Cecil at Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com) has answered these and many other thousands of questions over the past 20-30 years. There is an archive with several hundred questions including the three in the parent.
The use of floating point numbers isn't all bad. Those of use who use them are often solving problems with condition numbers that render the answer we get less accurate than the number of digits of accuracy provided.
Think about tan(89.99) versus tan(89.991) (which is very ill-conditioned around 90). Both numbers are not terribly truncated by floating point, but the results are different by about 1,000. Try it and you'll see floating point error isn't as dangerous as things like cancellation, ill-conditioning and the like.
I'll bite, since I am waiting for a very long compile to finish. I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged, 1000 pages of refutation to this argument. While I believe neither Rand's opinion nor yours, I can tell you where I think both are flawed.
Rand contends that it is the absolute weakest of government that will allow for both the Jeffersonian form of freedom (life, liberty, etc.) and the Roosevelt form of freedom (prosperity, abscence of need, etc.). Her basic argument is that trade is the only true measure of value and by giving anything to anybody (ie taxes to welfare, corps to unemployment insurance, etc) reduces the inherent value of all trade. If I buy something from you for $1 then give you $1, then I have essentially paid $2 for the item, thereby devaluing my original $1. Since I work the same for each $1, my work value is cut in half wrt the item I purchased from you. As an example of this, farming is subsidized by the government of the US to protect various crops from countries more suited to grow them. Therefore, when I buy bread, I pay the $1 for the loaf and give another $1 to the farmer through subsidies for not growing a particular crop, poor weather, or whatever else the government wishes to pay out in subsidies to ``protect'' the farming industry.
While this is not directly on point with your argument, there are some conclusions that can be drawn that are. Still considering the farming industry, why are there protections? The protections are not there for Cargill or ADM--two of the largest industrial firms in the world. They are there for the family farmer. That is who is being protected--you know Paul Neuman and other multimillionaires with small farms raking in subsidies there to protect the industry from the power of ADM, Cargill, and other foreign countries.
Your example of unemployment insurance is another example of this sort of policy. Rand focuses precisely on alleged deleterious effects of such policies. In the end, a strong government will devalue currency implicitly--even though bread still costs a $1 at the store, it will cost substantially more in work.
As for the power vacuum you mention, Rand addresses this quite elegantly--the only power that can be taken from you is the power that you give away. Should you not like a particular companies practice, don't use the companies products. That simple. And simply because you feel they are bad does not mean that they are. Even if a majority feels that, it doesn't mean anything. For if you ask 100,000 people if they would like to have $1,000,000US free for the taking, no strings attached, 100% would say ``YES! GIMME GIMME!'' Does that mean that everyone should have $1,000,000US? If it does, then how much is $1,000,000US going to be worth once everyone has it?
Your fault: you believe that people cannot be trusted with power of their own. Her fault: she believes that public works projects can never be more efficient that private works. I can tell you that I am glad that I don't have to use Microsoft, eat ADM, or ship by FedEx. I would rather pay for choice then have a strong government regulate an industry in favor of what you or I or anybody else would like so that pork and other favors rule the day rather than quality. I also am glad that I can drive on a road and that road is guaranteed, roughly, to be in good repair regardless of how the finances of local road construction companies are doing.
If you think this argument doesn't apply to you, Ayn Rand predicted as much. She even explained why you might not think this argument is applicable or even sound.
hey, numbskull.. I purchased the card not from directv, but from some shady guy on the 'net. i seem to own it, do I get to sue or not? i bought the damn thing and it does NOT say it is property of directv. do i get to sue or not?
exactly my point.. there is obviously more to this whole "business" thing than just distribution costs. just because it is cheap to distribute, maybe even cheap to manufacture, does not mean that it can be sold cheaply.
as for swinging the dead cat. that dead cat will soon be hitting a lot of dead links-- i, and most people included, consume squat from most of those sites.
As for your shrinkwrap package for $5. Does that include paying the artist for some spiffy and clever artwork? Does that pay Roadway to ship in mass quantities? Does that pay the bean counters to keep track of all this for tax purposes? Does that pay for the least bit of development infrastructure for future content? (not to mention rent, salaries, utilities, you know - overhead)
Or does that just pay for the box, media, plastic, pressing, and printing? I dare you to buy an Id game for $7 now. It seems that $7 doesn't quite cut it for having content that is worthwhile. It seems the give it away and they'll come back for more phenomenon is not just for drug dealing anymore.
And before you shut me out, I dare you to tell me the name of one, just one, shareware game written in the past 12 months that would hold my attention for more than 24 hours. It may be possible, but then again wormholes for travel is possible, too.
economic argument long on emotion, short on logic. For instance, Ford makes cars until the marginal cost of production equals the actual cost of the car.
the idea that there is very little marginal cost for mass production of digital media is ludicrous. if it were so cheap to distribute digitally, why has suck.com folded? they produced very little of their own content and distributed lots
communism != sharing. half of communism is sharing, the other half is ignoring the economic principle of marginal cost ("from each according to his ability")
The Internet and its predecessors were built with one thing in mind, making a better gun. DARPA isn't into communism all that much. DARPA is entirely about weapons. Sandia, Lawrence Livermoore, etc., make some excellent weapons.
these are hard facts. more facts: if the marginal cost of producing more content is high compared with the actual cost of the content, then this leads to no more content being manufactured. (these are microeconomic principles here, not my opinions).
there is no economic difference between real and intangible assets. they all follow the same rules. guess what, if you dump $$$,$$$ into content and recoup only $$$, then no more content can be produced. (high level argument, does not take into consideration what the actual margins on the content are)
I'll go one step farther.. Having done systems programming and GUI programming, I know that the user interface is BY FAR the most complex, frustrating, and therefore most difficult type of programming there is.
