I think that would be OK... it's a defensible statement. The idea that a contract is trying to accomplish something and that a typical contract requires the legal equivalent of error-checking code ("and if one end of the contract keels over dead, the following shall occur:", etc.), and that many times the 'function' of a contract can only be seen by considering the whole as a gestalt, not taking some mechanical, 'error-checking' bit of it out of context, should not be a new one to a judge.
"Legal fluff" is a bit of a geeky term but it makes sense. SCO could try to make a deal out of this but I doubt it'll do anything but make them look stupid in front of a judge and do little for their stock value. (Remember that despite appearences, they aren't actually trying to look stupid, it all has a purpo$e.)
There are many qualities which contribute to "better", and some of them are in conflict (e.g. "more profitable for the marketer" vs. "easier to get bugs fixed"), depending on the value system of the speaker.
Entirely true, but part of the problem is that it is not widely understood that "better" largely is definable, if you're talking about something other then the immediate short term. "Easier to bug fix" will directly translate to "more profitable" eventually. So will "better architecture".
You only get fully-fledged discontinuities in the definitions of "better" when you insist on continuously taking a short term view. In my opinion, the largest failure of our current implementation of the capitalist system is how it so strongly encourages ultra-short-term thinking for publically held companies. (It is not intrinsic to "capitalism", for what it's worth.)
A "mouse" is not the observer. A "quark" in an atom next to the cat is an observer. Slipping "living" into the definition of observer is a sleight-of-hand trick with English that has no physical meaning. Every subatomic particle or anything else that might interact with any other particle in a way that depends on a an actual state is an observer. The universe is rife with them.
For that matter, the "cat" has no meaning quantumly so the whole experiment needs to be understood as "there is some small particle named 'cat' that will be in one state if the particle decays and another if it doesn't." Macroscopic objects still behave as we're used to, no matter what thought experiment we play.
Oh, and that stuff about needing an E-Reader to get everything on the SMB3 cart? You don't. You have everything on the cart already. The stuff you get on the E-Reader *isn't* on the cart, it's on the cards. They can create new levels at a later date to extend the life of the cart.
No, the part where you can scan in new powerups at will is *certainly* programmable into the game.
Nintendo's marketting is really pissing me off. I own a GBSPA and I don't regret it, but their shameless attempts to make you buy extra crap for it is infuriating, because they cheat and make things that have no technical reason to require a Gamecube, or a Gameboy, have them.
I might have bought the Mario games, rehashes that they are, but I'm ticked off that to truly use everything on the cart, I have to shell out for a e-Reader. Why? No technical reason, just that Nintendo wants to sell you an e-Reader.
It backfired; now I'm considering getting a flash ROM for the GB and putting the Nintendo emulator on it instead. To hell with that crap.
So here's another game that sounds like it should be playable with just two Gameboys but requires a Gamecube (probably). I am not impressed here at all.
Not going to stop buying games for my GB but I find myself avoiding Nintendo's first-party games like the plague. I don't have a GameCube, I'm not going to get a GameCube, I don't want a GameCube. (I have a PS2 and if I get a second console it'll be an XBox... or considering the likely timing of that purchase, an XBox 2 if it's reverse-compatible at all.)
I'm a customer, not a mooing cash cow to be milked. The way it works is that I give you money for functionality... you don't withhold functionality in stuff I've already bought until I fork over extra money, I consider that a hostile act of war.
they don't need to be the best when it comes to manufacturing, since we today already have enough resources to permit waste.
You obviously don't work in manufacturing. Waste is relative. You may theoretically be able to 'waste' 20% of something (number for the sake of argument), but if your competition is only wasting 5%, he's going to drive you out of business. Now you don't have the opportunity to waste.
(Capitalism promotes unheard of levels of efficiency. The Native Americans, frequently cited for using "the whole buffalo" vs. the wastage of the settlers, have nothing on modern capitalist societies. But this is a sidenote.)
