So if I get a speeding ticket, I deal with it like a big boy.
I wonder how you'd feel about it if you were faced with up to 15 years in prison for speeding, as is the case here. Your manly ability to suck up speeding tickets has absolutely nothing to do with this case.
"Very clean looking cases" tend to be boring. Let's compare to other instances of aesthetically pleasing objects:
First, cars. Cars have quite a few constraints on their external shape. Designs we appreciate integrate well with these constraints - for example, smooth lines between and around features that absolutely have to be there, like wheels and windshield glass. Alternatively, some good designs may defy convention, by having deliberately boxy or unstreamlined shapes.
Similarly, in building architecture, designs which either contrast with or integrate well into their environment tend to be appreciated. The famous architect Frank Gehry has done both: the Bilbao Guggenheim is applauded for how well it integrates into its physical setting. By contrast, MIT's Stata Center is a complete shock, utterly unlike its surroundings, or any other building, for that matter. Again, in the case of buildings, there are some significant constraints - people need to get in and out of them, they tend to need windows, entrances and exits have to be at certain levels (usually ground level!) and they may require external features such as balconies. "Clean looking designs" for buildings have to fit in with these constraints.
Unlike any of this, the requirements on a computer case are minimal: almost anything goes. You can pretty much install a computer in any shaped object you want, and people have done exactly that. A perfectly smooth cube or sphere would be "clean looking", but is that what you're talking about? I suspect it would be pretty boring. For example, inside the transparent plastic, the Apple G4 cube had a relatively smooth, featureless case - very clean looking - which they felt the need to jazz up by inserting it into a transparent shell, which had no purpose other than to look cool (and in fact led to quality problems).
The point is that in the absence of other constraints, "clean looking" gets you very quickly to boring featurelessness. What we see happening with computer cases instead is that people impose arbitrary external constraints on their custom cases, in order to give them meaning. In the current story, the external constraint is that of a hypercube, but we've seen all sorts of other examples. The more constraining the requirement is, the more challenging and interesting the resulting case tends to be. That's a big reason this hypercube case is interesting.
If I were a conservative, I wouldn't want Derbyshire's misogyny and homophobia associated with my beliefs. There are good conservative values, but those aren't among them.
In any case, when I read Derbyshire's weak attempts at arguments to support his prejudices, I find it difficult to imagine he could write anything worth reading. At least my prejudices operate on the individual level, rather than condemning an entire gender. It doesn't surprise me to read that he's not very good at math; he's not very good at logical argument, objectivity, or understanding of the human condition. He's taken a personal psychological hangup and dressed it up as though it were a political position.
You don't work in the PR department for the dinosaur government do you?
Oh yeah, I remember that guy from 65 million years ago - the Dinosaur Government Information Minister. He was hilarious!
"Certain ridiculous and unpatriotic reports are claiming that the asteroid strike has superheated the atmosphere and caused widespread fires to appear across the entire planet. I can assure you with complete certaintly that this is not the case - it is utter nonsense! [pause]...excuse me for a moment. Ow! Why is my tail on fire??"
wait, you don't think that is the point of scaremongering us, is it?
Well, duh! But I'd rather see the American public be scaremongered into colonizing other planets, than be scaremongered into implanting chips into all DoublePlusGood Citizens as protection against terrorism.
So, let the scaremongering war begin! I'll see your dirty bomb and raise you one contintent-destroying, atmosphere-transforming supervolcano!
It's just like "Extreme Programming" -- release early, release often.
And just as with XP, the result is often so minimal as to be absolutely useless except to indicate that yes, some miniscule level of progress is occurring on a week-to-week basis.
For those who don't live for the sheer unmitigated adrenaline rush of reading one new sentence a week, my advice is to wait for the damn thing to be finished.
Your attitude is messed up because cameras in post offices gets your heckles up more than terrorists killing thousands of civilians.
Realistically, most people in the U.S. are more likely to experience problems due to misguided and overly zealous government attempts to "protect" them, than to be directly affected by a terrorist attack. It's not a question of which gets your heckles (sic) up more, it's a question of which is most likely to have a direct effect on you. The answer to the latter question is "Homeland Security".
Make no mistake, one of the primary purposes of Homeland Security is to cover the government's collective ass when the next attack happens. "We tried everything - from a color-coded warning system, to forcing mothers to drink their own milk at airports, right down to photographing everyone who buys a stamp! What more could we have done?"
The problem with giving up liberty for security is that there's no exchange rate between the two -- you can't trade one for the other. Don't confuse a bureaucratic immune response with an intelligent response to security threats.
