Tentatively true? It is what it is. Judging something as true or not like that is not the way science works. You reproduce the results and if you get the same and you draw the same conclusions; that's how science works.
If you're not in a position to reproduce the experiment, then you're not in a position to even think about whether the paper is "true" or not. You can argue about the theory, since you can run those experiments with enough knowledge, but this paper is about experimental results.
Yes, there is usually a panel of people review work for entrance to a journal, but this guy didn't submit it a journal. But that's really just a way to select which things get into the journal since they can't publish all submissions.
Without peer review, you have to rely on your own gut feeling to tell whether something published is totally bogus, questionable, or likely to contain basic errors. In your own subfield, you might trust your gut, as well as your impression of the authors based on their previous work or on your having met them. Outside your field, it becomes much harder to tell.
In other words, you want someone to think for you. Even papers that went through a committee before it made it into the journel isn't to be trusted on those merits, only the merits of the contents.
If you're not able to judge the merits of the content, then that's too bad. It's fair to trust other people's eruidte opinion of the paper, but what good is a paper to you if you don't understand it, quality approved or not?
The peer-review and peer-validation process is fundamental to science, but it is much more than some guys presiding on a panel deciding what gets put into a journal or presented at a conference. Skeptisism is more fundamental to science than peer-review or peer-validation, and you can't suspend skeptisism just because someone else told you it's okay.
Yes, it is convienent to narrow someone's work to one paper, but peer-review is really a process, and not limited to one paper. If this guy publishes a paper, then any reviews should also get published. So what if they don't get attached? It may be less convienent to you, but it is not harmful to science or the peer-review process. You're just used to how journals work. But it doesn't mean that it's not good science to publish without using a journal. It just means less of the process has occured before your eyeballs see the paper.
The point of a journal is convienece; a place to record the science of a topic. It is not the only way to do legitimate science.
What are you talking about? Publishing a paper is enabling peer-review. If he didn't publish his paper, then none of his peers could review it.
The concept of peer-review is deeper than a bunch of scientists sitting on a journal or conference panel. It doesn't have to appear in a journal or in conference proceedings in order to be legitimate.
What do you think he's doing by posting his paper?
He's saying what he did, what happened, and what he thinks it is. Duh, it's a paper. That's what papers are for.
From the introduction of the paper:
The results described in this report should be regarded as preliminary. An improved
version of the experiment is currently being planned. Nevertheless, the body of results, as
well as the complexity of the experimental procedures and of the theoretical interpretation
are such that a detailed description and difusion could not be further delayed. All measurements
were done by E. Podkletnov in Moscow, while G. Modanese provided theoretical
advice.
The type of peer-review you're talking about are for submissions to a journal or a conference. The author explicitly states that the results could not be delayed. It sounds like he got bugged enough to write the paper. He probably didn't feel it was ready to be submitted to a journal or presented at a conference, since it is marked as preliminary. It could also be he didn't feel any of the existing journals or conferences addressed all the people interested in his work.
And in any case, publishing a paper is the start of a peer-review process. It's not peer-review for the paper, but peer-review of the work. And that's the point, after all! He's done nothing wrong by making the paper available.
I noticed that the WMA format has bugs. When the song is finished playing, then some information in the WMA file is tripped and the player pops up a browser and goes to the URL specified in the WMA.
This is seriously bad and I no longer even consider using the WMA format, even though it compresses better. That, and there isn't support under Linux as far as I know. I'll be sticking with my MP3s, thank you very much.
I would like to think that by virtue of the documents I make available that the moderators would place me in.smart, but I myself would not have that power. It sounds like you have very little power in real life to be making such hollow threats on-line.
Of course I know people live in countries. Yes that is the way it is, but it could be better. You see no room for improvement for humanity?
The majority of us do not delight in our differences, we delight in defiling other people because they're different, and quite often over trivial differences such as language, skin color, or ethnic background.
I am not suggesting that everyone pretend they're all the same, I'm only suggesting we stop judging people because there're merely different.
I am inspired by sleep withdrawl and cafeine.
With regard to my suggestion in another comment that we'll find a way to resolve namespace conflicts in the tradition of the virtual world instead of the physical world, I propose the Brand Name Service.
Recognizing that the DNS is not suitable for organizing brand and trademark based name resolution, a different framework is necessary that addresses the needs of a namespace composed of brand, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property. Whether you agree that intellectual property is a valid idea, you surely can't deny that people treat it as such and laws exist backing it up. To solve the current problems with DNS namespace allocation is to address the problems people see with intellectual property disputes that arise from use of the DNS.