As for the rest of your post, it's nearly incoherent. "Quality of programming" does more to disprove your point; in commercial programming where ideas are scarce, ideas aren't evaluated at all. In Open Source where the ideas are abundent, the better idea eventually wins. Only in the society without scarcity does the better idea ewer[sic] win.
I believe that nanotech, just like AI and superconductivity, is a pipe dream.
Superconductivity is a pipe dream?!? Have you been living under a rock for 92 years? It was accomplished in 1911 for Pete's sake!
(Yes, I'm sure you're referring to the way it isn't in "common usage", but the reasons for that are largely economic, not technological. The benefits of superconductivity simply aren't large enough to matter. It's certainly possible, though!)
Have you already seen an application of NanoTech in real life?
Yes. Your ignorance of them does not negate them.
We're only at the beginning of the flood here. You're the guy in August 1981 declaring that desktop PCs are impossible because who has ever seen a useful desktop PC? You're not exhibiting special insight, you're ignoring what's going on right now, right in front of you, at the infant stage.
Full-scale Drexler assemblers may or may not happen (though IMHO the real question is "how large will they be?", not "are they even theoretically possible?"), but nanotechnology marches onward, even though it can't jump to the ultimate conclusion of the technology instantaneously.
Let me give you the flip side: People who care so little about their noise because it doesn't bother them, and they have nothing remotely resembling a clue that it does bother other people, and it's not a "choice" the other people make, it's a deep-seated instinct.
You can't turn your ears off.
These people made my dorm years a living hell, and they couldn't care less.
I would never have brandished a gun, but I sure as hell did fantasize about it.
The fact this occurred in Canada changes none of my post. I would still consider it a violation of the fifth or first amendment rights. Personally, I consider free speech an inherent right, not one "granted" by governments.
I would consider forcing somebody to fund an advertisement saying, well, anything to be a violation of thier free speech. Free speech includes the choice to not speak. For instance, the fifth amendment.
Come to think of it, it's a violation of the spirit of the fifth amendment too, if perhaps not technically the letter.
...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,...
You could read that as one can not be forced to "witness" against one's self (which being forced to proclaim to all their guilt could be considered) as part of the "trial" (including punishment) as being protected here.
Really, this strikes me as a bad idea over all. "Innovation" in punishment is something that should generally be discouraged, and held to a very high standard.
Re:Sure, your bank account first
on
Real Security?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Security is not supposed to be easy, thats the point.
Wrong.
The first priority of security is to raise the cost of breaking the security above the value of the benefits of breaking the security.
If anything about the security makes it fail, then it has failed.
In the vast majority of common cases, security needs to be easy enough to use, or people won't. When it fails that way, it's partially the person's fault and partially the security's fault... but whatever the ratio it's certainly not 100% the person, because it's always a game of probabilities and risk assessment.
Making security hard decreases the value of the secured item for the people who are supposed to be using it. Make it hard enough and it will exceed the value of the thing being secured. Then it's not just pointless, but of negative value. Making security easy is a high priority unless the secured item is of high enough value to make devaluation not enough of a concern to be worth worrying about.
The idea that security should be hard is unfortunately a very poisonous one, because people then assume if it's hard, it must be security. Then we end up with shitty systems like "airport security" that decrease the value of the airline system while doing nothing to increase true security. The best way to attack this problem is to remove the false idea that "security is not supposed to be easy", i.e., security should be hard.
When, exactly, has anybody had the "ability to community[sic] with the rest of the world"? Seems to me partisianship has been the order of the day since day one. To think otherwise is to be seriously deluded.
The problem is not the protocol, the problem is XML's insistence on "one XML document per stream" being a rock-hard rule. I consider a mistake but Tim Bray says it's an advantage in just this situation.
If you could have more then one root element then your DOM library would already support multiple documents coming in as discrete chunks.
There's really no way in an XML protocol around this; dispense with the element at the beginning and you can no longer think of the Jabber communication as a single XML document. Now you've got other problems.
