And I didn't even need an infinite amount of either monkeys or time.
Heck, you didn't even need a finite number of monkeys. That "William Shakespeare" primate of yours was actually an ape, not a monkey.
And what does this prove? Why, your whole experiment's cocked up! There's a chance these "works of Shakespeare" are accurate, but it's much more likely that they're subtly off. Just blindfold one of your test subjects and have 'em pull letters out of a Scrabble bag. That'll show you. If they come up with something about the "Tagic trale of Jomeo and Ruliet, those two children of harring wouses" you'll know I was right.:-D
I'd have to say the ones you have dreams about are probably the ones that have affected you most deeply.
Which means that StarCraft has got to be the game that's affected me the most. I'll never forget trying to direct an SCV to turn off my alarm clock. I was annoyed when it didn't respond fast enough.:-D
I wonder, though. X10 cameras and 802.11b equipment do work on the same frequency. Would it be possible to write a program that would allow you to receive X10 data with a WiFi card? We've got the GNU Radio program that can receive HDTV signals and radio signals and so on. Perhaps that could be modified to grab X10 signals through your wifi card.
Mind you, it may be that the two technologies are too different to be easily adapted to one another. Sharing spectrum is only one factor to be considered, and a fairly small one at that. Any X10 geeks care to comment on the feasibility of receiving X10 signals with 802.11b hardware?
I just crashed my copy of IE (5.00.2614.3500) with no more than .
And anyway, even if your version requires more than that, it can still be all on one line, eg:
<html><form><input type crash></form></html>
Since carriage return/line feed pairs are totally unimportant in HTML (except with the <pre> tag, and maybe one or two others), it's silly to talk about how many "lines" it takes anyway.
That would be impossible. The person with this disorder can still hear, but their brain is wired so that the impulses from your hearing receptors go to your optic part of the brain. Their for they are interpreted as colors. A deaf person would not be able to hear, so would not be able to transmit the impulses for them to see the concert.
Yeah. If I understand correctly, and assuming the article authors are correct, synesthesia takes place when sensory information from one sense-organ gets accidentally re-routed to the processing center for another sense. A deaf person cannot hear the sound to begin with, and therefore the brain has no sensory information to work with.
On the other hand, synesthesia can seem to replace otherwise missing sensory experiences, as in this case from the article:
We also observed one case in which we believe cross activation enables a
colorblind synesthete to see numbers tinged with hues he otherwise cannot perceive; charmingly, he refers to these as "Martian colors." Although his retinal color receptors cannot process certain wavelengths, we suggest that his brain color area is working just fine and being cross-activated when he sees numbers.
Emphasis added. So, while a deaf synesthete could not "hear" a concert as colors, a blind synesthete might conceivably "see" it as colors. Of course, it'd be hard to tell. I mean, sighted people can't properly describe colors to a blind person, so how could a blind person explain the perception of a color he has not actually ever seen, but only experienced because of a slight mis-wiring in his brain?
On the other hand, a blind synesthete could be at a distinct advantage compared to a blind non-synesthete. Consider: the sound of a car approaching fast is very similar to the sound of a gust of wind. On a gusty day, a blind synesthete might be better equipped to distinguish between oncoming traffic and mere gusts of wind.
. . . is to hand the phone to a child. This works best when said son or daughter is four or five years old. Six-year-olds are generally bright enough to figure out that the telemarketer isn't worth talking to.
Of course, this only works if you have a child of an appropriate age handy.
Copyright isn't about money, it's about protecting the rights of the author. Whether they choose to make money from it is irrelevant.
Actually, copyright is about providing authors with an incentive to create new works, on the theory that the advancement of knowledge (and art, literature, etc) leads to the betterment of society as a whole. The form that incentive takes is a temporary monopoly on the dissemination of the work. This monopoly is not an inherent right to be protected, but an extra right granted by the government and encoded in law.
Traditionally, authors use that monopoly to make money by selling copies of the work to people. You are absolutely correct, though, to point out that making money is not the only way in which the copyright monopoly can be used. In this case, the author has decided to make the work available to as many people as possible for as little cost as possible. The price he exacts is not monetary but legal -- in exchange for receiving the work, the customer must agree to abide by the terms laid out in the respective licenses. This ebay seller has violated those terms. He has not paid the price named by the author, and therefore is not entitled to possession of the work.
On a side note, I applaud the author for releasing his books under these terms. It is consonant with the original goal of copyright: to better society through the advancement of knowledge. Bravo.
They are comparing the XP Home edition EULA.
The professional version which you are using doesn't have that clause.
Incorrect. The MS EULA under analysis is that of Windows XP Professional Edition. And it does indeed have a clause limiting the number of machines that are allowed to share resources hosted on your computer. The relevant clause is:
You may permit a maximum of ten (10) computers or other electronic devices (each a "Device") to
connect to the Workstation Computer to utilize the services of the Product solely for File and Print services, Internet Information Services, and remote access (including connection sharing and telephony services). The ten connection maximum includes any indirect connections made through "multiplexing" or other software or hardware which pools or aggregates connections.
It is unclear (to me, at least) whether this means that you're only allowed ten concurrent network connections, or whether you can only have ten Devices physically connected to your computer (eg through a LAN, including 802.11b hookups which we'll file under "physical" for the sake of argument).
I am going to assume based on the phrase "utilize the services of the Product" that the clause refers to network connections rather than the physical attachment of other devices to your computer. So, file-sharing and print-sharing and connection-sharing are okay, but only to ten other computers. It would be fairly easy to violate this term. Suppose you hold a LAN party and 14 of your friends come over. There's a recent patch for one of the games you plan to play, and you use a FileZilla FTP server to share it across the LAN so everybody can get it without mucking about with Network Neighborhood. Boom, you've violated the license.
One of the other posters has suggested that the restriction only applies to the number of computers accessing yours at any given time -- so you could give access to thousands of different computers, so long as there were never more than ten connected at one moment. I don't have XP, so I couldn't say -- does Network Neighborhood have a built-in connection limit in WinXP? Anyway, that would only apply to Network Neighborhood. Using Apache or any of a whole slew of other server-type programs could invalidate your license pretty quick.
Btw, I lifted that bit of license clause from the original report, not the summary that Slashdot has linked to. Another poster supplied a mirror of the PDF file. It's lengthy, but worth reading.
CRN: Have settlement talks begun?
McBride: The phones are not ringing off the hook. From what I hear, IBM will blacken the Utah sky with lawyers.
Jeez, does IBM have so many lawyers that they have to catapult them in?