What is Brand Name Service?
It is a new namespace under which the specific concerns of intellectual property naming boundaries can be respected and resolved with a minimum of effort.
Specifically, what is it?
I don't know exactly, the necessity of such a system just now occured to me. I see two viable models, one based on distributed reputation, and another based on centralized registration. I do know that it either has to map intellectual property namespaces either onto the DNS or to IP networks. It can either be a parallel entity to the DNS or sit on top of the DNS.
Perhaps it would be best to create a system that is a blend of distributed reputation and centralized registration. This is how people recognize each other and entities, and there are working established rules and procedures for dealing with names in such namespaces. There must be an acceptable system we can create in the virtual world that'll interface properly with the system in existence in the real world.
Why is such a system necessary?
The DNS was created under circumstances which, by and large, no longer apply to the Internet. The Internet is not a research project anymore. DNS solved the very pratical problem of remembering numeric addresses and to institute some semantic ordering of those addresses. A fairly arbitrary system was devised that would map meaningful strings to those numbers for the convienence of people. The system created to allocate those strings was based on the logical, functional, and political network topology of the Internet at the very beginning of the Internet.
Needless to say, the Internet has changed with the most significant portion being the political componenet of the network topology.
The DNS fits the old model much better than the new model. It no longer satisfactorially addresses the political needs of the Internet. We can tweak the technology to address the problems or we can wait for the legal system to tweak us. I prefer to solve the problem without getting a bunch of strange hybrid physiecal/Internet commerce laws passed that will erode the potential of the Internet.
Solving Current DNS Conflicts
The DNS was never meant to deal with intellectual property conflicts other than saying "registrars will sort it out." Now people are discovering that registrars aren't the appropriate entities to sort this out because the namespace itself is inadequate.
So what can be done? Essentially what has to be done is to take the existing intellectual property databases and create a mapping onto the DNS. For instance, if I am Nissan Motor Company and someone has taken nissan.com, no problems at all. People will not simply try nissan.com to look me up. They will go to the BNS, look up "Nissan Motor Company", the BNS would in turn query "nissan-usa.com" to find the proper IP address.
This also eases the problem of internationalization. Suppose I'm only interested in Nissan Motors in Japan. No problem. My browser would have my locality set to Japanese when I typed "Nissan Motors" (or the Japanese equivalent) and the BNS would find the Japanese version of the "Nissan Motors" and query "nissan.co.jp" in the DNS.
This makes the BNS the authority for brand, trademarks, and other types of intellectual property that businesses rely on for reputation.
I'll have to think some more on how the BNS could handle distributed reputation without requiring a centralized repository, but I believe it is only a matter of articulating my thoughts.
Please my son, consider your ties to the physical world. Your intellectual discourse cannot rise above your physical discourse until you transcend your physicality. I don't want divide up a namespace based on parameters that have very little bearing on that space in most cases.
The first step to hatred is to seperate people.
People hating other people arising because of geographic differences is not rational and has led to a lot of problems that are readily apparent.
Why do some Americans hate the French? Simply because they are in France. Oh sure you could say it is because Americans sometimes perceive French people as arrogant. Regardless of how much merit there is in that accusation or perception of that accusation, defining a group such as "French people" is what enabled that irrational label in the first place. There is no way to prevent the association of attributes to a group of people, it is best to not define the group in the first place. Or at the very least, don't define membership in the group using something as trivial as geography.
Better yet, why not let people make decisions regarding which groups they want to affiliate with. It is not my duty to be American. I am American simply because I was born here. Do I feel certain duties as an American? Of course. Do I feel a need to defend my group? Of course. Would the world be better off if each person made up their own mind as to which group they belonged? Probably. Why force the issue in any case?
People naturally label things to make it easier to comprehend the world. Labels of people based on location do not accurately characterize people. In fact, why characterize people at all?
What's the point of labelling people? We all know that you have to evaluate people on a person by person basis in order to have any degree of accuracy of judgement. Sure, you can make distinctions to make decisions quicker. That is the role stereotypes play.
When it comes down to it, stereotypes serve a purpose. Do I cross the street in the dead of night when a mean looking person carrying a blunt object approaches me in the opposite direction? More often than not, yes. I do that because my ancestors tended to survive better because of that behavior. However, as a rational person do I know that I can't use that stereotype to make any real judgements? Of course not.