Of course you can now say "Well Jabber shouldn't be XML then" (though I don't know that you personally would), but of course Jabber is XML for other reasons, reasons I consider very good ones. (Few people have truly taken advantage of these reasons but I'm working on it; part of the problem is that I'm first having to build an innovative way to parse XML because neither DOM nor SAX paradigms work; but again, that's a weakness of the XML libraries, not Jabber!)
Oh, and Alton Brown, please stop plugging foodtv in the middle of your show. I know, they provide funding, balh blah blah, but it's really getting annoying. The little logo is at the bottom of the screen, and I know I can go there (and I do) if I need the recipe in print.
You may know where to get the recipes, but every episode new people are learning that. I just started watching a couple of weeks ago.
I don't think he's "plugging" the site, just saying where you can get the recipes.
ObOnTopic: Of course, since I use a TiVo I've been using that to actually follow the video version of the recipe while I'm cooking. Cooking show + PVR = actually useful recipes. Kick-ass combination.
Not really true, it just a teensy-weensy bit of cleverness... assuming you're talking about DOM and not SAX (which requires no cleverness at all and has no significant memory impact), instead of feeding the entire document to your DOM library, feed each chunk to the DOM library. If you're brave there's some very simple string search heuristics that you can use that for all intents and purposes are 100% effective on a Jabber stream, even though in theory they could go wrong.
How about going to the store and knowing if you got the correct change?
When you have one, and only one, stereotypical answer to a question as open-ended as "Why do students need to know arithmetic?", it's a smell (in the sense used in the link; please do read it carefully before assuming you know what I mean).
(Similar such smells include technologies where everybody gives the same use case across a span of technologies, like "Home automation is useful because you can turn on your dishwasher at work!" If that's all you got, it's not a good argument, and lo, home automation has never taken off. Also see video phones, where The Argument (singular) seems to be "Relatives on the other side of the country can see their kids/nephews/grandchildren!" (while ignoring a raft of negatives associated with real use of the technology).)
Doesn't mean you're "wrong", but it does mean that's an awfully weak argument.
I still think arithmetic is important, but mostly because it's in the class of "things so god-damned easy that if you can't even add two numbers together, you have no hope of understanding anything logical, ever." Harder to point to concrete use cases, but goddam folks, if you can't teach your kids about basic arithmetic, you're already fucked; give up and let everyone go home.
To me all good art is like a reflecting surface that shows YOU, the audince, in a different, surprising light.
Ironically, I would suggest that content-free art is inferior to content-based art on this count. One does not merely "consume" content-based art, but one examines the messages, decides if they agree with it, or perhaps just part of it, connects with it, and in so doing learns about themselves.
Whereas any piece of content-free art can more or less substitute for another, and the range of "exploration" they provide is minimized.
To use your visual analogy, modern art tends to be nothing but a mirror in a dark room, whereas "old-fashioned" content-based art is a mirror, and some lighting, and maybe some helpful props. The variety of situations one can "learn about oneself" in is much greater in the latter case.
I would say that it is much harder to write/compose in a new form than just conforming to an existing form.
This did used to be true. Now that post-modern art says all things are equally pointless, so you might as well be random, it is no longer. I've seen works of musical "art" that involved a guy doodling on a digitizer tablet and converting the doodles into sounds through "granular synthesis" (you can look that up). The resulting sounds resembling stereotypical telemetry sounds. This is an entire "musical" discipline where random doodling is the only thing possible. Since effort can't pay off, it's damned easy; a four-year-old could produce a result indistinguishable from a PhD.
Compare the difficulties Wagner faced bending tonality with this. Wagner had to work hard, and IMHO sometimes failed, sometimes succeeded.
If you can't fail, which you really can't with post-modern art, it's not difficult. In fact, it's as easy as possible, by definition, and so we see that the only "innovaters" are innovaters in form. (And we're running out of things there, too.)
I would suggest trying to 'consume' old-style art with your goal ('reflecting the audience'). I think you'll find it's better then the po-mo stuff at that, too. (I've tried po-mo in nearly every form, so there's no need to counter-offer; I find it weak in any form of beauty and as I explained above, useless at being a mirror since it's in a "dark room".)