No, it's just that IBM's lawyers are seven-foot-tall black shadows with glowing red eyes and bewinged black steeds. The maleficent, quavering calls of these dark dwimmerlaiks will echo across the low, rolling plains of Utah, and when the wings of their ebon steeds sweep across the gibbous moon, the SCO lawyers will think "Oh, shit!"
Yes; a similar bill was passed in my home state (Colorado) earlier this month. So. Now that it's law, what can we do? Aside from all the usual stuff -- writing letters, sending faxes, emailing, pickets, meetings with state reps, etc. -- we can file lawsuits to enforce the law. These bills are so broadly written that they're their own worst enemy. We should file lawsuits against innocent bystanders who happen to have had their otherwise legitimate activities outlawed by these bills, in order to raise a mighty ruckus over them.
An example. According to the EFF's analysis of these bills, the bills incorporate language that bans devices that "conceal... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication." The EFF points out that this includes things like the lightweight routers (made by companies like Linksys, Netgear, SMC, etc) that have become popular for sharing internet connections within one's own home. The process of Network Address Translation that these routers use to allow for the sharing has the side-effect of concealing the real origin of communications from your network: everything looks like it's coming from the router, when in fact it comes from the assorted devices behind the router.
So. If the use of these devices is now illegal, surely it must therefore be illegal to offer them for sale? Let's see, who all sells these things? Office Depot, Office Max, Best Buy, CompUSA, and Amazon.com spring to mind. So we file suit against them demanding that they remove the affected merchandise from their stores in affected states. The bills provide for heavy-duty damages on a per-device basis. Simple possession of a router could cost between $1,500 and $10,000 -- each. With fines like that on the line, and dozens or hundreds of devices in stock, the companies selling the routers are sure to fight back. And regardless of whether they win or not, the case will generate lots of bad publicity for the nimnulls who voted it into law. Which, combined with more traditional techniques like blanketing the legislature and the local papers with letters, should make it a lot easier to get the law repealed.
Now, all we need is some lawyer who's interested in doing it.
There are two issues at hand here: legality and politeness. It is certainly legal for mozilla.org to choose and use the name Firebird for their browser -- it is indeed difficult to confuse a browser for a SQL server. It was also, however, impolite of them to do so without even taking the time to send an email to the FirbirdSQL people saying "Hey, we'd like to call our browser Firebird. You cool with that?" After all, it's not as if there's no similarity between the projects. They do different things, sure, but they're both open source, they're both computer programs, and sometimes you use a browser to access a SQL database. Fairly often, in fact.
And don't tell me that the name-choosers were unaware of the SQL project. It took them, what, four months to pick this name? Or was it five? Five and a half? And in all that time, these inveterate computer geeks never even typed the word into Google? (As of this writing, the FirebirdSQL project still tops the list of results for that search.)
It's not as though there's no precedent for two OSS projects to share a name. Look at Gentoo the Linux distro and Gentoo the file manager. At the very bottom of that second link you'll find a little note from the developer of the file manager saying "Gentoo the Linux distribution has nothing to do with gentoo the file manager, except the latter runs on the former. I actually used the name first, way back in September 1998. I've been in touch with the Gentoo folks, and we're cool."
So, ultimately, the parent post is only partially right: the legality of this move is a non-story. The story lies in the fact that the name change was made in an impolite way, apparently without any attempt to contact the FirebirdSQL group at all. Would it really have been so hard to have sent that email? They could even have exchanged reciprocal links, so that anybody who did get confused would easily be set straight. In the initial announcement of the name on the MozillaZine forums, Asa Dotzler (sp?) wrapped up with the words "Hopefully this will be the end of naming legal issues for a while." Well, he got his wish -- about the legal part, anyway.
Remote control of television/home theater setups would seem to be an area where one might profitably use voice recognition for control. Voice recognition works best when it uses a limited set of words; I suggest that a voice-recognition system for controlling a home theater system could be abstracted to a suitably limited set of commands.
The actions required to control a home theater can be broken down into these categories: 1) selecting the source, 2) controlling playback, and 3) channel tuning and volume control. Thus, you'd have this command for selecting the source:
SELECT {TV|DVD|VHS|SATELLITE|CABLE|RADIO|CD|TAPE}
Which is fairly self-evident -- say select and then the name of the device you want to use. For playback:
PLAY PAUSE STOP REWIND FAST FORWARD
Those should be clear. Then for the last bit, you'd need:
VOLUME {UP|DOWN|NUMBER} MUTE
These last need commentary. Volume UP/DOWN will adjust the volume one notch up or down. NUMBER is a number between zero and ten, setting the volume at 0%, 10%, 20%, etc, zero being muted. MUTE is a toggle: when you say it, mutes the audio or returns it to the previous volume level, based on the current state of the volume. You could theoretically divide that into two commands MUTE and UNMUTE, but there's no real reason to do so. Then, for tuning control:
CHANNEL {UP|DOWN|NUMBER} SURF {UP|DOWN|END}
Channel UP/DOWN bumps it up or down one channel. NUMBER requires you to say the number of the channel, eg "CHANNEL three four" will switch the channel 34. It would be nice to add support for proper numerical recognition, eg thirty four instead of three-four, though that would obviously increase the number of number-phrases for the software to recognize by quite a few.
The SURF command will switch up or down one channel every five seconds till you say "SURF END". This is to avoid having to say "CHANNEL UP" over and over and over.
Controls of the tint, brightness, and so on of the monitor are best left to actual buttons on the TV. (Or perhaps a jog-dial + OSD, like on some computer monitors). Similarly I'd use a physical on/off button rather than POWER ON|OFF.
That's a fairly limited vocabulary, meaning it could probably be implemented comparatively easily. It has some distinct advantages: no remotes to get lost, no batteries to replace, doesn't require line-of-sight to the equipment, can be operated by blind people without difficulty (yes, many of them like to listen to the TV even if they can't see it), and best of all it's an intuitive interface: we give verbal instructions all the time, and even people with zero technical knowledge can figure out how to SELECT DVD and PLAY. (Whereas my mother still cannot figure out how to play DVDs on our current four-remote system; selecting the DVD player as the source of the video seems to be beyond her, so she always gets my brother to do it.)
On the other hand, it has some disadvantages. Mute people would be totally unable to use it. Different software would be required for different languages, and possibly for different dialects depending on how great the linguistic variation between the standard version and the dialect was. Lastly, you wouldn't be able to operate it quietly (if, for example, it was late at night and you didn't want to disturb anybody who was sleeping). Probably there are also some technical challenges of which I am unaware, too.
So, they're going to forge this standard? Isn't there some kind of law against that?;-)
Re:Mind shaped by evolution
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 1
Why should an AI want to have ultimate power, understand the universe, or even have a sense of self-preservation?