It's hard enough to bring people together. We are wired and trained by culture to divide people. It's no wonder there's so much hate in the world.
We have an opportunity to make distinctions based on ideas or category of industry instead of something as arbitrary as geography.
If you ask me, and I'm sure you are all hanging on my every word, we would all be better served to scrap the whole country based domain system and set something that doesn't make divisions that are so arbitrary and fundamentally unnecessary in this medium.
Why drag boundaries such as geographic location from a system proven to yield fear, hatred, rampant stereotyping, violence, ignorance, and misunderstanding into a system that can do without those boundaries? Why not try something new and possibly improve the state of our world instead of making the same mistakes?
Pragmatism
To answer your concerns, after building a 10 foot (3 meter) tall soap box and leaping up and down on it, it is a simple matter of namespace resolution. The concerns you are voicing arise because of our ties to a geographically based system. Instead of taking the path of least resistance and mirroring that model in a virtual system, let's resolve the problems and preserve the possibilities a virtual system offers over a physical system.
I don't want to recreate the concept of a locality on the Internet and I certainly don't want it to correspond to geography. Let's improve the system now that we've got a chance.
Search engines and other information tools will help the make those resolutions. I don't care if there are two IAPS. People will adapt to the new environment and figure a way to deal with it. I would much rather have them deal with it on a new playing field and improve known best methods instead of dragging old baggage along with them to the new field.
That's what all the noise regarding taxes and laws is about. We have a fundamental choice about how to deal with the Internet. We can either adapt the Internet to fit our model of the physical world, or we can adapt our notions of the physical world to fit with the different model the Internet enables. I would rather try something new. I'm sick of repeating all the same horrible mistakes.
What? No. You've got to remember that the US is made up of "dirty" foreigners, except for a very small percentage that we effectively squashed.
I might concede the need for a.them TLD on the grounds that if there's a ".us" then by simple deduction there's a ".them".
I would like to cast out the whole idea of dividing the net up into.us and.them. It wouldn't improve the signal to noise ratio in either domain. I base that idea on the observation that people are stupid no matter where you go.
By the way, under my scheme, it's my guess that the.smart moderators would put your domain in.stupid.
Sorting ideas is always preferable to sorting people.
- Me
We already are footing the bill, and it is quite expensive.
You know, you'd think someone advertising Libertarian literature in his tag would pounce all over that comment, you tax-abolishing-liberty-loving-son-of-a-gun.
I propose we eliminate all domains and create
two:.stupid and.smart. Then I can block everything in.stupid.
We can use a Slashdot style moderation scheme to decide who goes in.stupid and in.smart.
Of course by doing so, Slashdot runs the risk of being put in.stupid. <ducks>
It may make sense to administer a physical
infrastructure by partitioning based on geographic location, but doing this in a logical space is not needed and constrains the system unaturally. What about entities that exist in multiple locations, constantly move around, or don't exist anywhere?
It just makes no sense to impose geographic only ordering to the web. The web isn't about geography, it's about ideas, and increasingly, marketing and mindshare.
A fingerprint is a piece of data computed from the song, not something embedded in the song itself. A proper fingerprint would somehow capture the essence of the song, so even if it were filled with static or missing the last minute it would still work.
A watermark is data embedded in the song itself with the idea that it is hard to remove the watermark from the song without destroying the song.
I agree. At least with cryptographic hashes there is very sound theory at work. This is based on trail and error. And not only that, but it's trying to be inclusive instead of exclusive.
A cryptographic hash takes an exact set of bits to result in the hash, a very exclusive operation. It's excluding all of the wrong values. If any of the bits in the configuration are slightly off, then there's a very high likelyhood that the hash will be completely different.
I believe common sense will tell you it is easier to do that than to loosely define a large set of bits that will result in the same hash. And furthermore, the boundary for the bit bag is defined by human intuition (psychoacustics) and empirical research (trial and error).
Granted, lots of hashes are created by people tinkering with an algorithm, but there are excruciatingly detailed and highly refined tests that'll tell how good the algorithm is. The development of the algorithms and tests are based on information theory and statistics.
What are the tests for the audio fingerprinting based on? The answer appears to be our grossly underdeveloped understanding about how the human mind processes sound all the way through to making comparisons between different samples of music.
I seriously doubt that something hinging on human intuition and interpretation as part of the algorithm can overcome the fact we don't understand how people's mind work to any acceptable degree.