I'm not switching objections -- my first comment was intended to point out that there are other factors involved than the criterion you were focusing on, and that's been my point all along (implied in my first message, explicit later), that an overly narrow focus on a single criterion leads to incorrect conclusions.
I'm also not "deciding" what is or isn't enough by itself -- I'm talking about factors which current copyright law takes into account. It's your argument which involves a decision to ignore aspects of existing copyright law, and requires acceptance of the as yet unsupported premise that only one factor should matter.
The reason I'm focusing on logical errors is that your original argument was framed as a logical one, with a premise, a supporting example, and a conclusion introduced by "therefore". My real underlying objection is that the pretense at logic was unjustified -- what you're really saying is that in your opinion, current copyright law takes too many factors into account, and should simply ignore them all except the one you're choosing to focus on.
You'd need to provide a lot more justification and evidence to make a case for that, though -- and if you tried, in that broader context, your argument would either simply fail, or you'd need to introduce new kinds of protections for creative works to compensate for the aspects of copyright protection that you're currently ignoring.
I stated my objection in a way that was more specific to your first post. For your second post, I should have made the more general point that your argument is suspect because of its extremely narrow and selective focus, which provides insufficient context to justify drawing any kind of conclusion.
To provide an example of the problem, let's look at how the logic used in your second post contradicts your first point. You wrote "I'm saying that even though books and machines are similar in that they cannot be easily copied, they are rightfully treated differently by law." But by choosing my examples appropriately, I could use that exact same logic to argue "Even though binary software and machines are similar in that you can't learn from them by reverse engineering, they are rightfully treated differently by law." This supports the current copyright situation, and is at odds with your first claim. Your own positions aren't logically self-consistent -- depending on how the examples are selected, entirely opposite conclusions can be reached using the same (apparently) logical principles.
Like any problem, the only way to address it correctly without making errors is to identify all the components of the problem, and ensure that the proposed solution addresses all those components. You originally identified one component, the question of whether one can learn from something directly, or whether doing so requires reverse engineering. That could be considered a necessary component of the problem, but it's not a sufficient one for arriving at conclusions like the one you reached, that "binary software, like other machines, should not be copyrightable."
You've just repeated the same logical error you made in the post I responded to.
You're making an argument by focusing on a single point of similarity between two different cases, and concluding that because of this similarity, "therefore" a conclusion which applies in one case must apply in the other. This is logically fallacious. If you don't understand why, perhaps an example would help: cars have seating; houses have seating. Therefore, we should require a license to operate a house, and impose speed limits on houses. Yes, it's silly, but that's the point -- logically, it's no more or less silly than the two arguments you've made.
Re your sig, Neal Stephenson's book "Snow Crash" is a good, gentle introduction to the issue of the connection between religion and the occasional human propensity to hear voices.
It's not a double standard, but it is an interesting issue that's worth examining. Different rules apply to different situations. If you don't make your private information public in some form, there's no reason that it should "want to be free".
The kind of information that is usually described as "wanting to be free" is the information inherent in products that are sold for money. If I buy something that contains information -- whether music, a movie, an article, or even say a car -- I may want to reuse the information it contains in various ways. I may want to use it in some other media format, e.g. download music, a movie or an article to a mobile player. In the case of a car, I might want to modify it or install an add-on which requires information about its inner workings. Saying that the information inherent in these commercial products "wants to be free" is really a way of characterizing the collective desire of all the users of these products to reuse the information they contain. That collective desire is a kind of force, which can be very strong, and it's easy to see how the end result can be described as "information wants to be free".
There's no comparison in any of this to private information that is never sold or otherwise made publicly available in any form.
However, one could argue that the collective desire of all the sleazebags who want access to other people's private information constitutes a similar force. But in that case, the sleazebags don't normally have access to the information in the first place, not even in a protected form, so can't claim any rights to it.
Spyware/adware does change this picture, allowing the sleazebags the technical means to access this information. So now there's a technical force which is pushing private information into other hands. But note that this is certainly not making the information "free" - on the contrary, the sleazebags want to resell the information, profit from it, and certainly not share it freely. So the appropriate phrase in this case would really be more like "insecure private information wants to be fenced".
(P.S. that's "fenced" in the sense of selling stolen property).
Did you do it much *after* you burnt your neck? Some people are capable of foreseeing such outcomes and avoiding the activity in the first place. It's a little thing called "intelligence".
Immigrant Americans (i.e. every American citizen alive today, whose family immigrated here sometime within the last couple hundred years or so) have continued to live up to the reputation which they created early on with the native Americans: "white man speak with forked tongue".
