My french isn't that good, but the article seemed to indicate that anyone hosting a web page with no means of identifying authorship was in violation of this new law. As far as I can tell, any agency that allows someone to put up a page under their domain, in france, is responsible for that page if they cannot supply the author.
So what keeps french citizens with beefs against the government from posting their revolutionary propaganda to, say, a US public hosting page? It doesn't seem like this accomplishes anything but the inconveniencing of harmless teenagers creating their first web site... anyone else would be just as well served getting foreign hosting.
It would have been more effective for a government with such anti-liberty tendancies to take control of these public hosting sites and make them more intrusive without being obvious - IE, requiring an email to send access password to, requiring it to be.fr, and requiring all french domains to be in some manner registered.
Not that I advocate totaltarian governments. No, not I.
The Snowcrash concept is in the artist's concepts2 page. The updates indicate that concepts are added by date, about nine per page, and that the concepts5 page has just been filled. Based on the artist's statements about time, I'd guess this was commissioned at least three years ago, making it non-newsworthy...
The interview leaves me wondering one thing. I agree that Gutenberg started something that became a massive revolution... I think A&E's Biography of the Millenium even recognized him for it. There's no doubt that the protestant split was huge... but I fail to see the connection. The parallel is the Internet, not project Gutenberg... the internet's presence as a revolutionary medium is tremendously significant to society. But there's a lot more to this significance than a text repository...
Project Gutenberg is a noble effort in the same way that Open Source is. Unfortunately, it hasn't got what its namesake had: something that couldn't be had before.
Public libraries have been a standard in the US for so long that free access to information is now taken for granted. The only thing offered by this repository is convenience. It is an advance, with advantages, but not a revolution.
I do, however, anticipate another revolution of sorts. It is already becoming obvious: web based publication is starting to massively change things in the comics industry, and starting to show up as a viable alternative for fiction as well. Here is where it matters: new publication, not old, where things not printed, or printable, before the means were available.
As admirable as the project is, it fails to see where the real revolution lies. When will someone start a repository (searchable and reviewable) for new works? That would be the revolution...
For those of you who enjoy SF, Baen Books (www.baen.com) publishes a large number of their books in html a good month before the dead tree version makes it to bookshelves. They have what they call a "webscription", which allows members to access full books, as well as the first few chapters of each new book open to the public. They did, about a year ago, publish David Weber's "The Apocalypse Troll" in its entirety online, about two weeks before it hit the stores.
At some point soon some changes are going to have to be made. If simple lineage is accepted as the dividing factor, nothing with more pig genes than human would count as human, I would think. There might be issues over percentage of genes, but the end result would be... disaster.
Visualize a world in which intelligent slaves are common - so long as less than X% of their DNA can be identified as human, they aren't.
What if we do accept intelligence as the dividing factor? What elements define humanity? There is already a precedent for accepting genetic defects that result in individuals who cannot even manage to care for themselves. Would we dismiss our own offspring as human if they failed these tests? I can't say what is right in this case.
What if we advanced the art to the point that the organ could be grown without a complex organism's hosting body? Would a heart (100% human DNA) get treated as human? I seriously doubt it. What of a full body minus brain? Much harder to say.
And it doesn't end there... eventually, computers will be capable of passing a turing test. When a computer can convince any of us that it is human, do we accept it as such? It may not be, yet, but I fear the day that we have sapient software, and keep it enslaved.
None of which is reason to stop the research. If we don't go forward with this out of fear, we may find that we are slowly going backward.
Slashdot Mirror
My french isn't that good, but the article seemed to indicate that anyone hosting a web page with no means of identifying authorship was in violation of this new law. As far as I can tell, any agency that allows someone to put up a page under their domain, in france, is responsible for that page if they cannot supply the author.
.fr, and requiring all french domains to be in some manner registered.
So what keeps french citizens with beefs against the government from posting their revolutionary propaganda to, say, a US public hosting page? It doesn't seem like this accomplishes anything but the inconveniencing of harmless teenagers creating their first web site... anyone else would be just as well served getting foreign hosting.
It would have been more effective for a government with such anti-liberty tendancies to take control of these public hosting sites and make them more intrusive without being obvious - IE, requiring an email to send access password to, requiring it to be
Not that I advocate totaltarian governments. No, not I.
[goosestep off, stage left]
The Snowcrash concept is in the artist's concepts2 page. The updates indicate that concepts are added by date, about nine per page, and that the concepts5 page has just been filled. Based on the artist's statements about time, I'd guess this was commissioned at least three years ago, making it non-newsworthy...
The interview leaves me wondering one thing. I agree that Gutenberg started something that became a massive revolution... I think A&E's Biography of the Millenium even recognized him for it. There's no doubt that the protestant split was huge... but I fail to see the connection. The parallel is the Internet, not project Gutenberg... the internet's presence as a revolutionary medium is tremendously significant to society. But there's a lot more to this significance than a text repository...
Project Gutenberg is a noble effort in the same way that Open Source is. Unfortunately, it hasn't got what its namesake had: something that couldn't be had before.
Public libraries have been a standard in the US for so long that free access to information is now taken for granted. The only thing offered by this repository is convenience. It is an advance, with advantages, but not a revolution.
I do, however, anticipate another revolution of sorts. It is already becoming obvious: web based publication is starting to massively change things in the comics industry, and starting to show up as a viable alternative for fiction as well. Here is where it matters: new publication, not old, where things not printed, or printable, before the means were available.
As admirable as the project is, it fails to see where the real revolution lies. When will someone start a repository (searchable and reviewable) for new works? That would be the revolution...
For those of you who enjoy SF, Baen Books (www.baen.com) publishes a large number of their books in html a good month before the dead tree version makes it to bookshelves. They have what they call a "webscription", which allows members to access full books, as well as the first few chapters of each new book open to the public. They did, about a year ago, publish David Weber's "The Apocalypse Troll" in its entirety online, about two weeks before it hit the stores.
At some point soon some changes are going to have to be made. If simple lineage is accepted as the dividing factor, nothing with more pig genes than human would count as human, I would think. There might be issues over percentage of genes, but the end result would be... disaster.
Visualize a world in which intelligent slaves are common - so long as less than X% of their DNA can be identified as human, they aren't.
What if we do accept intelligence as the dividing factor? What elements define humanity? There is already a precedent for accepting genetic defects that result in individuals who cannot even manage to care for themselves. Would we dismiss our own offspring as human if they failed these tests? I can't say what is right in this case.
What if we advanced the art to the point that the organ could be grown without a complex organism's hosting body? Would a heart (100% human DNA) get treated as human? I seriously doubt it. What of a full body minus brain? Much harder to say.
And it doesn't end there... eventually, computers will be capable of passing a turing test. When a computer can convince any of us that it is human, do we accept it as such? It may not be, yet, but I fear the day that we have sapient software, and keep it enslaved.
None of which is reason to stop the research. If we don't go forward with this out of fear, we may find that we are slowly going backward.