Poe has meat. The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, etc., as well as being poems, are also stories. I may not interpret them the same as somebody else but there's certainly a baseline of real content in there.
The poetic equivalent of Pollack's painting has no meat, just as the paintings do not. In fact, they revel in their pointlessness and make up entire philosophies about how pointless they and everything else is (a.k.a. "postmodernism"). I'll refrain from commenting too much on how I regard postmodernism (though you can probably guess) and simply make the on-topic observation that it's really damned easy to fake post-modern poetry, whereas faking Poe is hard. Hence, this computer-generated poetry does not impress me on any level, even a technical one. One that at least matched Poe on some coherent level would.
Of course I just chose him because he is a personal favorite; there are many other poets with substance.
(Side note: I'm amused somebody bothered to mod my post "overrated"; apparently somebody's definition of "nerd" is too narrow. I may have a degree in Comp. Sci. but I can still be interested... or "anti-interested" as the case may be... in poetry, and so can other nerds.)
Having read some of the generated "poetry", I think this speaks more to the pointlessness of modern poetry more then it reflects well on Kurzweil. Show me a poem with real meat, like, say, Poe wrote, and I'd be much more impressed.
Put a modern poem in front of me and some of the fully random poetry I've seen and I can't tell the difference; if a random algorithm works that well, anything can work that well. There's just no meaningful information, in the information-theoretic sense, in a modern poem of that length.
I don't know whether to be impressed; somebody feed it Poe and tell me how it does. If it's any good, then I'll be impressed.
Yeah, I know this one site with thousands of books, only a handful of which have their author's permissions.
(Permission isn't everything.;-) )
Re:The "security blanket" factor
on
Javascrypt
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· Score: 1
No highly secretive government assassin and spy program (or the equivalent) would use something like this for sure, but they're not the audience.
Actually they can, and have; if you've got good physical security it's more secure then key exchange protocols (one more step that can't be broken), and it's not as inconvenient as one-time-pads, which as Schneier points out, is generally useless as it requires a secure sending of enough bits to send the entire message; why not send the message that way in the first place? (The answer, of course, is you may want to send a message later, but that's a relatively rare case; it happens but it's definately an edge case and means that "one-time pad" is not the be-all, end-all of encryption despite being the strongest of the "provably secure" algorithms.)
This argument is what I obliquely referenced in my original post; if you've got a secure mechanism for key exchange, 99 out of 100 times you can just use that to pass your messages instead, so why bother with this encryption?
The algorithm Javascrypt implements is absolutely useless for what you're talking about. AES is a symmetric encryption algorithm, which means that if you're going to send the data to some server using Javascrypt, at some point you need to communicate the key. If you send the key with the data (not to mention the.js for decryption), you've just royally wasted your time. This could only be useful if you agree to a key in advance using some non-internet connection method, in which case you're not going to go with a "cheap ass" encyption technique like this.
(I do not mean to disparage the Javascrypt work, it's good stuff. But it's more useful to introduce people to encryption then for any practical use.)
The genius of asymmetric encryption is that you can negotiate a secure connection without compromising it; it is not immediately obvious this should be possible and I consider it one of the larger mathematical results of the previous century. Extensions of that work have resulted in the ability to "sign" the keys during exchange. None of this applies to symmetric encryption because you have to agree on a key directly with the sender. (You could in theory still provide a third-party affirmation of the validity of a given key with symmetric encryption but not without giving the third party the key, which is undesirable. With asymmetric encryption the third party can sign a public key without knowing the private key that generated it, so even though Verisign signs your key it does not mean that Verisign can read through the resulting encrypted connection.)
A lot of people seem to be laboring under this misconception. Javascrypt is a neat toy and a valuable educational tool. It is not and can not replace SSL or the SSL layer of the browser. If someone wants to implement a version of SSL it may be sort of possible, but since you don't get raw socket support it's going to be a non-compatible kludge, barring some extremely clever and probably not at all cross-platform hack.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, the Star Trek "alternate timeline" approach^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H copout.