On the one hand, tens of millions of illegal aliens are welcomed into menial jobs throughout the country: from farm labor to maid work to nannies. Ordinary people employ them, as well as companies. You even get illegals doing not so menial work, like tech contracting. Illegal aliens collectively form an essential part of the economy.
On the other hand, the INS (or whatever it's called nowadays) is the most dysfunctional federal agency of them all, and it's not just the agency's fault - it's a function of the national schizophrenia in which cheap labor is desperately needed, but the fiction needs to be maintained that not anyone who wants to can come here to work. Quotas for immigrants aren't even close to realistic in terms of what the economy needs - you could eliminate all the legal immigration and the economy would continue to function just fine, the legal immigration is really just there for show at this point. You couldn't do the same with the illegal immigration.
So, you ignorant anti-immigration types out there (and you are anti-immigration, if all you support is the current legal immigration system which is just for show, and a poor show at that), just keep on with your little fantasies about the way life works in the imaginary U.S. of A. that you live in, while the rest of us live in the real world which you don't understand. The difference is between the two is that the real world isn't going to go away, whereas your fantasies will become harder and harder to sustain as long as you continue to refuse to acknowledge your national addiction to cheap labor supplied by illegal aliens.
Space Opera has nothing in common with Science Fiction - never has, never will. It's a lot like the difference between astrology and astronomy: people see they both start with "astro" and involve stars, so they can't tell the difference.
Moral: if you think Star Trek is science fiction, that's a sure sign you're a moron who wouldn't know science fiction if it bit you in the balls.
Kudos for admitting it! Now all you have to do is point out that you were educated in the U.S., so we know it's not your fault and we can all feel sorry for you.;)
Second, this MD5 weakness is not yet actually harmful, because no-one has yet devised a successful attack which exploits it. However, it could be considered harmful someday.
There's no pretense in Washington to appointing competent people to top jobs. The idea is that it's the backroom wonks that are supposed to do the thinking - the guys on the front line are just there to be a pretty face to appear on TV and elsewhere. How do you think George Bush got to be President?
Turbine blades must be inspected by your closest General Electric Turbines facility each 10,000 hours of operation.
Alternatively, you can purchase an optional genetically engineered miniature turbine inspector, who will live in a compartment next to the turbine and inspect your blades on a regular basis. Miniature food supplies sold separately.
Slashdot Mirror
"Very clean looking cases" tend to be boring. Let's compare to other instances of aesthetically pleasing objects:
First, cars. Cars have quite a few constraints on their external shape. Designs we appreciate integrate well with these constraints - for example, smooth lines between and around features that absolutely have to be there, like wheels and windshield glass. Alternatively, some good designs may defy convention, by having deliberately boxy or unstreamlined shapes.
Similarly, in building architecture, designs which either contrast with or integrate well into their environment tend to be appreciated. The famous architect Frank Gehry has done both: the Bilbao Guggenheim is applauded for how well it integrates into its physical setting. By contrast, MIT's Stata Center is a complete shock, utterly unlike its surroundings, or any other building, for that matter. Again, in the case of buildings, there are some significant constraints - people need to get in and out of them, they tend to need windows, entrances and exits have to be at certain levels (usually ground level!) and they may require external features such as balconies. "Clean looking designs" for buildings have to fit in with these constraints.
Unlike any of this, the requirements on a computer case are minimal: almost anything goes. You can pretty much install a computer in any shaped object you want, and people have done exactly that. A perfectly smooth cube or sphere would be "clean looking", but is that what you're talking about? I suspect it would be pretty boring. For example, inside the transparent plastic, the Apple G4 cube had a relatively smooth, featureless case - very clean looking - which they felt the need to jazz up by inserting it into a transparent shell, which had no purpose other than to look cool (and in fact led to quality problems).
The point is that in the absence of other constraints, "clean looking" gets you very quickly to boring featurelessness. What we see happening with computer cases instead is that people impose arbitrary external constraints on their custom cases, in order to give them meaning. In the current story, the external constraint is that of a hypercube, but we've seen all sorts of other examples. The more constraining the requirement is, the more challenging and interesting the resulting case tends to be. That's a big reason this hypercube case is interesting.
Sorry, but there's well-known prior art for this invention:
1. input
2. ???
3. Do I really need to say it?
If I were a conservative, I wouldn't want Derbyshire's misogyny and homophobia associated with my beliefs. There are good conservative values, but those aren't among them.