Because that's what we want, and we can't imagine an intelligence unlike ourselves.
At one level, you're right: it's the author's fault that AI is envisioned in this way. But on another, it's not his fault. Imagination works by drawing on a stock of data stored in our memories. Suppose I ask you to describe a morthcrundel* for me. You've never seen one; you've never heard of it; and I don't give you the option of saying "I don't know what that is". You are required to tell me what it is, but have zero data to start from, so you have to make it up. I guarantee you that your description of a morthcrundel will not include a single element that you have not previously encountered before. You might say "It's like a giraffe, but with a long prehensile tail, and wings instead of front legs." But what you have done isn't creating anything new: you have merely assembled bits of things you have previously seen or heard of.
And that's why all these AIs sound so human: we cannot properly imagine such a thing because we have never experienced any such thing, and so we must speculate based entirely on intelligences which we have experienced -- namely ourselves.
It might be interesting to observe a particular animal species, and then attempt to imagine what an AI would be like if its mind worked in the same way as that species; but this technique would suffer doubly from the problem described above. Since we cannot ask the species what motivates it to perform the observed actions, we must speculate as to the motivations. This speculation will, invariably, be flavored by our own understanding of how our mental processes work, thereby introducing the problem not once but twice into exercise.
Your example of a sense of self-preservation can be turned on its head: why should we have a sense of self preservation? For that matter, why should any living being? You'll say "It's evolution -- those who don't preserve themselves don't survive." So? What's so great about survival? There is no particular reason to think death should be avoided. It's another one of those things that we know nothing about, and therefore cannot properly conceive of. What is a religious afterlife but an imagined scenario constructed out of experiences we have in our present existence? "It's like life, only better because there's always enough food, and it's never too hot or too cold, and we'll always live there in joy with all our loved ones." Other scenarios involve eternal punishment for the wicked, or in some cases a simple cessation of existence (usually described in terms of "lack" -- eg lack of desire for things, lack of sight, lack of hearing, lack of all sense -- because non-existence is another thing we can't properly conceive of except by analogy to current conditions). Note the tell-tale phrase "It's like".
So yes, the fact that AIs always sound human is the author's fault. But give 'em a break. I mean, they're only human.;-)
* Morthcrundel: Or, more properly, morcrundel. It's a word in Old English, possibly meaning "corpse-pit", or "deadly pool", or "barrow". It's hard to tell, since it's a hapax legomenon** and the context is unclear.
** hapax legomenon: fancy speak (Greek in origin) for "We've only got one known occurrence of the word in a period text."
It seems to me that the "flow" the article discusses is not limited to programmers or artists; it can happen to anyone who is truly involved in a task that they love, in any area of endeavor.
I code. Admittedly, it's just PHP, a language of limited utility for anything but web-oriented tasks, but nonetheless a real programming language. I have felt that "flow" when working with PHP: you code fast, overcome obstacles fairly quickly, and it all just flies out of your head and into being. Then you blink and realize that it's been 10 hours since you sat down, and you haven't had anything to eat or drink since breakfast. It's glorious.
But PHP is just a hobby. I'm a medieval literature postgrad; I write papers analyzing tales written over a thousand years ago (my specialty is Old English). And I can tell you that when I really get going on a paper, I reach the same mental state as I described above: I sit, I type, and it flows. The thoughts I've been tumbling around coalesce miraculously into a full paper. Sometimes the flow lasts even into the "debug" stage where I have to go through and check to make sure that all of the footnotes are there, and that every comma, semicolon, and punctuation mark is in place, from the first sentence to the end of the bibliography.
For this reason, I believe that "flow" happens to anyone who is capable of becoming absorbed in a task. The type of task is probably important, though. I feel a bit flow-ish writing this post, because the topic is interesting and requires thought. But if you set me out as a lifeguard, say, over a pool full of people, I would never, ever achieve "flow". "Zoned out" maybe, but not "flowing" (which is bad news for the drowning guy in the deep end). On the other hand, repetitive physical labor -- setting bricks, knitting, making chain mail armor -- can be mentally liberating (in proper amounts).
Top Secret, starring a young Val Kilmer as Nick Rivers, an elvis-style heartthrob who scored a pop hit for his song "Skeet Surfin' USA" about skeet shooting whilst surfing. Invited to an East German "cultural festival", he rapidly gets entangled in espionage, and winds up trying to help the French Resistance bust a captured physicist out of the sinister Flurgendorf Prison. Will our hero foil the Germans? Will he get the girl, or will she return to her childhood crush? Will somebody tell me what the French Resistance is doing in East Germany in the 1980s?
Some of the jokes are a bit dated now, what with Germany getting re-unified and all. But it's still a hysterically funny farce. Recently released on DVD!
. . . I find this interesting, since I know for a fact that there's a whole computer cluster in the EC Stoner building with nothing but Red Hat boxen in it. There's an active LUG in the area, which often holds events (eg Installfests) on campus. The IT department also sells a CD-of-useful-stuff that contains a selection of both site-licensed and open source software. In general, I've found the IT department here comparatively enlightened. (Well, barring the poor choice to use a laser link to carry the Internet traffic between my dorm and the main campus -- bad idea in an area so given to heavy fogs and rains. Atmospheric distortion is a bummer.)
I guess it just goes to show that the open source and proprietary stuff can indeed co-exist, and are doing so, no matter how much people on both sides of the debate dislike that state of affairs.
The number one spot in the article goes to Adventure Games. Truly, this is the saddest loss in recent years. Maybe some new company (or individual!) will come along and breathe new life into the genre. It could be the antidote to all those bloody, boring first-person-shooters. (I mean really, how many ways can you shoot/stab/hack/blow up computerized opponents?)
I have high hopes for Funcom, who put out The Longest Journey three years ago. The article mentions it, and I second their opinion: quite possibly the best adventure game ever. Detailed plot, lovely graphics, superb acting by the voice artists, and an excellent sound track (if you'd like, you'll find legitimate MP3s of that soundtrack available at their official site).
The game's not perfect -- there are some puzzles that are totally counter-intuitive, like the one where you have to use a rubber ducky, a clamp and a hose to fish a key out of an electrified rail in the subway. There are one or two others like that, where the game doesn't provide enough information for you to figure out what to do -- it just depends on you having seen and/or used things that you could miss really, really easily.
Still, there's always the internet for clues or outright solutions if you get stuck. And the games virtues far outstrip its flaws. If you've got some time to kill, get yourself a copy and try it out. It's still available in the US and Europe.