I spent some time thinking about a way to fingerprint music, and it is a very hard problem to come up with something that captures the essense of our perception of music. Simply doing that is a huge accomplishment. It involves distilling down human methodology for sound recognition, something that is based on a massivly parralel biochemical neural network, or at least something we can only crudely model as a neural network, into a mathematical formula that can be implemented efficiently on a processor.
It is much more likely this won't work because there's a fundamental difference in the platform these two tasks are done on: subjective analysis by a person of some music as to what is and is not the same and some convoluted algorithm attempting to approximate that process on a von-neuman style computer. I won't hold my breath, no matter how cool the idea is. And it is very cool.
They would probably have better luck building a neural network and training it against a large set of people to attempt to capture their collective equality operation
I doubt they will reach their goal, but if they can come up with an algorithm that reasonably sorts music the way people do and to satisfactorally compare music, it will still be very powerful. I personally would love to see such technology be successful.
The ability to emulate how people discern music and to detect differences between samples is tremendous. If nothing else I can finally catalog my music intelligently and to seek new music that will be something I very likely will dig.
Imagine listening to a song that really scratches
an itch, taking the fingerprint of that song, even if it is from the radio and getting songs that scratch the itch the same way from a database. How cool would that be?
Not only that, but we'd need that sort of technology in order to find musicians and bands (there is a distinction) that we like if there isn't a huge mega-media-greedy conglomerate driving the mindshare and play time. Combine that with reputation certificates and something like SPKI and you've got a very successful way to implement the
Street Performer's Protocol (see the recent/. story)
A reputation certificate is similar in concept to what eBay does with its sellers in capturing the history of the person to create a mark of how reputable that person or entity is, but it goes one step further and cryptographically binds that information to to an identity. See the SPKI document above for detailed information.
This is stuff that needs to be worked on and I salute tuneprint for working towards that goal.
Sure it's possible, it just hasn't been done yet.
Of course, how can I make such a claim? Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if it has been done before, or at least attempted.
Have you ever taken two CDs and compared them? I haven't. This is great fodder for conspiracy theorists. Luckily even if there were unique identifiers in the bits on the CDs, I don't see a way that the association can be made with the credit cards.
After all, it is easily verifiable that the UPC codes on the CDs that are scanned at the register are not unique over the CDs. You can easily verify that.
And on top of that, associating someone's name and a billing address registered with the credit company with some MP3 floating out on the Internet is a very hard and expensive problem to solve.
As most things this comes down to an economic argument. It's just not feasable to do such a thing for the benefit of being able to slap someone with a singular violation of copyright law. It's just not profitable to do such a thing.
Trust the economics, not the technology. One of the fundamental ideas in security is to make the attack more expensive than the worth of what is being protected, in this case our privacy. So far it seems to work.
Of course, if you used DNS, then you'd also have to deal with domain name propagation problems, and I'm sure that's a mess you don't want to get involved with.
I think most people comfortable with the command line are able to work faster than most people using a GUI. Why isn't there a middle ground, like in Emacs? I would much prefer to see a graphical display of the filesystem triggered by command line input. There would be a hacked shell that provides hooks into a GUI and would trigger them when certain things happened, such as a directory changing.
This experiment was carried out somewhat by midnight commander, but why are the large projects not integrating these two interface methods better?
It is because people view choosing one software package over another as a serious commitment to one software package. Indeed, this is how the world operates, but this is not a good thing. I wouldn't mention this, but the adapatation layers necessary to obliterate the distinctions are inefficient themselves! How yucky can this situation get?
Choosing one software package over another, such as MySQL over PostgreSQL, should not make it difficult later to switch. This is where the
focus should be instead of bitterly crusading under the banner of one package over another.
Even with the best of evaluations, a choice represents a judgement over a fixed set of data, both current facts and speculated future facts. It is, in effect, establishing a constant choice in a dynamic environment. Obviously the choice will be soon invalidated.
If MySQL is the best choice now, and in the foreseeable future, the unforseeable future will silently sneak up on you and invalidate all your hard won conclusions. Loyalty to one software package is based on merit, and merit changes over time. Instead of investing so much time with benchmarking to get people to create brand loyalty under the guise of merit loyalty, effort should be directed to making the transition between software packages seemless.
Benchmarks should always be carried out through an adaptation layer. When software packages do poorly when compared with each other through this abstracted layer, it is up to the authors of the packages to optimize their code against the abstracted layer, not to bitch and moan about how unfair the world is and if someone would take the time to perform specialized tweaks on their package it would have run much better.