No doubt about it: For instance, we are now working on a project with about 8 user interface programmers and 3 server programmers.
I don't think Linux on the desktop is necessarily dead, but I definitely do not see it rivalling M$ or Crapple. Those are "intuitive" in that the user has spent many moons learning the intuition necessary to work. By giving them three whole mouse buttons, life gets a little kooky. I hate user interface programming so much for this very reason that I refuse to do it.
that's my point. VBScript isn't the problem, vbrun*.dll is. The only beef I have with VBS itself is the 'B,' not that it is inherently evil. The evil is in the implementation not the language.
As best I can figure, it is the SIGSEGV causing the problem. The only reason why I know this is that I catch the signal, report the error to eventvwr (another wonderous idea.. i know, let's map i/o for ALL running services while the evenvwr is open--seems silly since the SDK purports to have sub-file level locking for NTFS). After the thread causing the problem dies and reports its death (turns out it was a double destruction causing the problem--damn pointers), the service thread can no longer find the dead thread but is quite certain that it is running. Without a SIGHUP (why oh why they left this out, I will never know), all I can do is stop the service and restart. The reason I have to do this is the service thread will no longer spawn more threads (neat, huh?). Mind you these problems are on both NT and 2000, though I develop on NT for 2000 (the reason--sysadmins do not want to purchase a 2000 server 300 user license. So, we have a 2000 box on a 10 network behind a linux router that makes sure 2000 doesn't try to hold elections. The mind boggles..) SERVICE_STOPPED never comes and a SERVICE_CONTROL_INTERROGATE returns pending stop (don't have the SDK up in front of me). Under what circumstances is this considered acceptable OS behavior? While I realize that no OS has an acceptable implementation of pthreads, the least MS could do is not expect developers to rely on theirs. However, SIGKILL should mean just that: die now.
As for the SDK documentation, it is almost adequate, not execellant, and I use the one on msdn.microsoft.com, I assume that will always be the most recent. If you want an example of an excellently documented SDK, check out man. You will never, ever, never run across stuff like: "this variable is undocumented," which exists in the SDK.
As for fixing problems in MS, turning off VBScript isn't the solution. Seems to me that perl, tcl, python, and other equivalents do not have the same security problems as VBS. I think the main problem lies in vbrun*.dll.
Hey, I've got a thought. Let's write a security patch for IIS. Wait a sec, am I supposed to rewrite a dll? To do this, I would need the api for the dll. have you seen the MS SDK? There are so many partially documented functions, not to mention evidence of undocumented functions as far back as Windows 3.1, possibly farther. You can't rewrite the dll since you don't know what the undocumented functions are doing.
Believe me, there have been many _many_ times I wish I could fix NT's inability to kill a crashed service. A service that crashes when a thread tosses the ms equivalent of a SIGSEGV. I would also do my best to add a POSIX.1 pid_t fork (). I am in no way proseltyzing, just presenting facts.
Rather than calling it technophobia and political grandstanding, let's look at it from another perspective..
The parables of Pandora, of the temptation of the forbidden fruit, of the tower of Babel, Prometheus, (sorry about all the occidental references, but I am not too familiar with other belief systems) and others all point to the fact that with new technologies come an entirely different set of problems and responsibilities.
Whether or not the change is good or bad (I do not pretend to be able to judge any of the parables, let alone cloning), there is a lesson to be learned: the consequences of invention include unforeseen, radical shifts in everything, most of which cannot be determined a priori.
To speculate about the repercussions is folly. However, to deny the fact that radical problems will arise is more so. The pols are short on facts but long on principle. Whether or not their actions are correct (history is the only yard stick we can use, and the history has not happened yet), it is a bit naive to assume that just because something is done in the name of science, it has to be valued as good, whether you measure by cost-benefit analysis or other metric. Einstein went to his grave rueing his thoery of special relativity.
The only way we can learn and judge paradigm shifting discoveries is to experience their ramifications. Experience does not grade on a curve, so I believe we should best understand what direction we are going in before blindly heading down that path. ET IN ARCADIA EGO, death also lives in heaven.
Pray tell, if the internet "is nothing but a corrupter of public morals" (assuming I got your antecedents correct), why are you using a browser at all? Do you want to be corrupted? Or are you so enlightened as to be above corruption?
Do you feel that your average person is incapable of filtering the amount of smut they can tolerate and blindly click away at what search engines give them?
Are you concerned that Cinemax has been doing the same thing for around 20 years.. ie distributing smut to your house without checking ages of the viewers?
Are you concerned that most any teenager can get in to see a rated 'R' flick? Need I remind you of the nudity and sex in Titanic, the so called teen-girl Star Wars?
If a child sees something they shouldn't, whose fault is it--the purveyors or the people who let the child run free on the internet (read parents)?
Whenver I read/hear/consume opinions like this, I am wondering if the holder of the opinion thinks that their enlightened state is not only superior but the only one of its kind as to point out that this is horrible. Face it, you are in the minority--otherwise internet filth would not be a multi-billion dollar industry.
