After a bit of research, I've failed to turn up any names, but this is how the law got passed:
One independent politician holds the balance of power in Australia. The governing party recently wanted a (totally different) piece of legislation passed, and this guy's vote was the decider. To keep him sweet, they promised that they'd vote for his Internet ban later on. (Sorry the names are missing, but I just couldn't find them.) Stepping out of character for a while, these other politicians kept their word. So there you have it. It had nothing to do with the Internet; it was just politicians being what they are - evil old men so arrogant they honestly believe they know what's best for us.
I find it difficult to believe the US government is behind this. (OK, so soon all governments will shrivel and die as the web replaces their functions one by one, but the US government at least pays lip service to freedom.) My guess would be that it's Milosevic spreading a little FUD here after shutting.yu himself.... but I have no problem getting into rts.yu from Paris. The US acting like a Communist country? Weird.
Such Luddism is rare today. You're performing a valuable service by keeping the old dogmas alive, much as the Inquisition taught scientists to be as meticulous as possible.
Er, if I've owned physical copies all the software and music on my hard disk, it's not pirated...
In answer, although I DO own most of my stuff, a software pirate isn't the same as a bike thief - the software pirate hasn't deprived the original owner of any property, and in most cases, not even any potential income. (How many warez d00dz are actually in the market for Photoshop?)
I own nothing - or so my friends say. What I mean is, I own nothing physical. My apartment has no family pictures, my pots and pans came with the lease, and I only value my computer for the pattern of information on it. (A mountain bike is the one exception.) Yet I don't feel poor; totally the opposite.
Anyone with a grasp of nanotech research knows that within thirty years it's likely any physical object (within broad limits) will be replicable from a cheap feedstock; even physical objects will become valuable only for the pattern of information they're made from. So digital possessions won't just be on a par with physical things - they'll replace physical things. ("Got that new AMD box yet?" "Yeah, downloaded it yesterday.")
Think how much time you've invested tweaking your code as opposed to tweaking your hardware; I'd bet it's far more. You "value" your code far above the hardware it runs on. Perhaps we're already in that world of largely digital possessions and just haven't realised yet.
Joe also posts long rants on sci.nanotech, which has had a steadily decreasing signal-to-noise ratio for at least a year. His basic problem is that he sees what's POTENTIALLY possible in years to come as a valid selling point of his research NOW. Furthermore, many of his claims have no basis in physics, let alone engineering. My $0.02...
Katz's experimenting is over
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 0
I was happy to see Jon writing for Slashdot at first; I'd enjoyed much of his previous work on Hotwired. But after the strange diversions on sexbots and Microsoft - which seemed to be completely out-of-character, apparent experiments at finding the water level here - it seems he's now gone back to what he does best: thinking out loud.
I'm not concerned about his writing ability; the average is high. I'm not concerned about his ideas: he's quite a deep thinker. But nowadays I'm getting really, really bored by the length and monotonous pace of these unedited pieces. Much as I hate killfile stuff, I'm going to have to cut him out now; I just haven't got the time to sift thru the murk for gems. (I'll remember you for the better stuff, Jon - goodbye and thanks.)
Along with Stephen Jay Gould, Pinker makes the mistake of putting forward his views as fact. I liked the book (as I like Gould) but felt a little annoyed at the way he arrogantly assumes his theories are truer than anyone else's without any compelling evidence. That said, the book's a great way to think about how we'd grow an AI.
The greatest thing coming out of the new Linux/Internet supercomputer paradigm is the way no-one from the old top-down power structure can do anything about it. Distribute and devolve and you give up a bit of control - something the old order can't dream of doing - but gain vast amounts of robustness. Of course, we're not quite there yet - we'll need a far more distributed and less wired Internet than we have today. (You may laugh at Melissa infecting Windows homegenity, but would you laugh if an analogous problem got into the 80% of the Net that runs on Cisco routers?) But the day gets closer. Distribute and give up control.
One thing we need to check: was the Dead's open source attitude actually sanctioned by whatever music label they were enslaved, oops, signed by? I recall an unattributed comment on Garcia's death that the suits had always opposed concert taping.
OK, so maybe AOL violated labour law - but if it did, the law is an ass, m'lud. If these fools wanted paid work, what's wrong with getting a job?
A very dangerous trend - letting the law tell you what to think. Fortunately, the day when the web will hollow out governments and let us start building a truly open world of glorious open source anarchy is near.