If PostgreSQL makes significant optimizations to the backend that would double the capacity of my application if only I were using it, I want it to be as easy as possible to make the switch. I do not want to violate the abstraction of the layer between me and the backend, because I'll just get trapped. If I allow this to happen I may as well have written to the native interface of the backend and plunge myself to the hilt where I get better performance and screw the opportunity cost of other packages improving or new ones coming down the pipe.
I would prefer effort be focused on making the ODBC drivers more efficient. The value in having competing database systems is to be able to switch between them based on merit and have the transistion be as painless as possible. Any time I see a battleground based on brand loyalty I see a situation where people are directing effort in the wrong places.
If it were more painless to switch software packages, there would be less bickering and more sharing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course you can critique their procedures, but beyond that, you can't critique the results, and that is really what you want to judge.
If you're not in a position to reproduce the experiment, then you're not in a position to even think about whether the paper is "true" or not. You can argue about the theory, since you can run those experiments with enough knowledge, but this paper is about experimental results.
Yes, there is usually a panel of people review work for entrance to a journal, but this guy didn't submit it a journal. But that's really just a way to select which things get into the journal since they can't publish all submissions.
In other words, you want someone to think for you. Even papers that went through a committee before it made it into the journel isn't to be trusted on those merits, only the merits of the contents.If you're not able to judge the merits of the content, then that's too bad. It's fair to trust other people's eruidte opinion of the paper, but what good is a paper to you if you don't understand it, quality approved or not?
The peer-review and peer-validation process is fundamental to science, but it is much more than some guys presiding on a panel deciding what gets put into a journal or presented at a conference. Skeptisism is more fundamental to science than peer-review or peer-validation, and you can't suspend skeptisism just because someone else told you it's okay.
Yes, it is convienent to narrow someone's work to one paper, but peer-review is really a process, and not limited to one paper. If this guy publishes a paper, then any reviews should also get published. So what if they don't get attached? It may be less convienent to you, but it is not harmful to science or the peer-review process. You're just used to how journals work. But it doesn't mean that it's not good science to publish without using a journal. It just means less of the process has occured before your eyeballs see the paper.
The point of a journal is convienece; a place to record the science of a topic. It is not the only way to do legitimate science.
Did you actually look at the paper? It's a paper. It's over 50 pages and they called it a paper.
The concept of peer-review is deeper than a bunch of scientists sitting on a journal or conference panel. It doesn't have to appear in a journal or in conference proceedings in order to be legitimate.
He's saying what he did, what happened, and what he thinks it is. Duh, it's a paper. That's what papers are for.
From the introduction of the paper:
The type of peer-review you're talking about are for submissions to a journal or a conference. The author explicitly states that the results could not be delayed. It sounds like he got bugged enough to write the paper. He probably didn't feel it was ready to be submitted to a journal or presented at a conference, since it is marked as preliminary. It could also be he didn't feel any of the existing journals or conferences addressed all the people interested in his work.And in any case, publishing a paper is the start of a peer-review process. It's not peer-review for the paper, but peer-review of the work. And that's the point, after all! He's done nothing wrong by making the paper available.
Deal.
More Information on Perl and Python.
I shouldn't have ignored my threshold setting. But now I have to ask, what is your problem? Someone please moderate the coward's post to -1.
See my comment about just such a system.
I noticed that the WMA format has bugs. When the song is finished playing, then some information in the WMA file is tripped and the player pops up a browser and goes to the URL specified in the WMA.
This is seriously bad and I no longer even consider using the WMA format, even though it compresses better. That, and there isn't support under Linux as far as I know. I'll be sticking with my MP3s, thank you very much.
The offending player is WinAmp with WMA support.
They should include a Rosetta Disk.
I would like to think that by virtue of the documents I make available that the moderators would place me in
My Kung-Fu is stronger!
0.53
Of course I know people live in countries. Yes that is the way it is, but it could be better. You see no room for improvement for humanity?
The majority of us do not delight in our differences, we delight in defiling other people because they're different, and quite often over trivial differences such as language, skin color, or ethnic background.
I am not suggesting that everyone pretend they're all the same, I'm only suggesting we stop judging people because there're merely different.
I am inspired by sleep withdrawl and cafeine. With regard to my suggestion in another comment that we'll find a way to resolve namespace conflicts in the tradition of the virtual world instead of the physical world, I propose the Brand Name Service .