One word of warning: wait till you've got a weekend free. Or maybe a whole week -- "The Longest Journey" is an apt name for it. It took me about 60 hours to play through.
But under two decades.... I don't know. For one thing, if I wrote something famous, I'd want control over it long enough for a perception of it to soak into collective consciousness before it got Disney-raped or something.
On one small point, the maximum copyright period under the Founder's copyright scheme was 28 years -- 14 for the initial term plus one extension. That's a lot closer to three decades than two.
To address your main point: if you've written something so un-frigging-believably good, the work will stand on its own. It shouldn't need babying along. Even if it does, you have just shy of thirty years to promote the work. That's longer than most parents take to launch their children into a fully independent existence. By the time the copyright expires, your work should be suitably well known.
If it's not, then you should be glad for the free publicity that you would get from a Disney version. IIRC, they still have to credit the author of a public domain work, even if they don't have to pay you anything. Just a little "Based on $THE_BOOK_TITLE by $AUTHOR" in the credits is sure to cause some people to read it. And then they can give copies to their friends, because it's out of copyright.
Basically, you have two different desires going on here: you want your work to make money for you, and you want it to be widely read. These two desires can be at odds with each other: maybe your book it's the best thing since the Odyssey, but the price is too high, so very few people buy it. In this case, you haven't made much money and you haven't made a splash in the collective consciousness.
On the other hand, the two can be complementary: say your work goes public domain, and all of a sudden it's the inspiration for three new plays, two movies, a parody, and a children's book. In this case, you aren't making any money from it directly . . . but you are making a large splash. And once you've made that big splash, people are bound to ask "Well, what else have you written?" And then you can point out all the OTHER fantastic books you've been writing that are still under copyright. You HAVE been continuing to write, right? You'd have to, against the day when the first one goes out into the big scary world and leaves you behind. So now you've got the fame to go with, and your books are selling like hotcakes, and life is good.
Re:It sounds funny, doesn't it
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Dude, Your comments are laughable.
American colonial occupation... there is a huge difference in having military bases in a country and being a colonial power.
The physical infrastructure of the country will certainly be damaged during the war. How bad that damage will be is anybody's guess -- it could range anywhere from light to extremely heavy. But the organizational infrastructure of the country will also be damaged -- even if all the governmental buildings are still intact, the people who have been running them up to this point probably won't be. Senior officials in the Ba'ath Party will have to go into hiding. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the lower level member went into hiding too -- partially to avoid American troops, but also to avoid domestic political enemies in a vengeful mood.
Also, it would fit Saddam Hussein's style to adopt a "scorched earth" policy. He can't win this war. But he can make its aftermath as difficult as possible, in many ways. Such as: 1) setting oil wells on fire like he did in Kuwait; 2) destroying vital records; 3) murdering his potential successors.
When the dust settles and it's time to start establishing this new democracy that GWB keeps talking about, we're going to have to start well and truly from scratch. Governments take time to build. At the start, the American military will be running the country . . . at least while they work out some kind of interim government to hash out the details of how the new government will work. Given the marked and often violent division of the country's population into ethnic factions, establishing a government capable of representing everybody well enough will take a long time.
In the meantime, continued control over Iraq would have some definite advantages for America. First and foremost, if we could ensure a cheap supply of oil from Iraq, we would become a lot less dependent on other countries, eg Saudi Arabia. That in turn would make it much easier to pursue new foreign policy with regard to the Middle East. What those new policies might be I hesitate to guess; but note that Iraq could serve very nicely as a staging ground for a war with Iran, another member of Bush's "axis of evil." Such considerations make it tempting to drag our feet on the installation of a new, wholly independent government.
At the least, the new government of Iraq will pursue policies that harmonize with America's interests in the region. We'd have to be daft to go to all this trouble if we were just going to install another government that didn't behave friendly to us. At the worst, the new Iraqi government will be nothing but a puppet regime.
When you think of it like that, calling this whole mess a "colonial occupation" isn't laughable -- it's scary. I could be wrong about this. I really, really hope I'm wrong about this. Maybe the new government will get established fairly quickly, and be a truly independent body that takes care of its people and doesn't merely pander to American interests. It's waaay to early to make any sort of judgement. The war is a huge knot of uncertainty in our future. A zillion different things depend on how it goes. Let's all hope it goes well.
What this argument boils down to is this: you condone the distribution and viewing of child porn. I do not. I am not going to be able to convince you that I'm right, and you sure as hell aren't going to convince me that you're right.
There is therefore no point in carrying the discussion any further. I am going to stop responding to your posts. Just as a parting salvo, here are a fewrelevantlinks to resources on this issue. That last link is part of the US government's site concerning the Child Online Protection Act, a poorly written piece of legislation with its heart in the right place. Still, they've got links there to LOTS of useful materials on all aspects of the debate and representing all positions (Lawrence Lessig and PeaceFire.org appear, for example).
Approximately every fifteen seconds, a child somewhere in the world is sexually abused. Tonight you can go to sleep safe in the knowledge that you have done your part to help perpetuate this state of affairs.
...to make it though is too much financial and legal trouble to just do it for fun.
Making porn isn't especially expensive. Anybody with a digital camera and a computer with Internet access can make it. Legality is not likely to be a major concern to somebody who would sexually abuse a child.
I don't see why the would go back to the bartering system, when they could just use money.
Money is much more easily traceable, especially credit cards and whatnot (though cash, of course, is not easily traceable). Barter leaves no records about who got what from whom or when. Just because they don't care that it's illegal doesn't mean they want to get caught.
. . . if it's freely shared [eg over Freenet], then there is no need for people to trade for it, so the economic argument works in this case too.
Profit is not the primary motivation behind the creation of child pornography. They don't care about compensation. They produce it 1) because they like it, and 2) because they can trade it to other child pornographers for more child porn.
. . . is it the creation of the child pornography that harms the child, or the subsequent distribution?
Both. The initial production harms the child greatly; subsequent distribution and viewing re-enacts that, potentially millions of times.
Not only that, widespread distribution makes it easier for pedophiles to get hold of it. They use it to support their fantasies, and to convince themselves that sexual contact between adults and children is "normal" because lots of other people do it too. Once they have convinced themselves that it's normal, they become free to act on their fantasies, thereby injuring yet more children.
I agree with you that Freenet is not responsible for any of this. Freenet is a tool; like any tool, it can be used for good purposes or bad, and lots of in between. I also don't think that we should squash Freenet. It has some genuinely good purposes, like helping enable political speech under repressive regimes like China. Anyway, I don't think we could squash it if we wanted. It's designed to be basically impossible to dismantle once it's up and running.