For a seriously cool wireless Palm, check out Qualcomm's PDq, a CDMA cellphone eventually upgradable to 2mb web access. This is significant, since Qualcomm's superior tech has just won a big victory here in Europe - it looks like CDMA will be the new world standard for wireless telephony. (My source here's the new subscriber-only Gilder Technology Report, which I certainly wouldn't email to you if you asked.)
Yes, free competition is what this market needs. I pay $70 every two years to what used to be the InterNIC, and get possibly the worst customer service on the planet - as do many others.
Sony actually loses money on the hardware; it's a loss leader so they can sell more games. And since the emu will let them sell more games, they should SUPPORT Bleem, not take out an RIAA/MP3 style knee-jerk injuction. The Bleem people didn't steal any intellectual property and invested a ton of time in developing Bleem.
It's far from warez puppism - this is free competition in action.
The nanoharp and other toys are great demos of precision machining, but "real" nanotech is a bit different. It's about snapping together atoms into molecular machine parts, assembling them from the bottom up - not grinding away at vast clumps of atoms from the top down until you get something the right shape. The difference is important: think how different (and superior) digital is to analog for computing. Bottom-up molecular precision is digital; the nanoharp is analog. Nanotech guru Eric Drexler has two books online at http://www.foresight.org ; Linux types will get more out of "Engines of Creation" than "Unbounding the future." (Disclaimer: I'm a nanotech junkie and member of Foresight, and can say it's a VERY worthwhile society to belong to.)
Having worked in several European countries and on both US coasts, my view is that Europe has oppression/censorship in law but not in practice, whereas the US has it in practice but not in law. An example: my current home, France, has a huge wriggly mass of laws governing workspaces, wages, sexual harassment etc... and everyone ignores them in favour of what "feels right". Contrarily, the US has relatively few actual laws against stuff... yet your life can be destroyed merely because someone found something you said offensive. (The college student who was fined $1000s because he asked a girl for a date comes to mind.)
At last: a site where (perhaps) some attention will be given to the millions of users who'd like to try Linux but are scared by its hacker image and its high cost of entry (in time terms.) I hope it all goes ok...
Slashdot Mirror
After a bit of research, I've failed to turn up any names, but this is how the law got passed:
One independent politician holds the balance of power in Australia. The governing party recently wanted a (totally different) piece of legislation passed, and this guy's vote was the decider. To keep him sweet, they promised that they'd vote for his Internet ban later on. (Sorry the names are missing, but I just couldn't find them.) Stepping out of character for a while, these other politicians kept their word. So there you have it. It had nothing to do with the Internet; it was just politicians being what they are - evil old men so arrogant they honestly believe they know what's best for us.
I find it difficult to believe the US government is behind this. (OK, so soon all governments will shrivel and die as the web replaces their functions one by one, but the US government at least pays lip service to freedom.) My guess would be that it's Milosevic spreading a little FUD here after shutting .yu himself.... but I have no problem getting into rts.yu from Paris. The US acting like a Communist country? Weird.
Such Luddism is rare today. You're performing a valuable service by keeping the old dogmas alive, much as the Inquisition taught scientists to be as meticulous as possible.
Er, if I've owned physical copies all the software and music on my hard disk, it's not pirated...
In answer, although I DO own most of my stuff, a software pirate isn't the same as a bike thief - the software pirate hasn't deprived the original owner of any property, and in most cases, not even any potential income. (How many warez d00dz are actually in the market for Photoshop?)
Not "Diamond Age" - "Nanosystems", Drexler's scientific study of nanotech! Sci-fi's no support for nanotech, but the technical text is.
I own nothing - or so my friends say. What I mean is, I own nothing physical. My apartment has no family pictures, my pots and pans came with the lease, and I only value my computer for the pattern of information on it. (A mountain bike is the one exception.) Yet I don't feel poor; totally the opposite.
Anyone with a grasp of nanotech research knows that within thirty years it's likely any physical object (within broad limits) will be replicable from a cheap feedstock; even physical objects will become valuable only for the pattern of information they're made from. So digital possessions won't just be on a par with physical things - they'll replace physical things. ("Got that new AMD box yet?" "Yeah, downloaded it yesterday.")
Think how much time you've invested tweaking your code as opposed to tweaking your hardware; I'd bet it's far more. You "value" your code far above the hardware it runs on. Perhaps we're already in that world of largely digital possessions and just haven't realised yet.