"Those other movies are on another timeline. Everything actually turns out happily ever after! Here's more Jar-Jar for you!"
I think that would be OK... it's a defensible statement. The idea that a contract is trying to accomplish something and that a typical contract requires the legal equivalent of error-checking code ("and if one end of the contract keels over dead, the following shall occur:", etc.), and that many times the 'function' of a contract can only be seen by considering the whole as a gestalt, not taking some mechanical, 'error-checking' bit of it out of context, should not be a new one to a judge.
"Legal fluff" is a bit of a geeky term but it makes sense. SCO could try to make a deal out of this but I doubt it'll do anything but make them look stupid in front of a judge and do little for their stock value. (Remember that despite appearences, they aren't actually trying to look stupid, it all has a purpo$e.)
There are many qualities which contribute to "better", and some of them are in conflict (e.g. "more profitable for the marketer" vs. "easier to get bugs fixed"), depending on the value system of the speaker.
Entirely true, but part of the problem is that it is not widely understood that "better" largely is definable, if you're talking about something other then the immediate short term. "Easier to bug fix" will directly translate to "more profitable" eventually. So will "better architecture".
You only get fully-fledged discontinuities in the definitions of "better" when you insist on continuously taking a short term view. In my opinion, the largest failure of our current implementation of the capitalist system is how it so strongly encourages ultra-short-term thinking for publically held companies. (It is not intrinsic to "capitalism", for what it's worth.)
I believe privacy-sensitive information should be treated as a form of intellectual property; it's the only thing that makes sense.
(Sure, I could copy and paste it, but Slashdot would probably get annoyed at the length.)
A "mouse" is not the observer. A "quark" in an atom next to the cat is an observer. Slipping "living" into the definition of observer is a sleight-of-hand trick with English that has no physical meaning. Every subatomic particle or anything else that might interact with any other particle in a way that depends on a an actual state is an observer. The universe is rife with them.
For that matter, the "cat" has no meaning quantumly so the whole experiment needs to be understood as "there is some small particle named 'cat' that will be in one state if the particle decays and another if it doesn't." Macroscopic objects still behave as we're used to, no matter what thought experiment we play.
Oh, and that stuff about needing an E-Reader to get everything on the SMB3 cart? You don't. You have everything on the cart already. The stuff you get on the E-Reader *isn't* on the cart, it's on the cards. They can create new levels at a later date to extend the life of the cart.
No, the part where you can scan in new powerups at will is *certainly* programmable into the game.
Nintendo's marketting is really pissing me off. I own a GBSPA and I don't regret it, but their shameless attempts to make you buy extra crap for it is infuriating, because they cheat and make things that have no technical reason to require a Gamecube, or a Gameboy, have them.
I might have bought the Mario games, rehashes that they are, but I'm ticked off that to truly use everything on the cart, I have to shell out for a e-Reader. Why? No technical reason, just that Nintendo wants to sell you an e-Reader.
It backfired; now I'm considering getting a flash ROM for the GB and putting the Nintendo emulator on it instead. To hell with that crap.
So here's another game that sounds like it should be playable with just two Gameboys but requires a Gamecube (probably). I am not impressed here at all.
Not going to stop buying games for my GB but I find myself avoiding Nintendo's first-party games like the plague. I don't have a GameCube, I'm not going to get a GameCube, I don't want a GameCube. (I have a PS2 and if I get a second console it'll be an XBox... or considering the likely timing of that purchase, an XBox 2 if it's reverse-compatible at all.)
I'm a customer, not a mooing cash cow to be milked. The way it works is that I give you money for functionality... you don't withhold functionality in stuff I've already bought until I fork over extra money, I consider that a hostile act of war.
they don't need to be the best when it comes to manufacturing, since we today already have enough resources to permit waste.
You obviously don't work in manufacturing. Waste is relative. You may theoretically be able to 'waste' 20% of something (number for the sake of argument), but if your competition is only wasting 5%, he's going to drive you out of business. Now you don't have the opportunity to waste.