Recognizing that the DNS is not suitable for organizing brand and trademark based name resolution, a different framework is necessary that addresses the needs of a namespace composed of brand, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property. Whether you agree that intellectual property is a valid idea, you surely can't deny that people treat it as such and laws exist backing it up. To solve the current problems with DNS namespace allocation is to address the problems people see with intellectual property disputes that arise from use of the DNS.
What is Brand Name Service ?
Specifically, what is it?
Perhaps it would be best to create a system that is a blend of distributed reputation and centralized registration. This is how people recognize each other and entities, and there are working established rules and procedures for dealing with names in such namespaces. There must be an acceptable system we can create in the virtual world that'll interface properly with the system in existence in the real world.
Why is such a system necessary?
- The DNS was created under circumstances which, by and large, no longer apply to the Internet. The Internet is not a research project anymore. DNS solved the very pratical problem of remembering numeric addresses and to institute some semantic ordering of those addresses. A fairly arbitrary system was devised that would map meaningful strings to those numbers for the convienence of people. The system created to allocate those strings was based on the logical, functional, and political network topology of the Internet at the very beginning of the Internet.
Solving Current DNS ConflictsNeedless to say, the Internet has changed with the most significant portion being the political componenet of the network topology.
The DNS fits the old model much better than the new model. It no longer satisfactorially addresses the political needs of the Internet. We can tweak the technology to address the problems or we can wait for the legal system to tweak us. I prefer to solve the problem without getting a bunch of strange hybrid physiecal/Internet commerce laws passed that will erode the potential of the Internet.
The DNS was never meant to deal with intellectual property conflicts other than saying "registrars will sort it out." Now people are discovering that registrars aren't the appropriate entities to sort this out because the namespace itself is inadequate.
So what can be done? Essentially what has to be done is to take the existing intellectual property databases and create a mapping onto the DNS. For instance, if I am Nissan Motor Company and someone has taken nissan.com, no problems at all. People will not simply try nissan.com to look me up. They will go to the BNS, look up "Nissan Motor Company", the BNS would in turn query "nissan-usa.com" to find the proper IP address.
This also eases the problem of internationalization. Suppose I'm only interested in Nissan Motors in Japan. No problem. My browser would have my locality set to Japanese when I typed "Nissan Motors" (or the Japanese equivalent) and the BNS would find the Japanese version of the "Nissan Motors" and query "nissan.co.jp" in the DNS.
This makes the BNS the authority for brand, trademarks, and other types of intellectual property that businesses rely on for reputation.
I'll have to think some more on how the BNS could handle distributed reputation without requiring a centralized repository, but I believe it is only a matter of articulating my thoughts.
What do you think?
Please my son, consider your ties to the physical world. Your intellectual discourse cannot rise above your physical discourse until you transcend your physicality. I don't want divide up a namespace based on parameters that have very little bearing on that space in most cases.
The first step to hatred is to seperate people. People hating other people arising because of geographic differences is not rational and has led to a lot of problems that are readily apparent.
Why do some Americans hate the French? Simply because they are in France. Oh sure you could say it is because Americans sometimes perceive French people as arrogant. Regardless of how much merit there is in that accusation or perception of that accusation, defining a group such as "French people" is what enabled that irrational label in the first place. There is no way to prevent the association of attributes to a group of people, it is best to not define the group in the first place. Or at the very least, don't define membership in the group using something as trivial as geography.
Better yet, why not let people make decisions regarding which groups they want to affiliate with. It is not my duty to be American. I am American simply because I was born here. Do I feel certain duties as an American? Of course. Do I feel a need to defend my group? Of course. Would the world be better off if each person made up their own mind as to which group they belonged? Probably. Why force the issue in any case?
People naturally label things to make it easier to comprehend the world. Labels of people based on location do not accurately characterize people. In fact, why characterize people at all?
What's the point of labelling people? We all know that you have to evaluate people on a person by person basis in order to have any degree of accuracy of judgement. Sure, you can make distinctions to make decisions quicker. That is the role stereotypes play.
When it comes down to it, stereotypes serve a purpose. Do I cross the street in the dead of night when a mean looking person carrying a blunt object approaches me in the opposite direction? More often than not, yes. I do that because my ancestors tended to survive better because of that behavior. However, as a rational person do I know that I can't use that stereotype to make any real judgements? Of course not.