<sarcasm>
Hey, I got a good idea, let's regulate marijuana, ecstasy, LSD, cocaine, heroin, cigarettes, alcohol, murder, theft, prostitution, teenage sex, arson, guns, people-trafficking, nuclear bombs, and fanatic cults hell-bent on destroying the world! That'll stop them, won't it? I mean regulation will fix it right? That ought to stop all the troubles right?
I trust the regulators. They know what to do. They are stopping it right? Tell me I will wake up in a world that all these nasty things are regulated and there will be peace and prosperity.
</sarcasm>
Or did I wake up this morning in that world? Don't we already regulate these things? Has it brought a stop to the corruption of morals? Are there still drive-by shoootings with guns illegal to possess? Do high-schoolers sit in vans and pull tubes during lunch? What about the Montana Freemen and Bin-Laden guy, we got him right? Are there still crack-whores walking the urban streets? What about the human slave trade? Isn't all this regulated?
I don't see any real innovative work brought to either high performance computing (which has almost no real-time applications--ie, they run models that are not dependant on time of completion) or multi-casting (which is almost completely dominated by real-time applications--ie, the delivery of information must be done in a specific time frame or the information is useless) by bringing them together directly.
As for performance v. bandwidth, that's easy enough.. there aren't memory buses faster than a Pentium 100 cpu (ie, the fetch-execute cycle is bottlenecked at fetch), let alone network connections that can compete with the pure computational power of a--gasp--486/50. I can have a 486 just send sequential numbers to <i>x</i> recipients and tie up a 100Mb switch in the closest wiring closet heading for a gateway.
Perhaps there may be something said for making HPCs that communicate between processors using some multi-casting like technology. For instance, many problems involve performing calculations that SIMD pipes work wonderful for [ie SUM ( iFFT ( FFT ( A ) x FFT ( B ) ) ) over many distinct As and Bs]. It turns out, problems like this in parallel environments involve every node needing to know something from everyother node. This can be done in O(n log n) communications. However, use of multicasting might bring this down to O(n) communications where n is proportional to the number of separate nodes used. For interesting problems, this could improve the performance on a supercomputer by an order of magnitude (ie from 1 year of CPU time to 1 month of CPU time).
Of course, this involves writing your own memory management system, redesigning boards, and other not-quite-so-simple tasks.
If you read the article, the second hacker at midnight starts netting ccs. At 12:30 he has about 30. Then he calls the 800 numbers on the back. What, did he get the actual credit cards in his email? or did he not check his facts?
Implementation is total FUD. I agree totally that the things said are totally off the wall. However, we are dealing with a criminal justice system that a) upheld the one-click patent, b) does not care one lick about how silly implementations get, c) (to paraphrase someone whose name escapes me) decides who has the better attorneys and not necessarily who has the more correct position, d) has rules written by people who brought you the DMCA, e) does not care about the original intent of the internet.
I, myself, think that the ideas I presented are worthless from a technical prospective. However, neither you nor I are judges. Most judges do not care how a problem is solved as long as it is solved. Fact is, this is may become a reality.
Until all expert witnesses that can be called agree with you--that there is absolutely no way under the sun to limit transmissions on the internet--and this is proven in a court of law (not in a journal), we should worry.
At most, half is FUD. The fact you believe all of it is FUD illustrates the main point I want to make: according to precedant in the US, the right to free expression is subordinate to the right to commerce on any given medium.
Wake up and realize that what I am saying is ridiculuous only because you don't believe it can happen. It can happen. The government can come in and regulate anything they so choose for as little a reason as a damn good lawyer can defend. That is the paradigm you should be thinking in, not that of protocols and workability.
Your adversarial tone implies to me that you do not understand the mechanism by which this can be done. Let me explain...
Let's have a router at some IP with a netmask of N that routes traffic for some entity(s) [Say from a network of subscribers to @Home, my provider]. Simply drop all outgoing SYN traffic not destined for IP addresses not registered with the federal government. Don't tell me it can't be done. I do it at home with a 486 running Linux. I just do it backwards. When done backwards, it's called a firewall. Routers don't care where packets originate from (hence end-2-end), they just decide where to send them to get to their destination. There is no reason why they cannot be filtered by an access list.
People who claim that Gnutella and Freenet can't be shutdown are kidding themselves. The way they will be shutdown will be more horrific than any kind of censorware out there. There will be outrage and there will be shock at the step and those who think that this scenario won't happen are kidding themselves.
Follow my logic. The legal system is all about suing who has the money. Even those who have a passive role in the commission of a crime are obliged to pay damages. Who has money and facilitates the commission of these crimes? ISPs. With the advent of "technologies" like Carniwhore or POS-2000 or whatever its name is, those who are in court will realize (mistakenly) that ISPs can filter information passing through them. Thereby, injunctions will be slapped on the big ISPs like @Home, etc. (but not AOL, for some mysterious reason). The ISPs will then start filtering for known patterns of bytes of Freenet, Hotline, etc. traffic and block them in either direction. Of course, this solution is ridiculuous to think of, but then again, judgements of law are often unencumbered by the thought process.
Of course, there are obvious ways around this. They will be implemented until the ultimate work-around (use of encrypted packets) at which point entire ranges of ports will be banned. Probably, even worse--everything but port 80 from a list of "registered web servers".
