For example, Blockbuster opened in our area. Put mom and pops out of business. Blockbuster got lax and started up with bad service, no available rentals, and high return fees, now new mom and pop shops open up. They do pretty good business nowadays.
The mom and pops rent porn and Blockbuster doesn't.
When I say "Joe is intelligent" do I mean "Joe knows a lot of facts?" No. Do I mean "Joe is good at symbolic logic?" No. I mean "Joe pursues goals in a flexible, efficient and sophisticated manner. He has a toolbox of methods that is continually growing and recursive." Does this description apply to Cyc?
No.
Well, Kasparov's experience would suggest otherwise. Deep Blue wasn't a triumph of programming intelligence; it was basically hardware assisted brute force. Yet, the world chess champion attributed depth and intelligence to it after he lost.
You know, what may look like intelligence to you is often just retrieval of thoughts or thought patterns that an individual has read elsewhere or practiced before.
If, or when, RMS, FSF, and GPL prevail and destroy all proprietary rights - they will have ruined my, and many other authors, proprietary rights too - and we will no longer be abile to make even a fair living thru the production of personally authored IP.
Right, and so what? Many people before you who were involved in questionable businesses have had to switch jobs when the prevailing winds changed.
The US is arguably the most religious and culturally conservative among the developed countries. People actually go to church and believe in the bible, something other societies have long abandoned. But yet, nobody tops the US when it comes to exotic techniques of altering life. Modifying the germ line, research on human embryos, human cloning, rent-a-womb arrangements are all legal here and illegal virtually anywhere else. Wouldn't one assume that culturally conservative societies proceed much more cautiously? Can anybody explain this contradiction?
I believe it would be overly romantic to believe that if developers stopped being paid that they would continue to enthusiastically donate software. The bottom line is that every developer that contributes to open source has either: (a) made lots of money already (b) is making good money, or (c) has the promise of making good money in the future. In fact contributing to open source is a good way to learn and ultimately make good money.
For the longest time, most hackers fell into category (c): students.
People were hacking on Linux, FreeBSD, gimp and apache with abandon even before the term "open source" existed and before a single article about free software had appeared in the New York Times. There was no money in it, and putting your Linux experience on a resume was not on anybody's mind.
Hackers hack for three reasons:
It's a lot of fun.
Something doesn't quite work right and they want it to work right.
They want to be appreciated by cool people, i.e. by other hackers.
There simply is nobody who sits down at night and thinks "ok, tonight I'm going to submit a patch to the gimp in the hope that I will learn from it and that will improve my earning power in the future".
While I agree that nowadays writing the patch will probably marginally improve his earning power: even if it didn't, the guy would still write the patch.
Nor do I think that hacking on free software is an optimal strategy to maximize one's earning power in the least amount of time. There are lots of more efficient (but less sexy) ways to do that.
Plex86 isn't a Windows emulator, it's a PC emulator which can run any operating system, including standard Windows. It's hard to see how cyber sentry could detect this situation if it is even invisible to the OS.
But when emulating Windows with plex86 on a Linux box and screen capturing from the Linux/X Windows side, neither the Windows drivers nor the Windows file i/o are involved at all; Windows thinks it is displaying to hardware while in fact it is displaying in a window on an X desktop.
I'm a reasonable pianist and I buy sheet music from time to time. However, if there is only one song in the book I'll simply pick it up off the shelf, play it on a piano there and go home. I can usually remember most of the song.
Is that a copyright violation?
Sure. The act of making a copy is the crime, it doesn't matter how it is done.
The other end of the spectrum is a world in which all information is free. This would also be bad. What motivation would there be to provide new better ideas? None.
Assuming, of course, that monetary motivations are the only ones that matter. That however has been proven wrong repeatedly, for instance by the huge amount of free software produced by enthusiastic volunteers.
a tamperproof PC or preferably a terminal in a secure facillity (where you can observe to make sure people don't take pictures, copy down notes, etc). They you just have to worry about people remembering everything well enough to copy it down later.
What's the point of showing people something they're not supposed to remember? You may as well not show it to them in the first place, the net effect is the same.
As understood the challenge, there was no requirement that the data I give you be random, though I might ordinarily give random data for such a challenge. If that was the machine model, however, I'd just give you a 0 followed by random data, and you would lose.
Good point, the proposed machine model is not Turing complete and you can analyze it ahead of time.
If I remember my Kolmogorov complexity right, the probability that a random file can be generated by a program that's n bits shorter is roughly a*b^(-n), where a and b depend on the (Turing complete) machine model. If the model is chosen wisely to make the constants small, it should be possible to compress more than 1/50 of files by one bit. But it's not nearly as simple as I thought.
No, the machine architecture doesn't matter. The bet can be won only if you are very astronomically lucky.
I'd gladly stake large amounts of money on this, though it would feel like I'm running a scam.
If you allow me to specify the machine model ahead of time, you'd lose. This was observed by Anonymous Coward in
article 466.
Yes, or simply require that the contestant submit a single program (with prescribed file name) which can regenerate original.dat and is shorter than original.dat.
In that case, the outcome of the bet clearly depends on the machine model. If the machine model is "complete Debian Linux running on Pentium", I would conjecture that the bet can't be won, but it is far from clear (obviously, a succinct powerful language is needed, maybe A+). On many machine models, the bet can be trivially won.