It's hard enough to bring people together. We are wired and trained by culture to divide people. It's no wonder there's so much hate in the world. We have an opportunity to make distinctions based on ideas or category of industry instead of something as arbitrary as geography.
If you ask me, and I'm sure you are all hanging on my every word, we would all be better served to scrap the whole country based domain system and set something that doesn't make divisions that are so arbitrary and fundamentally unnecessary in this medium.
Why drag boundaries such as geographic location from a system proven to yield fear, hatred, rampant stereotyping, violence, ignorance, and misunderstanding into a system that can do without those boundaries? Why not try something new and possibly improve the state of our world instead of making the same mistakes?
Pragmatism
To answer your concerns, after building a 10 foot (3 meter) tall soap box and leaping up and down on it, it is a simple matter of namespace resolution. The concerns you are voicing arise because of our ties to a geographically based system. Instead of taking the path of least resistance and mirroring that model in a virtual system, let's resolve the problems and preserve the possibilities a virtual system offers over a physical system.
I don't want to recreate the concept of a locality on the Internet and I certainly don't want it to correspond to geography. Let's improve the system now that we've got a chance.
Search engines and other information tools will help the make those resolutions. I don't care if there are two IAPS. People will adapt to the new environment and figure a way to deal with it. I would much rather have them deal with it on a new playing field and improve known best methods instead of dragging old baggage along with them to the new field.
That's what all the noise regarding taxes and laws is about. We have a fundamental choice about how to deal with the Internet. We can either adapt the Internet to fit our model of the physical world, or we can adapt our notions of the physical world to fit with the different model the Internet enables. I would rather try something new. I'm sick of repeating all the same horrible mistakes.
What? No. You've got to remember that the US is made up of "dirty" foreigners, except for a very small percentage that we effectively squashed.
I might concede the need for a .them TLD on the grounds that if there's a ".us" then by simple deduction there's a ".them".
I would like to cast out the whole idea of dividing the net up into .us and .them. It wouldn't improve the signal to noise ratio in either domain. I base that idea on the observation that people are stupid no matter where you go.
By the way, under my scheme, it's my guess that the .smart moderators would put your domain in .stupid.
We already are footing the bill, and it is quite expensive.
You know, you'd think someone advertising Libertarian literature in his tag would pounce all over that comment, you tax-abolishing-liberty-loving-son-of-a-gun.
We can use a Slashdot style moderation scheme to decide who goes in .stupid and in .smart.
Of course by doing so, Slashdot runs the risk of being put in .stupid. <ducks>
It just makes no sense to impose geographic only ordering to the web. The web isn't about geography, it's about ideas, and increasingly, marketing and mindshare.
A watermark is data embedded in the song itself with the idea that it is hard to remove the watermark from the song without destroying the song.
A cryptographic hash takes an exact set of bits to result in the hash, a very exclusive operation. It's excluding all of the wrong values. If any of the bits in the configuration are slightly off, then there's a very high likelyhood that the hash will be completely different.
I believe common sense will tell you it is easier to do that than to loosely define a large set of bits that will result in the same hash. And furthermore, the boundary for the bit bag is defined by human intuition (psychoacustics) and empirical research (trial and error).
Granted, lots of hashes are created by people tinkering with an algorithm, but there are excruciatingly detailed and highly refined tests that'll tell how good the algorithm is. The development of the algorithms and tests are based on information theory and statistics.
What are the tests for the audio fingerprinting based on? The answer appears to be our grossly underdeveloped understanding about how the human mind processes sound all the way through to making comparisons between different samples of music. I seriously doubt that something hinging on human intuition and interpretation as part of the algorithm can overcome the fact we don't understand how people's mind work to any acceptable degree.
I spent some time thinking about a way to fingerprint music, and it is a very hard problem to come up with something that captures the essense of our perception of music. Simply doing that is a huge accomplishment. It involves distilling down human methodology for sound recognition, something that is based on a massivly parralel biochemical neural network, or at least something we can only crudely model as a neural network, into a mathematical formula that can be implemented efficiently on a processor.
It is much more likely this won't work because there's a fundamental difference in the platform these two tasks are done on: subjective analysis by a person of some music as to what is and is not the same and some convoluted algorithm attempting to approximate that process on a von-neuman style computer. I won't hold my breath, no matter how cool the idea is. And it is very cool.