If you think this is absurb, try this on for size. Broadcast something for 24 hours at about 100MHz. Yep, that's right, the FCC will be on you in a heartbeat to shut you down.
To think that these cannot be shutdown is absurd. To think that the government will not try to regulate the Internet in an absurd fashion is hubris. They have done it before (from the sinking of the Titanic onward, the US has regulated airwaves) and they WILL do it again.
The fact that we have licensed radio stations is proof enough for me.
Is it a bug in Gnutellish clients that data gets transferred? Seriously.. The fact that there is no signature on any Gnutella packet decrying the type of client being used, how could this be fixed? As far as the gnutella spec reads, at no point does it rely on a human to directly respond to each query. Rather the queries are assumed to be xmitted to clients. This just happens to be a client that is not intentionally run.
It conforms (mostly, it seems) to the spec for xferring data. That makes it a valid gnutella client. Without a montioring of the type of client sharing data, there is no fix.
and expecting the operating system from preventing attacks. It is not a software nor an implementation problem. Rather, it is an attack on the protocol that relies on human engineering to work. (ie, Gnutella operates on a big fundamental flaw.. all clients are kind and good)
The way I see it, it was just a matter of time. Those who wish to transfer data anonymously should consider the source of the data. Fact is, unless you can authenticate the source, then expect garbage and get surprised from time to time.
In other words.. I double dog dare somebody to fix this in software. And even if they manage by some stroke of super-genius to fix it, it will not prevent similar attacks entirely.
Re:Tech Supporters Have tried this....
on
Anticryptography
·
· Score: 2
Many aspects of linguistics overlap CS.. particularly the facility with which concepts can be expressed--for this I cite Noam Chomsky (sp?).
Other aspects of information translation figure into CS--ie NLP, the holy grail of user interfaces. A good reason why this should fall under CS is that CS provides a vehicle (ie Turing machine and others) for which it is possible to prove certain things as correct in an abstract way--ie without many preconceptions. All that must be taken for granted are the existence of zero(0), the existence of a next number, a way to express whether or not a number is larger than another, and 3 truth tables (and, or, and not). From these six things, all concepts that can be explained to a computer can be explained in terms of these 6 axioms--albeit, it gets complicated.
Of course, the problem lies in the location of actual information--idiomatic, ambiguous, and connotive meanings are the tricky beasts. For instance if I say "I cleaved the fat from the meat," it has a completely different meaning from "I cleaved the fat to the meat." The meaning of the word "cleave" and the information the meaning carries does not reside with cleave--since cleave is its own antonym. Rather, it lies in the prepositional phrase modifying the verb. Of course it can get more complicated (Hofstadter has quite a few fun ones in his books).
Computers, however, do not deal with ambiguity very well. They need 100% perfect transfer of information as well as intent to operate within constraints specified.
Without knowing a priori what is acceptable to a civilization and what is not (it was not uncome for mothers to fellate their sons as a sign of affection in fuedal China, but a kiss on the cheek was considered intimate), information and intent must be passed 100% correctly. It seems to me that CS is a natural candidate to study this.
Excluding multi-process/multi-thread timing conditions, politics of design, promises made by salespeople, and ill-formed specifications, this is a reason why systems crash.
My current project at work has a very fluid specification. I cannot tell you what is garbage and what is good for a particular module until the module is written and given for inspection to those who are designing the overall process to use the software. That means I have to make guesses about something I know nothing about so as to make a design that will work with something. All I have are guidelines. Should the guildelines change a week before delivery, in goes the fix--sans testing and sans rational design philosophy. In a word, I knowingly write shoddy code to fit political design decisions to meet deadlines set by ill-advised individuals who know not the first thing about how a computer operates.
Quite possibly, the single biggest problem with coding is the concept of a deadline. The second, almost because of the deadline, is the "I'll figure that out later" philosophy. Without a full blueprint of an application or system, (hell, I'd be happy with an accurate spec once in a while) it is impossible to make sound decisions. Ergo, bad software.
What you speak of are luxuries to your average code-for-a-living individual.
An inventor too poor in capital to exploit his invention directly is free to approach potential partners under terms of non-disclosure.
This is protection of the inventor's interest via a private contract, not a patent.
I tell you how to make a widget after signing an NDA, you tell a third party. You are liable, not the third party who makes them. NDAs are good but rely on people keeping secrets. You and I both know that people cannot keep secrets. If I wanted relief, I could only sue you. You probably don't have fortunes to recover potential losses. Can't get blood from a turnip. Probably end up costing me more to sue than what I would get in the end.
If the idea truly requires much development and assembling of resources to exploit then the originator will have the natural advantage
of a significant head start and perhaps deserves no more than that.
Most of the problem with production is not the production itself, but securing capital and real property to do the construction. Production is (generally) very quick since Henry Ford. What takes so long is building a place to work, securing the necessary assecories (machines, computers, etc.) to work, and staffing. That is generally a large barrier of entry. After this is the cost of raw materials and salaries. Once again, I need to protect myself from companies that already have infrastructure.
If the idea is so easy to copy that others can very quickly bring a competitive idea to market after the inventor's version becomes
public then maybe it was not such a brilliant idea after all and does not deserve the benefit of a legal monopoly. So, would you have one company collecting these ideas so that you purchase everything from safety pins (patented last century) to computers? The theoretical (not as it stands today) point of a patent is to protect innovation. The fact that something is "simple" is not mentioned--only non-obvious. Most magic tricks are simple to perform but are intentionally non-obvious. Bad example, but you get the point.