(Capitalism promotes unheard of levels of efficiency. The Native Americans, frequently cited for using "the whole buffalo" vs. the wastage of the settlers, have nothing on modern capitalist societies. But this is a sidenote.)
As for the rest of your post, it's nearly incoherent. "Quality of programming" does more to disprove your point; in commercial programming where ideas are scarce, ideas aren't evaluated at all. In Open Source where the ideas are abundent, the better idea eventually wins. Only in the society without scarcity does the better idea ewer[sic] win.
I believe that nanotech, just like AI and superconductivity, is a pipe dream.
Superconductivity is a pipe dream?!? Have you been living under a rock for 92 years? It was accomplished in 1911 for Pete's sake!
(Yes, I'm sure you're referring to the way it isn't in "common usage", but the reasons for that are largely economic, not technological. The benefits of superconductivity simply aren't large enough to matter. It's certainly possible, though!)
Have you already seen an application of NanoTech in real life?
Yes. Your ignorance of them does not negate them.
We're only at the beginning of the flood here. You're the guy in August 1981 declaring that desktop PCs are impossible because who has ever seen a useful desktop PC? You're not exhibiting special insight, you're ignoring what's going on right now, right in front of you, at the infant stage.
Full-scale Drexler assemblers may or may not happen (though IMHO the real question is "how large will they be?", not "are they even theoretically possible?"), but nanotechnology marches onward, even though it can't jump to the ultimate conclusion of the technology instantaneously.
Let me give you the flip side: People who care so little about their noise because it doesn't bother them, and they have nothing remotely resembling a clue that it does bother other people, and it's not a "choice" the other people make, it's a deep-seated instinct.
You can't turn your ears off.
These people made my dorm years a living hell, and they couldn't care less.
I would never have brandished a gun, but I sure as hell did fantasize about it.
The fact this occurred in Canada changes none of my post. I would still consider it a violation of the fifth or first amendment rights. Personally, I consider free speech an inherent right, not one "granted" by governments.
Come to think of it, it's a violation of the spirit of the fifth amendment too, if perhaps not technically the letter.You could read that as one can not be forced to "witness" against one's self (which being forced to proclaim to all their guilt could be considered) as part of the "trial" (including punishment) as being protected here.
Really, this strikes me as a bad idea over all. "Innovation" in punishment is something that should generally be discouraged, and held to a very high standard.
Security is not supposed to be easy, thats the point.
Wrong.
The first priority of security is to raise the cost of breaking the security above the value of the benefits of breaking the security.
If anything about the security makes it fail, then it has failed.
In the vast majority of common cases, security needs to be easy enough to use, or people won't. When it fails that way, it's partially the person's fault and partially the security's fault... but whatever the ratio it's certainly not 100% the person, because it's always a game of probabilities and risk assessment.
Making security hard decreases the value of the secured item for the people who are supposed to be using it. Make it hard enough and it will exceed the value of the thing being secured. Then it's not just pointless, but of negative value. Making security easy is a high priority unless the secured item is of high enough value to make devaluation not enough of a concern to be worth worrying about.
The idea that security should be hard is unfortunately a very poisonous one, because people then assume if it's hard, it must be security. Then we end up with shitty systems like "airport security" that decrease the value of the airline system while doing nothing to increase true security. The best way to attack this problem is to remove the false idea that "security is not supposed to be easy", i.e., security should be hard.
That point extends well beyond movies, of course. It's something that is going to have to be worked out, sooner or later.
When, exactly, has anybody had the "ability to community[sic] with the rest of the world"? Seems to me partisianship has been the order of the day since day one. To think otherwise is to be seriously deluded.
The problem is not the protocol, the problem is XML's insistence on "one XML document per stream" being a rock-hard rule. I consider a mistake but Tim Bray says it's an advantage in just this situation.
If you could have more then one root element then your DOM library would already support multiple documents coming in as discrete chunks.
There's really no way in an XML protocol around this; dispense with the element at the beginning and you can no longer think of the Jabber communication as a single XML document. Now you've got other problems.