They would probably have better luck building a neural network and training it against a large set of people to attempt to capture their collective equality operation
I doubt they will reach their goal, but if they can come up with an algorithm that reasonably sorts music the way people do and to satisfactorally compare music, it will still be very powerful. I personally would love to see such technology be successful.
The ability to emulate how people discern music and to detect differences between samples is tremendous. If nothing else I can finally catalog my music intelligently and to seek new music that will be something I very likely will dig.
Imagine listening to a song that really scratches an itch, taking the fingerprint of that song, even if it is from the radio and getting songs that scratch the itch the same way from a database. How cool would that be?
Not only that, but we'd need that sort of technology in order to find musicians and bands (there is a distinction) that we like if there isn't a huge mega-media-greedy conglomerate driving the mindshare and play time. Combine that with reputation certificates and something like SPKI and you've got a very successful way to implement the Street Performer's Protocol (see the recent /. story)
A reputation certificate is similar in concept to what eBay does with its sellers in capturing the history of the person to create a mark of how reputable that person or entity is, but it goes one step further and cryptographically binds that information to to an identity. See the SPKI document above for detailed information.
This is stuff that needs to be worked on and I salute tuneprint for working towards that goal.
Have you ever taken two CDs and compared them? I haven't. This is great fodder for conspiracy theorists. Luckily even if there were unique identifiers in the bits on the CDs, I don't see a way that the association can be made with the credit cards.
After all, it is easily verifiable that the UPC codes on the CDs that are scanned at the register are not unique over the CDs. You can easily verify that.
And on top of that, associating someone's name and a billing address registered with the credit company with some MP3 floating out on the Internet is a very hard and expensive problem to solve.
As most things this comes down to an economic argument. It's just not feasable to do such a thing for the benefit of being able to slap someone with a singular violation of copyright law. It's just not profitable to do such a thing.
Trust the economics, not the technology. One of the fundamental ideas in security is to make the attack more expensive than the worth of what is being protected, in this case our privacy. So far it seems to work.
Of course, if you used DNS, then you'd also have to deal with domain name propagation problems, and I'm sure that's a mess you don't want to get involved with.
I think most people comfortable with the command line are able to work faster than most people using a GUI. Why isn't there a middle ground, like in Emacs? I would much prefer to see a graphical display of the filesystem triggered by command line input. There would be a hacked shell that provides hooks into a GUI and would trigger them when certain things happened, such as a directory changing.
This experiment was carried out somewhat by midnight commander, but why are the large projects not integrating these two interface methods better?
Why do people take their benchmarks so seriously?
It is because people view choosing one software package over another as a serious commitment to one software package. Indeed, this is how the world operates, but this is not a good thing. I wouldn't mention this, but the adapatation layers necessary to obliterate the distinctions are inefficient themselves! How yucky can this situation get?
Choosing one software package over another, such as MySQL over PostgreSQL, should not make it difficult later to switch. This is where the focus should be instead of bitterly crusading under the banner of one package over another. Even with the best of evaluations, a choice represents a judgement over a fixed set of data, both current facts and speculated future facts. It is, in effect, establishing a constant choice in a dynamic environment. Obviously the choice will be soon invalidated.
If MySQL is the best choice now, and in the foreseeable future, the unforseeable future will silently sneak up on you and invalidate all your hard won conclusions. Loyalty to one software package is based on merit, and merit changes over time. Instead of investing so much time with benchmarking to get people to create brand loyalty under the guise of merit loyalty, effort should be directed to making the transition between software packages seemless.
Benchmarks should always be carried out through an adaptation layer. When software packages do poorly when compared with each other through this abstracted layer, it is up to the authors of the packages to optimize their code against the abstracted layer, not to bitch and moan about how unfair the world is and if someone would take the time to perform specialized tweaks on their package it would have run much better.
If PostgreSQL makes significant optimizations to the backend that would double the capacity of my application if only I were using it, I want it to be as easy as possible to make the switch. I do not want to violate the abstraction of the layer between me and the backend, because I'll just get trapped. If I allow this to happen I may as well have written to the native interface of the backend and plunge myself to the hilt where I get better performance and screw the opportunity cost of other packages improving or new ones coming down the pipe.
I would prefer effort be focused on making the ODBC drivers more efficient. The value in having competing database systems is to be able to switch between them based on merit and have the transistion be as painless as possible. Any time I see a battleground based on brand loyalty I see a situation where people are directing effort in the wrong places.
If it were more painless to switch software packages, there would be less bickering and more sharing.
</rant>