The basic question which needs to be addressed, not begged, is: How do we know when the natural commercial advantages that
accrue to an originator, however large or small, are insufficient and must therefore be supplemented by a legal device such as a
patent?
This is the most eloquent statement of the connundrum I have ever read on Slashdot. Due to the quick nature of these comments, I am often too heavy handed. By the nature of putting the word "legal" in the sentence, the subjective words "advantages" and "sufficient" need to be precisely defined for what I see as an advantage and sufficient, would differ from your opinion. This seems to me to be a restatement of the halting problem. Is it possible to predict the future or the impact of innovation?
As for Thomas Jefferson, he was approaching the issue of IP from the standpoint of moral philosophy, not economics -- and even if
he was agruing economics what does his personal finances have to do with it? Would you have us believe that Bill Gates is a better
economist that Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson and all the other Nobel Prize winning economists put together because he is
wealthier than they?
Without getting too far away from the topic, Friedman, Samuelson, et al. did not die homeless. Rather, they had a keener understanding of personal property. And I would much rather have Herr Gates run a company I owned then any other person in the past fifty years except maybe Sam Walton. Go back 100 years, Gates is still my pick over Rockefeller. Go back 1000 years and I think the original Hapsburg might have him beat.
On the theory of business--go to a businessman. On the theory of economics--go to an economist. On the thoery of political (cough) science--go to, well, a philosopher. A philosopher is only as good as his assumptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Cecil at Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com) has answered these and many other thousands of questions over the past 20-30 years. There is an archive with several hundred questions including the three in the parent.
The use of floating point numbers isn't all bad. Those of use who use them are often solving problems with condition numbers that render the answer we get less accurate than the number of digits of accuracy provided.
Think about tan(89.99) versus tan(89.991) (which is very ill-conditioned around 90). Both numbers are not terribly truncated by floating point, but the results are different by about 1,000. Try it and you'll see floating point error isn't as dangerous as things like cancellation, ill-conditioning and the like.
Rand contends that it is the absolute weakest of government that will allow for both the Jeffersonian form of freedom (life, liberty, etc.) and the Roosevelt form of freedom (prosperity, abscence of need, etc.). Her basic argument is that trade is the only true measure of value and by giving anything to anybody (ie taxes to welfare, corps to unemployment insurance, etc) reduces the inherent value of all trade. If I buy something from you for $1 then give you $1, then I have essentially paid $2 for the item, thereby devaluing my original $1. Since I work the same for each $1, my work value is cut in half wrt the item I purchased from you. As an example of this, farming is subsidized by the government of the US to protect various crops from countries more suited to grow them. Therefore, when I buy bread, I pay the $1 for the loaf and give another $1 to the farmer through subsidies for not growing a particular crop, poor weather, or whatever else the government wishes to pay out in subsidies to ``protect'' the farming industry.
While this is not directly on point with your argument, there are some conclusions that can be drawn that are. Still considering the farming industry, why are there protections? The protections are not there for Cargill or ADM--two of the largest industrial firms in the world. They are there for the family farmer. That is who is being protected--you know Paul Neuman and other multimillionaires with small farms raking in subsidies there to protect the industry from the power of ADM, Cargill, and other foreign countries.
Your example of unemployment insurance is another example of this sort of policy. Rand focuses precisely on alleged deleterious effects of such policies. In the end, a strong government will devalue currency implicitly--even though bread still costs a $1 at the store, it will cost substantially more in work.
As for the power vacuum you mention, Rand addresses this quite elegantly--the only power that can be taken from you is the power that you give away. Should you not like a particular companies practice, don't use the companies products. That simple. And simply because you feel they are bad does not mean that they are. Even if a majority feels that, it doesn't mean anything. For if you ask 100,000 people if they would like to have $1,000,000US free for the taking, no strings attached, 100% would say ``YES! GIMME GIMME!'' Does that mean that everyone should have $1,000,000US? If it does, then how much is $1,000,000US going to be worth once everyone has it?
Your fault: you believe that people cannot be trusted with power of their own. Her fault: she believes that public works projects can never be more efficient that private works. I can tell you that I am glad that I don't have to use Microsoft, eat ADM, or ship by FedEx. I would rather pay for choice then have a strong government regulate an industry in favor of what you or I or anybody else would like so that pork and other favors rule the day rather than quality. I also am glad that I can drive on a road and that road is guaranteed, roughly, to be in good repair regardless of how the finances of local road construction companies are doing.
If you think this argument doesn't apply to you, Ayn Rand predicted as much. She even explained why you might not think this argument is applicable or even sound.
hate to break it to you, pi (and all other irrationals) is still approximated on a computer
hey, numbskull.. I purchased the card not from directv, but from some shady guy on the 'net. i seem to own it, do I get to sue or not? i bought the damn thing and it does NOT say it is property of directv. do i get to sue or not?
So when DirecTV fries my card that let's me get all the channels, I should have the right to sue for damages?
as for swinging the dead cat. that dead cat will soon be hitting a lot of dead links-- i, and most people included, consume squat from most of those sites.