In any case, when I read Derbyshire's weak attempts at arguments to support his prejudices, I find it difficult to imagine he could write anything worth reading. At least my prejudices operate on the individual level, rather than condemning an entire gender. It doesn't surprise me to read that he's not very good at math; he's not very good at logical argument, objectivity, or understanding of the human condition. He's taken a personal psychological hangup and dressed it up as though it were a political position.
Oh yeah, I remember that guy from 65 million years ago - the Dinosaur Government Information Minister. He was hilarious!
"Certain ridiculous and unpatriotic reports are claiming that the asteroid strike has superheated the atmosphere and caused widespread fires to appear across the entire planet. I can assure you with complete certaintly that this is not the case - it is utter nonsense! [pause] ...excuse me for a moment. Ow! Why is my tail on fire??"
Well, duh! But I'd rather see the American public be scaremongered into colonizing other planets, than be scaremongered into implanting chips into all DoublePlusGood Citizens as protection against terrorism.
So, let the scaremongering war begin! I'll see your dirty bomb and raise you one contintent-destroying, atmosphere-transforming supervolcano!
It's just like "Extreme Programming" -- release early, release often.
And just as with XP, the result is often so minimal as to be absolutely useless except to indicate that yes, some miniscule level of progress is occurring on a week-to-week basis.
For those who don't live for the sheer unmitigated adrenaline rush of reading one new sentence a week, my advice is to wait for the damn thing to be finished.
--
Realistically, most people in the U.S. are more likely to experience problems due to misguided and overly zealous government attempts to "protect" them, than to be directly affected by a terrorist attack. It's not a question of which gets your heckles (sic) up more, it's a question of which is most likely to have a direct effect on you. The answer to the latter question is "Homeland Security".
Make no mistake, one of the primary purposes of Homeland Security is to cover the government's collective ass when the next attack happens. "We tried everything - from a color-coded warning system, to forcing mothers to drink their own milk at airports, right down to photographing everyone who buys a stamp! What more could we have done?"
The problem with giving up liberty for security is that there's no exchange rate between the two -- you can't trade one for the other. Don't confuse a bureaucratic immune response with an intelligent response to security threats.A privacy issue my g/f will care about. She hates having her photo taken!
I'm not switching objections -- my first comment was intended to point out that there are other factors involved than the criterion you were focusing on, and that's been my point all along (implied in my first message, explicit later), that an overly narrow focus on a single criterion leads to incorrect conclusions.
I'm also not "deciding" what is or isn't enough by itself -- I'm talking about factors which current copyright law takes into account. It's your argument which involves a decision to ignore aspects of existing copyright law, and requires acceptance of the as yet unsupported premise that only one factor should matter.
The reason I'm focusing on logical errors is that your original argument was framed as a logical one, with a premise, a supporting example, and a conclusion introduced by "therefore". My real underlying objection is that the pretense at logic was unjustified -- what you're really saying is that in your opinion, current copyright law takes too many factors into account, and should simply ignore them all except the one you're choosing to focus on.
You'd need to provide a lot more justification and evidence to make a case for that, though -- and if you tried, in that broader context, your argument would either simply fail, or you'd need to introduce new kinds of protections for creative works to compensate for the aspects of copyright protection that you're currently ignoring.
I stated my objection in a way that was more specific to your first post. For your second post, I should have made the more general point that your argument is suspect because of its extremely narrow and selective focus, which provides insufficient context to justify drawing any kind of conclusion.
To provide an example of the problem, let's look at how the logic used in your second post contradicts your first point. You wrote "I'm saying that even though books and machines are similar in that they cannot be easily copied, they are rightfully treated differently by law." But by choosing my examples appropriately, I could use that exact same logic to argue "Even though binary software and machines are similar in that you can't learn from them by reverse engineering, they are rightfully treated differently by law." This supports the current copyright situation, and is at odds with your first claim. Your own positions aren't logically self-consistent -- depending on how the examples are selected, entirely opposite conclusions can be reached using the same (apparently) logical principles.
Like any problem, the only way to address it correctly without making errors is to identify all the components of the problem, and ensure that the proposed solution addresses all those components. You originally identified one component, the question of whether one can learn from something directly, or whether doing so requires reverse engineering. That could be considered a necessary component of the problem, but it's not a sufficient one for arriving at conclusions like the one you reached, that "binary software, like other machines, should not be copyrightable."
You've just repeated the same logical error you made in the post I responded to.
You're making an argument by focusing on a single point of similarity between two different cases, and concluding that because of this similarity, "therefore" a conclusion which applies in one case must apply in the other. This is logically fallacious. If you don't understand why, perhaps an example would help: cars have seating; houses have seating. Therefore, we should require a license to operate a house, and impose speed limits on houses. Yes, it's silly, but that's the point -- logically, it's no more or less silly than the two arguments you've made.