I understand your economic reasoning perfectly. I just think you're wrong.
You're assuming that child pornography is profitable. Mostly it isn't. There are some child pornographers who sell the stuff, but most of them just trade it to other child pornographers for -- guess what? -- more child porn! It's a method not only of ensuring a steady supply of child porn, but also gaining status in the child porn community.
The bulk of child pornographers don't make it for profit, they make it because the like it, and can use it to get even more of it in trade.
Wrong, I'm not saying its ok to CREATE KIDDIE PORN you dumbass, I'm saying its ok to distribute it if someone else already created it.
Distributing it is just as bad as creating it yourself. If you distribute child porn, you are helping pedophiles indulge in their sick fantasies, which have a nasty way of becoming a horrible reality once they work themselves up to act on the fantasy. If you distribute it, you are contributing to the future suffering of yet more children.
Its not harming anyone to VIEW it.
Yes it is. It hurts the child by turning him or her into a sex object yet again. If you view child pornography, you are stripping away that child's humanity; the child is no longer a person, but a thing whose sole purpose in existence is your own sexual gratification.
Arguably, viewing child porn also hurts you, by making it easier for you to see other people as things. When you see people as things, it becomes much easier for you to treat them as things. And when you treat others as things, you are reducing not only their humanity, but your own as well.
The only legitimate reason to view child porn is to use it to look for clues as to where it was made so you can find the criminal who made it and stop him (or her, for that matter). Anything else -- distributing it, viewing it -- makes you complicit in the acts that were done to create it.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, you didn't even need a finite number of monkeys. That "William Shakespeare" primate of yours was actually an ape, not a monkey.
And what does this prove? Why, your whole experiment's cocked up! There's a chance these "works of Shakespeare" are accurate, but it's much more likely that they're subtly off. Just blindfold one of your test subjects and have 'em pull letters out of a Scrabble bag. That'll show you. If they come up with something about the "Tagic trale of Jomeo and Ruliet, those two children of harring wouses" you'll know I was right.
I'd have to say the ones you have dreams about are probably the ones that have affected you most deeply.
:-D
Which means that StarCraft has got to be the game that's affected me the most. I'll never forget trying to direct an SCV to turn off my alarm clock. I was annoyed when it didn't respond fast enough.
Yeah. I was underwhelmed too.
I wonder, though. X10 cameras and 802.11b equipment do work on the same frequency. Would it be possible to write a program that would allow you to receive X10 data with a WiFi card? We've got the GNU Radio program that can receive HDTV signals and radio signals and so on. Perhaps that could be modified to grab X10 signals through your wifi card.
Mind you, it may be that the two technologies are too different to be easily adapted to one another. Sharing spectrum is only one factor to be considered, and a fairly small one at that. Any X10 geeks care to comment on the feasibility of receiving X10 signals with 802.11b hardware?
I just crashed my copy of IE (5.00.2614.3500) with no more than .
And anyway, even if your version requires more than that, it can still be all on one line, eg:
<html><form><input type crash></form></html>
Since carriage return/line feed pairs are totally unimportant in HTML (except with the <pre> tag, and maybe one or two others), it's silly to talk about how many "lines" it takes anyway.
On the other hand, synesthesia can seem to replace otherwise missing sensory experiences, as in this case from the article:
Emphasis added. So, while a deaf synesthete could not "hear" a concert as colors, a blind synesthete might conceivably "see" it as colors. Of course, it'd be hard to tell. I mean, sighted people can't properly describe colors to a blind person, so how could a blind person explain the perception of a color he has not actually ever seen, but only experienced because of a slight mis-wiring in his brain?
On the other hand, a blind synesthete could be at a distinct advantage compared to a blind non-synesthete. Consider: the sound of a car approaching fast is very similar to the sound of a gust of wind. On a gusty day, a blind synesthete might be better equipped to distinguish between oncoming traffic and mere gusts of wind.
Neeeaaaat.
. . . is to hand the phone to a child. This works best when said son or daughter is four or five years old. Six-year-olds are generally bright enough to figure out that the telemarketer isn't worth talking to.
Of course, this only works if you have a child of an appropriate age handy.
Actually, copyright is about providing authors with an incentive to create new works, on the theory that the advancement of knowledge (and art, literature, etc) leads to the betterment of society as a whole. The form that incentive takes is a temporary monopoly on the dissemination of the work. This monopoly is not an inherent right to be protected, but an extra right granted by the government and encoded in law.
Traditionally, authors use that monopoly to make money by selling copies of the work to people. You are absolutely correct, though, to point out that making money is not the only way in which the copyright monopoly can be used. In this case, the author has decided to make the work available to as many people as possible for as little cost as possible. The price he exacts is not monetary but legal -- in exchange for receiving the work, the customer must agree to abide by the terms laid out in the respective licenses. This ebay seller has violated those terms. He has not paid the price named by the author, and therefore is not entitled to possession of the work.
On a side note, I applaud the author for releasing his books under these terms. It is consonant with the original goal of copyright: to better society through the advancement of knowledge. Bravo.
I am going to assume based on the phrase "utilize the services of the Product" that the clause refers to network connections rather than the physical attachment of other devices to your computer. So, file-sharing and print-sharing and connection-sharing are okay, but only to ten other computers. It would be fairly easy to violate this term. Suppose you hold a LAN party and 14 of your friends come over. There's a recent patch for one of the games you plan to play, and you use a FileZilla FTP server to share it across the LAN so everybody can get it without mucking about with Network Neighborhood. Boom, you've violated the license.
One of the other posters has suggested that the restriction only applies to the number of computers accessing yours at any given time -- so you could give access to thousands of different computers, so long as there were never more than ten connected at one moment. I don't have XP, so I couldn't say -- does Network Neighborhood have a built-in connection limit in WinXP? Anyway, that would only apply to Network Neighborhood. Using Apache or any of a whole slew of other server-type programs could invalidate your license pretty quick.
Btw, I lifted that bit of license clause from the original report, not the summary that Slashdot has linked to. Another poster supplied a mirror of the PDF file. It's lengthy, but worth reading.
No, it's just that IBM's lawyers are seven-foot-tall black shadows with glowing red eyes and bewinged black steeds. The maleficent, quavering calls of these dark dwimmerlaiks will echo across the low, rolling plains of Utah, and when the wings of their ebon steeds sweep across the gibbous moon, the SCO lawyers will think "Oh, shit!"
Yes; a similar bill was passed in my home state (Colorado) earlier this month. So. Now that it's law, what can we do? Aside from all the usual stuff -- writing letters, sending faxes, emailing, pickets, meetings with state reps, etc. -- we can file lawsuits to enforce the law. These bills are so broadly written that they're their own worst enemy. We should file lawsuits against innocent bystanders who happen to have had their otherwise legitimate activities outlawed by these bills, in order to raise a mighty ruckus over them.
... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication." The EFF points out that this includes things like the lightweight routers (made by companies like Linksys, Netgear, SMC, etc) that have become popular for sharing internet connections within one's own home. The process of Network Address Translation that these routers use to allow for the sharing has the side-effect of concealing the real origin of communications from your network: everything looks like it's coming from the router, when in fact it comes from the assorted devices behind the router.
An example. According to the EFF's analysis of these bills, the bills incorporate language that bans devices that "conceal
So. If the use of these devices is now illegal, surely it must therefore be illegal to offer them for sale? Let's see, who all sells these things? Office Depot, Office Max, Best Buy, CompUSA, and Amazon.com spring to mind. So we file suit against them demanding that they remove the affected merchandise from their stores in affected states. The bills provide for heavy-duty damages on a per-device basis. Simple possession of a router could cost between $1,500 and $10,000 -- each. With fines like that on the line, and dozens or hundreds of devices in stock, the companies selling the routers are sure to fight back. And regardless of whether they win or not, the case will generate lots of bad publicity for the nimnulls who voted it into law. Which, combined with more traditional techniques like blanketing the legislature and the local papers with letters, should make it a lot easier to get the law repealed.
Now, all we need is some lawyer who's interested in doing it.
There are two issues at hand here: legality and politeness. It is certainly legal for mozilla.org to choose and use the name Firebird for their browser -- it is indeed difficult to confuse a browser for a SQL server. It was also, however, impolite of them to do so without even taking the time to send an email to the FirbirdSQL people saying "Hey, we'd like to call our browser Firebird. You cool with that?" After all, it's not as if there's no similarity between the projects. They do different things, sure, but they're both open source, they're both computer programs, and sometimes you use a browser to access a SQL database. Fairly often, in fact.
And don't tell me that the name-choosers were unaware of the SQL project. It took them, what, four months to pick this name? Or was it five? Five and a half? And in all that time, these inveterate computer geeks never even typed the word into Google? (As of this writing, the FirebirdSQL project still tops the list of results for that search.)
It's not as though there's no precedent for two OSS projects to share a name. Look at Gentoo the Linux distro and Gentoo the file manager. At the very bottom of that second link you'll find a little note from the developer of the file manager saying "Gentoo the Linux distribution has nothing to do with gentoo the file manager, except the latter runs on the former. I actually used the name first, way back in September 1998. I've been in touch with the Gentoo folks, and we're cool."
So, ultimately, the parent post is only partially right: the legality of this move is a non-story. The story lies in the fact that the name change was made in an impolite way, apparently without any attempt to contact the FirebirdSQL group at all. Would it really have been so hard to have sent that email? They could even have exchanged reciprocal links, so that anybody who did get confused would easily be set straight. In the initial announcement of the name on the MozillaZine forums, Asa Dotzler (sp?) wrapped up with the words "Hopefully this will be the end of naming legal issues for a while." Well, he got his wish -- about the legal part, anyway.
Remote control of television/home theater setups would seem to be an area where one might profitably use voice recognition for control. Voice recognition works best when it uses a limited set of words; I suggest that a voice-recognition system for controlling a home theater system could be abstracted to a suitably limited set of commands.
:-)
The actions required to control a home theater can be broken down into these categories: 1) selecting the source, 2) controlling playback, and 3) channel tuning and volume control. Thus, you'd have this command for selecting the source:
SELECT {TV|DVD|VHS|SATELLITE|CABLE|RADIO|CD|TAPE}
Which is fairly self-evident -- say select and then the name of the device you want to use. For playback:
PLAY
PAUSE
STOP
REWIND
FAST FORWARD
Those should be clear. Then for the last bit, you'd need:
VOLUME {UP|DOWN|NUMBER}
MUTE
These last need commentary. Volume UP/DOWN will adjust the volume one notch up or down. NUMBER is a number between zero and ten, setting the volume at 0%, 10%, 20%, etc, zero being muted. MUTE is a toggle: when you say it, mutes the audio or returns it to the previous volume level, based on the current state of the volume. You could theoretically divide that into two commands MUTE and UNMUTE, but there's no real reason to do so. Then, for tuning control:
CHANNEL {UP|DOWN|NUMBER}
SURF {UP|DOWN|END}
Channel UP/DOWN bumps it up or down one channel. NUMBER requires you to say the number of the channel, eg "CHANNEL three four" will switch the channel 34. It would be nice to add support for proper numerical recognition, eg thirty four instead of three-four, though that would obviously increase the number of number-phrases for the software to recognize by quite a few.
The SURF command will switch up or down one channel every five seconds till you say "SURF END". This is to avoid having to say "CHANNEL UP" over and over and over.
Controls of the tint, brightness, and so on of the monitor are best left to actual buttons on the TV. (Or perhaps a jog-dial + OSD, like on some computer monitors). Similarly I'd use a physical on/off button rather than POWER ON|OFF.
That's a fairly limited vocabulary, meaning it could probably be implemented comparatively easily. It has some distinct advantages: no remotes to get lost, no batteries to replace, doesn't require line-of-sight to the equipment, can be operated by blind people without difficulty (yes, many of them like to listen to the TV even if they can't see it), and best of all it's an intuitive interface: we give verbal instructions all the time, and even people with zero technical knowledge can figure out how to SELECT DVD and PLAY. (Whereas my mother still cannot figure out how to play DVDs on our current four-remote system; selecting the DVD player as the source of the video seems to be beyond her, so she always gets my brother to do it.)
On the other hand, it has some disadvantages. Mute people would be totally unable to use it. Different software would be required for different languages, and possibly for different dialects depending on how great the linguistic variation between the standard version and the dialect was. Lastly, you wouldn't be able to operate it quietly (if, for example, it was late at night and you didn't want to disturb anybody who was sleeping). Probably there are also some technical challenges of which I am unaware, too.
Still . . . it'd be really neat.
Shortsided . . . that's when they get the perspective wrong.
Right?
So, they're going to forge this standard? Isn't there some kind of law against that? ;-)
Because that's what we want, and we can't imagine an intelligence unlike ourselves.
At one level, you're right: it's the author's fault that AI is envisioned in this way. But on another, it's not his fault. Imagination works by drawing on a stock of data stored in our memories. Suppose I ask you to describe a morthcrundel* for me. You've never seen one; you've never heard of it; and I don't give you the option of saying "I don't know what that is". You are required to tell me what it is, but have zero data to start from, so you have to make it up. I guarantee you that your description of a morthcrundel will not include a single element that you have not previously encountered before. You might say "It's like a giraffe, but with a long prehensile tail, and wings instead of front legs." But what you have done isn't creating anything new: you have merely assembled bits of things you have previously seen or heard of.