Of course you can now say "Well Jabber shouldn't be XML then" (though I don't know that you personally would), but of course Jabber is XML for other reasons, reasons I consider very good ones. (Few people have truly taken advantage of these reasons but I'm working on it; part of the problem is that I'm first having to build an innovative way to parse XML because neither DOM nor SAX paradigms work; but again, that's a weakness of the XML libraries, not Jabber!)
Oh, and Alton Brown, please stop plugging foodtv in the middle of your show. I know, they provide funding, balh blah blah, but it's really getting annoying. The little logo is at the bottom of the screen, and I know I can go there (and I do) if I need the recipe in print.
You may know where to get the recipes, but every episode new people are learning that. I just started watching a couple of weeks ago.
I don't think he's "plugging" the site, just saying where you can get the recipes.
ObOnTopic: Of course, since I use a TiVo I've been using that to actually follow the video version of the recipe while I'm cooking. Cooking show + PVR = actually useful recipes. Kick-ass combination.
Not really true, it just a teensy-weensy bit of cleverness... assuming you're talking about DOM and not SAX (which requires no cleverness at all and has no significant memory impact), instead of feeding the entire document to your DOM library, feed each chunk to the DOM library. If you're brave there's some very simple string search heuristics that you can use that for all intents and purposes are 100% effective on a Jabber stream, even though in theory they could go wrong.
Been here, done this, have the code to prove it.
How about going to the store and knowing if you got the correct change?
When you have one, and only one, stereotypical answer to a question as open-ended as "Why do students need to know arithmetic?", it's a smell (in the sense used in the link; please do read it carefully before assuming you know what I mean).
(Similar such smells include technologies where everybody gives the same use case across a span of technologies, like "Home automation is useful because you can turn on your dishwasher at work!" If that's all you got, it's not a good argument, and lo, home automation has never taken off. Also see video phones, where The Argument (singular) seems to be "Relatives on the other side of the country can see their kids/nephews/grandchildren!" (while ignoring a raft of negatives associated with real use of the technology).)
Doesn't mean you're "wrong", but it does mean that's an awfully weak argument.
I still think arithmetic is important, but mostly because it's in the class of "things so god-damned easy that if you can't even add two numbers together, you have no hope of understanding anything logical, ever." Harder to point to concrete use cases, but goddam folks, if you can't teach your kids about basic arithmetic, you're already fucked; give up and let everyone go home.
To me all good art is like a reflecting surface that shows YOU, the audince, in a different, surprising light.
Ironically, I would suggest that content-free art is inferior to content-based art on this count. One does not merely "consume" content-based art, but one examines the messages, decides if they agree with it, or perhaps just part of it, connects with it, and in so doing learns about themselves.
Whereas any piece of content-free art can more or less substitute for another, and the range of "exploration" they provide is minimized.
To use your visual analogy, modern art tends to be nothing but a mirror in a dark room, whereas "old-fashioned" content-based art is a mirror, and some lighting, and maybe some helpful props. The variety of situations one can "learn about oneself" in is much greater in the latter case.
I would say that it is much harder to write/compose in a new form than just conforming to an existing form.
This did used to be true. Now that post-modern art says all things are equally pointless, so you might as well be random, it is no longer. I've seen works of musical "art" that involved a guy doodling on a digitizer tablet and converting the doodles into sounds through "granular synthesis" (you can look that up). The resulting sounds resembling stereotypical telemetry sounds. This is an entire "musical" discipline where random doodling is the only thing possible. Since effort can't pay off, it's damned easy; a four-year-old could produce a result indistinguishable from a PhD.
Compare the difficulties Wagner faced bending tonality with this. Wagner had to work hard, and IMHO sometimes failed, sometimes succeeded.
If you can't fail, which you really can't with post-modern art, it's not difficult. In fact, it's as easy as possible, by definition, and so we see that the only "innovaters" are innovaters in form. (And we're running out of things there, too.)
