a dupe with only two stories in between the original and the dupe, what are the editors thinking???
;)