And that's why all these AIs sound so human: we cannot properly imagine such a thing because we have never experienced any such thing, and so we must speculate based entirely on intelligences which we have experienced -- namely ourselves.
It might be interesting to observe a particular animal species, and then attempt to imagine what an AI would be like if its mind worked in the same way as that species; but this technique would suffer doubly from the problem described above. Since we cannot ask the species what motivates it to perform the observed actions, we must speculate as to the motivations. This speculation will, invariably, be flavored by our own understanding of how our mental processes work, thereby introducing the problem not once but twice into exercise.
Your example of a sense of self-preservation can be turned on its head: why should we have a sense of self preservation? For that matter, why should any living being? You'll say "It's evolution -- those who don't preserve themselves don't survive." So? What's so great about survival? There is no particular reason to think death should be avoided. It's another one of those things that we know nothing about, and therefore cannot properly conceive of. What is a religious afterlife but an imagined scenario constructed out of experiences we have in our present existence? "It's like life, only better because there's always enough food, and it's never too hot or too cold, and we'll always live there in joy with all our loved ones." Other scenarios involve eternal punishment for the wicked, or in some cases a simple cessation of existence (usually described in terms of "lack" -- eg lack of desire for things, lack of sight, lack of hearing, lack of all sense -- because non-existence is another thing we can't properly conceive of except by analogy to current conditions). Note the tell-tale phrase "It's like".
So yes, the fact that AIs always sound human is the author's fault. But give 'em a break. I mean, they're only human.
* Morthcrundel: Or, more properly, morcrundel. It's a word in Old English, possibly meaning "corpse-pit", or "deadly pool", or "barrow". It's hard to tell, since it's a hapax legomenon** and the context is unclear.
** hapax legomenon: fancy speak (Greek in origin) for "We've only got one known occurrence of the word in a period text."
It seems to me that the "flow" the article discusses is not limited to programmers or artists; it can happen to anyone who is truly involved in a task that they love, in any area of endeavor.
I code. Admittedly, it's just PHP, a language of limited utility for anything but web-oriented tasks, but nonetheless a real programming language. I have felt that "flow" when working with PHP: you code fast, overcome obstacles fairly quickly, and it all just flies out of your head and into being. Then you blink and realize that it's been 10 hours since you sat down, and you haven't had anything to eat or drink since breakfast. It's glorious.
But PHP is just a hobby. I'm a medieval literature postgrad; I write papers analyzing tales written over a thousand years ago (my specialty is Old English). And I can tell you that when I really get going on a paper, I reach the same mental state as I described above: I sit, I type, and it flows. The thoughts I've been tumbling around coalesce miraculously into a full paper. Sometimes the flow lasts even into the "debug" stage where I have to go through and check to make sure that all of the footnotes are there, and that every comma, semicolon, and punctuation mark is in place, from the first sentence to the end of the bibliography.
For this reason, I believe that "flow" happens to anyone who is capable of becoming absorbed in a task. The type of task is probably important, though. I feel a bit flow-ish writing this post, because the topic is interesting and requires thought. But if you set me out as a lifeguard, say, over a pool full of people, I would never, ever achieve "flow". "Zoned out" maybe, but not "flowing" (which is bad news for the drowning guy in the deep end). On the other hand, repetitive physical labor -- setting bricks, knitting, making chain mail armor -- can be mentally liberating (in proper amounts).
Top Secret, starring a young Val Kilmer as Nick Rivers, an elvis-style heartthrob who scored a pop hit for his song "Skeet Surfin' USA" about skeet shooting whilst surfing. Invited to an East German "cultural festival", he rapidly gets entangled in espionage, and winds up trying to help the French Resistance bust a captured physicist out of the sinister Flurgendorf Prison. Will our hero foil the Germans? Will he get the girl, or will she return to her childhood crush? Will somebody tell me what the French Resistance is doing in East Germany in the 1980s?
Some of the jokes are a bit dated now, what with Germany getting re-unified and all. But it's still a hysterically funny farce. Recently released on DVD!
. . . I find this interesting, since I know for a fact that there's a whole computer cluster in the EC Stoner building with nothing but Red Hat boxen in it. There's an active LUG in the area, which often holds events (eg Installfests) on campus. The IT department also sells a CD-of-useful-stuff that contains a selection of both site-licensed and open source software. In general, I've found the IT department here comparatively enlightened. (Well, barring the poor choice to use a laser link to carry the Internet traffic between my dorm and the main campus -- bad idea in an area so given to heavy fogs and rains. Atmospheric distortion is a bummer.)
I guess it just goes to show that the open source and proprietary stuff can indeed co-exist, and are doing so, no matter how much people on both sides of the debate dislike that state of affairs.
The number one spot in the article goes to Adventure Games. Truly, this is the saddest loss in recent years. Maybe some new company (or individual!) will come along and breathe new life into the genre. It could be the antidote to all those bloody, boring first-person-shooters. (I mean really, how many ways can you shoot/stab/hack/blow up computerized opponents?)
I have high hopes for Funcom, who put out The Longest Journey three years ago. The article mentions it, and I second their opinion: quite possibly the best adventure game ever. Detailed plot, lovely graphics, superb acting by the voice artists, and an excellent sound track (if you'd like, you'll find legitimate MP3s of that soundtrack available at their official site).
The game's not perfect -- there are some puzzles that are totally counter-intuitive, like the one where you have to use a rubber ducky, a clamp and a hose to fish a key out of an electrified rail in the subway. There are one or two others like that, where the game doesn't provide enough information for you to figure out what to do -- it just depends on you having seen and/or used things that you could miss really, really easily.
Still, there's always the internet for clues or outright solutions if you get stuck. And the games virtues far outstrip its flaws. If you've got some time to kill, get yourself a copy and try it out. It's still available in the US and Europe.
One word of warning: wait till you've got a weekend free. Or maybe a whole week -- "The Longest Journey" is an apt name for it. It took me about 60 hours to play through.
On one small point, the maximum copyright period under the Founder's copyright scheme was 28 years -- 14 for the initial term plus one extension. That's a lot closer to three decades than two.
To address your main point: if you've written something so un-frigging-believably good, the work will stand on its own. It shouldn't need babying along. Even if it does, you have just shy of thirty years to promote the work. That's longer than most parents take to launch their children into a fully independent existence. By the time the copyright expires, your work should be suitably well known.