As for your shrinkwrap package for $5. Does that include paying the artist for some spiffy and clever artwork? Does that pay Roadway to ship in mass quantities? Does that pay the bean counters to keep track of all this for tax purposes? Does that pay for the least bit of development infrastructure for future content? (not to mention rent, salaries, utilities, you know - overhead)
Or does that just pay for the box, media, plastic, pressing, and printing? I dare you to buy an Id game for $7 now. It seems that $7 doesn't quite cut it for having content that is worthwhile. It seems the give it away and they'll come back for more phenomenon is not just for drug dealing anymore.
And before you shut me out, I dare you to tell me the name of one, just one, shareware game written in the past 12 months that would hold my attention for more than 24 hours. It may be possible, but then again wormholes for travel is possible, too.
the idea that there is very little marginal cost for mass production of digital media is ludicrous. if it were so cheap to distribute digitally, why has suck.com folded? they produced very little of their own content and distributed lots
communism != sharing. half of communism is sharing, the other half is ignoring the economic principle of marginal cost ("from each according to his ability")
The Internet and its predecessors were built with one thing in mind, making a better gun. DARPA isn't into communism all that much. DARPA is entirely about weapons. Sandia, Lawrence Livermoore, etc., make some excellent weapons.
these are hard facts. more facts: if the marginal cost of producing more content is high compared with the actual cost of the content, then this leads to no more content being manufactured. (these are microeconomic principles here, not my opinions).
there is no economic difference between real and intangible assets. they all follow the same rules. guess what, if you dump $$$,$$$ into content and recoup only $$$, then no more content can be produced. (high level argument, does not take into consideration what the actual margins on the content are)
No doubt about it: For instance, we are now working on a project with about 8 user interface programmers and 3 server programmers.
I don't think Linux on the desktop is necessarily dead, but I definitely do not see it rivalling M$ or Crapple. Those are "intuitive" in that the user has spent many moons learning the intuition necessary to work. By giving them three whole mouse buttons, life gets a little kooky. I hate user interface programming so much for this very reason that I refuse to do it.
that's my point. VBScript isn't the problem, vbrun*.dll is. The only beef I have with VBS itself is the 'B,' not that it is inherently evil. The evil is in the implementation not the language.
As for the SDK documentation, it is almost adequate, not execellant, and I use the one on msdn.microsoft.com, I assume that will always be the most recent. If you want an example of an excellently documented SDK, check out man. You will never, ever, never run across stuff like: "this variable is undocumented," which exists in the SDK.
As for fixing problems in MS, turning off VBScript isn't the solution. Seems to me that perl, tcl, python, and other equivalents do not have the same security problems as VBS. I think the main problem lies in vbrun*.dll.
Hey, I've got a thought. Let's write a security patch for IIS. Wait a sec, am I supposed to rewrite a dll? To do this, I would need the api for the dll. have you seen the MS SDK? There are so many partially documented functions, not to mention evidence of undocumented functions as far back as Windows 3.1, possibly farther. You can't rewrite the dll since you don't know what the undocumented functions are doing. Believe me, there have been many _many_ times I wish I could fix NT's inability to kill a crashed service. A service that crashes when a thread tosses the ms equivalent of a SIGSEGV. I would also do my best to add a POSIX.1 pid_t fork (). I am in no way proseltyzing, just presenting facts.
I didn't say stop.. I just said be careful, very very careful.
The parables of Pandora, of the temptation of the forbidden fruit, of the tower of Babel, Prometheus, (sorry about all the occidental references, but I am not too familiar with other belief systems) and others all point to the fact that with new technologies come an entirely different set of problems and responsibilities.
Whether or not the change is good or bad (I do not pretend to be able to judge any of the parables, let alone cloning), there is a lesson to be learned: the consequences of invention include unforeseen, radical shifts in everything, most of which cannot be determined a priori.
To speculate about the repercussions is folly. However, to deny the fact that radical problems will arise is more so. The pols are short on facts but long on principle. Whether or not their actions are correct (history is the only yard stick we can use, and the history has not happened yet), it is a bit naive to assume that just because something is done in the name of science, it has to be valued as good, whether you measure by cost-benefit analysis or other metric. Einstein went to his grave rueing his thoery of special relativity.
The only way we can learn and judge paradigm shifting discoveries is to experience their ramifications. Experience does not grade on a curve, so I believe we should best understand what direction we are going in before blindly heading down that path. ET IN ARCADIA EGO, death also lives in heaven.
Do you feel that your average person is incapable of filtering the amount of smut they can tolerate and blindly click away at what search engines give them?
Are you concerned that Cinemax has been doing the same thing for around 20 years.. ie distributing smut to your house without checking ages of the viewers?
Are you concerned that most any teenager can get in to see a rated 'R' flick? Need I remind you of the nudity and sex in Titanic, the so called teen-girl Star Wars?
If a child sees something they shouldn't, whose fault is it--the purveyors or the people who let the child run free on the internet (read parents)?
Whenver I read/hear/consume opinions like this, I am wondering if the holder of the opinion thinks that their enlightened state is not only superior but the only one of its kind as to point out that this is horrible. Face it, you are in the minority--otherwise internet filth would not be a multi-billion dollar industry.