Re your sig, Neal Stephenson's book "Snow Crash" is a good, gentle introduction to the issue of the connection between religion and the occasional human propensity to hear voices.
And just like machines, unlimited copies of binary software can be produced at the click of a button. Wait, that doesn't sound right!
I urge you in future to consider carefully before choosing to increase the universal level of stupidity.
It's not a double standard, but it is an interesting issue that's worth examining. Different rules apply to different situations. If you don't make your private information public in some form, there's no reason that it should "want to be free".
The kind of information that is usually described as "wanting to be free" is the information inherent in products that are sold for money. If I buy something that contains information -- whether music, a movie, an article, or even say a car -- I may want to reuse the information it contains in various ways. I may want to use it in some other media format, e.g. download music, a movie or an article to a mobile player. In the case of a car, I might want to modify it or install an add-on which requires information about its inner workings. Saying that the information inherent in these commercial products "wants to be free" is really a way of characterizing the collective desire of all the users of these products to reuse the information they contain. That collective desire is a kind of force, which can be very strong, and it's easy to see how the end result can be described as "information wants to be free".
There's no comparison in any of this to private information that is never sold or otherwise made publicly available in any form.
However, one could argue that the collective desire of all the sleazebags who want access to other people's private information constitutes a similar force. But in that case, the sleazebags don't normally have access to the information in the first place, not even in a protected form, so can't claim any rights to it.
Spyware/adware does change this picture, allowing the sleazebags the technical means to access this information. So now there's a technical force which is pushing private information into other hands. But note that this is certainly not making the information "free" - on the contrary, the sleazebags want to resell the information, profit from it, and certainly not share it freely. So the appropriate phrase in this case would really be more like "insecure private information wants to be fenced".
(P.S. that's "fenced" in the sense of selling stolen property).
Did you do it much *after* you burnt your neck? Some people are capable of foreseeing such outcomes and avoiding the activity in the first place. It's a little thing called "intelligence".
Immigrant Americans (i.e. every American citizen alive today, whose family immigrated here sometime within the last couple hundred years or so) have continued to live up to the reputation which they created early on with the native Americans: "white man speak with forked tongue".
On the one hand, tens of millions of illegal aliens are welcomed into menial jobs throughout the country: from farm labor to maid work to nannies. Ordinary people employ them, as well as companies. You even get illegals doing not so menial work, like tech contracting. Illegal aliens collectively form an essential part of the economy.
On the other hand, the INS (or whatever it's called nowadays) is the most dysfunctional federal agency of them all, and it's not just the agency's fault - it's a function of the national schizophrenia in which cheap labor is desperately needed, but the fiction needs to be maintained that not anyone who wants to can come here to work. Quotas for immigrants aren't even close to realistic in terms of what the economy needs - you could eliminate all the legal immigration and the economy would continue to function just fine, the legal immigration is really just there for show at this point. You couldn't do the same with the illegal immigration.
So, you ignorant anti-immigration types out there (and you are anti-immigration, if all you support is the current legal immigration system which is just for show, and a poor show at that), just keep on with your little fantasies about the way life works in the imaginary U.S. of A. that you live in, while the rest of us live in the real world which you don't understand. The difference is between the two is that the real world isn't going to go away, whereas your fantasies will become harder and harder to sustain as long as you continue to refuse to acknowledge your national addiction to cheap labor supplied by illegal aliens.
Since this.
Space Opera has nothing in common with Science Fiction - never has, never will. It's a lot like the difference between astrology and astronomy: people see they both start with "astro" and involve stars, so they can't tell the difference.
Moral: if you think Star Trek is science fiction, that's a sure sign you're a moron who wouldn't know science fiction if it bit you in the balls.
Kudos for admitting it! Now all you have to do is point out that you were educated in the U.S., so we know it's not your fault and we can all feel sorry for you. ;)
First, the title is a reference to a famous computer science paper by Edsger Dijkstra, Goto Statement Considered Harmful.
Second, this MD5 weakness is not yet actually harmful, because no-one has yet devised a successful attack which exploits it. However, it could be considered harmful someday.
I don't need any questions answered, it's clear that this could only be one thing: a quark matter strike!
Albeit a very small one.
However, it vindicates this guy.
There's no pretense in Washington to appointing competent people to top jobs. The idea is that it's the backroom wonks that are supposed to do the thinking - the guys on the front line are just there to be a pretty face to appear on TV and elsewhere. How do you think George Bush got to be President?