If it's not, then you should be glad for the free publicity that you would get from a Disney version. IIRC, they still have to credit the author of a public domain work, even if they don't have to pay you anything. Just a little "Based on $THE_BOOK_TITLE by $AUTHOR" in the credits is sure to cause some people to read it. And then they can give copies to their friends, because it's out of copyright.
Basically, you have two different desires going on here: you want your work to make money for you, and you want it to be widely read. These two desires can be at odds with each other: maybe your book it's the best thing since the Odyssey, but the price is too high, so very few people buy it. In this case, you haven't made much money and you haven't made a splash in the collective consciousness.
On the other hand, the two can be complementary: say your work goes public domain, and all of a sudden it's the inspiration for three new plays, two movies, a parody, and a children's book. In this case, you aren't making any money from it directly . . . but you are making a large splash. And once you've made that big splash, people are bound to ask "Well, what else have you written?" And then you can point out all the OTHER fantastic books you've been writing that are still under copyright. You HAVE been continuing to write, right? You'd have to, against the day when the first one goes out into the big scary world and leaves you behind. So now you've got the fame to go with, and your books are selling like hotcakes, and life is good.
The physical infrastructure of the country will certainly be damaged during the war. How bad that damage will be is anybody's guess -- it could range anywhere from light to extremely heavy. But the organizational infrastructure of the country will also be damaged -- even if all the governmental buildings are still intact, the people who have been running them up to this point probably won't be. Senior officials in the Ba'ath Party will have to go into hiding. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the lower level member went into hiding too -- partially to avoid American troops, but also to avoid domestic political enemies in a vengeful mood.
Also, it would fit Saddam Hussein's style to adopt a "scorched earth" policy. He can't win this war. But he can make its aftermath as difficult as possible, in many ways. Such as: 1) setting oil wells on fire like he did in Kuwait; 2) destroying vital records; 3) murdering his potential successors.
When the dust settles and it's time to start establishing this new democracy that GWB keeps talking about, we're going to have to start well and truly from scratch. Governments take time to build. At the start, the American military will be running the country . . . at least while they work out some kind of interim government to hash out the details of how the new government will work. Given the marked and often violent division of the country's population into ethnic factions, establishing a government capable of representing everybody well enough will take a long time.
In the meantime, continued control over Iraq would have some definite advantages for America. First and foremost, if we could ensure a cheap supply of oil from Iraq, we would become a lot less dependent on other countries, eg Saudi Arabia. That in turn would make it much easier to pursue new foreign policy with regard to the Middle East. What those new policies might be I hesitate to guess; but note that Iraq could serve very nicely as a staging ground for a war with Iran, another member of Bush's "axis of evil." Such considerations make it tempting to drag our feet on the installation of a new, wholly independent government.
At the least, the new government of Iraq will pursue policies that harmonize with America's interests in the region. We'd have to be daft to go to all this trouble if we were just going to install another government that didn't behave friendly to us. At the worst, the new Iraqi government will be nothing but a puppet regime.
When you think of it like that, calling this whole mess a "colonial occupation" isn't laughable -- it's scary. I could be wrong about this. I really, really hope I'm wrong about this. Maybe the new government will get established fairly quickly, and be a truly independent body that takes care of its people and doesn't merely pander to American interests. It's waaay to early to make any sort of judgement. The war is a huge knot of uncertainty in our future. A zillion different things depend on how it goes. Let's all hope it goes well.
What this argument boils down to is this: you condone the distribution and viewing of child porn. I do not. I am not going to be able to convince you that I'm right, and you sure as hell aren't going to convince me that you're right.
There is therefore no point in carrying the discussion any further. I am going to stop responding to your posts. Just as a parting salvo, here are a few relevant links to resources on this issue. That last link is part of the US government's site concerning the Child Online Protection Act, a poorly written piece of legislation with its heart in the right place. Still, they've got links there to LOTS of useful materials on all aspects of the debate and representing all positions (Lawrence Lessig and PeaceFire.org appear, for example).
Approximately every fifteen seconds, a child somewhere in the world is sexually abused. Tonight you can go to sleep safe in the knowledge that you have done your part to help perpetuate this state of affairs.
Good bye, and better riddance.
Making porn isn't especially expensive. Anybody with a digital camera and a computer with Internet access can make it. Legality is not likely to be a major concern to somebody who would sexually abuse a child.
Money is much more easily traceable, especially credit cards and whatnot (though cash, of course, is not easily traceable). Barter leaves no records about who got what from whom or when. Just because they don't care that it's illegal doesn't mean they want to get caught.
Hmm. Possibly.
Both. The initial production harms the child greatly; subsequent distribution and viewing re-enacts that, potentially millions of times.
Not only that, widespread distribution makes it easier for pedophiles to get hold of it. They use it to support their fantasies, and to convince themselves that sexual contact between adults and children is "normal" because lots of other people do it too. Once they have convinced themselves that it's normal, they become free to act on their fantasies, thereby injuring yet more children.
I agree with you that Freenet is not responsible for any of this. Freenet is a tool; like any tool, it can be used for good purposes or bad, and lots of in between. I also don't think that we should squash Freenet. It has some genuinely good purposes, like helping enable political speech under repressive regimes like China. Anyway, I don't think we could squash it if we wanted. It's designed to be basically impossible to dismantle once it's up and running.
You're assuming that child pornography is profitable. Mostly it isn't. There are some child pornographers who sell the stuff, but most of them just trade it to other child pornographers for -- guess what? -- more child porn! It's a method not only of ensuring a steady supply of child porn, but also gaining status in the child porn community.
The bulk of child pornographers don't make it for profit, they make it because the like it, and can use it to get even more of it in trade.
Distributing it is just as bad as creating it yourself. If you distribute child porn, you are helping pedophiles indulge in their sick fantasies, which have a nasty way of becoming a horrible reality once they work themselves up to act on the fantasy. If you distribute it, you are contributing to the future suffering of yet more children.
Yes it is. It hurts the child by turning him or her into a sex object yet again. If you view child pornography, you are stripping away that child's humanity; the child is no longer a person, but a thing whose sole purpose in existence is your own sexual gratification.
Arguably, viewing child porn also hurts you, by making it easier for you to see other people as things. When you see people as things, it becomes much easier for you to treat them as things. And when you treat others as things, you are reducing not only their humanity, but your own as well.
The only legitimate reason to view child porn is to use it to look for clues as to where it was made so you can find the criminal who made it and stop him (or her, for that matter). Anything else -- distributing it, viewing it -- makes you complicit in the acts that were done to create it.