Joe also posts long rants on sci.nanotech, which has had a steadily decreasing signal-to-noise ratio for at least a year. His basic problem is that he sees what's POTENTIALLY possible in years to come as a valid selling point of his research NOW. Furthermore, many of his claims have no basis in physics, let alone engineering. My $0.02...
I was happy to see Jon writing for Slashdot at first; I'd enjoyed much of his previous work on Hotwired. But after the strange diversions on sexbots and Microsoft - which seemed to be completely out-of-character, apparent experiments at finding the water level here - it seems he's now gone back to what he does best: thinking out loud.
I'm not concerned about his writing ability; the average is high. I'm not concerned about his ideas: he's quite a deep thinker. But nowadays I'm getting really, really bored by the length and monotonous pace of these unedited pieces. Much as I hate killfile stuff, I'm going to have to cut him out now; I just haven't got the time to sift thru the murk for gems. (I'll remember you for the better stuff, Jon - goodbye and thanks.)
Along with Stephen Jay Gould, Pinker makes the mistake of putting forward his views as fact. I liked the book (as I like Gould) but felt a little annoyed at the way he arrogantly assumes his theories are truer than anyone else's without any compelling evidence. That said, the book's a great way to think about how we'd grow an AI.
The greatest thing coming out of the new Linux/Internet supercomputer paradigm is the way no-one from the old top-down power structure can do anything about it. Distribute and devolve and you give up a bit of control - something the old order can't dream of doing - but gain vast amounts of robustness.
Of course, we're not quite there yet - we'll need a far more distributed and less wired Internet than we have today. (You may laugh at Melissa infecting Windows homegenity, but would you laugh if an analogous problem got into the 80% of the Net that runs on Cisco routers?) But the day gets closer. Distribute and give up control.
One thing we need to check: was the Dead's open source attitude actually sanctioned by whatever music label they were enslaved, oops, signed by? I recall an unattributed comment on Garcia's death that the suits had always opposed concert taping.
OK, so maybe AOL violated labour law - but if it did, the law is an ass, m'lud. If these fools wanted paid work, what's wrong with getting a job?
A very dangerous trend - letting the law tell you what to think. Fortunately, the day when the web will hollow out governments and let us start building a truly open world of glorious open source anarchy is near.
For a seriously cool wireless Palm, check out Qualcomm's PDq, a CDMA cellphone eventually upgradable to 2mb web access. This is significant, since Qualcomm's superior tech has just won a big victory here in Europe - it looks like CDMA will be the new world standard for wireless telephony. (My source here's the new subscriber-only Gilder Technology Report, which I certainly wouldn't email to you if you asked.)
Yes, free competition is what this market needs. I pay $70 every two years to what used to be the InterNIC, and get possibly the worst customer service on the planet - as do many others.
Sony actually loses money on the hardware; it's a loss leader so they can sell more games. And since the emu will let them sell more games, they should SUPPORT Bleem, not take out an RIAA/MP3 style knee-jerk injuction. The Bleem people didn't steal any intellectual property and invested a ton of time in developing Bleem.
It's far from warez puppism - this is free competition in action.
The nanoharp and other toys are great demos of precision machining, but "real" nanotech is a bit different.
It's about snapping together atoms into molecular machine parts, assembling them from the bottom up - not grinding away at vast clumps of atoms from the top down until you get something the right shape.
The difference is important: think how different (and superior) digital is to analog for computing. Bottom-up molecular precision is digital; the nanoharp is analog.
Nanotech guru Eric Drexler has two books online at http://www.foresight.org ; Linux types will get more out of "Engines of Creation" than "Unbounding the future." (Disclaimer: I'm a nanotech junkie and member of Foresight, and can say it's a VERY worthwhile society to belong to.)
Having worked in several European countries and on both US coasts, my view is that Europe has oppression/censorship in law but not in practice, whereas the US has it in practice but not in law. An example: my current home, France, has a huge wriggly mass of laws governing workspaces, wages, sexual harassment etc... and everyone ignores them in favour of what "feels right". Contrarily, the US has relatively few actual laws against stuff... yet your life can be destroyed merely because someone found something you said offensive. (The college student who was fined $1000s because he asked a girl for a date comes to mind.)
At last: a site where (perhaps) some attention will be given to the millions of users who'd like to try Linux but are scared by its hacker image and its high cost of entry (in time terms.) I hope it all goes ok...