As the length of the file increases, the number of bits needed to *specify the position* of this run of zeroes also increases. And you're going to have to record that position somewhere in your decompressor or compressed file.
Nope, you don't have to record it, simply attach the part of the original file following the block of zeros to your decompressor program. The "compressed file" is the part of the original file preceding the block of zeros. Your decompressor prints out the contents of the compressed file, then 1024 zeros, then it reads from itself the remainder of the file and prints that out.
The bet can be won; not in every instance of course, but in the long run.
. In order to use the NY Times for free, you have go through the extra work of webwasher, and while not 'hard', it's work.
Well, if that's your definition of "free", then indeed nothing is ever free, trivially. If I gave you my Mercedes, you'd probably complain "It's not free: I have to go through the extra work of driving it from your place to mine, and while not 'hard', it's work."
The best things in this world are free. The most information-dense sites on the internet come from academic or hacker volunteers, for free. The New York Times is completely free if you install webwasher. The most flexible computer software is free. An engaging usenet discussion is free.
The fact that so many people believe that only expensive things can have value simply proves how effective advertising really is. "Buy more stuff and you'll be happy."
Obviously from those suckers who look at the
ads or pay for the subscription. This doesn't mean that I have to do those things though, because capitalism is not charity: I don't care how you feed your children, I'm only concerned with minimizing my costs. That's how the system works.
Slashdot Mirror
The mom and pops rent porn and Blockbuster doesn't.
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You can't and you shouldn't. Thousands of hackers have not given their time so that somebody can make a quick buck. It's about fun, not profit.
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Well, Kasparov's experience would suggest otherwise. Deep Blue wasn't a triumph of programming intelligence; it was basically hardware assisted brute force. Yet, the world chess champion attributed depth and intelligence to it after he lost.
You know, what may look like intelligence to you is often just retrieval of thoughts or thought patterns that an individual has read elsewhere or practiced before.
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Right, and so what? Many people before you who were involved in questionable businesses have had to switch jobs when the prevailing winds changed.
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For the longest time, most hackers fell into category (c): students.
People were hacking on Linux, FreeBSD, gimp and apache with abandon even before the term "open source" existed and before a single article about free software had appeared in the New York Times. There was no money in it, and putting your Linux experience on a resume was not on anybody's mind.
Hackers hack for three reasons:
There simply is nobody who sits down at night and thinks "ok, tonight I'm going to submit a patch to the gimp in the hope that I will learn from it and that will improve my earning power in the future".
While I agree that nowadays writing the patch will probably marginally improve his earning power: even if it didn't, the guy would still write the patch.
Nor do I think that hacking on free software is an optimal strategy to maximize one's earning power in the least amount of time. There are lots of more efficient (but less sexy) ways to do that.
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But it doesn't. The cheapest laptops have been around $1000 forever now. When can I buy one for $500?
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Is that a copyright violation? Sure. The act of making a copy is the crime, it doesn't matter how it is done.
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Assuming, of course, that monetary motivations are the only ones that matter. That however has been proven wrong repeatedly, for instance by the huge amount of free software produced by enthusiastic volunteers.
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Do these screen shot preventers still work if windows is run through plex86 or vmware?
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What's the point of showing people something they're not supposed to remember? You may as well not show it to them in the first place, the net effect is the same.
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Thanks.
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It's a*2^(-n), sorry.
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Good point, the proposed machine model is not Turing complete and you can analyze it ahead of time.
If I remember my Kolmogorov complexity right, the probability that a random file can be generated by a program that's n bits shorter is roughly a*b^(-n), where a and b depend on the (Turing complete) machine model. If the model is chosen wisely to make the constants small, it should be possible to compress more than 1/50 of files by one bit. But it's not nearly as simple as I thought.
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Consider the web server situation.
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I'd gladly stake large amounts of money on this, though it would feel like I'm running a scam.
If you allow me to specify the machine model ahead of time, you'd lose. This was observed by Anonymous Coward in article 466.
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In that case, the outcome of the bet clearly depends on the machine model. If the machine model is "complete Debian Linux running on Pentium", I would conjecture that the bet can't be won, but it is far from clear (obviously, a succinct powerful language is needed, maybe A+). On many machine models, the bet can be trivially won.
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Nope, you don't have to record it, simply attach the part of the original file following the block of zeros to your decompressor program. The "compressed file" is the part of the original file preceding the block of zeros. Your decompressor prints out the contents of the compressed file, then 1024 zeros, then it reads from itself the remainder of the file and prints that out.
The bet can be won; not in every instance of course, but in the long run.
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Well, if that's your definition of "free", then indeed nothing is ever free, trivially. If I gave you my Mercedes, you'd probably complain "It's not free: I have to go through the extra work of driving it from your place to mine, and while not 'hard', it's work."
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The best things in this world are free. The most information-dense sites on the internet come from academic or hacker volunteers, for free. The New York Times is completely free if you install webwasher. The most flexible computer software is free. An engaging usenet discussion is free.
The fact that so many people believe that only expensive things can have value simply proves how effective advertising really is. "Buy more stuff and you'll be happy."
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