I would suggest trying to 'consume' old-style art with your goal ('reflecting the audience'). I think you'll find it's better then the po-mo stuff at that, too. (I've tried po-mo in nearly every form, so there's no need to counter-offer; I find it weak in any form of beauty and as I explained above, useless at being a mirror since it's in a "dark room".)
Poe has meat. The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, etc., as well as being poems, are also stories. I may not interpret them the same as somebody else but there's certainly a baseline of real content in there.
The poetic equivalent of Pollack's painting has no meat, just as the paintings do not. In fact, they revel in their pointlessness and make up entire philosophies about how pointless they and everything else is (a.k.a. "postmodernism"). I'll refrain from commenting too much on how I regard postmodernism (though you can probably guess) and simply make the on-topic observation that it's really damned easy to fake post-modern poetry, whereas faking Poe is hard. Hence, this computer-generated poetry does not impress me on any level, even a technical one. One that at least matched Poe on some coherent level would.
Of course I just chose him because he is a personal favorite; there are many other poets with substance.
(Side note: I'm amused somebody bothered to mod my post "overrated"; apparently somebody's definition of "nerd" is too narrow. I may have a degree in Comp. Sci. but I can still be interested... or "anti-interested" as the case may be... in poetry, and so can other nerds.)
Having read some of the generated "poetry", I think this speaks more to the pointlessness of modern poetry more then it reflects well on Kurzweil. Show me a poem with real meat, like, say, Poe wrote, and I'd be much more impressed.
Put a modern poem in front of me and some of the fully random poetry I've seen and I can't tell the difference; if a random algorithm works that well, anything can work that well. There's just no meaningful information, in the information-theoretic sense, in a modern poem of that length.
I don't know whether to be impressed; somebody feed it Poe and tell me how it does. If it's any good, then I'll be impressed.
Yeah, I know this one site with thousands of books, only a handful of which have their author's permissions.
;-) )
(Permission isn't everything.
No highly secretive government assassin and spy program (or the equivalent) would use something like this for sure, but they're not the audience.
Actually they can, and have; if you've got good physical security it's more secure then key exchange protocols (one more step that can't be broken), and it's not as inconvenient as one-time-pads, which as Schneier points out, is generally useless as it requires a secure sending of enough bits to send the entire message; why not send the message that way in the first place? (The answer, of course, is you may want to send a message later, but that's a relatively rare case; it happens but it's definately an edge case and means that "one-time pad" is not the be-all, end-all of encryption despite being the strongest of the "provably secure" algorithms.)
This argument is what I obliquely referenced in my original post; if you've got a secure mechanism for key exchange, 99 out of 100 times you can just use that to pass your messages instead, so why bother with this encryption?
The algorithm Javascrypt implements is absolutely useless for what you're talking about. AES is a symmetric encryption algorithm, which means that if you're going to send the data to some server using Javascrypt, at some point you need to communicate the key. If you send the key with the data (not to mention the .js for decryption), you've just royally wasted your time. This could only be useful if you agree to a key in advance using some non-internet connection method, in which case you're not going to go with a "cheap ass" encyption technique like this.
(I do not mean to disparage the Javascrypt work, it's good stuff. But it's more useful to introduce people to encryption then for any practical use.)
The genius of asymmetric encryption is that you can negotiate a secure connection without compromising it; it is not immediately obvious this should be possible and I consider it one of the larger mathematical results of the previous century. Extensions of that work have resulted in the ability to "sign" the keys during exchange. None of this applies to symmetric encryption because you have to agree on a key directly with the sender. (You could in theory still provide a third-party affirmation of the validity of a given key with symmetric encryption but not without giving the third party the key, which is undesirable. With asymmetric encryption the third party can sign a public key without knowing the private key that generated it, so even though Verisign signs your key it does not mean that Verisign can read through the resulting encrypted connection.)
A lot of people seem to be laboring under this misconception. Javascrypt is a neat toy and a valuable educational tool. It is not and can not replace SSL or the SSL layer of the browser. If someone wants to implement a version of SSL it may be sort of possible, but since you don't get raw socket support it's going to be a non-compatible kludge, barring some extremely clever and probably not at all cross-platform hack.