<sarcasm>
Hey, I got a good idea, let's regulate marijuana, ecstasy, LSD, cocaine, heroin, cigarettes, alcohol, murder, theft, prostitution, teenage sex, arson, guns, people-trafficking, nuclear bombs, and fanatic cults hell-bent on destroying the world! That'll stop them, won't it? I mean regulation will fix it right? That ought to stop all the troubles right?
I trust the regulators. They know what to do. They are stopping it right? Tell me I will wake up in a world that all these nasty things are regulated and there will be peace and prosperity.
</sarcasm>
Or did I wake up this morning in that world? Don't we already regulate these things? Has it brought a stop to the corruption of morals? Are there still drive-by shoootings with guns illegal to possess? Do high-schoolers sit in vans and pull tubes during lunch? What about the Montana Freemen and Bin-Laden guy, we got him right? Are there still crack-whores walking the urban streets? What about the human slave trade? Isn't all this regulated?
I don't see any real innovative work brought to either high performance computing (which has almost no real-time applications--ie, they run models that are not dependant on time of completion) or multi-casting (which is almost completely dominated by real-time applications--ie, the delivery of information must be done in a specific time frame or the information is useless) by bringing them together directly.
As for performance v. bandwidth, that's easy enough.. there aren't memory buses faster than a Pentium 100 cpu (ie, the fetch-execute cycle is bottlenecked at fetch), let alone network connections that can compete with the pure computational power of a--gasp--486/50. I can have a 486 just send sequential numbers to <i>x</i> recipients and tie up a 100Mb switch in the closest wiring closet heading for a gateway.
Perhaps there may be something said for making HPCs that communicate between processors using some multi-casting like technology. For instance, many problems involve performing calculations that SIMD pipes work wonderful for [ie SUM ( iFFT ( FFT ( A ) x FFT ( B ) ) ) over many distinct As and Bs]. It turns out, problems like this in parallel environments involve every node needing to know something from everyother node. This can be done in O(n log n) communications. However, use of multicasting might bring this down to O(n) communications where n is proportional to the number of separate nodes used. For interesting problems, this could improve the performance on a supercomputer by an order of magnitude (ie from 1 year of CPU time to 1 month of CPU time).
Of course, this involves writing your own memory management system, redesigning boards, and other not-quite-so-simple tasks.
If you read the article, the second hacker at midnight starts netting ccs. At 12:30 he has about 30. Then he calls the 800 numbers on the back. What, did he get the actual credit cards in his email? or did he not check his facts?
I, myself, think that the ideas I presented are worthless from a technical prospective. However, neither you nor I are judges. Most judges do not care how a problem is solved as long as it is solved. Fact is, this is may become a reality.
Until all expert witnesses that can be called agree with you--that there is absolutely no way under the sun to limit transmissions on the internet--and this is proven in a court of law (not in a journal), we should worry.
At most, half is FUD. The fact you believe all of it is FUD illustrates the main point I want to make: according to precedant in the US, the right to free expression is subordinate to the right to commerce on any given medium.
Wake up and realize that what I am saying is ridiculuous only because you don't believe it can happen. It can happen. The government can come in and regulate anything they so choose for as little a reason as a damn good lawyer can defend. That is the paradigm you should be thinking in, not that of protocols and workability.
PerES Encryption
Let's have a router at some IP with a netmask of N that routes traffic for some entity(s) [Say from a network of subscribers to @Home, my provider]. Simply drop all outgoing SYN traffic not destined for IP addresses not registered with the federal government. Don't tell me it can't be done. I do it at home with a 486 running Linux. I just do it backwards. When done backwards, it's called a firewall. Routers don't care where packets originate from (hence end-2-end), they just decide where to send them to get to their destination. There is no reason why they cannot be filtered by an access list.
PerES Encryption
Follow my logic. The legal system is all about suing who has the money. Even those who have a passive role in the commission of a crime are obliged to pay damages. Who has money and facilitates the commission of these crimes? ISPs. With the advent of "technologies" like Carniwhore or POS-2000 or whatever its name is, those who are in court will realize (mistakenly) that ISPs can filter information passing through them. Thereby, injunctions will be slapped on the big ISPs like @Home, etc. (but not AOL, for some mysterious reason). The ISPs will then start filtering for known patterns of bytes of Freenet, Hotline, etc. traffic and block them in either direction. Of course, this solution is ridiculuous to think of, but then again, judgements of law are often unencumbered by the thought process.
Of course, there are obvious ways around this. They will be implemented until the ultimate work-around (use of encrypted packets) at which point entire ranges of ports will be banned. Probably, even worse--everything but port 80 from a list of "registered web servers".
If you think this is absurb, try this on for size. Broadcast something for 24 hours at about 100MHz. Yep, that's right, the FCC will be on you in a heartbeat to shut you down.
To think that these cannot be shutdown is absurd. To think that the government will not try to regulate the Internet in an absurd fashion is hubris. They have done it before (from the sinking of the Titanic onward, the US has regulated airwaves) and they WILL do it again.
The fact that we have licensed radio stations is proof enough for me.
PerES Encryption
PerES Encryption
It conforms (mostly, it seems) to the spec for xferring data. That makes it a valid gnutella client. Without a montioring of the type of client sharing data, there is no fix.
In other words, this is as much a bug as typing:
and expecting the operating system from preventing attacks. It is not a software nor an implementation problem. Rather, it is an attack on the protocol that relies on human engineering to work. (ie, Gnutella operates on a big fundamental flaw.. all clients are kind and good)The way I see it, it was just a matter of time. Those who wish to transfer data anonymously should consider the source of the data. Fact is, unless you can authenticate the source, then expect garbage and get surprised from time to time.
In other words.. I double dog dare somebody to fix this in software. And even if they manage by some stroke of super-genius to fix it, it will not prevent similar attacks entirely.
PerES Encryption
Other aspects of information translation figure into CS--ie NLP, the holy grail of user interfaces. A good reason why this should fall under CS is that CS provides a vehicle (ie Turing machine and others) for which it is possible to prove certain things as correct in an abstract way--ie without many preconceptions. All that must be taken for granted are the existence of zero(0), the existence of a next number, a way to express whether or not a number is larger than another, and 3 truth tables (and, or, and not). From these six things, all concepts that can be explained to a computer can be explained in terms of these 6 axioms--albeit, it gets complicated.
Of course, the problem lies in the location of actual information--idiomatic, ambiguous, and connotive meanings are the tricky beasts. For instance if I say "I cleaved the fat from the meat," it has a completely different meaning from "I cleaved the fat to the meat." The meaning of the word "cleave" and the information the meaning carries does not reside with cleave--since cleave is its own antonym. Rather, it lies in the prepositional phrase modifying the verb. Of course it can get more complicated (Hofstadter has quite a few fun ones in his books).
Computers, however, do not deal with ambiguity very well. They need 100% perfect transfer of information as well as intent to operate within constraints specified.
Without knowing a priori what is acceptable to a civilization and what is not (it was not uncome for mothers to fellate their sons as a sign of affection in fuedal China, but a kiss on the cheek was considered intimate), information and intent must be passed 100% correctly. It seems to me that CS is a natural candidate to study this.
PerES Encryption
My current project at work has a very fluid specification. I cannot tell you what is garbage and what is good for a particular module until the module is written and given for inspection to those who are designing the overall process to use the software. That means I have to make guesses about something I know nothing about so as to make a design that will work with something. All I have are guidelines. Should the guildelines change a week before delivery, in goes the fix--sans testing and sans rational design philosophy. In a word, I knowingly write shoddy code to fit political design decisions to meet deadlines set by ill-advised individuals who know not the first thing about how a computer operates.
Quite possibly, the single biggest problem with coding is the concept of a deadline. The second, almost because of the deadline, is the "I'll figure that out later" philosophy. Without a full blueprint of an application or system, (hell, I'd be happy with an accurate spec once in a while) it is impossible to make sound decisions. Ergo, bad software.
What you speak of are luxuries to your average code-for-a-living individual.
PerES Encryption
I tell you how to make a widget after signing an NDA, you tell a third party. You are liable, not the third party who makes them. NDAs are good but rely on people keeping secrets. You and I both know that people cannot keep secrets. If I wanted relief, I could only sue you. You probably don't have fortunes to recover potential losses. Can't get blood from a turnip. Probably end up costing me more to sue than what I would get in the end.
If the idea truly requires much development and assembling of resources to exploit then the originator will have the natural advantage of a significant head start and perhaps deserves no more than that.
Most of the problem with production is not the production itself, but securing capital and real property to do the construction. Production is (generally) very quick since Henry Ford. What takes so long is building a place to work, securing the necessary assecories (machines, computers, etc.) to work, and staffing. That is generally a large barrier of entry. After this is the cost of raw materials and salaries. Once again, I need to protect myself from companies that already have infrastructure.
If the idea is so easy to copy that others can very quickly bring a competitive idea to market after the inventor's version becomes public then maybe it was not such a brilliant idea after all and does not deserve the benefit of a legal monopoly.
So, would you have one company collecting these ideas so that you purchase everything from safety pins (patented last century) to computers? The theoretical (not as it stands today) point of a patent is to protect innovation. The fact that something is "simple" is not mentioned--only non-obvious. Most magic tricks are simple to perform but are intentionally non-obvious. Bad example, but you get the point.
The basic question which needs to be addressed, not begged, is: How do we know when the natural commercial advantages that accrue to an originator, however large or small, are insufficient and must therefore be supplemented by a legal device such as a patent?
This is the most eloquent statement of the connundrum I have ever read on Slashdot. Due to the quick nature of these comments, I am often too heavy handed. By the nature of putting the word "legal" in the sentence, the subjective words "advantages" and "sufficient" need to be precisely defined for what I see as an advantage and sufficient, would differ from your opinion. This seems to me to be a restatement of the halting problem. Is it possible to predict the future or the impact of innovation?
As for Thomas Jefferson, he was approaching the issue of IP from the standpoint of moral philosophy, not economics -- and even if he was agruing economics what does his personal finances have to do with it? Would you have us believe that Bill Gates is a better economist that Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson and all the other Nobel Prize winning economists put together because he is wealthier than they?
Without getting too far away from the topic, Friedman, Samuelson, et al. did not die homeless. Rather, they had a keener understanding of personal property. And I would much rather have Herr Gates run a company I owned then any other person in the past fifty years except maybe Sam Walton. Go back 100 years, Gates is still my pick over Rockefeller. Go back 1000 years and I think the original Hapsburg might have him beat.
On the theory of business--go to a businessman. On the theory of economics--go to an economist. On the thoery of political (cough) science--go to, well, a philosopher. A philosopher is only as good as his assumptions.
PerES Encryption